Gokcen Erkilic

The planetary scale of urbanization and shifting scales of ecological devastation have recently brought new forms of attention to the conditions of the urban edge. Preconceived temporal frameworks, scales, and agents fail to decipher histories. This paper introduces a conceptual and a cartographic methodology to study the material history of Istanbul’s urban edge by the water through the “critical delineation” of its coastline. In a city whose process of urbanization has been predominantly defined by the colonization of land, this methodology aims to shift attention to the waterward space, to the production of port geography. It follows material dispositions between land and sea, focusing on the organization of port logistics, dislocation, and discharge of coastal sediments. By landing and production of urban debris, the coastal geography of the city was made and remade as a place of human engage- ment with nature. A longue durée take on this material disposition provides over a hundred years of historic processes to delineate a cartography of fluctuations of the changing coastlines on this shifting landscape. The coastline of Istanbul becomes the body of research, and therefore, the production of port geography initiates a production of meaning. As an urban edge, it unfolds nonhuman agency and human engagement with the planetary, as much as it unfolds the everyday production of political discourse and its discrepancies.

Gezegensel kentleşme ve ekolojik yıkımın yer değiştiren ölçeklere yayılan etkileri, kent çeperi olarak anılan yerlere dair yeni ilgi biçimleri getirdi; alışılagelmiş ölçek algıları aşılıyor, zamansal çerçeveler genişliyor ve öznelikler artıyor. Bu yazı, kıyı şeridinin eleştirel bir tasvirini yaparak, İstanbul’un suyla birleşen kentsel çeperinin maddi tarihini incelemek amacıyla kavramsal ve kartografik bir metodoloji önermektedir. Kentleşme süreci anlatısı ağırlıklı olarak karanın kolonileştirilmesi olarak tanımlanan şehri düşündüğü- müzde, bu metodoloji dikkatini kıyı çizgisinin su tarafına, liman coğrafyasının yaratımına yönlendiriyor. Kara ve suyun arasında cereyan eden maddi yer değiştirmeleri, liman lojistiğinin organizasyonu, yerinden etme ve kıyı boşaltımına odaklanarak takip ediyor. Şehrin kıyısal coğrafyası, karada yerleşim ve kentsel atık üretimiyle, doğayla insan etkileşiminin bir mekânı olarak devamlı yeniden üretilmiştir. Bu maddi duruma uzun süreli bir tarihsel bakış (longue durée), yerinde sabit durmayan bu peyzajdaki değişken kıyı şeritlerinin yüz yılın üzerinde bir tarihsel sürece yayılan dalgalanmasının bir kartografyasını sunmaya yardım ediyor. İstanbul’un kıyı şeridi araştırmanın temelini oluşturuyor, dolayısıyla liman coğrafyasının üretimi anlam üretimine önayak oluyor. Şehir çeperi olarak, siyasal söylemler ve onların tutarsızlıkla- rının gündelik üretimini ortaya koyduğu kadar, insan olmayan öznelikleri ve insanın gezegensel olanla ilişkisini açığa çıkarıyor.

For no two successive days is the shore line precisely the same.
Rachel Carson
Did you recognize that the coastline of Istanbul is slowly changing? There is an ongoing disposition between water and earth. “This is not a Line” experiments with a way of looking at the city by the changing lines between water and land, shaped by humans; through the spaces of solid and fluid; the dry and wet. Different terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems intersect and often compete along the shorelines. Hydrologists call those spaces of intersection “ecotone.” Ecotones address the conflicts of material displacements at the making of the coastal geography in Istanbul. Critical delineation of the coastline follows the alteration of the coastal strip and brings together geographic, architectural, and journalistic representations. Spread over the history of the past hundred years of visual colonization via aerial photography, maps, and satellite images are disassembled, blown up, and reframed in multiple montages. Coastal stories from the news are brought together with the images to follow the displacement of water bodies and urban debris. Results of the inspection show that the coastline has changed in the past ten years more than it did in the past hundred. The natural port was dislocated. Infills replaced seascapes. Mudflats filled up quarries. Quarries morphed into post-modern entertainment landscapes. Water reserves dried. Ex-lake areas flooded. Ecosystems were displaced. Sometimes there is an error in the map. Here, the cartography holds a material record of the changing coastline. The impact of humans on the planet has been rendered in divided representations that formed fractured worldviews in the past decade. While political ecology, and its alter-versions delved into the manifestations of flat ontology regarding humans as equal beings among wider ecosystems, habitats, and urban systems, the conventional divisions among natural and cultural, urban and natural, human and nonhuman were crossed over. However, the tools remain obscure about new versions of imagining the urban edge conditions. “This is Not a Line” looks for a way of seeing the stratification of the coastal urban edge which equally becomes a political zone and a planetary common.

Changing maps: How the delineation of the water and land division of the earth was shaped by natural means? How did humans re-shape it? To what extent will it change with the rising sea levels and floods resulted by climate change? Is the shoreline it a fixed threshold dividing the land and sea? Is it a form in flux? Land infills, canals, straits, glaciers, fjords, achipleagos, deltas; their forms are changing due to the melting of the icecaps, changing of the water currents, flooding of the river valleys. How do humans use the waterfront to adapt to such changes? Waterfront: an ecological concern or a matter of climate change? Ecology is the science that explores all living things in relation to one another. Earth’s crust formations, water currents, CO2 levels, atmospheric heat, marine ecosystems; all affect and are affected by the changes in the climate. Can ecological thinking be a metaphor to trace connections between things in relation to each other? If all is connected to one another, how do the melting glaciers in Greenland affect for example, impact the Mediterranean sea currents? How can we develop a wholistic view of the changing dyanmics of the waterfront regarding our planet?

This paper develops a conceptual agenda and a critical cartographic methodology using aerial photographs to monitor the shaping of waterfront as a geography in Istanbul by humans. Starting from the first aerial photographs of Istanbul until present, the gaze of the vertical dimension in geographical space holds divergent evidences of spatial transformation captured in aerial views. From construction sites to building of coastal roads, demolishing of port scapes and technological rifts of logistic flows, to large infills in longshore space; events and moments of spatial deformation of coastal space become visible and evident through aerial photography. Aerial gaze, when considered within an archeology of a developing military reconnaissance technology, is presented as an ironic tool to shed light to evidences and historical record of spatial transformation within an act of witnessing. Viewing coastal unfixity through aerial photographs are argued here to provide two different temporalities: longue and court dureé which operate in the eventual and geological time. As these photographs unveil, the material-geological body of the waterfront itself becomes the bearer of historical records of human and nonhuman relations that shape the coastal geography. The ground beneath is unfixed as it is pulled into a cartographic questioning tool of "critical delineation" of Istanbul's waterfront. In the end, the waterfront is re-conceptualized and monitored as a dynamic geography. With this gaze, this paper suggests a debunking of oppositions of land and sea space to reframe the waterfront as an urban edge in the process of urbanization.

The waterfront is the generator of a city as it provides the required connectivity to dwell on that particular location on Earth. It is paradoxically the end of it too, it is the borderline where the ever growth of the city is limited by a non-buildable geological zone, the surface of the water. This paper will focus on the contour of the waterfront at the zero level that bears the tension of human interventions and natural processes overlapped to shape the map. Istanbul as a city in this sense deserves a deeper understanding of its waterfront as a thick space that marks both the beginning and the end of it. Is the waterfront edge only a geological space with a unique demarcation of the macroform of Istanbul or is it more than that? In what ways does the changes in its physical form also reform the conceptual understanding of human intervention to the planet? Can the factor of design at the ecological scale be re-conceptualized at the waterfront where natural and human processes overlap in multiple time frames? This paper will aim to form an inquiry to the architectural and ecological understanding of the waterfront of Istanbul. It will be conceptualized as an ecological agent of Istanbul in the form of a continuous hydrographical contour and as a dynamic setting where, large scale infrastructural interventions and changing governmental strategies have generated different forms of meeting with water. With two complementary cases, Canal Istanbul and land infill in Yenikapı, it will take a closer look at the ongoing practice of reconfiguring land, water, public space relations where natural and human made processes collide. The former an infrastructure, a doubling of the Bosphorus as a highway for tankers; the latter a public space land infill at the coast of the historical peninsula. One is a speculative "future projection" while the other is a quietly executed "fait accompli". The paper will demonstrate these cases along a set of photographical log and mapping of their sites at the years 2012 and 2016 which frames the before and after conditions of the geo-physical space. What do we see when we step out of the four year time frame of history a non linear formation? In a larger scale of time? 1 Could we manage to make natural contract? 2 What can we learn from human and non human blending of planetary interventions? 3 How far the measure in human intervention in designing the land changes the roles of human intervention and ecology? 4 How can they help re-conceptualize the waterfront of Istanbul as a place of changing hydrographical contour? And most importantly is it possible to re-draw the responsibilities of architectural design in the waterfront of Istanbul between as human made and natural borderline? Keywords: Waterfront, human and non-human agency, environment, ecology 1 De-Landa, M. (2000). A thousand years of nonlinear history, New York.

İstanbul kıyılarının değişimini karasal çıkarlara odaklı kentleşme sürecinin bir parçası olarak değerlendiren Gökçen Erkılıç ile “Bu Bir Çizgi Değildir” adlı doktora tezini konuştuk. Erkılıç, “Kadıköy’e denizden bakarsak, hikayesini kıyısını konteyner kutularına, iskelelere, mendireklere, sahil yollarına ve marinalara borçlu olduğunu görürüz” diyor