Blisstanbul

Istanbul is HUGE. The city is hilly -- in the centre, both sides go up from the Bosphorus and then keep rolling -- and from anywhere you stand, downtown at least, all you can sea is city and water. The bus from the airport drove mostly along the water (Sea of Marmora); and on the drive up to Agva on the black sea we went north on the Anatolian / Asian side and didn't leave city for more than two hours. The striking thing for somebody familiar with North American cities is how most of the city feels like a "downtown" -- multiple-use neighbourhoods, shops/restaurants/so on mixed with housing, densely packed but with lots of little streets. Further out there are "planned" areas with big housing blocks, and there are plenty of gated communities on the outskirts (which run the gamut all the way to out-there California special-interest styles), but all this is very much the minority.
Everyone says (or at least both academics and random guys I met on the street) that Istanbul is not planned; that it plans itself. The city has grown at a consistently wild rate for decades now; estimated population today is 15 million. Julia (travelling companion studying urban development and history) says the majority of housing in Istanbul is self-built (this too goes back decades). There is lots of talk about the "Gecekondu" (there should be a little cidilla on the c, which makes it sound like "ch" in English pronunciation), which I think translates to something like "grew overnight" -- whole neighbourhoods, mostly immigrants from the East (often Kurds) of houses built by people with their families and neighbours, semi-governed by neighbourhood councils who set their own rules about the heights of buildings, the density of the area, and so on. The game is to set up a house quickly enough that it seems permanent and won't be torn down. The flipside of this is the movement to tear down Gecekondu neighbourhoods for "development" -- move the inhabitants to "planned" (highrise) housing on the outskirts of the city and build "respectable" neighbourhoods downtown. The star example of this dispossession process happened a few years ago when a Roma neighbourhood - one of, if not the, oldest sedentary Roma settlements in the world - on the historical peninsula (on "Golden Horn" on the European side, where the Big Hits of Istanbul tourism - Topkapi palace, the Hayya Sophia, the Sultanahmet "Blue" Mosque - are) was razed and the inhabitants were moved -- the newspapers announced that they were "dancing with joy" over their new highrise digs in the equivalent of, hm, maybe Burlington? -- without consideration that people who largely made their living as artists, especiallz musicians, kind of relied on a downtown environment... the estimate today is that well over half of those displaced have since moved back downtown, into the surprisingly expensive Istanbul housing market (a little cheaper than Toronto).
Everything official here seems to have an "informal" counterpart. The public transport buses and ferries (!!!) coexist with smaller private ones - but you can use the same pass card for both (Istanbul, I was informed by the spectacularly lazy professor who delegated organizing the INURA conference to Julia, had these cards a decade before London. The Turks, like every other group ever, "are a proud people"). Same goes for garbage collection, etc. We walked through a largely Kurdish neighbourhood (semi-ghetto) where the houses aren't owned, but are operated by landlords who charge rent and do some "maintenance". Now the city is, claiming ownership, selling some of these buildings to private developers; so property values go up, rent goes up, gentrification ensues... Meanwhile, not only the Gecekondu are illegal, but so are many of the skyscrapers being built downtown -- including what will be the second tallest in the work, which is being built on a lot about three times the size of the one it's licenced for.
It's remarkable how similar the processes of urban development todaz are from city to city -- gentrification and dispossesion, police presence working against neighbourhood self-organiyation, rising property rates transforming "informal" economies into poverty; but it's also remarkable how FAST things happen in Istanbul. We got home two nights ago to find a trench dug down the entire length of Marlene's street -- I think it's for electricity -- and a huge scaffold put up along the building across the street from Julia's...
The wild thing is how well this all seems to work. There are many many problems, but the city is livable and lived in. Everywhere I've gone people are using the streets - as workshops, as places to hang out, as playgrounds, for market stalls - and this holds across tourist neighbourhoods to highly "conservative" neighbourhoods.
I haven't been here long, but it really helps to be hanging out with two people who have lived in Istanbul for three years, studying Ottoman history in Istanbul and the contemporary development of the city. On which point I terminate this totally rambling note. Kisses.