urban carnival network- potential spaces in the city

emphasis of carnival

What happening in a carnival always came from real life.It includes a lot of spontaneous activities and always takes place in different places,such as public squares, streets, the ceremony extends into every corner of the city. It is a perfect heterotopia within the city,while it is moveable and instant, it reflect people's pure desire and finally have to back to reality.Carnival always represent the happiness and pleasure of urban life in the city,and leave those beautiful memories to people who participated. It is worth to rethink the relations between carnival and the location's urban context.

By means of urban carnival, my initial idea is recreating some urban pattern based on those creative human activities in Istanbul,concerning both ecological and social sustainability. Istanbul is suffering the process of gentrification in recent years,which shows the government's ambitions when facing the trend of globalisation.

(This is my question for government guild for the city's public space and the answer from IMP

Is there any policy or rules to administrate the city public space from the government, such as for streets, squares which are filled with all kinds of informal activities. Is the government encourage such phenomenon or want to get it into control? (Kamusal alanların yönetimi nasıl? Yerel yönetim bunu control altına almak istiyor mu?)

There is a specific and very comprehensive study currently being carried out for Developing the principles for the management of the UNESCO World Heritage Listed area of Historic Peninsula. This study is to shape a set of specific policy or rules to administrate, preserve and maintain the historic city public spaces. The management of the rest of the public spaces are subject to the İstanbul’s “Urban Development” Guidelines. İstanbul metropolitan government and the district municipalities shares the responsibilities to apply the rules for managing and controlling the public spaces and all the informalities in public spaces. )

It seems obviously the new development or "urban transformation"process will take place mostly in a top-down way, as more administration on social activities, demolishing and rebuilding of old residential area, the extreme sample should be the new CBD project in Kartal designed by Zaha Hadid,which may be the symbol project of the city's development. Although it said the design process has concerned a lot about the city's real situation,it will definitely become something never happened in this city before.we can't image how serious the impact it will have on the city's environment and social relation.

These eight positions in Istanbul are picked out from the places i visited in the field trip. each of them has some particular characters of unprogrammed space and has potential to be transformed .I think they could be part of the urban carnival network, where people can explore life wonders, have interaction with city memories, and form new relationship with each other. By analysing the existing urban context of surroundings, we can recreate spaces which can continue some life characters of istanbul or let the future users have the memory of what ever happened in the city during the leisure time spend here.