In every country, some cities more than others are involved in the organizations and networks of the global economy. At the same time, these cities are embedded in national aspirations and subject to regulation by the state. In Turkey, Istanbul, a major commercial and financial center, has emerged as the country's globalizing city. What follows is an attempt to establish the appearance of a historically particular new middle class in Istanbul as a consequence of the liberalization of the Turkish economy. Taking into account the relationships among state, market, and family institutions in class formation, the substantive areas of emphasis will be on cultural capital in the forms of lifestyle and material capital in the form of housing.
Nowhere in Turkey was the middle class more affected by neoliberal ideology and policies than in Istanbul, a world city that after 1980 became a globalizing city. How did Istanbul become a globalizing city, and how did a conjunction of global, national, and local forces contribute to the remaking of a fragment of the upper middle class as a new middle class? In the last two decades of the twentieth century, Istanbul underwent an economic revival and cultural transformation as the central location of Turkey's integration into the global economy. It became a globalizing city, the center of changes in transnational networks of foreign capital, currency exchange, import-export trade, media and communications, and technology that emanated from other parts of the world. A key part of this transformation was the appearance of a new cosmopolitanism, reflected in an outward-looking new middle class that was entrepreneurial in spirit, quick to embrace the cultural ideology of consuming everything foreign, and engrossed in postmodern preoccupations with the deconstruction of old identities in the interest of creating new ones.
Globalizing Cityscapes
While Turgut Özal's Motherland Party pursued the political strategy of urban populism to win the national election in Istanbul, one of its members, Mayor Bedrettin Dalan, pursued an economic strategy more in tune with the Motherland Party's liberalization strategy for global integration. The two strategies worked in tandem to reshape Istanbul's cityscape during the 1980s. The Ankara government set the parameters by changing the administration of metropolitan government, passing legislation that created new channels of funding to pursue a variety of urban renewal projects, and instituting the National Housing and Investment Administration, which through the Mass Housing Fund underwrote the enormous expansion of Istanbul real estate markets. Perhaps as important as any of these policies was Dalan's vision of Istanbul as an international city and his ability to articulate his vision in a way that mobilized business interest groups to enact it.
The Motherland government began to increase progressively the proportion of total tax revenues allocated to municipal administrations. In 1983, new legal provisions also allowed metropolitan governments to levy and or increase local taxes, fees, and charges on activities ranging from sports and entertainment to advertising. These activities were among the growth sectors of the urban economy. Increases in tax revenue not only allowed the city to undertake projects to improve physical infrastructure but it also financed a new fleet of buses and imported new passenger ships at a time when the center city was becoming more congested from increased automobile traffic (Keyder and Öncü 1993: 26). In 1984, the Motherland Party enacted a law designed to centralize major metropolis-wide functions and place them under the direct control and authority of the metropolitan mayor.
The Globalizing Cityscape 1: Commodification of Culture as Heritage
Mayor Dalan's economic strategy for globalizing Istanbul reflected his vision of an international city that would attract conferences and tourists from all over the world. But his vision extended beyond the usual trade and commerce industries to wed economic prosperity to cultural industries by imagining past history as heritage, an accumulation history of eleven centuries of Byzantine Constantinople followed by five centuries of Ottoman Istanbul as centers of world power and commerce. Business groups supported his initiatives, which included new highways, under- and overpasses, and clearance and beautification projects.
The historical peninsula at the confluence of the Bosphorus Strait and the Sea of Marmara had been a destination of foreign tourists for a long period, but Dalan used heritage to promote the assets of two world cities as the cultural capital of a globalizing city. The culture industries of London, New York, and other global cities were being recognized as assets of inestimable market value for attracting global corporate headquarters as well as symbolic value in their global images. In Istanbul, a vital past is present and visible within the borders of the western peninsula. Topkap1, commonly referred to as the Ottoman sultans' “palace,” is an imperial city that rests on a promontory overlooking the Sea of Marmara. Before it became the home of Ottoman sultans for nearly five centuries, it was the home of Byzantine emperors for a thousand years. While much of Byzantium was ruined by the time of the Ottoman conquest in 1453, to the trained eye a surprising amount of Byzantine architecture remains intact.
Coexisting with and dominating the historical cityscape is the monumental architecture of the Ottoman period. Topkap1's walls and gates and the many buildings that housed the treasury, the enormous kitchens, the harem, and the palace itself occupy the point of the peninsula. The imperial treasures remain in the various buildings. Sultans' mosques on hilltops overlooking the Golden Horn dominate the sight line of the peninsula. The intricate pattern of lacework streets and narrow alleys that surround the museums, palaces, mosques, and monuments house one of the most densely packed residential populations in metropolitan Istanbul.
There is, then, a material presence of cosmopolitan heritage that has become a symbolic currency in efforts to reimagine Istanbul as a globalizing city. The heritage movement is also important to the story of a globalizing city in another way. It was through the tourist gaze that the city's inhabitants, especially its upper middle class, began to imagine itself as a city that was on the move, able to visualize the prospect of a bright future as continuous with a glorious past. Nearly all the physical structures that have been mentioned are in use today.
The historical peninsula also represents the deep past as present in the lives of Istanbullus. Foreign visitors and tourists who come to the historical peninsula have no choice but to intermingle with Turks from all over the metropolis who live, work, trade, and shop there. The historical peninsula remains the symbolic and physical center of the city, alive with every activity, sight, sound, and smell.
The Globalizing Cityscape 2: Financialization
If the strong presence of global financial institutions is an indicator of a globalizing city, then Istanbul met the test. By the early 1990s, a glass city that became the home of the fledgling Turkish stock market, investment banks, insurance carriers, and five-star international business hotels could be seen a few miles to the north of the old city center, just over the hills from the Bosphorus shore and minutes from the intersection of highways that brought workers over the bridge from the Asian side to merge with the traffic caused by the north-south commuters on the western side. Maslak, as the new financial area was called, became the headquarters of some of the largest Turkish transnational corporations and banks. The rapid change was dramatic when contrasted to the preexisting 1930s state banks headquartered mostly in the central Anatolian capital of Ankara to be close to the state bureaucracy that regulated them, a pattern the early private banks followed from 1950 to 1980. The Turkish Lira was not yet traded on international currency markets, and most banks in Turkey were state enterprises, each with a designated function in different development sectors of the national economy such as agriculture, social security, insurance, and maritime shipping.
The monopoly of the Central Bank over foreign currency transactions came to an end when commercial banks were freed from government regulations and able to operate in international markets, in some cases forming joint ventures with foreign banks. After 1983 there was a premium on banks with greater access to world markets. The export