Nerlin wrote below (in the "New City, New People" post) about a project the class did a few days ago. I'll provide a little bit of context by explaining the assignment. For this project, students were sent in a group out to a neighborhood they had never visited before. During our time here we've gone various places in Istanbul, but the students haven't had much opportunity to go outside the areas commonly frequented by tourists. This assignment is designed to get them to see a different community here and try to understand it. The neighborhood for this year's students was Zeytinburnu, a district on the Sea of Marmara. This is a working class neighborhood that is home to a large number of immigrants from various places. The students were to go to the district and choose a neighborhood (each district is broken up into smaller neighborhoods which are easily walkable and a small enough size that it's realistic to get a good feel for the neighborhood). I had suggested the Nuripasa neighborhood to them, but they could choose any of the neighborhoods that were relatively close to the train station but still in the district.
Once they arrived in the neighorhood, they were to learn as much as possible about it. They were specifically trying to answer questions like who lives there, what do the inhabitants see as particular features of the neighborhood, where do they perceive the neighborhood boundaries to be, etc. Each neighborhood has specific political boundaries, but these may or may not be the boundaries that residents perceive to define the neighborhood. The students' goal was to try to recreate a map that approximated how the residents see and use the neighborhood. This is not simply a geographical map but is more of a representation of the ways the people use the neighborhood.
Nerlin mentions a number of terms in her blog, and I'll try to clarify those. The students used a few tools to help them conceptualize the neighborhood. One of these is a model developed by Kevin Lynch, an American urban planner, to describe how people actually think about cities. This model describes urban spaces in terms of important functions of space. Nodes are defined as points where traffic comes together. They are a type of junction. When people come to a node, they usually need to make a decision whether to continue along the same path they are already using or turn off to head another direction. This may be a central area like a square or a traffic circle or a park. In order to identify nodes, one needs to watch the flow of pedestrian traffic at these points to see whether people seem to need to pay extra attention at those points and to make decisions about where to go. Probably a good analogy in a suburban environment might be freeway junctions, but in this case we were looking specifically at pedestrian traffic.
Another way to think about urban spaces is to define the paths. Paths may be streets, but they don't have to be. These are the lines along which traffic travels. They may be slightly different for different people, but they define the ways that people tend to walk. In some areas a path may cut through a store or a building if that's the way people travel. In other areas, paths may converge to avoid barriers. For example, near our neighborhood in Istanbul there is an underpass that's the only way to get across a railroad line. Paths on either side of that underpass fan out, but many of them lead to the underpass. There is a mosque on the opposite side of the underpass from us, and people on our side may use the underpass several times a day to go to and from the mosque. In this case, the convergence of all the different paths is a node where people have to make decisions about which way to go.
A third term Lynch uses to describe spaces is "boundaries." Boundaries are places people view as edges. For example, in the neighborhood the students went to there is a street that has a working class neighborhood on one side of the street and an upper middle class neighborhood on the other side. If one talks to the residents, it's likely that specific people will feel comfortable on one side or the other of the street. This is likely to be seen as the place where the boundaries of each neighborhood meet, and it's possible that people from each side may not be seen as welcome in the other neighborhood. Often one cannot identify boundaries from a map, unless they coincide with political boundaries (e.g. city lines, etc), but people who live in the neighborhood will perceive them as mental boundaries.
Similar to boundaries are "edges." Edges can occur anywhere in the neighborhood, but they are usually some type of physical barrier that blocks people from moving easily from one place to another. These might be walls, railroad tracks, or even a type of landscaping. On the University campus there is one place that has a large bed of ice plant. Although the landscaping is only a few inches high and people probably could walk through the ice plant, they essentially never do. That planting is perceived as a "no pass" zone, and some students have mental maps of the campus that include buildings above and below that area, but they have to think hard about what is there.
Finally, Lynch talks about landmarks. These may be historic landmarks or things that people traditionally see as landmarks (like statues) or they may just be a place that people living in a particular area tend to know about, like Keyes barber shop or the tree that the Jones kid ran into on his bike last summer.
The students were also supposed to look at architecture and other constructed places to determine what the urban planners or architects were intending to convey with that particular structure. E.g. a mosque or church may be built to convey a sense of the greatness of God or the wealth of a people or it may be designed to show humility and simplicity. Each of these are different messages.
The neighborhood the students went to is interesting because it is very mixed ethnically and it was originally built as a gecekondu in the 1950s. Gecekondus are a bit like shanty towns, but they take advantage of a Turkish law that allows any structure that is completely built overnight to remain where it was built. In other words, if you can get any structure built before the sun comes up, you can keep it. After it's built, you can make "improvements." Zeytinburnu was originally a gecekondu, but over time it's been incorporated into the city. This means that it lacks organized urban planning or the type of neat zoning that occurs when a set of planners sit down and draw an entire district before anything is built. Currently this district is going through a period of earthquake renovation because the haphazard construction of the 1950s is not up to current standards. In addition to the Kazakhstani population that Nerlin mentioned, there is also a large Uighur population in Zeytinburnu. Uighurs are Muslims from Western China and as ethnic minorities there, they have experienced pressure from the Han Chinese. They are Turkic, and thus Turkey is a natural place for them to settle when there are problems in Western China.
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