Workshop Program 2011
The Golden Horn, estuary on the European side of Istanbul, has a relevant historical past. It was a natural harbour during the Byzantine and Ottoman Empire, as well as a trade centre of the Mediterranean and the Near East throughout the 10th and 11th centuries. Along the centuries it gained an Islamic identity, with the construction of religious centres, public buildings and mosques. In the 18th century the waterfronts became a famous residential and recreational area for the city. Old Galata Bridge, built in 1836, connected, for the first time, both shores. Also steamships started being used as public transportation. With the foundation of the Republic in 1923, Istanbul was a city of recessing economy and population. Higher income groups were emigrating to new housing areas in the periphery. In 1937, the Master Plan of the European side of Istanbul, by the French urban planner Henry Prost, aimed to modernize the city and to sustain the economic development. As a consequence, the Golden Horn was transformed into an industrial zone. The increase number of factories and commercial areas in the 1950´s had a serious impact on the physical relation between the city and the water, and on the environmental quality and socio-cultural structure of the Golden Horn and its surroundings. The housing areas lost their prestige and became worker neighbourhoods. On the other hand, slums appeared as a result of the immigration from rural areas. The Golden Horn, which used to be one of the main recreation areas of the city, became an unrecognizable industrial productive landscape, with a damaged relation between the city and the waterfront. In the 1980s, during the administration of Bedrettin Dalan, Mayor of Istanbul, an urban renewal effort was initiated to solve the main problems of rapid urbanization in the metropolis, such us traffic congestion, noxious factories and air pollution, lack of services, amenities, open and green spaces. As a result, the Golden Horn experienced a process of "greening". However, urban renewal was concentrated on a major cleansing effort and the beautification of the estuary rather than dealing with its environmental ecology or historic character. Buildings were demolished, residents displaced, and the estuary banks were replaced with parks. The cleaning-up of Golden Horn meant the demolitions of factories, illegal slaughterhouses, and historical buildings, without taking into account the cultural and historical character and identity of the buildings, the economical survival and the life of its inhabitants. The basic question is how to preserve and protect the multicultural and multifunctional character of Golden Horn, evaluating its built and socio-cultural heritage. The actual state of deterioration of its architectural heritage, the lack of public facilities, transportation, services, and local economic activities have transformed Golden Horn into an unsustainable area in its socio-economic structure. In order to propose a strategy for urban regeneration of Golden Horn, it is also necessary to reinvent a new productive landscape.
GreenEngines 3rd. Edition: Golden Horn Urban Rehabilitation – Reinventing a Productive Landscape aims to develop a new sustainable planning alternative for urban rehabilitation by means of pedagogic tools. It reconsiders those spaces that once were industrial, inserted in the urban tissue of cities, generating an economical, social, cultural and architectonic synergy. Once these productive landscapes are abandoned and dismantled, urban voids become wastelands or in the case of Golden Horn in Istanbul, green areas and urban parks that do not take into consideration the rich socio-cultural structure surrounding them. Therefore, to achieve a sustainable strategy of urban regeneration of an obsolete productive landscape, it is necessary to integrate heritage and culture, energy and food production, industry, tourism and education, leisure, nature and open spaces, housing, commerce and new means of transportation. Regarding local food production, parks and green urban networks can integrate food gardens as an ecological lung and source for local food production, self-organized activities and ecological education. Despite the fact that urban agriculture will never be self-sufficient to sustain the food needs of a city, and its ecological footprint, it allows social interaction within the local environment helping to educate new generations, introducing new sustainable habits.