Istanbul: Disconnected from the Hinterlands
Another central tenet in the conceptualization of global cities is the belief that with the burgeoning growth of a global city “the economic fortunes of these cities becomes increasingly disconnected from their broader hinterlands” (1). As global cities form, power is decentralized from the central business district across the entire city, and yet there is an impermeable membrane between the bounds of the city and its hinterlands in regards to economic prosperity. No other city in the Urban Imagination illustrates this stark difference better than perhaps Istanbul.
Istanbul’s relationship with its hinterlands has a complex history. In the Omeka exhibit “Istanbul’s Chora Church: The Metamorphosis of a Holy Space,” this relationship is briefly touched upon through virtue of the original location of the Chora Church (2). Built outside of the first walls of Constantinople, Chora Church was given its name because it was located in the “fields,” or outside of the city center. Despite being incorporated into the city proper relatively soon after its founding, tracing Chora Church’s history shows that it has always been considered in the fields and less important to Istanbul than its direct counterpart, the Hagia Sophia, on the Golden Horn. Though an inherently holy space respected by both Greeks and Turks, Chora did not take part in the massive restructuring of the city that came about after the Ottomans conquered Istanbul in 1453. The outskirts of the city where Chora is located were treated separately from central Istanbul many centuries ago and even today are less trodden than the central Golden Horn.
We see this dichotomy between the center of the Istanbul and its hinterlands in Orhan Pamuk’s novel Istanbul: Memories and the City as well. In his chapter “The Picturesque and the Outlying Neighborhoods,” Pamuk discusses early visits to the outlying neighborhoods in the hinterlands (3). As the population of Istanbul rapidly expands, the city’s furthest hinterlands expand outward faster than the rate of expansion of wealth and prosperity in the center of the city. This creates a huge, but relatively homogenous, layer of hinterlands and outlying neighborhoods surrounding central Istanbul. When Pamuk visits these outlying neighborhoods he is struck by the “squalor, the helpless hopeless neglect” that is inherent to these neighborhoods (3). He writes lovingly of “pure and remote Istanbul” from a seat of great privilege and artistic pleasure, but the striking socioeconomic difference between Pamuk’s central Istanbul and the outlying neighborhoods cannot be ignored (3).
Though Istanbul is not the most prosperous city in the world, it is certainly a world city because of its influence and power throughout history and its strategic location on the Bosporus. Regardless of its current prosperity, the city has a magnetism which attracts peoples and cultures toward the locus and adds to the city’s huge hinterlands. Sassen posits that a global city uses “globalization…to recapture people, workers, communities, and…the many different worker cultures involved in the work of globalization” (1). In this way, for many centuries Istanbul has taken advantage of its broad hinterlands and any resources contained therein to fuel its globalization and status as a global city. Meanwhile, though reaping the benefits, the city is not rechanneling its wealth back into those hinterlands. The centuries-long disconnect between the city of Istanbul and its surrounding hinterlands fulfills another central tenet of a global city and truly supports the claim that global cities have been an urban phenomenon for much of world history.