INFORMATION FIELD. In Istanbul, typologies of urban conditions can be identified as the tangible consequence of the municipal development policy that dictates the manner in which people occupy the built environment. These conditions can be interpreted as an information field of urban complexities: the buildings that define the built environment, the people who occupy this environment and their ideas that make the city their own. The Sacred City, the False Modern City, the Informal City and the Emergent City each consist of such ‘information,’ yet because of the nature of policy unique to each, there emerges a dissimilar understanding of the layering of this information. Relationships between layers create a new reality that is distorted, revealing a juxtaposition of information, a juxtaposition of occupant to space.
What are the mechanisms behind this juxtaposition?
ETHINKING INFORMATION. Urban spaces are scanned as layers of information that are juxtaposed based on the relationships from one layer to another. Through a recombinatory process, each piece of ‘information’ becomes an object that is rethought as a construct of facades. As objects lose their ‘object-ness,’ they are occupied in a different manner. This occupation is defined at multiple scales (to façade, object and environment) in which the conventional relationship of the occupant to ‘front, back and side’ is lost. By losing the specific notion of facade, the occupant begins to occupy every facade at once, and therefore none specifically.
THE NEW FIELD. The notion of façade in the urban sense necessarily connotes false representation and the layering of the city. Yet the implicit connotation becomes the conception of Istanbul as a field of facades; objects deconstruct into façades, façades into fields of information. The city will possess a new dimensionality while simultaneously being flattened. It will expose itself while also causing the occupant to lose both the physical and metaphorical sense of location within an urban space. Are the mechanisms behind the juxtaposition in Istanbul revealed?
