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    12 views20 pages

    Theparceledcity

    Uploaded by

    Yunus Emre Yiğit

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    © All Rights Reserved
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    Pierre Pinon The Parceled City Istanbul in the Nineteenth Century Urban parcling processes have played a fundamental, but long neglected rolein the history of the European city. The development of London inthe eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, though based entizely on the subdivision of vast aristocratic properties through the use of long-term teases, has hardly been considered. In fact, parceling had been a private form of city planning that has never attracted the attention of historians of architecture and urbanism, who have concentrated ther attention instead on the publi politics of urban development atthe municipal and national Jevel. Studies on parceling strategies ean be found, but mainly in studies ‘on the design and the development of new towns, especially colonial ones. Although they changed overtime, parceling systems were atthe base of the development of the main European cities from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. They ranged from the sixteenth-century parceling of the neighborhoods in Rome south of the Piazza del Popolo on both ses of the Corso? to the more recent parcling of northern European cities such as eighteenth-century Berlin. Considered the most logical strategy for developing nev, exniilo neighborhoods, as well as for restructuring ancient areas (provided they were large enough to allow such a compre- hensive intervention), parceling met with widespread success [As so0m as a city begins to expand because of population pressures or the inhabitants’ wish to spread beyond a cramped, ancient town, land owners and/or realestate investors understand immediately thatthe sale of agri- cultural land for building parcels will generate enormous. profits Landowners never miss an opportunity to profit from ther landholdings, and realestate investors exploit the chance to buy up cheap agricultural land and sell it at a much higher price. The possibility of easy and immediate profit turns owners into entrepreneur: since this was favored by the public authority, for a lag time it limited its function to the encour- agement and control of private initiative. Public administration adopted the same method to increase land value, either directly or through registered intermediary agents Parceling involves subdividing private property (whether patrimonial, expropriated or acquired for speculation) into lots to be sold or rented. It is a phenomenon that affects the entire urban environment oF any ceavironment that isto become urbanized, including agricultural land oF ‘marshland on th outskirts of acity, abandoned industrial or military sites, areas suchas gardens suitable for development, vat properties belonging to impoverished aristocratic families, abandoned convents or monasteries, and so forth. Opposite: Te po Divisions of arsine intent cat Generally speaking, even if the final aim of any parceling operation is profit, it performs an urban role as well that should not be overlooked, Parceling was, and stil is, frequently used by public administrations to develop projects such as oad building and creating new and rehabilitating existing neighborhoods. It thus produces as many morphological variants {as there are objectives and approaches to urban design. However, they all share the same intrinsic mode of intervention, one that produces relatively ‘autonomous urban patterns, Parceling is done according toa preconceived set of boundaries that define the real estate or planning operation; the area ‘within those limits is then subdivided and roads are laid to link this new ‘area to preexisting networks, Al these factors contribute to the creation of {an ambiguous morphological relationship (uxtaposed or fused) between the newly parceled area and the overall urban form. ‘Another important feature of parcels is that they are architecturally relatively homogeneous because they are generally developed and sold in ‘a short time (quick tumover is fundamental to the parceling process, for it shortens investment time) and the most common types of structures atthe time of intervention are used for building on them. Building types might also be dictated by the shape and dimension of the parcels, unlessa specific architectural model is imposed beforehand. Thus a precise relationship exists between parceling morphology and building types. ‘The Parceling of Istanbul in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century ‘The greater part of the parceling of Istanbul was realized between the second half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. It was done in two ways: through rebuilding after a major fire, and through the development of undeveloped land. ‘Throughout Istanbul's history great fires often destroyed entire neighbor- hoods of this largely wooden city. The Ottomans exploited the ‘opportunity these fires presented to reorganize the city based on grid planning, ignoring those houses that had already been rebuilt in alignment With the ancient roads. In the new neighborhoods north of Pera (the European and Levantine quarters), parceling strategy was based on the subdivision of formerly large properties, Urban growth based on Western principles of urban planning was carried out essentially by juxtaposing afterire and development parceling on fallow or agricultural land on the periphery of Pera north of the Golden Horn and around preexisting villages along the Bosporus. The absence of any comprehensive planning strategy produced a patchwork of patterns made by parceling those areas of the old town destroyed by fires on the Stamboul side and through real- estate speculation on the Pera side. ‘One can imagine the fury of fires in a city where thousands of houses, built with matches, so to speak, are packed one against the other," wrote ‘von Moltke in 1836° As frequent in Istanbul as in all the other cities of the northwestern Ottoman Empire where houses were mainly built of wood, a 48 fires were long considered unfortunate but not catastrophic events. It was rot until later, when they came to be thought of as catastrophic that para- doxically they generated two postive developments: modemization and insurance. We can argue that fires played an important role inthe modern- ization process, leaving open the question as to whether a fie was simp! considered a fatal chance leading to modern redevelopment or a fundamental factor in revealing the possibility of modernizing the city. Before the first half ofthe nineteenth century, fires played no role in the evolution of urban form. A map of Istanbul from 18824 shows that modernized neighborhoods corresponding to areas destroyed by fires occurred only after 1845, The rest of the urban fabric~whether rebuilt after a fire of not ~ maintained its traditional structure. Until 1845, fires were not regarded as an opportunity to modernize the old fabric, and they never Jed to any special urban intervention: the street network, alignments, and parceling systems were generally simply reconstructed. G. A. Olivier, a traveler who visited Istanbul atthe end of the eighteenth century, testifies that ‘damage provoked by fire is soon taken care of. A few days alterwards, we can see houses being raised everywhere similar to those

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