In the 1930s, the attention of Turkey’s politicians shifted back from Ankara and Anatolian cities to İstanbul. In 1932, the Governorship-Municipality of İstanbul organized an urban design competition for İstanbul, and four foreign city planners were invited. In the meantime, Martin Wagner came to İstanbul for the preparation of urban reports. In 1937, Henri Prost, the prominent urbanist of Paris, was invited to İstanbul and prepared the first master plan of the city. In Turkey and in İstanbul, town planning processes have been significantly influenced by “Western” planning principles, cultures, and experiences while gaining a local meaning in the context of Turkish politics and the state-formation process. The aim of this study is to describe the urban design competition of 1933 and the first master plan of 1937. Beyond references to Western European cities as in the “city-beautiful” planning approach, this study, based on a series of official documents, plan reports and their rhetoric, investigates in particular the role of foreign planners/urbanists in İstanbul in the context of the construction of a nation-state. The analysis of these foreign planners’ work suggests that urban planning in Republican Turkey was closely linked to the construction of the nation state.

This paper develops a conceptual agenda and a critical cartographic methodology using aerial photographs to monitor the shaping of waterfront as a geography in Istanbul by humans. Starting from the first aerial photographs of Istanbul until present, the gaze of the vertical dimension in geographical space holds divergent evidences of spatial transformation captured in aerial views. From construction sites to building of coastal roads, demolishing of port scapes and technological rifts of logistic flows, to large infills in longshore space; events and moments of spatial deformation of coastal space become visible and evident through aerial photography. Aerial gaze, when considered within an archeology of a developing military reconnaissance technology, is presented as an ironic tool to shed light to evidences and historical record of spatial transformation within an act of witnessing. Viewing coastal unfixity through aerial photographs are argued here to provide two different temporalities: longue and court dureé which operate in the eventual and geological time. As these photographs unveil, the material-geological body of the waterfront itself becomes the bearer of historical records of human and nonhuman relations that shape the coastal geography. The ground beneath is unfixed as it is pulled into a cartographic questioning tool of "critical delineation" of Istanbul's waterfront. In the end, the waterfront is re-conceptualized and monitored as a dynamic geography. With this gaze, this paper suggests a debunking of oppositions of land and sea space to reframe the waterfront as an urban edge in the process of urbanization.

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