A Way of Life: architecture planning people

Unofficial Commercial Activity in Istanbul

This dissertation attempts to cut a section through the strata of shopping in Istanbul, concentrating on informal markets, and their intricate differentiation to local conditions.

Street traders and informal markets make use of interstitial spaces in the urban topography, where one prescribed use meets another. Such liminal situations allow self-advertisement to punters balanced with the ability to disappear from the authorities.
The ephemerality of their location is not a true nomadism. They exhibit a degree of stability on a par with established shops. There are also social conventions one is obliged to follow in the informal market, necessary for survival and good business. Stability gives reassurance to potential customers, and a sense of inevitability for those trying to maintain the law. There is always an attempt (perhaps unconscious) to feel situated. This can be expressed as standing in front of a column, or the need to line up next to each other in a row.
The inside of shopping centres are governed by similar rules, although taken together the mall imposes itself upon the topography creating solid boundaries of official endorsed use. The collective effect of informal traders can be as influential, but have multiple fading boundaries, which penetrate and overlap official uses.

There are different interpretations of the hierarchy of official globalised shopping and informal local traders, and ambiguity creates opportunities. Certainly street sellers are very local in their situatedness and adaptation to the specific fractures of the urban topography. However they use similar methods to generic chain stores and fuel the global network of products and consumers by satisfying desires. The individual buying the CD is linked to a community of internet newsgroups and fan-clubs, having had the personal involvement of running down the street or flicking through racks, linked ultimately to suppliers in Bulgaria or Korea.
Shopping fluctuates between global networks, local applications, and the individual. Global phenomena are rooted locally in the historic and spatial context of the real city. The global city is less the product of a homogenous globalisation, rather a messier but more vital structure of interrelated processes intertwined with the city's official metabolism.

images:

what: dissertation

when: 2003

where: Istanbul

with: Peter Carl, Cambridge University
Guzin Konuk, Mimar Sinan University
Ihsan Bilgin, Yildiz Technical University

extract:
Sometimes street sellers don't even really sell anything, but act as human adverts.
First a young boy asked me, then lots more men, “do you need any computer programs, brother?” Some held out two CDs in their hands. All you had to do was to look; “I've got others. What do you need?” The march had started before he even told me to follow; I tried to keep up, a jog, a chase down another street, over a pile of building sand, into a busy shop. Inside were upright stands containing normal looking music and video CDs. Many of the people wore dark suits and didn't look like customers. My guide brushed past them before I had a chance to take it in. We entered a partition in the back of the shop, and he began to frantically look through a small box on a counter. I concluded the speed was more for fear of losing business than of police. He couldn't find it. I was instructed to look through for anything else I might like while he went into a further room, where I could glimpse men huddled around a computer, and shelves piled high with CDs; he shouted at them to search. I had a moment alone to breathe, except for a quiet man examining another box. Shards of light entered the dimly lit space through gaps in the Formica surfaced chipboard ‘wall’, that was intended to be indistinguishable from the frameless ‘hidden’ door, but failed due to poor construction. The bright red and blue paint was peeling off the walls, one counter against a wall and two boxes. Never had any architecture excited me as much.

The CD was discovered and I was told to pay at the till at the front of the shop. They didn't have enough change in the till, so they asked an old man standing outside in a group, referring to him as “father”. A laminated business card was shoved into my hand and I was dispatched from the shop with a pat on the back; my guide overtook me running back to regain his street corner location. I put them in my coat pocket impressed by the efficiency and service.