“This is not a line”: Critical Delineation of the Coastline in Istanbul.

The waterfront of Istanbul is a critical urban edge that marks a human-shaped geography, whose transformation embodies an interval of crises and critique of urbanization. The urban projects have left an irreversibly shaped new geography on the actual terrain with displacements in the past years. The problem area of the study centers the project as a phenomenon that generates material dispositions and critical debates. The study looks for expanded temporal and spatial spans to evaluate projects and urbanization in Istanbul, with possible ways to re-think the position of humans in shaping the geographies of the land and water through a critical lens. Within and against the reductive hegemony of urban projects as spatial abstractions, it focuses on the deformation of the coastline demarcating the waterfront as a cartographic agent that highlights associations and material unfixites of actual space. By positioning the research between the object-based and the field-based rendering of urban space - between the world of architecture and urban geography - it claims a new experimental zone that weaves among the two as a contribution to the possible confrontations of architecture and urban geography for critically reviewing the processes of urbanization in Istanbul.

The study aims to generate a meta-theoretical framework and relative cartographic tools towards an ontological inquiry over the waterfront as a space across the firm land and fluid water. The theoretical inquiry of the research focuses on the waterfront and involves different bodies of theory that can expand the frameworks of understanding it. Lefebvre’s spatial thoughts on urbanization and planetary space offer new ways to position the waterfront as an urban edge in the context of planetary processes of urbanization. Deleuze and Guattari’s thought that merges the textual, material, and cartographic relations through agency and assemblages offers new ways of understanding the new cartographies of the planetary space. Latour’s concept of human and nonhuman agency and its widespread echoes in humanities, provide a holistic lens to see the waterfront with the economic, political, and ecological webs of relations; with assemblages. These divergent bodies of theory are argued to amplify each other to come up with a holistic conception of the waterfront and the coastline as a critical urban phenomenon.

Drawing together the problems and theoretical tools, the research generates the conceptual and cartographic methodology of critical delineation, which suggests following the coastlines to unveil the processes of shaping the waterfront. Critical delineation follows the changes in the coastline and is itself considered a questioning machine for the deformation of the coast, which is a dynamic geography as an object and as a field. Deriving from the gaps between precedent paradigms, critical delineation of the coastline claims three expansions in the preconceived conception of scale, temporal frameworks, and actors. Delineation beyond scale, traverses spaces from human scale to planetary scale, through objects, buildings, urban space, regions, and beyond by associating them. Delineation beyond temporal frameworks warps historical time with a nonlinear stream of longue and court durée, which overlaps geological and journalistic time by aerial photographs as visual tools to monitor waterfront transformation over the past century. Delineation beyond actors associates with the agency of human and nonhumans that surface in everyday events of two main acts of shaping waterfront: events of landing and landfilling. In the light of the three inquiries, the coastline of Istanbul is reframed as a space of material unfixities among the terrestrial and the maritime worlds with the geographical and architectural logics of the elements of port geography.

With a heterogeneous use of multiple methods; critical delineation uses aerial photographs, archival research of historical master plans of the port, maritime charts, urban maps, texts of urban history, geological history, maritime travelogues, reports of newspapers, political discourses over urban projects, site visits and personal experiences that are gathered to produce a new lens to see the shaping of the waterfront. The research is assembled as a glossary that debunks the hierarchies of the elements of scale, time, and actors.

In the light of critical delineations of the waterfront in Istanbul, the coastline redirects spatial questions to unveil overlapping relationships among agents of power, authority, nature, geography, and humans. The coastlines become cartographic, material and textual witnesses to a complete appropriation of shaping the contour of land and water. They highlight changing technologies of port logistics, effects of globalization, construction sites of urban transformations, uneven distributions of capital, authoritarian appropriations of urban space, and territorial projects as well as natural dynamics of the port geography that was deeply influential in the process of urbanization in Istanbul. Eventually, the process of urbanization, generates critical edge conditions where the complex political, ecological, economic, and social agents are impossible to completely distinguish from each other.

Critical delineation of the coastlines is a manifold, ever-growing, and associative process among the architectures and geographies of the waterfront that can be further adapted to other kinds of edge conditions at any scale. The quest over the phenomenon of the urban edge transcends differences between land/sea; human/nonhuman; natural/urban; near/far; historic/present; material/ immaterial; micro/macro; abstract/actual; and representational/nonrepresentational. Moreover it reveals the quandaries of the lines of projects and lines of geography in planetary space. The act of drawing coastlines surface further ethic and aesthetic dimensions of questioning urbanization therefore, beyond the critique of urbanization. Delineating the coastline of Istanbul is a counter-project, doubtful of its own representation, it reveals that "this is not a line."

Keywords: waterfront, coastline, critical delineation, critique of urbanization, material flows, material unfixity, urban edge, project, planetary space, port geography, Istanbul