filmvetare

Cultural producers have shaped the image of Istanbul's crude chaotic urbanization into a cooler image in the last few years, according to one of the participants at a recent conference on cinema and media studies.

"Just like what's happening with the 2010 Istanbul European Capital of Culture Agency's branding of the city, Istanbul is aestheticizing the urban poor, aestheticizing the urban chaos so intriguing to visitors, creating the 'Slumdog millionaire' effect," said Munich-based scholar Derya Özkan said at the 4th Annual European Network for Cinema and Media Studies Conference which is being held at Kadir Has University's Golden Horn Campus.

The "Slumdog Millionaire" effect refers to the exotic portrayal of the landscapes and livelihoods of Mumbai's urban poor in the 2008 awarding-winning feature film of the same name.

The title of this year's conference is Urban Mediations, one that the university's rector, Mustafa Aydın, finds particularly appropriate for Istanbul. "In Istanbul we constantly live in mediation between the past and the new, the East and the West. The city is in a process of understanding itself, of understanding ourselves within an urban narrative."

Within her presentation, Özkan explained how the "Istanbul cool" branding process leads to the “orientalization” and commodification of the poor. City developers and the tourism industry can capitalize upon Istanbul's hyperactivity as exotic for Western visitors, who can indulge in – but not be threatened by – the urban chaos during their short stay. Such examples include tours of those neighborhoods being gentrified, like Tarlabaşı and the recently demolished Sulukule, which displaced members of the Roma community in Fatih.

These messages create a paradoxical realm among the locals between the reality of living in the enduring chaos and what is sold as Istanbul's "essence" to visiting outsiders.

"These type of messages implement the urban chaos to understand the city, using crude elements to make Istanbul charming," said Özkan. Such branding initiatives "act as a seed" in accelerating urban transformation projects for foreign consumption.

The conference was held from June 24 to 27 with the participation of nearly 400 scholars from European, American and Turkish universities and featured keynote addresses from world-renowned academics like Saskia Sassen from Columbia University and Thomas Elsaesser from University of Amsterdam.