By Rachel Ellison ~
While the world was fantasizing over futurist, visionary cities as hybrids of culture, community, and creativity, three Turkish cities, Ankara, Istanbul, and Izmir, are also joining their bandwagon. Of significant meaning to their heritage, the three cities are envisioning urban life in new dimensions with art-, creativity-, and sustainability-based lifestyle transformation. The three cities not only are keeping the book relevant to their own times but are also demonstrating to the world how cities can flourish through city renewal through culture.
Istanbul: A Two-Continental Multicultural Melting Pot
No city is more intersectional culturally. Spanning from Asia to Europe, it’s a geography of ideas, tastes, and boundary of identity. Once the capital of three empires, Istanbul has re-emerged as an international capital of creativity in recent years, with ancient monuments nestled around new-age buildings.
In Kadıköy and Karaköy districts, former manufacturing zones have been transformed into bohemian ghettos. Side streets filled with street art, alternative art spaces, craft bars, and live music clubs constitute the cultural heart of the city. Bomontiada, a refurbished old brewery complex as a new home, is a case of rebirth through culture, boasting facilities from jazz concerts to digital art film showings.
Istanbul, according to UNESCO Creative Cities Network definition, is one of the cities that is investing its creative capital in sustainable urbanization. Empowerment through digital arts, fashion, and performance makes the city capable of forming an active framework in which young creatives and famous artists are encouraged to innovate.
Izmir: Sea City Open to Arms of Sustainability and Creativity
Along the Aegean coast of Türkiye, sun-baked Izmir is a tranquil, sun-scorched image of cultural rebirth. Don’t be fooled by its beach town appearance, though—silent innovation and green innovation are top priority in Izmir.
With the third-largest Turkish city, Izmir has focused culture on life. Public art, artisan bazaars, and green-celebrating festivals are the standard. Its European Jazz Festival, founded three decades ago, welcomes foreign artists and cross-pollinates foreign and indigenous players. It’s not a concert–it’s a fiesta partying multiculturalism in the city.
One of the interesting things about Izmir is that it isn’t natural. It is creating public spaces for cultural activities, and local artists and green-brands are thriving. The city thus becomes a city that not just becomes human but also draws in a whole new generation of entrepreneurs and artists to the city.
Ankara: The Underrated Capital Reinventing Itself
Having been taken over too frequently by hip cousins, Ankara, the Turkish capital, is experiencing its share of renaissance. While the country’s best culture institutions merely crawled along as an administrative city in the past, nowadays the trendy young-breed art colonies are monopolizing all the spotlight.
Suburbs such as Hamamönü, so serene an old district, are experiencing rebirth too, with erstwhile rehabilitated Ottoman houses being converted into art centers and design communities. The city is building co-working campuses and innovation parks such as Teknopark Ankara as it sets out to build creatives’ sharing clusters and technology start-ups’ clusters. Some of them are such places as Aydıntepe, Akıncık, and Ahlatlıbel neighborhoods.
Tempted by dreams of city art and cultural critique in the metropolis, Ankara is where new imagination converges—fashion, new media, or visual arts. Where designers and curators converge in Ankara, it is cheap, institutions are within reach, and cultural spaces transform overnight to be vibrant, all factors combined which are transforming the capital as the center of Türkiye’s renaissance of lifestyle.
A Blueprint for Urban Creativity
Istanbul, Izmir, and Ankara, all three combined, are demonstrating that creativity is not a luxury commodity—it’s what well-functioning, just cities need. Combined, their focus on place-based culture, on art, and on sustainability is an investment against the homogenization of most world cities. From corner jazz to neighborhood-scale culture, citywide, entire cities are building futures that are not only successful, but human.
What the three cities have in common is less Turkishness—and more a shared conviction in the ability of art, humanness, and imagination to transform the everyday. In contrast to the world’s demand for newly printed city master plans that just get everything perfect, the three design capitals of Türkiye share a secret ingredient: one in which every corner of the city has something to say and every one of its inhabitants is able to tell it.
