The city of the dialectical phenomena. A matter of measure

Abstract

Istanbul seems to be a suspended city. Split by the strait of the Golden Horn, it boasts the water square included by the estuary on the Bosphorus as its most important public space. Each day a multitude of inhabitants, like nomads, cross those waters professing abiding devotion to a ritual transit. Suspended between homologation and identity, Istanbul finds its figurative theme in a fragment. Its three water bridges apparently show a sense of flaunted modernity in which the attraction between Europe and Asia occurs in a geographic place generating a clash of different identities which at the same time repel and try to captivate one another. Hospitable and dangerous, noble and proletary, grand and working-class, Istanbul is the city of opposites which tell us about antique tensions bearing fresh energies.