If there’s one city in the world that could easily bear all the crosses in the world, from cross-cultural over cross-fertilization to cross bench minds and crossovers, it must be Istanbul. Due to its dazzling history – being once the capital of the Roman Empire and the world centre of the Islam, not to mention Atatürk’s revolutionary contribution to the city’s cosmopolitan image – Istanbul gradually became a blend of Turkish, Anatolian, Ottoman (Greco-Roman and Islamic) and Western culture and traditions.
Logically, today, Istanbul brims over with creativity and related initiatives shoot up like mushrooms. After the Istanbul Art Biennial and the Istanbul International Film Festival, Istanbul now also has its own design week, which was held from the 29th of September til the 3rd of October. The Istanbul Design Week aims to introduce Turkish Design to the world, and focuses on Istanbul’s future in design and on urbanization problems.
One of the design week’s subprojects, “Human Cities Brussels-Istanbul 2010: Designing Public Space”, was held at the Old Galata Bridge, which connects the two sides of Istanbul. This project aims at encouraging an interdisciplinary exchange between Istanbul and Brussels, and is concerned with urban design, culture and interaction in public spaces.
As part of this Human Cities project, Base’s creative director Thierry Brunfaut gave a lecture on city signage and a city’s (quarters) identity, with Base’s recent Mont des Arts project in mind. Mont des Arts/Kunstberg is an area in Brussels that gathers more than twenty musea and cultural institutions. Base designed the quarter’s identity and created a communication strategy to revalue the area and attract a more diverse public to the spot.
To explore the subject ‘Human Cities’ in depth, and to draw a connection between the Brussels Mont des Arts case and Istanbul, Thierry equally organised a cocreation workshop among Turkish and international design and architecture students.
“I let the particpants choose a quarter of Istanbul which was similar to the Mont des Arts quarter in Brussels. Together – via a post-it exercise – we cocreated names for the quarter, and concepts to develop the area further.”
“What was striking, was that many particpants thought I would label their ideas as either ‘bad’ or ‘good’. I explained them that for me, no such binary distinction exists. Every idea can be the core of another one. Once they realised this, much more energy and ideas were unleashed. The conclusion of the workshop was “Never work alone anymore”.
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