Tenth International Conference on The Constructed Environment

Abstract

Throughout history, cities have been treated as a machine or like a living organism but it has always been an active system. The dynamic state of the city is associated with the other systems that create and nurture it. One of these that construct the city is the wholesale market, which we can describe as the ‘throat of the city’. For the dynamics that sustain the city, the wholesale market is a vital energy source. It is the focus of a large network of spatial organizations extending from the urban to rural. In this context, it was inevitable to examine the wholesale market in a metropolis such as Istanbul, in order to decipher not only the city but also the rural and urban relations and the change of the dynamics of the city within this relation. To reveal how food constructs the geography which includes the urban and rural, we organized the research workshop called ‘The Wholesale Market of İstanbul’. The research aimed to open the discussion of the articulated states of Istanbul and Anatolia on the axis of food production-consumption networks. In this context, İstanbul Wholesale Market, as an example of an organism that connects the city to the rural through the complex processes of food such as a terminal, control, taxation, and distribution. It is an instrument in reading Istanbul, which is an endless urban articulation space, over food. This paper focuses on the outcomes of the research process in order to decipher how food shapes urban-rural geography.