Ecology is guilty of forgetting about society, just as social science and social theory are predicated on the forgetting of ecology.
Ulrich Beck, Ecological Politics in an Age of Risk
As the “ecological turn" of Istanbul is currently limited to specific managerial perspectives on urban governance – such as “resource management," “environmental risk," or “urban renewal and transformation" – it could be argued that this turn may also be seen as an opportunity to re-calibrate certain dialogues regarding much broader interpretations of ecology for the city. Rather than limiting the sustainability discussions to dichotomies of either an uncritical/progressive urban management framework or cynical ignorance of the new challenges that the city will face in the near future, sustainability might provide the necessary framework to build new relationships between various scales of Istanbul's contemporary urbanism (i.e., between the city and its larger geographical setting, as well as between the physical and the social aspects of its urbanism).
Rather than simply limiting sustainability to an urban managerial inquiry, the real question remains: what kind of projections might these new urban policies instigate regarding urban ecology and infrastructure and what do they mean for the livability and the social cohesion of Istanbul?As answers to such questions will be critical in the following years, at this stage, one could argue that sustainability might offer a framework for building necessary relationships between the city and its surroundings as well a between the physical and the social aspects of its urbanism. An initial conclusion deriving from this framework is the need to establish a wider understanding of Istanbul's larger metropolitan terrain – through further explorations on the changing spatial configuration of the hinterland-edge, its landscape, and the construction of the subway and other elements of public infrastructure – and the incorporation of that knowledge into Istanbul's urbanism.
Revisiting geographer Matthew Gandy's assertion that “it is perhaps only through an ecologically enriched public realm that new kinds of urban environmental discourse may emerge," [1] an important point would be that sustainability stands as a relevant and significant topic for Istanbul's contemporary urbanism as long as it helps to build new interactions among the city's ecologies, infrastructure, and public realm, ultimately resulting with a more expanded understanding of urban sustainability for the city.
[1] Matthew Gandy, "Urban Nature and the Ecological Imaginary," in In the Nature of Cities: Urban Political Ecology and the Politics of Urban Metabolism, ed. by N. Heynen, M. Kaika and E. Swyngedouw, (London; New York: Routledge, 2006): 63–74.