From February 27 to March 2, 2025, THEAGENT’s research team gathered for a second field trip on theater and gentrification: after Berlin, Istanbul. This trip occurred in-between two events in Vienna, the project’s home, one with artists and another one (still to come) with researchers, at a moment when each team member’s ethnographic work was under way. Thus, one started to have ground for comparison with other case-studies, which turned out to be both rewarding and challenging as the situation in Istanbul is quite different from that in Berlin or, in my case, Paris.

As I prepared for the expedition, I had a look at general resources introducing Istanbul, one of which insisted on its “waves of intensive urban development” (“Istanbul,” Britannica) that are obviously still ongoing. In contrast, the city of Paris just passed a new urban “bioclimatic” plan that considerably constrains new constructions. The area of Istanbul is fifty times bigger than the area of Paris (and six times bigger than Greater Paris): unlike Berlin and its rather flat topography, Istanbul is very hilly, and you can easily see on your way, from successive vantage points in the old city or in the Beyoğlu municipality (or else in a ferry from Kadıköy to Eyüpsultan through the Golden Horn), its unique urban sprawl.

Istanbul’s high seismic risks take precedence over bioclimatic considerations and require preventive measures that can result in the renovation of entire neighborhoods. These could serve as an excuse for developers to upgrade old buildings and make a profit out of it, raise rents, build infrastructures that cater to newcomers, to the detriment of the local population and for the attraction of tourists. In Istanbul, at least on the sites we visited, gentrification was glaring. 

The contrast between older housing and renovated buildings – with new storefronts – is striking throughout the city. One may think of the Şehit Muhtar neighborhood in the Tarlabaşı district, for example, where old and beautiful yet decrepit Greek houses adjoin brand-new buildings that house luxury apartments, travel and real estate agencies, and cosmetic surgeries in austere, silent, and spotless streets which could be part of any global city’s posh neighborhood, as well as part of a… dystopian film studio! Significantly, there was not a soul on these streets. One may also think of the cool coffee shops and pet shops in Balat, across the Golden Horn, or the trendy concept stores next to contemporary art galleries in Tophane, back in Beyoğlu, two traditionally conservative neighborhoods where the inhabitants do not look with a favorable eye on these Trojan horses of gentrification. The latter made the headlines in 2010, when local mobs attacked visitors outside of three art galleries (“Art Walk Turns Into Street Fight in Istanbul,” New York Times or “L’agression de galeries d’art à Istanbul révèle les fractures de la société turque,” Le Monde).

In Istanbul as elsewhere, yet in an especially conspicuous way, the arts seem to be a vector of gentrification. Not far from Tophane, malls and restaurants surround Istanbul Modern (Turkey’s first museum of modern and contemporary art) on the Galataport promenade, a massive development project that turned a historic port into “a vibrant hub for art, culture, and shopping,” as the project’s website brands itself (“Galataport Istanbul named ‘Best New Development Project’,” Galataport Istanbul), an original association of words: would it be that art and culture’s ultimate goal is consumption, or are they themselves but one aspect of consumption? The newly developed area boasts a gigantic cruise liner port where tourists can hop off and shop, see an exhibition, have a meal or a drink and hop on again and leave the city for another coastal destination.

On our way, we stopped by a number of theaters that have to deal with intensive urban development, gentrification (such as GalataPerform which had to leave its original venue), as well as other challenges listed in Adak and Altinay’s “Theatre and Politics in Turkey and Its Diaspora,” such as censorship and self-censorship, which go hand in hand with an opaque distribution of – and lack of – public funds. Although the authors point out that censorship is a longstanding problem, which they trace back to the Ottoman era, one also quickly understood, through various informal conversations, that the situation had recently gotten worse and worse. One could hear different versions of the sentence: “it’s changed a lot in the past twenty years.”

This is not to say that other fields of study are exempt of censorship: denying that it exists in Paris and other cities would contribute to make it even more insidious. When I asked a staff member of a Saint-Denis theater whether there would be performances or actions critical of the Paris Olympics, they bluntly answered that should the theater do so, those who funded it would be very unhappy. However, in Istanbul, theater makers repeatedly mentioned censorship and one learned that any association with the Gezi Park protests, misplaced criticism of the government, or references to taboo topics pertaining to minority groups or religions, for instance, could result in a permanent withdrawal of public funds. While I have heard in Paris that private theater companies lost a private source of funding because of what they put on stage, I haven’t heard of such stories for public theaters, which I have been focusing on for this project. It might also be that I am ill-informed or that no public theater would openly criticize French authorities…

The theatrical landscape in Istanbul is quite different from that of Paris. If censorship is considered to be a major issue in one field, it makes sense to focus on private institutions, and we only visited private theaters during this second field trip. Yet the comparative challenge does not only come from the relatively more important issue of censorship, or the lack of public funds, but also from the apparently-trifling fact that the many theaters we visited in Beyoğlu, Kadıköy or Fatih could not exist in other cities for mere security reasons: they were commonly located inside buildings housing apartments, and many didn’t have an emergency exit. The unique nature of Istanbul’s urban area and theatrical landscape might make it an outlier for our project, as much as Paris might be the outlier for the relationship between theater and gentrification there is not as blatant. Is this an insurmountable challenge? Quite the opposite: a productive and promising one!