planning

From Istanbul I flew Turkish Air to Sarajevo, the cultural heart of Bosnia. Larisa Kurtovic and I were both graduate student instructors for Michael Watts last fall. She is a PhD student in Anthropology at Berkeley which means that she is the social science equivalent of a rocket scientist. She wanted me to visit Sarajevo […]

Galata Galata is an urban district on the north shore of the Golden Horn. It was developed in the high middle ages by the Genoese as a trading colony adjacent to Constantinople. This is one of the first buildings I encountered when I crossed the Galata bridge. Pretty obviously Italian in its design; but does

Sultan Ahmet mosque A big, urban, Friday mosque. Mehmet Pasha mosque A more intimate, neighborhood-serving mosque Suleymaniye mosque Another monumental mosque, further back (west) in the city Beyazid moque

Topkapi Palas After walking around the neighborhood near my hotel I walked down to the waterfront and then back up through the old walls to the backside of the Hagia Sofiya. There is a beautiful Ottoman pavilion there, and then I realized that the wall behind the Hagia Sofiya has a massive gate in it,

July 6 through 9, 2007 My mission in Istanbul was to get images of urban development as examples for Afghan planners and architects. I mentioned on the July 7 post how it was strange to arrive in Istanbul ‘from the east’; another reason for this is that I was looking for images of Istanbul for

During the spring of 2007 I taught at both Kabul University and Kabul Polytechnic. Both at these universities and in the municipality, students and planners alike are trying to envision the future path of urban development for Kabul and all of Afghanistan’s cities. During my inter-semester break I am visiting several cities to gather images

21 June 2007 / 31 Jauza 1386 A foray into the unknown [Caution: there is some whining involved in this essay, which may be irritating. But this farce of errors is also informative.] Yesterday I received a text message from Marianne O’Grady: We r here @ park palace. lv 4 ghazni 2mro. Marianne had been

3 June 2007 / 13 Jauza 1386 I have been learning the transit system around Kabul. Taxis from the University to downtown, for a foreigner, can cost 120 AFS ($2.40). But if you catch a shared taxi or a minivan (Tunis), it costs only 10 AFS; bigger buses cost 5 AFS; and the National Bus