Text of the Speech of Mr. Serhat Tabanca, Executive Council Member of the Marmara Group Foundation, at the Asian Mayors Forum on November 21, 2024

Dear Participants of the Asian Mayors Forum,

I greet you from the Marmara Group Foundation in Istanbul.

I would like to start my speech titled “Thinking Man, Thinking City” by thanking our hosts for their great hospitality.

Cities have changed just like people. Our changing life habits are also transforming cities. As people become increasingly individualized and move away from themselves and society, the city is also moving away from people. However, humanity did not reach city life easily.

With the cultivation of land and agriculture, settled life consisting of small villages began. When centuries of agricultural society and land sovereignty were replaced by industry and machinery with the industrial revolution, villages turned into cities. The habit of horizontal settlement was rapidly transformed into vertical settlement, and houses with gardens into apartment buildings.

Today's rapid increase in information, change, development and transition to an information society have affected human and urban life more profoundly. Accelerated communication and transportation, while accelerating city life, have intensified the crowds and brought people closer in logic but further apart in emotion. With the acceleration of life, spaces have also changed dimension and the cities of the information society, equipped with advanced technology, have almost made us forget the human being and his/her values. So much so that people sharing the same spaces are unaware of each other. People started to resemble cities and cities started to resemble people.

People have logic, emotions and social aspects, and so do cities. A city with a well-developed intelligence (IQ) is mathematically established and neat in terms of numbers but if the emotional intelligence (EQ) is underdeveloped, the city will have aesthetic problems, the dimensions will be boring, the image of a person who is withdrawn into himself and cannot experience his emotions will come to the forefront. Therefore, the mind's eye alone is not enough, the heart's eye is also necessary for the city. Thus, what makes cities cities are the unseen emotions, history and aesthetics that circulate between the buildings.

Just as some people give positive energy to others with their bodies, gestures and facial expressions, cities embrace or stand aloof with their superstructures and substructures.

A person hears, thinks, feels, listens. A city also thinks, listens and feels.

As a matter of fact, cities carry souls like people. Untouchable, invisible but felt in every detail. Cities that cannot overcome the mass of one-dimensional, one-colored structures remain soulless. Like every living thing without a soul, all kinds of pollution develops, peace disappears, and the sound of nature cannot be heard.

The city should not forget to appeal to people's feelings and emotions with all its details. Because the city is a whole, just like a human being. It feeds, shelters and protects the people it carries. It does not stop there. Because among our basic needs is love. Yes, the city should offer love to those it harbors, it should raise lovers in its bosom, it should be a place for people who feel good. The city should push people to achieve better, it should compete with them. It should embrace the resentful and be a place of “us” for the others. It should cherish its guests because the living are the guests of cities.

What makes a person different from others is their personality. Cities are like that too. Which city is similar to another? Like the identity, values and personality that sustain human beings, there are values that sustain cities. A city forms an identity with the richness of carrying the personalities, values, culture, living and non-living things of centuries in its bosom.

As a matter of fact, places reflect those who inhabit them and places are as important as those who inhabit them. Therefore, the city should not exhibit an unbalanced, disorderly, aggressive, incompatible antisocial personality. It should foster life, living, cooperation and harmony.

The city is as much a whole with what we feel underneath it as what we see above it. Because as the great Turkish Poet Yahya Kemal Beyatlı said, “We live with our dead.” Cities are places for the dead as well as the living, and they bring the dead and the living together.

Cities are communication channels that bring the past and the future together and make them talk. Cities cannot be unaware of their own future and their own past. The city should reduce violence with the developing civilization, dialogue bridges, which are as important as transportation bridges, should solve all kinds of conflicts Otherwise common values become individualized and social dissolution becomes inevitable. The instinct of aggression is activated and people start to miss their villages amidst advanced technology. They either return to their villages or turn their cities into villages.

None of us has the right to overshadow the natural and historical beauties of centuries. It does not matter whether we are the people living in it or governing it. If we squander the identity of the city for daily gains, the city will not be able to bear it, one day it will ask for an account, maybe it will not be able to carry our burden anymore, it will cut off its communication and will not hear us. As a matter of fact, it is a fact that we have seen throughout history that cities governed by people who have not passed through the station of love, who have not had their share of the sea of love, remain without love, without personality, without identity.

Thank you for listening to me.