Is this us? Is what we see in this city mirror us?

Since we are heading to an election on by whom and how our cities will be governed, it is of great benefit to take the occasion to think about the city for a while.

Thinking about the city means a human being's thinking about himself, even making an important advance in this thought. The human being, by nature, is the only being that can think about himself.

Of course, being able to think does not mean that he uses this possibility, that is, that he thinks. Just as being able to think does not mean that everything he thinks is accurate and sound.

A person's thinking about himself, knowing himself, being aware of himself, knowing the limits of his reason, learning the strong and weak sides of his personality, becoming aware of his bad feelings as much as his good ones; for example, watching the moments in which his arrogance, ingratitude, jealousy and envy, selfishness and sadism, and a series of complexes come alive, and thereby controlling himself. Is it an urbanity that will provide all this awareness that we are looking for?

In fact, becoming aware of all these feelings, which the person living in the city experiences most vividly and intensely, is a virtue of thinking about oneself. Of course, the human being is not made up of reason alone. Nor is the human being that capitalized "Human" whose name we often mention in philosophical texts.

There is in fact no human being drawn in those pictures either.

The human being always exists as a subject who was born of a mother and a father clad in flesh and bone, who stands out with his own special story, with special aspects that certainly distinguish him from others, who has an age, a gender, a profession, a homeland, a type, a body of his own, a language, a community, a bond of kinship, a social circle.

The city is a togetherness formed by the sum of such people. And these togethernesses likewise do not produce a city with the same characteristics everywhere, like the capitalized one. Cities are places that the lower-case people who form those cities create and organize, to which they give their colors, characters and vitality.

Yet on another occasion earlier we had asked whether anything would remain in the Turkey of the future of the Five Cities that Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar had depicted with great literary elegance. How that city spirit that the Five Cities represented, which made each of them distinct with the difference, vitality and identity of a separate planet, had begun to look as if cloned, with reinforced-concrete buildings, avenues and streets each resembling the other, shopping malls and other modern urban spaces.

In Anatolia you no longer need to be curious about a city, or, if you are curious, to take the trouble to go and tour it; when you see one, it is as if you have seen them all anyway. Scatterings of buildings and spaces of this kind, all identical to one another.

This is truly like the very place where cities are joined to cities (of course, not city but "death" dü şirdeki). Yet as the poet İsmet Özel said, life is against another life, and finds its vitality in this being against.

Is this as far as it goes, then? Will we have come to the end of the human story in this world? Where all human beings are also joined to one another, wouldn't we have come to the end of the human being as well?

It is not possible for it to be exactly so, of course, but in the urban practices that are being put forward in this so-called modern world there is an approach that ignores the dimension of life, that makes all cities resemble one another, and that makes an attempt on the life of the city

After all, what has brought cities to this state, brought them to a point that is the exact opposite of their own vitality and frozen them there, is the living human being himself. Everything has come about through a choice, and through another choice it can develop toward another place.

Throughout history, all civilizations that had a claim about this world have tried to show their claims through the cities they founded. Cities have not only been the expression of the grand spectacles of the civilizations that founded them. There have been such ones too, of course. Humankind has also founded cities whose only meaning and purpose was, out of human arrogance, to challenge other societies, civilizations, even God.

If such cities rested only on such a claim, then when the will that founded them reached the end of its life, the cities they founded also died out together with them. Because, as Ibn Khaldun said, especially if there were no badiyas feeding them, there was no reality that would keep those cities standing either, so they first weakened and then disappeared.

We of course must not take the matter of the management of cities as simply a question of who will establish power over the cities. Cities are the only places where people can find the opportunity to show all their civilizational claims.

The expression "civilizational claim" has never been one I felt close to, but if, as a result, we agree on the truth that whatever is inside us is what gets expressed outside, we must not overlook that whatever we complain about in our cities today is a reflection of what is within us. Perhaps we should start from here in thinking about the city, which will lead us to think about ourselves.

By looking at our cities we can find an opportunity to check our insides once more. Is this what we are? Is it we whom we see in the mirror of this city?

I can almost hear voices saying, but how many years have we been governing these cities?

We of course do not regard the matter as consisting only of architecture. I am speaking of human relations, of the way we look at one another, of the ways we conceive and implement organic division of labor and togetherness in a city, of our deficiencies or surpluses of solidarity.

We could also call this body politics. The skill of keeping a society within the integrity, harmony, beauty and functionality of a body.

The ancients, when thinking about the city and politics, started from precisely this point. Let us too continue thinking a little along this line..