What do we expect from those seeking to run the city?

In these days when we are heading to local elections, what do we expect from those who aspire to govern the city? What do those who aspire to govern promise the people in return for the votes they want? The dialogue between these expectations and promises is the essence of democracy, but it also shows the quality of a society. What is demanded of the administrator, and the manner of demanding it, are places where we can trace all the subtleties or crudeness, the ordinariness or originality, of a civilization. In the end, our cities too emerge as a product of this relationship of credit and debt, of expectation and outcome.

City management is not merely a series of practices in which scientific and technical methods are used in the best way and perfect geometric forms are achieved. It is not even merely a performance in which the water, food, transport, and cleaning needs of the city's inhabitants are met by a perfect mechanical organization. What is essential is the good and just management of the economic, class, cultural, and ethnic differences the city harbors.

Seen from this angle, the condition of today's cities can of course be the subject of different classifications and assessments. Above all, when we recall the debt that being a city-dweller entails, we also see that the subject is not limited to "management" alone. The city by its nature is a complex network of relations, and the big city is a social structure formed by a tangled network of relations.

Within this network, the quality of the governed matters as much as that of the governors. Problems we complain about so much, such as vertical structures, luxury places with no people in them, the decline of neighborly relations, and the formation of sterile gated communities, are not problems produced only by those who govern; they are a problem related to the tragic development of our human condition.

An end that the famous German philosopher Martin Heidegger attributed to the nature of technology, a process which the human being also takes part in and completes merely by doing his share, is gradually dragging the whole world toward a doomsday. In this contemporary existence he depicted from a very pessimistic perspective, Heidegger got out of the matter by saying "only a God can save us."

In fact he had not gotten out of it. When the world is portrayed this way, it was also possible to carry things to a fatalism, or even an ethical licentiousness, that leaves no responsibility to the human being.

All the negativities complained of about the city are largely a result of people forgetting, neglecting, or denying their debts to the city, to other people, or to others. Forgetting, neglect, or denial, each a different level of irresponsibility, make the city, instead of a blessing for us of being one body with other people, the channel through which we are dragged toward a doomsday we are not even aware of.

We said that within the division of labor that city life imposes by itself, no one is exempt from debt. That is why, for example, our civil society organizations, our opinion leaders, our community formations, our professional groups cannot extricate themselves by loading the negativities experienced in our cities onto only one segment, one administrator.

Do they think enough about what kind of responsibility they must bear under the division of labor (taksim-i amel) immanent in the nature of the city? If they do not think, it means they do not know their debts either. In a society that does not know, does not recognize, and denies its debts, nothing can be properly accounted for.

We have seen many opinion leaders who rush to impose a fait accompli by placing a mosque on public land for zoning changes they want to make in the interest of their own community. Those who think they are doing good works in their own way, and who reach, through an approach of grading and evaluating themselves, the point of thinking they owe nothing to other people or to the public, are also an organ of the social body that makes up the city.

Society is like a body. When one organ aches, the rest of the body feels all this pain. But what about when an organ of the body acts in a way that will harm and pain the other organs; how is the integrity of the body felt, or what does that body feel?

Our civility began with recognizing the debt that city-dwelling places on us and resolving to pay this debt. Just as it is not permissible for those who do not know and do not recognize this debt to take on the management of a city, it is also a separate truth that governing a society made up of those who do not feel this debt is a wholly different trial.

Let us take a look, after all, at what we expect from the people we elect to govern us. How many people are there who continue to live in this body without demanding a privilege for themselves? In what proportion are there in our cities people who do not see or feel themselves as privileged over other people, whether on an individual basis or on the basis of a community or congregation?

Are our cities not full of those who, when it comes to talk, want the rules to be applied to everyone, but when it comes to themselves, think they have a reason to exercise a privilege? Everyone, or every congregation, every association, every community, every clan or tribe in this society sees itself, let alone as indebted, even as a creditor.

The city is a place where everyone is indebted to everyone else. City quality begins where this indebtedness becomes a consciousness. That is why, even if you do not know them at all in the city, observing the courtesy and protocols displayed toward others is the first and simplest installment of this debt.

People's feeling of their indebtedness also increases the feeling of gratitude. This city life, which is possible together with the existence of other people, increases a person's gratitude. Thanks to the Creator begins with thanks to the created. One who does not know how to thank the servant to whom he is indebted cannot express thanks to the Creator either. Indeed, a person who does not even see his indebtedness in the city can hardly see that he is indebted to the Creator. That is why our cities are filling up with people who neither give thanks nor express gratitude.

Of course, what is worse is that those who do not see themselves as debtors constantly see themselves as creditors. Creditors of everyone, and therefore exceedingly aggressive, angry, and disrespectful in collecting this credit. Whoever administers the cities that are full of people who have these feelings,

no better result comes out.