Istanbul und das Wasser: Zur Geschichte der Wasserversorgung und Abwasserentsorgung von der Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts bis 1966 (review)

This is a fascinating study of the social function and the politics of water in Istanbul on the eve of the modern period. Noyan Dinçkal examines the transformation of an Islamic water culture in a bicultural metropolis. Beginning in the middle of the fifteenth century, the Ottoman Empire constructed a large infrastructure of dams, basins, and pipes. Religious authorities, governmental officials, and wealthy private citizens collaborated in sponsoring the importation of water from distant regions, organized its administration, and provided it to the population by means of public wells. During the second half of the nineteenth century, however, the traditional system underwent a crisis. Rapid population growth (Istanbul had one million inhabitants by 1897), endemic diseases, and big fires engendered critical debates which paved the way for a new system. Massive legal interventions undermined the role of the religious authorities in maintaining the water infrastructure, and the French Compagnie des Eaux de Constantinople and the German Compagnie des Eaux de Scutari et Kadi-Keui obtained concessions to build the waterworks of Terkos and Emali.

Although the new water infrastructure clearly privileged the European and Muslim elites, Dinçkal insists that this cannot be reduced to a mere "imperialistic" imposition of a Western model on a traditional Islamic society. He identifies strong interests among the local population that sustained the implementation of the new system. What was emerging was a kind of bicultural compromise or mixed system. The Compagnie des Eaux, for example, was obliged to provide water free of charge to a number of hospitals, police and army camps, and institutions of higher learning, and to supply public wells which in fact competed with its own commercial waterworks.

Conflicts between the companies and the local government began to escalate in the 1920s. In a context of campaigns for nationalization, the new Turkish state forced the companies to sell the waterworks for a relatively low price. Local administration was modernized and in 1933 the Istanbul Waterworks (ISI) was founded. The ISI took control of the facilities of the private companies as well as responsibility for the public wells. Dinçkal leaves no doubt that the work of the private companies had been insufficient. In the 1930s, more than 70 percent of the population of Istanbul was still dependent on wells. This situation was continuously improved until the 1950s, when enormous problems of water management developed in the context of a rapidly growing metropolis with numerous illegally erected settlements ("Gecekondus").

Dinçkal has mined archives in Istanbul, Germany, and Switzerland, and he has studied a vast number of contemporary journals as well as the relevant secondary literature in English, French, and German. In his notes, he addresses crucial theoretical issues: the "oriental" versus the "occidental" city since the time of Max Weber, the contrast between Ottoman and Western European concepts of hygiene, as well as relevant empirical matters. Illustrations and tables provide additional information, and there are two indexes (persons and places).

One hopes that this pathbreaking book will find a wide readership in the scientific world and beyond.