Kadıköy-Haydarpaşa Harbour Urban Design

“A Palimpsest of Water and Time:                                        Reflections on the Reinvention of Haydarpaşa Harbour”

A city is never merely a collection of buildings. It is a text—written, erased, rewritten, and read anew by generations, by rulers, merchants, and dreamers. Istanbul is such a city—perhaps the city par excellence. And Kadıköy, its ancient origin, carries within its soil, its waves, and its scents a memory older than any chronicle.

The Haydarpaşa Harbour, once the vibrant terminus of the Baghdad Railway, was never just a logistical hub. It was always a threshold. A threshold between Asia and Europe, past and future, arrival and departure. Imagine the travelers arriving here, the panorama of Topkapı before their eyes, the silhouette of minarets in the mist, the hope of a new chapter in their hearts.

But today—and this is no accident of time but the result of structural decisions—the harbour stands before a transformation. The customs terminal is being relocated, and thus, a rare space opens up within the dense narrative of the megacity: a vast, free access to water, to history, to collective memory.

What is to be done with such a place?

Here begins urban planning not as an act of engineering, but as a semiotic challenge. For a site cannot simply be “repurposed.” It must be read. Like a palimpsest. The old layers—the Greek origins of Chalcedon, the Ottoman gardens, the colonial railway infrastructure—must not be built over, but interpreted.

The vision, as suggested in the TCA proposal, is nothing less than a utopia: an urban structure that combines leisure, education, research, and housing—without falling into the traps of postmodern gentrification. This means not taking capital as the measure of all things, but quality of life.

Moda and the surrounding neighborhoods—with their literary aroma, their tea gardens, and scattered books on park benches—demonstrate how urban identity arises from balance: between nature and density, privacy and public life, modernity and melancholy.

The new Haydarpaşa could become a topos—in its original sense: a place that generates meaning. Not through spectacular architecture, but through depth. A place not just to live, but to think. Institutions for science, cultural spaces, libraries, galleries, and also housing for those increasingly displaced from the city—these would not be a futuristic fantasy, but a recollection of what cities were always meant to be.

Landscape planning must not simply allow space for nature, but speak with it. The wind from the Sea of Marmara, the salty humidity, the flight of the seagulls—these are the original inhabitants of this space. Humanity must insert itself, not dominate.

In the end—and this may be the most crucial thought—the transformation of Haydarpaşa Harbour is a question of ethics, not only aesthetics. For a city that sacrifices its most meaningful threshold to short-term profit loses its soul. But a city that opens it—to everyone, to thought, to life—wins back its future.