Ankara Bugs

There is a popular account on Turkish social media called Ankara Bugs (Ankara bugları) in which users upload pictures of the cityscape in Ankara that seem to defy all logic: staircases leading into other staircases, street lights tightly packed together in bunches, broken chairs and other objects stuffed into potholes making them look like they’re sinking into lava. Street signs contradict themselves, clocks either tell impossible times or have no hands at all. Several pictures show fire hydrants buried up above their outlet caps, or locked up behind especially made gates. Sidewalks and tactile paving  snake around streets like rivers or randomly break off.  

The word ‘bugs’ refers to the digital kind, glitches in the functioning of the system. Residents post about these bugs as evidence of the illogic of the built environment of Ankara. They are not seen as breakdowns or failures of infrastructure. Nor are they the result of poor planning or oversight. They are presented instead as absurd or surreal, spectacles without meaning. For the people of Ankara, they are  just like those digital bugs from which they take their name: random slips, autonomous unbalanced equations, authorless fuckups. The cause of bugs is often buried so deeply in the code that the original error, even if human, cannot but be forgiven. Nobody writes a bug in their code on purpose.

The reference to planning and codes is especially relevant to the Turkish capital. It is one of the great purpose-built capital cities of the 20th century. But while many planned capitals have been criticized for their location (Abuja), their artificiality (Brasilia), or soulsucking blandness (Canberra), few can match Ankara for the chaos and insanity of its built environment. Although the city was the object of several master plan visions in the early 20th century, the rapid construction and sprawl has left the city unable to cope. Retreating from grand visions, planning has become piecemeal, abstract, and at the mercy of the vicissitudes of commercial corridors and block housing development projects. The bugs appear increasingly all over the city, overrunning this anarchic urban expansion.

Looking at the history of planning in Ankara, and at contemporary trends and discourse on urban planning, this paper will argue that Ankara bugs are an expression of an urban environment being given over to the logic of supposedly objective power of computer codes and algorithms. These codes not free from error, as is evidenced by the Ankara bugs. This approach to planning only serves to further distance public understanding from a sense that they live in a place built for human purposes. Nor does the model/algorithm based approach to planning lend any more democratic decision making or decentralization to the construction of the city. The use of algorithms merely masks the continuation of political decisions and social control under the veneer of mathematical impartiality.

The Ankara Bugs

Since the beginning of 2013, a Facebook page calling itself Ankara'nın Bug'ları (Ankara’s Bugs) started posting images and commentary on the various manifestations of the absurd in the streets of Ankara. Like any good joke, it is a little tricky to define what exactly counts as a bug. Any city deals with the normal amount of poor infrastructure, congestion, or poor planning. What makes them a bug is when there is an active intervention to build new structures and elements which are useless, obstructing, or out of place. A bright orange road indicator bolted to the side of a tree. A new street paved completely around a car. It is clear that most Ankara bugs had to have been built by human construction crews. But the senselessness of their work almost convinces the onlooker than only a computer could have installed it.

The best Ankara bugs aren’t just a poorly maintained sidewalk. They are a brand new sidewalk built to defy all logic. Most sidewalks in Ankara are built with a band of yellow tactile paving strips down the middle to assist the visually impaired. An Ankara bug arises when the strips weave down the sidewalk to avoid planters and other obstacles in the sidewalk or encircles a light post (imagine the incredulity of someone who actually depended on it).  

Figure 1: tactile pavement obstacle course

What sets Ankara bugs apart is that they are usually  on the actual ground level: sidewalks, roads, and lots. Larger questions about the structure of transportation networks and general criticisms of municipal priorities are not the focus. The posts are making fun of absurdities at the phenomenological scale. While there is a pervasive sense that Ankara is a mess, the posts and conversations about Ankara bugs are decontextualized from larger questions about planning. The humor is focused in on providing imaginary justifications for the absurd construction mistakes. Perhaps the builders were channeling M.C. Escher, or perhaps they are setting up an elaborate parkour course for Ankarites. Surely nobody could have consciously decided to build a staircase leading into another staircase, or into a pit?

 

Figure 2: M.C. Escher style staircases in Ankara

Figure 3: Mario Bros. style staircase in Ankara

The individual construction elements make sense. The overpass staircase looks well-built, and has both handrails and elevator access to ensure the safety of its users. But the construction is built with such utter and complete obliviousness of the pit it’s been built over that the only explanation seems to be computer error. It looks more like an infrastructural building block dropped into place in a videogame like SimCity than something a municipality and a construction crew spent thousands of dollars and man hours to complete. Oversight like this could only be so egregious if humans were not involved until the staircase was fully functional.     

Another common site of Ankara bugs is on signage and electric signals. Many signs are actually digital, and so their bugginess becomes literal. Many posts show traffic signals showing red and green lights simultaneously, or cycling through the entire pattern over the course of a second. Written signs also give contradictory information. A metro timetable sign showed the time as 18:76. At one intersection in central Ankara the direction to Konya was given twice, in opposite directions. Not only are the illocutionary acts of Ankara’s street signs contradictory, they often become affected by speech disorders. One highway sign was posted in 2015 as stuttering from excitement.

   

Figure 4: The stuttering street sign

Ankara bugs show up in the city’s patterned surfaces. The language of the built environment as reflected in its signs is contradictory and illegible, and the repeating pathways provided by the city are treacherous. The defect code seems to spread from the digital to the tactile.  Random mistakes migrate from LED screens to surfaces made up of of cement, plastic, metal and paint. They are mounted on, and built into the fabric of the city in a way that begins to affect the ability to navigate through it. There is nothing inherently funny about a computer bug. They are funny in Ankara because they have infected the common sense order of the cityscape around them. It seems as though they are virtualizing things as simple as asphalt, making it vulnerable to computer bugs.

Figure 5: Traffic lines, full of bugs

Ankara bugs serves as an effective metaphor for the ways in which the planning of Ankara has been given up to the invisible, autonomous logic of codes; codes which have been left to run on their own without oversight. Small glitches compound in the code of tiles and street lights until nobody can get anywhere. Ankarians laugh in disbelief at the absurdity of their great planned city degrading into a jumble of anomalies.       

History of Planning in Ankara

Ankara’s history goes back to ancient times, with Hittite and Roman settlements being excavated in the 20th century. During the Ottoman period it mainly held strategic importance based on the easily defendable fortress perched on a hill in the center of the old city.  During the Turkish War of Independence, when Istanbul was initially occupied by European powers, and dangerously exposed along the borders of the besieged country, the military campaign to retake the country led by Mustafa Kemal used Ankara as its base for the new provisional government. It also came to be seen as a more authentically Anatolian city when compared to the multi-ethnic and cosmopolitan Istanbul.  For this reason Ankara was chosen as the new capital of the Turkish nation at the conclusion of the War. the city of Ankara was completely reenvisioned in the 1920s in order to make it worthy of the Mustafa Kemal’s (now Ataturk) modernist aspirations: a grand new city that would represent the authentic Turkish identity and its project to build towards a new, modern, secular future. Two separate city plans were drawn up which were meant to transform it from a backwater provincial Anatolian town into a grand international capital.

The first plan in 1924 was drafted by the German urban planner Carl Christoph Lorcher. He envisioned a tightly-knit city with a population of just 25,000 that would be centered around a central train station. Regardless of the practical effectiveness of his plan, it was one that was easily translatable into simple visual language. His architectural illustrations are legible, beautiful, and convey a classic sense of modern order. Even without a background in urban planning, the average citizen could understand the logic of expansive sight lines and open plazas promised in the Lorcher plan. Ankara would be an ordered city built to human scale.

Figure 6: The Lorcher Plan, 1924

     

Things did not go entirely according to plan. By 1927 it was clear that a more ambitious plan would be needed. The Turkish government commissioned three more European architects to draw up plans according to three requirements:

1. A 300,000 population for the next fifty years.

2. Construction of a new city other than the existing historical city.

3. Main road arteries.

The winning design was awarded in 1932 to  Hermann Jansen, a German architect who had also designed the winning plan for the Greater Berlin Competition of 1910. The plan included several hand drawn images of cityscapes at eye level such as the main square, and public parks. Individual blocks and avenues were sketched out in detail to detail the ways in which municipal blocks, apartment developments, and public space would be ordered along the central thoroughfares. More detailed blueprints of the Jansen plan were transposed onto topographical maps of the Ankara region to show how the street design would sit among the surrounding natural environment. The plan envisioned two main automobile corridors, north-south and east-west, which would intersect in the Kızılay  neighborhood, keeping the historically significant fortress as the central focus of the urban area. The automobile was a major consideration in Jansen’s plan, regarded as the future of urbanism. The Jansen plan was formalized into law in 1934 along with a statement of purpose claiming that “In all of Ankara, there would be no traffic police because the streets will be elevated and traffic will flow without interruption.”

While neither the Lorcher or Jansen plan were ever implemented in full, Ankara continued to function as the ideological projection of the revolutionary and modernity-obsessed fantasies of the early Turkish republic. Rational planning and centralized urban design was seen as evidence of the success of the regime. Stately public parks and wide avenues were tributes to the zeitgeist of the 1930s. Ambitious government buildings and monuments were constructed throughout the 1930s and 40s. The abstract values of the administration were translated into inspiring drawings and tangible urban forms. The dreams of planners were easily deciphered and residents could understand the analogies between state ideology and the built environment. Gençlik Parkı (Youth Park), for example, was meant to coincide with the Kemalist celebration of youth and vigour known as National Youth Day.    

These plans were again overwhelmed by population expansion in the 1950s, when yet another competition was held to account for an urban population which had reached half a million inhabitants. The new competition had more technical requirements than the previous two designs. This plan, and all of the others that were drawn up by the Ankara Metropolitan Office throughout the rest of the 20th century, would fail to keep up with the intense waves of internal migration, the construction of  apartment blocks which held little regard for public or green space (the sine qua non of the early Kemalist urban ideal), and the ever increasing dominance of sprawling development corridors into the suburbs. At the same time, the needs of automotive transport began to take precedent over any other aesthetic or ergonomic  considerations. As a result,  Ankara is now a sprawling behemoth, home to over 5 million residents. After successive municipal administrations failed to keep up with the influx of new residents, the 1980s saw the abandonment of unified visions for the city, the implementation of a planning strategy which divided the city into different district, and a concentration on isolated urban phenomenon. This relinquishment of grand visions is aggravated by the political base of the governing Justice and Development (AK) party which depends greatly on the ever-expanding productivity of the construction sector. The mayor of Ankara in particular, Melih Gökçek, has built his reputation on encouraging ill-conceived development projects. In 2003, he attempted to close down all pedestrian crossings downtown by fiat. He used public money to build a 6-metre statue of a robot in a central square. He spent approximately 3 million dollars on a recreational complex in the median of a busy road which has remained empty. If the Ankara bugs had an architect, it would be Melih Gökçek, known as the surreal mayor.

The AK Party has encouraged breakneck private development, and seemingly endless expansion away from the once centralized and planned core of central Ankara. Private housing development projects in particular are being planned by construction companies as fully enclosed gated communities, benefiting from municipal services but restricted to elite residents.   At least to the casual observer, the planning of Ankara has gone from a holistic human environment cast in the image of modern dreams to the improvised efforts to wrangle a city which has devolved into an amorphous, unwieldy blob.  But Ankara has never stopped being planned. It’s planning has merely become more technocratic, more abstract, and farther removed from the comprehension of its inhabitants.  

Use of Algorithms and Modeling in Urban Planning

The current master plan for the city of Ankara is being rolled out to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Turkish republic. “The plan proposes almost limitless growth along the south-western corridor, and the land speculation at the fringe has been unbelievable.”  The official documents outlining the philosophy behind the plan are full of abstract language, emphasizing the need to fully exploit  human and natural resources and potential. Rather than conceptualizing the city in holistic terms, the Ankara 2023 plan speaks about responding to the demands of abstract forces.

An approach which will include the true meaning of planning and its requirements: the time has come to no longer makes static “zoning plans” which continually run roughshod over economic activity, market mechanisms, and the decision makers, one that ignores the dead, the living, and the everyday.     

The plan is critical of the traditional forms of planning used for Ankara in the 20th century, deriding them as “zoning plans”.  It portrays these visually articulated plans for the city as monolithic and tries to reconceive of master plans as one that takes into account the various flows and codes hidden in the urban fabric: economic, demographic, financial. This is reflected in the types of maps and illustrations which are privileged in the public explanations of the new Ankara master plan. A media packet for the Ankara 2023 plan is available online for download and speaks excitedly about having envisioned the future of the Turkish capital in a thoroughly systematic way. The plan is organized into three themes: Working in Ankara, Living in Ankara, the Environment in Ankara. The very first model given to the reader in this packet is meant to illustrate the interaction between these three themes by means of a type of venn diagram / family tree. Urban phenomenon are abstracted into nodes which related to two or more aspects in the tree: tourism between working in Ankara and the Environment, technology/value-added surfaces connecting to all three nodes.

   

Figure 7: A mode of Ankara 2023

Other initial models are equally abstracted from the physical environment, with a complex workflow for the planning process (page 18), population projections (page 20), and multiple charts full of statistics and numbers. There are maps of physical spaces, but almost none of them are of the city. Ankara is shown as a collection of various shapes, color-coded according to their development potential, the amount of natural resources available, and their investment potential. Other partially abstracted maps of the Ankara region show how the city will fit into the transportation and economic flows of the nation as a whole. What is not visible in any of these plans for Ankara is a view at street level. We can see how Mevlana Boulevard connects to global capital flows, but there is no way to know if it is loud, or ugly. Ankara is situated in the global context without any sense of the city itself. There are maps of the Eastern hemisphere, showing how far you can get from Ankara by plane in two and four hours (page 31-32), making it an attractive opportunity for the global business traveller. Ankara is being marketed like a financial product.

This conceptual, formulaic approach to planning is not unique to the Turkish context. Urban planning everywhere has been transformed by digital practices. Drafting by hand is hopelessly archaic and now all architects draw their models using computer programs like AutoCAD. And rather than merely drawing pleasant street scenes, urban planners now have to take entertain considerations of the impossible complexities of the modern city. One does not have to look long before finding mathematical analogies being used in the field of urban planning. The fractal city with its superimposed competing connective networks. Land-use models, determining the suitability of an allocation in the context of the land-use allocation process, defined by the following function:

 

Planning does continue in modern cities, but where plans were once sketched by hand, grounded in the grand visions of modernity, they can now be programmed using code. And codes will inevitably have bugs.    

Algorithms and the Illusion of Transparency   

In a world increasingly run by algorithms, it could almost be taken for granted that they would have a role to play in the planning of our cities. They stock our grocery stores, guide our trains, and help us buy sunglasses. On Ankara 2023’s venn diagram of the city’s various conceptual realms, algorithms would be connected to most of them. Their ubiquity enough should be argument enough for their application to urban planning. But they also accompanied by a discourse about the ability of computer codes and models to subtract the petty squabbles of politics from the equation of technocratic governance. If things are running according to a mathematical model, urban planning should be reduced to figuring out the most efficient code for planning new urban spaces. They offer the illusion of transparency: operating on the basis of their own quasi-magical power.

Algorithms are simply sets of instructions, a sequence of actions to be taken in a repeated sequence in order to complete a task. They will continue working unless they run into a situation not accounted for in their programming, or when new conditions arise from the execution of the algorithm itself which lead to paradoxes or illogical conditions. Because of the blind speed with which algorithms function, whenever a well-intentioned process unintentionally leads to such a condition, it can suddenly create disproportionately large effects. It can also lead to absurd ones.

Urban planning in Ankara is no longer entrusted to grand visionaries like Lochner and Jansen. The decision making process has instead literally been turned into an algorithm. As can be seen in Figure 8, the planning process is a feedback loop which designates how decision-making should proceed. The first step is determining stakeholders and evaluating them. The second step kicks down to a series of loops which are meant to analyze, set goals, and draw up plans. If performance indicators seem to be off, the loop can be reset for further scaled plan analysis. The regional plan is the final outcome which then goes to be implemented, evaluated, and the process starts over again.     

Figure 8: Urban planning as an algorithm

While it would be a stretch to draw a direct line between this encoding of planning rhetoric and the Ankara bugs shown on social media, it is not hard to see how the distinctly tone deaf approach towards planning as typified by the technospeak seen in the Ankara 2023 media kit could lead to the satirical attitude shown by normal Ankara residents in their #ankarabuglari posts. Who could care about the unmatched potential of foreign direct investment in a city where the asphalt swallows cars and traffic signs like the monster in a horror movie. The inconsistency between the municipal government and the AK party’s rhetoric of hyper-capitalist, computer-managed growth without end on one hand, and the shopping cart chained to a pole sitting in the middle of a shallow pond in the middle of a commercial center on the other gives rise to the sense that one is living in a city dedicated to the absurd.         

Conclusion

But we should be careful to dismiss the urban planning stakeholders and their planning apparatuses with cynical humor. The idea of the surreal city gives the connotation that there is no deeper meaning behind the Ankara bugs. When residents call Melih Gökçek the mayor of the absurd, they are letting him off the hook. We should not think of Ankara bugs as mere computer glitches stupid, random mistakes rather than as symptoms of some deeper neuroses plaguing the city? How can they be blamed on the gross failure of planning, or the sloppy product of neoliberal building sprees, when much of planning is managed now by computers?

Everything depends on the way that codes and algorithms are initially set up. Unfortunately, because they are seen as a proprietary software, most companies do not release the details of the algorithms they use, leading to a lack of accountability. And although advocates claim them to be perfectly objective, algorithms and codes depend entirely on their inputs and programming, which are still completely open to bias and political interest. In her book Weapons of Math Destruction, Cathy O’neil details exactly how seemingly altruistic algorithms often lead to exacerbating problems they were meant to fix. In the social field this means furthering inequalities and the oppression of the disadvantaged. One of her main takeaways in doing research for the book was that these algorithmic solutions “show up when there’s a responsibility that nobody wants to take on.” Algorithms become a sort of black box that is meant to dole out social incomes accordingly to the just logic of computers, free from sticky political judgments and, more importantly, political consequences. Unfortunately, the rise of Ankara Bugs as a social media trend gives cover to this attempt to obfuscate the responsibility of the AK Party and the Ankara municipal government for the strange urban landscape they have been busy creating. To speak of the absurd failures of the municipal government to provide infrastructure in terms of Ankara bugs is to be complicit in the attempt to hide political decision-making from the work of municipal governance.    

     

Works Cited

"ANKARA BÖLGE PLANI 2014 - 2023." 2014 - 2023 (n.d.): n. pag. Ankaraka.org. Ankara Planlama Ajansi, 2014. Web.

Ankara'nın Bug'ları. Facebook, 2013. Web. 15 May 2017.

Balaban, Osman. "The Negative Effects of Construction Boom on Urban Planning and Environment in Turkey: Unraveling the Role of the Public Sector." Habitat International, vol. 36, no. 1, 2012, pp. 26-35.

Batuman, BuLent. "City Profile: Ankara." Cities, vol. 31, 2013, pp. 578.

F. R. Atay, Çankaya: Atatürk’un Dogumundan Olumune Kadar (Istanbul, Turkey: Pozitif Yayınları, 1952).pg. 489

"GIRIŞ-AÇIKLAMALAR." (2014): n. pag. Ankara Belediyesi. Turkiye Cumhuriyet, 2014. Web. https://www.ankara.bel.tr/files/1613/4726/5687/A-giris.pdf

Güney, Baykan. "Ankara Spatial History." AESOP 2012 (2012): n. pag. METU. 2012. Web.

Kacar, Duygu. "Ankara, a Small Town, Transformed to a Nation’s Capital." Journal of Planning History, vol. 9, no. 1, 2010, pp. 43-65.

Katoshevski-Cavari, Rachel, Theo A. Arentze, and Harry J. P. Timmermans. “Sustainable City-Plan Based on Planning Algorithm, Planners’ Heuristics and Transportation Aspects.” Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 20 (2011): 131–139. Web.

Lefebvre, Henri, and Donald Nicholson-Smith. The Production of Space. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2009. Print.

O'Neil, Cathy. "Welcome to the Black Box." Jacobin Magazine. N.p., 19 Sept. 2016. Web. 15 May 2017.

Salingaros, Nikos. "Connecting the Fractal City." Keynote Speech, 5th Biennial of Towns and Town Planners in Europe (2003): n. pag. Web.

Tunçer, Mehmet. "ANKARA / CAPITAL OF THE MODERN TURKEY and ITS HISTORICAL CONSERVATION ISSUES." ”THE CONFERENCE ON THE PRESERVATION OF ARCHITECTURAL HERITAGE OF ISLAMIC CITIES”, (n.d.): n. pag. Print.