The World Without Us

Which is more than he can say, unfortunately, for the rest of the city of his birth. Not that it’s quite the same city. Through history, Istanbul, née Constantinople, née Byzantium before that, has changed hands so many times that it’s hard to imagine what could fundamentally alter it, let alone destroy it. But Mete Sözen is convinced that the former has already happened and the latter is imminent, whether humans stick around or not. The only difference in a world without people is that no one would be left to try to pick up Istanbul’s pieces.

When Dr. Sözen, who holds a chair in structural engineering at Indiana’s Purdue University, first left Turkey in 1952 for graduate studies in the United States, Istanbul had 1 million people. Half a century later, it has 15 million. He describes that as a far greater paradigm shift than its previous transformations from Delphic to Roman to Byzantine Orthodox to Crusader Catholic and, finally, to Muslim—in all its Ottoman and Turkish Republican strains.

Dr. Sözen sees this difference through an engineer’s eyes. Whereas all the previous conquering cultures erected fabulous monuments to themselves like the Hagia Sophia and the nearby ethereal Blue Mosque, the architectural expression of today’s hordes is manifest in more than 1 million multi-story buildings jammed into Istanbul’s narrow streets—buildings that he says are doomed to abbreviated life spans. In 2005, Sözen and a team he assembled of international architectural and seismic experts warned the Turkish government that within 30 years, the North Anatolian Fault that runs just east of the city will slip again. When it does, at least 50,000 apartment buildings will fall.

He’s still awaiting a response, although he doubts that anyone can imagine where to begin to stave off what his expertise deems inevitable. In September 1985, the U.S. government rushed Sözen to Mexico City to analyze how its embassy had weathered an 8.1-magnitude earthquake that collapsed nearly 1,000 buildings. The highly reinforced embassy, which he had examined a year earlier, was intact. Up and down Avenida Reforma and adjacent streets, however, many high-rise offices, apartments, and hotels had disintegrated.

It was one of the worst quakes in Latin American history. “But it was mostly confined to downtown. What occurred in Mexico City is a flake of what will happen to Istanbul.”

One thing that the two disasters, past and future, have in common is that nearly all the buildings that crumbled or will crumble were built after World War II. Turkey stayed out of that war, but its economy took the same beating as every other country’s. As industries recovered in the postwar European boom, thousands of peasants migrated to cities everywhere seeking jobs. Both the European and Asian sides of the Bosphorus Strait, which Istanbul straddles, filled with six- and seven-story housing of reinforced concrete.

“But the quality of the concrete,” Mete Sözen told the Turkish government, “is 1/10 of what you’d find in, say, Chicago. Strength and quality of concrete depend on the amount of cement used.”

Back then, the problem was economics and availability. But as Istanbul’s population grew, the problem did, too, with more floors added to accommodate more humans. “The success of a concrete or masonry building,” Sözen explained, “depends on how much you have to support above the first level. The more floors, the heavier the building.” The danger comes when residential stories are stacked on top of structures whose ground floors are used for shops or restaurants. Most are open commercial spaces that lack internal columns or load-bearing walls because they were never intended to support more than one story.

Complicating matters further, floors added as afterthoughts rarely align in adjacent buildings, placing uneven stress on shared walls. Worse still, Sözen said, is when space is left at the top of a wall for ventilation, or to save material. When a building sways during an earthquake, exposed columns in partial walls shear off. In Turkey, hundreds of schools have just such a design. Wherever air-conditioning is unaffordable in the tropics, from the Caribbean to Latin America to India to Indonesia, these extra spaces are especially common as a way to bleed off heat and invite breezes. In the developed world, the identical weakness is often found in structures without climate control, such as parking garages.