Gas explosion near Istanbul’s Taksim injures four
▻http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/gas-explosion-near-istanbuls-taksim-injures-four.aspx?pageID=238&
A loud gas explosion in a street near Istanbul’s central Taksim area injured four people and caused panic in the city on Feb. 17.
The mayor of Istanbul’s Beyoğlu district, Ahmet Misbah Demircan, confirmed that the explosion was caused by a gas leak
“Tarlabaşı Is Renewed” | Near East Quarterly
▻http://www.neareastquarterly.com/index.php/2011/06/11/tarlabasi-is-renewed
The Istanbul neighbourhood of Tarlabaşı has long been the black sheep of the chic and rapidly gentrifying central Beyoğlu district. While in the proximity of Taksim Square, Cihangir and Galata, very few Istanbul visitors would ever stray into Tarlabaşı and most Istanbul residents avoid setting foot in the area, for fear of its reputation as being inhabited solely by robbers, drug dealers and ‘terrorists’. But the current AKP Municipality under Mayor Ahmet Misbah Demircan is now set to change the image of the neighbourhood by implementing a radical urban renewal project dubbed Tarlabaşı Yenileniyor – Tarlabaşı Is Renewed.
(...)
Critics of the project say that Tarlabaşı Yenileniyor is not only a fierce attack on the historical fabric of Istanbul, but also on its growing Kurdish population: about 80 per cent of Tarlabaşı inhabitants have migrated there from the Kurdish Southeast. As a result of the intensifying Turkish-Kurdish civil war, Tarlabaşı began to receive a large number of Kurdish migrants in the early 1990s. Many of those newly arrived had been forcibly displaced from their villages; those who were too poor to move elsewhere settled in the small, run-down apartments on the lower, less popular side of Tarlabaşı Boulevard. (...)
