Two years after Istanbul's protests, will Gezi Park be redeveloped after all?

This week’s best city stories take us from Istanbul to Bangkok, exploring the redevelopment of public space, urban wind turbines shaped like trees and “ruin porn” tourism.

We’d love to hear your responses to these stories and any others you’ve read recently, both at Guardian Cities and elsewhere: share your thoughts in the comments below.

The future of Gezi Park

It was almost two years ago that protesters stood up against bulldozers that were set to destroy Istanbul’s Gezi Park in order to construct on a government-sponsored shopping mall and barracks complex. The ensuing violent police treatment of a growing body of peaceful demonstrators in Taksim Square sparked unrest across Turkey, leading to prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan cancelling the redevelopment project and proposing a referendum.

As David Lepeska reports in Next City, a movement to protect Gezi Park remains strong today. Only two months ago, the original redevelopment plan to destroy the public park reappeared on the city’s strategic agenda, in direct contradiction to official promises of its cancellation. Interestingly, the timing of this move coincided with the decision from Turkey’s environment ministry that shopping malls should be exempt from compulsory environmental impact assessments.

As Lepeska explains, a court ruling on the plan is expected in the coming weeks: if the court approves the plan, a referendum will be held for final approval. And if it is indeed approved, activists have promised to resume street protests.

London’s underground

Acclaimed London psychogeographer Iain Sinclair has written a new essay in the London Review of Books about underground development in the capital. What began in traditionally wealthy districts such as Chelsea and Mayfair is now spreading all across London: the extension of homes into the very soil of the city, to gain more space.

Following a collaboration with an artistic project in Hackney responding to this excavatory process of gentrification, Sinclair explores the notion of digging underground with both empathy and criticism: “The epidermis of the city is so heavily policed, so fretted with random chatter, so evidently corrupted by a political assault on locality, that humans unable or unwilling to engage in a war they can’t win respond by venturing into forbidden depths.”

Urban wind trees

Wind turbines in cities seem unfeasible: they’re large, noisy and potentially dangerous. But designers have now come up with a city-friendly turbine – and it’s shaped like a tree. As CityMetric reports, French entrepreneur Jérôme Michaud-Larivière and his company, New Wind, have created the “Arbre à Vent”, a 36ft tree-shaped structure covered in leaf-shaped mini-turbines. Each tree produces 3.1kw and could be used to power street lighting; three or four together could run a a nearby building.

Ruin porn tourism

Uncube magazine explores the impact of abandoned construction projects in Bangkok’s Sathorn Unique Tower. This 49-storey building has sat derelict in the city’s downtown for 17 years, after an economic crisis halted its costly development. (A similar fate befell Torre David in Caracas, which has now been informally occupied.) Leigh Theodore Vlassis calls it “both a symptom of local boom and bust urban development and an unlikely new symbol for the city as a major ‘ruin porn’ tourist attraction.”

Bizarrely, however, it has influenced the neighbourhood which now develops around it: newer buildings in the area have adopted elements of the tower’s original design. “It’s as if the presence of the building is valued and gives this area of the city an identity, while its actual fabric remains unvalued, not worthy of the investment to rectify and revive it. This is a perfect example of how urban development is initiated and carried out in Bangkok.”

Park(ing)

In San Francisco, the Pavement to Parks programme has transformed parking spaces across the city into 51 miniature public parks (or “parklets”) since 2010. More are being designed or built.

As the New York Times reports, even in the last two years, at least 72 more parklets have been created in cities around the world – from Mexico City to Auckland. There is also an annual worldwide event, Park(ing) Day, in which people transform parking spaces into their own miniature parks.

Although the parklets are usually commissioned by nearby small businesses hoping to attract more customers, they still function as public places for people to gather in. Replacing cars with people might sound like an ideal urban strategy – but some local residents have launched complaints about the loss of parking spaces.

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