Suchergebnisse

The megacities arising around the planet are like the Internet where many events are taking place simultaneously. The urban scape today is becoming more a space of flows—migrants, trade, capital, information, microbes—than a space of places rooted in an historical identity.The megaurban condition today encompasses many realities, from the glittering generic city‐state of Singapore to the slums climbing up the hillsides around Mexico City or Sao Paulo. In these spaces we work, love and live out the intimate moments of our lives. In these spaces we consume and spew out climate warming gases.In this section, two of the world's "star architects"—Rem Koolhaas and Frank Gehry—the visionary "arcologist" Paolo Soleri and the Turkish novelist and Nobel laureate, Orhan Pamuk, grasp at chronicling the reality of where we live.

Orhan Pamuk, Turkey's best known novelist, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006. I spoke with him in his beloved Istanbul just after his novel Snow—which explores the clashes and symmetries of secularism, nationalism and Islam in Turkish hearts and minds—was published in English in 2005.

In this age of confrontation, the secular Turkish model has been seen as a bridge between Islam and the West as well as the link between Europe and Asia. Now that model faces the most severe test in its history. How the current crisis is settled will frame future relations between Islam and the West no less than the events of 9/11.