ABSTRACT
The completion of the first suspension bridge across the Bosporus Straits in Istanbul in 1973 marked the culmination of a century-old dream to connect Europe and Asia. From its emergence as a daring but unrealistic idea during the late Ottoman Empire, to the first unrealized proposal in the 1930s and its gaining traction after 1950 following Turkey’s economic liberalization and international realignment in the Cold War, the story of the Bridge compellingly illustrates how geopolitical ambitions, competing national agendas and trans-national flows of technical expertise intersected in the making of an iconic structure that transformed the city’s urban morphology and metropolitan imagination in unprecedented ways. The chapter traces this earlier story of the Bosporus Bridge using primary sources and some untapped archival material. The overall argument is that engineering works like the Bosporus Bridge are more than technical and aesthetic objects: they embody myriad political, symbolic, historical and cultural meanings. Far from being smooth processes, their conception, design, construction, and reception involve contentious processes and unintended consequences—in this case, the phenomenal expansion of Istanbul towards its hinterland, as well as the unleashing of a ubiquitous instrument of modern Turkish politics: namely, the linkage of infrastructure with populist propaganda.
