CULTURAL AND URBAN TRANSFORMATION: FROM BABEL TO ECUMENOPOLIS

Assist. Prof. Dr. Mberra YKSEL Kadir Has University

I. INTRODUCTION In this paper, I have employed two films to reveal the significance of both cultural and urban issues with particular reference to Asia. The frst film is Babel (2006) and is about the aftermath of 9/11 and its impact on discrimination against diverse segments in different parts of the world. It is also about cultural transformation and diversity concerns in different regions and continents. The second film Ecumenopolis (2011), which is a documentary on urban transformation and globalization processes in Istanbul is a case study of an emerging global city. Under late capitalism characterized by space and time compression (Harvey, 1989), the global, regional and local, the familiar and strange, the real and the virtual have become inextricably intertwined, while creating a 'transnational urban experience' as the ideal of boundless and undefined spatiality predominates a digital age of fragmented post modernity with its costs and benefits. Istanbul may be regarded also as a representative case in Asia. Films may help us put various aspects of conflict processes in multiple perspectives and enhance our self-reflexivity and moral deliberation to distant others as individuals. One may endeavor to understand how to invent the future with others from a constructivist standpoint. The common language of suffering and caring for others may shape events into more affirmative narratives of hope, understanding and humanity. II. A FICTION FILM: BABEL The first films title is from the story of the Tower of Babel (Ziggurat) at the site of Babylon in which God punishes mankind for the arrogance and pride in attempting to build a tower leading to the Heaven. This mythological story highlights different cultures, languages and values as the origins of diversity. As a punishment of an act of defiance, God has separated mankind into different races divided by diverse languages; consequently, there is chaos and lack of communication. Babel (2006) is the final part of the Trilogy by Inarritu who has directed the prior two films, i.e., Amores Perros and 21 Grams. The film Babel depicts the dark side of the human condition, that is, confusion and mistrust caused by the inability to communicate. With three stories set in Morocco, Mexico and Japan, Babel shows how connected local issues become global and how misreading of events may lead to unintended consequences in different regions of the world. In the narrative of the film, the series of tragedies started with a Moroccan shepherd who acquires a rifle. His two young sons, while playing with the rifle, accidentally shot an American woman riding with her husband in a sightseeing bus. American officials interpret this as an act of terrorism which is immediately on the global news. Meanwhile, in the United States, the American couples baby-sitter is taking care of their kids, while her son is preparing for his wedding in Mexico. Finally, in the third story, a deaf Japanese girl is trying to cope with the recent suicide of her mother and her father whom she thinks does not pay enough attention to her. The third storys connection to the other two is not developed more

than half way into the film. All of the stories reveal people that have difficulty in expressing their identity and because of different languages and meanings lost in translation, prejudices, stereotypes or misunderstandings and indifference. As a result, they are left in isolation. Babel can be considered as an epic of confusion in response to the shock of the September 11th, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center. Transformational issues have become even more challenging in the troubling aftermath of the 9/11 event. Observers often note increased skepticism and fear that cross-cultural or identity-based disputes might prove more volatile and intractable and that communicative reconciliation processes might be ineffective in changing conflict perceptions. The three intersecting story lines revolve around parents and children and the fear of losing the loved ones on three different continents: When the boys test the rifle and unintentionally shot the American woman on the tourist bus passing by, first the media discourse coded it as a deliberate terrorist attack. Then, the wounded womans husband and the boys take her to a village. An Arabic speaking woman wearing a black chador tried to help them. Although they find more sympathy and support from her than their fellow European and American tourists, still the American couple was prejudiced about what she represents and they misjudged the native woman. Thus, the media stereotyping on terror and fundamentalism has acted as cultural codes and was demonstrated in values and behaviors of characters in the film. The Mexican caretaker who takes the two American children of the couple across the border without permission in order to be at his sons wedding is another story. While they were coming back to the United States, a police arrested her for kidnapping the children and she was deported. The final story is about a disobedient deaf Japanese teenager and her reserved father, who is desperately in need of love. The motto of the film may be summed up as If you want to be understood, listen with full awareness. Perceiving and becoming open to the diversity, creating relationship with the others without judging them is not easy. As James Sebenius states viewing the world without the aid of filters of stereotypes is rather difficult since forming stereotypes has almost become a natural reflex (2002). On the whole, the director Inarritu is interested in conveying more through his film than just despair. For instance, as the American couple finally finds their way out of the village, their translator is by their side. He has let the tour continue on without him, regardless of whether he loses his job or no to make sure that this couple will be all right. The husband offers him money for his help which he refuses. He cannot accept money for doing the right thing- for empathizing with another human being. In that moment, the language and cultural barriers between the two strangers fall and they truly understand each other for the first time. Similarly, in Japan, the police officer that the young deaf girl has attempted to attract understands that she is not asking for physical intimacy; she merely wants someone to love and care for her. So, the officer embraces her with compassion Small human flaws snowball to have unintended and unimaginable consequences: One man's decision to buy a gun to protect his flock leading to so many events in various regions of the world "Babel" is about the difficulty of human communication due to differences of language, culture, social classification, and attitudes. Yet, although the stories unfold in four countries and in five languages - English, Arabic, Spanish, Japanese and sign language- it is far from being the principal barrier. Instead, the film explores the ways in which cultural assumptions and biases tend to conceal facts even when they are simple and obvious. Further, the film also shows how our perceived differences make our life complex as well as how we

become indifferent to others and why we are detached from life and truth. The film makes us become aware of the multiple ways cultural differences may cause misunderstandings, simultaneously with the fact that many of our human experiences are the same irrespective of all these differences. III. CULTURAL TRANSFORMATION AND SENSITIVITY Globalization has been defined as the intensification of worldwide social relations which link distant localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice versa (Held, 1991, p. 9). Some people see globalization as increasing the homogeneity of societies, whereas others see it as increasing the hybridization of cultures and diversity. As for Kellner we are in an interregnum period between an aging modern and an emerging postmodern era (1997, p. 3). Globalization cannot be analyzed only in terms of polar discrete opposites but should be seen as a borderline situation between two historical epochs. As such, it is a complex, multidimensional phenomenon that involves different levels, flows, tensions, and conflicts, such that a transdisciplinary social theory is necessary to capture its contours, dynamics, trajectories, problems, and possible futures (Kellner, 1997, p. 4). Although cultural transformation, which is an uneven process is going on as a consequence of globalization and connectedness, there is a need for cultural awareness and sensitivity. Parallel to the story of Babel, nowadays the world is threatened by terrorism and is still divided by language, race, money, power and religion. The film is inviting us to get past the babble of realistic discourse and start listening and understanding each other through caring and daring to act accordingly. In Babel, Inarritu shows that emphasizing sensitivity to different cultures and exposure to different life styles, perspectives, languages rather than focusing on our worldly power and possessions make us develop and transform as individuals. In Babel, Inarritu is attempting to break down cultural barriers between people and is treating all with equal respect, while he is regarding both civil and uncivil aspects as natural and human. As Stuart Hall states: Representation is an essential part of the process by which the meaning is produced and exchanged between members of a culture. It does involve the use of language, of signs and images which stand for or represent things. (1997: 15). For instance, in media how news stories are constructed so that they will be comprehensible to a particular audience is significant. This involves bringing events within the horizon of the meaningful and this entails referring unusual and unexpected events to the maps of meaning which form the basis of our cultural knowledge, into which the social world is already mapped as our daily thinking-as-usual. Such a discourse is ideologically manipulated, because by using language which promotes a particular view of the world these maps of meaning are disseminated to a much wider audience and they become the universal maps. Discourse is a tool of power; therefore, clarifying how discriminatory values are mediated in language by dominant groups and institutions that control over the media is significant despite the fact that most people are unaware of these manipulative influences and accept the imposed attitudes as facts of life (Bourdieu, 1991). The three major theories about discourse are: the reflective, intentional and constructionist, which all emphasize language with different reasons of inquiry.

 Reflective (Does the language simply reflect a meaning which already exists out there in the world of objects, people and events? ) Intentional (Does the language express only what the speaker or the writer wants to say, his or her intentional meaning?) Constructionist approaches to representations, (Is the meaning constructed in or through language? ) which is recently often used in both international and communication studies (Fairclough, 1992). Nowadays our cultures are media saturated and we spend one-third of our lives involved in the media. Our abilities to speak, think, forming relationships with others, and our own sense of identity are now shaped mostly by the media discourse. Media-based or community-based reality is socially constructed; therefore there is no static definition. Castells claims that "we do not see reality as it is, but as our languages are And our languages are our media. Our media are our metaphors. Our metaphors create the content of our culture (...) Cultures are made up of communication processes and thus there are no separation between 'reality' and symbolic representation" (Castells, 1996 pp 328, 372-73, 375). Another significant question is whether a cultural conflict is different in kind from prior examples of ideological conflicts in world politics. Since in many instances of ideological conflicts, negotiating workable solutions to specific pressing policy problems across blocs has been possible; it might be similarly probable to negotiate effectively between relatively hostile cultures. Through mindfulness, that is, an openness to new information and an awareness that more than one perspective exists, one may overcome biases (Sebenius, 2002: 126) Stereotyping can reduce a wide range of differences in people to binary black and white categorizations, they might transform assumptions about particular groups of people into "realities", they can be used to justify the position of those in power to perpetuate social prejudice and inequality. Much would seem to rest on transformation, meaning a fundamental change in attitude, values and behavior of individuals and/or the relationship between relevant parties or stakeholders. However, the possible impact of films on human suffering and rights of distant others are also claimed to pave the way to false activity or to ethical amnesia due to compassion fatigue rather than forging an ethical community of human beings, since group identities of thick relations that are close rather than distant strangers often determine our responsible choices (Margalit, 2002; Zizek, 1998). A Framework of Cultural Transformation Preconceptions obfuscate the reality within which we speak. . .They make us became narrowsighted, which creates difficulty in seeing the reality for what it is That is at the heart of the film Babel and how one can clarify his/her image and insight is brought into the attention of all spectatators. Through active listening and observing one might rise above these presumptions. In any dialogue or conflict resolution process, there are three ways in learning to tell the same story of a cultural incident: by active-listening, by being "neutral" and by reflecting upon the differences. Nowadays, "complexity" and "interculturality" are overlapping concepts in communication; therefore, active listening together with constructionist view is vital. "Framing" and "learning to learn" are methods for understanding decisions since they refer to sets of alternatives from which choices can be made. Changing such sets of alternative lenses corresponds to stepping out of the frames of reference or orbits which are part of us and of our way of seeing and acting, which we might not even be aware of. Learning to learn corresponds to wiping out the conventional information we employ from

memory (i.e., unlearning) when we manage to confront these systemic and self-referential changes successfully. In knowledge management as well as conflict management scholars as diverse as Georg Simmel, Barbara Gray and Mikhail Bakhtin, Kurt Lewin and Chris Argyris whose concept of "double-loop learning" is similar to learning to learn. The ability to change deeply the rooted habits of perception-evaluation requires creativity and sensitivity to "the pertinence of context to meaning" that combines artistic or scientific competencies since these abilities are not reducible to a rational or to a technical analysis. Following E. Halls low and high context, and paraphrasing Margalits and Geertz' distinction between thin and thick relations, we might talk of two schools of thought about active listening for constructivism. The first one is well known and is based upon empathy. The second requires going beyond empathy and getting to exotopy or extralocality, which is more appropriate to the complexity of the world (Bakhtin, 1986). An intercultural discourse is not primarily concerned with behavioral patterns, but with perceptive and evaluative thought. Habits that are ingrained that isare difficult to change and transform. Empathy is sufficient when one is in a position similar to that of a person who is in control of the situation, and the interviewer/ observer needs to react with curiosity and respect to another persons' opinions and behaviors that (s)he might privately judge negatively. Exotopy is adequate when you are part of a conflict, you are offended and angry and you decide that instead of reacting with violence, you are going to act in a way that apparently is unexpected: you are aiming at being true to all parties and stakeholders (Bakhtin, 1986). In other words, empathy is a simple condition of putting yourself in others shoes, while exotopy is a complex situation which requires a double displacement: you displace yourself in order to be able to displace the interlocutor. You and the interlocutor are both ready for a fight or flight reaction and the double displacement is aimed at creating a situation of reciprocal recognition and respect, a context for a meta-communication . The politically correct attitude to adopt as an active listener (both thin and thick) is the direct opposite of what is conventionally expected on the part of a good participant observer/ mediator: impassive, neutral, self-assured, heedless of his/her own emotions and ready to conceal or ignore her own reactions to what she hears. Nowadays, displacement" becomes a necessary step to establish the mutual recognition, respect and learning required for the joint and creative solution to a problem. That way, the arrogance of the know-it-all and status derived from hierarchical position is replaced by an acceptance of vulnerability and closeness together with the modesty that comes from learning and growing continuously. IV. A RECENT DOCUMENTARY: ECUMENOPOLIS (CITY WITHOUT LIMITS) This documentary film investigates stanbuls ecological, demographic and economic limits with regards to urban growth and pressure to into one single city, an become a global city, through interviews with architects, urban planners, environmental engineers, economists and sociologists. It asks whether stanbul has a limit to its growth and whether an alternative strategy for development that would be more friendly towards the city dwellers needs and the original fabric of the city is possible. Greek architect and urban planner Constantinos Doxiadis came up with the concept of ecumenopolis in 1967 to describe his idea that all urban spaces and megalopolises in the

world will combine ecumenopolis, in the future as the pac of urban development and population is increasing on a global scale. A global society where there is virtually contiguous urban development separated only by major natural barriers has been called the Ecumenopolis. Cities will increasingly be seen as brandscapes, where each building markets itself as a distinct sign, or billboard, representing corporate identity and globalization. The notion of the branded landmark is explored as a major public structure, which will mark place as well as represent chosen brand identities (Doxiadis 1976, 327). The concept of ecumenopolis was first used in Turkey by Alp, who defined it as a a nightmare city, cancerous city and a city on steroids, which has run out of its green spaces, water and other natural resources due to enormous growth. According to Alp, stanbul is likely to become an ecumenopolis in the future with its enormous growth and population that reaches 30 million. Cities have their own life cycles; they are born, they grow, they decay if they grow to an extent that it cannot cope with and then they die, said Alp, warning the stanbul city administration that the new projects are harming the citys ecologic and historic make up. Alp addressed the stanbul city administration to urgently take the necessary measures against further population growth in the city, mentioning that promoting economic growth in other provinces of Turkey would better, and would hopefully bring about counter migration from Istanbul to the provinces. The film is about the urban transformation campaign of Istanbul. The main two reasons are: openning up to attract global capital and improving or rebuilding of houses against natural disasters-earhquakes and flood. The clearence of squatter settlements on the outskirts of the city for -redevelopment and the imposed gentrification of the inner slums, consequently eviction of the urban poor from the city center to the peripery. Asserting that the stanbul city administration is following a neoliberal model of growth, Yalntan, said it is seeking to boost foreign investment and turn stanbul into the finance capital of Turkey. He said the pattern of growth will bring about many changes to the social, economic and demographic structures of the city, adding that such comprehensive changes should be made according to a wellprepared plan. Yalntan exemplified these changes as moving industrial production centers and residents out of the city to the outskirts and opening profit-generating places, including luxurious hotels, shopping malls and so on, which he says will advance the service sector in city center. Explaining that many people, including residents, industrial investors and the labor force working in industrial centers have been negatively affected by the projects, Yalntan said that a plan to be developed for such projects will provide people the opportunity to prepare themselves for the consequences of urban renewal. According to Yalntan, the democratic participation of city dwellers is of primary importance in urban planning, given that they are the real users of urban space. He clamied that a plan which does not take a citys inhabitants needs into consideration inevitably leads to social and economic problems, including lack of social integration and settlement for residents. He criticized the latest city plan, the stanbul Environmental Order Plan (DP), which was drawn up in 2009 and was prepared using only city experts opinions without consulting the public. Another project to be realized is building a third bridge over the Bosporus that will connect Saryers Garipe village on the European side with Beykozs Poyrazky neighborhood on the Asian side. As well as allowing democratic participation of city dwellers during the preparation stage of city planning, once a detailed city plan has been prepared by the common efforts of various experts, including urban planners, art historians and environmental

engineers, the government and the city administration should act according to the plan, because such plans , because such plans examine the ecological, historical and socioeconomical characteristics of a city in a very detailed way, Yalntan said. In numerous theses and articles: Gnengil also thinks the remaining green areas in stanbul will soon be destroyed, and claimed that the green areas in the north of the city, in other words stanbuls lungs, are almost all gone due to urban migration and urban sprawl. He also stated that some remaining green areas that include the citys reservoirs are also under threat because of a project to build a third bridge over the Bosphorus, which will be initiated at the end of 2011. In addition to deforestation in the citys outskirts, the green areas inside the cities are diminishing day by day because of unplanned urbanization and rent-seeking new construction projects, Gnengil said. V. URBAN TRANSFORMATION With globalization, metropolitan cities face accelerating uncertainty and competition that demand sustainable urban development through strategic planning. Availability of reliable information through adequate communication among stakeholders is at the crux of effective strategic decision-making and problem solving in urban policy making. Yet, in times of fluidity and crisis, municipalities often focus on the improvement of inefficiencies or restructuring through an authoritarian form of neoliberalism in the short run rather than long term transformation by involving urban citizens. Transforming cities into an aesthetized commodities and brands so that they are marketable to a global audience and become global cities (Karaman, 2010). Castells (1996) argued that power resided in the network, as places cannot exist outside of flows of information, transactions, people, and goods. Places do not disappear, but their logic and their meaning become absorbed in the network as spaces or more. The proliferation of 'non-places'; shopping malls, indistinguishable airports, office blocks, gated communities, theme parks, old-worldly villages, and managed and coifed "wilderness" areas that, functioning as signs rather than places, immerse the consumer in a self-conscious form of ritual bearing little relation to any actual time or location. Such emergent dimensions and new communication system radically transforms space and time. Localities become disembodied from their cultural, historical, geographic meaning, and reintegrated into functional networks, or into image collages inducing a space of flows that substitute for a space of places. In the information society the dominant form of social time is what Castells (1996) called timeless time, 'the annihilation and manipulation of time and space by electronically managed global capital markets'. With hyper mobility and space/time compression, the city has indeed emerged as a site for new claims: by global capital, which uses the city as an 'organizational commodity'. The denationalizing of urban space and the formation of new claims centered in transnational actors and involving contestation cities constitute the global city as a frontier zone for a new type of engagement (Sassen, 2003). The post-modern age is characterized by the commoditization of place, privatization of public space (mallification), fragmentation of spatial experience, globalization of local culture. As post-modern turn results in fragmentation, instability, indeterminacy, and uncertainty (Harvey,1989), network principles renounce rigidity, closed structure, universal schemes and central authority, offering plurality, differences, ambiguity, incompleteness, contingency, and multiplicity. Cities are virtualities with a set of architectural potentials which contain unpredictable elements. There is no real and no imaginary, except at a certain distance.

Because 'reality' or the world now seems to be cybernetically organized continuum of images, information, and technological artifacts, it appears that value and meaning also have been lost in the transformation" Cities market their cultural assets; that is why, entrepreneurial policies, revitalization projects and mega events are significant (Harvey, 1989). In sum, this emergent process with significant implications for the competitiveness of nations is global urbanization. The world has experienced unprecedented urban growth in recent decades. However, urbanization is occurring rapidly even in less developed countries and it is expected that 60 percent of the world population will be urban by 2030. Theorizing cities with respect to their heterogeneous temporalities and spatialities has profound implications for rethinking urban theory and rethinking geographic regions. Even though the urban future lies in cities like Shangai, stanbul,Cairo, Mumbai, Dakar, the global cities are where capital accumulation and democratic governance happen under specific circumstances. To the extent that the emergent third world city entails informal territories, networks, and relations that are not measurable, it remains outside the regulation of the state, it remains elusive. For instance, economic liberalization has brought fascinating changes to Chinas urban development. By using Shanghai as another example, the stereotype perception of rigid state intervention is no longer applicable towards an understanding of Chinas urban transformation. The same is true of the overwhelmingly described market. Rather, urban development in contemporary China is shaped by the interplay between state and market (McGee and Robinson, 1995). VI. CONCLUDING REMARKS Metropolitan or mega cities create opportunities for high productivity, creativity and diversity of life styles due to high population density and operational effieciency. The emerging Ecumenopolis and related region based urbanization in Asia shows a mixed patchwork of spatial usage where modern, traditional and postmodern buildings exist side by side unlike the city-based planned urbanization in Europe. Whether Asian mega-urbanization as a component of the global informational society with its urban problems need to be studied within the regional context or the global networks and flows is yet to be seen. The increasing commercial competiti is affecting mass media as well as new media. The increasing construction of audiences as consumers can be seen as part of normalization and naturalization of consumer culture. The urban people are constructed as spectators of events rather than participating citizens even in the process of urbanization. In a nutshell, the aim is not to replace the mainstream market discourse, which is adequate when the context is simple and the implicit premises can be taken for granted. Instead, we need to supplement it with a more complex habit of thought. Yet, these two different frames of thought are not at the same level: the transition from the complex to the simple is relatively smooth, because it boils down to a reduction of frames of reference. On the other hand, the transition from the simpler habits of thought to the complex appears to be irrational. From this standpoint, it is much easier to move toward the simple (the reduction of frames), while if we start from a simple we get to the complicated (the multiplication of variables) rather than to the complex. Hence, the familiar and convenient approach has to be turned upside down: for open communication: we have to begin with the complex in order to understand the simple. When we move within the confines of a "simple system" (shared frames of reference, the same assumed premises), the most appropriate habit of thought is that of conventional logicanalytical and linear reasoning plus some empathy. Yet, when the system is "complex" (characterized by communication between different frames of reference), one needs different

habits of thought, one guided by thick active listening (exotopy), which considers the observer as an integral part of what is being observed, both circularly and self-reflectively. The diverse nature of our networked society makes active listening of citizens an indispensable competency even within the "same culture". On the whole, we need multi-perspectives against double standards and distortions that probe into cultural values and socially shared ideas about what is desirable for future in different regions and communities as citizens, i.e. social norms and perceptions about both ourselves and the other. In our efforts at short-term resolution of complex issues, we may continue to respond in simple and often technologically-neat-and-smart systematic manner and forget about the people concerns and their particular human needs, but we cannot go on like that in the long run. There are no absolute norms or points of reference from which to comprehend or judge the others existence: there is no neutral ground. However, the standards are relative to each other and they are connected. Obviously, there are simultaneous commonalities as well as differences between and among us. When we cannot see similarities we believe that our position is the sole truth. Yet, truth must always be understood in terms of how it is made as a process, for whom it is made, and for whom and at what time it is true.
REFERENCES
Amin, A. and Thrift, N.(2002) Cities: Imagining the Urban, Cambridge: Polity. Bakhtin, M.M. (1986) Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, University of Texas Press, Austin. Batty and Longley(1995.). Fractal Cities. Academic Press, London Brenner,N. (2004) New State Spaces: Urban Governance and Rescaling of Statehood, Oxford University Press. Castells, M.(1996) The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture: Volume 1: The Rise of the Network Society. Oxford: Blackwell. Doxiadis & Papaioannou (1974) Ecumenopolis: The Inevitable City of the Future (WW Norton USA. Dua, Vivek (2001), Megacity Management: Saving the Metropolis. New Delhi: Dominant Publishers.Harvey, D. (1996) Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference. Cambridge: Blackwell. Gray, Barbara (2005) Mediation as Framing and Framing within Mediation, the IACM 18th Annual Conference, Seville June Hofstede Geert and Jean-Claude Usunier (1996) Dimensions of culture and their influence on International Business Negotiations, Pergamon. Hofstede, Geert(2001). Cultures Consequences: Comparing Values, Behaviors, Institutions and Organizations Across Nations. London: Sage Publications Ltd. Lederach, J. P. (1996) Building Peace: Sustainable Reconciliation in Divided Societies. Washington, DC: United States Institutes of Peace Press. ----- (1995) Preparing for Peace: Conflict Transformation across Cultures. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Karaman, Ozan (2010). Remaking Space for Globalization: Dispossession through Urban Renewal in Istanbul, an unpublished doctoral dissertation. McGee & Robinson, eds. (1995) The Mega-urban Regions of Southeast Asia, Vancouver:UBC Press. Simmel, G.(1997) The Metropolis and Mental Life in Rethinking Architecture ed. Neil Leach, London Routledge , p. 69-79, Marshall McLuhan (1994). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.MIT Press. Thomsen, Christian (1994). Visionary Architecture: From Babylon to Virtual Reality Prestel-Verlag. Sassen, Saskia(2009) The Immutable Intersection of Vast Mobilities, Istanbul: City of Intersections, London:Urban Age. Sclavi, M (2005) Why Humor Matters in Active Listening?, Essec Business School, Paris. Schram, Matin (2003), Avoiding Armageddon: Our Future, Our Choice. New York: Basic Books. Yokohari, Makoto et al. (2000), Beyond Greenbelts and Zoning: A New Planning Concept for the Environment of Asian Mega-cities, Landscape and Urban Planning, 47:159-71. Yksel, Mberra (1999) A Case Study of Ankara within the Context of Decentralization: DikmenValley Project in the Policy Implementation Process in Developing Nations, ed. Lazin; Fred. Policy Studies and Developing Nations, Nagel, Stuart S. (series ed.) Vol:6. Zizek, S. (2006) How to Read Lacan. London: Granta Books.