From the row of baked-potato stands in Ortaköy to the complex of fabric shops in Unkapan覺, many of Istanbul’s neighborhoods are known for their commercial districts full of stores selling essentially the same thing. Though it may seem hard to understand how all those, say, plumbing-supply stores can stay in business, the longstanding practice benefits proprietors and consumers alike.
Suha Demiralp is the owner of Demiralp Illumination and Accessories, a family business that has been operating in the ihane neighborhood for 80 years. The streets around Tarlaba覺 Boulevard are chock-full of lighting stores selling everything from simple lamps to intricate chandeliers. The increasingly trendy area in the Beyolu district is now home to chic bars and restaurants as well, but it is still the first place most Istanbul residents think to head when they need new lights for their homes.
The district grew organically and gradually, said Demiralp, whose family opened its shop after his grandfather acquired the necessary skills from the non-Muslim craftsmen working in the area at the time.
“The proximity to Karaköy’s Perembe Bazaar, extending to the area around the Galata Tower where hardware supply stores conglomerated, and to Çukurcuma, where antique and secondhand goods are sold, has influenced ihane’s development into a cluster of lighting stores,” said Demiralp. The convenience of working in close proximity to shops selling the necessary components for their craft is considered an asset by Turkish artisans and craftsmen, and is one of the factors behind groupings of similar businesses.
Despite the obvious tendency for such clusters to become crowded and competitive over time, Demiralp said his family’s business – along with many others – has managed to survive, and even thrive despite the challenges posed by the economic crisis. “Today around 300 lighting stores and a number of workshops are located in ihane and most of them are doing well,” he said.
According to Mehmet Çak覺lc覺olu from the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality’s City Planning Directorate, such neighborhood groupings actually help attract more customers to a particular area by creating a market for a certain product. “We can liken such clustering to the ‘arasta’ tradition from Ottoman times,” Çak覺lc覺olu said, referring to the term for shops of the same trade built in a row. “Since customers know they will find a variety of choices and will not be overcharged, they first try such clusters without going to an individual store.”
Such collaboration allows groupings of businesses to be more successful than individual ones in attracting customers, and was a practice that historically operated in tandem with the development of craft guilds.
“Clustering gives us the chance to be recognized,” said Mehmet Miçooullar覺, a sales representative for Cangöz Musical Instruments and Accessories, which has been located on Galipdede Avenue, Beyolu’s “music street,” for 60 years. The steep street descending from the lively Tünel district toward the Galata Tower is full of shops selling musical instruments of all kinds.
“Our customers, ranging in age from 14 to 35, come from all over Istanbul, from the Anatolian side and from the far corners of Bak覺rköy, because they know that the heart of music beats in Tünel,” Miçooullar覺 said. Even if these music shops only coincidentally became clustered on the same street, their proximity to one another has created a situation in which they promote each other, drawing young people interested in music and professional musicians alike.
According to Levent Sosyal, a sociologist working on the topic of “City, Globalization and the Metropolis” at Kadir Has University, commercial “clusters” should be examined from three main perspectives. “The historical background of such areas should be considered along with the decisions of shop owners and the policies of municipalities,” Sosyal said. Each factor can help lead business owners to congregate in groups.
This longstanding practice has, however, taken on a new meaning in the era of globalization, as “clustering” has in some circles come to refer to the creation of marketplaces full of internationally known brands that squeeze out local businesses. Think about the way that whenever a Starbucks opens, a Gloria Jean’s pops up in the immediate vicinity, or vice versa, eventually dominating a market once only served by small independent coffee shops.
But clustering, especially in its older meaning, is not always detrimental to local businesses – it can also help areas that have lost prestige regenerate by capitalizing on surprising trends in supply and demand. The Tarlaba覺 neighborhood in Beyolu, for example, is full of ramshackle houses and clotheslines hung across the streets. But it has also turned into a center for wig stores and erotic shops, clustered on the main boulevard heading up to Taksim Square. “Apart from artists’ tendency to buy hair pieces, our customers are mainly the drag queens living in the neighborhood,” said Seyfi Kuvvet, the owner of Sevket Wigs, which opened 45 years ago and has managed to survive the area’s ups and downs by catering to its changing population.
Nearby Dolapdere, the crossroads linking the Taksim, Pangalt覺, Kurtulu and Kas覺mpaa neighborhoods, is instantly identifiable by its many window displays of mannequins, which feature in local musicals such as “East Side Story.”
“Being in Dolapdere gives us the advantage of being close to textile stores and wholesale dealers in ili and Bomonti,” said Mehmet Asran, a sales representative from Meric Mannequins. “We make our products in Merter according to the specifications of our customers and we display them in our showrooms in Dolapdere.”
Transportation convenience is thus another reason why certain businesses prefer to conglomerate in the same districts. As a result, municipal architects and planners often take economic and possible transformation concerns into consideration when separating industrial areas from commercial centers. “During the drafting process, we determine those areas that could accommodate factories or showrooms and give a certain shape to possible cluster formation,” said Çak覺lc覺olu from Istanbul’s City Planning Directorate.
The emergence of “big box” stores such as IKEA, Bauhaus and Koçta, which offer a wide variety of products at cheap prices, has created some tough times recently for local business clusters, which cannot sell their products at such low prices or compete with the big retailers’ advertising campaigns. But local merchants remain confident of their continued appeal to customers.
“Out of curiosity, customers headed toward those retailers when they first opened, but before too long, they became aware of the fragility of the lamps presented on their shelves. Even carrying them in shopping baskets is a problem,” said lighting-store owner Demiralp. “Conscious consumers are aware of the difference.”
