Rooster and a Mosque

Rooster on steps of Ebu Fadıl Mehmet Efendi Camii, Cihangir, Istanbul

Thinking today about what makes a city a city; and what makes Istanbul in particular such a useful site from which to rethink how we arrive at our definitions of what a city is.

One way to define the city is by defining the urban relative to the rural; something that sometimes maps onto a distinction between the social/cultural and the natural. These binaries are problematic for all sorts of reasons, but they're often a jumping off point for discussions of 'urban nature' or 'urban political ecologies.'

But what I was thinking about today was not just an urban political ecology [nature in the city]; but about the ways that that urban political ecology is connected to a very Istanbul-specific urban political economy [the conditions that shape how property is bought, sold, and transformed]. How could we look at that intersection?

Or to ask the question a different way: What is a rooster doing on the steps of a mosque in Cihangir?