LocationsDemonstrating equality through food
Urban October: Istanbul
October 12, 2026
As part of the alchemy of cities, ordinary places often accumulate meanings their founders never planned.
Photo: Shutterstock
Urban October is a month-long campaign focused on sustainable urbanization and resilient cities. As our societies become increasingly urbanized, and the effects of climate change intensify, UNDP works around the world to make cities more livable for all their residents.
I live in a city that tends to attract attention for two reasons: First, there is the exhausted description of Istanbul as a city “where East and West meet,” as if other global cities have somehow escaped centuries of migration, trade and cultural overlap. Then there are the cats, which are harder to argue with.
But the Istanbul I have become most attached to is less visible. It is a quietly contested network of ordinary dining rooms.
Lokantas are everywhere. To someone unfamiliar with the city they may look like interchangeable Turkish cafés: cooked dishes behind glass, tightly arranged tables, fluorescent light, perhaps a television in the corner. Their architecture rarely announces itself. Yet their distribution across the city is anything but random.
The traditional esnaf lokantası, or tradesmen's restaurant, belongs to the economy immediately around it. It feeds mechanics, shopkeepers, office workers, tradesmen and residents who occupy the surrounding streets. Its catchment is walkable. Its opening hours follow working rhythms. Its regulars are known.
Seen this way, the lokanta is less a restaurant than a small piece of urban infrastructure, calibrated to the productive life of a neighbourhood.
The traditional esnaf lokantası, or tradesmen's restaurant, belongs to the economy immediately around it and attracts people from all walks of life.
Photo: Shutterstock
Its architecture is almost deliberately undistinguished. There is little attempt to filter people through taste or lifestyle. You enter, see what has been cooked, choose, sit, eat. The important thing is not the design of the room but the low threshold for entering it.
This becomes even more interesting in Istanbul’s municipal restaurants.
I remain fascinated by the absence of the architecture of charity. These are not spaces visibly designated for “the poor.” Students come. Pensioners come. Workers come. People who could probably afford lunch somewhere else come. The municipal identity is visible, but not embarrassing. There is almost a sense of civic ownership: this place belongs, indirectly, to us.
That distinction matters.
Cities are very good at spatializing exclusions. We build different housing for different incomes, different shopping environments, different schools, clubs, cafés and increasingly even different pavements. Socio-economic difference quickly becomes physical distance.
The lokanta does not abolish class, of course. Istanbul certainly does not. But these rooms occasionally erase the assumption that difference must always produce separation.
Maybe this is also why I am sentimental about their visual culture. In older family-run lokantas, portraits of founders often hang near the entrance: serious men photographed decades ago, sometimes accompanied by sons, brothers or the next generation. I find myself staring at them while eating.
What did they imagine they were building?
Probably not social infrastructure. Probably a restaurant. A livelihood. Something to pass to their children.
Yet this may be one of the things cities do best. Ordinary places accumulate meanings their founders never planned. A dining room becomes a neighbourhood institution. An affordable lunch becomes a spatial ritual. A municipal restaurant becomes an argument about what a city owes its residents.
Perhaps some of Istanbul’s most important infrastructure does not look like infrastructure at all. And in my work on cities at UNDP, this is what systems design teaches me to look for too: the intricate relationships through which everyday life is actually sustained, often hidden in plain sight.