digging istanbul: archaeology, mass transit, history

The metro system in İstanbul is, as this article from the NYTimes points out, "comically inadequate." Although the nineteenth-century Tünel--an underground funicular from the Galata Bridge up to the hill to Istiklal Caddesi--is the third oldest underground line in the world, progress since then has been, well, halting. The current İstanbul Metro (not counting the still-functioning Tünel) has only two short separate lines, both on the European side of the Bosphorus, but on opposite sides of the Golden Horn. Mass transit in the city is like a jigsaw puzzle: you hop from bus to ferry to tram to metro to surburban rail line, all the pieces of the city strung together in a suprisingly efficient and well-integrated but still piecemeal system.

Expansion plans for the metro (including a line to the airport) have long been in the works, but as the piece points out, what do you do when your subway dig hits more than twenty centuries' worth of historical ruins?

It does not take an archaeologist's training to see the risks of digging a railway tunnel under one of the world's most ancient cities - a center of both Islam and Christendom - where remnants of civilizations and empires are piled on top of one another like a stack of history books.
....
The trouble is, the project's engineers have concluded that the best route for the tunnel on the European side is beneath the old city - home to the Hagia Sophia, the Blue Mosque and the Topkapi Palace, where sultans ruled the Ottoman Empire for nearly four centuries. The workers are likely to hit something of historical value every time they put shovel to earth.

The article gives a good overview of the challenge posed in reconciling the demands of historical heritage with the practical development needs of a city whose actual (as opposed to official) population count is estimated to be somewhere in the range of 13 to 15 million. The insistence of a UNESCO expert that "A case as important as İstanbul should also have non-Turk experts" because of the site's "international value" is interesting--who should have sovereignty or influence over contested sites such as these? I'm increasingly interested in the possibility of a doctoral project centred around issues such as these: questioning how residents of urban centers such as İstanbul relate to, construct, and reimagine the historical legacies of their cities, and the ways that these relationships play into the broader issues at stake--identity, modernity, nationalism, representation.