Weather is the Future of Urban Design

[Image: From a newscast about Istanbul's recent tornadoes].

It's hard to resist a story where urban design is blamed for creating tornadoes. But the recent cluster of "freak mini-tornadoes" striking Istanbul offers an anomaly in search of an explanation, and the newly built outer edges of the metropolis are potentially to blame.

According to Ed Danaher at NOAA's Center for Weather and Climate Prediction, speaking to the Hürriyet Daily News, "we know that tornadoes are exotic to Istanbul, like snow is to Florida." That article go on to suggest, however, that these tornadoes "are possibly one result of the city’s rapid urbanization," and that such a claim can be made based on their conversations with other meteorological researchers working at NOAA.

As their headline states bluntly, "Istanbul tornadoes [are] a 'result of urbanization'."

This conjures up frankly outrageous images of a city so sprawling—and so thermally ill-conceived—that huge masses of air at different temperatures are now rising into the sky to do battle, violently colliding like mythological titans above the city to generate the surreal tornadoes now ripping through the neighborhoods below.

Weather might be the future of urban design—but the rest of the news story actually includes no such quotations or any relevant evidence that would back up such a claim. They refer to climate change and its effects on regional humidity, of course, but, oddly enough, there is otherwise no attempt to back up the opening statement.

[Image: Photographer uncredited; via the Hürriyet Daily News].

But... But... It's so tempting to speculate. Beyond just being clickbait, this vision of suburban sprawl inadvertently churning the skies with the introduced turbulence of tornadoes, and thus destroying the landscape like some twisted instant karma of the atmosphere, is too awesome not to entertain for at least the length of a cup of coffee.

What weird old gods of weather have Istanbul's architects accidentally awoken? As streets and buildings continue to bulge outward into the forests and hills of the region, what else might their spatial activities unleash?

(Originally spotted via @urbanphoto_blog. Vaguely related: The Weather Bowl).