In his 1969 published praise of hospitable streets, Streets for People Bernhard Rudofsky stated that climbing stairs had become an atavistic activity for modern industrialized man. In his polemic he stresses the advantages and the poetry of the stairs of the hilly city of Rome.

This video has been shot in Istanbuls district Tesvikiye. Istanbul, which is built on seven hills too, has an extreme topography, which has made it difficult in many parts to build up public transport systems.

Situated at the interface between privateness and publicness, the steps in front of the houses turned out to be a direct statement of individual possibilities of design and interventions in the urban surface. Each individual set of steps represents an individually designed measure. As opposed to western European cities, for example, the design of pavements in Istanbul has not been followed a uniform plan.