Being mayor of a town is probably a hard job – hey I saw what Carcetti had to put up with in The Wire – as you’re always juggling the needs and wants of all the different groups within your town and it’s impossible to please everyone. One way that you could probably succeed in pissing all of them off at the same time though is to spend the city’s entire budget on building a statue of a giant robot at the edge of the city.
We would like to introduce you to Mayor Melih Gökçek of the Turkish city of Ankara, who unveiled the giant Transformer statue earlier this month with the phrase ‘which robot is more beautiful?’ I’m not sure what he’s talking about there because there’s only one robot, but he clearly has a screw loose for pursuing this policy anyway so we won’t pay too much attention to that.
Predictably taxpayers weren’t happy and many complained. To be fair, I’m not surpsied people are upset – the robot doesn’t even look that good . In fact I would go as far as to say it looks completely crap, kinda like an old relic from Soviet Russia or something.
The uproar has led to the Turkish Union of Engineers and Architects’ Chambers deeming it a ‘monstrosity’ and suing Gökçek:
Images VIA
The money spent for the robot statue, which will be built for the Ankapark project and were referred to by Gökçek as his “prestige project,” belongs to the inhabitants [of the city]. We filed a lawsuit.
Gökçek himself doesn’t seem too bothered about his impending court date, merely telling his subjects to ‘respect the robot’ like a total badass. I guess we’ll see who the real badass is come election day/court, whichever comes soonest.
* Unfortunately as great as it would be if he had just built the robot for no reason, it is actually to promote some kind of new theme park in the city. Even so, it does seem like a colossal waste of money when there are probably more pressing problems over there. It’ll never be as good as this illegal World Of Warcraft theme park in China in any case.
