From Non-Places to Places: Neoliberalizing Istanbul, Taksim Gezi Protests, and Reflections on the Right to the City

FROM NON-PLACES TO PLACES:

Neoliberalizing Istanbul, Taksim Gezi Protests, and

Reflections on the Right to the City

by

Özlem Cebeci

Thesis submitted to

the Department of Anthropology, Princeton University

in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Bachelor of Arts

April 14, 2014

I hereby declare that I am the sole author of this thesis.

Özlem Cebeci

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

First and foremost, I would like to thank my advisor Professor Isabelle Clark-Decès and second-reader Professor Esther da Costa Meyer for their feedback and support throughout the process. I have really enjoyed working with both of them and consider myself very lucky to have had these two incredible women as my sources of inspiration.

Professor Clark-Decès, thank you for agreeing to take me on as your seventh advisee at the beginning of the second semester. Every since I met you, you have made sure that this project remained exciting and encouraged me to trust my talents. Your cheerfulness and enthusiasm for life is contagious! I cannot wait to host you in Istanbul this summer and share some of this city that is so dear to my heart with you.

Professor da Costa Meyer, I do not even know where to begin thanking you. You made me fall in love in with architecture history as I watched you make magic on stage during the ART 242 lectures. It was beyond incredible having the chance to work with you in a more intimate setting when you agreed to include me in your graduate seminar last semester. The two final papers I wrote for these classes, one on the early works of the Austrian architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky and the other on Shanghai’s iconic Park Hotel and its Hungarian architect László Hudec have extended my horizons and really forced me to think about architectural works as cultural artifacts deeply embedded in local histories and global connections. I am eternally grateful to you for that.

I would also like to thank Professor Abou Farman, who helped me sharpen my topic throughout the first semester, pointed me in the direction of the phenomenological experience of the protests, and helped me fill out the hellish paperwork for my IRB application. To my JP advisor Professor Serguei Oushakine, thank you for encouraging me to pursue my interests at the crossroads of anthropology and urban studies, and teaching me not to be afraid of the “I” in my writing.

A special thanks to Professor Bruno Carvalho, with whom I had the pleasure of spending the summer in Rio de Janeiro as part of Princeton’s global seminar. As I was writing sections of this thesis, his insights and incredible knowledge of urban studies showed me the right way. Eu também te agradeço muito por me introduzir ao português! This project would not have been possible without the generosity of my informants and I thank them for opening their homes and their hearts to me. To my brother Deniz Ünsal and my cousin Ali Dinç Fırat, thank you for helping me connect with my informants, and Deniz, especially, for patiently helping me transcribe some of my interviews. I would further like to thank Sebastian Marotta and Şölen Altop for taking the time to read some of my writing and providing me with valuable feedback. A huge thanks to Mo Lin Yee, Claire Nicholas, and the rest of the Anthropology Department for their support and kindness. I felt closer than ever to my fellow anthropology seniors in the process of writing this thesis and it was great having the company of some at the library when the light at the end of the tunnel seemed dimmer than ever. I cannot image my last two years at Princeton without the company of my boyfriend Joe Tobin. Everything I do above and beyond this thesis is colored by his love. Finally, I owe everything to my mom, my dad, and my grandmother, whose very different personalities have prepared me for almost everything in life. For the rest, I am grateful to know that I have their eternal support. Sizleri çok seviyorum ♥ ♥ ♥

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations ix Introduction: Her Yer Taksim, Her Yer Direniş 1 Chapter 1: Neoliberalizing Istanbul: “Don’t Touch My House, My Neighborhood, 11

My City” The Neoliberal City The Case of Istanbul Neoliberal Islamism in Ankara Neo-Ottomanism Istanbul as a “Global City”: From Places to Non-Places

Chapter 2: Beyond the Right to the City: The Arab Spring, #Occupy Wall Street,

and Taksim Gezi Protests 67 Taksim Gezi Protests The Right to the City Arab Spring and the 2011 Egyptian Revolution Occupy Wall Street Taksim Gezi Protests, Arab Spring, and #Occupy Everywhere

Chapter 3: View From the Park: As Told by Selen, Ali, Yiğit, and Eren 120

Theoretical Foundations Collective Effervescence and Communitas Embodied Space The Sensorial Experience of the Protests Symbolic and Political Significance of the Protests Perception of Space: Urban Combat and the War Metaphor

Conclusion: A Local Grocer and a Transvestite 183

Appendix: A Chronology of Taksim Gezi Protests 196 References 204

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Chapter 1: Fig. 1. A group of 30 protesters “occupied” Istanbul’s iconic Emek Cinema Theatre to protest the demolition of the historic building. Taner Yener / DHA photo. Source: Hürriyet Daily News, April 1, 2013. Fig. 2. A map of Istanbul showing the locations of Basibüyük and Tarlabasi. 2010 Tuna Kuyucu and Özlem Ünsal:1481. Fig 3. Top: Başıbüyük residents protesting urban transformation project; text reads: “We will not have your houses demolished, We will not have your health sold”. 2008 Mürsel Karadeniz. Zaman. Bottom: TOKI Apartment Buildings loom over the squatter settlements in Başıbüyük, Maltepe. Havadan Emlak. Fig. 4. Top left: A bird’s eye view of the proposed location for Tarlabaşı urban transformation project. Bottom left: A rendering of what the area will look like post-transformation. Top and bottom right: current state of buildings and narrow streets in Tarlabaşı. 2012 Beyoğlu Municipality. Beyoğlu Büyük Dönüşüm. Fig. 5. Location of Kemer Country. 2000 Kemer Country. Fig. 6. Aerial view of Kemer Country. 2001 Hakan Oge. Fig. 7. Istanbul Market day at Fatih Mosque. June 2004 Dick Osseman. Fig. 8. Women in Hijab on the Streets of Fatih. Anne Steckner 2007. Fig. 9. The single minaret in Çukurambar, Ankara stood within the lawn of an apartment building until a large mosque was built in the adjacent lot. 2012 Batuman: 6. Fig, 10. Ankara during the Republican Era. Top: Kızılay Park, Güvenpark, and the Presidential Palace, 1930s. Çankaya Municipality. Bottom: A recent panoramic view of Çankaya district in Ankara; the Presidential Palace can be seen on the right. Source: DS World’s Lands. Fig. 11. Keçiören district in Ankara. Source: Web Rehberi. Fig. 12. A rendering of the North Ankara City Entrance project juxtaposed with the same area in 2004. TOKİ. Fig. 13. Taksim Military Barracks (1806-1909): Top: Taksim Military Barracks in late-1920s/early-30s; its internal courtyard was into the Taksim Stadium in 1921. Independence Monument can be seen at the bottom right corner. Bottom: Gezi Park appears as the İnönü Gezisi (Inönü Promenade) in the Pervititch insurance map, 1944. Mechanical Turk 2013. The History of Taksim Military Barracks Fig. 14. A rendering of the revised proposal for Taksim Mosque by Ahmet Vefik Alp. Source: Hürriyet 2013.

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Fig. 15. Çamlıca Mosque: Top: View from Bosphorus facing the Asian side, photo indicates the proposed location of Camlica Mosque with a close-up view of the mosque’s rendering. Milliyet 2012. Bottom: A rendering of Camlica Mosque. Source: Arkitera 2013. Fig. 16. Tuscan Valley. Source: skyscrapercity.com. Fig. 17. Via Port Venezia. Source: reclaimistanbul.com. Fig. 18. Bosphorus City. Source: reclaimistanbul.com Chapter 2: Fig. 1. Taksim Gezi Park location, BBC. Fig. 2. Taksim Gezi Park aerial view, Bing Maps via Architect’s Newspaper Blog. Fig. 3. Taksim Gezi Park today, Urban Life Signs. Fig. 4. Renderings of the Topçu Barracks Project, Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality via Skyscraper City. Fig. 5 & 6. Thousands of protesters crossing Bosphorus Bridge to get to Taksim Square on the second day of protests. Source: Milliyet. Fig. 7. A makeshift hospital set within Dolmabahçe Mosque in Beşiktaş. By Nazım Serhat Fırat, June 2, 2013. Fig. 8. “What’s Happening in Turkey?” Crowd-funded, full-page Gezi ad that appeared in the front section of the New York Times. Souce: crowdact.com Fig. 9. The façade of Atatürk Cultural Center turned into a bulletin-board for the banners. Source: Cornucopia Magazine. Fig. 10. An earth table set on Istiklal Avenue. Bülent Kılıç / Getty. Fig. 11 & 12. Haussmann’s Paris, two ‘before and after’s: Top: Rue Soufflot. Source: Skyscraper City, Bottom: The Quai des Orfevres and Pont Saint-Michel, “Lost Paris: Destruction and Renewal on the Île de la Cité” by Marville via Le Figaro. Fig. 13. The Arab Spring, 2010-2011 by Foreign Policy Association. Fig. 14. Map of Tahrir Square. Souce: Guardian via Globe and Mail/GoogleMaps. Fig. 15. Tahrir Square occupied by Jonathan Rashad via WikiCommons. Fig. 16. Top left: Following the defeat of the Central Security Police, victory signs and determination. Bottom left: Euphoria and anxiety in the square. Top right: The signs read: ‘Doctors’ Revolutionary Headquarters 8 Medical Area’. Bottom Right: A wall poster displaying protesters’ art work. Such endeavors, in addition to singing and chanting, helped to lighten the atmosphere of perpetual anxiety and expectation. Text by Rashed; photography by Islam El Azzazi 2011. Fig. 17. Occupy Wall Street Encampment at Zuccotti Park seen is empty of demonstrators, Tuesday, Nov. 15, 2011 in New York. By Mary Altaffer, source: Cryptome. Fig. 18. Zuccotti Park Occupied: what’s where map of the encampment. Source: Occupying Wall Street by Writers for the 99%. Fig. 19. People sit amongst shelters and tents in Zuccotti Park at the Occupy Wall Street encampment. By Justin Lane / EPA, source: New York Daily News.

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Chapter 3: Fig. 1. Historic buildings in Cihangir, by Moshe Aelyon. Fig. 2. An aerial view of Gezi Park. Independence Monument can be seen on the top right corner, next to Taksim Square. The northwestern corner of the park grounds is taken up by Gezi Hotel Bosphorus, Source: bollier.org. Fig. 3. Gezi Park seen in perspective from Taksim Square side. Source: showdiscontent.com. Fig. 4. The Monument of the Republic (1928) on Taksim Square, crafted by Italian sculptor Pietro Canonica. The circular grounds of the monument is replicated at the heart of Gezi Park. Source: Wikimedia Commons. Fig. 5. Video stills from the documentary Videomappings: Aida, Palestine (2009) by the visual artist Till Roeskens, via Animate Projects. Fig. 6. Outline of the Park. Historical Atlas of Gezi Park, Map 1. postvirtual wordpress. com 2013. Fig. 7. “Gezi Republic”, Historical Atlas of Gezi Park, Map 2. postvirtual wordpress. com 2013. Fig. 8. “Gezi Neighborhoods”, Historical Atlas of Gezi Park, Map 3. postvirtual wordpress. com 2013. Fig. 9. “Gezi Commune”, Historical Atlas of Gezi Park, Map 4. postvirtual wordpress. com 2013. Fig. 10. “Gezi Empire”, Historical Atlas of Gezi Park, Map 5. postvirtual wordpress. com 2013. Fig. 11. Popular Forums in Istanbul, Historical Atlas of Gezi Park, Map 6. postvirtual wordpress. com 2013. Fig. 12. The woman in black. Source: baskahaber.org. Fig. 13. The “un-handicapped man.” Source: capulcugazete.com. Fig. 14. Some illustrations depicting trees as a symbol of Gezi Park. Sources (right to left): 1. By Hsynz via bobiler.org; 2. By Gürbüz; 3. By TGB Ajans Rize, text reads: “For Gezi Park: We are meeting at 12:00pm at Rize [the capital city of Rize province in the eastern part of the Black Sea Region of Turkey] Municipal Park.” Fig. 15 & 16. The many barricades of Gezi. The protesters used everything paving stones to signposts to build the barricades. Witty, anti-government graffiti were often painted on their surfaces, like that of Prime Minister Tayyip Erdoğan’s face with the text “wanted” underneath it. By Emrah Gökdemir, source: "Gezi Protest Visuals." Fieldsights - Hot Spots, Cultural Anthropology. Conclusion: Fig. 1 & 2. Protesters takeover the National Congress in Brasília. Source: Business Insider, June 18, 2013. Fig. 3 & 4. Protesters standing on the roof of Ataturk Cultural Center. Source: turkiyeturizm.com. Fig. 5 & 6. March across the Bosphorus Bridge which is normally closed to pedestrian traffic. Source: internethaber.com.

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“You are beautiful when you are angry my Turkey!” Source: Twitter, user @Uykulusuz, June 2, 2013

1

INTRODUCTION

Her Yer Taksim, Her Yer Direniş

Taksim is Everywhere, Resistance is Everywhere When Gezi protests first broke out on June 1st, I was having dinner at a rooftop restaurant

of a five-star hotel in Beşiktaş1 with a group of high school friends and a visitor from

Princeton. The view of the Bosphorus from the rooftop at sunset was spectacular: the

historic peninsula on the European side and Kadiköy2 on the Asian shore brushed cheeks

as historic ferries continued their nonchalant back-and-forth between the two continents.

At the open-air restaurant, English dominated over Turkish and a professional team of

waiters, waitresses and sommeliers catered to the needs of their moneyed cosmopolitan

clientele. This was the new global Istanbul in a nutshell.

Then we noticed the smell. The fair skin of the middle-aged German lady sitting

at the table across from us started to turn red and her husband could no longer fight back

the tears running down his cheeks from his blood-red eyes. As the smell intensified and

the burning sensation in our eyes became unbearable, there was no denying that our

cocoon of exclusivity could not protect us from the rising city. Amongst the cloud of tear

gas and the grumbles of the panicking guests, we could make out the angry crowds

1 Beşiktaş is a district of Istanbul, located on the European shore of the Bosphorus. 2 Kadıköy is a district of Istanbul, located on the northern shore of the Marmara Sea, facing the historic peninsula on the European side of the Bosporus.

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chanting, Government Resign! Tayyip Resign! The police must have chased the protesters

down the Gümüşsuyu ramp, which connects Taksim Square to Beşiktaş, as the wind

carried the intense tear gas as far as our 16th floor rooftop restaurant in defiance of all

social and spatial boundaries.

Over the course of the next week, protests engulfed the whole city and I was

confined in my house with my American guest, whose Irish complexion would have

made us an obvious target for the plastic bullets of the ferocious police had we dared to

step out. Soon after we waved goodbye to my guest at the Atatürk airport, my mom and I

were on our way to Gezi Park to see what the fuss was all about. The makeshift barricade

made out of bricks and signposts on Cumhuriyet Avenue prevented car access to Taksim

Square, so we got out of the taxi and started making our way to the park on foot. Three

police busses were parked right outside the barricade. Some policemen were sleeping

inside, while others were smoking and chatting outside wearing their gas masks on top of

their heads and their sleeves rolled up owing to the heat. Passing by us were men carrying

water bottles in packs of six stacked on top of one another and women with kids who

were bringing the dozen sandwiches and an assortment of pastries they had prepared at

home to distribute to the protesters. There was a strange calmness and quiet in the air

despite the many people in the no-car zone and the fact that it was only slightly past

midday. When we reached Taksim Square, the first thing I realized was that the façade of

the Ataturk Culture Center was covered in all kinds of banners and flags from a large

black-and-white portrait of legendary 1970’s revolutionary Deniz Gezmiş to one that said

“Shut up Tayyip (Kes Sesini Tayyip)” and another “Don’t Bow Your Head (Boyun

Eğme)” flanked by a national flag and a portrait of Atatürk. People were walking around

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the square casually in all different directions, some taking pictures and others asking for

their pictures to be taken. There were stands put together by smaller, mostly Left wing

political parties crowded around the entry of Gezi Park. Their representatives were

distributing leaflets and their leaders were speaking to the crowds through bullhorns in

solidarity against Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party

(Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, hereafter AK Party).

We made our way slowly into Gezi Park and as we had seen in many photos of

the commune, every inch of the park was indeed covered in tents. People were lying on

the grass, sleeping, relaxing, some reading books, while others were chatting. The air of

calmness persisted within the park. My mom was comfortable walking by people’s tents,

exchanging hi’s and hellos with strangers. I, one the other hand, felt like a complete

outsider and feared that I was intruding on their personal spaces. There was some

commotion at the designated spaces such as the infirmary or the canteen. The volunteer

managers were giving out orders to the other volunteers to organize the bottled drink

donations in this one corner and foodstuffs in the other. My mom and I took two water

bottles and some crackers, gratis, and resumed our walk through the park. A large group

of people was gathered around the stage set in the middle of Gezi listening to the one-

minute speeches given by ordinary citizens on topics ranging from personal anecdotes on

why they were at the park and how they got there (people had come from every corner of

the country to show their support) to the more angry anti-government monologues that

were with no exception met with a huge round of applause from the audience. My mom

and I returned to the tent-city for a last round before we set for home. Judging by the way

we walked, the way we talked, and the many photos my mom insisted on taking, there

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was no question that we were guests here. I could not help but to turn my eyes away and

avoid eye contact with the tent residents. Their gaze made me feel like I was seen in a

critical light, as one of those people who came during the day, empty-handed, just to snap

a couple pictures and were gone before the real resistance started, before the brutal police

attacks. We left, and the next day at that time, I was already on my way to Rio de Janeiro

for a six-week long Princeton global seminar, somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean.

In more precise terms, what I felt on that day that I toured Gezi Park with my

mom was an overwhelming sense of shame caused by somehow having let my

compatriots down. This feeling stayed close to my heart long after that visit. I partially

attribute my interest in the protests to this shame, which makes this thesis a lot more

personal and exciting for me. Initially, I was going to pursue a purely phenomenological

account inspired by my first encounter with the protests at the rooftop restaurant. This

study was to look closely at what I termed the aesthetics of Gezi Park, aesthetics taken to

its original meaning of sensory or sensori-emotional values. Anthropologist Setha Low

proposes the term “embodied space” to describe the “location where human experience

and consciousness takes on material and spatial form” (2003:9). Embodied space theory

underscores the importance of the body as simultaneously a “physical and biological

entity, lived experience, and a center of agency, a location for speaking and acting on the

world” (10). In Western culture, the self is often perceived as “naturally” placed in the

body and we imagine ourselves “experiencing the world through our ‘social skin,’ the

surface of the body representing a kind of common frontier of society which becomes the

symbolic stage upon which the drama of socialization is enacted” (10). The inherently

social and cultural makeup of the biological body means that the sensorial perception of

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the outer world is processed in cultural terms and frameworks. To get at the feeling of

protests and its embodied experience, I set up semi-structured interviews with eight Gezi

participants that I connected with through my extended family and friends.

Demographically, the participants I interviewed identified more broadly with the Left, all

had completed or were in the process of completing their university degrees and would

consider themselves artistic, their areas of expertise ranging from music to creative

writing and film production. The kinds of questions I had prepared in advance had to do

with their memories of sights, smells, taste, etc. and the sensorial experience of spending

the night in a tent within a public park that was under threat of police raids, or the

experience of being tear-gassed. Our conversations grew beyond this purely sensorial

experience and some interesting themes emerged such as the unique park community and

the interplay between diversity and solidarity within Gezi’s tent-city; the perception of

space through urban combat and the metaphor of war; and the symbolic and political

significance of the protests. I return to these themes in the third and final chapter after

situating the overall experience of protest within theories of Durkheim and Turner on

collective rituals, as well as within Setha Low’s embodied space theory.

My interviews further encouraged me to think more broadly about some of the

causes of the protests and the driving question was why Gezi Park. Why did it matter to

the protests that this specific park was under threat and why did the government’s plans

to rebuild the Ottoman Military Barracks on the park grounds further fuel their rage?

Here, I turn again to Setha Low (1996) and explore the distinction she makes between the

‘social production’ of space and the ‘social construction’ of space, specifically as it

concerns Istanbul.

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The social production of space refers to the physical creation of material settings

through social, economic, ideological, and technological processes. Low argues that the

“materialist emphasis of the term social production is useful in defining the historical

emergence, and political and economic formation of urban space” (1996:861). I consider

the neoliberalization of Istanbul as a form of social production of space. The neoliberal

city has recently received much scholarly attention (Brenner and Theodore 2002;

Hackworth 2007; Harvey 2012) and this literature looks at the multiple ways neoliberal

economic reforms have irrevocably changed the material makeup of cities. In a few

words, neoliberal ideology premises that optimal economic growth follows from open

and free markets liberated from all forms of state interference and the actions of social

collectivities. Within the context of neoliberalism, cities have been transformed by large-

scale urban development projects funded via public-private partnerships; by prestige

projects that aim to boost a city’s desirability for foreign investment and tourism

purposes; and by the construction of gated communities along the urban peripheries

inhabited predominantly by upper-middle and upper class citizens. The increased

commodification and privatization of urban land under neoliberalism have significantly

reduced the number of plazas, squares, parks, and other public amenities. Gentrification

within historic neighborhoods and the redevelopment of squatter settlements have pushed

the poor out of the urban core. Considered in the background of the growing number of

high-level professionals that reside in newly built, high-rise luxury apartments located in

downtown Istanbul, this shifting of bodies and capital has raised the degree of spatial and

socio-economic inequality within the city. Moreover, the Islamist and neo-Ottoman

politics of the ruling AK Party determine the ideological framework for neoliberalization.

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The construction of the many mega-mosques in Istanbul or the phenomenon of ‘minarets

without mosques’ (a result of the Islamist local administrators’ reluctance to tear down

minarets during extensive demolitions in squatter areas) that I explore in Chapter 1

illustrates the social production of space in progress. At the end of this first chapter, I take

a closer look at Istanbul as a rising ‘global city’ and utilize the theories of sociologist

Saskia Sassen and anthropologist Aihwa Ong to decode the branding of the city, the

practice of inter-referencing, and the imaginaries of the local and the global. I conclude

with French anthropologist Marc Augé’s seminal work on ‘non-places’ and argue that, as

a result of neoliberal urbanism and globalization, Istanbul is rapidly ceasing to be an

anthropological space. I propose that one way of looking at the Gezi protests is through

the lens of ‘supermodernity’ and the takeover of the park as an attempt to create places

out of a downtown that is on the verge of becoming a non-place. It is for this reason that I

have chosen to title my thesis “From Non-Places to Places” as a play on Augé’s “From

Places to Non-Places.”

Returning to the second half of Low’s formulation, the social construction of

space refers to the “actual transformation of space – through people's social exchanges,

memories, images, and daily use of the material setting – into scenes and actions that

convey symbolic meaning” (Low 1996:861-2). I consider the recent wave of urban

protests including the Arab Spring, #Occupy Wall Street and Taksim Gezi protests as

social construction of space. At the heart of all these protests are varying claims over the

production and the use of urban, and especially public space. French Marxist sociologist

Henri Lefebvre’s theory of the ‘right to the city’ (1967) predicts the reorientation of

decision-making pertaining to the production of urban space away from capital and the

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state and toward urban inhabitants, more specifically the working class. To Lefebvre the

real inhabitant of the city is he who “runs from his dwelling to the station, near or far

away, to the packed underground train, the office or the factory, to return the same way in

the evening” (1967:158). This “generalized misery” of the working class will become the

means to break free from the oppressive urban space by inciting its members to take a

stand against capital and the state. As Lefebvre predicted, urban dwellers in Cairo, New

York City, and Istanbul, among many others, took to the streets and occupied a public

space to claim their right to the city and criticize their respective governments. The

occupation of space and the creation of tent-cities within conquered territories were

political acts insofar as they transferred the cities from quotidian time and space to an

alternative one in which the exclusionary logic of urban development was undermined.

The protests disrupted the everyday order and accustomed routines, thereby challenging

the norms and values of urban society. The “anti-cities” (Shokr 2011) that emerged in

place of the increasingly fragmented and securitized public spaces were characterized by

harmony of difference and a slow pace of life in which people took time to socialize. The

experiment with direct democracy within the encampments was only part of the utopia

that the occupiers fell in love with; the other half of the story concerned itself with the

imaginaries of alternative uses of public space (such as General Assemblies, public

libraries, kitchens, universities, etc.) and alternative forms of socialization and face-to-

face interaction within these shared spaces.

✤

This thesis begins by discussing neoliberal urbanism in Istanbul beginning in early 1980s

as part of the city’s rise as a ‘global city.’ In this first chapter, I examine the phenomena

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of neoliberal Islamism and neo-Ottomanism as ideological forces that determine the

course of urbanization. I visit the theories of sociologist Saskia Sassen and anthropologist

Aihwa Ong to decode the branding of the city, the practice of inter-referencing, and the

imaginaries of the local and the global. I conclude with French anthropologist Marc

Augé’s seminal work on ‘non-places’ and suggest that the Taksim Gezi protests are an

attempt to make ‘places’ out of a downtown Istanbul that is on the verge of becoming a

non-place. In the second chapter, I begin by providing a detailed account of the Taksim

Gezi protests. I then examine Lefebvre’s ‘right to the city’ and its later adoption by

Marxist geographer David Harvey. Next, I consider the manifestations of Lefebvre’s

theories in the context the Arab Spring and #Occupy Wall Street. I end by comparing the

Taksim Gezi protests with the Arab Spring and #Occupy Everywhere. In the third and

final chapter, I provide an ethnographic account of Taksim Gezi protests. My own

interpretations of the ethnographic material are grounded in Durkheim’s ‘collective

effervescence’ and Turner’s ‘communitas’, as well as in Setha Low’s embodied space

theory. The rest of this chapter is organized around the following three themes: (1) the

sensorial experience of the protests; (2) the perception of space through the metaphor of

war; and (3) the symbolic and political significance of the protests. In the conclusion, I

begin by sharing with the reader some my field notes verbatim in an attempt to recover

the protesters’ feelings that have been lost in the more formalized discussions of the

protests. I conclude with revising Augé’s ‘non-places’ and make a case for the city’s

transformation from a non-place to a place via the protests.

“Don’t Touch My House, My Neighborhood, My City”

By Grace B. Kim, taken from Facebook

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1

NEOLIBERALIZING ISTANBUL

“Don’t Touch My House, My Neighborhood, My City”

Taksim Gezi protests are best understood as the last straw in an ongoing struggle over

urban spaces in Turkey triggered by neoliberal reforms that brought about dramatic

changes to both material and social landscapes of the city. Smaller protests over the

commercial gentrification and redevelopment of Istanbul had been taking place in various

parts of the city some time before the protests in Gezi Park erupted. A case in point is the

series of protests sparked by the planned demolition of the iconic Emek Theater at Istiklal

Avenue in Beyoğlu. The theater was built in a mixed baroque and rococo design in 1884

and used for a number of different purposes including Hunters’ Club, Athletics Gym,

Circus, Skating Palace until 1924, when it was turned into the Republic’s oldest movie

hall with a capacity of 875 spectators. The demolition was part of the supposed

renovation project of the historic Cercle d’Orient building, which was to be turned into a

shopping mall. The theater was closed to the public on September 26, 2009. Since then,

small and large groups of protesters ranging from world renowned actors and directors to

a member of the Confederation of Progressive Trade Unions of Turkey (Türkiye

Devrimci İşçi Sendikaları Konfederasyonu, DİSK) have come together at Istiklal Avenue

and on multiple occasions the police has used tear gas and water cannons to disperse the

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crowds. Some of the slogans popularized by the Emek protests included, “Don’t touch

Emek Theatre,” “Emek is ours, Istanbul is ours,” and “Istanbul is ours, capital get out!”

One large protest took place on April 17, 2011 as hundreds gathered at Istiklal Avenue

for what began as a rally and then turned into an hour-long occupation of the newly

gentrified neighboring building that was also turned into a big mall (Uzunçarşılı 2011). A

second event took place in the evening of the 2011 May Day demonstrations. In the

following months, every Sunday starting at five pm, under the leadership of the “Emek

Bizim” (Emek is Ours) Platform, the protesters organized activities and creative tactics to

appropriate Emek Street, including the hosting of the feminist film festival on May 8, tea-

coffee chats on the May 15 and two important speakers on urban transformation on May

22. Despite the efforts of protesters, the demolition of Emek Theatre took place on May

20, 2013.

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Fig. 1. A group of 30 protesters “occupied” Istanbul’s iconic Emek Cinema Theatre to protest the demolition of the historic building. DHA photo / Taner YENER. Source: Hürriyet Daily News, April 1, 2013. THE NEOLIBERAL CITY Notwithstanding the particularities of geography, national history, and political-economic

space, Turkey’s neoliberal reforms emanate from a global pattern of neoliberalism. An

analysis of the trajectory of neoliberalism and its relation to the changing urbanscape in

the developed world, especially in the United States, will shed light on the delayed

introduction and implementation of neoliberal reforms in Turkey. In The Neoliberal City

(2007), critical geographer Jason Hackworth defines neoliberalism as “an ideological

rejection of egalitarian liberalism in general and the Keynesian welfare state in particular,

combined with a selective return to the ideals of classical liberalism” (9). In other words,

14

neoliberal ideology premises that optimal economic growth follows from open and free

markets liberated from all forms of state interference and the actions of social

collectivities. The “actually existing” neoliberalism, however, rests on a dialectical

process of what Neil Brenner and Nik Theodore (2002) have termed the “neoliberal

creative destruction,” involving the destruction of Keynesian artifacts (public housing,

public space), policies (redistributive welfare, food stamps), institutions (labor unions,

U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development), and agreements (Fordist labor

agreements, federal government redistribution to states and cities), and the simultaneous

creation of new, or cooptation of extant, institutions or practices to reproduce

neoliberalism in the future (government-business consortia, workfare policies). Critical

geographers Jamie Peck and Adam Tickell (2002) explain the same process of creative

destruction through an initial “roll-back” phase (the destruction Keynesian policies and

artifacts), followed by a “roll-out” phase (the creation of more proactively neoliberal

policies).

Within the context of the United States, the neoliberal turn dates back to the

economic recession of the mid-1970s, when the OPEC oil embargo triggered a rise in

prices and other economic forces such as the growing productivity of German and

Japanese automobile manufacturers eclipsed the American dominance in the

manufacturing industry. Jason Hackworth explains that the spatial fix to the Great

Depression of the 1930s, which involved “an interrelated and government-supported

mixture of massive suburbanization, growth in the automobile industry and expansion

within key consumer durables markers (washing machines, televisons),” was inadequate

at dealing with the more complex problems of the 1970s (2007:80). As such, policy

15

makers during the Nixon and Reagan administrations resorted to a mixture of

centralization and decentralization policies in real estate investment (as opposed to the

Keynesian centrifugal spatial fix of the 1930s) in order to encourage city governments to

become more entrepreneurial as the federal government slowly withdrew from its role in

solving the urban problem. The measure of “good” governance at the municipal level

came to be defined in terms of the ability of formal government to assist, collaborate

with, or function like the corporate community. The reorientation of cities around

finance, insurance, and real estate in an effort to offset declining production accelerated

industrial decline and gave rise to struggling central business districts. Hackworth

suggests that three major urban forms emerged within this context: (1) the process of

inner city gentrification, or the revalorization of the inner core; (2) inner suburban

devalorization; and (3) the continued physical expansion of metropolitan areas. The

revalorization of the inner core through an active encouragement of real estate investment

became widespread practice across the deindustrializing American landscape, while at

the same time, the urban form was expanded, dismantled and reshaped to allow for faster

commodification of space. Social theorist David Harvey observes that the “main

achievements of neoliberalism have been redistributive rather than generative” insofar as

the neoliberal economic reforms have created favorable conditions for capitalist class

formation and thus increased social inequality (2006:43). Lastly, Hackworth draws our

attention to the concept of “glocalization,” introduced by geographer Eric Swyngedouw

(1997) to describe the “simultaneous upward (to the global economy and its institutions)

and downward (to the locality and its governance structures) propulsion of regulatory

power previously held or exercised by the nation-state” characteristic of neoliberalism

16

(Hackworth 2007:12). Especially in the developing world, large global institutions like

the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank play a major role in the promotion

and reproduction of neoliberalism by rewarding cities that adhere to a particular order

and penalizing those that do not. According to the World Bank’s 1993 Housing Policy

Paper, for instance, the “privatization of housing production should go hand in hand with

the overall privatization of public sector enterprises and the state should pave the way to

market forces in provision, marketing, and financing housing” (World Bank 1993:66). In

the developed world, particularly the United States, Canada and Japan, Hackworth writes

that the bond-rating agencies increasingly serve in this policing capacity.

THE CASE OF ISTANBUL Similar to its trajectory in the United States, neoliberalism became entrenched in Istanbul

in the aftermath of the 2001 economic crisis as a result of the restructuring of local

governance and a number of changes in the real-estate market including the type of

investments and actors. In “Emerging Spaces of Neoliberalism: A Gated Town and a

Public Housing Project in Istanbul” (2008) sociologists Ayfer Bartu Candan and Biray

Kolluoglu draw attention to some telling statistics that highlight the dramatic change in

Istanbul’s urban fabric from the 1980s into the 2000s. These include, among others, the

five-fold increase in the number of luxurious hotel beds from the 1980s to the 2000s

(from 2,000 to 10,199); the more than eleven-fold increase in the number of shopping

malls from the 1990s into 2013 (from ten shopping malls in the 1990s, the number

increased to fifty-seven by 2008, and by 2013, Istanbul had a total of 114 shopping malls

with thirty-two additional ones under construction); and the more than six-fold increase

17

in the office floor space in the eight years from 1997 to 2005 (from 267,858 square

meters to 1,676,268 square meters) (Emlak Kulisi 2013; Candan and Kulluoglu 2008:16).

Candan and Kolluoglu attribute this dramatic change to a series of municipality laws that

were introduced by the Islamist-rooted AK Party in 2004 and 2005 in an effort to

accelerate the neoliberalization of the city. The laws expanded the physical space under

the jurisdiction of the greater municipality; increased the municipalities’ power in

construction, development, and zoning with the aim of improving the overall quality of

residence; made it easier for municipalities to enter into partnerships and collaborate with

private companies; assigned new responsibilities to the municipalities in natural disaster

management; and created the first legal framework for urban transformation (Candan and

Kulluoglu 2008:13). Accordingly, the elimination of the checks and balances in the legal

structure granted the municipalities the power to initiate dramatic transformations in the

urban landscape without accountability. Candan and Kolluoglu point out that ironically

this revised framework was wrapped within the language of “neoliberal newspeak,” a

term coined by social theorists Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant to characterize the

abundant usage of terms such as vision, mission, transparency, efficiency, accountability

and participation. To this day, in an attempt to superficially engage their projects with

and for the people of Istanbul, AK Party’s municipal campaigns reproduce this lexicon in

a range of outlets such as annual activities booklets, the interactive website of the greater

municipality, billboards and banners located throughout the city, the “white desk” 24-

hour, toll-free line for any questions, comments, complaints and feedback about the

municipality’s activities, etc. (14).

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As per the change of actors in the real-estate market, Candan and Kolluoglu point

to the restructuring of the Mass Housing Agency (Toplu Konut Idaresi, TOKI), which

was established in 1984 with the aim of providing affordable housing for the low- and

middle-income groups, but was later assigned the task of constructing and selling of

houses for profit. The TOKI’s share in housing construction increased dramatically from

0.6 percent between 1984 and 2002 to 24.7 percent in 2004. As of February 2004, TOKI

has constructed 119,389 housing units in Istanbul alone (T.C. Basbakanlik Toplu Konut

Iradesi Baskanligi 2014). The TOKI especially prides itself in its implementation of

large-scale transformation projects in areas deemed ‘unsafe’ pursuing the earthquake of

1999. Candan and Kolluoglu argue that the discussion of the 1999 earthquake in the

mainstream media led to the emergence of a discourse of urgency around imminent

natural disasters and the according need for the strengthening of the housing stock and

the infrastructure was confined to urban spaces that have been traditionally tied to crime,

migration and overpopulation. The residents of these spaces, especially Kurdish migrants

and the Roma, were absorbed into the public evaluation of risks and the sense of urgency

to intervene. An example is a May 2008 commentary in the conservative newspaper

Zaman:

In big cities, while the public housing projects that are constructed through urban transformation projects end irregular urbanization, they also destroy the spaces that provide shelter for criminal and terrorist organizations. [...] TOKI and the municipalities realize numerous projects of mass housing in order to bring about a regular city look and to meet the demand for housing. Ali Nihat Özcan, an expert on terror, draws attention to the fact that people coming from the same city and origin live in the same squatter settlements, and suggests: “But those living in the public housing projects with different backgrounds can influence each other. Hence there aren’t any radical ideas and behavior. They get rid of their prejudices. They become more tolerant. They get more opportunities to recognize their common denominators.” The illegal organizations composed by the members of the terrorist organizations, such as PKK and DHKP-C, provoke

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people against the urban transformation projects by means of posters and booklets. [Candan and Kolluoglu 2008:18]

Accordingly, the urban transformation projects not only eliminate those urban spaces that

breed criminals and terrorist, but also accomplish a larger civilizing task, whereby rural

immigrants and the Roma are introduced to a different, modern way of living in the new

public housing projects which encourages them to put aside their radical ideas and

behavior. At the same time, those who resist the urban transformation projects are cast as

being backwards and potential terrorists. If one were to follow the logic presented in this

commentary, it is not out of a desire to prevent the municipality from bulldozing their

houses without providing satisfactory alternatives that the residents of squatter

settlements resist the transformation projects, but rather because they are provoked by

means of posters and booklets distributed by resident members of terrorist organizations.

An interesting parallel to the Gezi Park protests is the way in which Erdoğan depicted the

protesters as a few looters and terrorists, not too different from the media depiction of

squatter residents resisting TOKI’s transformation projects.

In “‘Urban Transformation’ as State-led Property Transfer: An Analysis of Two

Cases of Urban Renewal in Istanbul” (2010), sociologists Tuna Kuyucu and Özlem Ünsal

illustrate the parallel shift in the governance of urban land and housing markets in Turkey

from a ‘populist’ to a ‘neo-liberal’ model following the 2001 economic crash. The former

populist model relied on the incomplete commodification of land and relaxed property

and zoning rules. This allowed the informal market to absorb the growing urban

populations, who either squatted on peripheral, vacant state-owned land (which came to

be known as gecekondus, literally meaning ‘built overnight’) or formed inner-city slums.

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As Kuyucu and Ünsal explain, the “retroactive extension of ownership rights to occupiers

… helped to sustain a populist coalition between industrialists in need of cheap labor,

political parties seeking loyalty and lower-class urbanities in search of affordable

housing” (Kuyucu and Ünsal 2010:1483). Before the 2001 economic crash, no political

party dared to terminate the gecekondu areas and the inner-city slums despite their vast

rent potential. Still, beginning with Turkey’s economic liberalization after the 1980 coup

d’état the transition into a neo-liberal urban regime was already underway. Istanbul’s

mayor Bedrettin Dalan (1984-89) had as his goal to turn Istanbul into a world city and

under his mayorship, big capital rapidly entered the real estate sector. The newly

empowered metropolitan municipality executed expansive infrastructural and

development projects, including the construction of high-rise office buildings, gated

communities, mass housing projects, mall, and new transport networks. When the 2001

economic crisis hit, the AK Party pushed through a series of legal and institutional

reforms allowing for the implementation of a fully neo-liberal system. The four main

areas of reform were (1) the criminalizing of gecekondu construction (in 2004) and the

accompanying authorization (in 2005) of district municipalities to implement

transformation projects in derelict, obsolescent, and unsafe parts of the city; (2) the

restructuring of the Mass Housing Agency (Toplu Konut Idaresi, TOKI) and its

designation as the sole agency to regulate the zoning and sale of almost all state-owned

urban land; (3) the authorization (in 2005) of district municipalities to implement

regeneration projects in derelict and obsolescent areas within ‘historical and natural

protection zones’; and (4) the restructuring of the housing finance sector (in 2007) via the

institutionalized mortgage system. Together, AK Party’s housing reforms made possible

21

the appropriation of gecekondu and inner-city slum properties by state agencies and

capitalist developers and their commodification through large-scale urban transformation

projects.

Fig. 2. A map of Istanbul showing the locations of Basibüyük and Tarlabasi. Source: 2010 Tuna Kuyucu and Özlem Ünsal:1481.

Kuyucu and Ünsal examine two cases of urban transformation in Istanbul; the

poor working-class neighborhood of Başıbüyük in the Maltape district, which has

absorbed a significant rural migrant population from central and north-eastern Turkey

since the 1960s; and Tarlabaşı in Taksim, which became a low-cost living zone for

internally displaced Kurds, undocumented immigrants, and various marginalized groups

ensuing the deportation of its non-Muslim residents in 1964 and the demolition of over

three hundred Levantine buildings for the construction of the Tarlabaşı boulevard, a

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major urban axis connecting Taksim Square to the Golden Horn, by Dalan in 1986. The

Başıbüyük project was accepted in February 2006 and it involves gecekondu

transformation, i.e. the demolition of gecekondus within a 400,000 square meter area and

their subsequent replacement by apartment blocks built by TOKI. Almost all of the

gecekondus in the area are illegal and as such, the ‘rightful owners’ (which excludes

tenants) are offered a demolition value by the Ministry of Public Works and Resettlement

for their existing units and are given the option to purchase the new flats with state-

subsidized credit due in fifteen years. Unsatisfied with the price offered for their units,

Başıbüyük residents formed a neighborhood association (Kuyucu and Ünsal note that this

is especially interesting since Başıbüyük has traditionally been a conservative

neighborhood with no history of political mobilization) and filed a lawsuit against the

project in October 2008. The Başıbüyük residents’ efforts to prevent construction, such as

the putting up of barricades around the construction site, was met with a high degree of

state violence including the deployment of more than a thousand fully armed riot police

to oversee the entry of work machines into the site and the ensuing 24-hour police

presence for its protection. Within two months of initial filing, the administrative court

decided to temporarily halt the project. In spite of the ruling, the TOKI continued the

construction.

23

Fig. 3. Top: Başıbüyük residents protesting urban transformation project; text reads: “We will not have your houses demolished, We will not have your health sold”. 2008 Mürsel Karadeniz. Zaman. Bottom: TOKI Apartment Buildings loom over the squatter settlements in Başıbüyük, Maltepe. Source: Havadan Emlak.

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The Tarlabaşı project is distinct from the gecekondu transformation in Başıbüyük,

in the sense that it involves the regeneration of a historical protection zone (278 buildings

in nine blocks) deemed derelict and obsolescent by the Beyoğlu municipality. A private

developer, GAP, who took the bid in April 2007, is implementing the project that aims to

turn the area into a residential, tourist and commercial center with designs by nine

Turkish starchitects. Unlike Başıbüyük gecekondu transformation, the renewal project in

Tarlabaşı necessitates fair negotiation and resident participation in decision-making, and

property owners have a choice between full monetary compensation for their property’s

current value or 42 percent of their existing property after the project’s completion. The

Tarlabaşı tenants, too, are eligible for TOKI units built in Kayabaşı, 35 km away from

their current place of residence. The Tarlabaşı neighborhood association began official

talks with GAP in February 2008 to defend the rights of the residents and the association

was soon joined by the Chamber of Architects. The public-private partnership nature of

the project meant that the kind of state violence employed in Başıbüyük was not a viable

option in Tarlabaşı and this forced GAP to engage in intensive public relations campaigns

to stress the democratic and participatory aspects of its undertakings. Only able to

purchase twenty percent of the buildings in the two years since the project’s initial

announcement, GAP agreed to revise project details in significant ways, from changes in

design such as additional space for small businesses in the completed project area to

providing financial support to displaced tenants. Looking at Başıbüyük and Tarlabaşı as

two cases in point, Kuyucu and Ünsal summarize the three major shortcomings of state-

led urban transformation projects as (1) the lack of objective criteria in the Municipality

Law to designate areas as ‘transformation zones,’ apart from some vague references to

25

‘blight’, ‘earthquake risk’ and ‘obsolesence’, (2) the almost complete exclusion of

residents from decision-making processes, and (3) a total lack of welfare programs

targeted at the inhabitants to mitigate the risks of displacement, dispossession, and

geographical relocation of poverty (Kuyucu and Ünsal 2010:1490).

Fig. 4. Top left: A bird’s eye view of the proposed location for Tarlabaşı urban transformation project. Bottom left: A rendering of what the area will look like post-transformation. Top and bottom right: current state of buildings and narrow streets in Tarlabaşı. 2012 Beyoğlu Municipality. Beyoğlu Büyük Dönüşüm.

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Part and parcel to the same process of neoliberal urbanism that calls for the

construction public housing projects with aim of absorbing the displaced residents of

urban renewal zones are gated communities. As sociologist Serife Genis chronicles in

“Producing Elite Localities: The Rise of Gated Communities in Istanbul” (2007), until

very recently, the housing market in Istanbul was divided between apartment buildings,

which constituted the legally constructed central parts of the city built in piecemeal

fashion by small-firm contactors, and gecekondus, which were built illegally by the urban

poor and migrants on peripheral public land that lacked proper infrastructure. The

dualistic structure of the housing market reflected the social and symbolic hierarchies,

insofar as living in an apartment building in the central parts of the city was a marker of

middle-class status, a modern and urban lifestyle, whereas living in a gecekondu was

emblematic of a peasant way of life, backwardness and a lower-class disposition (Genis

2007:775). Even so, both the central parts of the city and the squatter settlements were

mostly mixed-use and heterogeneous in terms of their residents’ social class and status.

The rise of master-planned, self-sufficient gated communities since the early 1990s

diversified the housing options available particularly for the upper- and middle-income

groups. Genis notes that the number of gated communities in the city was estimated to be

around 650 at the end of 2005 and construction of more than 150 new gated

developments started in the same year (776).

Genis attributes the rise of the gated communities in Istanbul to the

aforementioned neoliberal structuring of the municipality laws and the establishment of

the Mass Housing Fund under the TOKI that provided public financing and subsidized

credits to local governments, cooperatives, and large capitalists with the aim of increasing

27

and regularizing the flow of finance to the housing sector. The accompanying changes in

the land use legislation authorized the sale of recently privatized large tracts of public

land in the periphery to large developers. In the process, small and medium-sized

contractors were pushed out only to be replaced by large developers with different

ideological positions and economic motivations. This point is made clear by one of

Genis’ interlocutors who identified himself as an architect/developer:

Until very recently, we did not have any developers in Turkey. We had contractors who would work as the financier, the developer and the designer at the very same time. The concept of marketing was absent. What does the contractor understand from marketing a house? […] Now slowly developers like the ones in the advanced countries are emerging in Turkey as well. Finally, the state is making some changes to help the real estate sector and we are working closely with international banks, mortgage institutions, architect firms to develop new ideas and projects. […] We are on the right track. You cannot have an organized city with small projects. A city can only become a city with large projects. This is how America has become America! [Genis 2007:779-80]

The professionalization within the real estate sector, the importance of marketing in the

sale of not just housing units but accompanying lifestyles, and the changes in the legal

framework of the real estate sector and the type of actors active within it are all

welcomed by the Turkish developer as essential propellers of progress. The crucial role

played by international banks and global mortgage institutions in the promotion and

reproduction of neoliberalism is coupled with a fascination with the real estate markets of

advanced countries, especially the United States. The city is no longer viewed as the

agglomeration of individual units built in piecemeal fashion by small-firm contactors, but

rather the playground of large developers and master-planned projects. The master

planning of the city is no longer seen as a responsibility of the municipality and the state

also is largely missing from the new economic, spatial order expect for its role in relaxing

the real estate laws to allow large developers to take charge. Along with creating a new

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class of large capitalists and accelerating the concentration of wealth among high-income

groups, the neoliberal policies have incentivized the developers to cater to the interests of

elite groups, who can afford high-quality infrastructure and services in socially and

physically isolated environments. Accordingly, the gated communities of Istanbul emerge

as neoliberal artifacts of the new spatial order marked by increasing socioeconomic

polarization of the city.

In her article, Genis focuses on Kemer Country, the first suburban, master-

planned gated community in Istanbul. The construction of Kemer Country began in 1989

on the outskirts of Belgrade Forest, in the northwest part of the metropolitan city. By

May 2001, about 400 people had already moved in, and this number increased to 4000, a

thousand short of the projected 5000 residents, at the end of 2005. The master plan was

drawn by the Miami, Florida-based leading “new urbanist” firm Duany and Plater-Zyberk

and other internally prominent neo-traditionalist architects were hired for consultation on

the landscape design of Kemer Country and the plan of Kemer Country Golf and Country

Club. The selection of Duany and Plater-Zyberk is especially noteworthy given that the

firm claims to have a “mission and a vision to solve the current problems of US cities,

such as segregation, alienation, and the sterile environment of American suburbs by

developing master-planned, nature-friendly and self-governing neighborhoods” (782). It

is ironic that Kemer Country, which introduced the concept of a suburban large-scale

gated community to Turkey, chose a firm specializing in the problem of sterility in

American suburbs, because neither the concept nor the problem existed in Turkey

beforehand. The United States is an obvious model for the developers of Kemer Country,

which itself became a model for latecomers in Istanbul’s gated community market. The

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fascination with transnational architecture firms and global urban forms is partially due to

the prestige gained from a perceived cosmopolitanism, modernity, and upper-class status

that association with these starchitects and discourses brings. Moreover, as a form that

found full expression in the United States under neoliberalism, new urbanist town

planning is best suited to address some of the construction and management issues that

might face large scale developers. Genis notes that new urbanism’s “attempt to bring

management and design together support community-based spatial organization and

privatization of service provision,” which serves elitist and neoliberal interests, and its

built-in translocalism makes its principles easily transferable to other places (2007:782).

Fig. 5. Location of Kemer Country. 2000 Kemer Country.

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Fig. 6. Aerial view of Kemer Country. 2001 Hakan Oge.

Accordingly, the self-enclosed, privileged space of Kemer Country emerges as a

foil to the rest of Istanbul, which is seen by its residents as a place of decay, chaos, and

unsavory encounters. Kemer Country’s homogenous community brings the contested

identity politics in Turkey to the forefront insofar as when Genis’ respondents were asked

to describe themselves in terms of lifestyle and world-view, they used the terms urban,

modern, Western, and secular in clear reference to the socio-cultural binaries of Turkish

society. Genis notes that sociologist Sencer Ayata (2002) in his study of a middle-class

suburb in the capital city Ankara has similarly observed the centrality of secular values

and Western lifestyles in the self-identification of the suburbia residents. The rise of

Islamic elites in society and politics in the past two decades has complicated the

alignment between class hierarchies and one’s religious versus secular orientation.

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Capitalizing on this disorientation, Kemer Country, in its verbal and visual

representations, depicts “contemporary Istanbul as a city of chaos and decay fallen to the

twin forces of massive migration and urbanization,” and singles out the “cultural and

symbolic pollution brought about by these forces that threatens the identity and sense of

belonging of the ‘real Istanbulites’” (Genis 2007:784). Quoting from a publicity brochure

of the Kemer Construction and Tourism Company from the year 2000, Genis writes:

“The greatest problem of Istanbul today is not the noise, or pollution, or traffic, nor is it

congestion and high cost of living, with all of which we cope in one way or another. It is,

however, the loss of our sense of belonging without which we cannot survive” (784).

Another brochure identifies the common vision of Kemer Country as “to discover the

lifestyle once enjoyed by the inhabitants of Istanbul and that has long been lost” and “to

create a community, give it the identity of a community and to breathe life into it” (784).

Importantly, Genis footnotes that the Turkish versions of the publicity brochures do not

use the word ‘community’, because “community or cemaat in Turkish is associated with

traditional and Islamic ways of living and is attributed to rural communities, lower

classes and Islamic groups who have not developed modern individualist relations and

support control over individuals” (795). The word neighborhood (mahalle) is used

instead.

The narrowing of its target audience down to secular and Westernized middle and

upper classes through the discourse of real Istanbulites realizes and legitimizes the

homogeneous and privileged space of Kemer Country. The exclusionary vision of

community and localism is made acceptable through the depiction of urban life in

Istanbul as alienating, crowded, chaotic, and polluted with an unpleasant socio-cultural

32

heterogeneity. Genis notes that a number of her respondents complained about the

invasion of even the most respected and established neighborhoods in the city by

outsiders, “invariably described as provincial, vulgar, uncultured and lower class”, as

well as complaints about the new Islamic middle classes and nouveaux riches, “those

who have the economic capital but lack the cultural norms or reject the lifestyles upheld

by the secular Westernized groups” (785). One female Kemer country resident who used

to live in a luxury apartment building on the hills looking at the Bosphorus told Genis:

Before, we used to live in Sariyer. A very nice place… I really liked it there. But we had this gecekondu neighborhood right across from our apartment. You know how they are. The way they dress, the way they talk… They are on the streets all the time. Men, women, kids… They are loud, dirty. […] Once I got pregnant and decided to leave work, I said, “I won’t have my kid here and mix with these people!” [2007:785]

In the privileged and exclusively secular and Westernized middle- and upper-class of

Kemer Country, residents do not have to worry about mixing with ordinary crowds who

through their uncivilized manners, uncared-for appearance, and smelly bodies set poor

examples for their children. In a community of likeminded individuals, they feel

comfortable bonding with their neighbors over their Western-style education and

lifestyles, their professional lives (mostly self-employed young professionals or managers

and executives employed in the Istanbul branches of multinational finance, accounting,

advertising, consultancy, etc. companies), frequent visits to the West, primarily to the

United States, for education, business and leisure, etc. The residents see class and cultural

differences in the city as barriers for developing intimate relations with their neighbors.

By contrast, Kemer Country has high levels of socialization and friendship. This

phenomenon of high socialization is unique to Kemer Country insofar as anthropologist

Setha Low (1997) has found that similar gated communities in the Unites States lack a

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sense of community, and its elite residents consistently display indifference toward

making friends. The difference can partially be explained by the acute diagnosis of

Kemer Country’s developers, who successfully responded to the lost of sense of

belonging and attachment to a city quarter (mahalle) in metropolitan Istanbul by offering

its residents a sense of communitarian identity. Sociologists Kevin Robins and Asu

Aksoy (1996) describe some of the design measures that have been put in place in order

to retrieve a sense of local belonging. First, Kemer Country houses are designed along

streets that open on to a square in which a community hall is situated. Robins and Aksoy

write, “The design on the buildings draws on referenced from traditional Turkish and

Ottoman architecture, from Italian pavilions and from American suburban homes”

(1996:19). The resulting “architectural pastiche” combines elements from urban gentility

and rural authenticity and successfully evokes a generalized sense of community

somewhere between the city and the small town.

In many ways, Istanbul’s new gated communities are the antithesis of the city’s

gecekondus. The steep rise in the number of gated communities in the past two decades

points to an increasing social and spatial polarization within the city. Robins and Aksoy

identify the increasing sense of alienation felt by the city’s rich and poor alike, and two

paradigmatic strategies, one for the rich and the other for the poor, that have emerged for

surviving in the city. These strategies have given rise to two different and competing

Istanbuls. I have already discussed the Istanbul of the rich, which is characterized by

large-scale luxury housing projects located on the city’s edges. Robins and Aksoy argue

that the proliferation of such ‘villa towns’ make possible a new lifestyle that can be

described as both post-urban and post-urbane: “It is post post-urban in that it promotes

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the idea of a kind of composite of suburban and country living – the ‘refined’ country life

of Western Europe and the United States, of course, not the ‘backward’ and ‘ignorant’

rural ways of Anatolia. It is post-urbane because it is turning its back on what has,

historically, made metropolitan Istanbul a civilized and challenging culture in which to

live” (1996:16). The private, self-sufficient, and fortified territories of the gated

communities are characterized by lack of public spaces, street culture, complexity, and

unforeseen encounters, which together eliminate the creative disorder of urban life. By

contrast, the Istanbul of the poor is confined to life in gecekondus. Its inhabitants are

mostly new migrants from Anatolia. With the unabated continuation of migration in the

1990s, the hope for the newcomers’ integration into modern urban life started to dissolve.

The spatial confinement of these newcomers into gecekondu neighborhoods means that

for the majority of them living in Istanbul is equated with the culture of the gecekondu.

Robins and Aksoy note that they continue to “wear their village clothing and

headscarves, and sustain their village customs and ways of life” (20). They explain that

the situation is aggravated by the fact that most newcomers “choose to live in areas where

their compatriots are already established in order to benefit from mutualistic networks of

support” (20). While the children of the migrant families keep their parents’ village

accents in these new urban villages, men maintain their social circles by going to the

same mosques as their compatriots. In fact, religion plays an active role in the migrants’

lives, because it allows them to create meaning and value in the face of prevailing secular

ideology. The social and spatial isolation of the gecekondu settlers further necessitates

that they rely on “a culture of mutualism and self-reliance, derived from and made

possible by shared village cultures and traditions” (20). Within the gecekondu districts,

35

religious foundations (vakıfs) capitalize on the city’s weak social and welfare systems by

becoming important venues for the distribution necessary amenies such as healthcare and

education. As Robins and Aksoy write, “In districts like Fatih and Eyüp, an alternative

and parallel Muslim way of life, with its own cultural and political agenda, has become

increasingly vigorous and assertive” (16). Although the new gated communities and

gecekondus are antithesis of one another in terms of their residents, it is ironic that both

are characterized by a communitarian and self-enclosed ethos whether out of necessity or

out of choice.

Fig. 7. Istanbul Market day at Fatih Mosque. 2004 Dick Osseman.

36

Fig. 8. Women in Hijab on the Streets of Fatih. Anne Steckner 2007.

The growing social and spatial polarization has led to hostilities between the two

groups. The discourse of resentment and fear on part of the established urban population

(or the ‘white Turks’) is especially used against the newcomers to cast them as

“uncultured and ignorant, incapable of assimilation, and as a threat to their established

way of life” (21). Robins and Aksoy point to a critical terminological shift that has taken

place in the past ten years as proof of a deeper change in perception and in attitude

towards the urban poor:

In the past, the urban poor have been referred to as the inhabitant of the gecekondu areas: the terminology was neutral, referring simply to the kind of housing (illegal, unplanned) that the settlers lived in, and the implicit assumption was that the new migrants living in these areas would gradually become integrated into the mainstream urban culture […] Lately, however, this descriptive term has been replaced by a more emotive one, and now the outlying zones are referred to as ‘varoş’. Varoş (which is literally translated as ‘suburbs’

37

or ‘outskirts’) has quite new and other associations and connotations, ones that are more problematical and troubling, akin to those of the French ‘banlieu’. Varoş invokes difference and otherness, with all the fearfulness that this can then incite. [1996:31]

The estrangement and suffering of the poor under the successive social-democratic and

liberal administrations was determining of their support of the religious Welfare Party

(Refah Partisi) during the March 1994 Istanbul municipal elections. The poor and the

marginalized voters united in anger and frustration and turned to the Refah Party to put an

end to the usual inefficiencies and the corruption of the city government.

NEO-LIBERAL ISLAMISM IN ANKARA The selective application of the urban redevelopment policies complicates

neoliberalism’s stronghold on Turkish cities, revealing a contested Turkish identity,

whereby the desire of the Islamist-rooted AK Party for instituting an Islamic identity onto

the Turkish society is played out first in the urban arena by the strategic elimination of

the early Republic’s legacy. Bülent Batuman’s uses the term “neo-liberal Islamism” to

refer to the consolidation of neo-liberal hegemony through the Islamic institutions within

civil society. In “Minarets without Mosques: Limits to the Urban Politics of Neo-liberal

Islamism” (2012), Batuman explores the peculiar case of minarets without mosques,

which came about as a result of the Islamist local administrators’ reluctance to tear down

minarets during the extensive demolition in squatter areas. The Islamists’ rise to power in

Turkey started two decades ago at the level of local administrators, as mayors from the

Islamist Refah Party took over most of the major Turkish cities in the 1994 municipal

elections. After the 1997 military intervention and the subsequent outlawing of the Refah

38

Party in 1998, a new Islamist fraction was born that moderated the radical Islamist

discourse of the older generation that was anti-capitalist and anti-Western by embracing

an agenda of democratization instead. Led by the current Prime Minister Erdoğan, this

new fraction established the AK Party. The AK Party expanded its stronghold on the

major municipalities across the country by balancing the neo-liberalization of urban

economy with a populist welfare system that to this day employs Islamic social networks,

when, for instance, the party distributes aid in the form of household goods to the urban

poor (in exchange for votes). The municipalities played a key role in the neo-

liberalization of urban economy, when in 2004 urban regeneration became a legal term in

Turkish legislation and the municipalities were endowed with the authority to cooperate

with the Housing Development Administration in the redevelopment of former squatter

areas. In the past ten years, vast areas have been designated as urban renewal zones

across the country.

39

Fig. 9. The single minaret in Çukurambar, Ankara stood within the lawn of an apartment building until a large mosque was built in the adjacent lot. 2012 Batuman: 6.

In his article, Batuman takes a closer look at the North Ankara City Entrance

project that began in 2004 on the premise of beautifying the squatter area immediately

along the road connecting the airport to the city center of the capital Ankara. Hidden

behind the rhetoric of beautification of the national capital was the Islamists’ attempt to

build a symbolic alternative to southern Ankara. Yenisehir, literally the new city of

Ankara located on the south side of the town, was built up in the 1920s to house the new

government buildings of the young republic and villas for the state elite. The republican

40

ideology was particularly materialized by the new presidential palace, Çankaya Köșkü,

which was located on the southern hills overlooking the city.

Fig, 10. Ankara during the Republican Era: Top: Kızılay Park, Güvenpark, and the Presidential Palace, 1930s. Çankaya Municipality. Bottom: A recent panoramic view of Çankaya district in Ankara; the Presidential Palace can be seen on the right. DS World’s Lands.

41

Beginning in the 1990s, the Islamists designated the northern district of Keçiören as an

alternative to republican Ankara. The visual mark of the Islamist takeover was

Keçiören’s new town hall, which was decorated with Ottoman and Islamic symbols.

Later, the municipality enforced an alcohol ban, and gender segregation became common

practice in the area. The North Ankara City Entrance project is best understood within

this context of rising Islamism in northern Ankara. 30,000 squatters were peacefully

evacuated in 2005 and their 6,500 squatter homes demolished in 2006 to be replaced by a

total of 29,100 units, 8,100 of which were reserved for the squatters. The rest of the units

were to be upper-class residential homes with a shared recreational area. The minarets of

the former mosques were preserved during the demolishment of the squatter houses and

Batuman writes that these minarets reflect not only the violence that is characteristic of

urban renewal, but also serve as “silent signifiers of Islamism, not as newly erected

statements but as relics of what was already there: as testimonies to the inherent Islamic

character of the area” (14). The regeneration projects, through their luxurious high-rise

aesthetics, introduce new living patterns and upper-class inhabitants to areas that were

former working-class neighborhoods characterized by daily routines revolving around

communal areas, the most important of which is the mosque. The new mosques that

replace their humble squatter counterparts are mostly semi-private spaces located within

gated communities. The privatization of use and the disruption of daily routines of the

squatters obsolete the minarets of former mosques yet these self-standing minarets are

strategically adopted by the authorities as emblems of the Islamist power executing the

projects.

42

Fig. 11. Keçiören district in Ankara. Web Rehberi.

Fig. 12. A rendering of the North Ankara City Entrance project juxtaposed with the same area in 2004. TOKİ.

43

It is then no coincidence that almost in all of his speeches during the Gezi

protests, Prime Minister Erdoğan alluded to what he saw as a categorical divide between

those secular, liberal-minded, and ‘marginal’ Turkish citizens that took to the streets, and

the remaining fifty percent of the citizens that were supporters of the AK Party, mainly

Muslim and politically conservative. When the protesters allegedly entered the

Dolmabahçe Mosque with shoes and beer bottles in their hands, Erdoğan framed this to

his sympathizers as an invasion of what to them is a sacred space. While the number of

mosques only increased during the ten-year rule of Erdoğan’s AK Party, many historic,

and mostly minority, neighbors were designated as urban redevelopment zones and many

historic staples of the Beyoğlu district were demolished to be replaced by shopping malls

and luxury residences, including the much contested historical movie hall Emek Theatre.

In many ways, the Taksim pedestrianization project was the ultimate clash between of the

secular, Western claims over space and the ruling party’s efforts to materialize a visibly

Muslim and neo-Ottoman architectural expression of their own. If built, Erdoğan’s

Ottoman barracks would challenge the Atatürk Cultural Centre (and its associations with

Turkey’s Republican modernism and Western aesthetics) in size and architectural

proportions. The presence of a mosque in the area would further call for a ban on the sale

of alcohol within a hundred meter radius of the mosque, according to the recent

amendments to the alcoholic beverage and tobacco laws (Haber 7 2013).

44

NEO-OTTOMANISM One of the unstated aims of the Taksim pedestrianization project was surely the

restoration of the Islamic character of the area following years of non-Muslim minority

rule in Beyoğlu. Spotted with churches and synagogues, the area had a Western feel ever

since the decline years of the Ottoman Empire. As Yael Navaro-Yashin (2013) points

out, Beyoglu has been the “hangout of Istanbul’s artistic and intellectual communities,

the heart of Turkey’s creative sector, with cinemas, theaters, art galleries, museums,

cafes, taverns, bookshops, and publishing houses.” A brief history of Taksim Square

reveals that the area has been a contentious site with claims made by opposing parties of

the Republican versus Ottoman, traditional versus modern, and secular versus religious

debates. With the foundation of the Turkish Republic in 1923 and the subsequent

proclamation of Ankara as the new capital, Istanbul was deprived of its privileged status

and was left unattended and neglected as the funds of the republic were canalized into the

construction of the new capital (Yildirim 2012). As sociologists Kevin Robins and Asu

Aksoy (1996) write in “Istanbul Between Civilization and Discontent,” the new capital

city of Ankara “became the spatial expression of disdain for Istanbul” (6). Ankara

represented the “center of secularism and enlightenment in opposition to Istanbul as the

center of a traditional political system, deeply entrenched in Islam” (6).

In 1933, an international competition was organized to radically modernize

Istanbul and to transform its Muslim Ottoman identity into a secular, civilized one. On

June 1936, French urban planner Henri Prost was commissioned as the master planner of

Istanbul and with a destructive attitude similar to Haussmann in Paris, Prost drew up a

dramatic network of boulevards connecting public spaces in the historic fabric, replacing

45

vernacular timber houses with their modern, hygienic equivalents. Rejecting the city’s

Islamic oriented Ottoman past, Prost chose to emphasize the Greco-Roman and

Byzantine past instead and opened monumental squares around these historic monuments

in a manner that provided them with perspective. Taksim Square was identified as the

main city square (for the Republic Day Celebrations) in Prost’s network of public

squares. While he did not propose any changes to the Independence Monument and the

circular city square around the monument, Prost demanded the demolition of Taksim

Military Barracks to make way for the Inönü Esplanade, now called the Gezi Park, and a

spectators' terrace to accommodate large crowds. The demolition of Taksim Barracks,

which was being used as a football stadium from 1921, was completed in 1940.

Sociologists Kevin Robins and Asu Aksoy argue that the urban elite of the 1930s was

approving of the modernist attitude of Prost, i.e. his emphasis on functionalism and

rationalization in urban planning, because it matched the positivism and rationalism of

the new Kemalist ideology (8). At the same time, Prost’s ‘anti-planning’ attitude proved

detrimental to the grain of the urban culture. The elimination of characteristic multi-

functional spaces to achieve regularity in the order of the city led to the segmentation and

zoning of urban space on the basis of functionality.

46

Fig. 13. Taksim Military Barracks (1806-1909): Top: Taksim Military Barracks in late-1920s/early-30s; its internal courtyard was into the Taksim Stadium in 1921. Independence Monument can be seen at the bottom right corner. Bottom: Gezi Park appears as the İnönü Gezisi (Inönü Promenade) in the Pervititch insurance map, 1944. Mechanical Turk 2013. The History of Taksim Military Barracks.

47

Over the years, Taksim acquired an important symbolic political value insofar as

Taksim Square became a fighting ground for the nation-state and the public expression of

discontent with the government. It emerged as the gathering point of May Day

demonstrations, until on May 1, 1977, during the most widely participated

demonstrations with over 500,000 citizens, unknown gunmen opened fire on labor

activists killing at least 34 (this event later came to be known as Bloody May Day). Since

then, officials have kept the square mostly off limits to the May Day events, resulting in

annual protests and violent clashes between the demonstrators and the police. Turkish

architect Korhan Gümüş, a member of the civil initiative Taksim Platform, in a June 2013

interview has argued that since the Republic designed Taksim Square as its prestige

project, each subsequent government have sought to leave its mark on the square and as

such the area became a ground for tension about who was going to dominate the public

space (Yinanc 2013a). With claims of having been elected by the majority vote, populist

minded government officials have proposed to do as they wish, provoking the opponents

to say “You can’t touch it;” and the other side would then say, “I will tear it down, I have

the support of the people, you can’t prevent me;” etc. and Gümüş says that this

confrontation has paralyzed creative thinking for decades. In “Taksim, the Battleground

of Projects” (Radikal 2012), Elif Ince reviews the three main Turkish newspapers,

Hürriyet, Cumhuriyet, and Milliyet, to recover the Taksim Square’s 57-year long history

of unrealized projects. On June 1955, it was reported that the largest garage of the

Balkans and the Near East would be built under the Gezi Park. A couple months later

news broke that the largest decorative pool of the Balkans would be built on the same

48

park grounds. In 1964, while underground tunnels for automobile traffic were being

constructed in the nearby districts of Karaköy, Unkapanı ve Saraçhane, Istanbul’s mayor

Haşim İşcan reported that an elliptical underground mall with 100 stores would be built

in Taksim, similar to the one in Vienna. The project would be accompanied by an

underground tunnel that would put into order the irregular pedestrian traffic in the square

and a two-story car park with its own gas station. On September 1986, under the

mayorship of Bedrettin Dalan, a more ambitious three-story underground complex was

proposed with its first-floor reserved for pedestrian traffic, second-floor for a mall with

exhibition halls and conference rooms, and the bottom floor to car traffic. Huge

aquariums were to be erected in the park as stores and bus stations were being transferred

underground.

On February 19, 1997, Milliyet reported that the then mayor R. Tayyip Erdoğan

had sent demolition notices to stores around the Gezi Park for the construction of a

mosque on the park grounds. At the time, under Turkey’s first Islamist prime minister,

Necmettin Erbakan, Erdoğan was overseeing the local commission in charge of the

mosque project. In the March 1994 issue of Islamic magazine Yeni Zemin, Erdoğan said,

“This is the point of attraction of Istanbul’s tourism. The person who comes there should

be able to tell that he has arrived in an Islamic city … As we succeed in uncovering the

historical and cultural texture of our city, its Muslim character will become apparent to

the visitors” (Bora 1999:48). According to the Milliyet article, the secular Turks objected

to the mosque because it would symbolize the power of the Islamists over Taksim as well

as the whole country. A group of Taksim residents who wanted to see a sports complex

on the park grounds rather than a mosque began to meet at the park every weekend and

49

exercise together. In the meantime, the representatives of the pro-Islamist Refah Party

insisted that the mosque project was aimed at meeting the natural demands of Muslims

living around Taksim for places to pray. To the secular public, this argument was not

convincing. Their concerns were validated by an interview in which then Prime Minister

Erbakan supposedly said that Taksim would be ‘reconquered’ via the building of the

Taksim Mosque side by side with the five star hotels and entertainment places as a show

of strength by the Islamists (Beki 1997). Nusret Bayraktar, mayor of Beyoglu district

under Refah Party regime, commissioned a survey, which showed that there were

fourteen churches in and around Taksim for the use of a resident minority population of

about 23,000 members. For the 600,000 Muslim residents and the two million daily

circulating Muslim population, however, there were only three small mosques in Taksim.

Commenting on the findings of the survey, the former mayor of Beyoglu, Huseyin Arslan

of the Republican People's Party (CHP) called the Taksim Mosque project a political

game. Arslan said:

The area across from Taksim Park where they plan to build the mosque is the tourists' favorite place. Building a mosque there will also effect the hotels around. In addition, they will kill off one of the few green areas in Beyoglu by building it […] Erdoğan 's efforts to bring the Conservation Council under the Greater City Municipality is an attempt at dictatorship. While I was the Beyoglu mayor, many mosques were repaired, restored and opened to worship in the district. There are enough mosques around Beyoglu. But if they have to build a mosque, they can do it after demolishing a few of the old buildings in Tarlabasi. [Ayik 1997]

The Islamist publications supporting the project reported that an historic mosque was

located in the demolished Military Barracks, on the right side of the street opening onto

Harbiye from Taksim Square. The project was shelved when the fundamentalist Refah

Party was declared unconstitutional in 1998 on the grounds that it violated the secularist

50

separation of religion and state. A year later in 1999, R. Tayyip Erdoğan was given a ten-

month prison sentence (he was freed after four) for reciting a poem in the city of Siirt in

December 1997, which was regarded as incitement of religious hatred. The verses read:

“The minarets are our bayonets, the domes our helmets / The mosques our barracks and

the faithful our army.” Erdoğan’s life-long political ban was later lifted with a change in

the law, making it possible for him to run for Parliament and finally be named Prime

Minister.

Fast forward to 2010, the year when architect Ahmet Vefik Alp was

commissioned to design a mosque that would replace the old one in Taksim, its 2,500

square meter area extended to a total of 17,000 square meter construction site in the

proposed structure with seven floors underground. The first proposal that placed the

mosque within a bowl on two hands praying to God was rejected by the Prime Minister

on the grounds that it was too modern. The revised project had a less assertive minaret

and the so-called infinity lines on the dome were replaced by verses from the Quran. On

regular days, the mosque will have a 300-person capacity, while this number will

increase to 1,500 people in congregational prayers on Fridays. In a September 2013

interview with the center-left newspaper Hürriyet, architect Alp told that the

commissioner of the project Taksim Mosque Culture and Arts Foundation (formerly

presided over by Prime Minister Erdoğan) recognized Beyoğlu’s symbolic meaning for

the Republic and as such they conceived of the Taksim Mosque as a mosque for the

Republic (Oghan 2013). He said that his design successfully married the Turkish flag,

Atatürk and Islam, insofar as when looked from above, the grounds would display a

moon and a star, the two symbols of the Turkish flag. According to the plans, the seven

51

floors underground would house a cultural center and a museum of religions with world

religions arranged chronologically in ascending order. Alp added that he thought the

Republican People's Party would also go forward with the project (if they came out as the

winners of the March 2014 municipality elections) because this mosque would showcase

the contemporary Turkish vision, culture, technology, materials, craftsmanship and the

Republic. A mosque for the Republic, however, is contradictory to the founding

principles of the Republic, which embraced secularism with the removal of the statement

“The state’s religion is Islam” from the constitution in 1928. The concern with the

country’s image in the international arena and the desire to change it to a more Islamic

one is apparent in Alp’s statement that the mosque would showcase the new Turkish

values and technology.

Fig. 14. A rendering of the revised proposal for Taksim Mosque by Ahmet Vefik Alp. Hürriyet 2013.

52

During the AK Party’s ten-year rule the number of mosques in Turkey increased

significantly. The major center-left Turkish daily newspaper Milliyet reported on

February that some 17,000 new mosques have been built between the years 2003-2013,

bringing the total number of mosques in the country to 93,000, while in the same period

the number of public schools has remained steady at 32,000 (ANSAmed 2014). Even the

prominent Hagia Sophia has been the subject of contention, when in November 2013,

Deputy Prime Minister Bulent Arinc called for the museum’s conversion back into a

mosque, adding that in the past it had been possible to accept that former mosques could

function as museums “but there is a different Turkey now” (The Financial Times:

Dombey 2013). Importantly, Hagia Sophia was inaugurated in 537 as a church by

Justinian, the last Latin-speaking ruler of the Eastern Roman Empire. Upon his conquest

of Constantinople in 1453, Sultan Mehmet II converted it into a mosque and in 1935,

Hagia Sophia was turned into a museum by the country’s new secular republic that

sought to break with the Ottoman past. The Deputy Prime Minister Acinc’s call for Hagia

Sophia’s conversion followed the reconversions into mosques of two other buildings

named Ayasofya in the cities of Iznik and Trabzon, and the recent calls by the imam of

the neighboring Blue Mosque for Hagia Sophia to become a mosque again to deal with

the overflow of worshippers during Muslim festivals. A controversial mega-mosque

project that similarly received a lot criticism from the secular opposition is the Çamlıca

Mosque project. Erdoğan himself announced the project in May 2012 and the

construction began in August 2013. In his announcement speech, Erdoğan said:

We are going to build a mosque over 15,000 meters square next to the broadcasting tower in Çamlıca [one of Istanbul's highest hills]. The planning

53

work is nearing completion. This giant mosque in Çamlıca was designed so as to be visible from all parts of Istanbul. [Hürriyet Daily News 2012]

When completed, the Çamlıca mosque is to have capacity for up to 37,500 simultaneous

worshipers. The styling of the mosque is reminiscent of Seljuk and Ottoman architecture

and the design bears a striking resemblance to Istanbul's iconic 400-year-old Sultanahmet

Mosque, or Blue Mosque, built by a student of the celebrated Ottoman architect Sinan.

The mosque is planned to have six minarets as tall as 1071 meters in symbolic

representation of the year of the Turkish victory in the Battle of Beyazit, and taller than

those of the Al-Masjid al-Nabawi, or the Prophet's Mosque, in Medina. Moreover, the

mosque complex is to include facilities underneath the building for traditional crafts, such

as “hat” (Turkish calligraphy) and gilding. The tourists are also not forgotten insofar as

the museum will offer information on Islam and the prayers will be read in Turkish,

Arabic, and English, while simultaneously being displayed on large screens. Likening

this mosque complex to the madrasahs next to mosques in the past, Erdoğan said his

architects have a done a great job in recreating the past in this contemporary setting and

added that they have been working hard to restore similar madrasahs on Akdeniz and

Haliç Avenues in Istanbul. Other restoration projects that he drew attention to included

the newly renovated Fatih Mosque and the Mahmut I Library in Istanbul, which together

cost about 24 million Turkish Liras and took four and a half years to complete by their

scheduled reopening on the 559th anniversary of the city’s conquest by Ottoman forces.

The secular Turks were quick to brand the proposed mosque unsightly and ostentatious.

54

Fig. 15. Çamlıca Mosque: Top: View from Bosphorus facing the Asian side, photo indicates the proposed location of Çamlıca Mosque with a close-up view of the mosque’s rendering. Milliyet 2012. Bottom: A rendering of Çamlıca Mosque. Arkitera 2013.

With regards to the Çamlıca mega-mosque project and Erdoğan’s plans to rebuild

the Military Barracks on Taksim’s Gezi Park grounds with a neighboring mosque, urban

55

researcher Onur Ekmekci (2012) proposes that the government’s interest in these

buildings can partially be explained with the current resurgence of interest in Istanbul’s

Ottoman past. Ekmekci suggests that the “neo-Ottoman” tendencies of the AK Party can

be summarized as the “willingness to come to terms with Turkey’s Ottoman and Islamic

Heritage at home and abroad” (60). Over the years, the Foreign Minister Ahmet

Davutoglu, in particular, has worked to place Turkey at the center of the Muslim world

and reorient the foreign policy so that Turkey would emerge as a nation that is “Looking

East.” Reviewing Davutoglu’s seminal book Strategic Depth (2001), Joshua Walker, a

postdoctoral fellow at the Transatlantic Academy of the German Marshall Fund, argues

that Davutoglu has emphasized Turkey’s connections to the Balkans, the Middle East,

and even Central Asia, in what he termed as a Ottoman geo-political space, in order to

identify Turkey as the natural heir to the Ottoman Empire that once unified the Muslim

world and underscore its potential to become a Muslim superpower (2010:5).

In this neo-Ottoman context, Istanbul, the former capital of the Ottoman Empire,

gains strategic importance and the restoration of its Ottoman-era monuments and heritage

sites becomes a way for the city’s AK Party municipality to showcase Istanbul as a

Muslim city. Terming this process of choosing monuments and heritage sites amongst

Istanbul’s multiple and multilayered past for restoration and publicity as tourist sites

“heritage struggles,” sociologist Ayse Öncü (2007) argues that the “mobilization of

Istanbul’s imperial legacy to articulate future aspirations for a ‘global’ future have

challenged modernist imagination of the Republican past” (236). The shift in power

within Istanbul’s metropolitan municipality from the city’s secular elite to the Islamist-

rooted political parties of first Refah Party and then the AK Party took place in 1994,

56

when Istanbul’s first metropolitan mayor with Islamic credentials, the current Prime

Minister R. Tayyip Erdoğan, came to power with 25.19 percent of the local votes. I have

previous mentioned that the support of the gecekondu voters was critical in Refah Party’s

victory. For Istanbul’s secular elite and middle classes losing Istanbul after having ruled

in the city administration for more than a decade meant that their authority over the

narration of the city’s past had come to an end. With regards to Refah Party’s victory, one

journalist lamented, “The destiny of the city is no longer being determined by the

previous ‘owners’ of the city, but by the ‘strangers’ who have settled in its peripheries”

(Robins and Aksoy 1996:22). While in power, this secular group worked toward

recapturing the spirit of fin-de-siecle Istanbul. The many social schisms, religious

conflicts, and the shameless racism characteristic of the era brushed aside, the advocates

of the idealized Belle Époque Istanbul wanted to see the relics of the Ottoman efforts to

modernize and Westernize the city brought to the forefront – the grandiose embassy

buildings of the European powers, the glittering lifestyle of the settler-bourgeoisie, the

municipal movement that introduced paved avenues, street cars, gas lighting, European-

style hotels, department, stores and cafes, etc.

The victorious Refah Party’s vision for the city diverged from that of the secular

elite in significant ways, as evinced by the party’s description of the 1994 victory as a

prophetic event. The party leaders had staged their campaign around the ‘conquest’ of

Istanbul. On number of occasions, the future mayor, Tayyip Erdoğan, mentioned the

second conquest of Istanbul as ‘a way of turning darkness into light’ (Robins and Aksoy

1996:24). The allusion with the language of conquest was to the first conquest of

Constantinople in the sixteenth century when under the leadership of Fatih Sultan

57

Mehmet, Ottoman armies took the city from the Byzantine Empire, and made it into the

Islamic Ottoman capital. Erdoğan rejected the city’s Byzantine heritage, and the

modernizing and westernizing efforts of the republican period, which he perceived as

having damaged the city’s Islamic identity and culture. The construction of the

westernized quarters of the city starting in the late eighteenth century was taken to signal

the beginning of contamination, with Republican policies in the twentieth century only

adding to this process (Bora 1999:48). As epitomized by his proposal to build a mosque

in Taksim Square, reinventing the lost spirit of Islam was Erdoğan’s top priority. Echoing

Erdoğan’s wishes, a small, hardline constituency formulated a kind of cultural jihad

against all kinds of western cultural and artistic approaches. Kevin Robins and Asu

Aksoy write:

International art festivals, for instance, are seen in terms of the invasion of foreign and ‘infidel’ cultures, leading to the degeneration of local culture. Tayyip Erdoğan himself has on occasions seemed to articulate this kind of radical approach, particularly during the 1994 election campaign, declaring, for instance, that he found ballet to be an immoral art (‘belden aşağı sanat’ – ‘a below-the-waist-art’), and that he considered new year’s celebrations to be a degenerate imitation of Western culture. In the same vein, there were some arguments for a complete ban on the sale of alcohol in the city – though in practice this has only been implemented in municipality-run cafes and restaurants, with great controls, however, over privately-run bars and restaurants. [1996:25]

Robins and Aksoy argue that although the Islamic element has been highly publicized in

both the national and foreign media, within the Refah Party, this element had only

minority support. Living up to its promises to the urban poor, the Refah leaders quickly

made considerable improvements in the city’s infrastructure, from the upgrading of the

water supply network to the renewal of the city’s street furniture, and began to tackle the

problems of traffic circulation, pollution, and environmental degradation. The leaders

also had to cater to the interests of the business and professional elites within Refah, who

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want to see the transformation of Istanbul into an international center for trade,

technology and science balanced against the cultivation of Turkish and Islamic cultures.

Öncü (2007) agrees with Robins and Aksoy that the metaphor of ‘conquest’ has

lost its relevance and the Islamic movement has became less radical in the years since,

embracing instead a neo-liberal, religious-nationalist outlook. Despite this, she maintains

that Istanbul’s Islamic mayors have continued to devise implicit and explicit ways of

bringing the city’s Ottoman past to the forefront and imagine and represent Istanbul as a

Muslim City. To illustrate her point, Öncü takes a closer look at Istanbul municipality’s

Tulip Campaign (‘three million Tulips for Istanbul’), launched in December 2005. At the

launching ceremony of the campaign at Taksim Square, Mayor Topbaş said, “tulips,

which were part of daily life in Istanbul, will be returning home again” (244). Öncü

argues that for the metropolitan mayoralty of Istanbul, the Tulip Campaign was in fact

part of a “persistent institutional effort to objectify […] an alternative 'golden moment' in

history when the ethos of Ottoman-Islamic civilization was at its peak” (245). The

strategic choice of tulips was meant to evoke the Ottoman-Islamic high culture of the so-

called Tulip Era of the years 1718 and 1730, corresponding to the second half of the reign

of Sultan Ahmed III. As described in history textbooks, the era was marked by the

encouragement of poetry, scholarship, and the arts, as well as the construction of much

artwork throughout the city including parks, gardens, fountains, educational endowments,

mosques, libraries and palaces. Tulip designs and motifs were central to these artworks

and constituted common tropes in poetry and literature.

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ISTANBUL AS A “GLOBAL CITY”: FROM PLACES TO NON-PLACES The branding of Istanbul through the promotion of its Ottoman heritage as a marketable

commodity establishes a link between neo-Ottomanism and neo-liberalism. Referring to

critical geographer Allen Scott’s theory on the “culture generating capabilities of cities in

transnational markets,” Öncü argues that the selective revival of Ottoman-era monuments

and heritage sites serves to increase Istanbul’s “attractiveness in the new global game and

gives it cultural cachet in the competition for foreign investments and tourist trade”

(2007:234). An understanding of cities as marketable commodities has its origins in

sociologist Saskia Sassen’s (2005) theory of the ‘global city’. Sassen sees the emergence

of global cities in the 1980s as part and parcel to neoliberalism and the accompanying

globalization of economic systems. The increase in the mobility and liquidity of capital

on a global scale was made possible by local neoliberal policies that deregulated and

privatized national industries and opened up economies to foreign firms. Transnational

corporations grew through the practice of outsourcing and so did their need for

specialized service firms offering legal, financial, technological, etc. assistance in

countries where they conduct business. These firms tend to limit their services to cities,

because their day to day functioning requires a global network of affiliates and cross-

border partnerships so that they themselves can offer global services to their transnational

corporate clients. Sassen notes: “The mix of firms, talents, and expertise from a broad

range of specialized fields makes a certain type of urban environment function as an

information center. Being in a city becomes synonymous with being in an extremely

intense and dense information loop” (29). This territorial centralization of top-level

management and control functions exists alongside the global dispersal of economic

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activities (at the metropolitan, national, and global levels). Cities, in the process, become

increasingly disconnected from their hinterlands and national economies. The growing

number of high-level professionals and high profit making specialized service firms

further raise the degree of spatial and socio-economic inequality within the immediate

national setting of these ‘global cities’.

In this global race over capital, Istanbul gradually shifted its economy away from

industrial production to various service industries, as well as casting itself as a global

tourist destination. More than once, Prime Minister Erdoğan expressed his desire to turn

Istanbul into a financial capital. This was to be achieved by incentivizing private sector

financial institutions to locate in the city, while the government relocated public finance

institutions (most importantly the National Central Bank) as well as the regulatory bodies

and organizations from Ankara to Istanbul (Ekmekci 2012:55-6). Istanbul’s primarily

finance-driven globalization project is accompanied by prestige mega-projects sponsored

by the Greater Istanbul Municipality. These mega-projects, including the third bridge

across the Bosphorus Strait, Istanbul’s third international airport that when completed

will be the world’s largest airport, and “Canal Istanbul,” a new waterway that will run

parallel to Bosphorus between Marmara and the Black Sea, were all announced and are

promoted personally by Erdoğan as part of his political campaigns.

Canal Istanbul was announced to the public on May 2011, but the project dates

back to the Ottoman Sultans who wanted to provide an alternative route to the Bosphorus

for large ships and tankers (Adanalı 2011). If completed, the 50 kilometer-long canal that

will cost an estimated $10 billion to build will transform Istanbul into an island and two

peninsulas. Yaşar Adanalı, a PhD candidate in international urbanism at Stuttgard

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University, calls Canal Istanbul a “mad project” in his blog, Reclaim Istanbul, and points

to the many environmental and political dangers that the projects raises. The project

seriously undermines democratic urbanism insofar as Erdoğan has openly stated that this

project was his dream, refused to consult civil society, political community, or Istanbul

residents as part of the decision-making process. Stating that the decision was made

behind closed doors, Adanalı angrily asks, “How come on earth can Istanbul be a

playground for one man, in a supposedly democracy country?” (2011). He sees this

project as part of “one big madness” that includes the Third Bridge Project, which will

pave the way into uncontrolled expansion of the city and loss of natural and water

reserves; the many gecekondu renewal projects that have already forcefully evicted

thousands of poor inhabitants and transfered their land to real estate developers; and

Galata Port and Haydarpasa Port Projects that aim to privatize public land and limit

access to the seaside.

In yet another post sarcastically titled “The Authentic Dubai Experience in

Istanbul,” Adanalı looks at three original real-estate projects that offer their clients an

‘authentic’ experience of a suburban Tuscan Valley, a skyscraper Venezia and a cloned

Bosporus (Adanalı 2012). The first project, “Tuscan Valley” is a gated community

located in Istanbul’s peripheral district of Büyükçekmece. Behind the US$700 million

project are the Dubai based global real-estate giant Emaar Properties and the California

based architectural firm JZMK Partners. The 540 luxury units including villas,

apartments, and townhouses are marketed by the slow city concept. The second project

Adanalı looks at is “Via Port Venezia,” a multi-use real estate project located in

Gaziosmanpaşa district of Istanbul. Jointly developed by the Turkish firm Bayraktar &

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Gürsoy Investment and Management Co. and Istanbul Metropolitian Municipality’s

housing development corporation KİPTAŞ, Via Port Venezia includes residential blocks

of 2500 units, a shopping mall with 70.000 m2 of rental space, office buildings and other

social amenities. The marketing campaign focuses on an ‘upgraded’ Venice experience:

“You no longer have to travel to Venice to experience Venice. The delight of Venice with

its historical texture, peerless water canals, and architectural esthetic is now in the

European side of Istanbul…” (Adanalı 2012). Yet another Disney-esque project is

“Bosphorus City” located in Küçükçekmece district of Istanbul, next to the newly

planned Theme Park. Bosphorus City is one of the first themed-housing projects in

Istanbul and is developed by the Turkish real-estate giant Simpaş REITs. The project

imitates the Bosphorus Strait with an artificial water canal that runs through the

residential units that are replicas of the historical mansions along the waterfront. In these

projects, Tuscany, Venice, and Istanbul emerge as replicable models that can be detached

from their places of origin.

Fig. 16. Tuscan Valley. Source: skyscrapercity.com

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Fig. 17. Via Port Venezia. Source: reclaimistanbul.com

Fig. 18. Bosphorus City. Source: reclaimistanbul.com

In her studies on the urbanization politics of the Asia Pacific rim, anthropologist

Aihwa Ong terms this practice of “citation, allusion, aspiration, comparison, and

competition” as inter-referencing (Ong 2011:17). She writes “the practice of citing a

‘more successful city’ – itself an unstable category – seems to stir urban aspiration and

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sentiments of inter-city rivalry as well as standing as a legitimation for particular

practices at home” (2011:17). These urban aspirations might involve a kind of elite

dreaming, as in the referencing of Venice or Tuscany in the construction of gated

communities. Ong argues that the idiom of inter-referencing “pits cities in relation to one

another, by invoking desirable icons of ‘world class’ amenities – upscale hotels, shopping

malls, entertainment and conventions facilities, symphonies, opera houses, international

enclaves, and airports – as symbols of desirable urban attributes” (18). Inter-referencing

is also used in the promotion of real estate programs that aim to clear slums, and

otherwise to evade political resistance from local residents. Importantly, the three

aforementioned projects in Istanbul that utilize inter-referencing as a strategy of elite

dreaming do not prioritize the history or the human component of the cities they strive to

replicate. Only the built spaces of the cities are relevant to the process of inter-

referencing and even then, the historic buildings or the natural peculiarities of these cities

such as the canals of Venice carry mere symbolic meanings. I would argue that the

popularity of such projects, along with the larger trend towards neoliberal urbanism, have

contributed to the growth of ‘non-places’ within Istanbul. These places did not develop as

organic entities with rich histories and original cultures of their own. As I previously

discussed in case of Kemer Country, securitization measures further mean that access in

and out of these private enclaves is heavily regulated. The relationship to space is thus

contractual.

In his seminal work Non-Places: An Introduction to the Anthropology of

Supermodernity (1995), French anthropologist Marc Augé argues that supermodernity

produces non-places, “meaning spaces which are not themselves anthropological places

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and which, unlike in Baudelairean modernity, do not integrate the earlier places”

(1995:63). If one were to look beyond the jargonistic language, the claim here is that

recent urban developments, including ‘non-places’ such as motorways, airports,

supermarkets, clinics, hotel chains, etc., have significantly altered the way in which

individuals relate to their surroundings and society at large. This is because these new

spaces lack the authentically relational and historical qualities of ‘anthropological

places,’ which, borrowing from Merleau-Ponty, Augé defines as “the scene of an

experience of relations with the world on the part of being essentially situated ‘in relation

to the milieu’” (65). In other words, an anthropological place provides its user with a

condensed version of the world; a network of symbolic meanings and relations that

ground the individual in the present with strong social and historic ties to both space and

time. We get a glimpse of what place might mean for Augé when he mentions the French

towns and villages (“main streets, lined with houses on both sides,” p. 79), as well as

Baudelaire’s Paris (with its chimneys alongside spires). Whereas an “anthropological

place is formed by individual identities, through complicities of language, local

references, and the unformulated rules of living know-how” (81), a non-place lacks a

similar organic evolution and personal initiative in its inception. A non-place, then, is a

“space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity”

(63). It refers more specifically to those “spaces formed in relation to certain ends

(transport, transit, commerce, leisure)” that create “solitary contractuality” (76). In

Augé’s formulation, non-places are a direct outcome of supermodernity. The

supermodernity that plagues humanity today is a pivotal point in history characterized by

the breakdown of the harmony among the built environment, society and the cultural

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heritage, the spectacularization of history, the increasing isolation of the individual, and

the proliferation of texts and images flooding from commercial, transport and retail

institutions.

As Istanbul is rapidly ceasing to be an anthropological space, its inhabitants are

feeling isolated and uprooted more than ever. One way of looking at the Gezi protests is

through the lens of supermodernity and the takeover of the park as an attempt to create

places out of a downtown that is on the verge of becoming a non-place with the

spectacularization of history by the planned reconstruction of the Ottoman-era military

barracks, the proliferation of texts and images flooding from the many retail stores that

line Istiklal Avenue, and the increasing gap between the old and the new as streamlined

prestige projects replace the gentrified Levantine buildings of Tarlabaşı. It is for this

reason that I have chosen to title my thesis “From Non-Places to Places” as a play on

Augé’s “From Places to Non-Places.” I am of the opinion that Gezi Park became an

anthropological space in every meaning of the phrase. Before its occupation, Gezi Park

was just another space in the eyes of many that they did not frequent much, if at all. The

park was in fact considered by many as being eerie and unsafe at night. Its significance

completely changed with the occupation as it acquired personalized connections through

its repeated use by protesters. A version of a quaint French town center was created at the

park with main streets lined with tents on both sides and makeshift public facilities such

as the library, the general assembly, and the kitchen functioning as staples of the town. I

will revisit this transformation from non-places to places via the protests in my

conclusion.

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2

BEYOND THE RIGHT TO THE CITY

The Arab Spring, #Occupy Wall Street, and Taksim Gezi Protests

TAKSIM GEZI PROTESTS

On May 28, 2013, spontaneous groups of people from different walks of life began to

occupy Taksim’s Gezi Park in response to its planned demolition.3 Earlier in the week,

Mayor Kadir Topbaş announced that as part of the Taksim pedestrianization project, the

Ottoman-era Taksim Military Barracks (Taksim Topçu Kışlası: built 1803-06; demolished

in 1940) and its courtyard would be reconstructed on the park grounds. The original plan

was to reserve the ground floor of the rebuilt barracks for a shopping mall and the upper

floors for luxury flats. The first confrontation with the police at the park happened on

May 27 led by the members of the Taksim Gezi Park Protection and Beautification

Association, founded in 2012 when the pedestrian project first began. As news of the

confrontation spread on social media, greater numbers flocked to the park to join the

group’s routine night watch. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of the Islamist-rooted

AK Party dismissed the demonstrators and said: “Whatever they do, we have made up

our minds and will do it” (Hürriyet Daily News 2013h). On May 30, at the break of

3 For a detailed chronology of events, see Appendix.

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dawn, the police raided the park using tear gas and the Mass Incident Intervention

Vehicle (TOMA) to disperse the protesters. Some of the tents were burned down during

this initial raid. In the evening, ten thousand people gathered at Gezi in response to the

activists’ calls through social media for a major gathering at the park. Quickly, the

protests broadened into a wider expression of discontent with police violence and the

authoritarian politics of Erdoğan and the AK Party, which has been in power for over a

decade. There was another police attack at dawn on May 31st . This time the police used

more tear gas, as well as water cannons. Throughout the day, the police continued its

efforts to disperse the crowds with indiscriminant use of tear gas. The game of cat and

mouse spread to the nearby areas of Harbiye, Gümüşsuyu and İstiklal Avenue, some of

Istanbul’s most populated sites. In the late afternoon, an estimated hundred thousand

people were in Beyoğlu4 (Hürriyet Daily News 2013h). Reuters reported that the number

of injured surpassed one hundred on this second day of the police crackdown (Journal of

Turkish Weekly 2013). Shortly thereafter, the protests spread to other major Turkish

cities. Turkish newspaper Zaman reported that in the capital city, Ankara, people

gathered in front of the Turkish Parliament building to protest Gezi Park’s demolition and

were met with heavy use of tear gas. There were also protests in Eskişehir, Muğla,

Konya, Yalova, Antalya and Bolu (Today’s Zaman 2013). The same day, an Istanbul

court ruled in favor of a petition by a local advocacy group, temporarily suspending the

construction at the park (Arango and Yeğinsu 2013).

4 The district located on the European side of Istanbul, separated from the old city (historic peninsula of Constantinople) by the Golden Horn. It encompasses the historic neighborhoods of Taksim, Cihangir, Şişhane, Karaköy and Tophane among others (Wikipedia).

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Fig. 1. Taksim Gezi Park location, BBC. Fig. 2. Taksim Gezi Park aerial view, Bing Maps via Architect’s Newspaper Blog.

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Fig. 3. Taksim Gezi Park today, Urban Life Signs. Fig. 4. Renderings of the Topçu Barracks Project, Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality via Skyscraper City.

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Early on the morning of June 1st, forty thousand demonstrators crossed the

Bosphorus Bridge (which normally is closed to pedestrian traffic) from the Asian side to

join the protesters at Taksim Square. Shortly after they crossed the bridge, they were

confronted by the police who had set up barricades blocking the roads leading up to

Taksim (including İstiklal Avenue, Sıraselviler Avenue, Harbiye and Gümüşsuyu) and

dispersed the crowds using water cannons and tear gas (Milliyet 2012). The police

withdrew from Taksim Square in the late afternoon bringing down the barricades around

the square and the park. Soon after, thousands flocked to Gezi Park. They set up tents at

every inch of the park and ‘urbanized’ it with makeshift public spaces, including among

others, a library, an infirmary, a marketplace, a general assembly, and a speaker’s corner.

Journalist Çetin Cem Yılmaz (2013) of Hürriyet Daily News, a liberal English-language

daily in Turkey, called Gezi Park a “utopic Freetown” referring to its festival-like

atmosphere of outdoor yoga classes, barbecues, kids’ activities corners, and musical

performances. In strong contrast to the atmosphere at the park, brutal clashes between the

protesters and the police continued at the many barricades set at the borders of Gezi’s so-

called conquered territory and in the surrounding neighborhoods. These clashes picked up

routinely in the afternoon around 6 p.m.

On June 2, Prime Minister Erdoğan denied that the rebuilt barracks were going to

be turned into a shopping mall and suggested that the space could be utilized as a city

museum or an architectural work that will put different activities in place (Hürriyet Daily

News 2013c). He also said that the Atatürk Cultural Center (built 1946-1969), one of

Taksim Square’s staples, was to be demolished and replaced by an opera house and a

mosque. Erdoğan added that he would not seek permission for his projects from the main

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opposition leader or the protesters, since the people who voted for the AK Party had

already given him the authority. In press conference on June 3rd, Erdoğan got into a

heated argument with Reuters reporter Birsen Altaylı:

Don’t tell me that all of society [is supporting the protests], I will not believe it … There is fifty percent of [the country who voted for the ruling Justice and Development Party], and we can barely keep them at home [and prevent them from coming onto the streets for counter-protests]. But we have called on them to calm down. [Hürriyet Daily News 2013d]

The divisive rhetoric makes it apparent that Erdoğan clearly sides with the fifty percent of

those citizens who voted for the AK Party. To him, the protests are the making of a

minority that he does not see himself as being the representative of and thus he will not

entertain the demands of the protesters. Yet, Erdoğan’s menacing remarks seriously

undermine the ideal of democracy by advocating instead to a majoritarian approach to

governance. His words triggered the mobilization of minority and marginal peoples as

part of the protests, who similarly do not find themselves represented in the Parliament.

Initially, Erdoğan dismissed the protesters as "a few looters" (çapulcu). He invited those

demonstrators upset by his use of this term to look in the dictionary for the accurate

meaning of the term, and said, “Those who burn, destroy and attack are called çapulcu.

Those who back them are of the same family” (Hürriyet 2013). He claimed that the

protesters had entered the Dolmabahçe Mosque in Beşiktaş with shoes and beer bottles in

their hands when they took refuge there after a fierce police crackdown on protesters

demonstrating at the nearby Prime Minister's Working Office. In his later talks, Erdoğan

alluded to an organized plot against him. Among the assortment of foreign actors blamed

for the unrest were the “interest lobby” and “Zionists.” Yet in another speech, Erdoğan

targeted the foreign media, accusing them of “serving stories to placed orders with

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ideological approaches,” with his critique more specifically directed at a crowd-funded,

full-page ad placed at The New York Times that appeared in the front section (Hürriyet

Daily News 2013i).

Fig. 5 & 6. Thousands of protesters crossing Bosphorus Bridge to get to Taksim Square on the second day of protests. Source: Milliyet.

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Fig. 7. A makeshift hospital set within Dolmabahçe Mosque in Beşiktaş. By Nazım Serhat Fırat, June 2, 2013.

Fig. 8. “What’s Happening in Turkey?” Crowd-funded, full-page Gezi ad that appeared in the front section of the New York Times. Source: crowdact.com

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Contrary to Erdoğan’s claims, anthropologist Yael Navaro-Yashin (2013) posits

that the occupants of Gezi Park had not been part of a unified social formation before.

The unconventional mix of protesters included members of minority ethnic groups such

as Kurds and Laz peoples (of the Black Sea), football fans from rival teams, anti-

capitalist Muslims, secularists, LGBT activists, among many others. These minority

groups had the chance to display their cultures and political views freely and side by side.

Kurds danced their halays and Laz people did their horon dance. The protesters turned

the iconic steel-lattice-covered façade of the Atatürk Cultural Center into a bulletin board

for banners and flags. Here, a portrait of the legendary 1970’s revolutionary Deniz

Gezmiş looked down on the area, while next to him were posters of left-wing groups and

a ‘shut up’ call to Prime Minister Erdoğan (Yılmaz 2013). Two professors from Istanbul

Bilgi University, Esra Ercan Bilgiç and Zehra Kafkaslı (2013) circulated the online

survey #direngeziparkı between June 3–4 to map the demographics of the protesters. The

results revealed that of about 3,000 survey participants 39.6 percent were between the

ages 19 and 25. Seventy percent of the total participants described themselves as being

unaffiliated with a specific political party. The majority identified as libertarian (81.2

percent), environmentalist, secular (64.5 percent), democratic, and Turkish. Those who

did not vote for the AK Party constituted 92.1 percent. Some popular reasons behind the

survey participants’ involvement in the protests were Prime Minister Erdoğan’s

authoritarian politics (92.4 percent), the disproportionate use of force by the police

against the protesters (91.3 percent), the infringement of democratic rights (91.1 percent),

the limiting of personal freedoms, and the silence of the media during the demonstrations

(84.2 percent).

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Fig. 9. The façade of Atatürk Cultural Center turned into a bulletin-board for the banners. Source: Cornucopia Magazine.

Özlem Gezer, a German Turk reporting to the German magazine Der Spiegel

from Taksim Square, interviewed a wide range of Turkish citizens and her findings reveal

that the categorical divide that Erdoğan repeatedly alluded to in his speeches between his

headscarf-wearing, devout-Muslim supporters and marginal, violent looters did not hold

true on the ground. A case in point is the 28-year old Fatma Dogan. A teacher from

Istanbul, Dogan was wearing a black headscarf and a dark-colored robe when Gezer

interviewed her at Gezi Park. Dogan told Gezer that she had been actively involved since

the first day of the protests, because she believed that Erdoğan used Islam to hold onto

power and saw him as a capitalist exploiting Islam for his own purposes (2013a). This

kind of rhetoric was shared among a group of devout-Muslim citizens commonly referred

to as the Anti-Capitalist Muslims. Led by the modern Islamist theologian İhsan Eliaçık,

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they made their first appearance in the 2011 May Day celebrations in Istanbul. Eliaçık, in

a July 2013 interview, describes the philosophy of the group as a defense of an

understanding of Islam based on freedoms and pluralism (Yinanc 2013b). On Fridays, the

anti-capitalist Muslims gathered at the tents built for them in the middle of the Gezi

Commune by leftist football fans. Together they prayed together for the dead

demonstrators, the dead police officers, and the many injured during the protests. During

Ramadan, they set “earth tables” in the streets and on Istiklal Avenue for iftars5 and at

these tables, fasters were joined by many who fasted for the first time in their lives, as

well as those who were not fasting at all (Taştekin 2013). The three slogans popularized

by these earth tables (“The luxury iftar of the rich: capitalism,” “The iftar tents of the

hegemons: exploitation” and “The people’s earth tables: freedom”) challenged the

Ramadan-long iftar tents built by the Istanbul Municipality, and the more expensive

iftars hosted at the city’s luxurious hotels, where fraudulent deals were cut and money

exchanged hands between sponsors and state agents.

Fig. 10. An earth table set on Istiklal Avenue. Bülent Kılıç / Getty.

5 Dinners to break day-long fast during the Islamic month of Ramadan.

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Although the Anti-Capitalist Muslims had a strong presence at Taksim, there was

still an uncompromising group of Erdoğan-supporters that bought into Erdoğan’s rhetoric

on a few looters sabotaging the country, damaging public property, and disrespecting

Islamic values. One example was journalist Gezer’s 64-year-old uncle Sahmi who

refused to visit the protesters' camp in Gezi Park, even though it was less than nine miles

from his apartment. He would rather frequent the small mosque on his street, praying for

Erdoğan and asking God to give him strength to fend off the attackers. While the

protesters were chanting for the government’s resignation at Taksim, Sahmi cheered for

Erdoğan at the rallies organized by the AK Party as counter-protests. In a tone that is

clearly disapproving of her uncle’s actions, Gezer writes:

He argues that the demonstrators destroyed everything, the beautiful lawns and flowers. They lit city buses on fire and stole police cars. Even worse, says Sahmi, they insulted his prime minister and his Justice and Development Party, which Sahmi supports and believes is best equipped to run the country. […] [He] did hear what Erdoğan had to say about the tent city, and it was enough for him: that it stank of urine, that condoms were being kept there, and that the protesters were all terrorists. Sahmi believes that dark forces, from both Turkey and abroad, were behind the protests. [2013b]

Erdoğan’s remarks on the acts of vandalism at Gezi strategically utilized his party’s

rhetoric of progress and prosperity to depict the protests and those behind them as

obstacles on the way to Turkey’s advancement into a superpower. At his rallies, his

sympathizers were reminded, among others, of the country’s booming economy,

achievement of an inflation rate less than ten percent for the first time in Turkish history,

the highways built in Anatolia, the country's first nuclear power plant, the ceremonial

groundbreaking for the third bridge across the Bosphorus Strait, the plans for Istanbul’s

third international airport and for the new iconic canal between the Black Sea and the

Marmara Sea, all accomplished under the 10-year-rule of AK Party. According to AK

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Party supporters like Sahmi, Erdoğan was also sympathetic to the needs of ordinary

citizens as evinced by AK Party’s support programs for families who care for the sick

and the elderly, revision of the heath care system and public hospitals where citizens

eligible for Medicaid used to stand in line for hours for an ordinary check-up, distribution

of free schoolbooks and uniforms at the elementary school level, and elimination of

tuition at state universities.

On June 15, a day after Erdoğan’s warning to the protesters that Gezi Park was a

park and not a place to occupy (Hürriyet Daily News 2013n), the riot police intervened in

Taksim Square with tear gas and water cannons. They subsequently entered Gezi Park for

the first time in two weeks. After clearing some of the remaining barricades around the

park, security forces proceeded with demolition of the tents. The police also removed the

protesters' banners from the façade of the Atatürk Cultural Center and replaced them by

the usual triptych of a portrait of Atatürk, flanked by two national flags. It took the police

less than half an hour to bring an end to the 18-day occupation (Reynolds 2013). As

much as the June 15 crackdown officially ended Gezi Park’s occupation, the many

demonstrations that happened since have kept the Gezi spirit alive. On July 2nd, a court

ruled against the plans for rebuilding the Ottoman-era barracks at the park, deciding that

the plan violated preservation rules and unacceptably changed Taksim Square’s identity.

According to the Interior Ministry’s report, some 2.5 million protesters hit the streets

across Turkey during the 18-day occupation of Gezi Park (Hürriyet Daily News 2013t). A

large majority of the protests were staged in Istanbul and Ankara and only in two cities,

Bayburt and Bingöl, did people not take to the streets. The same report noted that some

4,900 protesters were detained and 4,000 people were injured, including 600 riot police.

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Turkish Medical Association, by contrast, reported the total number of those injured

during the protests in the thirteen major cities at 8,121, including five casualties.

THE RIGHT TO THE CITY

Geopolitical analyst Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya (2013) suggests that the protests that

have been unfolding in Istanbul within the past couple years have led to the development

of an eclectic urbanite movement. This movement is best understood through the theories

of French Marxist sociologist Henri Lefebvre. In his seminal essay “The Right to the

City” (1967), Lefebvre introduces this concept in the following terms:

The right to the city is like a cry and a demand […] [it] cannot be conceived of as a simple visiting right or as a return to traditional cities. It can only be formulated as a transformed and renewed right to urban life.

Looking closely at three of Lefebvre’s works, “The Right to the City,” Space and

Politics, and “The Production of Space,” urban geographer Mark Purcell (2002) writes,

“Lefebvre’s right to the city is an argument for profoundly reworking both the social

relations of capitalism and the structure of liberal-democratic citizenship” (2002:101). At

its core, Lefebvre’s theory anticipates the reorientation of decision-making pertaining to

the production of urban space away from capital and the state and toward urban

inhabitants, more specifically the working class. Employing a Marxist language,

Lefebvre writes “only the working class can become the agent, the social carrier or

support of this realization” (Lefebvre 2009[1970]:158). To Lefebvre the real inhabitant of

the city is he who “runs from his dwelling to the station, near or far away, to the packed

underground train, the office or the factory, to return the same way in the evening”

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(Lefebvre 2009[1970]:158). In his view, the “Olympians of the new bourgeois

aristocracy no longer inhabit” the city insofar as by confining themselves to grand hotels,

gated communities, nature retreats, etc. they have broken their ties with the city. The

“generalized misery” of the working class will become the means to break free from the

oppressive urban space by inciting its members to take a stand against capital and the

state, and claim their right to the city. One important point of divergence from the present

enfranchisement structure that is based on national citizenship is that Lefebvre’s right to

the city empowers urban inhabitants, citadins, instead of citizens. Purcell argues that the

right to the city involves two principle rights for urban inhabitants: the right to

participation, and the right to appropriation. The right to participation maintains that

“citadins should play a central role in any decision that contributes to the production of

urban space” (Purcell 2002:102). Stressing that these decisions could be made at a range

of scales, from any level of the state (national, provincial, local) to corporations that

operate at any scale (global, national, local), Purcell offers the example of the right of the

citadins of Seattle to participate centrally in an investment decision of a corporation like

Boeing (now headquartered in Chicago) that would affect urban space in Seattle (101).

The right to appropriation, on the other hand, includes the “right of inhabitants to

physically access, occupy, and use urban space” (102). In Lefebvre’s formulation, the

right to appropriation extends beyond the right to occupy already-produced urban space

and includes the right to produce urban space so that it meets the needs of inhabitants.

Here the use value aspect of urban space (its use by urban residents) is prioritized over

the exchange value aspect of urban space (profit interests of capitalist firms). As such, the

right to appropriation complicates the capitalist logic of space that aims to maximize

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exchange value of urban space via property rights that grant land owners relatively free

reign in the production of spaces.

Lefebvre’s right to the city was later taken up by social theorist and so-called

Marxist geographer David Harvey and redefined as part of his study on urbanization,

capitalism, and urban revolutions. Harvey argues that the intimate connection between

the development of capitalism and urbanization rests on the principle of surplus product.

The simultaneous needs for the exploitation of labor, production of a surplus product, and

the continued reinvestment of surplus value to generate more surplus value have set in

motion the search for profitable terrains for capital-surplus production and absorption.

This has led to the geographical and social concentrations of surplus product, the process

otherwise known as urbanization. The social hierarchies central to capitalism, i.e. the idea

that surpluses are extracted from the working classes while the control of capital and the

authority over their disbursement typically lies in a few hands, have been replicated

through the process of urbanism. According to Harvey:

The right to the city is […] far more than a right of individual or group access to the resources that the city embodies: it is a right to change and reinvent the city more after our hearts' desire. It is, moreover, a collective rather than an individual right, since reinventing the city inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power over the processes of urbanization. [2012:4]

The focus on this collective aspect of the right to the city encouraged Harvey to look

more closely at urban revolutions. He begins his survey with the 1848 European-wide

protests, the events evincing crises of both unemployed surplus capital and surplus labor.

Within the Second French Empire, the protests led to the ascent to power of Louis-

Napoleon Bonaparte, who resorted to widespread repression of alternative political

movements to survive politically and implemented a vast program of infrastructural

investment both at home and abroad to survive economically (Harvey 2012:25). Most

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importantly, he appointed Georges-Eugène Haussmann as the head of the city’s public

works in 1835, with the intent of instigating a massive program of planning reforms (of

new boulevards, parks, and public works) in Paris. The rebuilding of Paris became a

primary vehicle of social stabilization insofar as it “absorbed huge quantities of labor and

capital by standards of time and [suppressed] the aspirations of the Parisian workforce”

(26). Haussmann’s renovation transformed Paris into the ‘city of light’, a great center of

consumption, tourism and pleasure. The system worked well until the economic crash of

1868, ensuing the collapse of the overextended and speculative financial system and

credit structure. As a result, Haussmann was dismissed, Napoleon III went to war against

Bismarck’s Germany and lost, and in the ensuing vacuum arose the Paris Commune,

which Harvey describes as “one of the greatest revolutionary episodes in capitalist urban

history, wrought out of […] the desire to take back the city on the part of those

dispossessed by his works” (26).

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Fig. 11 & 12. Haussmann’s Paris, two ‘before and after’s: Top: Rue Soufflot. Source: Skyscraper City, Bottom: The Quai des Orfevres and Pont Saint-Michel, “Lost Paris: Destruction and Renewal on the Île de la Cité” by Marville via Le Figaro.

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Harvey then fast-forwards to the 1940s in the United States, when politicians and

economists began to ponder over ways of dealing with the surplus capital after the war,

which had been temporarily resolved via the huge war mobilization. Urban planner

Robert Moses, an enthusiast of Haussmann, emerged on the scene as a critical player in

New York. He conceived of a system of highways and infrastructural transformations,

suburbanization and led the total re-engineering of not just the city but also the whole

metropolitan region. The construction boom helped resolve the capital-surplus absorption

problem, while simultaneously suburbanization led a radical transformation in lifestyles,

mainly through the growth of a consumer society and an altered political landscape, such

that the debt-encumbered new homeowners were less likely to go on strike. Harvey

suggests that the dramatic events of 1968 in the United States must be understood in this

context of dramatic lifestyle changes, especially the soulless qualities of suburban living,

as discontent white middle-class students went into revolt, forming unprecedented

alliances with marginalized groups. Together, they claimed civil rights and rallied against

American imperialism.

At the same time in France, the campaign to stop the Left Bank Expressway and

the destruction of traditional neighborhoods by high-rise giants such as the Place d’Italie

and Tour Montparnasse led to a massive wave of student occupation protests and

followed by a nationwide general strike. Harvey writes:

It was in this context that Henri Lefebvre wrote The Urban Revolution, which predicted not only that urbanization was central to the survival of capitalism and therefore bound to become a crucial focus of political and class struggle, but that it was obliterating step by step the distinctions between town and country through the production of integrated spaces across national territory, if not beyond. The right to the city had to mean the right to command the whole urban process, which was increasingly dominating the country- side through phenomena ranging from agribusiness to second homes and rural tourism. [2012:28]

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A financial crisis within the credit institutions ensued the 68 revolt and the debt-financing

measures used to address the crisis fueled the property boom in the following decades.

The global property-market bubble burst in 1973 and New York City filed for bankruptcy

in 1975. Neoliberalism emerged out of this context of financial crisis as a solution to the

problems of perpetuating class power and the failure of the existing system to absorb the

surpluses of capitalism. The rise of international capitalism brought with it similar

financial crashes in East and Southeast Asia in 1997-98, Russia in 1998 and Argentina in

2001. A parallel development to the internationalization of capitalist institutions and

arrangements was the globalization of urbanization. Harvey suggests that the

urbanization of China over the last twenty years, with its heavy focus on debt-financed

infrastructural development, is the primary stabilizer of global capitalism today. Further

mega-urbanization projects in places such as Dubai and Abu Dhabi have been

instrumental in absorbing the surplus arising from oil wealth. The globalization of the

sister processes of capitalism and urbanization have triggered transformations of lifestyle.

Harvey writes, “This is a world in which the neoliberal ethic of intense possessive

individualism, and its cognate of political withdrawal from collective forms of actions,

becomes the template for human socialization” (Harvey 2012:32). The restoration of

class power to neoliberalism’s nouveau riche and the increasing income gap between the

rich and the poor despite the soaring Gross National Products in countries ranging from

Brazil and Argentina to India and China made segregated quarters, gated communities,

and privatized public spaces the norm in urban planning rather than exceptions. The

recent urban social movements such as Occupy Wall Street that seek to overcome

isolation and reshape the city in a different image from that put forward by the developers

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must be understood within this context of global neoliberalism and urbanism, as well as

the increased social segregation in cities along income lines.

ARAB SPRING AND THE 2011 EGYPTIAN REVOLUTION

Fig. 13. The Arab Spring, 2010-2011 by Foreign Policy Association. Arab Spring is an umbrella term used to characterize the revolutionary wave of protests

that began on December 18, 2010 in Tunisia ensuing the street vendor Mohamed

Bouazizi's self-immolation in protest of police harassment. The unrest spread rapidly to

Algeria, Jordan, Egypt, and Yemen, followed by many others in the Middle East and

North Africa. Tahrir Square in downtown Cairo became the focal point of the 2011

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Egyptian Revolution and a symbol for the larger Arab Spring. This section is not meant

to provide a comprehensive account of the Arab Spring. Instead, an overview of the

Egyptian Revolution and the deeper spatial struggles revealed by the conquest of Tahrir

Square will help contextualize the use of urban space in recent global uprisings. My

analysis of the Egyptian Revolution draws heavily from the account of Mohammed

Abouelleil Rashed (an Egyptian doctoral candidate specializing in psychiatric

anthropology at University College London) regarding his return to Cairo in late January

of 2011 to participate in the uprising at Tahrir Square.

Rashed explains that the protests in Cairo began on January 25, 2011 following

the lead of several smaller groups, most prominently the April 6 Youth Movement: “a

Facebook- based coalition of young activists that formed in April 2008 in support of

industrial workers demonstrating against low wages and which was further galvanized by

the death in June 2010 of Khaled Said, a young man who was beaten to death in public

by police” (Rashed 2011:23). At the early stages of the revolution, the protesters were

demanding the termination of Egypt’s 30-year ‘state of emergency’, police brutality,

systemic corruption, and mismanagement. Ensuing the brutal police response, however,

the protesters switched course and began to demand the removal of President Hosni

Mubarak’s regime. In denial of the violent police measures that involved the use of tear

gas, water cannon and even live ammunition, tens of thousands of protesters flocked to

Tahrir Square:

The speed with which the square was transformed – really within a few days – into both a symbol of the Egyptian people’s aspirations and a functioning social universe was remarkable. At the same time as the barricades put up at the edges of the square marked it off from the rest of Cairo, a psychological boundary also emerged, binding protesters together in a simplified yet unifying identity as people of the revolution. Within the square, the central section became a space of stability and functioning social life, while the ‘Front’, the main thoroughfare

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leading into the square where the barricades were placed against attack from regime supporters, became a space of uncertainty, violence and paranoia. [Rashed 2011:22]

Rashed suggests that the use of Tahrir Square, or Liberation Square as it used to be

called, was not a coincidence given that it was the location of the 1919 uprising against

British rule. The square came into being as part of the modernization of downtown Cairo

in the nineteenth century under Khedive Ismail and has since been a favorite site for

popular gatherings (Shokr 2011). Egyptians have poured into Tahrir to celebrate soccer

victories as well as to mourn the passing of national icons and to protest injustice. They

gathered at the square in July 1952 after the Free Officers’ coup to hail the birth of a new

republic. In 1977, Tahrir was the locus of the bread riots that swept the country, and

similarly in 2003, it was home to huge rallies against the Iraq War. Beginning sometime

in 2005, as part of a larger strategy for asserting physical control over Cairo’s urban

space, Mubarak regime turned its attention to the square. Police presence spiked and

armored vans were stationed along the square’s edges. Open spaces inside the plaza were

fenced off into smaller and smaller plots, significantly impeding the pedestrian traffic.

Whenever a group of protesters gathered at the square, they were rapidly encircled by

impenetrable rows of riot police. These security measures were justified through the

several ministerial buildings, as well as the parliament surrounding the square and the

fact that Tahrir today is a major transport hub. Whereas in reality, historian Ahmad Shokr

(2011) argues, these restrictions were Mubarak’s antidote to bottom-up democracy on

Cairo’s streets.

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Fig. 14. Map of Tahrir Square. Source: Guardian via Globe and Mail/GoogleMaps.

Fig. 15. Tahrir Square occupied by Jonathan Rashad. Source: WikiCommons.

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Early on January 28 the regime cut all Internet and mobile phone connections.

This strategy greatly backfired and many more started coming out on the streets since

they were unable to get information on the happenings at Tahrir Square otherwise. On

that subsequent Friday, termed the ‘Friday of Rage’, the protesters defeated the riot

police after daylong battles. The police withdrew from the streets on orders from the

Ministry of the Interior, and strategically the gates of prisons across the country were

opened to cause panic and to quell the revolution by forcing people to stay at their homes

and protect their immediate surroundings. Rashed explains that the resulting security

vacuum prompted city residents to form armed protection groups (with improvised

weapons) and to occupy Tahrir Square with tents and makeshift shelters. Rashed

describes the impressive social solidarity and organization at the occupation with the

following words:

Amid continuous, often creative chanting, young men and women are going around collecting rubbish, one of them telling me ‘this is our square, our home, we must keep it clean’. People are forming neat queues – something Egyptians never do – to buy tea at improvised stalls. Everywhere everyone is on their best behavior; a few days later, women will tell me that sexual harassment, an endemic problem in Cairo, is absent from the square. A nearby hall has been transformed into an emergency clinic for those injured in battles with the police. Protesters of all ages, social classes, education levels and ideologies are talking politics and sharing their grievances, united by a simple goal: the status quo must end. [2011:25]

On February 1, an estimated one million people joined several thousand protesters

camping at the square and they declared Tahrir a ‘free’ territory. By this time, there were

over three hundred casualties, but Mubarak’s newly appointed government insisted on

characterizing the revolution as a ‘series of regrettable incidents’. President Mubarak

echoed this sentiment when on national television he said that he would not be forced out

of power. In a strategic maneuver to exploit Egyptians’ wariness of foreign interference

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and predilection for conspiracy theories, the government declared that foreign agents had

initiated the revolution. Slowly, groups of regime supporters and a number of undercover

police infiltrated the square. They attacked protesters with rocks, metal rods and Molotov

cocktails. At night, several campers were killed by snipers from nearby buildings. In

response to the square’s infiltration, the protesters started carrying out ID checks and

searches at entry points at the ‘Front’. Those who were cleared to enter the square,

however, were greeted like a hero, by a chorale of young men chanting, “Welcome

revolutionaries!” (Shokr 2011). The precarious entry points were marked by “several

rows of makeshift barricades constructed from metal panels removed from abandoned

police vehicles” (Rashed 2011:25). The Front was also the place of sporadic battles

between the riot police and mostly male protesters, who wore handwritten badges that

read ‘Public Protection Committee’. In the subsequent Fridays ‘of Resilience’ and ‘of

Departure’ hundreds of thousands of protesters continued to join the core group of

thousands who were living at Tahrir Square. Characteristic of these Friday gatherings

were the communal prayers that Muslims held soon after noon, as Christian protesters

stood guard around those praying within and outside the square. February 11 marked the

end of the sixteen-day non-stop occupation of Tahrir Square. Around five pm, the vice

president announced Mubarak’s decision to waive his powers and hand over authority to

the army’s Supreme Council. The long-awaited announcement prompted huge

celebrations at the square. Within a few days, those who had been camping in the square

left and the square was reopened to traffic. On the following ‘Friday of Remembrance’, a

million people returned to the square and prayed together for the revolution’s martyrs.

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Fig. 16. Top left: Following the defeat of the Central Security Police, victory signs and determination. Bottom left: Euphoria and anxiety in the square. Top right: The signs read: ‘Doctors’ Revolutionary Headquarters 8 Medical Area’. Bottom Right: A wall poster displaying protesters’ art work. Such endeavors, in addition to singing and chanting, helped to lighten the atmosphere of perpetual anxiety and expectation. Text by Rashed; photography by Islam El Azzazi 2011.

In a final section he calls “Reflections,” Rashed discusses the mood at the square

and people’s emotional state as being simultaneously fragile and robust similar to the

situation on the ground. He suggests that people were taken by a contradictory euphoric

conviction despite a sense that all could collapse instantly, politically as well as

psychologically. The mental burden of holding and containing these contradictory

feelings was tiresome, especially when combined with the physical challenges of

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protesting and camping out in the square. These contrasting states of emotional stability

and uncertainty experienced by the occupants were replicated in the square itself. For the

most part, the square functioned as a self-contained social universe, but the center

differed significantly from the Front in terms of the dominant mood. The Front was the

boundary between ‘liberated’ and non-liberated territory and here the dominant mood

was one of paranoia. Uncertainty and a sense of unreality prevailed at the Front owing to

the sporadic battles between the riot police and the protesters, and the precarious nature

of the barricades making the lines. The Front was a psychological as well as a physical

border insofar as it determined the limits of the revolution and at the same time made

possible the kind of uninterrupted, quotidian social reality of the revolution experienced

at the heart of the square. Borrowing from medical and psychiatric anthropologists Janis

Jenkins and Robert Barrett (2004), Rashed characterizes the Front as the ‘edge of

experience’. He writes: “So acute was the difference that a walk from Front to center was

accompanied by a simultaneous shift from feelings of unease and suspicion to a sense of

solidity, unity and safety” (2011:27). The unity was a result of people coming together

under the shared goal of removing Mubarek and his regime from power. People from all

walks of life – rich and poor, devout and secular, old and young – shared this desire and

their togetherness could be realized through a simple yet powerful demand like that of the

regime’s removal. Rashed argues that one’s religion, regional affiliation, and class did no

matter, because by joining in the protests individuals embraced new, simplified ‘anti-

regime’ identities. The division of labor in the square was such that spontaneous,

leaderless committees of volunteers were formed. This structure reflected the lateral

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distribution of power, as well as the democratic aspirations of the protesters. Rashed

writes:

In addition to being logistically useful, the formation of committees was reassuring, furnishing an embryonic community, one in which we all behaved in an idealized manner. It was both a message to the regime that we could manage ourselves without any imposed government or police presence, and a practical expression of the feeling that Tahrir Square was now liberated territory: it was truly empowering. [2011:27]

This sense of empowerment made possible by leaderless committees of volunteers further

helped contain the emotional unease and aforementioned fragility of the political and

psychological situation on the ground.

Ahmad Shokr (2011), an Egyptian doctoral candidate in Middle East history at

New York University, echoes many of Rashed’s sentiments in his on-the-ground report

of the revolution. He describes Tahrir Square as a “radical utopia” during its 18-day long

occupation. He writes of a “colorful sea of Egyptians,” of an “endless carnival,” of a

“spirit of mutual aid,” of free food offered at Tahrir’s makeshift canteens to anybody in

need, and of makeshift clinics providing first air to the wounded as volunteers stepped up

to ensure communal comfort and security. A creative energy took hold of Tahrir during

its occupation, palpable in the many anti-regime graffiti covering the walls of nearby

buildings, in the homemade banners and cartoons mocking Mubarek and in the photo

displays, the live concerts, and poetry readings that became part of Tahrir’s everyday

routine. Everyone was welcomed at the square including rebels young and old,

professionals, factory workers, friends, families, performers, lovers, and street vendors.

Everyone had a place, everyone had a role to fill, and resources were the sole property of

no one. Prior to its occupation, Shokr writes:

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[Tahrir’s visitors] would enter a din of pollution and congestion, a zone outside the writ of proper urban planning. In the past decade, downtown Cairo began to attract the attention of state technocrats and private investors, who proposed to revive its imagined glory under the khedives through the restoration of old buildings and the redesign of major squares. Geared largely toward elite desires and consumption patterns, these efforts at gentrification threatened to drive out the poor and impose additional limits on access to the city. By moving into the square en masse, the people of Tahrir defied the exclusionary logic that had governed their urban space for years. What they created was an anti-city of sorts. The pervasive sense of impatience and never having enough time that characterizes everyday life in a metropolis suddenly vanished. Social codes that customarily define appropriate interactions between people collapsed. In Tahrir, there were no strangers; everywhere people talked to each other with a newfound ease. [Shokr 2011]

The occupation transferred Tahrir from quotidian time and space to an alternative one in

which the exclusionary logic of urban development was undermined and the pervasive

sense of impatience vanished. The “anti-city” that emerged as a result was characterized

by harmony of difference, a slow pace of life in which people took time to socialize and

an understanding of a shared values and goals. The coming together of people from all

walks of life presented an opportunity for face-to-face interaction and exchange of ideas

about everything from religion to television to politics to soccer. Within the tent city

(located at the center of Tahrir) people had the opportunity to discuss serious politics and

experiment with an alternative model of society marked by interdependence and

collective decision-making. Together they forged a society. Without the disciplined

mechanism of an organized state, they had to teach themselves ways of addressing basic

necessities (food, shelter, and security) and protect their territory against the regime’s

attempts at sabotage. Self-sustenance was achieved through the most mundane acts of

sweeping the streets, preparing food, and pitching tents. “This is the kind of society I

want to live in. Tahrir brings out the best in every Egyptian,” was a commonly heard

refrain at Tahrir.

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The self-organizing power of the people of Tahrir manifested itself in the face of

attacks initiated by ruffians sent by ruling-party officials on February 2. Shokr describes

the struggles to hold the space at Tahrir as follows:

Within hours, the scraps of Tahrir’s built environment were fashioned into instruments of fortification. Steel barriers erected years before to cut up the square were taken down and used as barricades. Burned-out police vehicles were flattened and positioned to block the main entrances. Groups of men crowded along the sidewalks, breaking the stone tiles into rocks to repulse the attackers. The street clinics mushroomed. Tahrir turned into a mass cooperative where everyone was involved in some from of labor to protect the square. [Shokr 2011]

The language of urban warfare is evident in Shokr choice of words such as fortification,

barricades, stone tiles turned into rocks to repulse the attackers, etc. The protesters used

whatever they could find in the surrounding area including burned-out police vehicles

and stone tiles to strengthen their borders, as well as deploying an army of men

positioned along the sidewalks to exhaust the enemy before it could reach the center. This

rapid strategizing and deployment was possible despite a lack of leaders. People

organized themselves in an improvised manner and assumed responsibilities according to

their abilities; the medically trained were doctors, the physically powerful built barricades

and took on attackers, often determined by gender. At the end of the war, the people of

Tahrir displayed the same level of self-organization when they returned to the square to

pack up the tents, dismantle the barricades, and sweep the streets. Shokr writes that in this

rush to return to normalcy, some even began to scrub away graffiti and repainted the

pavement. The material legacy of the anti-city that once stood at the heart of Tahrir had

to be destroyed in order to allow for the reintroduction of quotidian time and space. The

immaterial legacy of the protests, however, including the feelings of solidarity and

camaraderie, and the imaginary of a radically horizontal society based on collective

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decision-making and interdependency could not be destroyed as easily. As Shokr

observes, “Tahrir did not deliver a complete revolution, but it did awaken an exhilarating

sense of possibility that had been absent for far too long” (Shokr 2011). The protests were

won insofar as Mubarek was removed from power, but a lot remains to be confronted

within Egypt’s new political order including a history of sectarianism, class divides,

sexual harassment, opportunism and other social ills. The seeds of willpower, vision, and

optimism necessary to take on these challenges have been planted by the revolution.

Political scientist Mona El-Ghobashy (2011) draws attention to the politico-

historical context of the 2011 revolution, especially the many small and large street

protest that have happened in the country under Mubarak’s 30-year rule, as a means of

contextualizing the otherwise unforeseen popular uprising. El-Ghobashy argues that

rather than spontaneously willed into being by the population as commonly assumed, the

revolution was a result of a sudden change in the balance of power between the regime

and the population. Her starting point is that the two models frequently used in the study

of popular collective action are oddly without context. These are (1) the dramaturgical

model, which identifies a cast of self-propelled characters, armed with courage and a new

consciousness, who then make an uprising; and (2) the grievance model, which predicts

that social troubles accumulate over time and steadily diffuse among the population until

they reach an unforeseeable tipping point. The two models combine the role played by

specific actors, as well as their generalized complaints at the start of a collective action;

however, they do not, El-Ghobashy writes, explain when such people will band together

to challenge the conditions they deplore. She turns to the work of sociologist and political

scientist Charles Tilly (1973), who observed that revolutions happen when the efficiency

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of government coercion deteriorates. According to Tilly, this decline occurs “when the

character, organization and daily routines of the population to be controlled change

rapidly.” In the case of Egypt, three popular explanations emerged to make sense of the

unforeseen popular uprising against Mubarek’s autocratic rule: technology, Tunisia, and

tribulation. Besides these three, El-Ghobashy calls attention to the gradual politicization

of the Egyptian public. While the regime dismissed the many workers’ protests, rural

riots, electoral struggles and any other forms of popular striving as economic, local and

defensive, El-Ghobashy writes that the reality was that “Egyptians had been practicing

collective action for at least a decade, acquiring organizational experience in that very old

form of politics: the street action.”

Until the revolution, Egypt’s street protests could be classified under three types

of mobilizing structures: (1) workplace protests including such actors as industrial

laborers, civil servants, students and trade practitioners; (2) neighborhood protests; and

(3) associational protest including professional associations such as lawyers’ and doctors’

syndicates, social movements such as the pro-Palestine solidarity campaigns or the April

6 Youth Movement; and the youth wings of political parties. By January 25, 2011, the

first day of the revolution, every protest sector had field experience with police rule. A

strategic maneuver made possible by social media on this first day was the announcement

of the zero hour of the protests as 2 pm and its stated plan as demonstration in front of the

Interior Ministry, but it was a ruse. In the morning, organizers, most prominently the

April 6 Youth Movement, used cell phones and Facebook among others to disseminate

the real locations of the protests and the actual start time as noon. What started as a

midsize demonstration snowballed as people marched down small side streets (security

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forces had sealed off all the vital downtown streets leading to and from the Ministry and

were conducting ID checks at the entrances) picking up people along the way. The

operations room lieutenant colonel would later recall: “What we saw on January 25 was

an uprising, not a demonstration. A young man standing in front of an armored vehicle,

jumping on it to strike it, falling off and then doing it again? Honestly, there was no fear.”

Inspired by Lefebvre’s work on the revolutionary potential of urban space,

anthropologist Ahmed Kanna (2012) proposes that the revolutions of Arab Spring

significantly undermined the recent urbanist discourse of the U.S. military as practiced

during the Iraq War and its aftermath. By urbanist discourse what Kanna means is a “set

of assumptions, representations and practices that constitute the city as a culturally,

aesthetically, politically and economically ‘pathological’ space in need of top-down

intervention by visionary experts” (Kanna 2012:360). In the recent years, under the

auspices of the ‘global war on terror’ and neoliberalism, the U.S. military turned its

attention to the global south urban life. Its theorists predict that urban areas will be “the

future battlefield and combat in urban areas cannot be avoided” (2012:361) and expect

urban terrains in the developing world, including the Middle East, Latin America and

South Asia, to pose the most challenges for U.S. military strategy. Kanna notes that the

literature on military operations on urban terrain is notable for its culturalization of urban

growth and squalor. An example is the pathologization of the space occupied by the

‘Islamic’ world as a hotbed of revolt and terroristic tendencies. Kanna quotes a U.S. army

urban warfare theorist who justifies his prediction of the challenges to be faced in the

Middle East through a growing population of disaffected, terroristic youth: “Removed

from traditional cultural, religious, and social bonds that hold their aggression in check,

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restless young males will add more human kindling to the growing fires of urban,

fundamentalist insurgencies” (362). Rather than accepting this social reality, military

theorists propose to uproot the allegedly problematic society inhabiting such urban

spaces. In this vein, military urbanism resembles the high modernism of 1950s that

recreate space as a ‘tabula rasa’ upon which a radically new urbanscape (of wide

thoroughfares, and monumental, sculptural buildings in vast open spaces) can be

inscribed. Neoliberal urbanism and military urbanism of the ‘global war on terror’ both

attempt to shape space as a means of social control. Both aspire to minimize chaos and

unpredictability, and rather than address the causes of such social ills as terrorism and

insurgency, they simply sweep the problem under the rug.

While the Arab Spring resulted from this oppressive urbanism, militarization and

pathologization of Muslim societies after 9/11, it was simultaneously made possible by

the inability of neoliberal military urbanism to recognize the inherent complexity of and

the possibilities for unexpected occurrences within urban space. Kanna returns to

Lefebvre’s distinction between abstract space and representational space to reconcile the

militaristic and populist perspectives on urban space. Lefebvre’s description of abstract

space (“the space of expertise in capitalist society, space in which signification and visual

representation are dominant over other modes of knowing and being,” Kanna 2012:365)

characterizes the U.S. military’s approach to urban territory. Military theorists commonly

use maps, satellite images, and cultural generalizations to make sense of a complex urban

reality. A comical manifestation of this approach is the so-called culture cards that were

“distributed to U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, in which the indigenous populations

are shoehorned into a map of a priori categories such as ‘Shi‘a Arab’ and ‘Kurd’”

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(2012:362). The approach of the revolutionaries to urban space, by contrast, is

characterized by Lefebvre’s representational space (“experienced, lived, space in which

signification and visualization take their proper place beside embodiment, tactile

sensation, aesthetic experience and the like,” 365). For instance in Egypt, by taking over

a central public square and transforming it into an occupied territory with makeshift

barricades, the revolutionaries exploited and mapped urban space with their erratic

actions in ways illegible to the agents of the state. A famous line by Lefebvre most

accurately summarizes the aspirations of the revolutionaries: “To change life… we must

first change space” (360). By occupying Tahrir, they seized a unique opportunity to

reimagine space in ways different than the existing structural relations of fragmentation

and isolation.

#OCCUPY WALL STREET Inspired in part by the Arab Spring, the 2011 occupation of Wisconsin’s statehouse to

defend collective bargaining rights and the May 15 acampada, or campout, movement is

Spain, Occupy Wall Street began on September 17, 2011 in Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park.

The first rally and march on Wall Street was attended by two thousand people and nearly

200 camped out that night in Zuccotti. The occupation lasted until a police crackdown

that displaced protesters on November 15, 2011. The original call for the occupation of

Wall Street came from the Vancouver-based online journal Adbusters, which described

the new tactic as “a fusion of Tahrir with the acampadas of Spain” (Juris 2012:261).

From its beginning, the movement professed to being a part of a global network, both

culturally and geographically, encouraging international collaboration on the preparation

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and organization of its practicalities (Sparke 2013). Initially, videos and messages

attributed to the hacker collective Anonymous helped to spread the word about the

occupation (Juris 2012:261). In record time, similar occupy protests popped up across the

United States, most prominently in Chicago, Oakland, Washington, and Denver, and

around the globe, including cities like London, Berlin, Frankfurt, Quebec, and Hong

Kong (Harcourt 2012:46). Sociologists Yvonne Yen Liu (2013) argues that the

movement was spearheaded by the middle class, including the many young and college-

educated individuals, who united under their shared sense of frustration and

disillusionment with the job market.

Fig. 17. Occupy Wall Street Encampment at Zuccotti Park seen is empty of demonstrators, Tuesday, Nov. 15, 2011 in New York. By Mary Altaffer, source: Cryptome.

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Fig. 18. Zuccotti Park Occupied: what’s where map of the encampment. Source: Occupying Wall Street by Writers for the 99%.

The slogan “We are the 99%” reflected this criticism of the wealth inequality in

the United States by singling out the ‘Party of Wall Street’ as the representative body of

the one percent holding the majority of financial and political capital. David Harvey

summarizes the tactics of Occupy Wall Street as follows:

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To take a central public space, a park or a square, close to where many of the levers of power are centered, and, by putting human bodies in that place, to convert public space into a political commons – a place for open discussion and debate over what that power is doing and how best to oppose its reach. [Harvey 2012:161]

Anthropologist Jeff Maskovsky (2013) writes that the Occupy movement was

unprecedented in its political strategies and tactics, such as mass nonviolent occupations

of urban public spaces, nonhierarchical forms of organization, and large-scale assemblies

for radical direct democracy, a leaderless mode of decision making via group-consensus

building. Among others, the occupiers of Zuccotti Park expressed popular concern for

excessive control of big money in politics, un- and under-employment, exploitation in

workplaces, the monopoly powers in the media, and the recent foreclosures and

thousands who were dispossessed of their houses and assets as a result. Maskovsky

argues that the Occupy Movement provides a “powerful Left alternative to the right-wing

populism and austerity policies that have gripped the United States and Europe since the

global economic crisis of 2008” (2013:127). The movement encouraged broad coalitions

between students, immigrants, and underemployed due to its defense of the alienated, the

dissatisfied, and the discontented. Still, a survey conducted in late 2011 by Occupy

Research confirmed that over 80% of Occupy participants identified as white (Occupy

Research 2012). The average age of the 5,074 survey respondents was 42; almost half

were between the ages of 25 and 44, followed by those between 44 and 64. Moreover,

almost half of the respondents identified as working or lower middle class, with more

than half (54.4 percent) reporting that they earn less than $50,000. More than a third

declared that they were independent or did not identified with any political party, while a

similar number of respondents said they were sympathizers with the Democratic party.

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The most common activity amongst the Occupiers was posting on Facebook, followed by

holding face-to-face conversations about the movement.

In Occupying Wall Street: The Inside Story of an Action that Changed America

(2011), the anonymous writers’ colony for the 99% provide us with a quasi-ethnographic

account of living in Zuccotti Park. The author of the chapter “Living in the Square”

recounts the lived experience of those sleeping in the park through spatial markers such

as the kitchen, the people’s library, the media center, meditation space, and the medic

tent. Brief portraits of some of the Occupy participants will be of help in putting a

familiar face and attaching a personal history to the otherwise theoretical discussions of

the movement. The OWS Kitchen Working Group comprised of members such as

Heather Squire at 31 years old, who despite her BA in sociology had spent the four years

since graduation filling out applications for entry-level jobs with no luck, other than her

recent job as a $150-a-week deliverer of sandwiches. Another member was Eric Smith, a

former chef at Manhattan’s Midtown Sheraton Hotel. The People’s Library soon boasted

4,000 books, all through donations, and Betsy Fagin volunteered as a library at the park.

A resident of Brooklyn, she had worked at several libraries, including the National Art

Library in London. Looking for a way to make herself useful, she decided she was best

suited for a voluntary position at the library: “I said, ‘I’m a librarian. I can organize

books. At this time, organizing books is a revolutionary act” (Occupying Wall Street

2011:73). Despite not having been an activist before, Fagin described her participation in

Occupy Wall Street as a kind of calling, inspired in part by her parents’ (her father is

black and her mother is white) involvement in the Martin Luther King march. She said

that during the second week of the occupation, she “just got on a train and came over”

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(73). Many out-of-towners were attracted to Zuccotti Park and a case in point was Mandy

Henk, from Greencastle, Indiana, almost 800 miles away. She described her trip to New

York as follows: “It’s about a 12-hour trip. We drove for the first time with kids and dog

in the car, dropped the kids and the dog off at grandma’s, and then my husband and I

came out” (74). Mark Bray and Senia Barragán were two early members of the press

relations working group. The author describes the pair as “longtime activists and self-

professed anarchists, who in daily life are history Ph.D. students” (80). Because the daily

press interviews they did as part of their public relations duties required them to turn out

every day well-groomed and dressed in clean clothing, they felt they could not camp in

the park and chose to commute from Jersey City. Ed Mortimer worked as part of the

medic team and was the point person for drug and alcohol interventions. In a

conversation with the author, Mortimer said: “I’m cold, wet, and invisible, but it’s the

best time of my life” (96).

Fig. 19. People sit amongst shelters and tents in Zuccotti Park at the Occupy Wall Street encampment. By Justin Lane / EPA, source: New York Daily News.

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Anthropologist Jeffrey Junis (2012) studies the links between social media and

public space within the #Occupy Everywhere movements, arguing that the use of social

media such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter have contributed to an emerging “logic

of aggregation,” which explains the use of social media tools not as an end in itself, but

as a means to generating crowds of individuals at particular physical locations. By

contrast, within the global justice movements of the late 1990s and 2000s, social

networking channels such as listservs constituted a communicative infrastructure that

allowed individuals to come together under a common goal or a project and build

discursive communities around that shared interest. Junis terms this phenomenon the

“logic of networking,” because via listservs people formed “network-based

organizational forms that allowed groups of actors to communicate and coordinate at a

distance” (2012:266). This type of decentralized coordination among diverse,

autonomous collective actors was unique in its horizontal structure that allowed for free

and open circulation of information, and the practice of directly democratic decision-

making. Global justice mobilizations against the WTO in Seattle in 1999 or the World

Bank and IMF in Prague in 2000 were organized via listservs and in this context, the

listserv functioned as the primary tool of communication and coordination, allowing for

complex patterns of socialization among its members. During the #Occupy Everywhere

protest, social networking channels such as Facebook and Twitter, by contrast, were

mainly used by activists for “microbroadcasting,” that is, they allow individuals to

“quickly, cheaply, and effectively blast out vast amounts of information, links, and

updates via person-to-person, ego-centered networks, taking advantage of powerful

‘small-world’ effects to generate massive viral communication flows” (267). Given

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especially the strict character limit on Twitter, these new social networking tools “are less

effective than listservs for facilitating complex, interactive discussions regarding politics,

identity, strategy, and tactics” (267). This is why they physical occupation of spaces in

the #Occupy Everywhere movements mattered. The initial impetus for the occupation

was successfully created through social networking tools, but their use went only so far

as the creation of temporary “smart mobs.” As Junis writes, “It is only with the long-term

occupation of public space that such ‘mobs’ are transformed from ‘crowds’ of individuals

into an organized ‘movement’ with a collective subjectivity” (267). Through face-to-face

interactions and community building initiatives within the occupied physical spaces,

individual actors can forge a collective subjectivity. This subjectivity, though, is very

precarious and is under the constant pressure of disintegration into its individual

components.

Junis goes on to discuss the relationship between the virtual and the physical

spaces that are created through social networking tools during moments of discontent

such as #Occupy Everywhere. He sees the advantages of tent cities as being two-fold:

first, they play a tactical role by “occupying space and provoking conflict to garner media

attention and inspire participation” (2012:268). Second, tent cities play an infrastructural

role in that they facilitate ritual and community building and provide a space for

grassroots participatory democracy and ongoing interaction, collaboration, and

networking. In the case of Occupy Boston, the makeshift facilities built in occupied

territories such as the ‘library tent’, ‘people’s university’ workshops (262) on subjects

such as solidarity economics, and the ‘media tent,’ where activist wrote press releases,

sent tweets, and edited webpages (263), embodied the spirit of collaboration and

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solidarity. Junis observes that the occupiers discovered the true importance of space

during the course of the protests, although public occupations were seen as constituting a

primary tactical expression (along with a strong online presence) from the start. He

writes:

Space is important, first, on a microlevel, as the occupations contested the sovereign power of the state to regulate and control the distribution of bodies in space, in part, by appropriating and re-signifying particular urban spaces such as public parks and squares as arenas for public assembly and democratic expression. #Occupy encampments were thus “terrains of resistance”, physical sites of contention involving myriad embodied spatial struggles with the police and symbolic sites of contention over the meaning of space […] On a second, macro, level, the occupations challenged the transformation of social space into abstract space under the calculus of exchange value that drives neoliberal capitalism […] Projects of social change thus seek to reappropriate abstract space and recast it according to an alternative calculus of use value. [Junis 2012:268-9]

The micro- and the macro-levels are useful in identifying the multiple scales (the

immediate physical space and the larger political space) that are being contested by the

symbolic occupation of public grounds. The challenge to the regulation and control of the

distribution of bodies refers specifically to the use of space as a tool of domination and

social control by the government, whereas the particular choice of public parks and

squares comments on the erosion of public space through policies of fragmentation,

securitization, and the construction of private enclaves. Lefebvre’s theory on the

production of space manifests itself in the case of #Occupy Everywhere as the urban

dwellers’ discontent with the hegemony of capital and the state in decision-making

pertaining to the production of urban space. They demand the reorientation of power

towards urban dwellers and towards use-value. The experiment with direct democracy

within the encampments was only part of the utopia that the occupiers fell in love with;

the other half of the story concerned itself with the imaginaries of alternative uses of

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public space (such as General Assemblies, public libraries, kitchens, universities, etc.)

and alternative forms of socialization and face-to-face interaction within these shared

spaces. A sense of ownership towards the occupied public parks, the squares, and the tent

cities evolved over time as evinced by efforts to keep the shared spaces clean and orderly.

This responsibility stemmed from the fact that people themselves had created these tent

cities from scratch by appropriating and re-signifying built spaces that had come into

being without their consultation and over which they had no control otherwise.

As much as space is critical to the politics of aggregation, lawyer and professor

emeritus of urban planning Peter Marcuse (2011), a strong supporter of the movement,

cautions against ‘fetishizing’ Zuccotti Park’s tent city. With an eye towards later

questioning the role played by space and the physical occupation of a specific space, he

begins by identifying seven functions of the Occupation movement. These functions are

summarized by sociologist Todd Gitlin (2011) as follows: (1) A confrontation function

that is achieved by “taking the struggle to the enemy’s territory [this territory being the

Financial district and Wall Street more specifically], confronting, and potentially

disrupting [its] operations.” (2) A symbolic function that uses the economic inequality

argument as merely a springboard for the discussion of larger political issues and the

criticism of things as they are and the direction in which they are going. The symbolism

of occupation and the active involvement of bodies tie in to the occupations in the Arab

Spring, and a long history of social protest. (3) An educational function that involves the

promotion of “debate and clarification, toward the end of clarifying what the 1 percent

and the 99 percent mean, and how that infernal cleavage developed” (Gitlin 2011). (4) A

glue function that facilitates community building and promotes the creation of reciprocal

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trust, commitment to the pursuit of common goals, and mutual support during the process

of occupation. (5) An umbrella function that sees through the creation of “a space and a

format in which quite disparate groups can work together in pursuit of ultimately

consistent and mutually reinforcing goals” (Marcuse 2011). The political alliances that

are formed are meaningful only when they are on-going coalitions and not just temporary

collaboration between the deprived and discontented. (6) An activation function that

inspires others “to greater militancy and sharper focus on common goals and specific

demands … providing space for … cross discussions among supporting groups and

interests, organizing … events in support of … reforms that point [toward] Occupy’s own

ultimate goals of change” (Marcuse 2011). Lastly, (7) A model function that promotes

the Occupy movement’s internal organization and methods of proceeding as proof of an

alternative form of democracy and “of organization, not so much of spatial organization

as of social and political organization, ways of living together, diversity, democratic

decision-making, mutual support, self-help on a collective basis” (Marcuse 2011).

Marcuse argues that only in the first confrontation function is the physical

occupation of space critical, but even this significance is more of a symbolic one. The

actual physical interference with Wall Street’s functioning was very limited to the

occupation of Zuccotti Park and the encampment affected more residential than business

functions. Although the anti-city at Zuccotti emerged as the symbolic spatial alternative

to Wall Street and contemporary urban life dictated by capital and state interests,

Marcuse posits that “for the space to perform a symbolic function it need not necessarily

be occupied around-the-clock and need not be in only one location over time.” He

recognizes the many advantages of a constant spatial setting such as “the Glue holding

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together those sharing similar concerns” and the fact that threats to this constant shared

space can strengthen the bonds tying that community together, or the convenience of

having tents near each for purposes of offering a political umbrella to other groups.

Moreover, the umbrella and the activation functions do in fact require space for staging

and performing activities for spectacular purposes, and for collective action and public

demonstrations of unity and mutual support. The point Marcuse makes is simply that

there are alternatives to around-the-clock occupations and exposing Wall Street can be

done in many ways, in multiple spaces, at many times. Although important, space is a

secondary concern for when occupiers fight with the police to defend the boundaries of

their encampment. Marcuse believes that it is the “social interaction that the budding

community defends when it defends the space, the space being only its most visible and

most threatened manifestation.” Similarly, the umbrella function and the staging of

discontent do not necessarily require an occupied ground and can be achieved at any

single larger and well-known, easily accessible area as long as planning is done within

either virtual or an incubator space. The reason Marcuse wishes to highlight the fact that

the occupied space is simply a means to an end and only one means among others is that

he has observed an emerging fetishization of space. He is at the same time critical of and

discouraged by this fetishization, because it has made the “defense of that space the

overwhelming goal of the movement, at the expense of actions furthering the broader

goals that that space is occupied to advance.” In this obsession with the protection of

boundaries and the time and productive energies devoted to what goes on within the

occupied space, to how the occupants pitch their tents, survive the winter, etc. the big

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picture might get lost. Just as the conquest of a particular space is not the goal of the

movement, the space itself should not become the prize.

Occupy Wall Street’s claim to internationalism and its global appeal inspired

multiple critical geographical studies of occupy activism and a shared focus on the

interplay between the global and local scales of the movement. Anthropologist Zoltán

Glück (2013) attempts to resolve what he sees as one the central tensions of the

movement between the park-scaled locality of physical occupation and the global scale of

high finance. Building on theoretical work by Neil Brenner and Neil Smith, Glück posits

that both geographical and social scale are produced and reproduced through social

practices. The perpetuation of financial capital in a global scale depends on the social

practices of stockbrokers, debtors, etc. as well as a network of global institutions such as

World Bank. The local as a scale is produced by the social activity of people who build

communities, make claims of belonging, camp-out together in a public park, etc.

Accordingly, the global scale of the Occupy movement was reflected in its focus on

“Wall Street,” a metonym for global finance capital. Wall Street was not only the

principle locale of occupation, but also a symbol of economic injustice and wealth

polarization. It became, as Glück argues, “a prism through which the movement

understood itself, a master signifier which gave meaning to events” insofar as when

outside groups sought “Occupy Wall Street’s official endorsement for their planned

events or actions, the first question and litmus test for endorsement was usually how the

action would contribute to fighting ‘Wall Street” (Glück 2013). By contrast, the local

scale was materialized by the physical occupation of Zuccotti Park and the subsequent

attention paid to the everyday needs of the community through activities of Working

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Groups such as Kitchen, Comfort, Sanitation, and Medical. Similarly, critical geographer

Matthew Sparke (2013) studies the articulation of new communities of cross-border and

cross-cultural solidarity through the worldwide resonance of occupy activism. He begins

by problematizing social activist Naomi Klein’s opening remarks at Zuccotti Park on the

perceived political-geographic shift from a geography of blaming territories – wealth

nation-states – to targeting transnational geographies of class domination. In Spark’s

view, the power relations intrinsic to what he terms the “global geographies of

dispossession” provided the context to the protesters’ local, lower-Manhattan “geography

of repossession” (2013:388). Besides the “target space” and “everywhere space” of the

movement, Spark identifies a “shared space” that brought different communities together

to share their common sense of dismay and discontent with dispossession, an “affect

space” that captured the wider spirit of caring, empathy and sympathy that was felt at

many encampments across the United States and the world, and a “utopian space” that

materialized the dream image of an inclusive global struggle for repossession.

TAKSIM GEZI PROTESTS, ARAB SPRING, AND #OCCUPY EVERYWHERE On June 4, Turkish Head of State Abdullah Gül said that Gezi protests resembled the

Occupy movement in the West more so than uprisings in the Middle East due to the

simple fact that Turkey has democratic governance. Unlike the countries of the Middle

East, where there are no free elections, no public representation at the ballot box and no

courts that meet Western standards, Gül argued that Turkey had healthy democratic

institutions. Turkish people, similar to Occupy protesters in Western countries, were

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reacting to the government’s actions they perceived as being limiting to their lifestyles

and added:

Two years ago in London, cars were burned and shops were looted because of similar reasons. During revolts in Spain due to the economic crisis, people filled the squares. The Occupy Wall Street movement continued for months in the United States. What happens in Turkey is similar to these countries. [Hürriyet Daily News 2013u]

Gül’s words initiated debates on the differences and the similarities between the Gezi

protests, uprisings in the Middle East and North African countries, and the Occupy

Movement, the most well known example of which is the 2011 occupation of

Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park. Besides Gül, the Gezi protesters initially embraced the

Occupy theme as well in an attempt to spread their message to a foreign audience. They

started an “Occupy Turkey” Tumblr and encouraged the use of hashtags, #occupyturkey

and #occupygezi.

Staff writer for the liberal magazine New Republic, Delphine Rodrik (2013)

suggests that such superficial similarities between the Gezi protests and Occupy Wall

Street might be misleading in capturing the full extent of the demands and the success of

the protests in Istanbul. First, Gezi has accomplished a much broader coalition of

political, religious, and ethnic interests than Occupy Wall Street. The protests have urged

participants to put aside a conflicted national history notorious for its treatment of

minorities, particularly of Kurdish and Armenian populations. Rodrik recounts of an

instance when on June 28, while the protests were continuing at full speed across the

country, security forces opened fire at an unrelated protest in Lice, a district in Turkey’s

heavily Kurdish province of Diyarbakır. An 18-year-old Kurdish man was killed in the

attacks and 10 wounded. Although at other times, this attack would be perceived with

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disinterested contempt, this time the news were tweeted with a twist on the popular

#direnGezi hashtag #direnLice, or resist Lice. Second, Rodrik argues that Gezi

accomplished a lot more than Occupy Wall Street has. Gezi’s success was made palpable

when a Turkish court ruled against the plans to build a replica of Ottoman-style military

barracks in Taksim Square at the peak of the unrest in early June. What I would add to

Rodrik’s point is that unlike the purely ideological role that Zuccotti Park played in the

Occupy Wall Street protests, Gezi Park has actual significance insofar as initially the

protesters mobilized in an attempt to save the park from conversion into a shopping mall

in the guise of Ottoman-era Military Barracks. A third difference, pointed out by

investigate journalist Aydoğan Vatandaş (2013) in a piece published in the conservative

newspaper Zaman, concerns the fact that although Turkish authorities, similar to their

American counterparts, saw the Gezi protests as primarily a security concern, they

viewed it as an extension of certain internal and external threats. This point refers more

specifically to Prime Minister Erdoğan’s accusation of an assortment of foreign actors for

the unrest in Istanbul including the “interest lobby” and “Zionists.”

Those who declared a “Turkish Spring” by contrast had at the base of their claim

a comparison of Erdoğan’s anti-democratic ruling style with Mubarak’s. Erdoğan’s

authoritarian, religiously inspired and obsessively neoliberal politics after eleven years

and three terms in power became a target of criticism since 2001, with the jailing of

journalists on suspicion of conspiring with military generals-cum-terrorists, the start of

violent repression of public protests and the updating of the 1980s’ military regime’s

anti-terrorism laws (Gökay and Shain 2013). Tunisian writer and professor of political

science Larbi Sadiki compares the Gezi Protests and the Arab Spring using the categories

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of authoritarian space and neo-liberalism. Sadiki argues that Gezi protests, similar to the

many uprisings in the public squares of the Arab world, seized an “opportunity to reclaim

public space for the purpose of re-making citizenship and unleashing democratic

identities” (2013). The powerful symbolism of Mohammed Bouazizi’s self-immolation in

front of the Tunisian parliament and in plain daylight was precisely that it was committed

in public. The act instantly raised the issue of ownership of public space and served as a

detonator for larger displays of discontent. The initial uproar against the plans to rebuild

military barracks in Taksim’s Gezi Park functioned similarly as a detonator. Like

Bouazizi’s self-immolation, Gezi quickly become a rallying symbol for channeling public

outrage against central authority. Sadiki sees a commonality between the uprisings in

Arab countries and Turkey in the way public land was transformed into what he calls

“geographies of resistance” intended to challenge the hegemonic design of public space.

Sadiki further argues that both the Gezi Park and Arab protests ought to be interpreted

within a historic context of cumulative frustration and disaffection. The origins of

frustration and disaffection are numerous, although the recent marriage between Islamist

ideology and neoliberal dogmatism has singularly had serious undemocratic

consequences for especially the have-nots throughout the Middle East and the Arab word.

By contrast, sociologists Farzana Shain and professor of international relations

Bülent Gökay (2013) argue that Erdoğan’s authoritarian politics alone do not justify the

placement of the recent events in Turkey in the same category as the so-called Arab

Spring countries. Among the differences, Gökay and Shain list is the fact that Mubarak

was a dictator, whereas Erdoğan is an elected prime minister. Moreover, the Arab

uprisings were mass events preceded by massive economic crises, while the Gezi protests

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have mainly been led by middle and upper-middle-class youth and young urban

professionals – the beneficiaries of much of the economic growth – defending their urban

space and lifestyle. The two writers posit that the comparisons between Taksim and

Tahrir Square “represent a gross over-simplification based on a range of superficial

similarities many of which ignore the class analysis of the events” (Gökay and Shain

2013). Under AK Party’s 10-year-rule, Turkey’s economy has grown immensely and

since late-2012 Turkey has been ranked among the top ten emerging stars of the world

alongside with the BRICS – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. The per capita

income has tripled during this time. Gökay and Shain point to Turkey’s economic

development when they argue that Gezi protests also need to be distinguished from the

recent uprisings in the Mediterranean including Greece and Spain, where weak

economies have brought the unemployed youth out onto the streets.

At any rate, judging by the previously discussed accounts of their participants,

there is something to be said about the universality of the on-the-ground experience of the

Taksim Gezi Protests, the Egyptian Revolution, and #Occupy Wall Street. The theoretical

and political approaches are able to discern the differences and the varying ideological

significance of the protests, yet the actual experience of solidarity and the feelings of

affection, good will, and belonging are true across the board. The next chapter will

provide an ethnographic account of the Taksim Gezi protest, with the aim of giving shape

to the personal experience. A unifying theme is liberation from strict regimentation of

everyday activities, which opens up a liminal space of intense comradeship and

egalitarianism, while enabling social critique.

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3

VIEW FROM THE PARK

As Told by Selen, Ali, Yiğit, and Eren It had been almost six months since the protests when I began my research in Istanbul. I

have not spent much time in Istanbul during those six months between my six-week

seminar in Rio and fall semester at Princeton. The proverbial ‘homecoming’ was unique

this time in that I was not coming back to the same Istanbul that I have left in late June.

At its surface life in Istanbul was back to normal. Everyday order was restored in all

possible areas of life from commerce to education. Every now and then, smaller,

impromptu protests popped up in various quarters of city in an attempt to keep the Gezi

spirit alive. The closer one got to the immediate area around Taksim Square, however,

the more apparent it became that this was only a superficial fix. The city carried the

physical markers of the revolutionary summer. It appeared as though a new one was

being added every night to the already rich repertoire of playful Gezi graffiti. Piles of

rubble on the sides of the streets where barricades used to keep the police away from

Gezi were still waiting to be picked up by the municipal cleaning services. The city had

significantly increased the number of police patrol in and around Gezi Park. The

tenseness in the air really got under your skin the more time you spent in this area. On a

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personal level, participants’ lives have been irrevocably changed by the protests. In the

process, people learned to become a public and all my interlocutors told me that the

togetherness was still in people’s minds. They told me a revolutionary seed has been

sown and there was no going back. The struggle was very much alive on the social media

with new leaked videos and phone conversations of the members of the cabinet being

tweeted and retweeted everyday, complimented by funny memes mocking Prime

Minister Erdoğan. This study is based on my semi-structure interviews with eight Gezi

participants that I connected with through my extended family and friends.

Demographically, the participants I interviewed identified more broadly with the left, all

had completed or were in the process of completing their university degrees and would

consider themselves artistic, their areas of expertise ranging from music to creative

writing and film production. For the purposes of this study, I will focus on Selen, Ali,

Yiğit, and Eren.6

Selen and Ali agreed to meet me at their apartment in Cihangir, a neighborhood in

Beyoğlu that is about a ten minute walking distance from Taksim Square. Selen, who told

me she was 37 years old, did not look her age in the relaxed shalwar pants and headband

made from a traditional ornamented Anatolian cloth. She worked as a documentary

director for years, travelling to remote villages of Anatolia and making short films on

traditional arts and ways of life. Ali, at 30 years old, was in between jobs when I met him,

but told me he worked at a bookstore at the time of the protests. He had studied

philosophy as an undergraduate and enjoyed reading just about anything he could lay his

hands on. He had a beard and many tattoos that in my mind complimented his overall

artistic attitude. The two chain-smoked through our chat, while sipping on their large 6 All names are pseudonyms to protect privacy.

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coffee mugs. Within a couple minutes of meeting Ali and Selen, it made sense to me that

the two should live in Cihangir, which is known for its artistic and intellectual

community.

Cihangir is one of the few remaining neighborhoods in old town Istanbul that

successfully retained its neighborhood (mahalle) feel. Turkish scholar Altan İlkuçan

describes the subsequent waves of gentrification in Cihangir, starting with the late

Ottoman period. From the 18th century onwards, the general area in which Cihangir is

located, which is known by the names Galata and its extension Pera, had been quarters in

which the Europeans and Levantines constituted the majority of population. In this area,

with their embassies, churches, synagogues, İlkuçan writes, “the Levantines, Greek,

Armenian, and Jew minorities formed the first bourgeois population – in Western sense –

of the town, and recreated all the features of the European lifestyle of the era” (2004:52).

After the founding of the Turkish Republic in 1923, many minority residents left for their

home countries and ensuing the displacement of Greek minorities starting 1964, Muslim

middle-class moved into Cihangir. During the 1970s, Cihangir was composed of mostly

internal migrants from Eastern Anatolia, and intellectual households generally referred to

as the ‘bohemian bourgeoisie’. Around this time, underground prostitution businesses

entered Cihangir and towards the end of 1980s the neighborhood was introduced to a new

group of minority, black population from Africa – especially Nigeria. The municipal

government began its larger Beyoglu project in the early1990s and helped the

rehabilitation of Cihangir with its practices. In 1995, the Association for Improvement of

Cihangir was formed with the support of architects and professionals, as well as some of

the old residents of the neighborhood. Its aim remains to this day to promote community

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participation in efforts to improve Cihangir’s social and built environments. This is

achieved through cultural activities, such as concerts and plays, and a monthly bulletin on

recent community developments, activities and achievements. İlkuçan writes, “The

neighborhood society helped Cihangir to (re)-gain a positive reputation within the public

– both residents and nonresidents – not only for its physical characteristics but also its

social composition” (69).

Fig. 1. Historic buildings in Cihangir, by Moshe Aelyon.

As Cihangir residents, their active involvement in community development and

familiarity with urban politics was determining of Selen and Ali’s activism during the

Gezi protests. When the protests first started, Selen said she was in Bodrum, a famous

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Turkish port city on the southwestern Aegean shore, but returned to Istanbul

immediately, because she felt like her “neighborhood was being raided.” Due to the

proximity of her apartment to Gezi Park, the place had a special meaning in her life. She

described how she would walk through Gezi Park everyday on her way to work and take

walks in the park when she felt like temporarily escaping the city. Cihangir was not only

a place of residence for Selen, instead it was an important part of who she was and she

took pride in identifying herself as Cihangirli, from Cihangir. When in Bodrum she was

together with a group of Cihangir residents, similarly she shared a tent at Gezi with her

neighbors from Cihangir and kept close to what she called the Cihangir crew throughout

the protests. She said, “First I perceived of [the protests] as the neighborhood I belonged

to, where I lived. This I think stemmed from having known the place from before.” Ali

agreed with Selen on the importance of knowing the area well:

Ali: In a situation like this it is very important to have a map of the area in your mind, because the places you could escape to, all of a sudden they could intensify attacks, you might be put in a tough situation. It is very important to know accordingly where you will escape, to know the holes.

Selen: Living here was a huge advantage.

Ali: After all we live here. Drop me here with my eyes covered, it wouldn’t make a difference, I will find my way.7

This personal view of the protests, one that literally hit close to home for Ali and Selen

contrasted with the significance Gezi Park had for most other protesters. Meeting a fellow

protester from Izmit, the largest city of the neighboring Kocaeli Province, was shocking

for Selen. She mentioned numerous times that meeting this man who saw Gezi for the

first time in his life gave her a unique perspective on the protests. Prior to her encounter

with the man, Selen considered the protest as a local event pertaining to a space that was 7 All interviews were originally conducted in Turkish. This and all subsequent translations are my own unless otherwise noted.

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deeply personal for her – her neighborhood, her city, the park she walked through

everyday one her way to work. The encounter with the man from Kocaeli was a breaking

point at which Selen got a glimpse of the geographical expanse of the protest beyond her

immediate surroundings, as well as its political reverberations. The local, the national,

and the global merged into one at that point in time and this opened up her eyes to a

larger reality that she grew to like. She liked the aspect of accommodating the whole of

Turkey in her backyard and sharing this space that is dear to her heart with others.

I met my two other interlocutors, Yiğit and Eren, at Yiğit’s apartment in

Mecidiyeköy, a neighborhood located in the Şişli district well connected to Taksim via

subway and metrobus lines. The face of Mecidiyeköy has been rapidly changing since the

demolishion on Ali Sami Yen Stadium in 2010, which used to be home to one of the top

three football clubs in Istanbul, Galatasaray. The municipality has an urban renewal plan

for the area that seeks to replace the old four-, five-storied apartment buildings with

luxury residential complexes suitable for its new role as financial and a residential hub.

The change began with the opening of the shopping mall Cevahir, which between 2005

and 2011 was the largest shopping mall in Europe. The 40-storied Trump Towers (one

residential, one office) were completed soon after. The two towers loom above the old

neighborhood where Yiğit’s apartment building is located, making its predestined

demolishment ever more apparent. Yiğit’s apartment was located on the top floor of an

old walk-up building and inside it was a total bachelor’s pad with a big library full of

philosophy and pop culture books, and various kinds of electronic guitars hanging from

its walls. At 30 years old, Yiğit told me he studied film production and media studies as

an undergraduate and was currently working as freelance photographer and video

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producer. He had lived in London for some years, but said life abroad was not for him.

From the way he talked about the protests, it was clear to me that he was not only heavily

interested in politics, but also liked to theorize and think in sociological terms about the

political developments in Turkey since the AK Party came to power in 2002. When

talking about Erdoğan, he did not hold back and identified himself broadly as a Kemalist,

a supporter of the founder of the republic Atatürk. Yiğit and Eren were practicing their

tunes when I knocked on the door and they insisted on playing some of their new stuff

before we proceeded with our conversation on Gezi. Eren was 23 years, and was still at

university for his mechanical engineering degree, but was in no rush to graduate, because

he would much rather be a musician than an engineer. He had long hair and an unkempt

mustache and goatee that suited his aspiring rocker look. The two met several years ago

when Eren was called in to substitute for a bass guitarist at Yiğit’s old band and went on

to start their own 60s inspired surf rock band “Bosporus Surfers.”

THEORETICAL FOUNDATIONS

Collective Effervescence and Communitas

Generalizing Yiğit’s hesitance toward the potential reasons behind his involvement in

Gezi to the whole of Gezi participants, I would assert that most protesters were unable to

claim agency and explain the precise motivations driving their actions at the moment of

coming out to the streets:

I guess I went out to the streets because I had been opposed to this government ever since they came into power but I didn’t know why I kept coming out during those three months […] How did we find ourselves out on the streets like this? I, for the first time in my life, went out as a protester, as a rebel against this

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oppressive government. Like all others, we too had exploded. We saw the courageous people and followed in their footsteps.

Months after his involvement in Gezi, Yiğit is still unsure about why he went out on the

streets. He thinks the reason is primarily political, but says towards the end that seeing

courageous others was the deciding factor. His hesitance, however, juxtaposed strongly

with the assertive way in which Selen and Ali stated that at the end Gezi irrevocably

changed things:

Selen: I think Gezi changed many things in people’s lives.

Ali: A temporary transition into the most logical kind of democracy, direct democracy, took place and people liked it. The togetherness is still in people’s minds. Time has passed since, it seems like everything is very calm now, as if people are busy dealing with other things, but this idea persists in people’s minds.

Selen: People know that they have the necessary strength for it. That feeling of strength, of togetherness… Not just physical, but also online. Not a lot is being done right now, but this war is continuing on the Internet and on the social media. That spirit, knowing that we are all together in this is empowering. That’s to say we can do things. When pushed for it, we will do things.

In its communication to me, the clarity achieved by Selen and Ali through their

involvement in the protests is in strong contrast to the hesitancy demonstrated by Yiğit.

Interestingly though, Selen and Ali both use elusive terms like idea and spirit, and

sensorial rather than cognitive ways of knowing such as feelings of togetherness and

strength to communicate their new-found perspective on life and society. They claim that

the protests have been a learning experience, but the way in which they acquired

knowledge was unique in that their level of clarity was only available to those who were

bodily present at the park. As Yiğit later told me jokingly, half of his words in English,

Gezi was a “wish you were there” kind of experience. Some reflection on anthropological

theory will be of help in elucidating Yiğit’s journey from seeming oblivion to Selen and

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Ali’s new-found perspective on life and society. The two concepts I will use to think

about the broader implications for the individual of involvement in a large scale protest

like Gezi have their origins in social rituals. These are “collective effervescence”

introduced by French sociologist Émile Durkheim (1858-1917) and “communitas” by

British anthropologists Victor Turner (1920-1983).

In Durkheimian terms, it was the social in Yiğit that called him for action. One of

the key concepts introduced by Durkheim is human dualism. According to Durkheim,

human beings possess two consciences within them. First is what Durkheim calls the

individual being that is determined by and limited to the physical body, and the second is

the social being that concentrates the highest reality in the intellectual and moral realm

within the individual. Religion scholar Tim Olaveson explains that this “homo duplex can

be viewed in terms of the body and the soul (an extension of the profane and the sacred),

the egoistic appetites and moral action, the individual and the social” (2001:97). Whereas

the individual self is driven by sensations, the sensual appetites, and more broadly the

ego, the social self is characterized by moral behavior and attachment to something larger

than the self. In Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), Durkheim writes:

For the collective force is not entirely outside of us; it does not act upon us wholly from without; but rather, since society cannot exist except in and through individual consciousness, this force must also penetrate us and organize itself within us; it thus becomes an integral part of our being and by that very fact this is elevated and magnified. [2001[1912]:209]

Although Yiğit went out to the streets by himself, the awareness that once outside he

would no longer be alone but instead be a part of something larger was determining of his

decision. The singular use of “I went out to the streets” quickly transforms into the

collective language of “how did we find ourselves out on the streets like this.” When at

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home, Yiğit is an isolated being, hence the “I went out,” but when he is at the streets the

boundaries between his own self and the collective blur.

Durkheim’s theory is principally motivated by his interest in religion and

Aboriginal totemism more specifically. Durkheim situates the origins of philosophy and

sciences in religion, arguing that “collective representations” precede any individual

thought. Upon birth, individuals inherit societal “categories of understanding,” which are

religious in origin. These categories —including, notions of time, space, number, cause,

substance, personality— through which we interpret our sensory experiences and form

judgments are not only products of religious thought, but are also social. Central to

Durkheim’s theory is the equation of the totem with society. The totem’s materiality

makes the religious experience seem “external to individuals and transcendent,” yet “like

the clan it symbolizes, the [religious] force can be realized only in and through those

individuals” (167). The concurrent immanence and transcendence of the religious define

the experience of the sacred as acting from within, and also as an external power that

compels the individual to act in certain ways. More than once, “society requires us to

become its servants, forgetting our own interests,” and we submit to these demands not as

a result of physical force, but rather the “moral authority with which [society] is

invested” (154) compels our respect. The moral authority of the group becomes

compelling in moments of collective action, which Durkheim calls “collective

effervescence.” When the dispersed tribe members come together for religious rites,

something sacred takes place:

The very act of congregating is an exceptionally powerful stimulant. Once the individuals are gathered together, a sort of electricity is generated from their closeness and quickly launches them to an extraordinary height of exaltation […] The initial impulse is amplified each time it is echoed, like an avalanche that

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grows as it goes along. And since passions so heated and so free from all control cannot help but spill over, from every side there is nothing but wild movements, shouts, downright howls, and deafening noises of all kinds that further intensity the state they are expressing […] People are so far outside the ordinary conditions of life and so conscious of the fact, that they feel a certain need to set themselves above and beyond ordinary morality. [Durkheim 2001[1912]:153]

The experience of collective effervescence is thus characterized by intensity of emotions,

intimacy and a range of stimuli that join feelings and ideas of solidarity. The communal

aspect of collective effervescence is especially important in the transmission and

strengthening of emotions. Olaveson posits that religious rites are generative of society

insofar as they allow for society to make and remake itself periodically (163-4). He

writes that Durkheim’s description of collective effervescence borders on a type of

delirium or ecstasy that overwhelms participants through the imminence of animalistic

instincts and an intense emotional surge (107). This differs in significant ways from the

profane phase of aboriginal life, which dominated by economic activity and menial tasks,

such as farming, gathering food, hunting and fishing. Economic units are dispersed across

the landscape and society rarely comes together as a group, which makes life “rather

monotonous, lazy and dull” (162).

Another way of thinking about Yiğit’s transformation from someone sitting at his

house to a “protester” or a “rebel” is through the language of a rite of passage, popularly

discussed by British anthropologists Victor Turner (1920-1983). Borrowing from French

ethnographer Arnold van Gennep (1909), Turner defines rites of passage as “rites, which

accompany every change of place, state, social position and age.” He writes:

Van Gennep has shown that all rites of passage or ‘transition’ are market by three phases: separation, margin (or limen, signifying ‘threshold’ in Latin), and aggregation. The first phase (of separation) comprises symbolic behavior signifying the detachment of the individual or group wither from an earlier fixed point in the social structure, from a set of cultural conditions (a ‘state’), or from

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both. During the intervening ‘liminal’ period, the characteristics of the ritual subject (the ‘passenger’) are ambiguous; he passes through a cultural realm that has few or none of the attributes of the past or coming state. In the third phase (re-aggregation or reincorporation), the passage is consummated. [Turner 1966:94-5]

Turner picks up on the idea of liminal entitles, which refer to neophytes in initiation or

puberty rites, and defines them as “betwixt and between.” Turner posits that during rites

of passage we are presented with a “moment in and out of time,” in and out of secular

social structure. The idea of being in between refers specifically to the two models for

human interrelatedness, or structure, singled out by Turner. He writes:

The first is of society as a structured, differentiated, and often hierarchical system of politico-legal-economic positions with many types of evaluation, separating men in terms of ‘more’ or ‘less.’ The second, which emerges recognizably in the liminal period, is of society as an unstructured or rudimentarily structured and relatively undifferentiated comitatus, community, or even communion of equal individuals. [1966:95]

The liminal period is characterized by an intense comradeship and egalitarianism

amongst the neophytes. The disappearance, or homogenization, of secular distinctions of

rank and status brings the liminal entities closer. Turner prefers to use the Latin term

“communitas” as opposed to “community” to distinguish the particular form of social

relationship and human bond that exists between the liminal entities from a simple area of

common living. Anthropologist Tom Boland (2013) explains that communitas “provides

the possibility of unfettered, spontaneous free association, without limits on behavior,

desire and imagination” (234). For the neophyte in the liminal phase, everyday structure

appears merely as the “stifling of humanity and the constraint of freedom, the imposition

of mundane and closed beliefs on wonder and imagination” (2013:234).

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Tim Olaveson asserts that functionally Durkheim’s collective effervescence and

Turner’s communitas are one and the same. Importantly, both phenomena are collective

in nature; both “developed in the study of ritual and attributed to a de-differentiating,

transgressive, leveling and equalizing nature” (107). Collective effervescence and

communitas exist outside the normal social existence of a group, and this liberation from

daily regimentation of activity place both phenomena at a space of immediacy, allowing

them to posses only a temporary existence. Because both admit behavior not normally

accepted in the everyday life of society, an intense emotional content emerges in the

process of liberation. Both Durkheim and Turner have found the intense emotional and

bodily experiences as foundational to higher cognitive processes, such as the formation of

values and norms.

Van Genner’s criteria are of help in identifying the three stages of Yiğit’s rite of

passage as characteristic of the larger protester experience at Gezi. The first phase is

marked by Yiğit’s separation from home, signified by the act of coming out to the streets.

As his unsure tone indicates the decision to come out was more instinctual than

calculated. Yiğit characterizes it as an exposition, an outburst of accrued anger and

frustration with the oppressive practices of the AK Party government. I suggest that this

fleeting moment of visceral agency over reasoned passivity characterized not just the act

of coming out but the rest of the protests as ephemeral and momentary. In a similar vein,

W. J. T. Mitchell, professor of English and Art History, argues that Occupy Wall Street is

more accurately characterizes as a revolutionary ‘moment’, rather than an ‘event’. He

asks: “Would it be better to think of this as a revolutionary moment, with all the

associated ambiguities of the merely ‘momentary’ and ephemeral alongside the sense of

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the momentous turning point, the ‘moment of force’ that torques historical events and

makes tiny occurrences (a fruit vendor’s self-immolation in Tunisia, for example) into a

global incident and a catalyst for revolution?” (2013:ix). Reason alone cannot explain

why hundreds of thousands came out to the streets in Tunis following Mohamed

Bouazizi's self-immolation and the same is true for both Occupy Wall Street and Gezi

Park protests. The threshold for when people say they had enough with the government

seems arbitrary and as Yiğit’s case demonstrates individual actors cannot reason through

their momentary decision to come out. The ambiguities of the momentary allow us to

look past the customary cause-and-effect sequence and situate the protests outside of the

established time and space index. Yiğit’s separation from home signifies a detachment

from everyday life in the city and the associated strict regimentation of activities, such as

when one gets out of bed, what time one arrives at work, a predetermined lunch break,

etc. The liminal period and the momentary begin with Yiğit’s identification as a protester

or a rebel.

The liberation from everyday regimentation opens up a liminal space wherein

characteristics of status system such as totality, anonymity, and homogeneity make way

for partiality, heterogeneity, and systems of nomenclature. Turner identifies these binary

oppositions as being central to the experience of liminality, and some other relevant

binary pairs include, absence of property/property; minimization of sex

distinctions/maximization of sex distinction; absence of status/status;

unselfishness/selfishness; acceptance of pain and suffering/avoidance of pain and

suffering (106-7). During the ten-day détente that started on June 1st with the withdrawal

of the police from Gezi Park, the ordinary regimentations were replaced by what one can

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broadly refer to as the Gezi routine. In many instances during my conversations with the

Gezi participants, they brought up an interesting binary opposition to characterize how

unique Gezi to them was. First, the concept of time changed. As Eren said, “Night and

day were mixed up.” A lot of the workplaces were closed during the protests, and those

who stayed at the encampment at Gezi Park rarely left for their homes, except to take a

quick shower and come back. The protesters knew that the police would come in exactly

at midnight and the day revolved around this fact. People stayed up all night fighting with

the police and slept during the day instead. Ali described a time when he was up at four

in the morning, building barricades with a group of men. They would carry signposts,

paving stones, and even a picnic table from the front yard of a nearby apartment building.

Second, the lines between public and private property blurred. The protesters

began calling the park their homes. Yiğit once said that at Gezi he was feeling as

comfortable as he does at home. People living in the apartment buildings nearby kept

their doors unlocked. Both Yiğit and Eren told of instances when they escaped into

apartment buildings and even into people’s homes when running away from the police.

Unselfishness drove the sharing of private property and money. Eren said, “I remember

giving my last bill of 50 TL [about $25] to someone so that person would buy some

things. A tear gas canister might have hit the man in his leg. We would give money to

help him.” Third, although almost everyone mentioned some gender specific roles at the

protests determined for the most part by one’s physical abilities, such as men fighting

with the police at the front and women volunteering at the makeshift infirmary or the

kitchen, Selen’s experience at Gezi’s tent city evinces the minimization of sex

distinctions:

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I was sleeping in the tent. Five guys came into the tent and laid next to me while I was sleeping. My friend’s husband had been in there, slept for about half an hour. Because you stay up all night, there are no such perceptions, not a sense of discomfort. Instead there is trust.

Sleeping with a stranger in a small tent can be an intimate and discomforting experience

for many, especially if members of the opposite sex are involved, and Selen takes this for

granted when she says “there are no such perceptions” without feeling the need to specify

what “such perceptions” might mean. The absence of gender distinctions and of private

property during the liminal phase of Gezi makes Selen accepting of physical intimacy

with strange men and the feeling of discomfort is replaced by trust. Four, Ali’s words on

his dislocated shoulder as a result of close combat with the police shed light on the

acceptance of pain and suffering as a distinctive experience of liminality:

It affects you more when the smaller plastic bullet or the tear gas canister hits you. You want to get more involved […] But when my shoulder was dislocated, the unity of my body was upset. I was especially sad about not entering another front, because my shoulder was dislocated, I was a half man, I had to stay in the background […] Otherwise, you get into the routine of “it didn’t hurt,” “it didn’t hurt” [acımadı ki, acımadı ki; mimics a children’s game in Turkish]. You get more combative. Nothing happened, maybe it hurt a bit, but acımadı ki, acımadı ki. You end up wanting more.

Ali not only accepts pain, but wants more. He thrives on chaos, commotion, and

disobedience. Interestingly, the borrowing of the phrase “acımadı ki, acımadı ki” from a

children’s game which taunts the aggressor as if they are not powerful enough to hurt

whomever they just struck implies that for Ali combat with the police is merely a game.

Although his shoulder is dislocated, the possibility of death does not cross his mind, and

what instead disheartens him is his inability to fight in the front. Within the seeming

chaos of police combat, Ali discovers a game with its set of rules and regulations. This

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claim for structure is substantiated by the fact that police attacks started promptly at

midnight everyday.

Lastly, the intense comradeship and egalitarianism amongst the neophytes

characteristic of the liminal period is apparent in Ali and Selen’s words on togetherness

that persists in people’s memories of Gezi. To Ali, the egalitarianism that exited in the

park is proving of the “the most logical kind of democracy, direct democracy.” As

opposed to representative democracy, wherein representatives elected by people

deliberate and vote on policy initiatives in line with their constituent’s interests, direct

democracy empowers the people for making executive decisions and laws. Evidently,

Ali’s claim is a subjective one and is shared by many left-minded occupy movement

participants. This claim is embedded in Ali’s observations of the smooth functioning of

the general assembly at Gezi, which similar to the other global occupy movements

functioned as the primary decision making body based on consensus building among all

participants, and the elimination of social ills such as rape and robbery despite the lack of

police and community leaders. Ali, however, seems to overlook the fact that the

conditions which allowed for direct democracy to work, such as the homogeneity of

interests, anonymity, the absence of status, etc. were unique to this liminal phase.

I would argue that the third phase of re-aggregation or reincorporation at Gezi is

incomplete. Tom Boland (2013) explains that feasting and sociability traditionally

characterize this final state and it involves a celebration of the renewed structures by the

society. The point is that those cultural values that may have been taken for granted are

renewed and reaffirmed by the ritual process. The apparent disorder of ritual makes way

for the everyday order. Although prima facie all is back to normal in Istanbul (Ali says

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everything seems very calm now), Gezi spirit is kept alive by the social media. The

dismissal of the protesters from Gezi was forced rather than by choice. Boland argues

that social critique is located in liminality, especially in the experience of communitas

where all is open to question and normative structures are made external and

meaningless. He draws attention to a passage from Turner’s The Ritual Process (1969):

“If liminality is regarded as a time and place of withdrawal from normal modes of social

action, it can be seen as potentially a period of scrutinization of the central values and

axioms of the culture in which it occurs” (229). The point is that social critique is less

dependent on individual brilliance than the collective suspension of order. Boland warns

that if the ritual cannot be completed, liminality and thus critique may become chronic.

Embodied Space

Anthropologist Setha Low proposes the term “embodied space” to describe the “location

where human experience and consciousness takes on material and spatial form” (2003:9).

Embodied space theory underscores the importance of the body as simultaneously a

“physical and biological entity, lived experience, and a center of agency, a location for

speaking and acting on the world” (10). In Western culture, the self is often perceived as

“naturally” placed in the body and we imagine ourselves “experiencing the world through

our ‘social skin,’ the surface of the body representing a kind of common frontier of

society which becomes the symbolic stage upon which the drama of socialization is

enacted” (10). The inherently social and cultural makeup of the biological body means

that the sensorial perception of the outer world is processed in cultural terms and

frameworks. Anthropologist Mary Douglas (1970) similarly writes of “two bodies” of the

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social and physical, and Nancy Scheper-Hughes (1987) of the “three bodies” of the

individual body, social body, and body politic (11).

Anthropologist Miles Richardson (1982) provides an ethnographic account of

embodied space in Cartago, Costa Rica by looking at the contrasting experiences of

being-in-the-plaza versus being-in-the-market. His study of embodied space is grounded

in German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s (1962) concept of being-in-the-world. This

concept concerns our existence in the world and explains that the means through which

we achieve existence is through being in the world: “for us to be we must have a world to

be in” (1982:421). Yet at the same time ‘world’ is not external to our existence insofar as

we bring about the world in which we live through our actions and interactions.

Richardson writes:

With the ability to make artifacts, we can fix our experience – much in the manner that a text fixes discourse […] As the objectification of our subjective experience of social interaction, material culture, then, is not simply there, like an object of nature, structuring our movements by its mere physicality. Instead, it assumes the dramatistic qualities that Kenneth Burke (1962) attributes to words and so becomes a ‘scene,’ or better, an opened text, whose narrative we read even as we interact. [1982:422]

The interdependence between the material production of space and the “social

construction of space” (Low 1996) brings to mind a cohort of actors ranging from

architects and urban planners to politicians and the eventual users of space. The material

production of public spaces involves economic and political decisions that are further

shaped by the architects’ and the planners’ aesthetic concerns and the ideological

interests of the state. The way that space is actually used and appropriated through the

users’ everyday routines is a cultural process that reflects the desires and the needs of the

public. It is also a political process, because due to the exclusivity of space, only one of

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the competing desires can be materialized within a given space at a given time.

Accordingly, the social construction of space is better understood as a dialogue and a

process of negotiation among the competing values, rationale, ideals, etc. Richardson

discusses the interaction between space and its user as “defining a situation,” which

means that the user responds to the “overt messages that objects present through their

appearance and arrangement and the more implicit theme that the setting in its totality

conveys” (1982:424). Claiming that something is in-place versus out-of-place is a

normative statement that depends on people’s interpretive responses to the material

setting.

Richardson observes that whereas being-in-the-plaza is about cultura, appropriate

and socially correct behavior, being-in-the-market is about listo, the smart, ready, and

clever behavior. He writes:

Basic market activity requires that people engage each other’s presence. Because their livelihood depends on it, the vendors must intrude themselves into the customer’s sphere and disrupt the customer’s reflection […] The physical organization of the market – the tramos [literally, contiguous pieces of terrain separated from each other by whatever means at hand] lined up one after another and the checkerboard arrangement of the aisles – facilitates the close, two-party, face-to-face exchanges between vendor and customer […] Contrary to the focused participation of the market, plaza interaction necessitates that people self-consciously become observers even as they respond to the actions of others. The organization of plaza space distributes clusters of men, women, and children so that as they sit or stroll together, they become the audience for other small groups. Likewise, the very uniqueness of the plaza, its circularity in a squared world, its outdoor setting, its cultivated greenness, and its monumental displays, means that it conspicuously intrudes itself into people's awareness and encourages them to distance themselves from their absorption into the actions of others. [1982:430]

People act as if they are ‘on stage’ when in the plaza. Their actions that border a kind of a

serene performance are calculated and conscious of the other users’ disengaged gaze. The

cultured performance of people when in the plaza finds its origins in the material

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arrangement of the space. The plaza is centrally located in the nexus of urbanity and is

surrounded by institutions such as the palacio municipal (which houses both local and

provincial offices) that represent order and authority. Similarly, the display of nature

within the plaza is of a “nature that has been tamed and arranged according to a reasoned

plan, [depicting] the triumph of rationality over barbarism” (1982:432). By contrast,

people are offstage when in the market. They act more naturally and do not concern

themselves with maintaining certain standards of conduct. The market is about the

exchange of commodities and requires that the users are engaged, alert, that they are

negotiating prices to their advantage and are acting smart.

Prior to the protests, the experience of being-in-Gezi-Park was similar to that of

being-in-the-plaza, such that its similarly circular arrangement encouraged onstage

performance and serene action. Located by one of Istanbul’s busiest public squares and a

transportation hub, the park was designed to be inward-looking and is physically isolated

from its surrounding by a thick wall of tall, densely planted trees. The side that borders

Taksim Square has wide steps that lead into the park and the concrete pours into the

park’s core. While the overall plan is rectangular, the circular grounds of the Monument

of the Republic located at Taksim Square is replicated at the heart of the park and

alternative paths leading to this circular core follow a winding path for a leisurely

promenade. Indeed, the park was inaugurated as İnönü Promenade (İnönü Gezisi) in 1944

and is known as Gezi Park today. “Gezi” is one of those imprecise words that could be

translated as tour, promenade or sightseeing. Clear from the park’s original name is its

planer Henri Prost’s intention for cultura. I remember my grandmother telling me that

people used to put on their best clothes to visit Taksim’s Istiklal Avenue. Arm-in-arm

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with her girlfriends, my grandmother would take a stroll up and down the avenue to enjoy

its many boutiques, window displays, and cafes and they would end their day of

promenade at the park to enjoy a bit of nature before they returned to their homes. Today,

the northwestern corner of the park grounds is taken up by the 11-storied Gezi Hotel

Bosphorus. The promenade culture is very much dead and people no longer dress up to

visit Taksim. Yet Gezi Park remains one of those few green spaces in downtown Istanbul

where people from the surrounding offices come to enjoy their lunch breaks or people

choose to take a detour and walk through the park on their way to work to momentarily

get away from the hustle and bustle of the city. Phenomenologically, the park feels like a

radically serene and quiet sanctuary when juxtaposed with the loudness, commotion, and

the high-speed of Taksim Square.

Fig. 2. An aerial view of Gezi Park. The Monument of the Republic can be seen on the top right corner, next to Taksim Square. The northwestern corner of the park grounds is taken up by Gezi Hotel Bosphorus, Source: bollier.org.

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Fig. 3. Gezi Park seen in perspective from Taksim Square side. Source: showdiscontent.com.

Fig. 4. The Monument of the Republic (1928) on Taksim Square, crafted by Italian sculptor Pietro Canonica. The circular grounds of the monument is replicated at the heart of Gezi Park. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

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The protests transformed the experience of being-in-Gezi-Park to that of being-in-

the-market, as cultured rationality and serenity gave way to listo. Very much like a

market place where people negotiate the price of commodities, Gezi’s tent-city became a

place of face-to-face socialization and intense politicking. In many ways, Gezi Park was a

space that was “under construction” and the uncertainty of its eventual arrangement and

use meant that it was constantly being created and recreated. This creative energy and

Gezi’s constantly changing landscape led to people constantly being on their toes and

acting smart and alert to defend their interests. The at times disorderly yet dense, and at

other times side-by-side, straight-lined arrangement of tents forced people to interact with

their neighbors and negotiate the borders of their shrinking personal spaces. Although the

occupiers were constantly being photographed by the press and the day time visitors of

Gezi who came to see the park and took a couple pictures as proof of their presence, they

did not act as if they were ‘on stage’. To the contrary, they were very casual and relaxed.

When I visited the park, I saw people sleeping in their tents during the day, half of their

bodies extending out of the tents, I saw someone who was reading a book on a hammock

that he had built by Gezi’s makeshift library, I saw people sharing food on blankets they

laid on grass. Despite all the commotion and the high energy, there was a surprising

calmness, which I perceive as an outcome of the arrangement of the park and its isolation

from the neighboring busy streets and Taksim Square. The wall of dense trees function as

a sound barrier so that a couple meters into the park, one stops hearing clearly the sounds

of the cars, their honks, the street vendors loudly marketing their products, etc. and a

general hum replaces the usual sounds of the city. Interesting, the tent city was neither in-

place nor out-of-place. It was of an alternative universe that had temporarily invaded

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Gezi Park and existing categories cannot do justice to the experience of being-in-Gezi-

Park. In terms of its everyday commotion, dense population, and the priority given to

social interaction, it was like a marketplace. It was like a settlement in that people stayed

overnight at the park, but the makeshift facilities and the impermanence of tents

contradicted this categorization. Moreover, it was out-of-place insofar as a marketplace

or a settlement of this complexity would normally not exist within the serene

environment of a park meant to promenade. In short, Gezi was everything and nothing all

at once.

In an interesting project to capture the temporary physical space of the park and

the social organization within it, an anonymous author of the ‘Post Virtual’ blog has

created a “historical atlas of Gezi Park” through six maps of varying complexities. The

hand drawn maps transform the embodied space of Gezi into something representational.

The project is an attempt to illustrate everything from social groupings within Gezi to the

many barricades set around the conquered park as if they were permanent, material

fixtures. The physical struggle and the ideological contestation over space take on a

representational form and challenge the other modes of representation such as the many

Google Maps or Google Earth images that became popular during the course of the

protests. The project reminds of the documentary Videomappings: Aida, Palestine (2009)

by the visual artist Till Roeskens, in which Roeskens asks the inhabitants of the Aida

refugee camp in Bethlehem (a Palestinian city located in the central West Bank) to draw

maps of their surroundings. Roeskens’ project is an attempt to recover the subjective

geographies of Bethlehem inhabitants. The viewer discovers the camp and its environs

through the “journey of men, women and children and their risky attempts to come to

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terms with the state of siege in which they live” (Animate Projects). The hand drawn

maps of the inhabitants drawn from memory make representational the embodied space

of Aida or what Roesken calls ‘bypass resistance’. While drawing and talking to

Roeskens about the significance of the child-like, poorly drawn figures and plans, people

talk about such things as the taste of the fruits that used to grow on the carob trees in the

area and texture of these fruits in one’s mouth. They recount family histories and one

older lady named Sabha Khader Abusrour represents the cave she grew up living in

before moving to Aida Camp in 1956 in a minimalist arch. Sabha draws the camp

grounds through stick-figure-like triangular lines that represent the tents, or the ‘homes’

of her relatives and keeps adding a triangular figure after another in a arbitrary fashion as

she recounts the names of the tent inhabitants from memory. She then connects the tents

by drawing lines that cut across the spaces in between the tents that represent the streets,

the one running though the middle of the camp named after the first martyr of her family.

The map gets ever more detailed as Sabha tells stories of her neighbors, of the young man

who got shot at Bethlehem University by the an Israeli for allegedly holding a Palestinian

flag, of the water tanks on the roofs that the Israeli shoot at and the UN replaces, of the

antennas that the residents used to have before they got satellites, etc. Sabha draws a box

around each tent symbolizing the construction of buildings that have taken their place as

she speaks of distrust within the camp the Israelis put spies among the refugees.

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Fig. 5. Video stills from the documentary Videomappings: Aida, Palestine (2009) by the visual artist Till Roeskens, via Animate Projects.

Aimee Shalan, professor of politics of Palestinian literature, writes, that

Videomappings “circumvents the standard flood of media coverage and enables us to

perceive the Palestinian landscape […] Working in the space between words and

pictures, the gap ‘between the visible and the sayable’, [it] likewise lays bare the basic

facts of Israel’s military occupation” (Shalan 2012). The child-like maps of Aida drawn

by its residents contradict the images of the occupied Palestinian territories as they appear

in the mainstream media as well as capturing the missing personal histories and the

experience of Palestinians living under occupation. Shalan suggests that Roeskens’

project adds an extra dimension to the tradition of mnemonic mappings as “his ‘situation

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maps’ are motivated by a fear of freezing the world by changing it into pictures” (Shalan

2012). The combination of video recoding and drawing adds a layer of dynamism.

Roeskens is able to capture the passing of time and the gaps in memory as his subjects

draw on top of the figures that used to exist at a time gone by or cross out the figures that

they draw as they misremember certain details. The viewer participates in the process of

remembering and the making of maps and witnesses the “social construction of space”

(Low 1996). Shalan notes that Roeskens describes Videomappings as “a political project

insofar as it is an expression of the right to draw one’s own map” (Shalan 2012). This

question of ownership is especially relevant to both the social production of space and the

social construction of space, because space making is a social process and hence a

negotiation over competing values, rationale, ideals, etc. Similar to its production and

use, the representation of space is similarly a social process insofar as the language of

mapping is charged with cultural symbols and modes of representation. Shalan turns to

artist and cartographer Dennis Wood’s observation in his book The Power of Maps, and

states that what is at stake in process of mapping “is not longitude and latitude, measured

to whatever degree of fineness imaginable but ownership because the map does not map

locations, so much as create ownership at a location” (Shalan 2012). Somewhat

problematically, the Gezi maps claim to have omniscience and bird’s eye visibility of the

entire protest grounds, despite having been prepared by an individual who took part in the

protests and yet could have only so much information about all the happenings in and

around the park. The author explains that these maps were created as a result of his own

geographical explorations and data collected through his interactions with other

participants. Rather than take these maps as an unchallenged representation of the Gezi

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Park protests, I will consider them as cultural artifacts depicting the subjective experience

and the spatial perception of their creator.

The first map is a general overview of the ‘administrative’ subdivisions of the

park. This map divides the park into three zones: uptown, midtown (subdivided into east

and west sides and a central park in the middle), and downtown. The second map is a

detailed road map of Gezi Republic with residential zones and infrastructure. The author

explains that uptown was made up of the main platform facing Taksim Square and

housed almost exclusively political stands and a Kurdish corner. Midtown’s ‘central

park’ was a mix of residential zones and socio-political stands, characterized by the big

square with the Fountain (Map 2, number 10) and the children’s Castle (9). Midtown’s

East Side was mainly residential. The Lower East Side by contrast was the core of the

park, both logistically and politically. It housed the Commons, the Infirmary, the Kitchen,

the Çapulçu Cafe and the Radio (Map 2, numbers 1,2,3,4, and 12), as well as being home

to the Stage (11), which was controlled by Taksim Solidarity (17). The author writes that

the West Side was “dominated by the fixed structured of what used to be a cafe, and what

was turned into the Television studio of Çapulçu TV once it was occupied (13). Behind

it, there was a natural border in the form a Grand Canyon leading down to the

reconstruction site of Taksim Square. Compared to the rest of the park, the far West Side

was made up of slums” (Post Virtual 2013). A memorial commemorating those who died

during the protests was erected at the border between the central square and downtown.

Downtown differed from the rest due to the “the organic layout of the streets as opposed

to the rational Roman/American style city grid in Midtown” (Post Virtual 2013). Here,

the author refers to the built space of the park as laid out by Prost. Evidently the

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arrangement of the flowerbeds, the planting of the trees etc. within the park determined

the way people organized themselves physically once the park was conquered. Three

main features of Downtown were the central Warehouse (Map 2, number 5), which

collected and distributed all necessary medical, food and other supplies donated by

people, the Library (7), built in the form of a fortress, and the Mosque (8), made from

two party tents.

The author complains that the third map, which depicts an approximate indication

of the various neighborhoods by their social or political nature, was especially hard to

plot, because of the complicated divisions and subdivisions of the Turkish left, including

not just the communists and the socialists, but also Marxists, Leninists, Maoists,

Stalinists, Trotskyists etc. He resorts to depicting them under the broad categories of

communists and socialist, which were concentrated mostly in the Central Park, in

Uptown, and on the Lower West Side. He explains that despite their later presence in the

park, the majority of left wing political stands were located in Taksim Square (until the

battle of June 11), because of the symbolic value of Taksim for the Turkish left wing,

“especially since the Taksim Square Massacre on May Day 1977, when snipers opened

fire on the crowd from the surrounding buildings and around forty people were killed”

(Post Virtual 2013). The Left had a disproportionately high visual presence in and around

the park stemming from the many revolutionary slogans and images of partisan leaders

(whose memory has always been suppressed by the government) plastered on the

surrounding buildings. A second group that had significant presence within the park was

the nationalists. The nationalist presence was marked by the iconic images of Atatürk,

and the many Turkish flags. The author writes that there was nationalist presence

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everywhere in the park and that it was especially “curious to see them next to the Mosque

in downtown” (Post Virtual 2013). The anti-capitalist Muslims had their religious base

around this Mosque in Downtown, but their political base on the platform in Uptown.

The author posits that the Kurds “came to Gezi only after their leader Öcalan exhorted

them to do so, and then still, they stayed in a corner” (Post Virtual 2013). Despite the

occasional discontent with their presence in the park, for the first time ever, the Kurds

were able to raise images of their leader without facing prosecution. Special interest

groups such as the ecologists and LGBT organizations had their main basis in upper

Central Park. Lastly, the anarchists had a strong presence in Downtown, near Gezi

gardens, and on the platform in Uptown. The author notes that “on a subconscious level

they embodied the spirit of the park as a whole,” because occupation was an anarchist

practice and the Gezi Commune an anarchist experiment (Post Virtual 2013).

The colored circles that represent the different social and political organization

(‘neighborhoods’) are plotted on top of the blueprint of Gezi’s built space (including

solid lines for the makeshift facilities built by the occupiers such as the infirmary,

kitchen, etc.). The map displays areas that are seemingly inhabited and not claimed by

any one organization. Moreover, the clear demarcations of the different social groups

give the impression that they were isolated and inward looking and that their members

socialized exclusively with one another. A similar trend of self-segregation emerged in

my interviews as Selen mentioned multiple times that she hung out mainly with those

Cihangir residents that she knew from living in the neighborhood. She said: “The

Cihangir crew is separate, Kasımpaşa, Bakırköy crews, they are all separate” (Kasımpaşa

and Bakırköy are two residential quarters in Istanbul known for their unique

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neighborhood culture). At the same time, all my interlocutors pointed to a social unity

within the commune that they have not experienced before. Yiğit said:

When you go there, you see this is not a May Day event, not a nationalist gathering, not a “Don’t Touch my Internet” demonstration, not a Salvation gay rights movement. This is everyone’s protest, I mean, everyone was there. Even the religious people were there. To me, it was interesting that the religious groups were also there.

My impression is that people were naturally drawn to those organizations and friend

groups that they knew from before or were members of, but rather than restrict their

opportunities, this grounded them socially while they branched out and socialized with

strangers. Similarly, the lines between the organizations were not as rigid as the

‘neighborhood’ map makes them seem. They had the opportunity to share their visions

with one another and formed unheard-of coalitions, when, for instance, the fans of the

three rival football teams, Fenerbahçe, Galatasaray and Beşiktaş, stood in union against

the police and the barricades.

The fourth map depicts what the author calls the ‘greater Gezi Commune’ with

surroundings, suburbs and barricades, and the fifth map is of ‘Gezi Empire’, the complete

territory in central Istanbul that was conquered during the entire course of the protests

(from May 31 to June 3). The author describes the area under popular control as

extending from the end of Istiklal Aveune down to the Beşiktaş Inönü Stadium and up to

the panoramic terrace of the Hilton Hotel. He writes:

To picture this, bear in mind the geographical configuration of central Istanbul. Taksim Square is on a hill. And Gezi Park is like a fortress on a hill. After the people conquered the square on June 1, clashes with police continued for two more days on the roads leading down to the waterfront. These clashes were spearheaded by Çarşı, the anarchist hard core of the Beşiktaş fans, aided by Kurds and transsexuals […] At its height, the Commune encompassed, at the very least, one university (with two campuses), one high school, two hospitals,

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one cultural center, one library, one convention center, two mosques (not including the one in Gezi Park), two churches, seven consulates (upgraded to full scale embassies for the occasion) and eight luxury hotels. [Post Virtual 2013]

The category of suburbs (depicted in light green in Map 4) refers to smaller settlements

with tents or stands, which were located to the south of Taksim Square, in the park

between the Divan and Hyatt hotels in the north, next to the Istanbul Technical

University in the northeast, and on the hill opposite the Beşiktaş Inönü Stadium in the

east. Another important fixture was the barricades. Burned police buses made up three of

the barricades and others were built using everything from paving stones to signposts.

The author describes in detail Gezi’s many barricades and their use as follows:

By far the most barricades, twenty-three lines in total between main and supply barricades, were located on the roads leading down to the sea, where the battle had taken place. Aside from those, all exits to Taksim had been barred, except for Istiklal Avenue. It was a fundamental weak spot in the defense of the Commune, but it was necessary to have a life line through which ambulances, garbage trucks and supply vehicles could enter. To this effect, the barricades on the northeast side could be opened, so that the wounded from the infirmary could be quickly evacuated. The barricades were manned twenty-four hours a day, mostly by anarchist football fans, but also by communists and nationalists. The easternmost suburb of Gezi, opposite the Beşiktaş stadium, was home to dozens of people who acted as an early warning system in case of a police attack from Dolmabahçe palace. [Post Virtual 2013]

The barricades transformed an extensive area around Taksim Square (in fact the whole of

what the author calls the ‘Gezi Empire’) into a traffic free zone. The sixth and final map

is a Google map of all known popular forums in Istanbul that sprouted up after the

eviction of the park. Alternatively called the ‘democracy forums,’ these smaller meetings

were organized in parks across the city after the police dispersed the occupiers from Gezi

on June 15.

✤

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The rest of this chapter is organized around three major themes that emerged in my

conversations with Selen, Ali, Yiğit, and Eren: (1) the sensorial experience of the

protests; (2) the perception of space through the metaphor of war; and (3) the symbolic

and political significance of the protests.

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Fig. 6. Outline of the Park. Historical Atlas of Gezi Park, Map 1. postvirtual wordpress. com 2013.

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Fig. 7. “Gezi Republic”, Historical Atlas of Gezi Park, Map 2. postvirtual wordpress. com 2013.

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Fig. 8. “Gezi Neighborhoods”, Historical Atlas of Gezi Park, Map 3. postvirtual wordpress. com 2013.

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Fig. 9. “Gezi Commune”, Historical Atlas of Gezi Park, Map 4. postvirtual wordpress. com 2013.

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Fig. 10. “Gezi Empire”, Historical Atlas of Gezi Park, Map 5. postvirtual wordpress. com 2013.

Fig. 11. Popular Forums in Istanbul, Historical Atlas of Gezi Park, Map 6. postvirtual wordpress. com 2013.

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THE SENSORIAL EXPERIENCE OF THE PROTESTS

Senses play a central role in the overall experience of protest. One way of validating this

claim is through approaching public order as an organization of senses. In the case of

Occupy Wall Street, businesses and residents around Zuccotti demanded that the

protesters be removed from the park because of the smell caused by urination in the

streets and noise at late hours (CBS News 2011). Anthropologist Jeffrey Junis (2012)

describes the political discourse on the Occupy movement in the United States as one that

disproportionately focused on public hygiene and ‘cleansing’ strategies:

Occupiers succeeded by following a classic civil disobedience strategy: placing their bodies where they were not supposed to be. Such “matter out of place” was portrayed by mayors around the United States as a source of great consternation, and many cities reacted by raising concerns about public hygiene to justify the dismantling of camps as acts of literal and metaphorical “cleansing.” [2012:268]

Julia La Roche (2011) of Business Insider, reporting from Zuccotti Park wrote, “A bunch

of the protesters confessed to me that they have not showered since the start of the

movement. In my opinion, the smell is extremely pungent. And the camp site is littered

with trash, cardboard, and garbage bags piled up.” La Roche’s words echo the shared

sense of discomfort felt by outsiders, and especially the residents of nearby apartment

buildings, about the movement and its participants. Their criticism of the movement and

demands for law enforcement were initially couched in these sensorial rather than

moralizing terms. The experience of hygiene by whose living in the park, however,

departed from the outsiders’ claims in significant ways. As an anonymous writer part of

writers’ colony for the 99% describes:

Socio-economic divides in the park became evident around hygiene issues. Middle-class, more educated occupiers tended to have friends, or friends of friends, with apartments not far away. These contacts provided bathing facilities

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and even beds to crash in when occupiers needed a break from camping. Less schooled, poorer, and more troubled sleepers were, by contrast, left in the cold. [2011:65]

These class hierarchies marked on the occupiers’ clean versus dirty bodies were not

immediately legible to outsiders, nor did they especially care about exploring the park

demographics. Those against the movement perceived all of the Occupy participants as

part of single category of ‘filth’.

Another strategy employed frequently by protesters for disturbing the sensorial

order is “cacerolazo,” which involves the collective banging of pots and pans. Started in

1971 in Chile against the shortages of industrial products, cacerolazo was popularized

during the Argentine economic crisis in 2001 and was over time picked up by protesters

in countries ranging from a number of Spanish-speaking countries to Canada and Iceland.

In Istanbul, too, Gezi demonstrators took to the banging of pots and pans and soon

cacerolazo started happening routinely at nine pm sharp, with millions joining in the

protests from their balconies. This was accompanied by the flashing of lights in

apartment buildings, shouting and clapping on the balconies, and government resign

chants sung in unison. During the couple minutes of cacerolazo “collective

effervescence” was achieved without bodily proximity. Individual protesters were unified

through the lights, through the noise and the faint smell of pepper gas in the

neighborhoods close to Taksim. At other times, bodily presence at Gezi was encouraged

through chants like "If you are not in Taksim today, you are no different from the

regime.” The senses served as a confirmation of presence, of “being there,” to those who

were out on the streets or camped at Gezi.

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In “Protest and the Limits of the Body,” anthropologist Ayse Parla (2013) asserts

that the physical borders of the body were denied by the Gezi protesters. Parla focuses on

two visual symbols that call attention to protesters’ demonstrated invincibility in the face

of brutal police violence: The first one is the woman in black, who stood in from the

TOMA8, arms wide open, one leg crossing the other in a classic tango cross as

pressurized water poured down her body. The second one is the so-called ‘un-

handicapped man’ who leaned against the TOMA, tapping its armor-clad front with his

walking sticks in rage and fury. As much as these images celebrated the innate power of

the human body and represented it as limitless, one further aim of the circulated images

was to encourage people to show up at Taksim. Protesters unanimously accepted the

indispensable power of the crowd. Accordingly, Parla explains, the acknowledgement of

bodily harm was a mixed matter on social media and graphic images of burnt skin,

bloody gashes, or broken body parts were discouraged. Also problematic were those

widespread chants that were fraught discriminating innuendos. The fans of the football

team Besiktas popularized one such chant that explicitly celebrated virility and macho

bravado: "Bring on the spray / Take off your helmet / Let go of your club / Then we'll see

who's the real man." Another popular chant that according to Parla was less explicit in its

discrimination was: “Jump up / up / who does not / [gets] to be Tayyip." Upon first

glance, the two chants appear as unproblematic and characteristic of the protesters’

efforts to taunt the aggressors and encourage active resistance in a playful way. When

one considers the implications of this call to jump for those bodies that are physically

incapable of jumping, such as an old person’s body or someone who needs a wheelchair,

8 TOMA is the acronym for Toplumsal Olaylara Müdahale Aracı, or Vehicle of Intervention in Social Incidents.

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the discriminatory nature of the chants begin to make itself known. The frustration caused

by one’s inability to take part due to physical handicaps is evident in Ali’s

aforementioned comments on his dislocated shoulder and his subsequent inability to fight

in the front. He described his body as having lost its unity and as a result he became a

‘half man’ and was no longer a ‘real man.’

Fig. 12. The woman in black. Source: baskahaber.org.

Fig. 13. The “un-handicapped man.” Source: capulcugazete.com.

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Through questions that encouraged sensorial memories of the protests, I tried to

get at the significance of senses and the bodily perception of the park. Two contradictory

themes emerged: the senses were regarded as unifying the protesters through a pool of

shared stimuli, while the discriminatory effects of forceful stimuli such as tear gas or

baton blows on more vulnerable bodies of the elderly and women were seen as

problematic. All respondents described the protests as having a wide range of visual,

auditory, olfactory, and tactile stimuli and this sensorial chaos was seen as a proof of the

truly diverse nature of the protests. On separate occasions Yiğit, Ali, and Selen described

Gezi as multicolored. Yiğit described the protests as “more of a visual experience.” He

said, “Gezi was a place where you primarily saw the colors. It was a beautiful place in

terms of its colors.” Ali similarly said he remembered a rainbow. The primacy given to

the visual aspect is not surprising given what renowned Finnish architect Juhani

Pallasmaa (2005) describes as the ocularcentric tradition: “In Western culture, sight has

historically been regarded as the noblest of the senses, and thinking itself thought of in

terms of seeing. Already in classical Greek thought, certainty was based of in terms of

seeing” (15). Pallasmaa believes that the failings of everyday architecture today can

partially be blamed on the ocular bias of our culture and the negligence of the body. The

growing alienation, detachment, and solitude that characterizes contemporary urban life,

felt overwhelmingly in the most technologically advanced settings of hospitals and

airports, Pallasmaa argues, is an outcome of the suppression of the other senses.

The multicolored occupation of Gezi was an attempt to restore the human element

and the bodily scale in the concrete space of Taksim Square and the infrequently

populated Gezi Park. The banners and flags that covered the façade of Atatürk Cultural

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Center were all of bright colors, which contrasted with the gray, minimalist aesthetics of

the structure. In the face of the park’s greenery, the multicolored tents stuck out. There

were layers of graffiti written in all different colors on the confiscated bright-yellow

municipal buses. Moreover, protesters frequently wore their football jerseys, primarily of

Istanbul’s three rival teams Galatasaray, Fenerbahçe, and Beşiktaş, of colors red, yellow,

navy, black, and white. The exceptional sportsmanship amongst fans that were unified

under a common enemy encouraged savvy entrepreneurs to sell fan scarfs near the protest

grounds that combined the colors and the logos of the three times with a message that

said, “Despite our different colors, our hearts are one.” But more so than this, I would

argue that the repeated reference of the respondents to the multiplicity of colors is telling

of their conceptualization of the movement. They remember the colors because for them

this multiplicity is part of the identity of the movement—this all-inclusive group seeking

to fight oppression—not because of their unheralded diversity. Selen’s description of the

various visual and auditory environments at Gezi is telling of her underlying appreciation

of multiplicity:

On one side, there are those who are doing the halay dance9, the sounds for example, such diverse sounds are coming at you from all different directions. Somewhere a group of people is singing Kurdish songs and doing the halay dance. Somewhere else, someone is playing the guitar and singing English songs. And none of this is disturbing to you. Among all the chaos, there is calmness. Yes the bathrooms stank of pee, but you didn’t perceive as this as some kind of filth.

Selen emphasizes the all-inclusive and yet the traditional and national nature of

the protests by singling out the halay dancers and Kurdish songs, which are associated

9 Halay is a type of popular dance in Turkey that is traditionally played during weddings and celebrations, supported by a davul (a large double-headed traditional drum). It involves the forming of a circle or a line by Halay dancers, while they hold each other with the little finger or shoulder to shoulder or even hand to hand with the last and first player holding a piece of cloth. (Wikipedia)

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with specific regions and subgroups of Turkish society. The senses have been trained in

discerning these cultural differences and labeling them as such. Outside the protests, the

diversity and the chaos that is inherent to Turkish society are commonly perceived as

disturbing and divisive. In the first chapter, I have demonstrated the increasingly

segregated character of neoliberalizing Istanbul with the secular upper-middle class and

upper class residents retrieving to gated communities like Kemer Country in the

periphery of the city, and migrants from rural Anatolia choosing to live in areas where

their compatriots have already settled in. Cihangir, where Selen and Ali live, is similarly

a self-segregated neighborhood of intellectuals and the so-called bohemian bourgeoisie.

By contrast, differences were welcomed and celebrated at Gezi. The equation of chaos

with calmness signifies Selen’s comfort and sense of security in the face of societal

differences. More often than not, outsiders perceived of Gezi’s loud and diverse sounds

or the smell of urine as disturbing if not disgusting. As in the aforementioned case of

Occupy Wall Street, those opposed to the protests used noise and smell as the basis of

criticism and as evidence to substantiate demands for a crackdown. An insider like Selen,

however, perceives these same sounds and smells in a completely different light. In other

words, one’s level of engagement with and perception of raw stimuli determine the

dividing line between the insiders and the outsiders. According to Selen, this disparity

between perspectives is why bodily presence at Gezi matters: “When you watch the

events from a video, you see this as a war. You look at it through a political lens. But

once you are in Gezi Park, it all changes. It’s not politics. It is also no longer about Recep

Tayyip Erdoğan. When you are there, you understand the bigger picture. This gives you

courage.” The argument here is that there are certain things that the body perceives and

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the mind alone cannot understand. Taking part in the protests affords one with a

broadened perspective and access to the bigger picture. The better one understands, the

more confident one feels. Selen talks about courage in visceral terms, as an irresistible

feeling rather than an intellectual product. Ali agrees with Selen:

When you comprehend it with your five senses, it’s all very different. When you breathe in the tear gas, you share that with all the other people there. It’s like sharing your food with the all the others sitting at the same table. You sit down and swing your spoon into the same pot. This is part of our culture. Taking in the smells, for example the mixing of the smells of meatballs and teargas. The people, it was hot so people were sweating, the mixing of people’s colognes, the sweat, and the smells of pee, you know? And then the music… Hearing the halay there, or some rock 'n' roll song. The mixture of all this. You feel a little tipsy there. It makes you feel drunk.

The parallel drawn between breathing in tear gas and sharing food with people sitting at

the same table presents the otherwise painful experience of tear gas in a pleasurable light.

Ali emphasizes the fact that sharing is an important part of Turkish culture, and like the

experience of sharing food from the same pot, the shared experience of tear gas brings

people together. Only those who were present at the park will be able to identify the

unique smell of meatballs mixed with teargas, or the smell of sweat mixed with cologne

and urine, and this ability distinguishes them as insiders of the protest. The experience is

overwhelming because of the intensity and the newness of stimuli similar to Durkheim’s

description of collective effervescence as a type of delirium or ecstasy. When he

confessed that there were instances when he missed tear gas post Gezi, Ali said it was all

about reliving that excitement, that thrill. Ironically, something as negative and painful as

tear gas was remembered in pleasurable terms because of its association with the overall

excitement of the protests. Some playful slogans and wall writings on tear gas included:

“Tear gas is good for the skin” written on the closed shutters of a nearby cosmetics store;

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asking the Muslim preacher “Does teargas break the fast?” since part of the protests

overlapped with Ramadan; and “I am addicted to tear gas.”

Although the protesters were united under the shared experience of tear gas, the

effects of tear gas varied from person to person. The protesters revealed that the social

divisions within Turkey have been marked on to people’s bodies. Immunity to tear gas

was a strong indicator. A Kurdish friend of Selen’s reassured her that her body would get

used to tear gas over time and told her that she did not know this because unlike him, she

has never been exposed to tear gas before. Selen was amazed by how experienced her

Kurdish friends were: “Their senses are so developed that when in cloud of tear gas, they

could say we are going to go through this way, they could see the roads without even

looking.” Since the 1970s, the Kurdish separatist movement has been united under the

Marxist-Leninist Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) and the guerrilla war continues in the

countryside in the southeast. The Turkish military is intolerant towards the Kurdish

separatist demands and protests are suppressed by pepper spraying, beatings, and even

mass arrests. Through their prior involvement in these separatist protests, the bodies of

the Kurdish occupiers have been trained to tolerate tear gas and this has provided them an

advantage during Gezi. In strong contrast to the Kurds, the elderly and women were

commonly perceived as vulnerable to tear gas and the baton blows of the police. Eren

described an instance when tried to help an elderly man after a tear gas attack at the park:

When we were trapped in the park, there were older men there who lacked any kind of defense. For instance, as he tries to shout slogans, all of a sudden there would be an attack and he would try to hide in a shelter in there, with a piece of cloth in his hand trying to cover his mouth, but he would be defenseless, this wouldn’t be of help. You try to help him, but in that moment of panic he can’t look at you, he resists you, because he is so desperate he doesn’t know any better.

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Because of his relative young age and fit body Eren feels compelled to help those more

vulnerable than him, especially the elderly. Yiğit, on the other hand, was concerned about

the wellbeing of his female friends. He talked about constantly strategizing in his mind

about potential exit strategies and places to hide when he was with women, and that he

was concerned more for them than he ever was for himself. Selen said she stayed away

form the Front (areas by the barricades where the protests routinely clashed with the

police), because it was a male space. Roles that suited her female disposition included

volunteering at the kitchen or the warehouse. Although the expectation was for him to

fight the police at the Front, Eren admits that during the first couple days, he stayed back,

because his body was not immune to tear gas. Smoking was one of those activities that

provided immunity to tear gas, but because he did not smoke a lot, Eren was easily

affected. He had to get used to the effects and learn how to navigate his way through a

cloud of tear gas because he mustered the courage to volunteer at the Front. Others

similarly talked about learning the particular way their bodies reacted to tear gas. Ali said

his first encounter with tear gas was the worst:

To be honest, I didn’t know it was so potent. I didn’t expect to have to gasp for breath so much. There were instances when I couldn’t move at all, moments when I instantly collapsed. Because when you are inside a cloud of gas, it is not the same as smelling it from a distance. The canister falls in front of you and you have to pass by it and if you breathe in while passing, you messed up. Your insides come out. You cough your head off. The need to vomit. Yes you suffocate. A constant cough and a vomiting reflex. Your eyes are already closed. You collapse where you were.

To avoid direct exposure to tear gas, the protesters began covering their bodies and

arming themselves with military gas masks and long-sleeved clothing. Their

paraphernalia was too amateurish, however, when compared to the professional

equipment of the police and this functioned as a material marker of the disproportionate

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power of the state. Judging by their all-black clothing, their bulletproof masks and stiff

padding around their elbows and knees, and rounded helmets, Selen likens the police to

Atom Ants, a cartoon ant and superhero created in 1965. She describes the body language

of the police as a particular system, drawing attention to their coordinated, routinized way

of walking and their attitude. Selen says she saw the police as enemies and that she felt

like she was in a war. Physical appearance determines Selen’s opinions of the police,

because the impenetrable, padded, bulletproof clothing and the reflexive glass of the

helmets prevent her from connecting with the individual that is behind the robot-like

mask. By contrast, she thinks of the protesters as a colony of ants. Both the multitude and

the close-knit organization of the protesters led her to this belief. Unlike the Atom Ant,

the protester as ant lacks artificial protection, and is instead organic in both its physical

makeup and the way the colony of acts organizes itself and behaves. Interesting the two

are cut from the same cloth insofar as both the police and the protests are ants.

THE SYMBOLIC AND POLITICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE PROTESTS In line with the larger political discourse on the preservation of Gezi, all my interlocutors

agreed on the foremost ideological role played by the park. One impetus was the

obliteration of green spaces within downtown Istanbul by large-scale construction

projects. Yet a second and more powerful impetus was that it flew in the face of

Erdoğan’s authoritarian, religiously inspired, and obsessively neoliberal politics. Ali and

Yiğit both echoed this dual significance of the park:

Ali:

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You know Istanbul well, it has very few green spaces. You know the city, everywhere is concrete, there are very few parks. One barely sees any greenery. Gezi Park is not a huge space but in terms of greenery, it is one of last spaces we have at hand. The guy [Erdoğan] wants to demolish it and rebuilt the stupid, stone barracks out of bigotry, as some kind of a punishment. He wants to revive it for ideological purposes. He is working towards that goal […] For me, a part of it was also ideological. OK, greenery, very few such spaces are left in the city, etc. but what is important is that he [Erdoğan] has overstepped into our boundaries, he has overstepped the mark, he is stepping into every aspect of our lives. You have this small park in the city, he wants to take over it for his own ideological reasons dating back to old hostilities, he wants to revive that. At last you say it’s enough.

Yiğit: The park was important for everyone because that is the singular place with trees. The singular place with trees amongst the office towers, the skyscrapers. The only place where you can breathe, rest, and step on soil. This tyrant minded man [Erdoğan] wanted to take that away. The only reason why people came out was not just the park of course. In the recent years, his man [Erdoğan] made illegal abortion, C-section, banned women’s rights, the internet, etc. This man is someone who tries to transform us into a religious society, according to his truths. Plus this man has been a thief since 2002. I am not the only one who knows this, everyone knows. This man is a thief. This man is corrupt. This man is ignorant. This man is uneducated. And despite being uneducated, this man, for example, is a sociologist, this man is an architect, this man is a doctor, this man is a painter, this man is an art critic. This man has every virtue that you can think of. Despite him being uneducated… Despite the fact that he doesn’t even know how to speak properly, this man has it all. Most importantly, I don’t see this man as a legitimate prime minister. This man definitely came to power through deception, through chicanery and there is proof of that. All the ballots after elections were found in the trash.

Yiğit described the protests as an attempt to claim one’s right to breathe

comfortably. He suggested that the tree was a symbol of producing new, fresh air to

revive the people, who could no longer breathe right because of the oppression and the

intrusion of politics into their private lives. Erdoğan’s claim to be the father of all made

him seem like a despotic tyrant in Yiğit’s eyes. The parallel between oppressive politics

and one’s inability to breath as a result was extended to the creation of claustrophobic

spaces within the city through the obliteration of green spaces. Yiğit was frustrated that

the residents of Istanbul did not have a space in the city where they could breathe. In

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“Nefes: Notes on Breath” anthropologist Umut Yıldırım reminds us that nefes is a

“Turkish word with Arabic and Syriac roots, which crudely translate[s] as ‘breath,’ as

title and metaphor for the framework of the Gezi Uprising” (Yıldırım 2013). Yıldırım

tracks the use of breath as a metaphor for political oppression back to a 1973 novel, Ford

Mach I, by Turkish author Sevim Burak, in which she writes “Wave your arms and hands

while pointing to the pine tree / For instance pointing to the pine tree / Hug it / (Let the

pine tree become your very own life)” (Yıldırım 2013). With these words, an old women

from Istanbul’s Erenköy neighborhood “laments her vanishing life and her memories as

they are embodied in a pine tree” (Yıldırım 2013). The city is changing before her eyes as

the construction of the Bosphorus Bridge unfolds and she projects the haunting fear of

transformation onto “an American racing car, a Ford Mach 1—a metallic memory-

destroyer, a blood-thirsty ‘monster’ with a ‘hacksaw-shaped tail,’ a shady, creepy

character stealthily overwhelming her (Yıldırım 2013). The old woman wishes to hug the

remaining pine trees in her neighborhood in an attempt to save them. The expressive

body language of waving arms and hands or hugging the tree indicates an instinctual

desire to put one’s self out there and to stand against the destruction of the city and

dispossession by one’s body. Yıldırım writes:

A concept with many implications, nefes means to inhale oxygen into the lungs and to expel it; to inhale carbon dioxide and exhale oxygen through the leaves; to control the outgoing air when producing sounds; to express; to have a rest by sitting against the wind; to momentarily and elusively endure difficulties; a time-span; and the longevity of conversations. It is a respiratory life-force interrupted and intermittently stolen by commodification. Thus, breathing is not apolitical. [Yıldırım 2013]

Like the old heroine of Burak’s novel Ford Mach I, on May 31 the many protagonists of

Gezi rushed to the streets, convulsively gasping for air. My informants told me that

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despite the thick cloud of tear gas hanging in the air, they felt like they could finally

breathe comfortably. The embraced the tree as a symbol of fresh air, but also likened

themselves to the trees of Gezi Park that face each other with open arms and live in

harmony. Below are some illustrations that depict the tree as a symbol of Gezi Park. Note

the connection between the symbolic tree and the body (especially the arm and the hand

is if the body morphs into a tree from its extremities).

Fig. 14. Some illustrations depicting trees as a symbol of Gezi Park. Sources (right to left): 1. By Hsynz via bobiler.org; 2. By Gürbüz; 3. By TGB Ajans Rize, text reads: “For Gezi Park: We are meeting at 12:00pm at Rize [the capital city of Rize province in the eastern part of the Black Sea Region of Turkey] Municipal Park.”

If the people became the trees of Gezi in the protesters’ eyes, Erdoğan and his

police force were the heartless lumberjacks, who made it their mission the complete

deforestation of Gezi. Yet in Yiğit’s perspective, Erdoğan was interestingly not the only

person to blame for Istanbul’s uncontrolled growth. America was always implied in his

political critique:

The park was just a symbol. People no longer want shopping malls. They don’t want the erection of malls everywhere. I want to communicate this to our fellow American friends: We don’t have a Central Park. We don’t have a space in this

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city where we can breathe. Because we are treated like a third world country by the United States, skyscrapers are being constructed everywhere and there is no public space. What I mean is that if I had a kid, there is no place for him to play football in Mecidiyeköy [the neighborhood where he resides]. There is no space for my kid to run. There is no space for me to exercise in the morning. There is only one place. Maybe there is only one place in the whole of Istanbul that we can identify as a park. And that place is not even 1,000 m2. And that is Gezi Park. And this man [Erdoğan] wanted to build a mall there.

Yiğit knew that I was doing this project for my Princeton thesis and I partially attribute

his repeated mention of the United States as a way to appeal to an American audience. At

another part of our interview, Yiğit said that in a lot of ways he considered Turkey as a

state of America and that Erdoğan was someone that the United States supports,

otherwise he would be gone by now. This wariness of foreign interference and

predilection for conspiracy theories is shared by a number of Turks after the popularity of

such books as Confessions of an Economic Hitman (2006) by John Perkins. In the book,

Perkins provides an account of his career as an economic analyst with the consulting firm

Chas. T. Main in Boston. He claims he was in fact being trained to become an economic

hit men, which he defines as those “highly paid professionals who cheat countries around

the globe out of trillions of dollars. They funnel money from the World Bank, the U.S.

Agency for International Development (USAID), and other foreign ‘aid’ organizations

into the coffers of huge corporations and the pockets of a few wealthy families who

control the planet's natural resources […] They play a game as old as empire, but one that

has taken on new and terrifying dimensions during this time of globalization” (Perkins

2006:xi). As explained in Chapter 1, Yiğit is partially correct to find fault with foreign

powers and international organizations for Istanbul’s growth, because especially in the

developing world, large global institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the

World Bank play a major role in the promotion and reproduction of neoliberalism by

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rewarding cities that adhere to a particular order and penalizing those that do not. In

directing his criticism solely at the United States, Yiğit is overlooking the relevance of

globalization and neoliberalism to the frenzied growth of the city. His claim that Erdoğan

is someone that the United States supports sounds more like a conspiracy theory than

reality. In his counter-Gezi rhetoric, Erdoğan similarly alluded to an organized plot

against him and blamed an assortment of foreign actors for the unrest in Istanbul

including the “interest lobby” and “Zionists.” The inevitable implication of the global

within the local politics of Turkey is a testament to interconnectedness of the world we

live in today and the difficulty of clearly demarcating one’s national space.

PERCEPTION OF SPACE: URBAN COMBAT AND THE WAR METHAPHOR

The occupation of Gezi significantly changed the embodied experience of the park and its

surroundings. Responsible from this shift in the perception of space were the changes to

both the material and the social landscapes of the area that was under the control of the

protesters. As depicted in the ‘Gezi Empire’ map (Fig. 10) this area extended beyond

Gezi Park, from the end of Istiklal Avenue down to the Beşiktaş Inönü Stadium and up to

the panoramic terrace of the Hilton Hotel. Gezi Park was like a fortress on a hill and this

impression was reinforced by the fact that Gezi is elevated and reached by stone steps

from Taksim Square. Multiple barricades were erected on the roads leading down to the

seafront from Gezi. Borrowing form the language of the Egyptian Revolution, the

immediate area by the barricades was called the Front. The Front functioned the

boundary between liberated and non-liberated territory, and Gezi’s male protesters

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protected it twenty-four hours a day. The barricades became spaces of violence and

uncertainty especially during the intermittent battles with the riot police. Anthropologist

Ayse Parla suggests that the barricades of Gezi point to one of the key paradoxes of

resistance – the “erection of certain physical borders in order to transgress political ones”

(Parla 2012). It was through the safety provided by the barricades that the Gezi commune

could become a reality in the first place. Ali describes the importance of the barricades as

follows:

Once the park was conquered, barricades were set up around it. Because we had conquered the whole area including Taksim, Beyoğlu, not just the park, barricades were set up at every entry and exit. It was obvious by then that we were going to keep the police away, because what we had there was a Front. There were many fronts. It turned into a full-fledged war […] You trust those boundaries. Inside you quickly organize yourself. What do we need? An infirmary. What will be of use? People are going to start coming, they will sit here, then we need things to pass time, like books, something to drink. It happened on its own, people organized themselves immediately.

Ali’s account stresses not just the physical need for erecting walls to protect the

commune from police attacks, but also the emotional need for security and trust. The

barricades became a material symbol of those feelings and the knowledge of their

existence, even when people did not necessarily interact with them as part of their

everyday lives, was comforting.

The protesters commonly referred to the Gezi Empire as their conquered territory

and this militaristic language of ‘conquest’, as opposed to the more common uses of the

word ‘occupation’ is the description of similar movements across the globe, deserves

attention. Ali said, “A piece of land was conquered together and an autonomous area was

set up.” The language of conquest borrows from a history of subjugation and assumption

of control of a place by the use of military force. International law defines the ‘right of

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conquest’ as the “right of the victor, in virtue of military victory or conquest, to

sovereignty over the conquered territory and its inhabitants” (Korman 1996:8). Within

the context of colonization, conquest has connotations of far away places and the

subjugation of indigenous populations. It is often succeeded by the formation of nation

states and the conversion of local populations into citizens. What does it then mean for

the inhabitants of Istanbul to ‘conquer’ a public park, a neighboring public square, and

the public roads providing access to the area? By virtue of their publicness, these spaces

should already belong to the people. As per Ali’s remark that an autonomous area was set

up, one has to further question the implications of this claim of sovereignty and of

leaderless self-governance within the urban space of Istanbul. One way of approaching

this outwardly militaristic view on urban life is to put the ‘right of conquest’ in

conversation with Lefebvre’s ‘right to the city’. In Chapter 2, I have provided the reader

with urban geographer Mark Purcell’s interpretation of Lefebvre’s theory as involving

two principle rights for urban inhabitants: the right to participation, and the right to

appropriation. Purcell suggests that the right to participation means that the inhabitants

“should play a central and direct role in any decision that contributes to the production of

urban space” (Purcell 2002:106). The right to appropriation, on the other hand, includes

the “right of inhabitants to physically access, occupy, and use urban space” (102).

At issue here are the contrasting languages of ‘conquest’ and ‘occupation’.

Merriam-Webster dictionary defines conquest as “the act of taking control of a country,

city, etc., through the use of force,” whereas in the same dictionary occupation is defined

either as occupancy: “the possession, use, or settlement of land,” or as seizure: “the act or

process of taking possession of a place or area.” Conquest as such entails the use of force

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as its method and the control of land as its result. Importantly, the territory that is in

question is an administrative unit such as a ‘nation’ or a ‘city’, and not an indeterminate

space such as ‘land’ or an ‘area’ as is the case for occupation. The two definitions of

occupation, by contrast, highlight ‘possession’ as both a process and a result of

occupation. Conquest has implications of permanence, whereas occupation is commonly

though of as temporary. An historic occupation that comes to mind is the Nazi

Occupation (1939-1945), during which the Nazi forces occupied numerous countries of

Europe for varying durations. I propose that one of the reasons we utilize the language of

occupation as opposed to conquest in this context is because of historic impermanence of

the Nazi Empire. Important to the occupation of the Nazi forces was their undeniable

visibility and not necessarily the multitude in the countries and the cities they occupied.

This visibility successfully functioned as a scare factor. In a similar vein, we today would

talk about the occupation of Zuccotti Park from late-September to late-December of

2011, or the occupation of Gezi Park from late-May to mid-June of 2013. These

occupations happened and they ended, and even as they were unfolding, no one thought

that they had claims of permanence. One of the reasons that my informants talked about

the conquering of the park rather than its occupation is because in the spur of the

moment, I was told that they genuinely did not question the commune’s permanence and

believed that for all they cared this could last forever. The language of conquest is also a

lot more victorious than that of occupation, which evokes instead mundane practice such

as tenancy and settlement.

The conquering of Gezi was a transformative act that collapsed the social

production and the social construction of space (Low 1996) into a single ‘right to the

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city’. According to Low’s definition, the social production of space refers to the physical

creation of material settings through social, economic, ideological, and technological

processes. I have discussed the production of Gezi Park and Taksim Square through the

urban plans of Henri Prost in the first half of 20th century and the later transformation of

the area within the context of neoliberalizing Istanbul. Behind these transformations were

decisions made by a cohort of politicians, urban planners, architects and financial

institutions. Although Gezi Park is a public park and Taksim Square is a public square,

the public did not have much say during the planning process and the later administration

of these spaces. They had to take Gezi’s built space as a given and had only so much say

in the appropriation of and kinds of social practices that took place within this. During the

course of the protests, the area’s built space too underwent a radical change. The roads

were closed off to automobile traffic and a walkable pop-up city emerged at the heart of

Istanbul with everything from its own infirmary to library. By repurposing the materials

and the public furniture, the protesters repurpose the space according to their own needs.

Multiple barricades were erected on the roads leading down to the seafront from Gezi,

twenty-three lines to be exact between main and supply barricades. Burned police buses

made up three of the barricades and others were built using everything from paving

stones to signposts. Eren describes the erection of the barricades and their selective

regulation of traffic in and out as follows:

Bricks, signboards you lay whatever you find on top of each other. That way, you can stop some vehicles from entering. Scorpions10, for example, they can’t enter. If the barricade is too high, TOMAs also can’t enter. Pedestrians can enter. The police enter with tear gas guns in their hands and you have to withdraw. Once they invade a barricade, bulldozers come in and tear down the barricades completely. At times, the barricades also stop tear gas canisters from coming in.

10 An iteration of a tank.

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Contrary to one’s image of a city wall that is stable, solid, and fixed, the barricades of

Gezi appear to be porous structures. There is a clear distinction between who can and

who cannot enter. The barricades are porous enough to allow pedestrians to enter the

conquered territory, but, when built high enough, they block vehicles, scorpions,

TOMAs, and gas canisters from entering. There is one problem, though, and it is that

pedestrians can also signify those police officers who enter with tear gas guns in their

hands. The barricades do not discriminate according to a body’s intentions.

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Fig. 15 & 16. The many barricades of Gezi. The protesters used everything paving stones to signposts to build the barricades. Witty, anti-government graffiti were often painted on their surfaces, like that of Prime Minister Tayyip Erdoğan’s face with the text “wanted” underneath it. By Emrah Gökdemir, source: "Gezi Protest Visuals." Fieldsights - Hot Spots, Cultural Anthropology.

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Israeli intellectual and architect Eyal Weizman (2007) writes about the peculiar

practice of “walking through walls” – the maneuver conducted by units of the Israeli

military during the attack on the city of Nablus (a city in the northern West Bank) in

April 2002. Weizman explains that the Israeli soldiers moved within the city “across

hundred-meter-long ‘over-ground-tunnels’ carved out through a dense and contiguous

urban fabric” (Weizman 2007). They did not “use the streets, roads, alleys, or courtyards

that constitute the syntax of the city, as well as the external doors, internal stairwells, and

windows that constitute the order of buildings, but rather moved horizontally through

party walls, and vertically through holes blasted in ceilings and floors” (Weizman 2007).

This practice of opening holes in the walls of living rooms, bedrooms, and corridors of

poorly built refugee homes forces one to reconsider the boundaries of the public and the

private within the context of urban combat. Weizman writes:

Rather than submitting to the authority of conventional spatial boundaries, movement became constitutive of space, and space was constituted as an event. It was not the order of space that governed patterns of movement but movement that produced and practiced space around it. The three-dimensional movement through walls, ceilings, and floors across the urban bulk reinterpreted, short-circuited, and recomposed both architectural and urban syntax. The tactics of “walking-through-walls” involved a conception of the city as not just the site, but as the very medium of warfare – a flexible, almost liquid matter that is forever contingent and in flux. [Weizman 2007]

Although Gezi was not a full-fledged urban war (as in the occupied Palestinian

territories), the participants perceived of themselves as soldiers in a battle for liberty and

of the police as not the protectors of the people but rather the enemy forces taking their

orders from Erdoğan. Just as they refused to submit to the political authority of Erdoğan,

the protesters also transgressed the spatial boundaries built into Gezi’s material space.

Weizman’s observation that movement became constitute of space in the practices of

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Israeli soldiers is relevant to the case of Gezi. Through their movement in and around

Gezi and Istanbul at large, and through their interactions with some iconic structures like

the Bosphorus Bridge and the Ataturk Cultural Center at Taksim Square, the protesters

produced and practiced space endowed with new meanings.

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CONCLUSION

A LOCAL GROCER AND A TRANSVESTITE

In my mid-twenties, I moved to Istanbul, the city I adore. I lived in a very vibrant, diverse neighborhood where I wrote several of my novels. I was in Istanbul when the earthquake hit in 1999. When I ran out of the building at three in the morning, I saw something that stopped me in my tracks. There was the local grocer there - a grumpy, old man who did not sell alcohol and did not speak to marginals. He was sitting next to a transvestite with a long black wig and mascara running down her cheeks. I watched the man open a pack of cigarettes with trembling hands and offer one to her. And that is the image of the night of the earthquake in my mind today - a conservative grocer and a crying transvestite smoking together on the sidewalk. In the face of death and destruction our mundane differences evaporated, and we all became one even if for a few hours.

Elif Şafak, TED Talks, June 2010 Since May 28, 2013, the first day of Gezi, a lot has been said and written in the media

and on the Internet about the protests, their political significance, the future of Turkey,

etc. These formalized discussions (Kongar 2013, Akınhay 2013, Teorik Bakış 2013) have

not paid much attention to the accounts of the protesters. In the transition from the on-

the-ground experience of the protests to a kind of theoretical talk, the participants’

feelings have been lost. What surprised me most in my conversations with the

participants was how much they enjoyed being a part of the protests. They spoke

affectionately of their days at the park. Their happiness and love of Gezi was contagious

– after talking to them for only a couple minutes, it was impossible not to say I wish I had

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been there. In order not to fall into the same trappings as the formalized discussions of

Gezi, I have decided to share with the reader my field notes verbatim and let my

informants do the talking

Yiğit: When I went there, I felt like I was part of a unity for the first time. I felt like I was part of a struggle. … What surprised me was as follows. No policemen entered the park for over fifteen days. What that park transformed into during those fifteen days surprised me a lot. In sociological terms, in cultural, economic, philosophical terms, what that park transformed into was something I saw for the first time in my life [...] First of all, the use of money was forbidden in the park, I believe on the fourth day. People tried to stop street vendors from entering the park. Secondly, people whose voices we don’t hear in the mainstream media had the opportunity to communicate their views by putting together stands in the park. By talking to them at these stands, we learned what these different groups wanted, that their views were in fact not so different from ours, that they too were working for a better world. Thirdly, people started caring for stray cats and dogs in the park. They fed them. People accepted everything that had been marginalized. This was noteworthy. What’s more, free medical services were provided […] The park transformed into a more European space than most other European countries. Everyone walked around freely. There were no fights. People talked and got along. … Togetherness, collaboration and learning from one another, taking something from each other. That transmission of information is not just political, rather it was maybe a food recipe, maybe how to look at a tree, maybe an idea… … What stayed with me the most was the environment at the park. The unity at the park. Because in the 21st century, it is incomprehensible that the individual who lives alone would return to the first ages like this, that such a communal life would be created there. Frankly, I don’t see this as being possible in this age. Ali: There was no rape, no robbery, no kidnapping and none of this for twenty or so days. When there was no police to be seen, there was also no crime. Selen: You had to trust the person next to you. They come over to you and spray Talcid11 on your face. And it doesn’t matter whose arm you take. At that moment, you are holding hands [...]You feel so small. So small but so strong [...] The crowds give to you a sense of trust, that the person next to you is thinking similarly, feeling

11 People carried around bottles of Talcid and Rennie solution (both are antacid tablets that are commonly used to neutralize stomach acidity) to ease the pain in their eyes after being tear-gassed.

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similarly, you just know it, you trust that person. I think this is the best thing that Gezi brought upon us. … The thinking there was let’s not ruin this. Everyone downplayed their sharp views and attitudes. Everyone was aware of the extraordinariness of the saturation and I think everyone liked it and understood that they had to smooth their ruffled feathers. A National Movement Party [Milliyet Halk Partisi, MHP] member understood this, so too did the man who hung a Kurdistan Workers’ Party [PKK] flag there. Because people knew that the smallest thing would become the excuse, everyone put their guards down so that it would not get spoiled. Ali: Everyone was there, what marginality? I think the most marginal of all is Erdoğan. When we take the time to think about it for a second, which one of us is marginal? No matter what anyone says, everyone was there. Selen: Those who do the halay dance, those who prepare meatballs, that man who came for the first time to Gezi Park from Izmit… Ali: Older women with head scarfs [başörtülü teyzeler], the hadjis and hodjas [hacılar, hocalar; a colloquial description of religious men] all were there. Some were driven to the park out of curiosity. […] Ali: Marginal? Yes, that many people from all different walks of live being there is a marginal situation. Gezi brought together different factions, groups of people that have been kept separate from each other for decades, that have been crowded out, yes, this is a marginal situation. Otherwise, there are no marginal groups there. There, there is a complete marginality for this country. Eren: A communal life emerged. There, you eat just enough to sustain yourself, biscuits, stale pastries [büsküvi, bayat poğaça] whatever you can find, just enough to stay alive […] A really pleasant environment of solidarity emerged. Without any individual prejudices, just together and fraternal living… We have food, we have water, we have everything, there is also a hospital, and you had people running to all your needs.

Some of the common themes that emerge are unity, belonging as in being a part of

something larger than the self, the breaking of social boundaries and stereotypes,

acceptance, empathy, collaboration, lack of crime and other social ills, sacrifice, and

contentment. The protesters’ accounts draw attention to a kind of social metamorphoses.

Within the Gezi commune, people became a part of a team in an era of individualism and

of social segregation. Yiğit describes this as a return to first ages. It is clear from the

accounts that everyone absolutely loved the transformation. This makes one wonder if it

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is against human nature to lead increasingly individualized lives. The space that the

community built invited a certain kind of performance from everyone. In fact, when I

asked my informants how they went about embracing certain roles within the commune,

they told me they just knew. They knew what they were capable of and what they were

good at and there was always a need for their particular set of skills. Whether protector,

nurse, librarian, etc. everyone had an instinctual role to carry out and the intricacy of this

division of labor was phenomenal. People felt that they belonged because they were

filling a gap or a need, and this resulted in a kind of warranted self-importance that is not

possible to achieve without having been put in a team context. One’s raw abilities and

qualities of leadership and mentorship were brought to the fore. Men had the opportunity

to perform their masculinity. A case in point is when Yiğit told me about having to

constantly strategize in his mind about potential exit strategies and places to hide when he

was with women, and that he was concerned more for them than he ever was for himself.

It was evident from the way he talked about this experience that Yiğit relished playing

the part of the protector. At other times, gender stopped mattering and a unigender spirit

emerged as people slept within the same tent as strangers of opposite genders without

worrying about rape.

Although none of my informants talked explicitly about fear or the fear of death

more specifically, it was implicit in the cautious ways they carried themselves within the

space of the protests. Some stayed behind when they could not muster the courage to face

the police and found other ways of making themselves useful. Others talked about a

consistent adrenaline rush while running around, fighting with the police, etc. and thus

feeling alive. In the process, everyone became more familiar with their physical,

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biological bodies, as well as facing some of their deepest fears and vulnerabilities. At any

rate, people’s perception of risk was significantly altered. When asked in an interview

why she put herself in front of a water cannon, the infamous ‘woman in black’ Kate

Cullen said: “I noticed a large group of photographers to the side of the TOMA and

decided I would stand in front of it, arms wide open, to emphasize the peacefulness of

these protests, in defiance of brutality” (No Rhetorike 2013). In this example, the spur of

the moment desire to send out a message of pacifism overrode any consideration of

danger. Similarly, I have mentioned earlier how Ali not only accepted pain, but wanted

more with the phrase “acımadı ki, acımadı ki” [it didn’t hurt, it didn’t hurt]. A common

denominator at the Gezi commune was people’s willingness to put themselves in danger

for their ideals and what they perceived as the greater good. In this respect, it was a

community of likeminded, brave individuals. During the attacks, people went the distance

to save a fellow protester even if that meant putting themselves in jeopardy. A number of

my informants mentioned holding hands with strangers or reaching out one’s hand to

someone in danger as a symbolic move of altruism. The instance people’s hands touched

one another, it did not matter if the person was an anarchist or a devout Muslim, if they

were gay or if their skin color was different. Although my informants did not talk about

the solidarity at the park in terms of some perceived danger, I would argue that the

atmosphere at the park was similar to that of a natural disaster or a state of emergency,

which compelled people to stay together.

This point brings me back to Turkish author Elif Şafak’s beautiful account of the

1999 earthquake in Istanbul and the image of a conservative grocer and a crying

transvestite smoking together on the sidewalk. Şafak writes, “In the face of death and

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destruction our mundane differences evaporated, and we all became one even if for a few

hours.” Similarly during Gezi, stereotypes ceased to exist and the boundaries of the social

and cultural circles were transgressed. Participants were forced to interact with people

outside of their inner circle, people that did not resemble their friends, neighbors,

colleagues, and family. There were those who met during the protests and later decided to

get married. The media’s favorite couple, Nuray and Özgür, wanted to celebrate their

wedding at Gezi but were barred them from entering the park by the police on the day of

the ceremony (Huffington Post 2013). The temporary breakdown of social boundaries

and norms further precipitated a kind of creative energy that is evident in the many

slogans and graffitis that remain popular to this day. In a way, the protests created their

own brand and initiated a social change by introducing younger apolitical generations to

politics. Gezi made politics cool again. I remember my 18-year-old brother insisting on

joining the protests and having prepared a backpack of essentials including his Talcid /

Rennie solution, a pair of swimming goggles and a hospital mask. After my father

dissuaded him from going, he had to make due with a selfie in front of a small group of

protesters in our neighborhood. Similarly, prior to the local elections that took place on

March 30, 2014, videos circulated on the Internet featuring famous artists who called

people to vote and during the elections, under the lead of a civil movement called “Vote

and Beyond,” a lot of young people volunteered at the ballot box to prevent fraud. The

social change was accompanied by a changed in the practice of urban space. I have

briefly touched upon French anthropologist Marc Augé’s theory of non-places in the first

chapter and here I would like to elaborate on the topic of law and order, and the spatial

ordering of people within non-places. In short, Augé (1995) argues that recent urban

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developments, including ‘non-places’ such as motorways, airports, supermarkets, clinics,

hotel chains, etc., have significantly altered the way in which individuals relate to their

surroundings and society at large. This is because these new spaces lack the authentically

relational and historical qualities of the so-called ‘anthropological places’ such as self-

contained old town centers.

Augé’s description of the contractual aspect of non-places (involving the

identification of individuals upon entry and exit, requirement for the proof of innocence,

and the instruction of users once inside through texts and images and the consequent

relegation of individuals to the ‘average man’) hints at the issues related to law and order,

and the spatial ordering of people within non-places. Augé insists that the “distinction

between places and non-places derives from the opposition between place and space”

(1995:64). It is important to him that space lacks a characterization, whereas place is

established and symbolized through its relational, historical and particular identity. To

Augé, non-places involve “spaces formed in relation to certain ends (transport, transit,

commerce, leisure) and the relations that individuals have with these space” (76). This

formulation brings to mind French social theorist Michel Foucault’s claim that “space is

fundamental in any exercise of power” (1982: 437). To Foucault, the “techniques for

practicing social relations, which are framed and modulated spatially, … allow for the

efficient expansion of power, or alternatively, for resistance” (428). Non-places grant

their patrons the power to control the users of space and mediate the set of relations they

have with one another as well as with themselves through implicit and explicit means.

Augé characterizes the patrons as ‘moral entities’ or institutions (airports, airlines,

Ministry of Transport, commercial companies, traffic police, municipal councils)” (Augé

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1995:78). Importantly, it is not a single individual who administers a non-place, but

rather it is the faceless institutional interest in the ordering of populations that determines

the code of practice within non-places. The codified ideograms, images and texts,

including instructions for use, and the contractual use make up the explicit means of

control within non-places. Together, they serve to restrict an individual’s movement,

disperse masses and minimize interactions between people.

I propose that it is precisely at the point of transgression of order that non-place-

ness is contradicted. Two cases in point are the Gezi protests and the protests in Brazil

that began shortly after Gezi during the summer of 2013. In Brazil, what began as a

public outcry over the increase in bus, metro, and train fares quickly evolved into a

nationwide demonstration of discontent with high levels of corruption, inadequate supply

of social services, and public funds allocated for the construction of facilities for mega

events like the World Cup and the Olympics and their subsequent privatization. One of

the iconic images of the protests was the takeover of the Congress Building in the capital

Brasília. At the time of its inauguration, Brasília was a non-place, because (1) a majority

of its inhabitants were either guest workers or federal employees all present in Brasília

under a contract, (2) although the planners and the architects tried to create a community

within the self-sufficient superquadras, a major criticism of the city was its highly

individualistic character, (3) lacking a history of its own, the city was conceived of as a

microcosm for all of Brazil (Holston 1989). The iconic character of the modernist federal

and residential buildings spectacularized the nation’s history. Moreover, Brasília was a

modernist city designed for the automobile and motorways (one of Augé’s principal non-

places) that dominated the urban plan. In my opinion, Brasília ceased to be a non-place

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the moment protesters climbed over Oscar Niemeyer's National Congress Building. At

this moment, Brasília’s non-place-ness was contradicted not because time had passed and

the city had developed a personality of its own, but because the order that is fundamental

to non-place-ness was transgressed. With the takeover of the Congress Building, the

protesters redefined the capital city as relational, historical and concerned with identity.

By creating a historical referent via the Congress Building other than the symbolisms

imposed by the architect or the government, they claimed the power to symbolize their

own place.

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Fig. 1 & 2. Protesters takeover the National Congress in Brasília. Source: Business Insider, June 18, 2013.

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Similar to the protest in Brazil, two of the iconic images of the Gezi protests were

the takeover of the Ataturk Cultural Center in Taksim Square and the march across the

Bosphorus Bridge. Both images depicted protesters as ‘out of place’ by placing them in

places they were not supposed to exist. The same could be said of the Gezi commune,

insofar as the existence of a makeshift town of that complexity next to one of Istanbul’s

busiest squares was beyond imagination and impossible in the eyes of many. Yet while

the protests were unfolding, the protesters felt that those places were exactly where they

were meant to be. I have discussed in the first chapter some of the practices of neoliberal

urbanism and inter-referencing that have placed downtown Istanbul on the verge of

becoming a non-place, with fundamental changes to both the material and the social

fabric of the city such as the spectacularization of history by the planned reconstruction

of the Ottoman-era military barracks, the proliferation of texts and images flooding from

the many retail stores that line Istiklal Avenue, and the increasing gap between the old

and the new as streamlined prestige projects replace the gentrified Levantine buildings of

Tarlabaşı. By climbing on the roof of the Ataturk Cultural Center and covering its iconic

steel-lattice-covered façade with banners and flags, the protesters reclaimed the

modernist edifice as their own. Similarly, by going against the law that does not allow

any pedestrians on the Bosphorus Bridge, the protesters reclaimed the bridge, which in

Augé’s formulation would be the epitome of non-place-ness by virtue of its formation in

relation to the sole purpose of transit. The protesters victoriously marched across the

bridge, arm in arm, in defiance of the rules of conduct set by ‘moral entities’ as a means

of social control. Taksim Gezi protests proved to the inhabitants of Istanbul that the city

is theirs no matter the claims of appropriation and redevelopment made by the local and

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national governments and big money. Despite the passage of time, these two powerful

images depicting protesters on roof of the Ataturk Cultural Center and marching across

the Bosphorus Bridge will continue to serve as a reminder of humanity’s intrinsic power

to transform non-places to places.

Fig. 3 & 4. Protesters standing on the roof of Ataturk Cultural Center. Source: turkiyeturizm.com.

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Fig. 5 & 6. March across the Bosphorus Bridge which is normally closed to pedestrian traffic. Source: internethaber.com

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APPENDIX

A CHRONOLOGY OF TAKSIM GEZI PROTESTS Taksim Gezi protests started on May 28, 2013 with spontaneous groups of people from different walks of life beginning to occupy Gezi Park in response to its planned demolition as part of the Taksim pedestrianization project. May 28, though, marks not the start of discontent with the redevelopment plan, but is a turning point at which the general public became aware of the government’s plans for Gezi Park and mobilized against the demolition. On October 31st, 2012, the government’s controversial pedestrianization project began with the closure of roads leading to the Taksim Square. In the name of making the square more pedestrian friendly, the project proposed to direct car traffic underground into subterranean tunnels that would be accessed by large ramps (each 100 meters deep and 100 meter long) at several boulevards around the square. On November 8th, 2012, Istanbul Mayor Kadir Topbaş announced that as part of the redevelopment plan, the Ottoman-era Taksim Military Barracks and its courtyard would be reconstructed on the park grounds. The original plan was to reserve the ground floor of the rebuilt barracks for a shopping mall and the upper floors for luxury flats.

The foundation of the Taksim Gezi Park Protection and Beautification Association in December 2012 was the first step taken towards saving the park. Long before the violent confrontations with the police, the Gezi Park Association organized events like flash-mob yoga sessions, music concerts, theater performances and photo exhibits with the Gezi Park to generate interest in the space. The one-day festival that took place on April 13 attracted about a thousand people to the park. The festival’s slogan was “stand up,” urging the city dwellers to take a stand against Taksim’s urban renewal. The unanimous feeling among the festival participants was that they had to make the park as part of their everyday lives in order to save it. In an interview with the independent Turkish press agency Bianet, Mehmet Özdal, a young writer, admitted that although he was supporter of the cause, he had never spent time in the park and recognized that it was considered by many as being eerie and unsafe at night (Mumyakmaz 2013). The press release distributed by the Gezi Park Association at the end of the festival described Beyoğlu as the “home, workplace, street, neighborhood, park, in short the mutual living space of the residents of Taksim, one that is importantly shared by other living creatures” (Ayazoğlu 2013). The members demanded that their voices be heard if an urban renewal project was to be carried out in their living space. One of the founders of the Gezi Park Association, 40-year-old-lawyer Birkan Isin, echoed this rhetoric, as he recalled his initial response to the redevelopment plan. He said in a June 4th interview with The New York Times: “I felt that Istanbul is my home, and Taksim Square is my sitting room, and I felt

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like someone came in and bulldozed my sitting room” (Arango 2013a). It was the members of this organization that confronted the police on the first night of demolition on May 27. A group of around fifty activists were at the park as part of the organization’s routine night watch, when the police arrived. It was an anticlimactic night, but the activists began spreading the word about the confrontation on social media. A member of the association recounts that on the subsequent day, there were about two hundred people in the park (Deniz Atam 2013). Together, they confronted the riot squad that had reappeared at the park with bulldozers and construction trailers this second time. The activists asked the police if they had the project details and the demolition permit with them and were left alone once the police failed to provide them with the proper documentation.

As news of the confrontation spread on social media, greater numbers flocked to the park to join the group’s routine night watch. The number of tents rapidly increased. On May 30, at the break of dawn, the police raided the park using tear gas and the Mass Incident Intervention Vehicle (TOMA) to disperse the protesters (Hürriyet Daily News 2013a). Some of the tents were burned down during this initial raid. Ten thousand people gathered at Gezi Park in the evening, in response to the activists’ calls through social media for a major gathering at the park. Rapidly, the protests broadened into a wider expression of discontent with police violence and the authoritarian politics of Erdoğan and his Islamist-rooted party AK Party, which has been in power for a decade. There was another police attack at dawn on May 31st. This time the police used more tear gas, as well as water cannons. Throughout the day, the police continued its efforts to disperse the crowds who had scattered to many nearby areas, Harbiye, Gümüşsuyu and İstiklal Avenue, some of Istanbul’s most populated areas, with indiscriminant use of tear gas. In the late afternoon, an estimated one hundred thousand people were in the Beyoğlu district (Hürriyet Daily News 2013h). Metro services were halted and travelers trapped inside the Taksim station, as the police threw tear gas into the metro station and blocked the exits. Reuters reported the number of injured surpassed one hundred on this second day of the police crackdown (Journal of Turkish Weekly 2013). The protests quickly spread to other major Turkish cities. Turkish newspaper Zaman reported that in the capital Ankara, people gathered in front of the Turkish Parliament building to protest the Gezi Park demolition and were met with heavy use of tear gas by the police. There were also protests in Eskişehir, Muğla, Konya, Yalova, Antalya and Bolu (Today’s Zaman 2013). The same day, an Istanbul court ruled in favor of a petition by a local advocacy group, deciding to suspend, at least temporarily, the construction at the park (Arango and Yeğinsu 2013).

Early on the morning of June 1st, forty thousand demonstrators crossed the Bosphorus Bridge (which normally is closed to pedestrian traffic) from the Asian side to join the protesters at Taksim Square. Shortly after they crossed the bridge, they were confronted by the police who had set up barricades blocking the roads leading up to Taksim (including İstiklal Avenue, Sıraselviler Avenue, Harbiye and Gümüşsuyu) and dispersed the crowds using water cannons and tear gas (Milliyet 2012). The police withdrew from Taksim Square in the late afternoon, taking away barricades around the square and the park. Immediately, thousands flocked to Gezi Park. Within a matter of couple hours, every inch of the park was covered in tents, and over the course of the occupation, protesters ‘urbanized’ it with makeshift public spaces, including a library, a

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preschool, an infirmary, a marketplace, a speaker’s corner, etc. Hürriyet Daily News journalist Çetin Cem Yılmaz (2013) called Gezi Park a “utopic Freetown” referring to its festival-like atmosphere, with yoga, barbecues, kids’ activities corners, and musical performances. Routinely, the clashes between the protesters and the police in the surrounding areas picked up in the afternoon around 6 p.m. in the surrounding areas. Erdoğan, in a speech at the 20th congress of Turkey's Exporters Assembly, called on demonstrators to end their mobilization without back peddling on the Military Barracks project. He said:

The issue is not the five, ten trees that are being removed. The demonstration that started with the Gezi Park protests has become ideological. […] The barracks have to be built in their place, while protecting the current green area. They say that some would get rent out of this. We are only aiming for our people to receive rents. [Hürriyet Daily News 2013b]

The same day, Interior Minister Muammer Güler said 1,730 people had been detained in 235 protests held in 67 cities (Hürriyet Daily News 2013h).

The withdrawal of the police from Taksim Square and Gezi Park on June 1st started a ten-day détente, but clashes continued in Beşiktaş, the nearest district to Taksim, as well as in the major cities of İzmir and Ankara. The first casualty was the 20-year-old Mehmet Ayvalıtaş, who was hit by a car during the protests in Istanbul. The next day, on June 3rd, Abdullah Cömert, a 22-year-old Republican People’s Party (CHP) youth branch member, was killed during the clashes in the city of Antakya. Contradicting figures provided by Turkey’s Deputy Prime Minister Bülent Arınç (that 244 police and 60 protesters had been injured in clashes), the Turkish Doctors’ Union reported that 4,177 people had been injured during the protests in addition to the deaths of Cömert and Ayvalıtaş (Hürriyet Daily News 2013h). On June 2, at the Rumeli Turks Association’s general assembly, PM Erdoğan denied a conclusive shopping mall project and suggested that the rebuilt barracks could be utilized as a city museum or an architectural work that will put different activities in place (Hürriyet Daily News 2013c). He also said that the Atatürk Cultural Center (built 1946-1969), one of Taksim Square’s staples, was to be demolished and replaced by an opera house and a mosque. Erdoğan added that he did not have to receive permission for his projects from the main opposition leader or the protesters, since the people who voted for the ruling AK Party had already given him the authority.

The protests embraced minority ethnic groups such as Kurds and Laz peoples (of the Black Sea) that have been cause for political tension with Erdoğan’s recent move towards greater recognition of Kurdish interests under the so-called “Kurdish opening,” as well as Laz people’s awakening to their language and culture, termed the “Laz Renaissance” in academic circles. These minority ethnic groups displayed their cultures freely and side by side as Kurds danced their halays, and Laz people did their horon dance. Similarly, minority, and some radical, political parties and views found visual expression on façade of the Atatürk Cultural Center, which quickly turned into a bulletin board for the banners and flags. Furthermore, the leading LGBT organization in Turkey (a country that was condemned by Amnesty International in 2011 for ignoring the violence and discrimination LGBT individuals face regularly), KAOS GL, had a presence at Gezi Park. GLAAD magazine reported that a large group was seen waving a large

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rainbow flag and shouting, "I am transsexual and I am here!" (Moch 2013). The LGBT rights activists and demonstrators were joined by Gezi Park protesters at the 11th annual Istanbul gay pride on June 30, KAOS GL placing the estimated number of participants at tens of thousands. The same group of protesters that celebrated LGBT rights asked for the slogans to be silenced when a prayer call was heard and invited people not to drink alcohol out of respect to the sacred night of Lailat al–Mi’raj (Yılmaz 2013). Hürriyet Daily News reported that the Islamic scholar İhsan Eliaçık had invited all Istanbul residents to join in the peaceful religious celebration at Gezi Park, describing Taksim as the “securest spot in Turkey” (2013e). Eliaçık said, “Fan groups are there, girls with headscarves are there. There is respect for belief at Gezi; there are those who say prayers during protests.” A Quran reading took place at Taksim Square at nine a.m. on the day of Lailat al–Mi’raj.

In fear of the government’s crackdown on anti-government news channels, most of the Turkish media practiced self-censorship. Turkish-American author Elif Batuman (2013) wrote in her blog for The New Yorker:

Back in my apartment, I turned on the television. CNN Turk was broadcasting a food show, featuring the “flavors of Nigde.” Other major Turkish news channels were showing a dance contest and a roundtable on study-abroad programs. It was a classic case of the revolution not being televised. The whole country seemed to be experiencing a cognitive disconnect, with Twitter saying one thing, the government saying another, and the television off on another planet. Twitter was the one everyone believed—even the people who were actually on the street. In a city as vast, diffuse, and diverse as Istanbul, with so many enclaves and populations and interests and classes, and with such imperfect freedom of the press, gauging public opinion, or even current events, can be fantastically difficult. The Twitter hashtag #OccupyGezi brought up hundreds, maybe thousands of appeals urging BBC, Reuters, CNN, and other English-language news outlets to “show the world” what was happening in Istanbul—as if only the international media could do what the news is supposed to do: provide an objective view of what was going on outside.

Besides social media outlets like Twitter and Facebook, people had to rely on their own bodily presence on the streets and in Gezi Park to access accurate information. A poll that was conducted by the research company Konda among 4,411 participants showed that 69 percent heard about the protests through social media, while only a small seven percent had heard about them via TV (Bianet 2013). In a speech that blamed social media for the protests, Erdoğan called Twitter a “menace,” saying, “The best examples of lies can be found there. To me, social media is the worst menace to society" (Letsch 2013). At the same time, the heavy reliance on social media meant that the protesters were an easy target for the government officials, who on June 4, detained twenty-nine people overnight in Izmir for “inciting riots and conducting propaganda” on the social media network Twitter (Hürriyet Daily News 2013g).

On June 5, six representatives from the Taksim Solidarity Platfrom, an umbrella group of the Gezi Park protest movements, met with the Deputy Prime Minister Arınç, presenting him with a list of demands. The list included the dismissal of the governors and the heads of the security forces of Istanbul, the capital Ankara, and the city of Hatay, the release of detained protesters, an end to the use of tear gas by the police, and the

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cancellation of the Military Barracks project that started the protests in the first place (Arsu 2013). Gezi Park supporters crowd-funded (through an online campaign on Indiegogo) a full-page ad appearing in the front section of The New York Times with the title “What’s happening in Turkey.” Reiterating some of the demands made by the Taksim Solidarity Platform, they wrote:

People of Turkey have spoken: We will not be oppressed! Millions are outraged by the violent reaction of their government to a peaceful protest aimed at saving Istanbul’s Gezi Park. Outraged, yet not surprised. Over the course of Prime Minister Erdoğan’s ten-year term, we have witnessed a steady erosion of our civil rights and freedoms. Arrests of numerous journalists, artists, and elected officials and restrictions on freedom of speech, minorities’ and women’s rights all demonstrate that the ruling party is not serious about democracy. Time and again, the Prime Minister has mocked and trivialized his nation’s concerns while Turkey’s own media have remained shamefully silent. The people protesting bravely throughout Turkey are ordinary citizens. We span several generations and represent a spectrum of ethnic, religious, socioeconomic, ideological, sexual, and gender identities. We stand united because of our concern for Turkey’s future. [Shapiro 2013]

In response, Erdoğan turned his attention to the foreign media and accused them of “serving stories to placed orders with ideological approaches,” with his critique more specifically directed at the full-page ad placed at The New York Times (Hürriyet Daily News 2013i).

Relaying the directives given to him by Erdoğan, Istanbul Mayor Kadir Topbaş, in a press release on June 8, said that is was too late to back down on the construction of the Barracks, “We already declared it in our electoral program and our people voted us in accordingly. Our Prime Minister absolutely desires the Military Barracks to be built” (Hürriyet Daily News 2013j). With an unexpected change of heart, Topbaş added that the Barracks would likely be converted into a city museum. Most of the 563 trees in Gezi Park were to be incorporated into this new project, 72 of which, according to Topbaş, were fit to be moved and 26 with prospects of replantation with some risks. The Taksim Solidarity Platform responded immediately and resolutely that it would not accept any construction on the site. Thousands gathered at Taksim Square on July 9 for a rally organized by the Taksim Solidarity Platform in response to the group’s failed attempts at resolving the issue through meetings with government officials, namely Deputy Prime Minister Arınç. At the same time in Ankara, a 5,000-strong crowd suffered a police barrage with heavy use of TOMA water cannon and tear gas to disperse protesters that had gathered at the city’s Kızılay Square. The police moved into the Kuğulu Park to dismantle the tents that had been re-erected in solidarity with the action continuing at Gezi Park (Hürriyet Daily News 2013m). In the other major cities of Edirne and Izmir, over 2,000 and 10,000 protesters, respectively, marched in support of the demonstrations. On June 9, upon his return to the capital from a long series of visits in North Africa and inside Turkey, Erdoğan gave a speech in front of thousands of his supporters, warning the Gezi Park demonstrators that patience had its limits. Only the people could call him and his party to account, he said, and not a marginal group:

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Are the people only those at Gezi Park? Aren't those who came to meet us at the airport the people too? Those who are gathered now in Ankara; aren't they the people, too? Let the country see the real picture of Ankara and not of those who terrorized Ankara. Instead of [occupying] Gezi Park or Kuğulu Park, there are seven months [until the elections]. Be patient and let's face off at the ballot box. [Hürriyet Daily News 2013k]

In his speech, Erdoğan insisted on his depiction of the Gezi demonstrators as looters, urging the demonstrators upset by his use of this term to look in the dictionary for the accurate meaning of the term, and said, “Those who burn, destroy and attack are called çapulcu. Those who back them are of the same family” (Hürriyet 2013). He claimed that the protesters had entered the Dolmabahçe Mosque in Beşiktaş with shoes and beer bottles in their hands when they took refuge at the mosque after the fierce police crackdown on protesters demonstrating near the Prime Minister's Working Office. The historic Dolmabahçe Mosque, otherwise known as the Bezm-i Alem Valide Sultan Mosque, was at the time converted into a first aid center and its imam and muezzin had allowed medics to treat the injured within the mosque. Erdoğan’s accusation stirred up huge controversy over the reality of what had happened that day at the mosque. A video appeared on social media showing what appeared to be a beer can among medical supplies used to treat the injured. On two separate occasions, the imam and the muezzin of the mosque denied Erdoğan’s accusation. The muezzin said, “No alcohol was taken here. If the protesters had seen people drinking after they took refuge here, they would have kicked them out themselves” (Hürriyet Daily News 2013l). Similarly, the mosque’s imam said, "A group that was chased by the police entered forcefully into the mosque. We tried to prevent it, to shut the doors but we did not succeed. The injured were treated for two days. Those who took shelter were running away from police tear gas” (2013l).

On June 9, Erdoğan accused the protesters of insulting headscarf-wearing girls and women and attacking civil building and vehicles. Bringing up the ban on headscarf-wearing women entering universities, he said, “For decades, my headscarf-wearing daughters and sisters have been treated like pariahs in this country. But they never did what these people have done. They remained patient, because they know that patience results in salvation” (Hürriyet 2013). He further protected the riot police against accusations of their disproportionate use of force against the protesters, and stressed the fact that over six hundred police officers have been injured during the protests. The two “Respect the National Will” counter-Gezi mass rallies organized by the AK Party (on June 15 in Ankara and June 16 in Kazlıçeşme, Istanbul) were attended by hundreds of thousands of government supporters. Erdoğan said that the goal of these rallies was to let the voice of the silent masses be heard. Not too far from Erdoğan’s own past as an Islamist leader opposed to the old secular state, his conservative supporters represent a social class that was previously marginalized. An example was Erdoğan’s June 11 speech: “The potato-head bloke, itching his belly — this was how they regarded us for decades. They think we do not know anything about politics, arts, theater, cinema, poetry, paintings, aesthetics, architecture” (Arango et al. 2013).

On June 11, the riot police moved into Taksim Square with tear gas, water cannons, and rubber bullets, ending to the ten-day détente. The protesters fleeing the square sought refuge at Gezi Park. Clashes continued as the riot police tried to make their way into the park, but retrieved after clearing off some of the tents located at the

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entrance. The police also removed the protesters' banners from the façade of the Atatürk Cultural Center and replaced them by a triptych of a portrait of Atatürk, flanked by two national flags. Commenting on the crackdown the same afternoon, Erdoğan vowed to take even tougher action against the protesters if they did not end their occupation of Gezi Park. He said, “Our determinacy with regard to Taksim Square and Gezi Park will continue. I am sorry, but Gezi Park is a park not a place to occupy” (Hürriyet Daily News 2013n). The following day, Erdoğan met with a group of eleven people representing the demonstrators and at the end of the meeting, offered to hold a referendum to decide the fate of Gezi Park. Yet what could be interpreted as an attempt at compromise was coupled with threatening language, as Erdoğan said he already ordered his interior minister to end all antigovernment protests within 24 hours. At another speech on the same day, Erdoğan continued his rhetoric of distinguishing between “well-intended” and “ill-intended” protesters:

Right now, Gezi Park is filled with filth, in the name of environmentalism. Some say it is magnificent and all, no offence but they should not attempt to fool us. You can hardly walk in the smell of piss and most of them are defecating there. All of that is identified. I do not mean the sincere ones. They go and fulfill their need in the hotels they made a deal with. […] Our patience is coming to an end. I’m making my last warning: mothers, fathers please withdraw your kids from there. […] I am telling my sincere, environmentalist, honest brothers: Do not upset us any longer, withdraw and leave us alone with those extremist terrorist organizations. [Hürriyet Daily News 2013p]

The demonstrators at Gezi Park were critical of the proposed referendum with many saying that it was yet another move in a seemingly confused strategy by the prime minister. “They first tell us to go home,” said 24-year-old student Bora Ekrem, “and then they present the idea of the referendum? How can we trust them? If they were sincere about a vote, they would not ask us to leave the park. We will not leave until they declare the park is ours” (Arsu and Yeğinsu 2013). The protesters’ response to Erdoğan was selected from a 2009 speech in which he had said: “The fundamental rights and freedoms cannot be subject to voting,” over a referendum proposal on a ban on the construction of minarets on mosques (Hürriyet Daily News 2013o). Academics, too, were critical of the referendum proposal, arguing that this was essentially an urban planning decision and thus should be made by local representatives and not dictated by the prime minister. At this point, a court decision had already temporarily halted construction at the park. On June 15, the riot police intervened once again in Taksim Square with tear gas and water cannons, and subsequently entered Gezi Park for the first time in two weeks. The local media reported that some 1,000 riot police officers earlier arrived at Istanbul’s Ataturk Airport from regions as far away as Diyarbakir and Sirnak. As the clashes were unfolding, a group of officers encircled the Divan Hotel, which was being used as a first-aid center since the first day of the protests, and threw tear gas inside its doors. According to the reports from the ground, the riot police stationed in front of the Atatürk Cultural Center made announcements before the intervention asking protesters to disperse from the park (Hürriyet Daily News 2013m). After clearing the remaining barricades around the park, security forces proceeded with demolition of the tents. It took the police less than half an hour to bring an end to the 18-day occupation (Reynolds 2013). The police

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cordoned off the Taksim Square and continued to repel the crowds ascending to the Square from Istiklal Avenue with water cannon trucks. The group of protesters that gathered at the Asian side in an attempt to cross the Bosphorus Bridge on foot in the direction of Taksim Square was stopped by the police who used tear gas, as well as barring some of the city's arterial roads. Many protesters in smaller groups gathered around the city both in the Asian and the European sides and some were subjected to severe tear gas and police brutality. The Taksim Solidarity Platform contradicted the Istanbul Governor Huseyin Avni Mutlu who described the operation as "extremely smooth" and said twenty-nine people had been lightly injured (Reynolds 2013). In its statement on the day following the attacks, Taksim Solidarity criticized the police for its “warlike violence” that left hundreds of people injured and described the “attack with rubber bullets, intense tear gas and stun grenades at a moment when there were a lot of women, kids and elderly people were at the park” as a “crime against humanity” (Hürriyet Daily News 2013r). On June 16, while clashes between the riot police and the protesters were still continuing in some parts of the city, Istanbul Municipality cleaners were sent to Taksim Square, which was temporarily closed to both car and pedestrian traffic. They cleared out the tents at Gezi Park in the early hours of the morning and washed the area with pressurized water. What was left of the barricades built by the protesters was also removed with the help of cranes. In a televised interview on the same day, Turkey’s European Union minister Egemen Bağış declared that everyone entering the Taksim Square after the crackdown would be considered a member or a supporter of a terrorist organization (Hürriyet Daily News 2013s).

The June 15 crackdown officially ended the occupation of Gezi Park. Soon after, on July 2nd, a local court ruled against the plans for rebuilding the Ottoman-era barracks at the park, deciding that the plan violated preservation rules and unacceptably changed Taksim Square’s identity. According to the Interior Ministry’s report, some 2.5 million protesters hit the streets across Turkey during the 18-day occupation of Gezi Park (Hürriyet Daily News 2013t). A large majority of the protests were staged in Istanbul and Ankara and only in two cities, Bayburt and Bingöl, did people not take to the streets. The same report noted that some 4,900 protesters were detained and 4,000 people were injured, including 600 riot police. Turkish Medical Association, by contrast, reported the total number of those injured during the protests in the thirteen major cities at 8,121, including five casualties. These were 21-year-old Mehmet Ayvalıtaş, who was ran over by a car trying to thread through a pool of activists in Istanbul’s Ümraniye district; 22-year-old Abdullah Cömert, who died during the protests in the city of Antakya due to baton blows to the head; 26-year-old Ethem Sarısülük, who was severely injured by a police officer’s bullet during the protest in Ankara; 19-year-old Ali İsmail Korkmaz, who was kept in intensive care for thirty days after he was attacked by unknown assailants in the city of Eskişehir; and police officer Mustafa Sarı, who was severely injured after falling off a bridge in the city of Adana (Turkish Medical Association 2013). The report further noted that eleven people lost their eyes due to plastic bullets and tear gas canisters. Four further deaths (Selim Önder, İrfan Tuna, Zeynep Eryaşar, and Serdar Kadakal) were tied to heart attacks allegedly triggered by overexposure to tear gas.

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I pledge my honor that this thesis represents my own work in accordance with Princeton

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Özlem Cebeci