Reclaiming the right to the city: Reflections on the urban uprisings in Turkey

Date

2013-07-08

Author

Kuymulu, Mehmet Barış

Metadata

Show full item record

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Item Usage Stats

332
views

0
downloads

The spark that drew Istanbul into a fire of protest and uprising was initially set off by a modest ‘occupy style’ peaceful resistance, staged against the destruction of an historically public park, an urban commons, in order to make way for yet another shopping mall in Istanbul. Following explicit police violence against the protestors, who were openly discredited by the government for being a few looters, the urban centers of Turkey saw a full-fledged uprising, gathering considerable international steam as well. Analyzing the path of this social mobilization flowing from Gezi Park to larger geographical scales of the urban, the national, and beyond, this article situates the urban uprisings in Turkey in the conceptual background of the right to the city, coined by Henri Lefebvre at the time of Parisian uprisings in 1968. The article further argues in the end that, if this revolutionary energy is to be channeled into a lasting social transformation, the Kurdish movement and the labor movement—historically, the two main motors of Turkey's democratization—should catch up with the protestors on the ground.

Subject Keywords

Geography, Planning and Development, Urban Studies

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/34528

Journal

City

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2013.815450

Collections

Department of Sociology, Article

Suggestions

OpenMETU
Core

Urban streets and urban social sustainability: a case study on Bagdat street in Kadikoy, Istanbul Lotfata, Aynaz; Ataöv Demirkan, Anlı (Informa UK Limited, 2020-09-01) This paper focuses on the social function of historical public space in Turkey that has been transformed with rise of modernism. Before that, it functioned as a suburban recreational area. The increasing demand for urban lands has been led to its transformation and its function as an urban component. The historical pattern of urban space can be conserved to protect and strengthen social interactions as the key issue of urban social sustainability. With a focus on the urban design through literature review, ...
Cultural actors as agents of generating social co-presences within the place: Istanbul's contemporary art scene KAHYA, GÜZİN YELİZ; Ataöv Demirkan, Anlı (Informa UK Limited, 2019-06-03) This paper builds on the designation of cultural actors' actions as a decisive factor in the emergence of urban patterns of art-driven social co-presences in Istanbul. It contributes to the creative city debate from the perspective of community development by incorporating the contemporary arts into urban social space making efforts. Methodologically, the locations of art organizations in the contemporary arts scene of Istanbul are approached as an urban pattern of art driven social co-presences that result...
Householder Satisfaction in Apartment Block Neighborhoods: Case of Ankara, Turkey Erdoğdu, Gülsün Pelin Sarıoğlu; Özdemir Sarı, Özgül Burcu (American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), 2018-03-01) In Turkey, the satisfaction of households with their neighborhoods has never been an explicit concern of policymakers. Multistory apartment buildings dominate the urban environment, and they lack, in most cases, any significant social and physical infrastructure. This has raised questions of how the neighborhood satisfaction of households can be measured and understood. This study investigates the neighborhood satisfaction of households in apartment buildings in the case of urban Ankara. The Ankara Survey r...
Displaced memories, or the architecture of forgetting and remembrance Sargın, Güven Arif (SAGE Publications, 2004-10-01) Under the political pressure of Turkey's Modernity Project Ankara's urban-planning processes and its monuments have always been utilized as significant tools of architectural displacement in the expedience of utopias, both socially and spatially. Urban-scale operations since the 1950s, a significant conservative breakthrough as a result of global liberalism and populism, however, have overwhelmed the secular state's organized forgetting, and have increasingly demobilized the capital city's modernist collect...
Rethinking the Tunisian miracle: a party politics view Yardimci-Geyikci, Sebnem; Tür Küçükkaya, Özlem (Informa UK Limited, 2018-01-01) Five years on from the Tunisian revolution, Tunisia stands as the sole success story of the Arab Spring. The country since then has managed to adopt a pluralist and democratic constitution, and held three free and fair elections. Accordingly, in the eyes of several observers, Tunisia is now in the process of consolidating its new democracy. However, the reality on the ground seems much gloomier, as most recent opinion surveys suggest that there is a significant degree of dissatisfaction, not only with polit...

Citation Formats

M. B. Kuymulu, “Reclaiming the right to the city: Reflections on the urban uprisings in Turkey,” City, pp. 274–278, 2013, Accessed: 00, 2020. [Online]. Available: https://hdl.handle.net/11511/34528.