Routledge Handbook on Middle East Cities

Abstract

Turkey’s cities have gone through several transformative periods and waves of modernisation in \nthe last two centuries. In an almost dialectical process, the modern experience was shaped by the \ninterplay of destruction of older structures and the construction of new ones, in architectural as \nwell as in societal and discursive terms.2 In this seesaw of destruction and construction, the issue \nof scale has been central: urban interventions created new spaces and destroyed old ones, but \ndue to limited capital and state weakness, they never resulted in a total transformation of urban \nstructures. Until the early years of the twenty-first century and despite waves of heightened \nurban reconstruction, cities in Turkey displayed recognisable patterns and forms shaped over \nlong periods of time and accentuated during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Urban \npolicies were a reflection of the economic and political structures of the day, while the resulting \ncityscapes were an amalgam of the many historical and architectural layers they were built on. \nLike most cities in empires, Ottoman cities were palimpsests written and rewritten by many \ngenerations of authors. \nThese urban, spatial, and social palimpsests have survived almost two centuries of enforced \nand often ideologically charged attempts at modernisation, including episodes of forced uprooting, \ncontinuous destruction, genocide, and the targeting of the heritage of non-Muslim and \nsometimes even of Muslim communities. Despite the rapid transformations engendered by these \npolicies and despite the cumulative destruction of subaltern lifeworlds, a tradition of Ottoman \nand Turkish urbanity and sociability remained to the extent that in the 1990s Juan Goytisolo \ncould still speak of Istanbul in terms of a “Palimpsest City”, where “new arrivals stand and listen \nto a polyglot text, babel of languages, language of the stones, tracing the unwritten history of the \ncity founded twenty-seven centuries ago, according to the promptings of an oracle” (Goytisolo, \n2003: 72). \nIn this chapter, I argue that these complex and delicate palimpsests and the nested sociabilities \nthey come with are being eradicated, in a final grandiose stand of capital gone out of control \nand political power destroying the foundations of the Turkish state. I try to show this by tracing \nthe emergence of what I term the “populist urban growth machine” and its evolution into a \nLeviathan that eventually devours everything, including itself. I also contextualise the effacement \nof difference and the destruction of urban heterogeneity in the context of debates on \nurbicide and larger trends of neo-liberal urban policies in the region and beyond, concluding \nwith the question whether, despite effacement and commodification, parts of the palimpsests can somehow survive and be enriched under the conditions of neo-liberalism3 and authoritarian \npower arrangements, or in short, under authoritarian neo-liberalism (Tansel, 2017). \nAfter establishing the historical context of cities in the late Ottoman Empire and Turkey, \nI approach this question by highlighting case studies, which illustrate broadly two differential \npaths of urban policies under the Justice and Development Party (AKP, Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi): \n(1) a more recognisably neo-liberal path of hyper-development in Western Turkey and (2) a \n“darker side of neoliberalism” (Göçek, 2017: 15) in the Kurdish-populated southeast provinces. \nTracing hyper-development in the West, I discuss four cases of urban transformation, examining \nthe reconstruction of the Istanbul district of Tarlabaı, the reimagination in the historical centre \nof Ankara, and the securitisation of the urban ensembles of Taksim Square and Gezi Park. I then \ndiscuss the urban transformation project of Fikirtepe and examples of escalations in scale and \nscope, to gain a sense of the emerging urban fabrics of modern Turkey. Finally, I turn to the \nattempt to create alternative forms for organising society and cities in the Kurdish provinces in \nthe 2010s and the subsequent destruction of Kurdish cities in a war that echoes earlier instances \nof destruction and genocide.

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