Architectures of Emergency in Turkey

Heritage, Displacement and Catastrophe

Eray Çayli, Pinar Aykac, Sevcan Ercan, Eray Çayli, Pinar Aykac, Sevcan Ercan

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781788319911
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

Challenging existing political analyses of the state of emergency in Turkey, this volume argues that such states are not merely predetermined by policy and legislation but are produced, regulated, distributed and contested through the built environment in both embodied and symbolic ways. Contributors use empirical critical-spatial research carried out in Turkey over the past decade, exploring heritage, displacement and catastrophes. Contributing to the broader literature on the related concepts of exception, risk, crisis and uncertainty, the book discusses the ways in which these phenomena shape and are shaped by the built environment, and provides context-specific empirical substance to it by focusing on contemporary Turkey. In so doing, it offers nuanced insight into the debate around emergency as well as into recent urban-architectural affairs in Turkey.

Introduction

The material and spatial politics of emergency

Eray Çaylı

As I type this introduction, the novel coronavirus – or, officially, Covid-19 – is raging across the globe, prompting numerous governments of various persuasions to implement measures in the name of ‘emergency’. Many countries are under one form of curfew or another. Where there is incompliance, the police are given powers to chase the incompliant ones back home and to fine or even detain them. Therefore, even the slightest possibility of appearing and encountering others in public space, which many theorists of democracy have considered the precondition of politics, is foreclosed. Globally, the authorities speak of staying at home as key to saving lives, obscuring the fact that domesticity, for many women and children suffering from patriarchal violence, means the exact opposite of safety and security. Whether due to their implications for domesticity or for publicness, these developments are united in reiterating the marked materiality and spatiality of the politics of emergency. They throw into sharp relief the role that the built environment plays in the politics of emergency as the latter’s primary medium, rather than an auxiliary instrument that merely gives it material and spatial form.

The topic of this book is, of course, not Covid-19. Yet, its critical and analytical objectives are rendered all the timelier by current developments around the coronavirus, particularly those that highlight architecture’s centrality to the politics of emergency. Architectures of Emergency in Turkey takes up the scholarly imperative to attend to this centrality. It, moreover, does so in an empirically grounded and context-specific manner; as the title indicates, the book focuses on contemporary Turkey. This is a particularly compelling context through which to explore the material and spatial politics of emergency. Between 2016 and 2018, Turkey was subjected to countrywide emergency rule. Throughout the same period, the country saw unprecedented levels of construction activity. Contributions to the book proceed from this combination of a full-blown emergency rule coinciding with a construction boom to ask what a focus on architecture might mean for critical analyses of the politics of emergency – a methodological question that remains underexplored in related scholarship. Based on research carried out in the mid-to-late 2010s, the contributors identify three phenomena through which to explore this question: heritage, displacement and catastrophe. Taken together, they argue that states of emergency are not merely predetermined by policy and legislation but are produced, regulated, distributed and contested through the built environment in both embodied and symbolic ways.

Emergency and normalcy in Turkey

A major body of scholarship that considers critically the relationship between emergency and normalcy revolves around the notion of exception. This critical scholarship has shown that the relationship between the exception and the rule as modes of governmentality has, throughout modern history, been one of interdependence and entanglement rather than antitheticality. Within that scholarship, a strand most pertinent to the built environment disciplines has revolved around biopolitics. This introduction evidently does not lend itself to a comprehensive survey of this strand of scholarship. But suffice it to say here that, more than any other scholar of biopolitics, it has been Agamben’s notion of exception that has influenced contemporary architectural theory.¹ Following on from Foucault’s theory of biopower as ‘making live and letting die’ (and thus, as opposed to sovereign power’s focus on making die and letting live), Agamben’s theory of biopolitics reconceptualized modern governmentality as the power to make live to let die meaninglessly, such that the distinction between life and death itself becomes meaningless.² Agamben traced this modern mode of biopolitical governmentality back to the ancient Roman figure of homo sacer, or sacred man, who was abandoned to oblivion, and whose murder was treated as a normalized exception as the constitution classed it neither as sacrifice nor as crime. The murder of homo sacer was a normalized exception in at least two ways, both because it was exceptionally devoid of legislative meaning, and because this meaninglessness was never truly an exception, given that it was constitutionally prescribed and thus always already part of the rule. Agamben’s history of modern biopolitics culminated in the twentieth-century concentration camp. For Agamben, the history stretching from ancient Rome and the Holocaust saw the sort of normalized exception that characterized the treatment of homo sacer become increasingly prevalent. So prevalent did this normalization become as to render ‘the camp’ central to ‘the models by which social sciences, sociology, urban studies, and architecture today are trying to conceive and organize the public space of the world’s cities’.³

Agamben is criticizable for disregarding that the normalized-exceptional-meaningless death his history charted is, in fact, not so socially sweeping an experience as he considered it – that its workings shape and are shaped by a number of sociopolitical forces absent from his analysis, including patriarchy, racism and poverty.⁴ But his architecturally resonant conclusions of the sort cited earlier might help address this very absence. In arcing from the homo sacer through the concentration camp to conventional models of public space, Agamben’s history indicated that the normalization of the meaninglessness of the life-cum-death he charted has come to increasingly depend on material-spatial arrangements as well as legislative ones.⁵ Put differently, no longer are bodies abandoned to meaningless life-cum-death merely by law, while still being allowed to remain within the city – within spaces paradigmatic of dominant architecture and urbanism. They are now abandoned by and from the city. A most pertinent and contemporary case in point is homelessness in the neoliberal city. Not only are the homeless excluded by law from, for instance, public space; that very spatial category has itself become conducive to rendering exclusive the fundamental practice of inhabiting the city by transforming inhabitation from the stuff of human rights or freedoms into that of commodity possession, accumulation and speculation.⁶ If the normalized exceptions constituting modern biopolitics do not affect everyone equally, then physical space is not only the scene where these socially uneven effects play out. Instead, they have by now also become constitutive of the unevenness in question.

It is particularly this constitutive significance that Architectures of Emergency in Turkey aims to explore – an aim that responds directly to the book’s empirical context. Spanning mid-to-late 2010s Turkey, this context has two defining features. The next section of this chapter will detail these features. But suffice it to introduce them here in the following way. The first feature concerns intense demolition and construction activity. While this activity gradually increased throughout the late 2000s and early 2010s, it entered a new phase in mid-2012, during the aftermath of which it reached new heights. Mid-2012 was when a piece of legislation known popularly as the Disaster Act, whose avowed aim is to disaster-proof the country, was issued. The second context-specific feature relevant to our analysis is the increasing visibility of political tension and acceleration of violence, which followed a period of purported democratization and peace in the late 2000s and the early 2010s. Here the adjective ‘purported’ is used advisedly; the mainstream approach to political periodization that has been at work in the case of Turkey, and that is premised on the binarisms of peace versus violence and democracy versus authoritarianism is, as detailed later, itself worthy of critical reconsideration in such a debate on emergency as that pursued in this edited volume.

Working from these two features that frame the empirical context of our study, we ask the following questions: Precisely what is architecture’s role in the politics of the entanglement between normalcy and emergency? How might this politics be understood not only as operative through or aided by architecture but also as produced by it in ways that otherwise would have been unproducible or not producible with the same political effects? In exploring these questions, we take our cue not only from the larger literature on the politics of emergency but also from the more specific scholarship on related developments in contemporary Turkey. While scholarly accounts of Turkey’s recent state of emergency are manifold, here I would like to focus on one by Saygun Gökarıksel and Umut Türem that I suggest is most insightful and relevant to this book’s critical analytical purposes. Gökarıksel and Türem problematize the prevalent scholarly tendency to understand such states of emergency as a ‘“backsliding” or “retreat” from democratic gains’.⁷ The authors find this tendency problematic for overlooking the ways in which liberal and illiberal methods of governance are entangled in, rather than antithetical to, one another, and for focusing narrowly on political ruptures at the expense of historical continuities that, indeed, evidence such an entanglement. Gökarıksel and Türem’s alternative, as relevant particularly to the case of Turkey, is to focus on how seemingly ‘exceptional’ states of emergency, in fact, build on purportedly ‘ordinary’ precedents that have been implemented in different parts of the nation state’s geography, and at different times in its history.⁸ Turkey is known to have experienced successive periods of emergency rule in one way or another since 1940; the military interventions in politics that took place in 1960, 1971, 1980 and 1997 have figured particularly prominently in relevant scholarship.⁹ But such a focus as Gökarıksel and Türem’s draws attention to the various episodes of emergency rule that have taken place often outside of these periods in the predominantly Kurdish-inhabited eastern and south-eastern region of Turkey (also known unofficially as northern Kurdistan). ‘[S]ince the foundation of the Republic’, observe Gökarıksel and Türem, these episodes of emergency rule not only have ‘been more frequent, intensive, and enduring’ in the region, but also have become particularly ‘immobilizing and destructive’ following the end in 2015 of the de facto peace talks that had been underway since the late 2000s.¹⁰

Gökarıksel and Türem’s attention to the geographically and historically uneven ways in which states of emergency have been implemented in Turkey is relevant to this book for both contextual and methodological reasons. The contextual relevance is evident in the geographical and historical span of our case studies. Geographically, cases discussed in this book range from Gökçeada/Imbros and Istanbul in western Turkey, through Ankara, Niğde and Kayseri in the Anatolian heartland, to Gaziantep and Diyarbakır/Amed in the country’s southeast, the very region that Gökarıksel and Türem consider most disadvantaged by the uneven distribution of emergency rule. The demographic make-up of these regions is, or has historically been, much more varied than that which is assimilable into the marker of Turk (the ethnicity of Turkey’s citizens as per its constitution), including Orthodox Greeks, Armenians and Kurds. This difference has been formed by, and formative of, numerous measures implemented in the name of emergency in those regions and elsewhere in modern Turkey. To address this differential distribution of emergency, the book adopts an approach that is as cross-historical as it is geographically comprehensive. While the research and practice that constitute the empirical material of each chapter date mainly from the 2010s, the political periods and events they feature criss-cross the history of modern Turkey. The aim in so doing is to navigate those episodes of emergency that have been constituted by, and constitutive of, the marking of particular demographics as being different from Turkey’s officially avowed ethnic identity.

Architectures of emergency in Turkey: Heritage, displacement and catastrophe

Two interrelated features shaped Turkey’s urban and architectural affairs throughout the 2010s, the empirical context explored in this book: first, a so-called ‘construction boom’, and secondly, the increasing visibility of political tension and acceleration of violence. The latter feature operated against the backdrop of government-endorsed discourses and practices of democratization that had been in circulation since the mid-to-late 2000s. It was then that a project of Europeanization and democratization was instituted by the ruling AKP (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi; literally: Justice and Development Party) led by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. AKP first rose to power in late 2002 and have since ruled Turkey in what has become the country’s longest-ever series of consecutive majority governments by a single party since its transition to multi-party democracy in 1946. The AKP government’s project of Europeanization and democratization promised to confront the troubles of the twentieth century throughout which various episodes of state-endorsed violence had targeted demographically minor or politically dissentient groups, including Kurds and Alevis.¹¹ This promise did initially materialize as a series of culturally oriented reforms geared towards historically marginalized populations like Kurds and Alevis, and constitutional minorities such as non-Muslims. The period, moreover, saw the government carry out what were in effect peace talks (although not formally named as such) with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (in Kurdish: Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan, or PKK) guerrillas, who since the 1980s have led an insurgency against the state. While limited in scope, the reforms still had wide popular appeal as they pledged to resolve some of Turkey’s longest-standing sociopolitical problems.

The government instrumentalized the resulting boost in its political legitimacy for the purpose of consolidating its social and economic grip.¹² This instrumentalization manifested itself in the built environment, whether directly or indirectly.¹³ Among the direct manifestations was the revamping of urban areas deemed ‘historical’ and ‘cultural’, where the history and culture in question concerned Turkey’s Ottoman past, including those parts that involved the country’s once-sizeable non-Muslim popu lations.¹⁴ Mid-2005 saw the issuing of a new piece of legislation called Act (no. 5366) for the Protection of Dilapidated Historical and Cultural Real Estate through Protection by Renewal. The adjectives featuring in this legislation, ‘dilapidated historical and cultural’, in effect concealed two histories of dispossession, the first of which was triggered by nation state-building in the first half of the twentieth century, and the second, by Turkey’s integration into the post-war global capitalist economy. The first history of dispossession affected non-Muslims, who had once constituted a significant part of the urban population until their being targeted through various measures geared towards their eradication from Turkey, ranging from population exchange, forced labour and unfair taxation to pogroms, massacres and genocide.¹⁵ The second history of dispossession targeted rural populations throughout the second half of the twentieth century who – whether due to war in Kurdistan or to capitalist agriculture policies – moved to cities to become the urban poor. This latter situation occurred especially due to the lack of a social housing policy, filling in many cases the spatial vacuum left behind by the non-Muslim populations dispossessed earlier on in the century....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: The material and spatial politics of emergency
• 2 The mutual construction of heritage and emergency: Neo-Ottomanist heritage policies in 2010s Turkey
• 3 Destabilizing national heritage: Preserving Turkey’s non-Muslim architectural heritage
• 4 Emergency as normalcy in mid-2010s Amed/Diyarbakır
• 5 Forum in relation to the polis: The case of I.39 and Turkey
• 6 Between the guests and the hosts: Spaces of illegalized migration in Turkey
• 7 The politics of normalcy: Examining the festival on the island of Imbros/Gökçeada
• 8 Coda: Establishing authority over historic areas under emergency
• After the emergency?
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright