In the years immediately before the 1980 military coup Istanbul was experienced as a city in crisis, described by activists as “electric,” “chaotic,” or “strained.” For Ertuğrul, it was “tense, like a family used to violence and waiting for it to happen” (Devrimci Yol [hereafter Dev-Yol, Revolutionary Path/Way]). Others remembered its sounds as raucous and threatening. Activists’ perception of the partisan, fragmented, and unstable qualities of the city reflects a period in which their own actions inflicted a radical contingency upon its spatial organization and order of places. Conventions of engagement, movement, and relationship, partially fostered by material arrangements, were replaced by an uncertainty about the “spatial economy” of places (Lefebvre 1991: 56). For Istanbul’s strongly ideological activists, the stress of the city meant sense and sensibility became acutely attuned to the semiotics of different political fractions, to the behavior of groups of people and to political signs encoded in the urban environment. A rapidly accumulating (and changing) spatial knowledge about when to move around the city, where not to go, how to sit in the coffeehouse, and who to avoid became a potentially life-and-death practice of urban living.3 Recognizing the political alignment of others as communicated through their bodies was critical. Paying attention to the acoustic cues resounding in public space—say to the singing of certain songs on the ferry by a group of people—might save one from a beating.
Activists’ embodied sensory experience of the city, their changing urban knowledge and emerging sense of place were intimately related to political practices of organizing, mobilizing and agitating. Perceptions of Istanbul derived from activists’ purposive attitude toward the city, oriented by the “task” of revolution. Walls were noticed for the possibilities they afforded posters and graffiti, reverberant streets for the cascading of sonic amplification. Squares were assessed for the concatenating choreography of gestures and slogans, the time between train stations for the shaping of a “shock” speech. Yet because activists were dispersed among rival groups, the affordances furnished by the urban environment were sometimes formally divided up between groups and sometimes fought over, adding affective registers of amity and enmity to their experiences of the city. Differences between leftist groups concerning Turkey’s situation spilled over into conflict between fractions, contributing to militants’ feelings of living in an intensely stressed and merciless city.
In brief, in the second half of the 1970s the activists of the socialist factions and the cadres of the ultranationalists together sought both to control and to remake the city, in the process changing radically the experiences and practices of place-making for their own members and for the rest of the city’s inhabitants. Their combat in, with, and over the city, their taking possession of its public spaces and institutions through occupying force, and their attempted creation of politically autonomous zones of self-governance in the city’s deprived shanty-towns were significant strategies in their appropriation, occupation, and transformation of space. The description and analysis of activists’ experiences connect to other matters that I discuss in this book. These include the city’s political geography and its key sites of conflict and mobilization; violence as both spatial practice and generator of urban space; militants’ perceptions of political fractions and of political ideologies; the junta’s post-coup strategies for urban pacification; contrasts in the socio-material structure and spatial organization of Istanbul before and after the coup; and the significance of activist practices and the coup for understanding the neoliberal “globalization” of Istanbul in the decades after.
Spatial Politics
Although this book’s first concern is the perception of urban activists in Istanbul, the larger context of their experience of the city involves their participation in spatial politics, an under-theorized subject for these critical years. By spatial politics here I mean the generation and transformation of space–both symbolic and physical–by a range of social actors, including legal and illegal organizations, the State, the junta, businesses and property developers, private builders, urban designers, and ordinary residents. I use it to include political factions’ appropriation and transformation of the city’s expanding buildings, streets, and institutions, as well as their gaining control of an area and defending and changing it in conformity with, in disregard of, or in opposition to the intentions of its authorities, builders, or other factions. The junta, as “architects” of the coup, pursued spatial politics too, intentionally orchestrating the sound, appearance, and uses of the city.
On both a more concrete and macro level, the spatial politics of earlier eras in urban Turkey have been well studied, most thoroughly in Sibel Bozdoğan’s (2001) work on the architectural culture, design, and buildings of the Republican state in the single-party period (1923–1950). Although the new monumental and modernist architecture that Bozdoğan analyzes in 1930s Ankara was only patchily present in Istanbul, it too was transformed in those very same years. In it the primary endeavor of Turkey’s first Kemalists was not to construct or reassemble Istanbul’s built environment but to disassemble its population, their nationalist program targeting Greeks, Armenians, and Jews for expulsion from the city while Turkifying its economy (Aktar 2000). The result was de-peopled places and displaced people (see chapter 3).
Urban planning, too, has continually remade Istanbul over the Republican period, first in the work of famed urbanist Henri Prost, author of the master plan for the city in 1937 and its chief planner between the years 1936–1951 (Pilsel and Pinon 2010), and then in the substantial transformation of Istanbul by the Democrat Party in the years 1950–1960, led by Prime Minister Adnan Menderes. Murat Gül’s The Making of Modern Istanbul (2009) focuses on the urban development of the city in the 1950s, including the chiseling out of its major thoroughfares—for example Aksaray Caddesi, Beşiktaş Meydanı, Vatan, and Millet Caddeleri or Tarlabaşı Bulvarı—that still give the older parts of the city much of their skeletal form. Yet his book has the same bias as Bozdoğan’s, concentrating on the emerging structure of the city—what Gül calls its morphology—and not on its inhabitants in relation to it.
Compelling as both these analyses are, they are circumscribed by their focus of study, concerned as they are for only half of what Bernard Tschumi (1994) has described as the “violence of architecture.” By this Tschumi means not only the “violence” inflicted upon inhabitants by the material and symbolic arrangements of architecture and urban structure, but also a second dimension: users’ “violence” against places themselves in their transformation—temporary or permanent, authorized or transgressive—of the built environment. For Tschumi, the violence of architecture is not just a metaphor, given the reality of certain sites that destroy emotional and bodily integrity—for example, in the spatialized brutality of prisons and of their soul-shredding sonic design (see chapter 7), or the construction of buildings over and out of the ruins of others.
Yet as metaphor, too, the violence of architecture captures the intensity of relations between buildings-spaces and their users: the ever-present reciprocal and frictional confrontation in which buildings qualify actions, just as actions qualify buildings (Tschumi 1994: 122). The metaphor can be expanded as well, illuminating how buildings redefine, diminish, and highlight other buildings, and how users’ actions impinge upon—rub up against—the actions of other users. Once we include both the planned and unplanned sonic/heard, olfactory/smelt, and textured/felt dimensions of the built environment in our analysis, the tracing of users’ violent engagement with Istanbul’s assemblages of urban space and with each other becomes a task in which the multisensory nature of the city and of the human body need to be taken into account.
My focus on activists’ social construction