Abstract
Official-institutional approaches to heritage have linked it intimately to proprietorship. In 2013–2014, Turkey saw Occupy-style protest at two sites that various actors have listed, nominated, and/or considered as heritage—Gezi Park in Istanbul and Hewsel Gardens in Amed (officially: Diyarbakır). In both cases, the heritage quality associated with each site and the various kinds of exclusion protesters challenged figured in interrelated ways that opened to debate the intimate link between proprietorship and heritage. I contribute to this debate by focusing on questions concerning temporality and human-nonhuman relations whose conventional understandings have been key to the link between proprietorship and heritage. I argue that the protesters have mobilized, rather than just combat, the exclusionary nature of heritage, challenging the disempowerment, agency deprivation, and political immobilization associated with dispossession.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
For a recent and elaborate discussion of the various ways in which heritage has been mobilized to overcome dispossession and secure possession, see de Cesari and Herzfeld (2015, pp. 181–184).
- 3.
The Disaster Law defines three urban-architectural categories as its purview: (1) ‘risky areas’, zones identified as at risk of causing damage to lives and property due to their soil composition or the characteristics of the buildings they host; (2) ‘risky buildings’, buildings which, while not necessarily located within risky areas, have ‘completed their economic lifespan’ or have been ‘scientifically proven’ to be at risk of falling down or receiving severe damage in case of disaster; (3) ‘reserve building areas’, zones identified as safe for new settlement. To view the law in full, see Resmi (2012).
- 4.
The Disaster Law has not created these processes anew but has only unified and precipitated them, as the practices it has introduced can be considered an extension of the wave of urban transformation projects that have already been taking place piecemeal across urban Turkey since the mid-2000s (Kuyucu & Ünsal, 2010).
- 5.
Indeed, the physical results of this ‘folding and unfolding’ has in many cases been so reminiscent of the aftermath of disaster that some of the areas being transformed have served as film set for war scenes (Çaylı, 2014b).
- 6.
This distinction between ‘qualitative’ and ‘quantitative’ builds on Gell’s (1992) concepts of ‘A-series time’ and ‘B-series time’; whereas the first concept is about dates and calendars—about time imagined as quantifiable—the second concerns temporality as it is experienced by humans in all of its possible forms. Therefore, the acts of proponing and protracting by definition belong more to the first category than they do to the second.
- 7.
Here I use the adjective ‘private’ advisedly, to indicate both the individual-familial and the financial character of the enterprise. To reiterate, this is not to say that such an enterprise is altogether devoid of political character; it is to suggest that what governs this character in this case is private proprietorship. Once again, research on this front remains to be conducted but indicating potential implications is the case of a man nicknamed ‘the bullhead of Fikirtepe’, who for weeks refused to participate in the transformation of the area in which his house is located and therefore resisted the demolition of his property. Initially hailed in the press as a case of heroic resistance against the top-down transformation of his neighbourhood, the man was later denigrated as seeking personal profit by blackmailing to stop the project. However, he has argued that to ask for decent terms of transformation is itself a social and politically implicated pursuit rather than being a merely personal one. For the story of this man, see Alagöz (2012, 2014), Uzunçarşılı Baysal (2014a, b). For other cases similar to ‘the bullhead of Fikirtepe’, see Butakın (2011), Kiraz (2013), Munyar (2013), Şahin (2014), AA (2014).
- 8.
Interview by the author, 13 June 2013. Names of the Gezi activists whose opinions are cited in this chapter have been omitted as their participation in this research was based on the condition of confidentiality.
- 9.
Interview by the author, 14 June 2013.
- 10.
Interview by the author, 13 June 2013.
- 11.
- 12.
- 13.
An updated version of this piece was later published on the same website in 2014 (Doğan, 2014).
- 14.
This was due to the valley’s being declared a ‘reserve building area’, which implicates it as a zone safe for new settlement (see Note 3 in this chapter).
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the organizers and participants of three academic events where the thoughts presented in this chapter were aired and debated: the symposium ‘Protest, Refuge, Conflict: Spatial, Material and Visual Implications Across the Middle East and North Africa’ held on 22 May 2015 at the History of Art Department, University College London; the colloquium ‘Thinking Spatial Practices with & Against Law’ held on 19 June 2015 at the Birkbeck Institute for Social Research, University of London; and the workshop ‘Heritage and Resistance’ held on 7–8 July 2017 at the School of Craft and Design, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. An earlier version of this chapter appeared in a special issue of the International Journal of Islamic Architecture 5.2 (2016). I would like to thank the editors of the journal and the guest editor of the special issue for allowing me to reuse this material.
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Çaylı, E. (2022). Imagining Heritage Beyond Proprietorship, Contesting Dispossession Beyond the Power-Resistance Binary: Occupy-Style Protests in Turkey, 2013–2014. In: Hammami, F., Uzer, E. (eds) Theorizing Heritage through Non-Violent Resistance. Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77708-1_6
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