Society and Space – Environment and Planning D

Mustafa Dikeç is a reader in human geography at Royal Holloway, University of London, a member of our editorial board, and the writer of  influential works such as Badlands of the Republic: Space, Politics and Urban Policy (Wiley-Blackwell, 2007). Here he engages the demonstrations thus far and the authoritarianism that led to them in the first place. We will have other commentaries on these events following from our Virtual Theme Issue on Turkey last week and Mark Purcell’s excellent discussion of democracy yesterday. –Eds.

Fraudulent democracy and Urban Stasis in Turkey

Huzur isyanda.

(One finds peace in revolt)

Graffiti in Istanbul

Democracy is a fraudulent contract, José Saramago once remarked; from the moment you cast your vote, you have abandoned power until the next election. This may be the way democratic elections work, but it is not how democracies should. Turkish Prime Minister Erdoğan, however, seems all too content with this fraudulent contract. Once an election is over, he will rule over the country, doing whatever he thinks is right, without the slightest opposition, not even criticism—which he, notoriously, cannot stand. He will tell you how many children you should have, that you should not smoke and not eat white bread, and that you should drink the non-alcoholic ayran rather than getting drunk with rakı or any other alcoholic beverage (also trying, unsuccessfully, to criminalise adultery and abortion, and toying with the idea of imposing visa restrictions for Turkish citizens to move to Istanbul). Ever the social engineer, the prime minister has an idea on how everything should be, ranging from the private lives of citizens to the planning of cities, all of which he has been trying to regulate the past ten years.

The problem is that he has the power to regulate many things. After all, he has won three elections since 2002. His power is legitimate, although it certainly should not extend to some of the areas he has shown a keen interest in. Furthermore, he has to understand that although his power is legitimate, it is not absolute. What is absolute is the legitimacy of revolt, and if Turkey is to become ‘fully democratic’ one day (this is the stated aim of the government’s project for a new constitution), going well beyond a democratic-election regime, then he and his followers will have to come to terms with this. Brutalization, demonization and incarceration of those who disagree and resist will lead elsewhere. We have been there before, and I don’t think anyone remembers it fondly.

Politically the most promising aspect of the revolts in Turkey’s cities is that they show people can still revolt against democratically elected governments even in times when economic conditions are not dire—revolt for political ideals, dignity, and aspirations. And revolt with courage, too, despite bones broken, eyes lost, lives terminated. The revolts are the spatialisation of the resentment that has been growing over the years because of authoritarian governance, repression, and erosion of civil liberties, but also a spatial manifestation of these ideals and aspirations, and of the dignity and courage of political subjects constituted in the here and now, demonstrating their political capacity in the city. By standing up against a democratically elected government, the protestors remind us that politics is the business of anyone and no-one in particular, with no privileged subject, specific time or pre-determined space.

The triggering event for the revolts was the extreme violence exercised by the police on protestors in a dispute over the redevelopment of Gezi Park in Taksim Square, Istanbul, into a commercial complex. Taksim Square is a symbolic place for the secular Republic as well as for Left politics. At the centre of the European section of the city, it is the place for official ceremonies celebrating the Republic (with a monument to its founders) as well as for May Day celebrations (though this is only occasionally allowed). When the first Islamist prime minister of Turkey, Necmettin Erbakan, came to power 1996, he promised to construct a mosque in Taksim Square. He was ousted the following year.

On 28 May, the police attacked the peaceful protestors of Taksim Gezi Park with tear gas. Just before dawn on 31 May, a brutal attack was waged by the riot police against protestors who were staging a peaceful sit-in in the park. Then all hell broke loose, police violence continued—as one female protestor put it, “it was as if they [the police] were trying to kill”—in an attempt to disperse thousands of citizens in Istanbul, as well as in other cities, notably Ankara, which did not fail to follow suit (with solidarity protests organised in several cities in the world ranging from Los Angeles to Athens). Many protestors have already died, thousands have been wounded (some seriously) and arrested. Excessive use of tear gas not only made thousands of protestors, including children, sick, but also killed the birds and dogs in Taksim—and we do not yet know the long term effects on humans of tear gas that expired two years ago (but was nevertheless used by the police). The protesters were labelled by Erdoğan variably as “marauders,” “vandals,” “marginals,” and, of course, “terrorists,” denying them all political legitimacy and capacity (they were following, so went his reasoning, orders from “foreign powers”). In the meantime, the prime minister did not fail to emphasise that the government would carry on with the controversial urban redevelopment project, which was at the origin of the revolts. Constructing a third bridge over the Bosporus (to be named after an Ottoman Sultan who had ordered the massacre of thousands of Alevis, who today represent more than 10 percent of Turkey’s population) and a canal to join Marmara and Black seas are also on the agenda.[1]

But it would be a mistake to focus merely on Erdoğan’s personality and the Gezi Park controversy. The resentment has been simmering for years over the erosion of civil rights and liberties, suppression of dissent, and authoritarian urban neoliberalism. This is a revolt against state-led neoliberalism, state-led Islamisation, and ever-increasing repression.

Since coming to power in 2002, Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party—the AKP—has implemented a revanchist politics against the military, journalists and intellectuals, and against what Erdoğan named the “White Turks” (the urban secular elite as distinguished from the “Black Turks,” poor and poorly educated classes and his voting base). Through reforms and practices that established networks of reciprocity or dependence—largely facilitated by religious connections and a clientelistic political culture—or, when those did not suffice, through the mobilisation of the state’s coercive powers, the AKP has tightened its grip on the media as well as on business. As AKP’s power consolidated over years, dissent was suppressed and civil rights and freedoms started to erode. Thousands of activists (mainly Kurdish) are jailed through the use of loosely formulated anti-terror laws that make the flimsiest charges possible. There is ample anecdotal evidence of how the social pressure arising from this revanchist politics is felt at the workplace and universities by secular classes that do not subscribe to AKP’s worldview. Critical journalists are jailed (Turkey is now ahead of China for the number of jailed journalists) or fired, at best—those who are not are intimidated to the point of self-censorship.[2] The silence of the Turkish media during the first days of the protests was staggering, which is best exemplified by the difference between CNN-International and the local channel CNN-Turk: while the former was airing live coverage of the revolts, the latter was treating its viewers to a documentary on penguins—which turned these lovely creatures into a symbol of resistance.[3]

The judiciary is filled with AKP nominees, army generals are jailed (not that anyone wants another military coup), and the opposition has been so incapable over the years that referring to them as “opposition” seems overly generous. Erdoğan must have felt he could forever exercise his legitimately acquired power with no checks. What he did not see coming was a new generation of urban citizens and new forms of solidarity cutting across social, religious, gender, political divides, and opening up spaces of politics and contestation, willing to risk losing their freedom and lives, rather than further submitting to the closure of all political space for dissent.

It is no surprise that these new solidarities and political subjectivities are constituted in and through urban spaces. We must remember that the AKP and its mayors have been zealous city builders, and not just in Istanbul (the citizens of Ankara remember well the provocative urban projects of Melih Gökçek, conceived and implemented undemocratically).[4] This city building, ranging from large-scale urban redevelopment projects to changing street names, not only suited their economic ideology, but also played a symbolic role by leaving its mark on cities. This re-ordering of urban space was supplemented by interventions that were more explicit in their religious motivations, such as rendering public spaces and municipality-owned facilities “family friendly” by establishing separate sections for single men and families, and banning alcohol.

Privatisation and selling of public land to developers have been integral parts of AKP’s economic strategy since the early 2000s, and the contracts went to friends and followers (including a company whose CEO is Erdoğan’s son-in-law).[5] The AKP has effectively used the state’s legal, financial and coercive powers—as well as its land—to consolidate an economic strategy focused on the development of urban property markets regardless of concerns over its social and environmental consequences. Resistance to top-down urban projects were met by repression; protestors in Turkey’s cities are not unfamiliar with the excessive use of tear gas, water canons, and violence by the police.[6]

The AKP has been quite successful in articulating neoliberalism and Islamism, consolidating a regime of governance characterised by market-oriented property development and mediated by Islamic codes of conduct, which became more mainstream.[7] While Erdoğan and his followers hoped the people of Turkey would find peace in Islam, thousands now believe they will find it in isyan—in revolt—as the graffiti that opens this piece suggests (“Huzur isyanda”), which is adetournement of the popular Islamist slogan “Huzur Islamda” that means “one finds peace in Islam.”[8]

This is a revolt against state-led property development by those who are enraged by the rebuilding of cities for profit maximization with little or no democratic possibility of contestation, and definitely no consultation.[9] This is a revolt against state-led Islamisation by those who are enraged by the increasing social pressure that seeks to impose certain moral codes on what they do, how they dress, how they behave, what they drink. This is a revolt of urban citizens who want to be considered as legitimate partners in the production of their urban spaces and maintain a way of life that is not regulated and restrained by moral codes imposed upon them by an Islamist government. Gezi Park was the last drop in growing resentment and urban resistance, as was the recent passing of a law aimed at restricting alcohol consumption; one clever graffiti in Istanbul suggested that the ban on alcohol had resulted in the sobering up of the people (the Turkish word for sobering up also means “waking up to something”). This is a revolt of citizens with political dignity, ideals, and aspirations. What unites them is their desire to affirm their political capacity, forming solidarities in urban space rather then falling back into tired divides of old. There are women in headscarves, “anti-capitalist Muslims,”[10] gays, lesbians, transsexuals, union members, football club fans, Alevis, Sunnis, Jews, Christians, atheists, Armenians, Kurds, as well as Turks. The revolts are not organised or structured around established social, cultural, gender, ethnic, religious, or political identities or affiliations. What brings the protestors together, what brings them to stasis, is their political capacity as equals and political desire to resist repression and authoritarian governance.

This is an urban stasis.[11] This Greek word rich in meaning seems to me to characterise best the situation in Turkey’s cities. Stasis does not merely mean inertia in a negative sense. Even if it suggests stillness, it is a disruptive stillness. Stasis means “standing up against” (which might bring something to a stop, hence the more commonly known meaning of stasis as inertia), “standing for,” and, following perhaps unsurprisingly from these two meanings, “uprising.”[12]The protestors at Gezi Park stood up against what was yet another commercially driven project imposed on their urban spaces for private profit maximization without the slightest procedure of consultation, let alone contestation. The protestors in Turkey’s cities now stand for political ideals that reject social engineering imposing moral and religious orders, authoritarian forms of governance, and repression. The urban citizens of Turkey have stood up against authoritarian governance, standing for their right to the city and right to difference, not understood in a folkloric, exotic, or nostalgic way, but as a right to resist top-down imposition of moral and spatial orders. The urban uprising has begun, we have come to a stasis. But this is not the end, just the beginning.

Acknowledgements:

I am grateful to Bahar Sakızlıoğlu, Ozan Karaman, Walter Nicholls, and the editors of Society and Space for their comments on an earlier version. Many thanks to Peter Gratton for inviting me to contribute to this forum.

Notes

[1] Alevis practice a more liberal form of Islam, which has led to their exclusion by those committed to Sunni Islam, who consider them unbelievers. The AKP is firmly committed to Sunni Islamic principles.

Mark Purcell is a professor in the Department of Urban Design & Planning at the University of Washington where he studies urban politics, political theory, social movements, and democracy.  He is the author of Recapturing Democracy (2008) and the recently published The Down-Deep Delight of Democracy (2013). Here he presents how his work on democracy connects to the events in Turkey and elsewhere. We plan other commentaries in the coming days on these recent events, following from our Virtual Theme Issue on Turkey last week. –Eds.

Seeking Democracy

I think and write a lot about democracy, but I find relating this work to contemporary events like the those in Turkey to be a real challenge.  I do not want to colonize the events by interpreting them as nothing more than confirmation of theoretical arguments I have made previously.  But I also want to say that it is possible to see in those events—at times, and here and there—a strong resonance with democracy as I understand it.  To do that, I begin by affirming that there are multiple desires, agendas, forces, and people involved in shaping the events in Turkey.  These desires interrelate in complex ways, and so it is not possible to characterize these events generally, to reduce them to one guiding logic, like religion or ethnicity or environmentalism or authoritarianism.  As a result I will not make statements like “everyone thinks the protests are about X, but really they are about Y.”  That’s imperious.  Such events are unavoidably about X and Y, they are always the result of a tangled mass of desires and actors.  This is true in Turkey just as it was true in Egypt and Tunisia and Spain and Greece and Occupy and so on.  So I will not offer any comprehensive statements that try to characterize the political soul of the events.  I think the only thing I can do honestly is to pick out some political desires that I think are at work in Turkey, desires that are of particular interest to me because they resonate with a larger project that I believe in: to nurture and spread a political vision and practice of democracy.  And so I write not so much to enlighten you about what’s going on in Turkey, but to present a vision of politics that I hope you’ll find compelling, maybe even to the point you’ll join me in spreading the word.

Democracy

Democracy means that people manage their affairs for themselves.  Its etymology bears this out: people (dêmos) retain for themselves their own power (kratos) to create new things in the world.  The dêmos acts together to make decisions for themselves.  In democracy, people do not yield their power to an entity outside themselves.  This means that members of a political community do not yield political control to a party or to a State.  It means that participants in an economy do not yield control over money to banks, or control over production to those who own the means of that production.  It means workers do not yield control over their struggle to unions.  What yielding control in this way does is to produce oligarchy, a community in which a few rule the many.  All States are oligarchies, whether they be liberal-democratic, autocratic, or otherwise, because they set aside a few State officials to rule the rest.

But the objection comes rapidly: surely we don’t want a life in which everyone together makes every decision for themselves.  It would be overwhelming, inefficient, exhausting.  This objection is not wrong.  And so we must think of democracy not as an end state that we hope to reach one day.  It is not a stable polity at the end of history.  It is, rather, a horizon.  It is not a community called “democracy” but a process of becoming democratic.  We should think of democracy as a perpetual struggle to increasingly retain for ourselves the power and responsibility of making decisions.  This is just what Lefebvre is saying when he writes that “democracy is nothing other than the struggle for democracy”(2009, p. 61).

So, a perpetual struggle to become democratic.  Such a struggle necessarily implies also a process of popular activation, of people becoming awake and alive and engaged in the world.  Again, we should not imagine here an end-state in which everyone is fully activated.  It is rather a struggle we could call becoming active, a struggle to progressively take onto our own shoulders the work of governing our affairs ourselves.  Taking the perspective of becoming active helps obviate one of the classic objections to democracy, one that goes all the way back to Plato, which is that people are incompetent, they are not capable of managing their affairs for themselves.  Becoming active suggests that people are neither fundamentally capable nor incapable of democracy.  Rather it is a question of their practicing democracy, a question of whether or not they have had the opportunity to gain the experience and skills necessary to govern themselves.  In this way, democracy is a matter also of growing up, a matter of becoming adult, of acquiring, through extensive practice, the competence and confidence that comes with managing oneself.

Of course democracy is never a solitary enterprise.  When people become democratic, active, and adult, they must always do so in common, in a community with others.  And so it is critical to understand what a properly democratic community is like.  Clearly that question is too enormous to fully address here, but let me just say briefly that I conceptualize democratic community, with Deleuze and Guattari (1987), as a rhizomatic network.  That is, democratic communities bring together a multitude of individuals who connect horizontally with multiple peers.  They do not rely on a few vital connections to hierarchical superiors (as in an arboreal system), rather they they establish many inessential, superficial connections with equals.  Each connection is inessential and impermanent.  Flexibility and adaptability are the key to thriving, and so effective members of such networks tend to be promiscuous in their connections.  For Deleuze and Guattari, a rhizomaticnetwork is also acentered or distributed, which means each peer has roughly the same number of connections as all the others.  No one part of the network occupies a more central position than any other.  Or rather, such centers of coordination do emerge, but they should not be permanent.  When centrality emerges and operates for a time, it should always fall back into the distributed rhizomatic network.

One last thing: we can think this vision of democracy spatially through Lefebvre’s work.  In The Urban Revolution (2003) he argues that the struggle to manage our own affairs for ourselves, what he calls the struggle for autogestion, must necessarily involve struggle by urban inhabitants to manage the production of urban space.  The city we inhabit today, the neoliberal city, is a classic oligarchy in which an elite few state experts and corporate managers manage urban space for everyone else.  Democracy, for Lefebvre, necessarily involves a struggle by the inhabitants and users of space to move beyond this urban oligarchy, beyond the city of capitalism and the State, and toward an urban democracy in which inhabitants produce and manage urban space for themselves.

Turkey

So it is perhaps not hard to see how events in Turkey can be seen to resonate with this vision.  Clearly the State and business interests have been pursuing a sweeping agenda of urban transformation in Turkey that involves both commercial and infrastructure development.  The initial resistance to the redevelopment of Gezi Park was clearly inspired by a concern for physical and ecological outcomes like the loss of trees and open space.  But we can also see in those actions a desire to no longer be excluded, a desire among inhabitants to participate in decisions that produce urban space.  The attempt to site yet another shopping mall in place of one of the few remaining open and green spaces in the city made it apparent to many that those who live in and use the space of the city are not calling the shots.  And it showed that those who are calling the shots have a different interest in the city than inhabitants do.  So part of what we might choose to see in the struggle forGezi Park, it seems to me, is a desire among inhabitants to no longer have Istanbul produced for them, but to produce it themselves.  And the Erdogan government’s unapologetically autocratic style helps here to awaken and energize this desire.

We can see something similar, I think, in the much-reported act of protesters cleaning the streets once they have been able to successfully seize and hold a space.  Some have read this act as an attempt by protesters to show that they are not hooligans (as Erdogan claims), as an attempt to make clear that they are mature liberal-democratic citizens—responsible adults rather than misbehaving children.  Certainly this is part of what is going on: it is a way for people to communicate to the oligarchs that the people are capable and should be trusted with making decisions.[1]  At the same time though, we could read this act as an expression of people’s desire to begin the project of actually managing urban space for themselves. We might see it as people experimenting with autogestion, trying it out, seeing what its freedom and responsibility feels like, and testing themselves to see if they are up to the task.  We might see it as not only the desire to demonstrate to the Statethat we are capable, but also a desire to show ourselves that we can do it.  And as we do it, as we engage in acts of self-management like cleaning the streets, or distributing food, or arranging for medical care, all of which has been going on inTaksim Square—and went on also in Tunis, Cairo, Madrid, Athens, New York, etc.—we begin to realize that we are in fact capable, that what we perhaps thought was impossible is perfectly possible.

Along these lines we should also remember the popular assemblies in Tahrir, Puerta del Sol, Syntagma, Zuccotti, and elsewhere that were a more explicit declaration by people that they wanted to manage their affairs for themselves.  As the first declaration[2] issued by the People’s Assembly of Syntagma Square in Athens put it:

For a long time decisions have been made for us, without consulting us.  We…have come to Syntagma Square…because we know that the solutions to our problems can only be provided by us.  We call all residents of Athens…and all of society to fill the public squares and to take their lives into their own hands.  In these public squares we will shape our claims and our demands together.

While similar assemblies may or may not become common in Turkey, there is very clearly much of the same dissatisfaction with government there, and in this case it is particularly focused on the figure of Erdogan.  Much of this dissatisfaction flows from his penchant for autocratic majoritarianism, and so for those who oppose him there is certainly something like a classically Lockean desire for a better governmental structure to contain that majoritarianism, to make sure his electoral success does not augment his prerogative to the point of tyranny.  This is of course the interpreation that the Western press relishes.  And that Lockeanism no doubt exists.  But again, we might also choose to see, in the mass of desires being articulated and enacted bodily in the streets of Turkish cities, a more basic desire among some participants to do things for themselves.  A desire to cease relying on a father figure, on an expert, on an elected government; a desire to rely on themselves instead.  A desire to take up the freedom and responsibility—and joy—of democracy.

One last point bears mentioning.  Many have emphasized that the actions in Turkey have taken place mostly without union or party leadership, that large and diverse groups have been able to act, often effectively, without organized leaders. Much is made, for example, of the crowd in Gezi Park singing to drown out a speech by the leader of the opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) (e.g. Cassano, 2013).  For its part, the government claims the opposite, that the CHP is entirely behind the protests.  Still others emphasize instead that the current explosion is the pay-off for years of patient and committed organizing by environmental, community, and labor activists.  Here again, rather than argue over what is reallygoing on, we can choose instead simply to pay attention to the fact that some people have created rhizomatic networks, at least to some degree.  We can notice that there have been experiments, both intentional and not, with horizontal structures. We can observe that established unions and parties were once again not the driving force of the actions.[3]  We need to carefully examine what these experiments with rhizomatic community produced, what they felt like, what successes and failures they had, and what lessons they learned.

Conclusion

Again, I am not saying that the desires I have been drawing attention to in this article are more fundamental than other desires to understanding the events in Turkey.  They may even be less important, more marginal, even unconscious.  I am only claiming that the desires I have articulated are at work in Turkey.  Some inhabitants do desire to manage urban space themselves and to connect with others in rhizomatic networks.  Of course at the same time they also desire other things—secularism, liberal democracy, nationalism, political Islam, justice for ethnic minorities, respect for the LGBT community, etc.  They may or may not desire those other things more than they desire democracy.[4]  And so my claim is only that the desire for democracy—real democracy—exists in the bodies and minds of people on the streets today in Turkey.  I think that claim immediately proposes a certain political praxis: when we encounter something like the current situation in Turkey, we should be intentional about seeking the desire for democracy.  We should learn to recognize it when we see it, pay careful attention to its texture, narrate it critically and yet supportively, augment its flow by connecting it with other such desires, allow it to flourish according to its own will, and help it proliferate everywhere.  We find ourselves in an era when democratic desire seems to be sprouting, and exploding, in city after city, all over the world.  We have no need for a vanguard to activate the people, no need to invent or bring to life the desire for democracy.  It already exists; it is already everywhere.  It is already growing according to its own inner drives.  Our role, I think, the role of everyone, is to look for it, to know it when we see it, to sing it, and to help it grow on its own terms.

Works Cited

Cassano, J. (2013) The Right to the City Movement and the Turkish Summer.  Jadaliyya, June 1.

Deleuze and Guattari (1987 [1980]) A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. B. Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Lefebvre, H. (2003 [1970]) The Urban Revolution. Trans. R. Bononno. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Lefebvre, H. (2009) State, Space, World: Selected Essays. Edited by N. Brenner and S. Elden. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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