including of course with other beings, both human and nonhuman. In examining perception, phenomenological investigation is analytically acute in identifying the (always temporally unfolding and educated) qualities and capacities—Ingold calls these “skills of perception”—of the actor-subject that enable this engagement or that experience of the world (of objects, environments, and others) to occur. By contrast, sometimes it is less sensitive in identifying the role of architects and their sponsors in intending (through design) the qualities and capacity of the actor-object (the thing that is perceived), which permits this experience or that evocation of it to occur.
Nevertheless, Ingold’s work itself is not particularly helpful in sketching out the violence of architecture, or of the political and conflictual dimensions involved in people’s interactional generation of their environment and its affordances. The claim is as much Ingold’s as it is my own. As he himself notes, “the criticism that the political is conspicuous by its absence from my own attempts to formulate a dwelling perspective is entirely just, and troubling” (2005: 503). The very material affordances of the environment that were malleable to militants’ projects and activities also had embedded in them the political intentions of their makers, configured in pathways and roads, artifacts and machines, buildings and interior design, architecture, zoning and urban planning. Here the fabricated efficacies of places and things themselves exerted perceptual power over their users, seeking to condition particular experiences and uses of them while actively contriving at activists’ bodily motions. Shull’s recent research (2012) on the engineering of experience in poker machine gambling is an awful case in point, where video graphics, ergonomic consoles, surround-sound acoustics, plastic-press buttons, marketing schemes, and player-tracking systems all conspire to trigger addiction through minute and synesthetic scripting of people’s behavior. Such manipulative control of the environment, and the carefully calculated algorithms that seduce players to feed in more money by periodically cascading back a proportion of their losses, are designed by corporations, with their intentions in play.
Moreover, in their own adversarial appropriation of places and in their energetic modification of them, activists contended with other efficacious users of space, entering into conflict with them over access to and adaptation of urban affordances. Neither activism nor dwelling is harmonious. In chapter 1 we saw how for Tschumi the prime violence of architecture involves confrontation between buildings or planned spaces and their users. Yet friction between inhabitants themselves in their bitter performative conflicts over the city and its configured assets is equally important in qualifying users’ spatial experiences and actions. In other words, the urban environment of militants was an intersubjective one, an emerging field of frictional relations and moods that gathered together and encompassed multiple actors. For individuals, regions of places—factories, schoolyards, student lodgments, shantytowns, town squares, houses—and peregrinations between them arose that were rich with the “wildness,” bodily presence, threat, and power of other beings. In response, two key spatial strategies of militants involved the occupation and the breaking of another group’s occupation (in Turkish işgal and işgal kırmak). To occupy meant to take control of a building or place (lodgment, school, factory, university department), to appropriate its resources and to expel members of rival groups so as to prevent their organizing there. Here we see an inversion of Ingold’s insight that lives are led “not inside places but through, around, to and from them” (2011b: 148): the factional apartheid governing Istanbul’s places sought to put a stop to the active perambulations of wayfaring, Ingold’s preferred term for the experience of inhabiting the environment. Post-occupation, users’ relationships with rivals were mediated through their possessive transforming of places’ visual, acoustic, and performative elements.
Equally significant, the perceptual attunements constituted by enacting activism were not only instigated in confrontation with contemporaries. In the urban assemblage itself, the acts, agency, and efficacy of predecessors were also encountered. The intentions of the dead lived on in places, in their socio-material distributions, in their trails for movement, and in their scenes for action, thought, or expression; indeed, given their constant immersion in them places constituted activists’ bodies as much as their bodies marked places. Ingold describes this process in somewhat neutral terms: “Human children,” he writes, “grow up in environments furnished by the work of previous generations, and as they do they come literally to carry the forms of their dwelling in their bodies—in specific skills, sensibilities and dispositions” (2000: 186) “The house is a book read by the body,” says Bourdieu (1977: 90). The words previous generations here are vague, as well as politically naive—in many urban places these past acts of spatial “furnishing” are more precisely described as initiated by militant groups, who may seek to effect a targeted rupture within the environment and its dwellers as much as to ensure continuity or evolution.7 Indeed, in deliberate projects of urbicide, places and environments are as vulnerable to forced rearrangement and destruction as the people they house.
As we will see in chapter 3, in the course of the twentieth century Istanbul has witnessed a number of ruptures in its history of dwelling. Most significant is the forced migration or expulsion from the city of its indigenous Armenian, Greek, and Jewish inhabitants in the first four decades of the Turkish Republic (1920–1960), enabling others to benefit from their fashioning of its environment. In the novel Huzur, Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar (1949–2011) describes another rupture, reflected in the perturbation and melancholy experienced by Istanbul’s inhabitants at the Kemalists’ selected transformation (in the same years) of the “sensuous presentations” (Casey 1996: 22) of late-Ottoman Istanbul, including most palpably of the familiar sonorities of the city by the muting of Ottoman music. These two events were aspects of a nationalistic transformation of Istanbul, antagonistically aimed at its cosmopolitanism and at the life-worlds of its inhabitants.
The 1980 military coup and the junta’s subsequent counterrevolutionary reassembling of the city caused a third rupture between inhabitants and environments in Istanbul. Activists in particular were systematically stripped of their ability to place-make, first in the dissolution through torture of the fragile concordances established between their bodies and Istanbul’s places; second, in the prohibition forbidding collective interaction in public with other inhabitants of the city; and third, by denying them involvement in new post-coup political processes that generated revised affordances in the city. In brief, Edward Casey is wrong to say that places are “generative and regenerative on [their] own schedule” (1996: 26). Even as places are sui generis—nothing can ever not be in place—they also allow themselves to be recruited by the political imagination, their ongoing fabrication shrinking or expanding in-built affordances for action, in the process entitling some groups and disenfranchising others.
For a number of reasons, the work of Henri Lefebvre in The Production of Space might here be usefully contrasted with Gibson’s naive presentation of environmental affordances, as well as with Ingold’s (absent) political analysis. For one, the book was first published in 1974, making its analysis contemporary enough with the practices described above to have a descriptive, analytic, and politically invested relationship to militant leftist movements in that period.8 A shared Marxist vocabulary informs both the broader socialist movement’s effort in Turkey to situate individual experiences in the historical development of the political economy, and Lefebvre’s text, as demonstrated for example in its stress on the centrality of the mode of production in the generation of spatial order. More specifically, the ambitions and tactics of these political movements account for what Lefebvre describes as the “special practical and theoretical status” that he gives to the category of appropriation in the book (1991: 368).
To identify the importance of appropriation, Lefebvre identifies three aspects of social space: first there is a society’s “spatial practice,” “which embraces production and reproduction” (1991: 33) and “secretes that society’s space” (1991: 38). Secondly, there exists “representations
