to blueprints, to mere images”—the architect has a “representation of space, one which is bound to graphic elements—to sheets of paper, plans, elevations, sections, perspective views of facades, modules, and so on” (1991: 361). Last (and confusingly named) there are “representational spaces,” the spaces of users and inhabitants, spaces as lived (not conceptualized). “When compared with the abstract space of the experts, the space of the everyday activities of users is a concrete one, which is to say, subjective” (1991: 362). It is also the “dominated—and hence passively experienced—space that the imagination seeks to change and appropriate” (1991: 39) (my italics).
Lefebvre’s notion of appropriation involves more than inhabitants’ negating of urban space, their using of the city as the setting for political struggle, or even of their diverting of existing space for new purposes (1991: 168). Ideally, it also entails the creation of counter-spaces, of a new urban morphology. Hence Lefebvre gives cardinal importance to class struggle: because the “secretion” of space in capitalist society is dominated by the bourgeois class, only class struggle has the capacity to transcend the passivity of users of space, creating in the process new environments, places, and interrelationships.9
Despite the rather schematic nature of his model, Lefebvre’s theory illuminates certain dimensions of activists’ experiences and practices in Istanbul. However, their accounts encourage us to revise certain of its emphases. For example, The Production of Space displays an orthodox Marxist preference for tracing out how the programming of everyday life by the capitalist mode of production renders the users of space passive. Thus, actors enter capitalism’s “secretion of space” after the fact of its production, which simultaneously preconditions their relationships, actions and consciousness in it: “Every space is already in place before the appearance in it of actors; those actors are collective as well as individual subjects inasmuch as the individuals are always members of groups or classes seeking to appropriate the space in question. This pre-existence of space conditions the subject’s presence, action and discourse, his competence and performance; yet the subject’s presence, action and discourse, at the same time as they presuppose this space, also negate it” (Lefebvre 1991: 57).
As we will see in chapters 4 through 7, the situation in Istanbul was much messier. By paying particular attention to the phenomenological dimensions of social life—in this case to how activists perceived phenomena (bodies, factions, violence, places, ideologies, suffering)—we grasp better how urban things were constituted by militants’ intentions and simultaneously reckoned with. It is not a criticism of Lefebvre’s The Production of Space to note that its positing of three dimensions of social space is in its own terms a “representation of space.” Yet Lefebvre clearly values a phenomenological “bias” in urban research when he argues in the same work that some artists, and even a few writers and philosophers “who describe and aspire to do no more than describe” (1991: 39) may engage in their work with space as “directly lived through its associated images and symbols” (1991: 39) (my emphasis).
2.2 REMEMBERING ACTIVISM
Long a world city, Istanbul’s more recent “globalization” is by now old news. Hyped by travel agents, lauded by cultural brokers, marketed as a bridge spanning East and West by the tourism and culture industries, the image makers and money makers agree: Istanbul is fashionably global, its markets and food places, its Sufi lodges and gay bars, its museums, mosques, mosaics, and manzara (landscapes) exhibited and consumed on- and off-line, by a flood of tourists and by the city’s own residents, twenty million people or more.
See Istanbul and die, says the poet Can Yücel.
Istanbul is all this, and much more. Do the extraordinary changes in its built environment and its sense of place post-coup mean that Istanbul, City of the Fearless is a study of a city and of a time that exists only in memory? This side of 12 Eylül, are activists’ spatial politics, experiences, and memories of the years before and after the coup—their private and arcane knowledge—of historical interest only? Are those years sealed off from the decades that succeeded them? Are 12 Eylül and the military government a door that opened to Istanbul’s neoliberal or “global city” future by slamming it shut upon the past?
In these next two sections I show that this is indeed partly true. Revolutionary Istanbul lives on in the memories of its ex-activists. But it lives on, too, in their learned capacities and accumulated reflective wisdom that even now give depth to and partially orient the lives of hundreds of thousands of citizens living in the city. Casey describes this process in his book Remembering, noting how “orientation in place . . . cannot be continually effected de novo but arises within the ever lengthening shadow of our bodily past” (1987: 194). In this process, militants’ embodied and emplaced historical memories and perceptions of the city prevent any easy articulation with the shallow self “free of any particularist spatial ties” (Gökarıksel and Mitchell 2005: 150) imagined and mobilized by neoliberalism, and sometimes assumed by analysts to be a plausible account of social agents’ modified dispositions and ethical consciousness (Hilgers 2013). The selves that ex-activists are in the process of becoming—just like the city that they are continually in the process of inhabiting—depends in part upon their memories of and reflections upon their earlier actions, convictions, and experiences. Elsewhere, Casey writes of the “incoming” of places into the body. Places, he notes, “constitute us as subjects. . . . To be (a) subject to/of place is to be what we are as an expression of the way a place is” (2001: 688, emphasis in the original). Accordingly, a history of the sedimentation and hierarchy of places in people’s bodies exists according to the intensity of experience encountered in them, even as places themselves are altered by people’s actions. Although this constituting of self through its marking by places is cumulatively produced over a lifetime, the city before and after 12 Eylül powerfully impressed its presence upon militants, interacting with and reorienting their earlier socialized bodies and personae.
Certainly the material infrastructure of much of the 1970s city has disappeared, in particular in the transformation of Istanbul’s housing. The gecekondu suburbs of the 1960s and ’70s with their small, separate houses have been transformed into apartkondu (four- to ten-story buildings). They are no longer on the periphery of the city. On the other hand, gentrification has conserved and spruced up the buildings of older, more central areas but contributed to the massive emigration of their earlier residents. Even the perduring monuments of the physical environment (mosques, museums, palaces, villas, administrative buildings, etc.) have been upgraded or restored, their lines of sight and their sightlines exposed through simplification of their surroundings, their sounds made more audible (or muted), their occupants changed, their functions transformed.
Of course, not every bit of Istanbul has changed. The three- or four-story apartment blocks put up in the 1960s in lower-middle-class suburbs like Aksaray are still there. Yet when Fırat, an ex-MHP sympathizer, took me on a tour in 2013 of Şehremini in Istanbul’s historic peninsula, where he had lived through the years before and after the coup, we did not encounter a single sign of the spatial politics of the 1970s. Like blood spilled in a stabbing on the stairs of an apartment block at night and washed away by the early morning cleaner, it was as if the era and its acts had never occurred. Fırat recognized few people in his old neighborhood, and Şehremini’s present occupants did not share his or his generation’s intimate memories of emplaced events experienced there. In brief, if memory requires anchoring or harboring in peopled places, activists’ option “to go back to a place [they] know, finding it full of memories and expectations, old things and new, the familiar and the strange” (Casey 1996: 24), is severely compromised in Istanbul.
Nevertheless, sometimes it is the very change of place that compels memory. Differences in places’ inhabitants, activities, appearances, smells, and sounds evoke absences.10 A peaceful street reminds one of a violent march; polite police stir up fears of a baton: the body remembers in its quickening of breath, sweating, or feelings of nausea. Similarly, the forced transformations
