Istanbul, City of the Fearless. Christopher Houston

      Spatial Politics,

      Historiography, Method

      Introduction

       Bu şehirde ölmek yeni birşey değil elbet

       Sanki yaşamak daha büyük bir marifet!

       (Ha, to die in this city brings no new thrill, Living is a much finer skill!)

      —CAN YÜCEL (2005), “Yesenin’den Intihar Pusulası Moskova’dan”

      1.1 URBAN ACTIVISM IN ISTANBUL

      Imagine a city characterized by the radicalization en masse of students, workers, and professional associations. Imagine as a core aspect of struggle their inventive fabrication of a suite of urban spatial tactics, including militant confrontation over control and use of the city’s public spaces, shantytowns, educational institutions, and sites of production. Sounds and fury, fierceness and fearlessness. Picture a battle for resources, as well as for less quantifiable social goods: rights, authority, and senses of place. Consider one spatial outcome of this mobilization—a city tenuously segregated on left/right and on left/left divisions in nearly all arenas of public social interaction, from universities and high schools to coffee houses, factories, streets, and suburbs. Even the police are fractured into political groups, with one or another of the factions dominant in neighborhood stations. Over time, escalating industrial action by trade unions, and increasing violence in the city’s edge suburbs change activists’ perceptions of urban place. Here is a city precariously balanced between rival political forces and poised between different possible futures, even as its inhabitants charge into urban confrontation and polarization.

      Imagine a military insurrection. Total curfew. Flights in and out of the country suspended, a ban on theater and cultural activities, schools and universities shut down. Removing books from library shelves that the new regime might find suspicious. “Wanted” posters pasted at ferry terminals, civil police watching for suspicious responses. Whole suburbs targeted for “special treatment.” Mass arrests and torture, random identity checks in public places, the sudden cutting of roads by police and the searching of buses, assaults on the houses of activists, summary executions. Martial law turning the city into another country. “It was as if time stood still,” said Ömer (Türkiye İsçi Partisi, or Workers Party of Turkey)¹ Imagine for hundreds of thousands of people fear of arrest seeping into consciousness, a fear of torture, and of telling under torture when they had a rendezvous or where they had last visited an organization house. Picture body habits changing overnight, in anticipation of future regulations of the junta. Shaving your head in order to stay at the university (Vassaf 2011: 5). “I didn’t go out much in those years,” said one activist.

      The city is Istanbul in the years 1974–1983. For militants,² what is it like to dwell there? How do they transform its places and mood, and respond to others’ remaking of its affective atmospheres and spaces? What of the urban environment itself, synesthetically known by the “whole body sensing and moving” (Casey 1996: 18): how does it sound, feel, smell, and appear? And what of the decades since then, forgetting and remembering it, your activism and its small part in the making of the city’s chaos? Snatch of a song, rhythm of a chanted slogan, anniversary of the death of a comrade, son, or friend. Each live on in the museum of the mind, in the pains of the body, in the affect exuded by objects and photos, and in the intersubjective imagination of daughters and sons who listen to your stories.

      Istanbul, City of the Fearless is a study of urban activism in those years, ruptured by the 1980 military coup d’état—12 Eylül (12 September)

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