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Article

Genie in the bottle:Gezi Park, Taksim Square,and the realignmentof democracy and spacein Turkey

_Ilay Romain Ors_Istanbul Bilgi University, Istanbul, Turkey

AbstractLeaving Istanbul Bilgi University on 22 May 2013, conveners of the Istanbul Seminars could not

have guessed that less than a week later the arguments they had debated would be revisited under

a new light. For little did anybody know that in the summer of 2013 Istanbul would become thestage of one of the most intriguing of urban uprisings in Turkish, if not world, contemporary

history. In this article I would like to take up some of the challenges brought up by Gezi resistance

to rethink the concept of democracy through the changing ways in which people engage with urban

public spaces in Turkey, and beyond.

KeywordsDemocracy, Gezi Park, public space, Taksim Square, urban protests

Democracy and space

Since Taksim Gezi protests erupted in May 2013, a new phase of democracy is starting to

be defined in Turkey. It is best to embark upon this endeavor of redefinition by revisiting

Corresponding author:_Ilay Romain Ors, Istanbul Bilgi University, Santral Campus E5-301, Kazm Karabekir cad. 2/13, Istanbul, 34060,

Turkey.Email: [email protected]

A version of this article was presented at the Reset-Dialogues Istanbul Seminars 2013 (The

Sources of Political Legitimacy. From the Erosion of the Nation-State to the Rise of Political

Islam) that took place at Istanbul Bilgi University from May 16-22, 2013.

Philosophy and Social Criticism

110

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conventional media, the street that develops a new language of resistance, the street

that voices a crisis of democracy as creative destruction the very gist of modernity.

The street is global (Sassen, 2011); it is real and as physical as it is virtual from Wall

Street to Tahrir Square, from Gezi Park to the streets of Rio de Janeiro, the crisis ofdemocracy strolls in public spaces of the world, seeking an effective redefinition, an

update of the concept, a way to bring the public back into the concept of democracy.

This article takes as its subject the unraveling process of Gezi as a critical moment of

reconceptualizing democracy in Turkey through the changing ways in which people

engage with public spaces in the urban sphere. Adding on to several noteworthy analyses

made recently, the main argument here is that understanding the Gezi resistance would

benefit from a careful reading of its spatial component, the debate over the use of public

space, the very origins of the rebellion. Situating the public space of Taksim Square and

Gezi Park within its historical trajectory is necessary to unleash the competing visualiza-

tions of democracy in Turkey, compiled here roughly under three rubrics: the Ottoman

cosmopolitan; the republican central; and the Gezi utopian. While the Gezi process is

unfolding, and is yet to find its direction in Turkish politics, I argue that the genie-in-

the-bottle is out to engage in the democratic debates taking place over public space. The

article ends with an open-ended question about the future of democracy in Turkey as

seen from the current state of Taksim Square.

Gezi resistance

Word spreads fast over social media on the evening of 27 May 2013: trees in Gezi Parkwere being uprooted!Taksim Square and the Gezi Park were closed for months without

much public announcement regarding their fate, with Istanbulites wondering what was

going on in the most central square of the city. Sporadic statements about a pedestrian

zone, a five-star hotel, a shopping center, a mosque, or another concert hall did not

amount to much more than rumors; after all, no official declaration was made in a way

to allow any public opinion to be formed. A few protesters gathered to witness what was

going on and called over many more to help them stop the bulldozers from ruining what

was left of the public park. Not trusting that construction would not resume after they

left, they built up tents to guard the trees overnight. They were caught off-guard at dawnon 31 May when police showed up with water guns and burned their tents in what

became the wake-up alarm of Turkey. The infamous process of Gezi Park resistance

began there and then, causing an uprising against the increasingly authoritarian measures

used by the government towards the Turkish people, as exemplified in the heavy-handed

police retaliation to a non-violent environmental protest to save the trees of a public park.

That brutal response intensified over the next days and weeks, while the resistance

amplified and spread over Istanbul, to other cities in Turkey, and in the world. The pro-

tests took place in various peaceful ways, yet the government always resorted to political

violence in response, leaving 7 dead, thousands injured and millions worried about thedirection of democracy in Turkey.

I would like to reflect on the Gezi resistance further to elaborate on the ways in which

different kinds of public spaces relate differently to political movements. The specific

kind of public space where an urban movement is placed gives the movement its

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character. Deliberating on the multiple notions of urban spaces helps articulate an inter-

action that visualizes the shifts between different democratic orders in the imagery of the

citizens and of the rulers. Different outlooks of public spaces can further be indicative of

the kind of political rule that is reigning at that particular time period.

Taksim Square

The official central square in the city is a theater a venue for parades, weddings, or

executions, an incarnation of the public sphere, a physical representation of political

power (Sonesson, 2003). It incorporates symbols visualizing the identity of the author-

ity, giving definition and shape to its character. Whether the totalitarian singularity of

Tiananmen in Beijing or the deliberate eclecticism of Stephansplatz in Vienna, the cen-

tral squares give the most obvious clues about the nature of the city and of the politicalestablishment in the country. Urban squares display in various ways; apart from sym-

bolic objects, such as statues or fountains, or public buildings, such as parliaments or

palaces, they can reveal their representative power by the very design of themselves.

Even their emptiness is telling, underlining the appeal of demonstration of power by

political authority the space is intentionally left blank in anticipation of the crowds

that would gather in support of the ruler to make use of the square as a space of politics.

Squares display the dominant national authority but they also represent alternative

ideological visions that make up the nation. Contemporary protest movements are also

grounded in material places, named after the places they occupied Tahrir Square, Gezi

Park, Wall Street, providing a stage on which different actors display their ideals and

perform and rehearse collectively (Gole, 2013a).

It needs to be noted that the recent wave of urban uprisings all have in common a par-

ticular preoccupation with public space. Protests in Greece, the USA, Egypt, Brazil, or

Spain were partially directed against policies of privatization, corruption and real-estate

development (Fregonese, 2013), which are intensified during financial crises and lead to

a massive verbalization of discontent over globally raised concerns with just how demo-

cratically the public is being ruled. It is the context of globalized capitalism that condi-

tions the protests against the commercialization of public space, and the subjugation of

the corrupt and inefficient national states to obey the rule of international financial cap-

ital (Zizek, 2013).

As a movement concerned from the onset with the question of democracy as it man-

ifests itself in the urban public space, Taksim Square and Gezi Park are important sites to

explore the shifting modes of democratic imagination in Turkey, both through spatial

memory and through an engagement with visible elements in display. The different

modes of political rule that found physical expression in Taksim Square may be summar-

ized in three different phases.

1 The Ottoman cosmopolitan

Initially Taksim was located at the outside border of an area opposite old Istanbul, Pera,

the other side or the side where the others lived. These others were first the Genoese and

Venetians, who occupied the Galata region. Extension of the space took place northward

4 Philosophy and Social Criticism



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as newcomers, immigrants, or foreign communities came to settle down around the city.

By the 19th century, Pera was reaching from the shore of the Golden Horn to the out-

skirts in Taksim, housing consular buildings, places of worship, businesses, residences

and spaces of sociability to the hundreds of communities making up cosmopolitan Istan-bul in the late Ottoman era.

Taksim was the end-point of the Grande Rue du Pera, right behind the French Palace,

where water distribution facilities were located. The vast uninhabited area reaching out to

the greenery of the Armenian cemetery became the site of the Taksim Artillery Barracks

that were built between 1803 and 1806. In the aftermath of the 1908 revolution, the bar-

racks became the site of a major uprising known as 31 March that turned into a massacre

of Christian army officers. Later evaluated as a conspiracy to eliminate unwanted ranks

and to end constitutional rule (Aksin, 1994), this event left an indication in the minds

of the people that religion could be deployed as a major factor against modernization.

In the 1920s, the barracks lost their functionality and were converted into a football sta-

dium. The ornate facade of the barracks stood as a haunted reminder of the Ottoman past

during the early years of the republic.

2 The republican central

When war-torn Istanbul shook off the occupation by the Allied powers, and Mustafa

Kemal sent off the last sultan to exile abroad, Taksim Square stood as a place containing

the unwanted relics of the Ottoman past: the ornate structure of the military barracks

despite the dissolution of the imperial army, and the cosmopolitan fabric of Pera amidthe elimination or escape of non-Muslims or non-Turks. Taksim was acknowledged in

its function as the central public square of the biggest city of the new state and was to

be appropriately decorated to manifest the modernization project hailed by the new

republican order. Following an international competition for the land-use of Istanbul,

Henri Proust was commissioned to undertake the re-design of the city center, so the

rebuilding of Taksim Square in a modernist style commenced in 1939. The total of

26,000 square meters containing the barracks was demolished and transformed into

todays Taksim Gezi, then known as _InonuPromenade after the second president (Polvan

and Yanek, 2010, cited in Ekmekci, 2013). The square featured a centrally located statueof Ataturk and others, depicted in proud celebration of national independence, circu-

mambulated by wide roads carrying trams and cars, surrounded with opera houses,

hotels, and a wide green space reaching all the way downhill to the Bosphorus in the

place of the previous Armenian cemetery. Taksim Square became the meeting point

of the Gezi Park, Republic Street and Independence Street (the renamed Grande Rue

du Pera), thereby verbalizing much republican symbolism. Prousts original plan under-

went minor alterations: the Greek Orthodox church was slightly sidelined and disguised

behind a set of smaller buildings and the central park was trimmed to be given away to

international hotel chains, which was another testimony to the western modernist direc-tion assumed by the republic. An eradication of the Ottoman remainders was thus made

possible by the physical reorganization of Taksim Square and the surrounding Gezi Park

to make public the values of the republic. A further architectural expression of those val-

ues came with the construction of the Ataturk cultural center in the 1960s, a concert hall

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and an iconic modernist landmark facing the square. With the building of luxury flats

surrounding the square, it became one of the poshest parts of the city for the trendy

republican elite.

Surely, that was already an alternative narrative of a republican kind of modernity andnation-building, at the expense of a more cosmopolitan, culturally pluralistic imperial

legacy. The public square was left to scream the vision of a monocular, unified, specif-

ically defined, dominant, bold, strict, definitive order, amid the previous overlapping

spaces of cosmopolitan, controversial, tangible, marginal, multiple, fluid shapes, exis-

tences and experiences at the time of Pera.

With its monolithic nationalistic vision of the republic, Taksim Square has been at the

same time a terrain of political practice, where public political encounters, democratic

negotiations and political dissent have taken place throughout the decades (Baykan and

Hatuka, 2010): from the bloody 1 May demonstrations in the 1970s, to those organized

by Islamists in the 1990s, and secularist rallies of 2007 by Kemalists in protection of the

very republic that furnished the Taksim Square (Tambar, 2009).

(The AKP parenthesis)

Even though the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government has ruled in unri-

valed power for over 11 years now, it has not been able to inflict its signature on public

places. The country turned into a huge construction site as a result of mega-projects, real-

estate developments and massive gentrification, all of which were highly controversial,

destructive and speculative in effect. Yet there was no noteworthy project of architec-ture, visual art, and/or other forms of culture instituted by the state (Kortun, 2013), nor

has it been possible to claim any major public space as AKPs own creation. With the

inevitable appeal of leaving indelible traces in the city, Erdogans vision of Taksim went

through several phases: since his days as mayor of Istanbul in the late 1990s he first

announced his will to build a grand mosque big enough to overshadow Hagia Triada

Church, later talked about replacing the Ataturk Cultural Center with a baroque struc-

ture, and finally came up with a so-called Taksim transformation project, which left the

square closed to traffic and to eyesight for many months. The park and the iconic build-

ings overlooking the square were neglected; this set a very opportune justification forlaunching one of the biggest undertakings of urban redesign. Construction work that

started under the rubric of pedestrianization projects, was to continue behind the metal

shields until a replica of the artillery barracks was rebuilt to house a shopping mall, lux-

ury residences, a museum, another hotel, or a combination of those. The attempts at

silently demolishing Gezi Park to realize Erdogans neo-Ottoman dream were shattered

with the loudest of noises that became his worst nightmare. Erdogans desire was clearly

to be not only a physical remaking of the public space, but also a move to change the

outlook of the square, and by extension, that of the republic. The plans to rebuild the bar-

racks had raised two different issues: the physical change and the idea behind it. AKPsattempt at revoking the memories of a certain version of the Ottoman past through the

building of the barracks was interpreted as an intention to shape a new social identity

from the pieces of anti-secular, Islamist, neo-Ottoman ideologies. TaksimGezi was not

the first site displaying neo-Ottoman tendencies in the city that tend to challenge the




8/11

official historiography set up by the republican period. These new interpretations of the

imperial legacy, which often collide with neo-liberal imperatives of development, were

manifested spatially in theme parks and real-estate projects (Oncu, 2007). Gezi protests

were against the will of Erdogan, who aspired to cloak Istanbuls identity and memoriesin a banal Islamic architecture as in Gulf Arab cities (Benhabib, 2013), turning the city into

a large theme park. It was resistance to this kind of aspiration that led to the Gezi revolts.

3 The Gezi utopian

The initial protest started in the park, grew in the street, flew into the square. Streets

full of environmentalists, football fans, academics, workers, artists, LGBTTQ [lesbian

gay bisexual transvestite transgender queer], Kurds, feminists, people from all walks

of life walked to the park to claim the square. The streets leading to the TaksimGezi

area became global streets, insofar as they bore parallels to urban protests elsewhere.

Similarly to Zuccotti Park in New York, Gezi Park was occupied; main arteries lead-

ing to the square were cut off from traffic to halt police interference by the very vehi-

cles now artistically decorated that were spraying pressurized water and tear gas

on to the crowds. Inside, there was Gezi, now with a utopian commune presence.

Taksim and Gezi were claimed by the ever-growing population of protesters as a venue

for displaying an alternative democracy. In the decorating of public buildings, statues, trees

and walls with banners, posters and flags, the square and the park were reflecting the colorful

multiplicity of the protesters. The initial sit-in expanded in the face of brutal police suppres-

sion and grew strongly to a very well-organized park featuring a vast tent city, an infirmary, aplayground, an organic vegetable farm, a botanical garden, a mobile transmitter for free

wi-fi connection, a speakers corner, a performance stage, a fire station, a free library, a rev-

olution museum, open lectures, a wish tree, and many more components of a self-sufficient

commune life. Food, drink, blankets, medicine, gas masks, yoga mats, books, phone char-

gers and other essentials of livelihood were brought in and shared, exchanged, distributed

for free. Slogans expressed an amazing creativity of political humor, disseminated fast

through the effective use of social media, and were instantly chanted into songs that people

sang along and danced to. Committees were formed to make sure that this idyllic, peaceful,

happy union of freedom and solidarity was not disturbed. Yet there were no instances oftheft, fighting, harassment or even bullying reported during the Gezi weeks, forming a

striking contrast to the earlier days of the park where any of these unpleasant occurrences

would be far from surprising. One of the slogans posted on a tree was summative of the

entire experience: Here at Gezi we live in the smurfs village. Happily ever after in our

mushroom houses, we are waiting for the arrival of Gargamel!

Gargamel, the baddy prime minister did not arrive; instead he sent over his armed

police forces to crack down on the protest or rather to hunt down the protesters. With

that, he displayed the angry and heavy-handed face of a repressive, undemocratic, cor-

rupt, authoritatian, greedy and paternalistic political rule, which attacked the alternativevision of a democratic existence in formation that rested on civility, creativity, an urbane,

rightful and peaceful expression of solidarity.

Following the horrifying violence that took place on the night of 15 June, the people

were taken out of Gezi, but Gezi could no longer be taken out of the people. In a

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process that is still unfolding, the Gezi spirit became an historical opportunity by which

people creatively engaged in the very definition of democracy. They became active

residents of their city by claiming their right to the city as the most basic of their dem-

ocratic rights. They became politicized global citizens by forging links of solidarityand inspiration with other urban movements around the world. They became conscious

bearers of their Ottoman past and their republican present, demanding a change to a

brighter future that is at the same time cosmopolitan and democratic. This was to be

a democracy beyond its limited definition as the rule of the elected people. It was to

be an inclusionary democracy where people engaged in how they were to be ruled, and

had a say on what their cities would look like.

The Gezi spirit found different formations in the aftermath of the commune experi-

ence: public parks in neighborhoods became locations for neighborhood assemblies

called forums, where performances and debates of democratic ideas took place. Apart

from political discussions, these neighborhood forums became sites to engage with local

needs, by sharing clothing and other supplies, and a practice of exchange that is best

described as gift-giving (Turan, 2013). Another creative display of democratic vision

was the gathering of thousands in streets, sitting on potlach tables laid on the ground,

sharing food for the break of fast during the month of Ramadan. All these acts stood wit-

ness to the peaceful search for a new democratic vision, stressing solidarity in their diver-

sity, and exerting the power of protest in their quest for their right to the city.

The right to the city, Lefebvres ground-breaking concept inspired by the Paris com-

mune (1968), rests on the mutuality of urban space and social change; there the link

between public space and democracy gets tightly formed over the notion of rights, theright of urbanites to question and transform the process that orchestrates the production

and use of space. The powerful reproduce and enhance their power by controlling

space through the appropriation and domination of the public space, Harvey claims

(1989), though ordinary urban dwellers are not powerless. They contest and subvert

domination by using public space for their own ends, sometimes through collective

action and sometimes by unofficially being in the space.

Gezi resistance had a clear urban agenda to reclaim the right to the city of ordinary

citizens who rely on the use value in the city and place it over the right to the city of capi-

talists, developers and their allies who recast the city as a locusof exchange value andcapital accumulation (Kuymulu, 2013). It revealed how a public square became literally

vital to democracy, especially when threatened by forces of private global capital and by

the disciplinary regulations and authoritarian tendencies of the state power (Gole,

2013a). Gezi is a turning point in Turkish politics for bringing about a platform with the

involvement of the widest array of active citizens, who debate how public space is to

be shaped, and how the public should (not) be ruled, and who engage in the very rede-

finition of democracy more directly than ever before.

The Gezi spirit

To recap in spatial terms, the rule of the elected AKP government could thus far not man-

age to inflict its identity on public spaces. Amid their mega-projects of urban transfor-

mation and gentrification, at the price of the natural and cultural fabric of the city,




10/11

AKP was not able to claim any square of central importance to display its own political

vision and identity. Just as it was hoping to convert Taksim Square for this aim, the

pressure valve of protesting crowds that thus far had only let out steam in limited

amounts broke to give way to the biggest display the government had yet seen. Thestreet proved to be the only force that could cause the government to stumble in its self-

confident style of ruling the people. The ruled would stop them short of converting the

square into a display of their own controversial vision, thereby claiming their right to

the city, and their right for a redefinition of democracy. If there needed to be a rede-

finition of democratic republican order, then this needed to take into account the

demands of this very place. They rooted the debate in the physical space of the square,

of the city, of the country, claiming its trees, its communities, its historical trajectories

within a globalized framework. They occupied Gezi Park to demonstrate just what kind

of democratic rule they envisioned, only to be vehemently opposed and destroyed by

the powers that be. The response from the AKP government was to mobilize the streets

in turn; often coined to be street-smart, Erdogan was in fact leading a movement that

originated in the back streets of the Turkish Republic by winning votes from the mar-

ginalized shanty towns of rural migrants in the city (Gole, 2013c). Organizing the street

counter-protest, however, was not enough to claim the city square. In the lack of any

political vision and creativity, the square ended up with an unreferential empty void,

which the current government cannot fill in.

Gezi protests made it clear that public space is not only an abstract concept, that new

political themes, a new public culture and a new understanding of citizenship start being

formed (Gole, 2013b). Gezi created an urban consciousness that brought environmental-ists, feminists, LGBTTQ activists, Kurdish groups together in searching for an institutio-

nalized cultural and political voice that is not contained within the existing political

structures (Benhabib, 2013). Partially due to its class-blindness and its inherently leader-

less nature (Tugal, 2013), which is only fitting to the general trend observed in other

occupy-type movements (Mitchell, 2013), thus far, such a common voice or political

direction could not be found. Whether the road to elections is hiding sharp turns that may

allow Gezi protesters to lose or find their political direction remains to be seen.

Yet one thing is certain: the Gezi genie is out of the bottle and will most probably not

go back in until the wishes for a more democratic Turkey will come true.

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