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Caring Ahead: Delays and Futures in Tarlabasi, Istanbul
Abstract
The last decade of city-making in Turkey has been marked by what is called urban transformation. Spearheaded by the incumbent Justice and Development Party, urban transformation became a term for state-led development projects that make room for luxury complexes for the affluent, oftentimes at the expense of minority groups. Tarlabasi urban transformation project, named Taksim 360, has been the first example of this in both Istanbul and Turkey. While it has been argued Taksim 360 is a local reflection of global trajectories of neoliberalization and displacement, remaining attentive to the unfolding of urban transformation reveals otherwise. I argue that delays mark the experience of urban transformation in Tarlabasi. Ongoing delays surrounding building projects in Tarlabasi create a temporal opening through which its remaining residents anticipate the future that awaits them. Led by these anticipations, I contend that Tarlabasi residents work delays: they produce networks of solidarity, develop quotidian forms of care, and share know-how to remain in the neighborhood in the future. Building on 14 months of activist and ethnographic work with Tarlabasi residents, I demonstrate that delays produce the future as both a pragmatic and an ethical tool through which the implications of urban transformation can be recalibrated by communities. In that, I move away from teleological studies of urban transformation that study the future as an object regulated by urban policymakers and private companies.
Discipline
Anthropology
Geographic Area
Turkey
Sub Area
Urban Studies