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Strolling A Geosocial Limit: “Hafriyat” and Politics in Istanbul’s Urban Peripheries
Abstract by Burc Kostem On Session III-23  (The Politics of Urban Space)

On Tuesday, November 30 at 2:00 pm

2021 Annual Meeting

Abstract
Over the past 20 years, Istanbul’s urban peripheries have witnessed a concerted effort of transformation. This effort is epitomized in several mega-infrastructure projects tightly focused around the city’s western periphery – a new bridge across the Bosporus, a mega-airport and a new canal dredged between the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmara. Such mega-infrastructure projects gesture to the interplay between the political economy of developmentalism, the affective politics of authoritarianism (Tokdogan 2019), and the environmental politics of extraction, that have collectively come to define the neoliberal fetishization of economic growth in Turkey (Adaman and Akbulut 2020). This paper thinks alongside the artistic, activist and academic interventions that have taken place against such mega-infrastructure projects. I study Between Two Seas, Serkan Taycan’s walking route/artwork that invites participants on a four-day stroll along the city’s frontiers; the work of the activist group Kuzey Ormanları Savunması, and İstanbul: 2023 Sinan Logie and Yoann Morvan’s walking ethnogrpahy of Istanbul’s peripheries. I also analyze mapping efforts and counter-visual tactics employed by artists and activist groups along İstanbul’s urban peripheries, working with mapping, photography and video footage. I contextualize these materials with cultural histories of the specific sites that are scattered around İstanbul’s peripheries, drawing on academic work, archival records, and documentaries. Last, I add to the mix with my own strolls of these sites. Drawing on this material, I engage in a reflection on the movements of hafriyat (used here as something between “extraction” and “debris”) as it mediates and traverses İstanbul’s limits. How does studying geosocial (Yusoff 2017) movements of hafriyat help us understand the superposition of extractive activities on the one hand and spaces of waste, excess, and ruination on the other? What kind of a commoning organizes around hafriayt, that situates itself at the margins of social reproduction? How does hafriyat help us know a city’s limits, not as a border given at the outset but as a relation, individuated through the collective labor of walking, mapping, organizing? To answer these questions, I draw on the broader tradition of Spinozist Marxism (Hardt and Negri 2009; Read 2011), bringing this tradition in conversation with feminist insights from anthropology (Oguz 2020), geography (Yusoff 2018), and media studies (Gabrys 2019). The concept of hafriyat is mobilized to move between the scales of environmentality, political economy, and affect, developing the Spinozist-Marxist focus on the production of subjectivity by investigating the geosocial conditions that subtend subjectivation.
Discipline
Anthropology
Geographic Area
Turkey
Sub Area
Theory