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Figuring It Out in Tarlabasi, Istanbul
Abstract
In 2006, Turkey’s Justice and Development Party-led government designated Istanbul’s Tarlabasi neighborhood—popularly known and stigmatized as a hub of informality, illicit activity, immigrants, and minorities—as an urban transformation zone. Expropriations of property, evictions, demolitions, and the construction of Taksim 360, a luxury business and residential complex, followed soon after. Since then, Tarlabasi has been undergoing delayed and extended urban transformation. Scholars and activists have often interpreted the beginnings of Taksim 360 as marking the failure of urban resistance in Tarlabasi. But for many remaining Tarlabasi residents, the extended process is instead an opening to cultivate future-oriented politics through everyday practices of care—which I call “figuring it out.” Accompanying my interlocutors to on streets, in living rooms, Ottoman archives, hospitals, and informal clinics, I show that residents temporalize care by “figuring it out.” Instead of caring to get by in the present, they orchestrate multiple temporalities of pasts and presents to work towards an urban future, shaping the outcomes of urban transformation. And approaching practices of care through a temporal lens, I contend, elucidates new understandings of care, somewhere between altruism and pragmatism, with the potential to reconfigure urban politics.
Discipline
Anthropology
Geographic Area
Turkey
Sub Area
Urban Studies