This paper argues that geopolitical knowledge is formulated through encounters in the city. Based on an analysis of essays, poems, caricatures, and short dialogues published in Turkish satirical journals (Akbaba, Aydede, Kelebek, Karagöz) during the period of Allied occupation, this paper examines humorous representations of urban and geopolitical, encounters. Urban encounters, and the humorous texts that translated them for Turkish readers, informed Istanbullu knowledges of the late Ottoman geopolitical situation. Rather than viewing the city as merely a stage upon which local experiences of geopolitical and national events would be enacted, this paper argues for a multi-scalar approach to geopolitics that considers the role of urban materiality in processes of imagining the larger social and political world. People interpet geopolitical events and discourses in the city, as they collide with and encounter material things and other people: the city thus plays a constitutive role in the production of geopolitical knowledge. Satire is a primary source for understanding the meanings produced through interactions among people and environments. I explore how urban encounters (among Istanbullu residents and Allied soldiers; among Turks and Armenians or Greeks; between ‘European’ and ‘local’ women and men) reverberate with depictions of geopolitical encounters (specific representations of Ottoman and European military or political figures, depictions of the Ottoman state in a human form) on the same page. While urban, national, and geopolitical discourses seem to exist at different scales, satirical texts and images suggest that they inform one another and are encountered together in daily urban life. Humorous representations of encounter in this period are important because they illuminate the meaning-making of a powerful geopolitical moment during which Ottoman and Turkish identities were defended and debated, debates that would later structure local imaginations of the Turkish nation. Istanbul is not only a material site of encounter, but is a generative context that conditions processes that reverberate beyond the city itself. Satirical journals were not only read and shared in the streets and coffeehouses of the city, but were also disseminated widely. The satirical press, imbued with urban knowledge, played an important role in creating geopolitical knowledges among readers. Reading satirical journals as geopolitical sources means collapsing conventional scalar assumptions regarding the authors and actors of geopolitics in the Middle East, examining the role of material urban environments, and writing ordinary things, peoples, and places into processes of geopolitical knowledge.

The Istanbul district of Eyüp is widely considered to be one of the city's most important religious centers. Yet its history over the past 30 years challenges simple characterizations of the neighborhood as being defined only by its central mosque complex of Eyüp Sultan. While the mosque and its tomb of Ebâ Eyyûb el-Ensârî are unquestionably an important source of the neighborhood's identity, an equally important site in the social life of Eyüp is its high school, Eyüp Lisesi. Over the past thirty years, debates about whether one should refer to the neighborhood –– and its high school in particular -- as "Eyüp" or "Eyüp Sultan" have played a prominent role in broader ongoing arguments about the neighborhood's identity and its appropriate social norms. Arguments about whether the neighborhood should be known as Eyüp or Eyüp Sultan are not simply about the 'right' name; they are also arguments about the neighborhood's past, its future, and about the other local, national, and global places to which Eyüp (Sultan) is linked. Naming this place "Eyüp" or "Eyüp Sultan" articulates different histories that in turn authorize different social norms in the present and encourage particular visions of the future. Drawing on both archival and ethnographic work, this presentation argues that these debates over Eyüp (Sultan) both help us understand in greater detail the importance of narratives of place in urban life and challenge analyses framing this naming only in terms of an opposition between the secular and the religious. Weaving together ideas about citizenship, the multiple histories of a place, and Eyüp's shifting relationship to the world beyond, these ongoing arguments about Eyüp (Sultan) give us some sense of the intimate encounters between people that render the urban meaningful.

This paper investigates the politics of mobilizing competing understandings of the “public” in the struggle over contested spaces in globally-connected Istanbul and Cairo. In particular it focuses on the politics of historical preservation, and how different actors mobilize competing visions and plans for public spaces in historical Cairo and Istanbul to gain authority and jurisdiction over transforming the city. With the adoption of neo-liberal economic policies and the thickening density of global ties, Istanbul and Cairo are increasingly governed by fragmentary rather than centralized urban planning policies. Hence, many actors including entrepreneurs, local and international NGOs and multiple state organizations are involved in transforming both cities. Each of these actors defends their transformational project as furthering “public interest.” The struggle over the authority to define the “public interest” takes material form in the competition over planning the city’s public spaces. The cities are not empty crucibles however, and as they become more globally-connected more urban dwellers and global audiences have a stake in the city’s transformation and in particular over its shared or “public” spaces. They too actively seek to transform these shared spaces to what suits their needs whether through everyday uses of these spaces or the buying power of international investors. Relying on eleven months of fieldwork research in Cairo and Istanbul in 2011-2012 that included semi-structured interviews, collection of plans and other documentary evidence, and participant observation, I conducted a comparative study of three urban transformational projects in historical Istanbul and another three in Cairo to study these questions. The comparative analysis is conducted across both cities and within the cities comparing the visions and projects of different sets of actors, as well as the local and global audiences that have a stake in the cities’ futures. This comparative lens allows me to study the heterogeneity of forces and contestations shaping cities of the Middle East today, challenging the notion that increasing globalization and neo-liberalization will produce uniform “neoliberal cities.” I trace the mechanics of the politics of historical preservation to argue that it is only in understanding the heterogeneity of forces and overlapping geographical scales shaping and being shaped by Middle Eastern cities that we can appreciate the ways in which publics are being constructed in the urban Middle East.

The paper is part of an ethnography, which follows deeply divided and contested urban space from Istanbul to Berlin. The arguments are based on my fieldwork in Kreuzberg-Berlin, previously known as a secluded “Turkish ghetto,” which has turned into one of the hippest and diverse neighborhoods of Berlin since the reunification. Contrary to predominant view that pits Muslim minority groups against the national majority in the European host states, my work shows that the politics of neighborhood in Kreuzberg generates deep splits within both Turkish-descent and German residents. Ironically, these fault lines facilitate, in turn, the formation of new friendships, bonds and alliance that cuts across these migrant-native dichotomy. I illustrate the ways in which urban divides over contested issues, such as rights, freedoms and neighborhood pressure (mahalle baskisi), travel from the homeland, Turkey, to the so-called “Turkish neighborhood” in Berlin. I argue that while these urban contestations concur with controversies within the states of home and host countries, they also (re)generate new alliances between Kreuzbergers that challenge the states and negotiate the terms of democracy. The paper makes two main points about the affinities between contested urban space and liberal democracy. First, my finding on similar urban splits in the neighborhoods of Istanbul and Kreuzberg-Berlin suggests an analysis of the “reach” of democratic struggle – a struggle that is manifested in urban residents’ demands, practices and negotiations for rights and freedoms. Second, by rethinking the widely contested concept of “scale” in the context of democratic struggle, I explore multiple and interconnected levels of democratic contestation-- urban/local, national/institutional and international. Using the Turkish Muslim minority in Kreuzberg as a case study, I conclude that when both government and its political opposition(s) fail to protect and expand rights and freedoms of ordinary Muslims, the interplay between urban space and states –both immigrant-sending- and immigrant-receiving-- takes on an central role. The multi-scalar quality of contestation, in turn, shapes the degree, depth and reach of liberal democracy.