Tag Archives: İstanbul

The New York Times: Let the Blames Begin – Andrew Finkel

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The promotional video the Turkish government showed the I.O.C. for Istanbul’s Olympic bid depicted cappuccino-drinking young executives, out jogging, flirting and having fun – exactly those Turks who had rallied to save Gezi Park and were pleased to see Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Olympics pitch turned down. The government seems unable to deal with dissent from this freer-thinking urban professional class other [...] → Read the full article…

The New York Times: Madrid and Istanbul Respond Differently to Rejection by Olympics

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Madrid, whose population, hit hard by record unemployment and a long recession, had rallied around the idea that the Games could help create jobs and revive the image and economy of Spain. In contrast, large groups of people in the central Taksim district in Istanbul celebrated their city’s Olympic defeat on Saturday night. They argued that the Turkish government had tried [...] → Read the full article…

The New York Times: With a Burst of Color, Turkey’s Public Walkways Become a Focus of Quiet Protest

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In Istanbul, known as the city of seven hills, dozens of public stairways crisscross centuries-old neighborhoods, giving pedestrians a way to avoid heavy car traffic on the streets. Those walkways generally attract little notice, but that changed last week, when a retired forestry engineer decided to paint the Findikli stairs in the central district of Beyoglu in all the colors of [...] → Read the full article…

The New York Times: Istanbul Skyline Reflects Cheap Dollars Now Growing Scarce

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The biggest beneficiaries of the Fed’s largess were not so much in the developed world, but among the politically connected elite in emerging nations like Turkey, where vanity towers, glitzy shopping malls and even grander projects to come — a third bridge across the Bosporus and a vast new airport — have become representative of the nation’s new dynamism, economic [...] → Read the full article…

Technosociology.org: “Come, Come, Whoever You Are.” As a Pluralist Movement Emerges from Gezi Park in Turkey

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After the Gezi Park occupation was dispersed, dozens of neighborhood forums popped up around Istanbul where people get together to discuss a variety of issues. I’ve been attending these neighborhood forums, which are are organized in an “agora” format where speakers line up and take turns to speak. While media attention remains on the  frequent Taksim Square demonstrations, the forums [...] → Read the full article…

Hürriyet: “We are everywhere!”

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Today’s heroes were also the heroes of Gezi…  Now, they are more reliable, more respectable.. Gezi; along with Çarşı, Redhack and Anticapitalist Muslims, has brought LGBT individuals under the spotlight. Lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans individuals will rejoice and walk together at 17:00 today. Their main slogan is “If you are not here we are one missing”. They are candid [...] → Read the full article…

City: Reclaiming the right to the city, reflections on the urban uprisings in Turkey – Mehmet Baris Kuymulu

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It has been more than four decades since Henri Lefebvre, Marxist philosopher and theorist of socio-spatial processes, presciently argued that the globalization of urbanization and the role of distinctively urban processes in the accumulation of capital were bringing about a specifically urban crisis that could not easily be subsumed under the crisis of industrial capitalism. This led Lefebvre to highlight [...] → Read the full article…

Jadaliyya: It is about the Park: A struggle for Turkey’s cities

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It is with alarming regularity that I read coverage of the protests and ensuing police brutality that erupted in Gezi Park and Taksim Square, Istanbul that emphatically insists that the confrontations are about “so much more than a park.” Reassuring their readers that the protests are not about something as silly or simple as the defense of a small park [...] → Read the full article…