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Genie in the bottle: Gezi park, Taksim square, and the realignment of democracy and space in Turkey
Ilay Romain rs Philosophy Social Criticism published online 6 March 2014 DOI: 10.1177/0191453714525390 The online version of this article can be found at: http://psc.sagepub.com/content/early/2014/03/05/0191453714525390

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Genie in the bottle: Gezi Park, Taksim Square, and the realignment of democracy and space in Turkey
rs _ Ilay Romain O

_ Istanbul Bilgi University, Istanbul, Turkey

Abstract
Leaving Istanbul Bilgi University on 22 May 2013, conveners of the Istanbul Seminars could not have guessed that less than a week later the arguments they had debated would be revisited under a new light. For little did anybody know that in the summer of 2013 Istanbul would become the stage of one of the most intriguing of urban uprisings in Turkish, if not world, contemporary history. In this article I would like to take up some of the challenges brought up by Gezi resistance to rethink the concept of democracy through the changing ways in which people engage with urban public spaces in Turkey, and beyond.

Keywords
Democracy, Gezi Park, public space, Taksim Square, urban protests

Democracy and space

Since Taksim Gezi protests erupted in May 2013, a new phase of democracy is starting to be defined in Turkey. It is best to embark upon this endeavor of redefinition by revisiting

Corresponding author: _ rs, Istanbul Bilgi University, Santral Campus E5-301, Kazm Karabekir cad. 2/13, Istanbul, 34060, Ilay Romain O Turkey. Email: ilay.ors@bilgi.edu.tr A version of this article was presented at the Reset-Dialogues Istanbul Seminars 2013 (The Sources of Political Legitimacy. From the Erosion of the Nation-State to the Rise of Political Islam) that took place at Istanbul Bilgi University from May 16-22, 2013.

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the etymology of the word from neighboring Greece: democracy, from demos [people, public] and kratos [power, rule], means power to the people; it is about ruling by the public, but also about having people decide how the public is to be ruled. Traditional or common practices of democracy have been laying more emphasis on the former at the price of the latter. In other words, ruling by the public through having elections had priority over the second meaning of democracy: people deciding how the public is to be ruled, determining how the elected will make decisions about ruling the public, defining the public domain, or shaping the public space. The original meaning of democracy, where the demos gathered in the agora to debate how to rule the kratos, has not made it much beyond ancient times. Much of this was due to the impracticality of having the people assemble in an agoralike space; size and logistics necessitated representation and minusculed the role of public space in democratic governance. The physical dissolved in the face of checks and balances from a distance, while the crucial importance of public space to democracy lost its appeal in both political practice and social theory. Yet today the crisis of democracy springs up from the very public space it neglected: the people gather in the agora, the streets and the squares making demands, exercising their right to have a direct say, requesting a redefinition of their democracy in terms of claiming the power to determine how the public is to be ruled. In insisting on a return to the original meaning of democracy, they underline the very crisis of its current, dominating, traditional version. The contact with the physical is called back through the establishment of the virtual, enabling both direct and representative democratic demands to come to the surface: the public reclaims its space, the people redefine their democracies of the new age. Overly occupied with the dominant understanding of the concept, democratic theory had little to say about the use of public space, except for its being used as a metaphor for public domain or public order. While Habermas carefully delineated the public sphere, distinguishing it from the economic and the political spheres (1989), he has left it as the realm of peoples participation in collective deliberation (Calhoun, 1992), rather than designating the physical setting where it occurs. Similarly, democracy has more often been theorized in connection with political rights, claims, processes of deliberation, decision-making and conflict, rather than a concern with the reasons, resources, or issues over which these actions take place. To follow another thread of political theory, however, Simmel had quite early (1908) established the central role of the visible in theorizing about the complex and constantly changing metropolis, followed by the work of geographers and urban theorists in the second half of the 20th century. In the aftermath of the spatial turn (Soja, 1989), social theory today rediscovers its connections with space and place, notably through a similar focus on the city. If the concept of democracy is intimately connected with the concept of the public, then public space, as the physical subset of public sphere, becomes reinstated as the site for democratic performance to a surprising extent even in the allegedly digital world today (Parkinson, 2012). As public space is intimately linked with democracy, so are the debates about it: crises of democracies start in the streets, alternative versions are visualized and performed in the square. It is the street that enjoys live reporting through social or

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conventional media, the street that develops a new language of resistance, the street that voices a crisis of democracy as creative destruction the very gist of modernity. The street is global (Sassen, 2011); it is real and as physical as it is virtual from Wall Street to Tahrir Square, from Gezi Park to the streets of Rio de Janeiro, the crisis of democracy strolls in public spaces of the world, seeking an effective redefinition, an update of the concept, a way to bring the public back into the concept of democracy. This article takes as its subject the unraveling process of Gezi as a critical moment of reconceptualizing democracy in Turkey through the changing ways in which people engage with public spaces in the urban sphere. Adding on to several noteworthy analyses made recently, the main argument here is that understanding the Gezi resistance would benefit from a careful reading of its spatial component, the debate over the use of public space, the very origins of the rebellion. Situating the public space of Taksim Square and Gezi Park within its historical trajectory is necessary to unleash the competing visualizations of democracy in Turkey, compiled here roughly under three rubrics: the Ottoman cosmopolitan; the republican central; and the Gezi utopian. While the Gezi process is unfolding, and is yet to find its direction in Turkish politics, I argue that the genie-inthe-bottle is out to engage in the democratic debates taking place over public space. The article ends with an open-ended question about the future of democracy in Turkey as seen from the current state of Taksim Square.

Gezi resistance
Word spreads fast over social media on the evening of 27 May 2013: trees in Gezi Park were being uprooted! Taksim Square and the Gezi Park were closed for months without much public announcement regarding their fate, with Istanbulites wondering what was going on in the most central square of the city. Sporadic statements about a pedestrian zone, a five-star hotel, a shopping center, a mosque, or another concert hall did not amount to much more than rumors; after all, no official declaration was made in a way to allow any public opinion to be formed. A few protesters gathered to witness what was going on and called over many more to help them stop the bulldozers from ruining what was left of the public park. Not trusting that construction would not resume after they left, they built up tents to guard the trees overnight. They were caught off-guard at dawn on 31 May when police showed up with water guns and burned their tents in what became the wake-up alarm of Turkey. The infamous process of Gezi Park resistance began there and then, causing an uprising against the increasingly authoritarian measures used by the government towards the Turkish people, as exemplified in the heavy-handed police retaliation to a non-violent environmental protest to save the trees of a public park. That brutal response intensified over the next days and weeks, while the resistance amplified and spread over Istanbul, to other cities in Turkey, and in the world. The protests took place in various peaceful ways, yet the government always resorted to political violence in response, leaving 7 dead, thousands injured and millions worried about the direction of democracy in Turkey. I would like to reflect on the Gezi resistance further to elaborate on the ways in which different kinds of public spaces relate differently to political movements. The specific kind of public space where an urban movement is placed gives the movement its

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character. Deliberating on the multiple notions of urban spaces helps articulate an interaction that visualizes the shifts between different democratic orders in the imagery of the citizens and of the rulers. Different outlooks of public spaces can further be indicative of the kind of political rule that is reigning at that particular time period.

Taksim Square
The official central square in the city is a theater a venue for parades, weddings, or executions, an incarnation of the public sphere, a physical representation of political power (Sonesson, 2003). It incorporates symbols visualizing the identity of the authority, giving definition and shape to its character. Whether the totalitarian singularity of Tiananmen in Beijing or the deliberate eclecticism of Stephansplatz in Vienna, the central squares give the most obvious clues about the nature of the city and of the political establishment in the country. Urban squares display in various ways; apart from symbolic objects, such as statues or fountains, or public buildings, such as parliaments or palaces, they can reveal their representative power by the very design of themselves. Even their emptiness is telling, underlining the appeal of demonstration of power by political authority the space is intentionally left blank in anticipation of the crowds that would gather in support of the ruler to make use of the square as a space of politics. Squares display the dominant national authority but they also represent alternative ideological visions that make up the nation. Contemporary protest movements are also grounded in material places, named after the places they occupied Tahrir Square, Gezi Park, Wall Street, providing a stage on which different actors display their ideals and perform and rehearse collectively (Go le, 2013a). It needs to be noted that the recent wave of urban uprisings all have in common a particular preoccupation with public space. Protests in Greece, the USA, Egypt, Brazil, or Spain were partially directed against policies of privatization, corruption and real-estate development (Fregonese, 2013), which are intensified during financial crises and lead to a massive verbalization of discontent over globally raised concerns with just how democratically the public is being ruled. It is the context of globalized capitalism that conditions the protests against the commercialization of public space, and the subjugation of the corrupt and inefficient national states to obey the rule of international financial cap iz ital (Z ek, 2013). As a movement concerned from the onset with the question of democracy as it manifests itself in the urban public space, Taksim Square and Gezi Park are important sites to explore the shifting modes of democratic imagination in Turkey, both through spatial memory and through an engagement with visible elements in display. The different modes of political rule that found physical expression in Taksim Square may be summarized in three different phases.

1 The Ottoman cosmopolitan

Initially Taksim was located at the outside border of an area opposite old Istanbul, Pera, the other side or the side where the others lived. These others were first the Genoese and Venetians, who occupied the Galata region. Extension of the space took place northward

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as newcomers, immigrants, or foreign communities came to settle down around the city. By the 19th century, Pera was reaching from the shore of the Golden Horn to the outskirts in Taksim, housing consular buildings, places of worship, businesses, residences and spaces of sociability to the hundreds of communities making up cosmopolitan Istanbul in the late Ottoman era. Taksim was the end-point of the Grande Rue du Pera, right behind the French Palace, where water distribution facilities were located. The vast uninhabited area reaching out to the greenery of the Armenian cemetery became the site of the Taksim Artillery Barracks that were built between 1803 and 1806. In the aftermath of the 1908 revolution, the barracks became the site of a major uprising known as 31 March that turned into a massacre of Christian army officers. Later evaluated as a conspiracy to eliminate unwanted ranks and to end constitutional rule (Aks in, 1994), this event left an indication in the minds of the people that religion could be deployed as a major factor against modernization. In the 1920s, the barracks lost their functionality and were converted into a football stadium. The ornate fac ade of the barracks stood as a haunted reminder of the Ottoman past during the early years of the republic.

2 The republican central

When war-torn Istanbul shook off the occupation by the Allied powers, and Mustafa Kemal sent off the last sultan to exile abroad, Taksim Square stood as a place containing the unwanted relics of the Ottoman past: the ornate structure of the military barracks despite the dissolution of the imperial army, and the cosmopolitan fabric of Pera amid the elimination or escape of non-Muslims or non-Turks. Taksim was acknowledged in its function as the central public square of the biggest city of the new state and was to be appropriately decorated to manifest the modernization project hailed by the new republican order. Following an international competition for the land-use of Istanbul, Henri Proust was commissioned to undertake the re-design of the city center, so the rebuilding of Taksim Square in a modernist style commenced in 1939. The total of 26,000 square meters containing the barracks was demolished and transformed into _ nu todays Taksim Gezi, then known as Ino Promenade after the second president (Polvan and Yanek, 2010, cited in Ekmekc i, 2013). The square featured a centrally located statue of Atatu rk and others, depicted in proud celebration of national independence, circumambulated by wide roads carrying trams and cars, surrounded with opera houses, hotels, and a wide green space reaching all the way downhill to the Bosphorus in the place of the previous Armenian cemetery. Taksim Square became the meeting point of the Gezi Park, Republic Street and Independence Street (the renamed Grande Rue du Pera), thereby verbalizing much republican symbolism. Prousts original plan underwent minor alterations: the Greek Orthodox church was slightly sidelined and disguised behind a set of smaller buildings and the central park was trimmed to be given away to international hotel chains, which was another testimony to the western modernist direction assumed by the republic. An eradication of the Ottoman remainders was thus made possible by the physical reorganization of Taksim Square and the surrounding Gezi Park to make public the values of the republic. A further architectural expression of those values came with the construction of the Atatu rk cultural center in the 1960s, a concert hall

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and an iconic modernist landmark facing the square. With the building of luxury flats surrounding the square, it became one of the poshest parts of the city for the trendy republican elite. Surely, that was already an alternative narrative of a republican kind of modernity and nation-building, at the expense of a more cosmopolitan, culturally pluralistic imperial legacy. The public square was left to scream the vision of a monocular, unified, specifically defined, dominant, bold, strict, definitive order, amid the previous overlapping spaces of cosmopolitan, controversial, tangible, marginal, multiple, fluid shapes, existences and experiences at the time of Pera. With its monolithic nationalistic vision of the republic, Taksim Square has been at the same time a terrain of political practice, where public political encounters, democratic negotiations and political dissent have taken place throughout the decades (Baykan and Hatuka, 2010): from the bloody 1 May demonstrations in the 1970s, to those organized by Islamists in the 1990s, and secularist rallies of 2007 by Kemalists in protection of the very republic that furnished the Taksim Square (Tambar, 2009).

(The AKP parenthesis)

Even though the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government has ruled in unrivaled power for over 11 years now, it has not been able to inflict its signature on public places. The country turned into a huge construction site as a result of mega-projects, realestate developments and massive gentrification, all of which were highly controversial, destructive and speculative in effect. Yet there was no noteworthy project of architecture, visual art, and/or other forms of culture instituted by the state (Kortun, 2013), nor has it been possible to claim any major public space as AKPs own creation. With the ans vision of Taksim went inevitable appeal of leaving indelible traces in the city, Erdog through several phases: since his days as mayor of Istanbul in the late 1990s he first announced his will to build a grand mosque big enough to overshadow Hagia Triada Church, later talked about replacing the Atatu rk Cultural Center with a baroque structure, and finally came up with a so-called Taksim transformation project, which left the square closed to traffic and to eyesight for many months. The park and the iconic buildings overlooking the square were neglected; this set a very opportune justification for launching one of the biggest undertakings of urban redesign. Construction work that started under the rubric of pedestrianization projects, was to continue behind the metal shields until a replica of the artillery barracks was rebuilt to house a shopping mall, luxury residences, a museum, another hotel, or a combination of those. The attempts at ans neo-Ottoman dream were shattered silently demolishing Gezi Park to realize Erdog ans desire was clearly with the loudest of noises that became his worst nightmare. Erdog to be not only a physical remaking of the public space, but also a move to change the outlook of the square, and by extension, that of the republic. The plans to rebuild the barracks had raised two different issues: the physical change and the idea behind it. AKPs attempt at revoking the memories of a certain version of the Ottoman past through the building of the barracks was interpreted as an intention to shape a new social identity from the pieces of anti-secular, Islamist, neo-Ottoman ideologies. TaksimGezi was not the first site displaying neo-Ottoman tendencies in the city that tend to challenge the

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official historiography set up by the republican period. These new interpretations of the imperial legacy, which often collide with neo-liberal imperatives of development, were ncu manifested spatially in theme parks and real-estate projects (O , 2007). Gezi protests an, who aspired to cloak Istanbuls identity and memories were against the will of Erdog in a banal Islamic architecture as in Gulf Arab cities (Benhabib, 2013), turning the city into a large theme park. It was resistance to this kind of aspiration that led to the Gezi revolts.

3 The Gezi utopian

The initial protest started in the park, grew in the street, flew into the square. Streets full of environmentalists, football fans, academics, workers, artists, LGBTTQ [lesbian gay bisexual transvestite transgender queer], Kurds, feminists, people from all walks of life walked to the park to claim the square. The streets leading to the TaksimGezi area became global streets, insofar as they bore parallels to urban protests elsewhere. Similarly to Zuccotti Park in New York, Gezi Park was occupied; main arteries leading to the square were cut off from traffic to halt police interference by the very vehicles now artistically decorated that were spraying pressurized water and tear gas on to the crowds. Inside, there was Gezi, now with a utopian commune presence. Taksim and Gezi were claimed by the ever-growing population of protesters as a venue for displaying an alternative democracy. In the decorating of public buildings, statues, trees and walls with banners, posters and flags, the square and the park were reflecting the colorful multiplicity of the protesters. The initial sit-in expanded in the face of brutal police suppression and grew strongly to a very well-organized park featuring a vast tent city, an infirmary, a playground, an organic vegetable farm, a botanical garden, a mobile transmitter for free wi-fi connection, a speakers corner, a performance stage, a fire station, a free library, a revolution museum, open lectures, a wish tree, and many more components of a self-sufficient commune life. Food, drink, blankets, medicine, gas masks, yoga mats, books, phone chargers and other essentials of livelihood were brought in and shared, exchanged, distributed for free. Slogans expressed an amazing creativity of political humor, disseminated fast through the effective use of social media, and were instantly chanted into songs that people sang along and danced to. Committees were formed to make sure that this idyllic, peaceful, happy union of freedom and solidarity was not disturbed. Yet there were no instances of theft, fighting, harassment or even bullying reported during the Gezi weeks, forming a striking contrast to the earlier days of the park where any of these unpleasant occurrences would be far from surprising. One of the slogans posted on a tree was summative of the entire experience: Here at Gezi we live in the smurfs village. Happily ever after in our mushroom houses, we are waiting for the arrival of Gargamel! Gargamel, the baddy prime minister did not arrive; instead he sent over his armed police forces to crack down on the protest or rather to hunt down the protesters. With that, he displayed the angry and heavy-handed face of a repressive, undemocratic, corrupt, authoritatian, greedy and paternalistic political rule, which attacked the alternative vision of a democratic existence in formation that rested on civility, creativity, an urbane, rightful and peaceful expression of solidarity. Following the horrifying violence that took place on the night of 15 June, the people were taken out of Gezi, but Gezi could no longer be taken out of the people. In a

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process that is still unfolding, the Gezi spirit became an historical opportunity by which people creatively engaged in the very definition of democracy. They became active residents of their city by claiming their right to the city as the most basic of their democratic rights. They became politicized global citizens by forging links of solidarity and inspiration with other urban movements around the world. They became conscious bearers of their Ottoman past and their republican present, demanding a change to a brighter future that is at the same time cosmopolitan and democratic. This was to be a democracy beyond its limited definition as the rule of the elected people. It was to be an inclusionary democracy where people engaged in how they were to be ruled, and had a say on what their cities would look like. The Gezi spirit found different formations in the aftermath of the commune experience: public parks in neighborhoods became locations for neighborhood assemblies called forums, where performances and debates of democratic ideas took place. Apart from political discussions, these neighborhood forums became sites to engage with local needs, by sharing clothing and other supplies, and a practice of exchange that is best described as gift-giving (Turan, 2013). Another creative display of democratic vision was the gathering of thousands in streets, sitting on potlach tables laid on the ground, sharing food for the break of fast during the month of Ramadan. All these acts stood witness to the peaceful search for a new democratic vision, stressing solidarity in their diversity, and exerting the power of protest in their quest for their right to the city. The right to the city, Lefebvres ground-breaking concept inspired by the Paris commune (1968), rests on the mutuality of urban space and social change; there the link between public space and democracy gets tightly formed over the notion of rights, the right of urbanites to question and transform the process that orchestrates the production and use of space. The powerful reproduce and enhance their power by controlling space through the appropriation and domination of the public space, Harvey claims (1989), though ordinary urban dwellers are not powerless. They contest and subvert domination by using public space for their own ends, sometimes through collective action and sometimes by unofficially being in the space. Gezi resistance had a clear urban agenda to reclaim the right to the city of ordinary citizens who rely on the use value in the city and place it over the right to the city of capitalists, developers and their allies who recast the city as a locus of exchange value and capital accumulation (Kuymulu, 2013). It revealed how a public square became literally vital to democracy, especially when threatened by forces of private global capital and by the disciplinary regulations and authoritarian tendencies of the state power (Go le, 2013a). Gezi is a turning point in Turkish politics for bringing about a platform with the involvement of the widest array of active citizens, who debate how public space is to be shaped, and how the public should (not) be ruled, and who engage in the very redefinition of democracy more directly than ever before.

The Gezi spirit

To recap in spatial terms, the rule of the elected AKP government could thus far not manage to inflict its identity on public spaces. Amid their mega-projects of urban transformation and gentrification, at the price of the natural and cultural fabric of the city,

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AKP was not able to claim any square of central importance to display its own political vision and identity. Just as it was hoping to convert Taksim Square for this aim, the pressure valve of protesting crowds that thus far had only let out steam in limited amounts broke to give way to the biggest display the government had yet seen. The street proved to be the only force that could cause the government to stumble in its selfconfident style of ruling the people. The ruled would stop them short of converting the square into a display of their own controversial vision, thereby claiming their right to the city, and their right for a redefinition of democracy. If there needed to be a redefinition of democratic republican order, then this needed to take into account the demands of this very place. They rooted the debate in the physical space of the square, of the city, of the country, claiming its trees, its communities, its historical trajectories within a globalized framework. They occupied Gezi Park to demonstrate just what kind of democratic rule they envisioned, only to be vehemently opposed and destroyed by the powers that be. The response from the AKP government was to mobilize the streets an was in fact leading a movement that in turn; often coined to be street-smart, Erdog originated in the back streets of the Turkish Republic by winning votes from the marginalized shanty towns of rural migrants in the city (Go le, 2013c). Organizing the street counter-protest, however, was not enough to claim the city square. In the lack of any political vision and creativity, the square ended up with an unreferential empty void, which the current government cannot fill in. Gezi protests made it clear that public space is not only an abstract concept, that new political themes, a new public culture and a new understanding of citizenship start being formed (Go le, 2013b). Gezi created an urban consciousness that brought environmentalists, feminists, LGBTTQ activists, Kurdish groups together in searching for an institutionalized cultural and political voice that is not contained within the existing political structures (Benhabib, 2013). Partially due to its class-blindness and its inherently leader al, 2013), which is only fitting to the general trend observed in other less nature (Tug occupy-type movements (Mitchell, 2013), thus far, such a common voice or political direction could not be found. Whether the road to elections is hiding sharp turns that may allow Gezi protesters to lose or find their political direction remains to be seen. Yet one thing is certain: the Gezi genie is out of the bottle and will most probably not go back in until the wishes for a more democratic Turkey will come true. References
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