TAKSIM SQUARE: FROM THE OTTOMAN REFORMATION ERA TO THE GEZI RESISTANCE 1 (original) (raw)

ISTANBUL'S TAKSIM SQUARE: AS A TERRAIN OF POLITICAL SYMBOL AND MATTER OF CONTESTATION

Urban spaces are the representatives of political ideologies and concern of power relations. Istanbul's Taksim Square is such a public space that serves as a political representation and a symbolic for many ideological groups in Turkey. Its symbolic characteristic arose from its production, as it was planned and organized to signify the hegemonic power and the ideology of the early Republican state. However, as political balance shifts, many ideological groups have claims on the hegemonic meaning of the Square. Through this claims, the symbolic meaning of Taksim has become a matter of contestation. Lately, in 2013, following the announcement of AKP's grand projects in Taksim, Turkey witnessed a massive public demonstration.

Istanbul's Taksim Square and Gezi Park: the place of protest and the ideology of place

2014

AbstractMay 2013 saw Istanbul witness a massive public demonstration. The incident began on 28 May when a small group of environmental activists tried to save Gezi Park, one of the most iconic green spaces in the Taksim district of central Istanbul. The park dates back to the 1940s and is well-known as public promenade. The modest demonstration was triggered by a government decision to reconstruct a former Ottoman Artillery Barracks. Within a few days, it developed into a violent uprising on an unprecedented scale lasting almost an entire month. Crowds not only gathered in Istanbul but also in many other Turkish cities such as the capital, Ankara. International media broadcast the protests live from Taksim Square turning the Gezi Park protest into an international phenomenon. Today the Park has become a reference point in Turkish politics where almost every issue is linked to the ‘spirit of Gezi’. It made a modest protest over an inner city promenade into a vivid symbol of political...

The Legacy of the Gezi Protests in Turkey

After Protest: Pathways Beyond Mass Mobilization, 2019

In May 2013, a group of activists staged a sitin at Istanbul’s Gezi Park, protesting the Turkish government’s plans to demolish the park to build a replica of the Ottoman-era Taksim Military Barracks that would include a shopping mall. The forced eviction of protesters from the park and the excessive use of police force sparked an unprecedented wave of mass demonstrations. Around 3 million people took to the streets across Turkey over a three-week period to protest a wide range of concerns. After these protests died down, activists had to adapt to a difficult political context. Many focused on local municipal issues and environmental concerns, while some civil society organizations focused on the more general state of Turkey’s democratic regression. Most activists, however, chose to adopt a lower profile as repression increased and the space for activism narrowed. In Turkey, postprotest attempts to form a new political party did not succeed.

Genie in the bottle: Gezi Park, Taksim Square, and the realignment of democracy and space in Turkey

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.

Historicizing the Gezi Protests - Sungur Savran and interviewed by Erol Ülker

The period between May and June 2013 witnessed the outbreak of an enormous wave of mass movements in Turkey aimed at stopping government attempts to demolish Gezi Park, located in the Taksim area of Istanbul, and put up a shopping center designed to resemble the old Taksim Military Barracks. The street actions that began in Istanbul around Taksim Square swiftly spread across Turkey, many parts of Europe, and even some cities in the United States. It is true that the single most important site of this people's protest was Gezi Park, occupied for a full fortnight, with the otherwise ubiquitous police nowhere to be seen. This was a genuine local commune with all needs being met in a communal manner. But to restrict the understanding of the movement to this location because it was so spectacular implies a kind of reductionism and prevents us from understanding the many different manifestations of opposition against the oppressive AKP government of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, then prime minister, currently president of the republic.