Emergencyscape: Politics of Disaster Risk and Urban Renewal in Istanbul

After the 1999 Marmara Earthquakes “urban transformation” has emerged in Turkey as a significant tool for the reproduction of the built environment serving a wide range of objectives such as disaster risk reduction, development, and urban aesthetics. This research project scrutinizes this process by looking at the discourses, policies, planning practices, and materialities with particular attention to the relationships among law, knowledge, affect, and temporality. The process has been dominated by a particular mode of governance – governing by emergency – that emerged out of and creates a multiplicity of practices, materialities, and affects. Thus, emergency is neither an imaginary nor a taken for granted fact but an effect of this mode of governance. Targeting emergency in this way, beyond the theories of sovereign decision that treat law, space, and population as passive and separated objects of governance, reveals the complexity and fragility of this process which keeps it open to alternative ways of thinking on security, aesthetics, and practices of building.