Taksim 360, located in the Tarlabaşı neighborhood of Istanbul, is one of the first state-led urban transformation projects in Turkey. Originally scheduled to be finished in 2014, the project is still under construction. Concordant with broader discussions, Tarlabaşı's urban transformation has been largely studied through spatial lenses centered on accumulation by dispossession and displacement. These works assume that urban transformation projects necessarily follow a linear trajectory from inception to completion. Building on and diverging from this body of research, I examine the relationships between construction companies, subcontractors, and politicians involved in Taksim 360 through ethnographic fieldwork and media analysis with a critical emphasis on temporality. I argue that urban transformation in fact works through manipulations of time, which necessitates a temporal analytical lens that does not take teleologies of buildings projects for granted. It is specifically through delays that economic and political power is exerted, navigated, and negotiated within Taksim 360 using legal contracts, work stoppages, and stand-offs; conjuring of continued investment; and improvisations with labor and political capital. And so, delays emerge as modus operandi of urban transformation rather than measures of its failures or successes [Urban Transformation; Temporality; Accumulation; Istanbul; Turkey]
In this article, I follow two urban experts, a Turkish construction site manager and a Kurdish foreman, working in Taksim 360, one of Istanbul’s first state-led urban transformation projects still in construction since 2006. Homing in on the protracted landscape of construction, I am concerned with how urban experts in Taksim 360, who do not entirely concur with the seemingly determined trajectory of urban transformation in Tarlabaşı, put inevitability to work. I ask: what makes urban experts stay with a project that might not materialize? The answer lies in what I call “counterfactual future-thinking”: a way of articulating the future in relation to what might have happened—an articulation that comes particularly handy when the gap between inevitable visions and everyday experiences of urban projects seems irreconcilable. Counterfactual future-thinking allows urban experts to navigate the tensions between suspension and inevitability. It offers a way to urban experts to bridge their quotidian experiences of urban projects with their future visions, which become hazier in their attainability. I argue that counterfactuals emanating from protraction are lenses through which we can understand what inevitability actually does, rather than dismiss it as a farse disconnected from urban expertise on the ground.
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