Assembling disaster: Earthquakes and urban politics in Istanbul

Assemblage theory and disaster risk management

“…Drawing upon AT specifically, Angell (2014) analyses the same disaster to show how the risk of earthquakes was reassembled as a natural and existential threat to the population by the government to reinforce the need for national governments to lead DRM initiatives. This reassembly ran counter to popular narratives within civil society that 'earthquakes don't kill people, buildings do', or that the disaster was not natural but the result of poor governance and risky, outsourced urban development (Angell, 2014). Angell explores the reverberations of the disaster through space and time in relation to contestations over urban development by showing that the government deployed imaginations of future earthquakes to pass a 'Transformation of Areas under Disaster Risk law' through parliament.…”

Ruined futures: managing instability in post-earthquake Van (Turkey)

“…This came to the fore in the suspicious attitude with which Van's inhabitants engaged with the materiality of their own homes during the weeks and months following the quakes. Such suspicion subjected cracks in particular to ‘anxious scrutiny’ (Angell : 670). ‘Might that crack in the corner not indicate a fundamental instability of the supporting pillar?…”

“…Simpson ). Turkey constitutes by no means an exception in this regard: as anthropologist Elizabeth Angell (: 674–5) has shown, the discourse of Istanbul being a city at particularly high seismic risk has justified sweeping governmental interventions into the city's urban fabric, which often align less with seismic risk zoning than with the interests of neoliberal capital and lucrative urban development plans. Therefore, I shall begin by briefly indicating how the geography of Van and its population have been historically produced as susceptible to bear effects of ruination in particular, what Stoler (: 200) calls ‘patterned’, ways such that seismic and political fault lines routinely come to intersect in this geography.…”

Stakeholders’ Resistance in Single Building Renewal: Bagdat Avenue, Istanbul

“…This process started around the 1950s in Turkey (Kuyucu & Unsal, 2010). The government that is the sole-ruling party in Turkey since the 2000s has attached priority in the activities of reproducing urban spaces considering the disaster risk (Angell, 2014).…”