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

Abstract

This article investigates how ruined materialities are implicated in projects of governance by affecting people’s abilities to engage with the future. Based on ethnographic material from the Kurdish-inhabited city of Van (Turkey), which was heavily damaged by two earthquakes in 2011, I analyse Turkish state authorities’ mobilisation of expertise regarding Van’s ruined built environment as a form of techno-political governance. Yet as ruins’ material properties continuously exceeded attempts at governing them, they created a particular structure of risk, thereby contributing to the formation of political subjects feeling themselves to be at the constant peril of both natural and political disaster

Editorial

“…This interweaving of contemporary Turkish politics with the intricacies and spatial arrangements of social life in Istanbul is more than just subtle. It equally demonstrates how ethnography can add to an understanding of highly live contemporary political debate (as did the article by Marlene Schäfers () in relation to Turkey in our previous issue).…”

Ruins for the future

“…In the last decade or so, disaster ethnographers have examined the ruins of what they label "misguided development," which they criticize for its role in generating "natural" disasters (Angell 2014;Dawdy 2006Dawdy , 2010Dawdy , 2016González-Ruibal 2008;Hastrup 2010;Schäfers 2016;Wilford 2008;Xu 2017). Many of these critiques, like the wider literature on ruination that they form part of, build on the ideas of Walter Benjamin (1998, 178), who claimed that ruins are the material equivalent of allegories: they are figures that can be interpreted to reveal deeper truths.…”

“…Recent ruins are not straightforward evidence of the past negations, violence, or inequalities that created contemporary geographies (Gordillo 2014, 11). They are, rather, polysemous sites that can promise or forestall possible futures (Schäfers 2016, 229), gather new publics, and create new fault lines. This depends on how they enable people to articulate critique in relation to different understandings of what the crisis was that created them (or, in this case, the disaster).…”

Counterfactual future-thinking

“…Indeed, the fact that Merdan worked at Taksim 360 was fraught, hence "the talk". Often, the government used earthquakes across the country to legitimize urban transformation projects (C¸aylı, 2016;Kayaalp and Arslan, 2022;Sch€ afers, 2016), or employed "terrorism prevention" as a ruse to target neighbourhoods with racialized minorities (Kuyucu, 2018;Saadi, 2021), as we see in Tarlabas¸ı. Like in many cities, then, expropriations targeted minoritized groups, using space as a medium to push them to the outskirts of cities by cutting off their ties with property (Lees, 2012;Schneider and Susser, 2003).…”