More Destruction/Development Ahead
Will Istanbul someday become a cartoon version of itself, a postmodern monstrosity, clean, sleek, soulless, its roots withering in the arid imagination of technocrats?
Will Istanbul someday become a cartoon version of itself, a postmodern monstrosity, clean, sleek, soulless, its roots withering in the arid imagination of technocrats?
Even the recently overworked police are on holiday. T24 reports that children are playing in Gezi Park and police are spritzing cologne instead of pressurized water and passing out chocolates to passersby, instead of shooting them with teargas canisters.
Now that I’m tweeting, Facebooking, and in general traveling about like a dervish, I want to make sure I don’t neglect my blog! There are a number of interesting things happening, which I’ll pontificate about shortly, but for now, let me just announce, for anyone interested, that on Wednesday I testified before the US Senate […]
Buyuk Ada, Istanbul
And then there’s Yiğit Bulut, a former television personality who has just been made PM Erdogan’s new chief advisor. He stated that he believes the protests are a giant telekinetik attack by dark forces plotting against Erdogan. (Really, you can’t make this stuff up!) One can imagine it as a kind of technophobia — Bulut imagining millions of Twitter users tweeting insults directly into the prime minister’s head.
After the forum in which Kocamustafa Solidarity commemorated Korkmaz, participants lit candles and began to move down the street. Suddenly they were attacked by stick-wielding men
Some interesting Gezi-related techno-factoids from a Forbes article, with a comparison to Egypt.
Like an enormous flock of dolphins 1,486 swimmers flailed their way down the Bosphorus in the world’s only swim race that starts in Asia (Kanlica) up by the mouth of the Black Sea and ends 6.5 kilometers later in Europe (Kuruçesme).
The Turkish flag — I realized that suddenly no one knows what it means anymore.
Several people have mentioned the film Ekumenopolis to me as being an important, powerful film that demonstrates the environmental and urban planning issues that drive the Gezi protesters, but also another part of the population — poor people standing up against land speculators, which now include the state through TOKI, Turkey’s Housing Development Administration, which has now become a main profit maker in the vast projects that are reshaping Turkey.