A Practice of Urban Citizenship - direngezi

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Why Gezi Park and Taksim Square become the urban space of experiencing citizenship and what is the relation or how differs if we consider other examples such as Syntagma Square, 8 December incident in Athens, Tahriri Square, Zuccotti Park or other movements such as Stuttgart 21 protest?

first days of direngezi (before its invasion by government)

In the last five years we extensively participated and saw how urban centers spatially hosted urban uprisings around the world. Urban resistance, collective riots in streets, occupying parks or squares in order to criticize capitalist society and protest authoritarian governments, prove itself again since the 1960s the only concrete political collective action nowadays. As David Harvey already explains referring to Lefebvre’s “revolutionary moment” in his recent book1: “…reinventing the city inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power over the processes of urbanization.” About the urban centers Harvey continues: “…there is an impulse towards and longing for its restoration which arises again to produce far-reaching political effects; as we have recently seen in central squares…”. Thus collective power that raises its visibility and action in urban space creates its own heterotopic urban space, which is the moment when the public does re-dwell; re-claim the urban space collectively despite their differences. In case of Gezi Park, it exemplifies a new urban space of conflict where the collective power exercises its action and re-forms the meaning, commoning of the space against urbanization. The heterogeneity of the public, types of passive resistance against police force and the common consciousness of claiming everyday life via park against neoliberal urban system has a lot of similarities with some other urban movements such as K21 (Stuttgart 21) protest or continuing anti-nuclear protest after Tsunami in a park in Tokyo. However, the spontaneous “coming together” has a source of accumulation of other local movements in neighborhoods of Istanbul, anti-nuclear protests in Turkey, protests by Istanbul Chamber of Architects, Istanbul Chamber of Urban Planners against urban destruction and centralized upside down projects such as 3.Bridge for Istanbul, Taksim Square construction and other related movements. Besides calling the authorities to a participatory grassroot urban decision-making or to the space of radical democracy; these parks and squares of urban resistance are also spaces of radical formation of citizenship. The spatial practices ofdecolonizingarchitecture (architects Alessandro Petti & Sandra Hilal) is a reference for practices ofcommoning and radical citizenship in conflict urbanism such as in the form of refugee camp where a citizen is stripped of his or her political rights, reduced to bare life. Conflict urbanism, urban uprising are still hopes against urbanization and a moment of “irruption” of a moment where heterogonous public appears spontaneously; as a as a reference to Lefebvre, the possibilities of collective action to create something radically different (2).