Gezi Park in Istanbul has been making headlines for two weeks, tempting the West’s fickle appetite for revolution. Last Monday, 50 protestors occupied the nine-acre park to confront demolition crews preparing to turn one of the last remaining green spaces in the city into a shopping mall. Three days later, their number had grown to 10,000.
Western media reports have followed a predictable pattern for anyone bred on the script written by the Arab Spring: an autocratic government, supported by militia thugs, are suppressing the people’s demand for democracy. “Democracy” in this context is a messy, sticky term, but surely, like Justice Potter Stewart we will know it when we see it.
Last week, CBC’s The Current emphasized that national news outlets were not documenting the protests. The Globe and Mail reported on a growing concern of Turkish police brutality by democracy experts like U.S. Secretary of State, John Kerry. Yesterday, all mainstream press outlets were dismayed at Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan cracking down on “vandals” with tear gas and water cannons. You could almost hear a bemused Turkish press whispering “Occupy” in reply.
This script, though familiar, is not quite catching on. For one thing, Turkey is a member of NATO and keen on joining the European Union — who, save some dissent, is keen to have them. The fact is that there’s nothing remarkable about Erdogan’s response. Excessive state violence has become de rigueur here in Canada — visible on a large scale both in Quebec and during Toronto’s G20 protests — so it seems a bit rich to wring our hands about a little tear gas and the odd broken limb. Our own Prime Minister might call Erdogan’s response “measured.”
The Western imagination would like to believe that the Arab Spring issued from identical political and cultural contexts in each of the distinct nations which witnessed widespread social upheaval. So it’s easy to extend that view to a religiously moderate, neoliberal Eurozone hopeful like Turkey — so long as they are Islamish. While most Canadian observers may view Tunisian fruit seller Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation as the spark which set North Africa and the Middle East aflame, there is no homogenous narrative which can account for each nation experiencing civil unrest. The influence Bouazizi’s courageous act exerted on the region is perhaps more accurately compared to the single grain of sugar dropped into a supersaturated liquid, spawning numerous unique crystalline structures with their own size and shape.
Current Western media reports would like to categorize the occupation of Gezi park as a new “Turkish Spring”; but such rhetorical moves forget history. The kind of inspiring protests the world witnessed last year issued from a complex geopolitical climate in which the West sees North Africa and the Middle East as a battleground for strategic control both at home and in global markets abroad. Without simplifying too terribly, the relics of European imperilism which kept Arab nations at the beck of capital showed their age and people across the region seized their chance — even as new structures of oppression and resistance spring up to replace the disarticulated bones of empire.
Gentrification: Think Locally, Act Globally
In contrast, the elites of Turkey, while still an attractive ally for Western power — they were the eastern headquarters of NATO during the Cold War, after all — have adopted the neoliberal politics of Europe rather than dictatorship in order to stay friendly to capital. As such, the struggle playing out in Taksim Square is one extremely familiar to neoliberalism. The protests in Turkey did not arise from unrelenting police harassment and brutality of an undereducated Tunisian produce merchant. They evolved from a separate struggle and a specific political exigency: the ongoing gentrification of Istanbul.
In a brilliant article, freelancer Jay Cassano argues that Gezi Park has been central to Turkish resistance to the country’s neoliberal turn for years. The current protest, then, owes a debt to this marshalling of public opinion and social power decades in the making. While Western media tries to portray the conflict as a younger secular precariat against an older, brutal, Islamist autocracy, “it is clear,” Cassano argues, “that the movement thus far is about a conflict in visions for urban space between ruling elites and the people who actually live, work, and play in the city.”
If anything, this is the script North Americans should be most familiar with. It’s no secret that Vancouver’s chief preoccupation is the relentless gentrification transforming the city. Activists in Montreal, À qui la ville? (Whose city is it?) have been occupying a vacant lot this month, owned by a local blowhard businessman in the iconic neighburhood of St Henri, to raise awareness of a social housing shortage. Meanwhile, in a stroke of almost saccharine coincidence, Rio-Can, Canada’s largest real estate investment trust, announced plans to build a three-storey shopping mall, including a two-storey Wal-Mart, on the front porch of Toronto’s bohemian Kensington Market. Gentrification is not some jacked-up, class-inverted version of NIMBYism: it is the primary strategy of neoliberalism’s practitioners to transform the cities we live in.
Yet when resident and activist groups oppose this kind of wholesale metamorphosis from public to capitalized space, the solidarity displayed by the Turkish people in Gezi Park is a rarity. Will Canadians rise up and chant, like those in Taksim Square, “Everywhere is resistance”? Or will we instead adopt the words of Prime Minister Erdogan: “This is a protest organized by extremist elements. We will not give away anything to those who live arm-in-arm with terrorism.”
What the impressive and ongoing Turkish demonstration should show progressive-minded Canadians is that gentrification is at once global and local. Globally, capital everywhere has only one goal when it comes to land: make it profitable. Any other use is improper, wasteful. Locally, every community has the capacity to recognize this incursion of market forces and hold fast: protect the right of people to define what a city should look like and whose interests it serves. This is why gentrification is so closely associated with colonialism: as visible in Turkey, where the ghosts of colonial Europe still exert influence; as it is in Canada, where land occupied by First Nations, whether on mineral deposits or urban throughfares, remains perpetually within corporate crosshairs.
Oppression, abuse and exploitation is most easily recognized from afar. From here in Canada, it’s a snap to admire the courage of those facing down state violence in Gezi Park and to denounce the self-serving, undemocratic rescue of capital undertaken by Prime Minister Erdogan. What’s much harder to see is not how our struggles mark us as different, but how they mark us as the same. When our media presents those opposed to the occupation as smug, self-serving Turks seduced by a corrupt Prime Minister, try to imagine what Turks must think of Canadians who see a new urban Wal-Mart or upscale beigneterie as a natural step in urban development and essential to human happiness.
Photo: wikipedia commons
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