Is Everywhere Taksim?: Public Space and Possible Publics
▻http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/12143/is-everywhere-taksim_public-space-and-possible-pub
« Everywhere is Gezi Park. Everywhere is Resistance," in Taksim, Istanbul. Image by Elizabeth Angell »
In a speech on 1 June, responding to the wave of protests sweeping through Turkey, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan proclaimed that “the issue is not the five to ten trees that are being removed.” By calling the demonstrators “ideological,” and suggesting they were simply opposition cadres or opportunistic rioters using the debate over the redevelopment of Istanbul’s Taksim Gezi Parkı to stoke unrest against his government, Erdoğan meant to discredit them. But on this point, the prime minister and the crowds of people in the streets calling for his resignation would agree: this is now about something much broader than the few hundred trees threatened by the plan to rebuild an Ottoman-era barracks in place of the park, or even about the preservation of a small green space at the center of a sprawling concrete city.
