“A Road Will Pass”: the Communicative Logic of Infrastructure in the Peripheries
BY BURÇ KÖSTEM
I’m making what is now my second trip near the Küçükçekmece lake near the Western peripheries of İstanbul. I am with a small group of hikers. We are waiting to cross a ditch that has been dug between Ayşe’s self-built home and an agricultural field that belongs to the İstanbul University over which Kanal İstanbul is planned to pass. Ayşe, a resident from the village nearby, is crossing back from the field with two plastic bags full of wild mustard she and her friends have collected. The ditch serves both as an obstacle and a reminder of the ever-looming construction efforts. While Ayşe and her friends make it easily across a narrow plank placed across the ditch, many from our hiking group struggle to follow in their steps. Ayşe’s friends take their phones out to document our clumsy attempts to cross, snickering at our incompetence. In the meantime, we have a moment to chat. She asks, “Are you taking these people out for a stroll?” (Sen bunları mı dolandırıyorsun), a well-crafted double entendre. “Dolandırmak” literally means to take someone on a stroll, but could also be used to indicate deceit, to “take someone for a ride” the way tour guides, or taxi drivers sometimes do to unsuspecting foreigners. When I laugh and explain that I’m a student she points to a field. “There,” she offers, “this is where the Kanal will pass” (“Buradan Kanal geçecek”).
Kanal İstanbul is a mega dredging project and an accompanying urban transformation plan that promises to open a new waterway between the Sea of Marmara and the Black Sea. As such, it combines the spectacle of a megaproject with the more practical effects of shifting the city’s peripheries. The dredging of such a waterway will prove disastrous for the unique ecology of the Sea of Marmara, not to mention the agricultural land, forests, wallows, and lakes located across the Northwest of İstanbul. This area will be subsumed not only by the Kanal but also the accompanying expansion of the city Westwards with new logistics ports, waterfront housing, roads, and bridges.
I have walked across the path that the Kanal İstanbul will subsume more than half of a dozen times over the last two years with different hiking groups and artists as part of my thesis research. Ayşe’s comment “this is where the Kanal will pass” is on the one hand a stock response one might hear from the residents of İstanbul’s Western peripheries. The project was originally launched into public consciousness as a speculative election promise in 2013 and recently became a more concrete plan. Either way, it has long haunted this geography, with the path that the Kanal would take remaining a mystery until 2018. It became the source of intense speculation, rumors and several defrauding schemes. At the height of this speculation there were as many as 10 different real estate agencies (or so I’m told) in Tayakadın, a village of around 3000 people located on the Northern section of the Kanal İstanbul project. And now that the bridges, roads, water, and electricity infrastructure to sustain such a project are being built, there is some chance the project might come to fruition, provided the government doesn’t lose the upcoming elections. This added weight has no doubt brought other researchers, artists, reporters like me to these villages. Hence Ayşe, like many of the people I encountered on my walks, is not surprised by my presence and can easily offer a stock response.
But this stock response “this is where the Kanal will pass” (“buradan Kanal İstanbul geçecek) also echoes another familiar phrase in Turkish “this is where a road will pass” (“buradan yol geçecek”). The phrase hints at both the promise and the perils of infrastructural development in Turkey (Kostem forthcoming). Begüm Adalet points out in her book Hotels and Highways (2018), how theories of modernization were actively tested in Turkey through the construction of material infrastructure like highways in the 1950s and 1960s by a team of experts and engineers from the United States and Turkey. Yet this particular locution captures a more diffuse and affective valence to the ideology of modernization and the way it intersects with mega construction projects and the promise of economic growth. Its declarative mode “where a road will pass” ties in macro phenomena such as economic growth and modernization with the promise of personal advancement and financial security or fear of violence and repression.
A caricature responding to the construction of a new highway that will cut across the Middle Eastern Technical University’s forests, a project launched under the Justice and Development Party but later reaffirmed as the main opposition party took control of the city’s municipality. Then Ankara Mayor Melih Gökçek (since retired) tells Snow White “Shht!! Lady! You can’t sleep here; a road will pass”.
Crossing the ditch near the Küçükçekmece lake with friends from Hiking Istanbul. Photo courtesy of Nick Hobbs.
From Bekir Didnar’s photography series titled “A Road Will Pass,” documenting the construction of another megaproject in this same geography, the Third Bosporus Bridge and its accompanying highway that opens the city to further infrastructural development.
Elsewhere I have analyzed how this phrase ties together the political economic forces behind infrastructural development, the dreams of personal financial advancement and security on the one hand, and the threat of state violence, expropriation and expulsion on the other (Kostem, forthcoming). Yet such phrases also present a broader communicative logic that subtends infrastructural development especially in such peripheral spaces that exist on the edges of the city. This communicative logic carries a promissory element that is both familiar and as Appel, Anand and Gupta note, multivalent (2018, 7), at times communicating a threat, at times promising development, at other times offering economic advancement, often shifting between the three and for different subjects. Yet this communicative structure also resembles a rumor, since the declaration that “a road will pass” or “the Kanal will pass” does not have a subject. Instead, it is often accompanied with the indefinite “so they say” (“yol geçecek diyorlar” or “yol geçecekmiş”). Indeed, this is how I instinctively responded to Ayşe “is that what they say?” (“öyle mi diyorlar?” ). More than a simple locution this communicative logic is reflected in how the state carries out infrastructure development, which takes place under conditions of great secrecy, especially in such peripheral spaces. What is prohibited and allowed, who owns which land, where a construction project might pass, how long it will take is often obscured, true enough for any construction project but doubly so on the peripheries of İstanbul, an area that has witnessed multiple generations of migration and extraction.
In his now classic book, Speaking into the Air, communication studies scholar John Durham Peters offers dialogue and dissemination as two schemas through which the idea of communication has been understood in Western thought. Could gossip, rumors and fabulation present alternatives to this two part model? After all, rumors and gossip are disseminated but not with everyone and not always equally. Gossip especially is what one talks about with family and close friends, god-sibb as the etymology of the word indicates is a practice of kin-making. Rumors also present a level of secrecy and restriction, their origin always obscured, hidden in collective desires, psyche and memory.
In her work, on İstanbul’s more urbanized Tarlabaşı district, anthropologist Alize Arıcan argues (2022) that rumors act as a kind of autonomous and collective archive for the racialized communities of this neighborhood, a site of history-making. Addressing the obvious criticisms of Kanal İstanbul that the project was being launched for the sole purpose of creating waterfront property and hence extracting rent, the Turkish Minister of Transportation Adil Karaismailoğlu recently insisted “Kanal İstanbul is a technical issue, we are talking of a world vision here. This is not a matter of political rumors”. And yet rumors seem to constitute the field of struggle over which financialized infrastructural development takes place both in İstanbul’s and especially also in its peripheries.
Next month Turkey moves ahead with a contested election shortly after a devastating earthquake that has once again brought attention to the destructive character of a society organized around the imperatives of construction, economic growth and capitalist expansion, all underwritten by state violence. In this charged electoral environment that has witnessed a renewed social mobilization, the current government has doubled down on Kanal İstanbul, incorporating it into their electoral manifesto. Mainstream opposition parties have opposed the project but they have instead tended to embrace a technocratic politics of expertise in regards to infrastructural development (Cayli 2022). In this environment, what would it mean for rumors to be an archive of political memory, knowledge-making and even resistance for an autonomous social opposition?
Works Cited
Adalet, Begüm. Hotels and Highways: The Construction of Modernization Theory in Turkey. Stanford University Press. 2018.
Arıcan, Alize. “Rumor as Archive: The Story of the Golden Cross in Taksim 360”. Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association, Vol.8(1), 2021, pp. 109-128.
Anand, Nikhil. Gupta, Akhil. Appel, Hannah. The Promise of Infrastructure. Duke University Press. 2018.
Cayli, Eray. This Is Not a Case Study: Situating the Politics of the 6 February Earthquakes within Long-Standing Injustices, Jadaliyya, 2023. https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/44923/This-is-Not-a-Case-Study-Situating-the-Politics-of-the-February-6th-Earthquakes-within-Long-Standing-Injustices
Kostem, Burc. “The Consummative Mood of Authoritarianism: the Production of Reactionary Sentiment in Turkey” (forthcoming).
Peters, John Durham, Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication, University of Chicago Press. 1999.
Burç Köstem (he/him) is a PhD candidate in Communication Studies at McGill University. He is currently finishing his dissertation on the aesthetic, political and economic meanings attributed to environmental limits in urban İstanbul. More broadly, he is interested in the politics of the built environment, the problem of waste and excess in urban economies, critiques of political economy, affective economy, theories of subjectivation and post-autonomist political thought. His work has appeared in Cultural Studies, Theory, Culture & Society and Pli: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy. In August he will be joining the Society of Fellows postdoctoral program at the University of Southern California.
