The protests started late on Monday after developers tore up trees to make way for the controversial construction project featuring a shopping centre in nostalgic Ottoman style and building a replica of an old military barracks.
Police staged consecutive raids on protesters, using tear gas and water cannon, but the protests grew in scale, with artists, intellectuals and opposition MPs joining the ranks.
Who knew that a small park in Instanbul, Taksim Gezi Park, would become the new front line in the post-crash struggle between neoliberalism and democracy. In this sequence, it takes the form of private versus public space, open versus closed space, development capital versus green urbanism. Indeed, the defining theories of David Harvey, which are an extension of the theories developed in the middle of the 20th century by Henri Lefebvre, have become a reality on the streets of Istanbul. Harvey, in his essay “Right to the City”:
The question of what kind of city we want cannot be divorced from that of what kind of social ties, relationship to nature, lifestyles, technologies and aesthetic values we desire. The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. It is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization. The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights.
There are some people who are saying that the current sequence of protests are about larger, national, political issues rather than just the privatization of a park. But this kind of thinking only belittles the great importance of city parks. We should see this sequence as mainly about a city park because cities are filled full with the future of our species. If you lose a park, you lose a lot. We need and must fight for our trees, our shade, our places outside of the mania of the market.
