THE PLACE IN MY HEAD
A large part of Istanbul's cityscape is characterized by Gecekondus, overnight-erected neighbourhoods that have been built since the mid-20th century by people immigrating from rural areas of Turkey in the hope of economic improvement. For a long time, the city tolerated the unclear ownership status of the settlements that were largely built without permits, as organized urban development was too slow to keep up with the rapidly growing population. Additionally, the new inhabitants meant high economic growth for the city at a low cost.
As a necessary symptom of Turkey's economy under President Erdogan, which is largely built on large-scale speculative housing developments, Gecekondus undergo a semantic reinterpretation from organically grown, autonomous parts of the urban fabric to places of poverty and crime.
Everywhere in the city, constructions sites present themselves like gashes in the urban landscape. These sites are still images of a continuous process: small-scale, informally grown neighbourhoods are giving way to generic and scaleless structures. This process of so-called Urban Renewal is taking place in countless neighbourhoods in Istanbul.
The de facto dispossession of hundreds of thousands of Istanbul residents is made possible because of a legal network that has been established over the last few decades. The inhabitants are forced to leave their homes and move to mass settlements on the outskirts of the city, often miles away, where urban planning, sensitive neighbourhood structures and architectural qualities are absent.
The neighbourhood Kirazlıtepe on the Asian side of Istanbul is a Gecekondu. Under the pretext of a lack of earthquake safety, an argument that is particularly difficult to deny in Istanbul, the site on the edge of the newly built Çamlıca Mosque was destroyed and replaced with high-priced apartments. Google Street View and the Facebook page of the association founded by the inhabitants to resist its destruction are witnesses to the process of so-called Urban Renewal.
Considering an urban site as one in which its physical structure and associated communal memory evolve interdependently, the disconnection of the newly constructed housing estate from the memories of the former settlement becomes particularly apparent. In an alternative timeline, a Neighbourhood-Centre is created in Kirazlıtepe. A plot of land in its centre becomes the carrier of the memories that have lost their material counterpart through the destruction.
The floor plan is created by superimposing the three most important buildings in the process of the struggle for the preservation/destruction of Kirazlıtepe:
the neighborhood café (place of reunification),
the mosque (cultural center and first destroyed building),
and the residential building (place of living and shelter).
The building materials of the destroyed neighbourhood are the carriers of memory; they are collected and reassembled. A structure is created that serves as a repository and catalyst of memories for the displaced and newcomers. It is constantly being rebuilt and filled with functions of the old neighbourhood: Laundry/prayer room, workshop, neighbourhood-café, community room...
