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hundreds of balconies, no two are the same

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hundreds of balconies, no two are the same

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@ Guiyang, China,
[photo: Jord Hammond]

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The settlement plan of villages in Scandinavian countries,2021.

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The settlement plan of villages in Scandinavian countries,2021.

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Ideal Republic Village Project, prepared by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk,1937 

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Ideal Republic Village Project, prepared by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk,1937 

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The human influence can be felt all over the planet; from the deepest oceans to the tippy top of our atmosphere. But is the extent of our influence so powerful that it warrants a new geologic age? Does this mean we’re living in the age of humans? In order to name Anthropocene as an official geologic time period, there has to scientific evidence of geologic change visible in the fossil record. Even though now it’s very easy to see the effect humans have on the planet; we have reshaped the landscape through agriculture and urbanization, and we’re changing the climate on a global scale. Alas, when did this Anthropocene began was confusing to me throughout the course. I’ve come to realize that it may be the sudden change in ecosystems and biodiversity about thousands of years ago when humans started domesticating livestock and growing crops. We built the first cities and our influence on local ecosystems became large enough to be seen in the fossil record. As there was another option to explain my questions; maybe we would see a spike in sulfate levels and CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere about two hundred years ago; which time would correspond with the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.

Even if I take into account that almost every topic covered in this course is still a human product, I still ask myself the question of whether the purpose of humanity's existence is to leave a trace. It is ironic that leaving a trace is such an important theme for humanity that so is the choice of words for "carbon footprint". As the most superior living things that nature has ever witnessed, it has opened my horizons to see that we maintain the "revolve to evolve" mentality at the same point, no matter how modern we have become.

As far as I understand, the concept of the city is a phenomenon that both unites and separates people from a sociological perspective. Although we made the basis of this week's topic and course discussions over the functioning of municipalities, the part that caught my attention helped to clarify the previous material that I had not been able to make sense of since the beginning of the course.

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After the collapse of the global financial crisis, millions of precarious employee workers lost their jobs. For bosses, giving up temporary and precarious workers was the cheapest and easiest way to restructure the workforce. Unfortunately, for the workers, this meant hardship and serious difficulties, as a natural consequence, they faced insecurity and a serious lack of control over their working lives.

As this was one of major the struggles of the textile industry, the assigned video on denim sandblasting raised skepticism in me. Even if I don’t want to fall into repetition with the group assignment, yet, the points that I’ve made there are so crucial that they must be highlighted. In summary, the main reason for the ban on denim sandblasting, which caused great propaganda among workers in the textile industry in the past years, is that it causes a very serious occupational disease called silicosis. I am sad that I will mention only one of the business groups that pay for their financial concerns with their lives. According to the National Employment Strategy Document (NIS), the main purpose is to promote “safe” precarious working. However, it is very difficult to say that it does so.

When we look around in the labor markets after the crisis, we will see that the staffed and permanent jobs in the past have been replaced by precarious and temporary jobs. This is why unions and their members all over the world act, organize, and bargain collectively for safe jobs and equal rights for all workers. Although it is gratifying to witness this organization, it would be a great mistake to believe that the responsibility lies solely with the workers. To conceptualize the problem as I understand it: There are 3 groups; employers, contract workers, and consumer audiences.

For example, the H&M brand from the "inditex" group declares that they produce clothes from recyclable materials. If we were to create a hypothetical scenario where people do not want to buy unnecessary clothes and therefore prefer longer-lasting products... If they act simply with the principle of "I am not rich enough to buy cheap goods"... unfortunately, the consumers’ failed attempt to be “careful" will still be shopping at the best quality of the same clothing chain. However, the lack of community support for H&M's eco-friendly policy worries me about the sustainability of the project. According to the comment that a friend of mine who also took this course on the subject was that "eco-friendly" clothes did not have breathable fabric. At the end of the day, with regards to the impact of populism, people's buying habits will not easily change. Considering that everyone buys from certain companies with a herd mentality, even if the employers fulfill their promises, the only people who are still in danger are the workers.

As soon as I finished doing research on the subject, I also felt the need to check my own wardrobe. Frankly, I was very upset to see that almost all of the jeans I own were sandblasted. However, this experience was beneficial since I realized what I should pay attention to when buying clothes. After all, the continuation of such a serious health problem is again based on plain supply and demand. The truth of the matter is this: even though sandblasted jeans are banned in our country, or even if companies say that they have changed their production methods, it is better to be cautious.

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Safety and security stand for a wide variety of issues, meaning that the concepts have a different meaning to people all over the world. Before moving on with examples, I believe that it is crucial to explain why it is important to feel that our understanding of the concepts of safety and security. Why this bothers me is that as a psychology major, I am well aware that these concepts are fundamental drivers for human beings in order to survive. We all need to secure our basic needs in terms of food and shelter, and we wish to be protected from violence and natural disasters. Also, we live in technologically advanced and interconnected societies, which offer us opportunities while confronting us with complex, and unexpected safety and security challenges. These range from industrial incidents to cyber-crime or to terrorist attacks. Due to these reasons, I am suggesting, safety and security generate a lot of attention from all societal strata. Not only citizens worry about these, but they also rank high in political agendas, and they are a key priority for businesses.

Now that we are well aware of the importance of safety and security, I would like to explore these contested concepts furtherly in terms of definition. To complicate matters further, the terms safety and security are usually used interchangeably, even when their descriptions are contrasting with each other.

The concept of Safety is most often used to describe situations when acquired values are harmed by accidental flaws and mistakes. These can be technical errors, organizational failures, or forces of nature. While safety is about protection from accidental harm, it also implies that no human is causing you any trouble.

Security also entails a similar mechanism. Namely harm to acquired values. The main difference between them lies in the source of the threat. In the case of security, acquired values are harmed by intentional actions undertaken by human actors. It ultimately comes down to a person or a group of people taking deliberate actions, and thereby, causing a security threat. In short, security is just about protection from intentional harm.

As to give an example of the two terms, we can start off with how double-edged and gendered experience CCTV is. A vision of the city is considered to be a form of patriarchy in urban planning where the authorities may control the streets. From a female citizen's perspective, being gazed at may be more of a relieving experience in the context of CCTV as they could roam more safely in the public knowing that they are occupied. However, the experience may be still distressing since the issue would also promote inadequacy and repression. As to name a living example to point out this experience can affect all people to some extent, I would like to talk about Çinçin Mahallesi. Even “as a male who -shouldn't- feel neither threat nor safe when being watched”, knowing that control in the area is barely maintained even by the police or there are no cameras in the district prevents me from stepping out of my comfort zone –literally-. Thus, when the concept of territory is revealed again, I realize that people are divided into segments no matter what. At this point, beyond demographic factors such as gender, age, ethnicity; I can't say that government authorities give me trust. It indicates that there will be a disconnection for my perception of urban space in this system, which may cost me to experience the city I live in a way that I don’t want to. As another example, I should mention the location of the apartment my girlfriend lives in. She is in an area parallel to the military entrance opposite the Anıtkabir; therefore, she is having difficulties in using the internet due to jammers. Although I think that she does not pose a threat, after a point, she feels as she poses a threat to the integrity of society. On the other hand, the fact that the location is under the control of the military makes her feel physically protected where she can go out more comfortably in late hours, or I am not afraid of a thief breaking into her house. To sum it up, because the two terms factor into each other, they coexist in how we experience urban space.

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It has pretty much become census that street art originated out of the “graffiti art scene”. Although it is believed to date back as far as ancient Rome, where it was used as a primitive social media of sorts, but graffiti as we know it today, gained a rise in the 60s and 70s. The impact of this subversive culture was imparted by artists looking for new places to make art while reacting and rebelling against society's rules. Throughout our class discussions on the assigned video, some people questioned when did vandalism become art but I tried to do my research, so here it is.

Street art has a long and controversial history, but in recent years it has evolved and been reinvented as a high art form. More and more, artists who appropriate public space are also harnessing market forces for their own gain.

But what is graffiti exactly? The artwork often refers to guerrilla artwork on inner-city walls and train lines. One of the earliest forms of graffiti was “tagging,” or the use of elaborate typography to encode the painter’s name on the sides of buildings or subway cars. Artists got extra points for tagging instantly inaccessible locations, often at great heights, and taggers competed to outdo their competitors. This insular group determined skill by evaluating control of the spray paint and developing their unique typographical marks.

From the beginning, this art form was meant to be transgressive: in a world dominated by global branding, graffiti alienated the power of commercialism and government infrastructure. Street art was often viewed negatively by politicians and more affluent communities because it was associated with street culture, but as in ancient Rome, the artwork served as a way for disenfranchised groups to express their dissatisfaction with society.

Yet, I still think that this issue was taken over by the municipality in Ankara quite successfully, as the graffiti artists were very welcomed and supported by all while the city center “Kızılay” was colored. However, I do not find it appropriate for a person or group to damage public property for the sake of leaving a trace. I loved Ankara from the bottom of my heart, the city where I was born and grew up with its gray color. In my opinion, different ways can be preferred to create an identity or to feel belonging, that is why I carry a tattoo of Ankara on my body to carry it as art, with all its grayness.

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The idea of bringing town and country together, also known as the Garden City Concept questioned the harmonious ways to becoming integrated to the city while not letting go of old ties and came up with a creation of a third hybrid option to this spatial understanding. This idea of Garden City is actually utopian imagery to bring the goods of the countryside together while avoiding the bad of the urban. The balance between industrialization and the former lifestyle requires self-sustaining due to limits in terms of mobility and access to resources where people didn’t need to be stuck in the urban industrial ideals.The contemporary Garden Cities ideal of living away all the unwanted elements and creating a sense of secure space seems to confuse me since not having to relying on a lack of society is more or less related with heterogeneity.

I may be looking at it from a very narrow point of view, but I think it is very utopian for a hybrid formation to exist on its own in the public space. When I try to think about it in terms of Ankara, this is what comes to my mind: when I think of the Ümitköy district, it seems like a more suburban concept to me. As we look at the state of our city long before it came to these days, the people who settled there wanted to live more individual lives where they could stay away from the center. Today, we see that one of the new centers formed in Ankara is Ümitköy itself. As a region that cannot preserve its homogeneous structure, it seems impossible to me to create a new Garden City between there and the main center of the city Kızılay. Even if we have to emphasize the limitation of city planning here, at some point in between, as people are now turning to vertical housing choices even in the farthest places from the center; a hybrid city that can live in isolation from the city without being noticed is impossible considering the current population and living space shortage. In related research I did, I came across to a project proposal developed for the Bahçelievler neighborhood to be re-planned in the past years, but it was unsuccessful. I think that not even trying this without being evaluated is parallel to the reasons mentioned.

If were to look from the window of Concentric Zone Theory, no matter what region it is; I think it is much more possible to see anti-urbanism motifs in the city today, because it is very difficult to separate the zones, at least for Ankara.

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W3 “The Metropolis and Mental Life” by Georg Simmel

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W3 “The Metropolis and Mental Life” by Georg Simmel

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For Simmel, society is nothing but lived experience, and social forces are not external to, nor necessarily constraining for the individual; rather it is individuals who reproduce society every living moment through their actions and interactions. In short, what he problematizes social interactions with the focus on routines of everyday life. While looking at the minor details of urbanism, he viewed modernization as a psychological process of becoming individualized.

The deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual to preserve the autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face of overwhelming social forces, of external culture, and of the technique of life. People respond to situations in a rational than an emotional manner, a common stance of urban dwellers is thus the blasé outlook. Simmel describes this phenomenon as an attitude of absolute boredom and lack of concern, while further explanation follows in the article as “… all things as being of an equally dull and grey hue, as not worth getting excited about”. The world of the blasé person is flat grey and homogeneous. Outer than the progression to be made on a societal level, What Simmel focuses in his article “The Metropolis and Mental Life” on the psychological aspect as well. He talks about this blasé attitude or individuals who get bored of modern life because of its speed of progress. In his view, qualitative values transform into quantitative ones. His emphasis on the psychological features of modern life can be seen when he talks about opportunistic and/or bored individuals with the blasé attitude. In my opinion, his beliefs are seemingly still correct since people today still cannot find any value in themselves, and there are also a great number of (competitive) people who try to be the best version of themselves.