Csaba Jelinek<\/p>\n
Films: \u201cThey are changing the whole world. But they, the rich, they cannot take that all, that cannot be!\u201d \u2013 says an old lady whose land and house, where she lived for the past fifty years, will soon be expropriated. We are in the suburbs of Bursa, in West-Turkey, where the interview was made, during a four-day study visit involving half a dozen urbanists familiarizing with city developments of Ankara, Bursa and Istanbul. In Imre Azem\u2019s film, Agoraphobia, we are becoming policy tourists for four days to understand complex processes \u2013 namely Turkish city renewal practices, and related social, economic and political procedures, through \u201csite visits\u201d and \u201cexpert meetings\u201d. An analysis of such a study visit, in itself, and of the potential knowledge gained through it, would be quite an important task.<\/p>\n It is not easy to focus on these meta-questions though, since the urbanization issues and public policies in matter, are amazingly complex and interesting in themselves. For the first glance, we face a similar modernization project that has redrawn the images of socialist cities of Western Europe: 15-20- storey buildings rise in quarters where one-level buildings did earlier; suburbs are replaced with the good old panel block housing aesthetics. Participants, mainly from the Netherlands, cannot resist comparing Turkish city rehabilitation projects to those in the beginning of the century, in the Netherlands. It slowly turns out, that nothing is, as it seems: \u201cslums\u201d sentenced to demolition do not turn out unlivable. \u201cSocial housing\u201d, as it appear in official documents, means condos for previous tenants with a huge mortgage in reality. So-called \u201ccity regeneration\u201d projects are more likely to be drastic interventions of bulldozers. And despite the facts, that the volume and costs of almost half a million apartments, having been built by a state owned organization called TOKI, resembling to the housing investments in Eastern and Western Europe after the Second World War; their realization, organizational and political frameworks significantly differ from them. We cannot ignore dissimilar social contexts, demographic tendencies, political intentions and Turkey\u2019s position in global world economics.<\/p>\n Although the situation presented in the film is globally known \u2013 including disappearance of public spaces, the crash of interests of market philosophy and low-status city dwellers, it is important to map local peculiarities and local terms of resistance. It is worth \u201cco-watching\u201d Aslihan Unaldi\u2019s film, Overdrive that introduces housing in Istanbul and other city conflicts including consequences of global warming, matters of city (public) transport, and how such problems are embedded in historical narratives. After watching the two films, we may have a better understanding on the background of the ongoing urbanization boom in Turkey.\u00a0 Furthermore, we may learn a lot of the motivations of the country-wide growing oppositional movement, rooted in the protests on Taksim square, accompanied by a thorough media cover.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Csaba Jelinek Films: Agoraphobia (Imre Azem, 2013, 53\u2019) Sunday March 9 – 15:30 Overdrive: Istanbul in the New Millennium (Aslihan Unaldi, 2011, 75\u2019) Sunday March 9 – 17:30 \u201cThey are…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":4537,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2824","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/filmnapok.kek.org.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2824","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/filmnapok.kek.org.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/filmnapok.kek.org.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/filmnapok.kek.org.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/filmnapok.kek.org.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2824"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/filmnapok.kek.org.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2824\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6546,"href":"https:\/\/filmnapok.kek.org.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2824\/revisions\/6546"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/filmnapok.kek.org.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4537"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/filmnapok.kek.org.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2824"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/filmnapok.kek.org.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2824"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/filmnapok.kek.org.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2824"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nAgoraphobia<\/a> (Imre Azem, 2013, 53\u2019)
\nSunday March 9 – 15:30
\nOverdrive: Istanbul in the New Millennium<\/a> (Aslihan Unaldi, 2011, 75\u2019)
\nSunday March 9 – 17:30<\/i><\/p>\n