“Walking Sounds Good”: Through the Trans-European Motorway
Burç Köstem
“Walking sounds good.” Yusuf took a long drag on his cigarette and looked off into the distance towards the Küçükçekmece lake just beyond the reeds. I can tell he was suspicious of my research. I was following a walking route called Between Two Seas, first created by artist Serkan Taycan in 2013. The walking route was created in part as an exploration of the rapidly expanding limits of İstanbul which continued to exploit and subsume the resources that existed in its peripheries. Yet over the years it had also become an unofficial response to the Kanal İstanbul project, a proposal by the then Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan to dredge open a second waterway between the Marmara Sea and the Black Sea essentially transforming part of İstanbul into an island. Erdoğan’s proposal was merely a speculative campaign promise in 2011. In fact, the Kanal project was announced in tandem with Vision 2023, a list of campaign promises, policy goals and construction projects that the government promised would grow the Turkish economy to be one of the “10 largest economies in the world”. Over 10 years later, the construction of the Kanal has finally been underway. Most people I had met here brought up the Kanal freely without me so much asking. Yusuf could have guessed that my walk had something to do with the Kanal.
I could see the questions running through Yusuf’s mind. Why would someone from Canada pass by his humble garden by the lack? Was I one of those pesky meddlers? Earlier he was teasing me about why I didn’t have any kids yet despite being married for over a year, “Does it say so in our holy book?”. It also didn’t help that I was there with a group of filmmaker friends who were visibly hungover from the night before. Perhaps this is why he was mainly focused on me. He fell silent for a second. The silence was briefly interrupted as his phone rang to the tune of a popular Ottoman military march (Plevne Marşı). Still, I seemed to spark his curiosity. He denied the call and continued to speak. “Walking is great. It’s like how the Reis (the Chief) ought to walk first, so that the millet (the nation) can follow.”
Figure 1: Underneath the Trans-European Motorway (photo credit: Yavuz Gözeller)
We had stopped by Yusuf’s garden on our way from the Sazlıdere waterway which flows from the Sazlıdere dam into the Küçükçekmece lake. We had just emerged from a rather rough patch of walking. The waterway that flows from the dam collects all the refuse from nearby towns, factories and villages and carries this refuse all the way to Küçükçekmece lake. There is a foul stench has collected here. Little bubbles emerge from the water as if the summer heat was boiling the chemicals inside into a soup of sorts. Following the waterway, we walked underneath the Trans European Motorway (TEM) carefully avoiding the pools of motor oil and grease that dripped from the highway above, while also making sure not to intrude on the living quarters of a family who seemed to inhabit this underpass. Originally established by the UN Economic Commission for Europe in 1977, the TEM is a massive network of highways built with the explicit purpose of fostering neoliberal ideals such as “growth” and “competitiveness” in Southern and Eastern Europe through trade. This stretch of the TEM also known as the E80 highway, stretches from Lisbon in Portugal to the town of Gürbulak near the Turkish-Iranian border.
As Begüm Adalet notes, in Hotels and Highways (2018) roads had always been crucial to theories of modernization and economic growth, especially as they were developed and put into practice in Turkey. For American economists like W.W. Rustow (1960), the private automobiles and roads were signifiers of economic growth. The E80 however was constructed in 1988, during the tenure of then prime minister Turgut Özal, at a much different political and economic conjuncture, as Turkey was being integrated into the financial and physical infrastructures of the global neoliberal order. Perhaps therefore today, Yusuf can count 12 different large logistics companies that have operation centers in the town of Hadımköy, just across the Sazlıdere waterway. It is perhaps also why the highway has been the site of blockade efforts in the last 10 years by construction workers working at the nearby towns of Halkalı and Bağcılar.
Figure 2: Path of the newly built North Marmara Motorway.
Yusuf’s operation of 11 trucks, ran out of this small garden, remains comparatively modest. When our tired caravan asked him where we could get a cup of tea around here, he had offered generously that we join his table. Now, after hm explaining his business dealings to us a little bit, an awkward silence fell once again. “Anyhow, walking sounds good”, Yusuf repeated, and I knew it was our time to leave.
I had found Serkan’s walking route interesting partly because of its obstinate refusal to mention the Kanal project in neither the map that accompanied the walking route, nor in many of his public appearances. “It was the government who copied the route of where the Kanal will pass based on Between Two Seas” he joked around referring to how his map had inadvertently predicted where the Kanal İstanbul project would eventually pass, as the particular route had not been formally unveiled until 2018. My aim in walking Between Two Seas was a similar belief that it could reveal something more about urban space than narrowly serving as a critique of the Kanal. I hoped it could reveal something on how to think about ecological limits, not as given in abstraction but discovered analogically, through and in political struggle. This discussion of ecological and economic limits was not merely and attempt to march orderly behind a Chief nor to flow across this geography, like Yusuf’s cars do on the E-80 highway. Refusing the Kanal is part of an experiment to discover where the limits of a city might be, where the city emerges and where it stops. Rather it was an effort to take ecological limits seriously, and in doing so affirming as the Salvage Collective urge us to do (2020), that we cannot know where ecological limits might be in the abstract, without political struggle, “Ecosocialists, we take the existence of limits seriously; ecosocialists, we take seriously the fact that we cannot yet know them”. It is not in opposition to but only through political struggle, including the struggle for refugee rights, for housing, for debt cancellation and against capitalist expansion through which we can assert the limits of urban space. The walk then exists as part of a pre-figurative politics of limitation, that seeks for points of intervention and inflection across this geography that has been so heavily transformed in the name of economic growth. “Walking is good” I thought. We thanked Yusuf for the tea and took our leave for exploring.