Book Chapter "Top-Down Disaster Preparedness and Grassroots Environmental Endurance in 2010s Turkey"

29 January 2026

Photo: Bristol Universtiy Press

Prof. Dr. Eray Çaylı's book chapter titled "Top-Down Disaster Preparedness and Grassroots Environmental Endurance in 2010s Turkey" is published open access in the volume Displacement Urbanism: Politics of Bodies and Spaces of Abandonment and Endurance edited by Giovanna Astolfo and Camillo Boano.

"This chapter explores how the Disaster Law recently issued in Turkey served to impose forms of displacement, mobilizing images of ecologies and preparedness. The chapter looks specifically at two self-built neighbourhoods from opposite ends of Turkey: a racialized working- class neighbourhood in Istanbul and another on the banks of the Tigris River in Amed/Diyarbakır. Through a critique of the architecture of state policy imposition, Çaylı makes visible the experiences of displacement by state-endorsed colonial-rooted developmentalism, and the disaster preparedness discourses complicit in purposing authoritarian urban and spatial development."

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