Assembling disaster: Earthquakes and urban politics in Istanbul

Elizabeth Angell

City, 2014, vol. 18, issue 6, 667-678

Abstract: This paper explores the politics of earthquake disasters in Istanbul, Turkey, arguing that urban assemblage theory offers a useful framework for thinking about disaster as an urban phenomenon. It examines the effects of the 1999 Marmara earthquake disaster and the anticipation of future earthquakes on Istanbul's built environment and urban politics, tracing how the city's fragile buildings become a source of personal anxiety and political critique, how debates about responsibility and blame reveal divergent understandings of nature and society, and how earthquake risk is mobilized to both justify and challenge controversial urban transformation projects. The paper argues that disasters prompt explicit engagements with the sociomaterial assemblages that make up the city, and ethnographic attention to these entanglements can reveal how those assemblages become legible as matters of political concern.

Date: 2014
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/13604813.2014.962881 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:cityxx:v:18:y:2014:i:6:p:667-678

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/CCIT20

DOI: 10.1080/13604813.2014.962881

Access Statistics for this article

City is currently edited by Bob Catterall

More articles in City from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().