The Gezi Park Protest Space and the Novel Urban Commons: Community Resilience in the Age of Translocalism

Abstract

The modern crisis of inclusionary and productive urban commons has augmented the vulnerability of urban communities, creating one of the major socio-spatial challenges to urban resilience building. The recent progressive displacement and financialisation of the infrastructures of these commons have disrupted the associative spatialisation basis that sustained the political, physical and functional growth and differentiation of many communities, particularly the weakest ones.
One exemplary instance of political urban commons that withstand the crisis by increasing community capacity and systemic relational redundancy emerged from the Gezi Park Movement—a protest started in 2013 in Beyoglu, Istanbul, to halt a commercial redevelopment of a central area including the first public park of modern Turkey. The effectiveness of this commons was grounded in its capacity to sustain the emergent phenomenon of independent translocal relationality.