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Assembling disaster: Earthquakes and urban politics in Istanbul

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.