Urban Transformation in Turkish Cinema of The 2000s

The break-up, decomposition, and partitioning process of cities began with the transformation period between January 24 and September 12, 1980, which introduced Turkey to a free market economy. With neoliberalism, sustained production runs parallel to a city’s becoming a part of capital accumulation, such that the place itself and the city become “commodities.” “Marketable” cities as the focus point of global investments, which are becoming central to capital accumulation, are being re-shaped according to the neoliberal conception of a city. During the period known as “urbanization of the capital,” a manifestation of neoliberal city policies, urban transformation is practiced with “creative destruction” strategies and “dispossession by the way of seizure” supported by new legislation. Although urban transformation started in Ankara with Law No. 5104 for the Urban Transformation Project of Northern Access to Ankara, introduced in 2004, Istanbul has since become the “capital city” of this policy. Cinema is one of the fields where this transformation is made visible. Setting off from the assumption that Istanbul, as a city subject to the threats that accompany “creative destruction” strategies, is the center of the stories told in film, this article questions and attempts to show how urban transformation is represented, how it impacts characters, and how it is represented through images in the “art” films of Turkish cinema in the 2000s. Urban transformation takes various forms. Therefore, the films 11’e 10 Kala (Pelin Esmer, 2009), Zerre (Erdem Tepeg？z, 2012), ？imdiki Zaman (Belmin S？ylemez, 2012), Annemin ？ark？s？ (Erol Minta？, 2014), and Kayg？ (Ceylan ？zgün ？z？elik, 2017) were examined, since these films include examples of “transformation with urban transformation/reformation projects” put into practice through new laws justified on such grounds as earthquakes, low quality housing and environment, “reformation,” and so on. Since the passage to a neoliberal city regime manifested itself more exactly in Turkey after the 2000s, the films were analyzed according to so-called “historical criticism,” or critical approaches that “classify and examine films according to their position within a historical context and under the light of historical developments.