ABSTRACT

This chapter traces a closer look at two of these – a social centre and a guerrilla garden – to begin building an understanding of the radical afterlives engendered by the outbursts of radical energies that Gezi reflects. It deals with sketching the hegemonic urban forces that protesters came together in Gezi Park to oppose. The hegemonic forces against which the Gezi protests and subsequent alternative spaces have been directed are characterised ideologically by a peculiar mix of neoliberal urbanism and social conservatism of a nationalist bend. Most of the activists who squatted in the building that became the Don Quixote Social Centre were “veterans” from Gezi. After the protests ebbed out towards the autumn of 2013, inhabitants in Istanbul, and elsewhere in Turkey, have continually lived under conditions of economic uncertainty and political oppression; however, the former occupants of Gezi Park were far from inactive.