Presentation short abstract

This paper examines Istanbul’s threatened Yedikule Bostans, where “green” redevelopment displaces subsistence practices. Drawing on ethnographic data, the paper explores how gardeners’ care and agroecological practices resist technocratic planning and open pathways for environmental justice.

Presentation long abstract

Istanbul is among Europe’s most climate-vulnerable coastal cities, where intensifying heat, floods, droughts, and sea-level rise reshape urban life and deepen inequalities for marginalized communities. Under authoritarian and neoliberal governance, municipal climate plans follow converging logics of climate urbanism and technocratic solutionism, prioritizing risk management, optimization, and “green” infrastructure fixes. Yet these interventions frequently target ecological commons and subsistence ecologies that have long sustained communities through food production, situated knowledge, and socio-environmental reproduction.

This paper examines one such site: the Yedikule Bostans, centuries-old subsistence gardens alongside Istanbul’s UNESCO-listed Land Walls, historically cultivated by diverse migrant communities. Long dismissed as “informal,” the Bostans gained renewed meaning in post-Gezi urban movements, becoming sites of resistance where gardeners, activists, and state actors negotiate contested claims to land, memory, and just urban futures. Here, climate-oriented redevelopment manifests as displacement, replacing subsistence gardens with “green” parks and erasing agroecological practices that have sustained biodiversity, food security, and flood mitigation.

The paper asks: How do marginalized communities adapt to climatic uncertainties while navigating dispossession? And what alliances emerge through conflicts that open possibilities for more just climate action?

Drawing on ethnographic research (2018–2022), I explore how gardeners’ embodied practices—soil care, seed saving, irrigation, and collective labor—constitute vernacular and politicized forms of climate adaptation that challenge technocratic planning. Integrating eco-feminist subsistence perspectives, commons scholarship, and feminist political ecology, the paper argues that contested urban ecologies such as the Bostans generate transformative adaptation imaginaries grounded in care, marginal ecological knowledge, and the right to the city.