Paper Short Abstract:

Informed by memory walks, sensory ethnography, oral history interviews, and archival examination of court documents, this paper tracks the establishment of an underground pipeline in a heavily industrialized coastal town in Northwestern Turkey. I follow this pipeline with Yasar and Gulten, a retired high school teacher and a former mukhtar (an elected public administrator at the scale of a neighborhood), who are residents of the coastal town and were involved in a legal battle with the gas company over rejecting the company's land grab. During a memory walk, we stop along the points of reference to examine a legal battle between Gulten, her friends, and the gas company, where the pipeline gets closest to the surface through the cracks on the asphalt. Gluten and Yasar’s memory walk around the pipeline reveals business and family histories as landscape histories, placed, and in relationship with the soil, asphalt, water, and sediment. In that, we can finally think of infrastructure not as something that conveys the already existing inequalities to places and people, but as something that makes the space not only a condition of life and liveliness, an entanglement of life and death.

Paper Abstract:

Since the early 2000s, the coastal land around the Gulf of Izmit in Northwestern Turkey has been captured and extended by global maritime industries reminiscent of imperial nodes. Heavy industries multiply and compete for land, weaving through quaint coastal towns. Informed by memory walks, sensory ethnography, and court documents, this paper tracks the construction of an underground pipeline. I walk through this pipeline with Yasar and Gulten, a retired high school teacher and a former mukhtar who proclaimed that the pipeline construction had started in conflict with municipal planning in the following weeks of a 7.1 M earthquake in the Gulf of Izmit, which created a massive infrastructural meltdown and gaps in municipal authority in 1999. Our walk along the pipeline facilitates an examination of the legal battle between Gulten, her friends, and the gas company. The walker's narratives mirror the spectral quality of the pipeline in a heterogeneous act of remembering and knowing. Although we cannot see the body of the pipes, we trace it through the cracks and bumps on the road, and the memories of lived experiences. Gluten and Yasar’s act of walking around the pipeline reveals business and family histories as landscape histories, placed and in relationship with the soil, asphalt, water, and sediment. In that, we can finally think of infrastructure not only as something that conveys the existing inequalities to places and people but as something that makes the space a condition of life and liveliness, an entanglement of life and death.