In Rebel Cities, anthropologist and critical geographer David Harvey points to the role the street and urban activism play in the formation of ideas: What we so often forget is “the role played by the sensibility that arises out of the streets around us, the inevitable feelings of loss provoked by the demolitions, what happens when whole quarters […] get re-engineered.” Turning to contemporary Paris, Harvey reflects that the unrest caused by the rapid urban transformation of the city was probably a major component of the revolts that led to the massive protests in May 1968. According to Harvey, this unrest is felt the artistic and the intellectual creativity of the time, for example in Jean Luc Godard's film Deux out trois choses que je sais d’elle (1967) as well as Henri Lefebvre's essay of the same year The Right to the City. He wrote: “Just walking out of his apartment in the Rue Rambuteau,” Lefebvre must have been able to sense the inevitable eruption in the streets. It is no coincidence that Harvey was writing this book on urban insurrections in 2011 in the wake of the Occupy movement and anti-government uprisings in the SWANA region. Across the globe, the streets were pulsating.

Rebel Cities came out in 2013, the year we were demonstrating massively on the streets of Istanbul. In the background of these demonstrations, many protesters read and discussed Lefebvre's work in the reading groups or emergent collectives. Urban transformation was the topic of everyday conversations, and ‘right to the city’ was a concept you’d hear and read increasingly often. The activist repertoire, political grammar, and intellectual legacy of May 1968 and the Paris Commune were haunting the streets of the city as well as the minds and the hearts of the protesters.

The writing of this book on cinema and pedestrianism coincided with this turbulent time in the recent history of Turkey, where the streets became the locus of many struggles. These moments of eruption have been crucial in sharpening my study of walking as a political act.