Time, development, and imagining a future

Scholarship on development could readily be labelled literature of despondency, describing a world in which

Within this critical literature, development—with its mission of empowerment, participation, and democracy—is cast as another way of controlling, co-opting, and integrating poor and marginalized populations into a project of modernity, namely, that of market-making, value creation, accumulation, and mass consumption (Cooke and Kothari Reference Cooke and Kothari2001). As is explained in the next sections, this project comes to fruition through mega development projects, in our case, the Bridge and the erection of a shopping center called 03 Oxygen that is not accessible by the local population of Dilovası who do not have the economic means to participate. Critics of development, e.g. Arturo Escobar (Reference Escobar2011 [1995]) and James Ferguson (Reference Ferguson1994), assert that it is an imposed phenomenon that does not work, at least for the poor and the marginalized populations. Yet, this does not mean that people do not seek development. Development has lost neither its charm nor its attractiveness. Whether we like it or not, development is inexorable, whether initiated by locals (whose opinion on subsequent changes is often disregarded) or external authorities through top-to-down policies or, more often, some combination of the two (Gow Reference Gow2008, 3).

The literature on development projects primarily focuses on construction, such as building roads in rural areas, and its impacts (Van de Walle Reference Van de Walle2009) on matters as diverse as poverty reduction (Gachassin et al. Reference Gachassin, Najman and Raballand2010), market access, well-being, and nutrition (Stifel and Minten Reference Stifel and Minten2017), economic growth (Jerome Reference Jerome2011), employment (Rand Reference Rand2011), and migration decisions (Castaing Reference Castaing2013). A similar line of research on urban projects is also emerging, focusing on the methodology used to assess urban road transport development projects (Griškevičiūtė-Gečienė and Burinskienė Reference Griškevičiūtė-Gečienė and Burinskienė2012), urban redevelopment as multi-scalar planning and contestation (Zhang and Li Reference Zhang and Li2016), environmental degradation (Alo Reference Alo2008), and damage to cultural heritage (Parumog et al. Reference Parumog, Mizokami and Cal2003). While these studies focus on spatial alterations rather than social changes or material change experiences, our goal in this article is to focus on the residents’ experiences on the ground and their reactions to material change.

While the scale of urban and social contingencies may not relate to asymmetries in Dilovası, Vancouver provides a good example for a theoretical discussion of North American post-industrial metropolitan places. Hence, focusing on downtown Vancouver, Hutton (Reference Hutton2004, 1953) highlighted:

What does such a retheorization entail? The global South is entering an ‘Urban Age’, in which cities will outnumber rural areas for the first time in history, as Datta and Shaban (Reference Datta and Shaban2016) highlighted. Even amid global economic crises, and given that the collapse of neoliberal urbanism is scarcely imminent (Jou et al. Reference Jou, Hansen and Wu2012), not only does the classical division between industrialism and post-industrialism become irrelevant, but the need for advanced, original, and unifying retheorization appears more salient than ever. Underlining the need to establish the analytical links between ‘everyday life and systemic trends and struggles’—thus linking the insights produced by ‘particularistic accounts’—Bayırbağ and Penpecioğlu (Reference Bayırbağ and Penpecioğlu2017, 2) took alienation as ‘a universal mechanism facilitating the accumulation of capital’ via physical dislocation and dispossession.’ ^{Footnote 7} The state is also a part of this process not only in terms of its ideological apparatuses but also through punitive processes of criminalization and control.

Wacquant (Reference Wacquant2009) examined how in the age of neoliberalism, the lower classes have been marginalized and denied access to basic public services that is every citizen’s right, while the upper class is constantly enriched by the state, protected by iron gates and armed guards in watch booths with intercoms. For him, the state protects the upper class from the deteriorated environment it has created while forcing the poor, marginalized, and discriminated-against lower class into a destructive space characterized by inconvenient living conditions and a severe lack of space, air, light, water, and sometimes food. Wacquant (Reference Wacquant2009, 1078) referred to this process and space formation as ‘urban relegation’ rather than ‘poverty territories’ or ‘low-income communities’. In so doing, Wacquant (Reference Wacquant2016, 1078) highlighted that the ‘proper object of inquiry is not the place itself and its residents but the multilevel structural processes whereby persons are selected, thrust and maintained in marginal locations, as well as the social webs and cultural forms they subsequently develop therein’. For Wacquant (Reference Wacquant2008, 71), the central paradox of development in the age of late capitalism is

We believe that the paradox results not only from punitive state processes and hegemonic social control, but also from the alienation and separation of the inhabitants from their space, time, interests, and claims. While the literature review here discusses alienation with reference to negative mental and emotional implications of dispossession and dislocation, this discussion may also be rooted in Cresswell’s (Reference Cresswell, Cresswell and Verstraete2002) theory on place which explores the geographical imaginations that lie behind mobilization by re-evaluating place and thinking through a politics of mobility and change. As Lefebvre (Reference Lefebvre and Nicholson-Smith1991) argued in his theory of dialectics of space, that space is inherently social when the experience in the perceived space will be mediated through the expectations of the conceived space into the lived space. Here the ‘third space’ of Soja (Reference Soja, Ikan and Wagner2008, 63–75) helps us to arrive at a synthesis of hybridity that displaces the histories that it constitutes and sets up new structures of authority, new political initiatives. On the one hand, this hybridity of space involves subordination and participation, but, on the other, it also encompasses alternative imaginations and resistance to produce a change in space (depending on the democratic processes available on the ground).

In our case, we discovered that the plurality of time must be added to the hybridity of place because our informants frequently come to socialize within different settings in a dialectical manner with time. According to Munn (Reference Munn1992, 116), time is a symbolic process that is constantly being produced in everyday practices. It is lived concretely through the various meaningful connections between people, objects, and space that are constantly being made in and through the everyday world (Munn Reference Munn1992, 116). As a result, time is social and can be traced within a relationship established between human and non-human transactions, which Durkheim (Reference Durkheim2008 [1912], 11–12) saw as a sociological issue. He saw society as a kind of clock, with moving parts consisting of individual human beings and periodic recurrences of rituals, feasts, public events, and ceremonies. These collective representations and divisions, which emerge from social life’s rhythms, result in a meaningful, qualitatively variegated temporality rather than an abstract, homogeneous one. In what ways, then, may an alternative socialization of time develop from a particular historical relationship and become a force in influencing today’s political and economic landscape?

Time is marked by extraordinary doubt and conflict, according to Laura Bear (Reference Bear2014, Reference Bear2016, Reference Bear2017). For Bear (Reference Bear2014, 7), ‘dominant in modern time is the abstract time-reckoning of capitalism, which acts as the basis for the universal measure of value in labor, debt, and exchange relationships’. For her, this abstract time-reckoning of capitalism habitually comes into conflict with the concrete experiences and social rhythms of time. In our ethnographic case, the Bridge animates the integration within an imagined global post-industrial time which is in conflict with the current local social industrial time experienced by its residents. In this irreconcilable and unpredictable sequence of dialectics between the Bridge and everyday life, a distinct time-space emerges, somewhere between the present and the future, as a zone of negotiation and reconciliation between the capital and the early migrant laborers who settled around the industrial factories.

An ordinary day in the toxic valley

A tall factory chimney, which is visible from every distant corner of Dilovası, welcomed us on a rainy December day in 2018 as we entered the industrial town—‘the toxic valley’, as some call it (See Figure 1). It was a familiar monument, one we had passed by numerous times on the journey between İstanbul and Anatolia. Our car traversed the factories and wound its way up to the new hospital, located on the north-east side of the valley between the chimney and the Coal Dealers’ Organised Industrial Zone (Kömürcüler Organize Sanayii Bölgesi, OSB). The dominance of the massive industry on the floor of the valley was evident from the hospital. Dozens of heavy industrial plants sprawled across the valley basin have forced residents to retreat to the edge of the hills. A torrent of thick, black smoke battered the houses clinging to the slopes.

Figure 1: The Bridge.

Source: The authors.

After watching the industrial landscape for a while, we drove down to a coffee shop in front of the municipal building. The city center was crowded when we arrived, and the police had set up a roadblock in front of the town hall (See Figure 2). We then realized that there were ongoing popular protests over the trial of two young locals who had hung a banner from the Bridge that read: ‘Temiz hava için kömürcülere hayır’ (For clean air, no to coal dealers). The vast fields of coal stockpiles located in the Kömürcüler OSB and overlooking the valley to the east have been a regular source of complaint. When the northern winds sweep in, they churn up the coal, dousing the town in black dust. As the valley basin belches fumes into the air, blizzards of coal dust blow down, hence the name ‘the toxic valley’. According to a resident, the coal dust coats the roofs and windows of houses miles away, agitating the lungs of anyone unfortunate enough to inhale it and causing breathing problems:

Figure 2: Coal protest in front of the municipality.

Source: The authors.

As one of the protesters stated, ‘Dilovası is a place abandoned to industry, and the state does not exist here … indeed it hasn’t existed for a long time, but we feel its absence more when coal is raining down on us.’ He continued to explain, ‘Everyone acts as if everything is normal. We even got used to the rain of coal. Sounds normal. Looks normal. We took a walk today to remind ourselves that this is not normal.’ After chatting with protesters, we continued toward the seaside to the city’s Diliskelesi district and back through the industrial depths of the valley. Finding ourselves lost while trying to find the port, a stylish shopping center called O3 Oxygen appeared before us. We passed by some slums and parked the car (See Figure 3). The parking area is rammed up against fences separating the slums of the industrial town and the shopping center and the modern highway. Cameras and security guards greeted us, and a skyscraper as tall as the factory chimney in the valley towered above, this time on the west side of the town behind a Starbucks. The skyscraper is a part of the IT valley project—the Turkish Silicon Valley—striving for progress in informatics and communications technologies with a budget of $400 million. This recently erected and envisioned post-industrial landscape bears no connections to the industrial town of Dilovası; in fact, it is positioned directly on the opposite side of the industrial landscape.

Figure 3: 03 Oxygen shopping mall on the highway.

Source: The authors.

The coal storage zones, which sit directly adjacent to supplies received from Russia and deliver fuel to local factories, were previously situated at the foot of the Bridge. They were later moved to their current location above the city to remove the unpleasant view. The flow of fresh air seemed comparatively much better than in the toxic valley we had left behind a few minutes before. The weather was clear, and the scenery was gorgeous in the IT valley. The highway leading to the Bridge seemed to fracture time and the town into two distinct zones: on the one side, a heavily industrial site full of William Blake’s dark, satanic mills and workers living under coal rain and, on the other, a post-industrial oasis with Edward Hopper’s lonely people drinking coffee in a sterilized landscape in front of their laptops. When asked about the relations between the town and the IT valley, a white-collar professional who has been working on a mission to attract start-ups to the valley comments:

In the following sections, we will continue to explore these two intersecting, but also alternating, landscapes and how they affect the individuals who are excluded from the material change and development that occurs there.

The industrial boom town

The geographical location of this region is particularly important to understand how it became an industrial and transportation hub over the past 60 years (Kanbak Reference Kanbak2013) (See Figure 4). Small mountains on its eastern and western borders, and from the south, zmit Bay butts up against Dilovası, containing seven ports, container terminals, and industrial zones. The region is responsible for roughly one-fifth of Turkey’s steel production, and ranks among the top ten in the world. Today, two superhighways that connect İstanbul and Ankara pass through Dilovası: the Transit European Motorway (TEM) and the D-100 (also referred to as the E-5). The district of Dilovası gained significant value in 1955 with the construction of the D-100 superhighway.

Figure 4: Map of the region.

Source: Author.

Industrialization began in Dilovası in the late 1960s. From then until 1980, 11 factories were established in the quaint town of Gebze. These factories are still among the most important in Turkey. In 1967, Izocam became the first company to invest in the area, followed by Oluklu Mukavva Sanayi (Olmuksa), a subsidiary of Sabancı Holding, in 1969. The Marshall Paint and Polisher Corporation started constructing its factory in 1967 and began production in 1972. BASF, the world’s largest chemicals company, together with Sumerbank, invested in Dilovası in 1970. The Polisan Dilovası plantation, which currently owns two international ports in Dilovası, started production in 1974. Among the other companies that migrated to the area in the first wave of industrialization were NASAŞ, Diler Demir Çelik, Yaşar Holdings, and Atabay Chemistry. Thus, the region became a hub for the production of petrochemicals, steel, aluminium, and machinery.

The formation of the Dilovası Municipality in 1987 marked a significant milestone for the development of the district. Dinçer (Reference Dinçer2007) explains that the most intensive developments in terms of industrialization, migration, and urbanization materialized before the announcement of the organized industrial zone in 2002. Only 14 factories were operating in Dilovası when the municipality was established in 1987; by 2002, the Dilovası Organised Industrial Zone (Dilovası Organize Sanayii Bölgesi, DOSB) was home to 171 factories (See Figure 5). Driven predominantly by factories, migration has always been a crucial element of population growth in Dilovası. The first significant population increase accompanied the establishment of the Dilovası Municipality. Today the population is made up of migrants from all over the country, most notably from Ağrı (approximately one-third of the current population), Kars, Erzurum, Gümüşhane, and Bingöl. A local resident and potential candidate in the local elections told us: ‘to win any election in Dilovası, one either has to be from Gümüşhane or Bingöl or secure the support of one of these groups.’

Figure 5: Kömürcüler OSB.

Source: The Authors.

Although Dilovası has been known for its pollution due to heavy industrialization since the 1970s, the first incident to attract media attention happened in 1994. A cholera outbreak killed 12 children, highlighting concerns about the effects of the pollution produced by industrial plants encircled by blue-collar migrant neighborhoods in the suburbs of the industrial town. As Dinçer (Reference Dinçer2007) explains, the political response to the public backlash from the cholera outbreak was to create organized industrial zones. Nevertheless, the Dilovası Industrial Zone was not established until 2002.

Since the 2000s, it has been widely acknowledged that the environmental and health problems in Dilovası were the result of 50 years of unplanned industrialization by the central government, which, until the enactment of Metropolitan Municipality Law no. 5216 in 2004, made decisions about business authorization and licensing. This law granted local municipalities the authority to authorize and supervise industrial plants. Dinçer (Reference Dinçer2007) defines this period of erratic development as a consequence of successive governments’ seeking to promote industrial growth at all costs. Rising air and water pollution linked to an increasing number of mills brought the issue of cancer to the agenda in the 2010s (See Figure 6). An alarming report (Hamzaoğlu et al. Reference Hamzaoğlu, Etiler, Cavit and Cağlayan2011, 372) revealed for the first time the astronomical rate of cancer-related deaths (33 percent of all deaths) in Dilovası. This figure is 2.6 and 2.7 times greater than the average for Turkey and the world, respectively. The report (Hamzaoğlu et al. Reference Hamzaoğlu, Etiler, Cavit and Cağlayan2011, 374) also highlighted that the risk of death due to cancer, irrespective of age group and tobacco usage, was 4.4 times higher for people who had been resident in the Dilovası district of Kocaeli for more than ten years than for those living there for less than ten years.

Figure 6: The Dilovası port and the Bridge.

Source: The authors.

Finally, the coal problem that is wreaking havoc today emerged in the early 2000s. In 2001, the Kocaeli Governorate and the Coal Exporters Association demanded land in Dilovası to create an organized industrial zone for coal. The Ministry of Industry and Commerce approved this in 2007 and granted them land in Dilovası. The zone’s construction took three years and was completed in 2010. All coal dealers in Kocaeli were given until 2012 to relocate their operations to the Kömürcüler OSB, which covers approximately 72 hectares of land. Residents of Dilovası, together with members of political opposition parties, protested against the creation of such a zone near residential areas. They blocked the roads coal dealers used for transportation and claimed that their homes would be swallowed by dust from the five million tonnes of coal planned for export each year. The past decade witnessed several small popular protests by Dilovası residents targeting the coal zone. Residents demanded that the coalfield be moved, explaining the harmful consequences of heavy coal dust, which included a prevalence of asthma among Dilovası’s children.

For Wacquant (Reference Wacquant2008, 56), the policy of ‘punitive containment’ pursued by the state complements labor, land, and environmental deregulation. It entails the ‘gradual replacement of the social welfare treatment of marginality by its punitive management through the aggressive rolling out of the police, the courts, and the prison in and around the hyperghetto’ (Wacquant Reference Wacquant2010, 217). In an area where the dominance of capital is so pronounced and the Weberian neutral arbitrator state has nearly vanished, police respond to resistance with swift punishment. In fact, as the state no longer governs the space through arbitration, it conversely violently pushes against resistance to establish perceived ‘presence.’ It is precisely for this reason that Onur Hamzaoğlu, who reported on the escalating cancer rates in Dilovası, and the teenagers who hung the banner from the Bridge to protest against the coal dust were swiftly imprisoned.

The Bridge and the future

In 2010, construction began on the Bridge to link Gebze to Yalova Province and carry the O-5 motorway across the Gulf of İzmit. Even before construction was completed, in July 2016, state officials heralded the Bridge as an exemplary scheme for the future development of Dilovası. In April 2016, a newspaper article claimed that ‘the Bridge benefits Dilovası the most’ (Osman Gazi Köprüsü 14 April 2016). The article quoted Dilovası District Governor Hulusi Şahin: ‘Museums, shopping centers, cafes, social facilities will be built in Dilovası, through which the Bridge passes.’ He stated that a shopping mall (now 03 Oxygen) to be built right by the Bridge would be a source of employment for around a thousand Dilovası locals (Osmangazi Köprüsü 27 June 2016). Şahin also suggested that the Bridge would reduce the industrial burden on Dilovası by helping to create new organized industrial zones in Yalova and Bursa. Hence, it was expected that the Bridge would not only stimulate economic growth and provide employment to the local population through investment in infrastructure, but also advance development by enhancing residents’ quality of life and increasing competitiveness. At the end of the day, as some of our informants have argued, the most significant impact that directly benefited local inhabitants was the predicted rise in real estate values. For Şahin, real estate prices in Dilovası started to rise even before the construction of the Bridge and land values would increase exponentially as the Bridge was built, which would ultimately bring wealth to the residents of Dilovası in the near future.

With one foot of the Bridge in Dilovası, the town is situated right next to the new highway that cuts travel time, from over eight hours to just three-and-a-half, between two of Turkey’s largest cities. Shopping centers, restaurants, and gas stations have mushroomed along the highway. The customers of these facilities on the sides of the highway can afford the high tolls. The O3 Oxygen shopping center standing right behind the giant mills in Dilovası also welcomes white-collar employees who travel everyday between İstanbul and the town. Local residents are unable to visit the shopping center due to the high prices charged, except for the local youngsters who sneak into a corner of Starbucks to use the free Wi-Fi and the beggars who previously stood before Dilovası mosques but now prefer to find a spot in the mall. Besides, only one of the six workers we spoke to was from Dilovası; the others travel every day from Gebze by shuttle. The O3 Oxygen shopping center has delivered wealth to passing motorists with high purchasing power while contributing to the further marginalization of local residents who breathe coal dust every day. When we asked local residents about the impact of the Bridge on their lives, none of them mentions any increase in employment opportunities or the development of recreational areas and facilities. Instead, our informants often talked about the rising property prices of their land, which have skyrocketed since the announcement of the Bridge. According to one real estate agent who saw a business opportunity and relocated from Bodrum to Dilovası, the price of a one-square meter apartment has increased from 100 TL in 2014 to 700 TL in 2020 as a result of the Bridge’s construction, as well as rumors, gossip, and humor about the relocation of Kömürcüler OSB, and urban renewal and reconstruction plans for the industrial town’s future. In Dilovası, he described the rapidly rising real estate values as follows:

In addition to the boom in property prices brought by its construction, the likely damage to the Bridge itself from industrial pollution has been an ongoing topic in ordinary people’s everyday conversations. One state official confirmed the harm and argued that the industrial zone should be moved somewhere away from the Bridge. Rumors circulated that the state would remove the factories in the city center to protect the Bridge. As a result, the area near the Bridge will be suitable for expensive new residences and villas to be sold to the rich. In fact, a similar process has already taken place when the Bridge pushed former seaside coal storage companies to relocate. According to one of our informants, the state’s plan is to remove local residents living on valuable lands in the city center, before evacuating the old factories polluting the town. For him, by means of inexpensive loans, the state will seek to sell cheap houses with title deeds and buy the buildings without title deeds from the residents. Eventually, it will relocate the mills, turn that location into a real estate paradise, and try to make money by selling out the land.

In June 2020, the Ministry of Environment and Urban Planning of Turkey declared that the Kömürcüler OSB in Dilovası would be relocated once again, now outside of the town, and the area used to develop a mass housing project (around 15,000 homes) for middle- and low-income groups in Dilovası with the assistance of TOKİ (the Turkish Housing Development Administration). As explained above, some of our informants believed this event to be part of the gradual displacement of local worker families from the city center in preparation for the relocation of industrial mills and gentrification of the area with the arrival of tech and service companies, as one local resident explained:

The heavy industry accumulating in the valley basin no longer tends to generate the high profits it once did, and there is speculation it will be shuttered. The area can be transformed into an entrepot, a warehouse, for imports bound for the two largest cities of Turkey, İstanbul and İzmir, which are now connected by the Bridge. It is not clear when this will happen, but several residents have heard or read somewhere that the service sector is now replacing heavy industry around the world, and they believe that they have evidence that the town will follow a similar fate. The potential transition, accompanied by a program of urban restructuring and transformation, seems to energize investors, who will scoop up cheap plots of land before the prices skyrocket, as well as residents who prefer to endure the coal rain rather than selling out their already valuable properties. This male worker, who has lived in the town for more than 20 years, explains why he prefers to wait:

Several residents believe that the chimney stacks in the valley that now belch out black smoke will shortly be relocated, and then the town will be ideal once again, as one of the neighborhood representatives of the town explained:

Dilovası is today being shaped both by its material industrial past and its imagined non-industrial future. The Bridge, as a megaproject, is central to this, opening a wormhole in time and fueling an imagining of a future that is radically different from the materialized conditions of the present. While today’s alienating materialized conditions produces resistance, imagining about tomorrow inspires inclusion and hope. On the one hand, the Bridge alienated local residents and furthered their marginalization as present-day non-consumers, but, on the other hand, it oriented the excluded toward imagining a better future and a landscape where they benefit from the material development of the town. Dilovası’s slum dwellers located around the industries in the center are urged to advocate for and support the removal of companies and the coal storage areas. Yet, given the lack of democratic processes and participation in political decision-making, they are unsure how much of what they imagine will materialize. While keeping up with the change and providing their consent, resistance potentially accumulates over the possibility that dreams will not come true. One of our interviewees described this multiplicity of positions as follows:

The families of workers and immigrants who have lived in Dilovası’s slums for many years are hopeful for the future. Along with the Bridge, the land on which no one wanted to live for years and on which they built their slums have suddenly became valuable in the market. They continue to wait for the factories to be removed in the hopes that their land will become even more valuable as a result. Their ambition is to sell their land for a high price and be compensated for the years of struggle they have endured. While these dreams have been triggered by the Bridge, they are quite disconnected from today’s conditions. In December 2021, enterprises in Kömürcüler OSB were still operating on top of the town. While Dilovası’s heavy industrial factories continue to emit smoke from their chimneys in the heart of the city, coal continues to flow over the houses of the worker families. For the time being, an alternative post-industrial future created through popular imaginations provides the excluded with a means of negotiating and participating in the change brought about by the Bridge, but unsatisfied expectations may soon arise to fuel resistance.