Guest edited by Şevin Yıldız, the NCR-07 [Ecology] is out on the streets of Istanbul. The issues contributers are Sonay Aykan, Boğaçhan Dündaralp, John May, David Harvey, Pelin Tan and Ayşe Çavdar.

In the Ecology of Risk

by Şevin Yıldız

How does ecological risk turn into neoliberal speculation in the context of urban transformation? By this time, we already have heard a thousand times that we have never been so urbanized in human history and maybe we have reached our limits on this world. The collective anxiety towards this end is constantly “soothed” through mechanisms that use of a co-opted language of ecology . Risk needs to be foreseen and calculated; in Istanbul, risk is the shaky ground, in New York it is the tidal water. The ecological risk created a vacuum for maneuvers of the urban politics; today the entire discourse of urban transformation in Istanbul, like in many other places, finds echoes in this earthquake speculation vacuum. Risk is there as it always has been, but the city has turned into a ground for “catastrophe” land grab. While long-abandoned totalitarian grand gestures of nature-engineering continue to be tools of political power through projects like Kanal Istanbul, a small scale community vegetable garden finds itself at the heart of the “commoning” discussion. Do the people who have rights to this garden also have rights to the Black Sea to oppose an artificial canal that will irreversibly change the hydrology of it?