Sunday October 12th 2014, Ekümenopolis – city without limits. Directed by Imre Azem 2011, 93 minutes, in Turkish with English subtitles. Door opens at 8pm, film begins at 9pm.
Eukemonopolis is documentation about neo liberal city development in Istanbul and the aspiration of its political leaders of turning it into a global city, one of those cities like London, Tokyo, Amsterdam or São Paulo, that shape globalisation and form the network of global cities where the service, banking and real estate businesses accumulate, where mega events takes place and a hegemonial hipster culture is cultivated. While the global alpha, beta and gamma cities posses the intellectual knowledge, tools and power the global division of labour is further extended, with the majority of factory production being outsourced to those parts of the world where people earn a shit for their 60 hours working week, have no labour rights whatsoever and endanger their health and well being by working in super precarious conditions, let alone the environmental destruction that this system of global division of labour provokes. Eukomonopolis shows quite in detail what the negative effects of repressive neo liberal urban development in Istanbul mean to local citizens and to the city’s natural environment while it also explains concepts like the global city (which was developed by Saskia Sassen) so that we can look at our own living environment and have more tools at hand to better understand what happens around us and affects us. We can develop strategies and actions to be solidare with the exploited people worldwide and get active locally in order to develop and realise our own strategies in contrast to that what is opposed on us by the state and its institutions, urban planners and the capitalistic system.
As further background we want to provide a text about urban development in the city which is part of more a comprehensive report about squatting in the Istanbul and a collection of reports about radical grassroots neighborhood and factory organisation provided by the the solidarity campaign for left neighborhoods in Istanbul, translated from german to english. Even though the documentary does not relate those particular stories, those texts may shed some light on local resistance against the urban development that takes place in the city.
[…Lees verder]
