saturday 11:15 – 12:45

Conflict and Coexistence in BERLIN AND IstanbuL
panel

​

This panel will discuss various forms of coexistence in urban space in light of their inherent conflicts. Drawing on different case studies in Berlin and Istanbul, the panelists will examine the roles of the state and inhabitants in shaping different social and spatial configurations of co-presence in the urban space as well as its management. Through the example of Syrian migration to Berlin and Istanbul, the panel will focus on newly emerging relations between host societies and newly arrived groups. Shedding light on grass-roots initiatives and various other forms of ‘arrival infrastructures’, these relations reveal multiple mundane practices that oscillate between solidarity and exclusion. The panel will further examine case studies from Istanbul’s urban margins to discuss how state security violence and the counterviolence it provokes can be analysed as forms of social engineering aimed at depoliticising and reorganising social antagonisms by translating them into a language of terror, security, and ethno-sectarian conflict. The panel will thereby look into the development of clashes between already existing and newly formed polities, the state’s role in the shaping of dissent and the ways in which spatial appropriation of newly arrived migrants may collide with humanitarian logics and technocratic emergency management.

​

Hİlal Alkan, Anna Steigemann, ​Denİz Yonucu
Gülçİn Balamir Coşkun (MODerator)
// aquarium (südblock)

​