A Network of Earthquake, Buildings, and Society: An Anthropological Observation of the Istanbul Anti-Seismic Urban Reform Plan

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to provide an anthropological (in Bruno Latour's sense) description and analysis of policies to control future earthquake damage in Istanbul, Turkey, conducted by Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality (IMM) after a big earthquake hit the northwestern part of Turkey in 1999.

Reflecting the recent move in the social science literature to take not only the Humanosphere but also the Biosphere and the Geosphere and their interrelationship into account, earthquake damage is considered as an outcome of interaction between the Humanosphere and the Geosphere. Thus anti-seismic policies can be viewed as efforts to predict behavior of the Geosphere and to regulate the undesirable consequence of that interaction.

This paper discusses three projects. The first is a study called “micro-zoning” conducted by JICA and IMM, which aims to visualize risk of future earthquake spatially. The second is the Istanbul Earthquake Master Plan prepared by IMM and Turkish four leading universities. The third is a pilot project of the Master Plan conducted in Zeytinburnu district. I will describe these projects as hybrid networks of organizations, scientific procedures, objects, law, and abstract ideas such as local community and participation, and analyze how the issue of damage caused by future earthquakes was introduced into those policies and transformed in the tense relationships among the multiple actors in these networks.