Illusion of Safety: Current State of Ataköy

Photography Series
2014

"First, a strict spatial partitioning: the closing of the town and its outlying districts, a prohibition to leave the town on pain of death, the killing of all stray animals; the division of the town into distinct quarters, each governed by an intendant. Each street is placed under the authority of a syndic, who keeps it under surveillance; if he leaves the street, he will be condemned to death. On the appointed day, everyone is ordered to stay indoors: it is forbidden to leave on pain of death. The syndic himself comes to lock the door of each house from the outside; he takes the key with him and hands it over to the intendant of the quarter; the intendant keeps it until the end of the quarantine. ... If it is absolutely necessary to leave the house, it will be done in turn, avoiding any meeting."

― Michel Foucault, "Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison."

'Illusion of Safety' project which investigates the panoptic perception in mass housing sphere through Ataköy, examines the evolution of the idea of a life together to the security obsession and the consequences of this situation.

Ataköy is one of the best examples that can be given to a paradigm shift in the architecture of the settlements can be read out for Turkey. Green areas around the building units and public housing landscapes; in addition to the known images of surveillance culture, such as watchtowers and security cameras, it turns into a phenomenon that makes the boundaries of the area clearer. All these images together can be read as the remnants of a kind of systemic change towards Ataköy, which passes from the 1957 Ataköy to a heterotopic plane considering the basic motives of centralized utopia and modernism.

Security is a result of concern in the new city, which has evolved into a decentralized network pattern for residents. In this context, the measures taken to protect against crime or its potential consequences are not related to whether it works or not. The existence of a landscape of small bushes or the existence of a security camera can never give a guarantee that the crime will not be committed. 

When considered as a dome-organism in the sense of Buckminster Fuller; although the closed atmosphere of Ataköy seems to be the opposite, it is closer to claustrophobia.

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