heterotopia for urban hacking

Urban hacking is defined as unauthorized artistic and creative practices that aim to de/reconstruct the power structures and spatial politics of the urban public space. It has a growing power to raise awareness of sociopolitical issues, and enhance solidarity. The acts of urban hacking can be identified as dismantlement, reappropriation, redefinition, and occupy from within. Micheal Foucault’s heterotopias are discursive spaces that are somehow other, they are disturbing, intense, contradictory and transforming. Therefore, heterotopias (other spaces) have enormous motivation to fulfill the acts of urban hacking. In urban context, they can be examined through city element triad introduced by David Grahame Shane.

enclave inventory

main section

Enclaves are spaces of stasis, while armatures are spaces of flow, together they need heterotopias that provide the balance between them, which handle exceptions in the city, and which are constantly in flux. So, dismantling and reappropriating enclaves and slowing down armatures, and making them exposed will create the urban heterotopias modern societies need. Indeed, a museum function itself is a heterotopia where things are in places they shouldn’t be and at times they are not meant to be. Starting from reproducing the enclaves, the long governance building at left, and Zafer Bazaar at right, through underground, and making them properties of urban daily life, creating a sunken garden that reach different levels of this deep city section instead of planar relation of Zafer Park, then creating niches for experiences from the urban underground armatures, subways, underground water, and infrastructure were initial strategies that bring this heterotopia idea to life.

” urban heterotopias, contradictory and complementary spaces “

section passing through urban skylight and sunken garden

inside urban skylight

inbetween two urban underground armatures

At the middle of the sunken garden, there is skylight, which actually introduces light to the alter native ground floor that is created at minus fifth floor. The great underground city armature, the green, and light become part of this ground at the same which makes this occurrence both contradictory and complementary, a heterotopia.

deep elevation; excavation, display, exhibition, archive

In Zafer Bazaar, with the reproduction through underground, and transforming the gallery and its foyer to an volumetric armature instead of a planar one, provides a dynamic space of interaction and experience with the historical and cultural background of this location. On the other side, there is an assumed excavation at the bottom of the governance building, then the objects from it are exhibited at next levels, then turns the function into a library where the stories and information of this place are documented and stored.

ground floor + underground floors plans

underground exhibition space of the great armature / Atatürk Boulevard

hall of others

In order to forming a experience space with the underground water, there is an installation which inspired from a project called ‘Mirror Mirror’ done by Jason Bruges Studio. It consists of led panels that collect visual data of the visitors, then giving this visuals them back to other visitors. So, individuals will be exposed to other that will be there. Situations of both encountering with others and becoming an object of the exhibition are theoretically heterotopic and deserves a place in the idea of an urban heterotopia.

model making