Site’s translation would be, a gated community, but this is one of the not-really-yet-gated ones, so I will refer to it by using the word site /síte/.

It is not that I have any kind of emotional connection with this site, with its monotype buildings, because I lived there in my childhood, but it is more like I want to say to it I acknowledge you and have respect for your being, the way you are. I believe you have gained more or less your grounding in your 30-something years lifetime, which is a commonality between us.

It was not until 2 years ago, that I got to see the other parts of the site for the first time, when I needed a new ID, as I was registered somehow still there.

Since as a kid, I didn’t have much agency to decide to go for a walk and it was something very rare to go for a walk inside the quite big site.

I, in those days, sometimes wondered how other parts of the site would look like, obviously more or less the same, but how same that would be.

I remember having some fantasies about weird and beautiful looking çardaks, the wooden garden furnitures that are put at that time in these kind of sites and I have a memory of sitting in one of them once or twice and feeling like in a very special and exotic place.

Last time, 2 years ago, when I was able to sight its other parts than where we lived, I was surprised that it was still very live, a new living emerged with its markets, Migros, some smaller shops and even a few people hanging outside.

It turned out to be a still living place, and not like the scenario I expected, that no more people would be living there, but keeping their houses to sell sometime when/if they would gain value one day and the buildings are probably lacking maintenance. Except a few younger white collar workers who end up living there because it is still affordable with their low but still middle class income.

In its advertising flyer from 1986, it says, Soyak takes its meaning and characteristics from ‘the nation’ and ‘traditions’; and its technicality from the ‘civilization’ and ‘the epoch’.

It says also, it has been shaped in the architectural sense of the traditional Turkish streets with well balanced cumbalar – the bay windows –.

It surprises me that there is no mention about the main characteristic, the dome-like burgundy rooftops of the buildings, and where they fit in between these concepts. Maybe they think it is too obvious that the rooftops manifest the mixture they wanted to depict.

As I wander through its streets today on Google maps, I see a security guard person, who seems to rush to somewhere. There are people with masks on the streets, it must be taken last summer. People are walking on its narrow streets, almost too narrow for a car to make a turn and the pedestrian walkway barely enough for one person to walk.

Google’s AI has blurred people’s faces, also among them is the head statue of Atatürk that is located in a tiny green area in the middle of the two lanes road, facing the cars passing by towards the exit.

Within a click, I face the communal election posters hanging and see a few people with lots of CHP (the social democrats) flyers in their hands and many more in half-open boxes on the pedestrian next to them, apparently waiting to be spread in the site soon. I firstly think that this must be from the 2019 municipal elections, but it turns out, the photo was taken in 2014. Google’s AI managed to blur the faces in the election posters, which augments the feeling of timelessness and being trapped in the same loop.

One more click brings me back to 2020, people with masks, ‘Migros Sanalmarket’ ‘Migros Virtual Market’ it reads on the partly orange cars gathered around Migros market.

In the next image I am already thrown out of the site, in the middle of the highway all of a sudden, which is because of one of Soyak’s features is that it is not a closed system in itself, unlike many gated communities from the last decade, it has many holes, no walls, allowing leaking totally.

It is possible to enter from these holes in between greens and you can easily find yourself outside of it from one moment to another.

Göztepe Soyak Sitesi is not in Göztepe, the district it is named after, but is located in Ünalan mahallesi, within the borders of Üsküdar. As the adjacent district Göztepe refers to a different class and topography with its much younger housing history accommodating newer houses built for the middle class on the former farms and fields, it was decided to name the site after Göztepe apparently, in order to make the buyers feel it is worth the money they pay and still belonging to the right class where they would like to be or stay.

A while ago, reading an interview with the labSurlab -a network of independent initiatives in South America- from the book ‘Provocative Alloys: A Post-Media Anthology’, one of the group members says, “We have never been modern, and if ever, then ‘postmodernity’ came first.” “…But for many if not all of those southern communities it is not a question of being ‘post’ or ‘modern’.

In the South such notions are somewhat imported, they land real-time within processes of hybridisation-pura”. This sentence stayed with me for some time after reading it, as it puts well together in words what finds its correspondence in south in a broader sense, Global South so to say.

These buildings don’t hide their concrete bodies by covering the facade with shields or marble or from bottom to top glasses and they don’t try to glorify it either.

They say “Hi, I am concrete and I am here”.

Intended as a unity in their design, these concrete bodies build a heterogeneous ensemble together, with their varying heights, bumpy street junctions, narrow pedestrian walkways, parked cars with their two wheels on these walkways, secret places around the small electricity houses, same but different looks of each balcony and window.

As a kid I was fascinated by these small electricity houses, that transform large amounts of power to smaller ones, and the labyrinth kind of paths that lead to them, made to keep them away from the looks. And sometimes they were hidden behind some greens. It was not yet a common practice to paint random figures colourfully on them to make them ‘disappear’. They looked so unpretentious, even if sometimes dirty, it was totally ok for them to look dirty. Them being so down to earth, makes it possible that Pongwiffy – a witch of dirty habits, the novel character from one of my favourite books at that time – could very well have lived around them.

On the current website of Göztepe Soyak Sitesi, where the site is being described, I come across bunch of words like: ‘collective living spaces’, ‘site sakinleri – site inhabitants’ which almost sound like social realism. The language that is being used here seems to be stuck at around 80s-90s, whereas the new built gated communities sell themselves rather by practicing storytelling, making use of ‘your house, your home, your view’, ‘fitting to different needs of each’ and ‘living spaces’ in their experience descriptions. Not surprising not to see anything from ‘site’, ‘inhabitants’, let alone ‘collective’.

Walking on the streets on Google Maps another day, I encounter a few cats, not many, walking, sitting, standing. They all seem to be single for that time being, I don’t see them anywhere together cooking up anything.

Due to the topography of the area, the site is full of small hills, going up and down, hard to find any bigger zones that are flat. I remember these bumpy green spaces – the only greens other than the sport fields – in between the buildings and parking cars where it is hard to undertake any activity. But again, this makes this place less controllable by the safety guards. These spacial features of the site obviously haven’t been tried to overcome by flattening it and left like as it was – once a farm –.

The fear from an earthquake that may occur in the Marmara sea determines in this city whether buildings are obsolete or condemned to be used by humans until the district begins to gain monetary value with the continual increasing amount of people searching for housing, pushed forward by continuously new built roads, metro stations, bridges or artificial seas. Then they are condemned to be tore down and replaced with a new and a bit more earthquake-resistant ones for another half century.

I find site’s architectural plan drawings linger in an internet archive of a cultural institute, open for public use. Its architects with their company built some of the state and university buildings in the 70s and 80s, in naked concrete look. Today the company designs luxury minimalist houses and company buildings all over Turkey. The one and only image of Soyak Sitesi on the company’s Instagram is a black and white grainy picture of its lined houses, taken with an analogue camera. The post says “When looking back”. Hashtag modernism. As if they would bury it alive.

The plan drawings of the site are hand-drawn with pen, pencil and coloured pencils in dark pink. The representation of plants and all kinds of greens have a standardised form in these landscape drawings. A circular form which is closed but cut from sides intentionally irregularly, conceived based on how the trees are supposed to look like in summer, as if taken by a satellite looking towards them.

Here, being hand-drawn, some of them overflown out of their templates, they have overall a spontaneity, an unregulated irregularity of a nearly sketchy romantic landscape study.