Can Popular Assemblies Contribute to a Genuine Social Change? Insights From Park Forums in Istanbul

The Turkish state terminated the June 2013 public insurgency which involved night-long marches and the occupation of squares in the different neighbourhoods of Istanbul and cities all around Turkey, by extreme police force and a witch hunt of activists and social media users. Through conducting participant observation, in-depth interviews with the participants and a virtual ethnography on the facebook sites of the park forums in Istanbul, this paper will scrutinize the ways in which the popular assemblies interact with the established institutional agents, organizations and structures as innovative socio-spatial alternatives. It will also investigate how the park forums resist, change and try to subvert such institutions. In so doing, the major objective of this article will be to answer whether the direct democracy experiment via popular assemblies can offer an alternative for a genuine social change.