"In the recent years, the population and urban fabric of Sur have become the target of the intertwined processes of urban renewal and military operations. The project of urban redevelopment, legitimized by the rhetoric of natural disaster risks, was facilitated by the 2015-2016 military operations. The narrative of terrorist threat, used as a justification for the military campaign, functioned as the final catalyst for the destruction of almost half of Sur’s built environment and the repeated dis-placement of around 24,000 people." 

In this virtual conversation, the collective discusses their collective’s project tracing and visualizing displacement and urban transformation in Sur, Diyarbakir’s historic district, which took place before, during and after the 2015-2016 military operations in the predominantly Kurdish southeast of Turkey. The presentation focuses on the continuity between the urban destruction through military means and the subsequent reconstruction of the city, both of which co-operate in a militarized form of urban planning. 

Members of the collective discuss the continuity between the destruction of the city’s built environment and the displacement of the population by military means and by means of the subsequent urban renovation. They also examine how these two interconnected aspects of state violence are employed for the purposes of ethnic governance.

The workshop compares the case of Sur with that of Maspero neighborhood in Cairo, presented by the “Madd Platform” team as part of their visual art project titled Memories of the City. The comparison of the two cases show that the memory of cities around the world is being continuously erased through the gentrification of its neighborhoods whether it happens through manipulating rents or by forced eviction as part of a military operation; whether the buildings are demolished or reused by other classes of people.

In a presentation titled "Sur's Streets and Courtyards," M. Zelal Tastan shares methods and experiences of the collective work to document the change and transformation of Sur's urban fabric during the conflict process.