Article Critique: Learning from Taksim Square by Watenpaugh - Essay Example

In the article, the author mentions that Taksim Park has seen many changes and social movements during different periods of the twentieth century. Once the area housed an Armenian cemetery and St. Gregory church; however, the cemetery was demolished, and on its area, and surrounding properties now stands the Gezi Park, the Istanbul Radio building, and many luxurious hotels, including Hilton. According to the author Taksim, in its present form, designed by the urban planner Henri Post, presents a vibrant section of the city and symbolizes modern Istanbul.

The author of the article states that the current Prime Minister wants to destroy the symbol of Istanbul and build in its place a shopping mall in the fashion of 19th-century artillery barracks of the Ottoman Empire. People consider that in taking such a decision Prime Minister acted as an authoritarian ruler who wants to revive the Muslim elite culture in a secular country. A peaceful sit-in protest against the uprooting of trees from a park created turbulence in the political arena of a country spreading a wave of violent protests across the country; was the author able to describe the underpinning cause of this incident?

From the title of the article, one would imply that the author is conveying a message that the Taksim Park incident should be an example that, in the 21st century, a leader cannot use state power to change a country’s environment. In the modern century, people’s concerns over the balance of development and degradation of the environment cannot be ignored anymore. The author very precisely portrayed the sentiment of a large cross-section of Turkish society through the sentence “Erdogan's and other government officials' apparent contempt for and vilification of the protesters, and their seeming indifference to their concerns (Watenpaugh 1).

” In the first paragraph, the author concludes that the movement shows deep discontent in Turkish society against Erdogan’s authoritarian government, but the author does not provide an analysis of this conclusion based on facts. Instead, the author provides links to different articles on the Internet, so the reader reads the articles to establish the validity of the author’s conclusion. The author uses this method repetitively in all the articles. This is perhaps the weakest side of the article.

However, the author successfully explains that the re-creation of 19th-century Ottoman military barracks, which once were destroyed, and the naming of a planned third bridge over the Bosphorus after the controversial 16th-century Sultan Selim indeed portray the current government as a neo-Ottoman Muslim elite. The article contains 10 paragraphs. In these paragraphs, the author failed to explain whether the article intends to present to the audience that the Taksim protest describes people’s concerns over urban development at the cost of environmental sacrifice, or it describes the protest against the authoritarian behavior of Erdogan’s government.

The motive in, this case is, the protest against the uprooting of trees, but the cause is political, rooted, and ed deep in society. Though auth the or implied it, but failed to explain it explicitly.  The author’s commentary in the article, “Through a series of highly contested lawsuits, the municipality managed to appropriate the cemetery from the Armenian community (Watenpaugh 2)” and subsequent analysis, ”This process illustrates the relentless power of the state (Wantenpaugh 2)” leads to believe that Turkey always had authoritarian rulers.