a cekcek's-length — ekineryilmaz

A çekçek’s-length

Storytelling of a waste(d) landscape
and its reaches through reclaiming the discarded

A çekçek’s-length is a study on navigating through and learning from a waste landscape characterized by precarity and uncertainty, embedded within the city of Istanbul with everlasting networks. My thesis work unfolds this landscape through a series of encounters that I had with one of the most prominent yet overlooked professions of Istanbul: the work of waste picking. It narrates what happens when waste(d) matter continues to live by communicating with new contexts, speaking to humans and non-humans whether it is the physical remains of a past or a garbage bag; and aims to dismantle deeply rooted ways of ‘not seeing,’ within the city and learn how to cope with a damaged planet that has already become our collective home.

M-Arch-T website

List of figures

Ekin Eryılmaz

index

works

Individual work

Master’s Thesis
TU Berlin
Spring 2024

Supervisors
Prof. Dr. Anke Hagemann
Dr.-Ing. Jamie-Scott Baxter
late Prof. Dr.-Ing. Hermann Schlimme

Awarded Best Master’s Thesis 2024 of the
M-Arch-T program

Starting from the çekçek (fig 9), the narrative zooms out to an abandoned piece of land (fig 2) which was later occupied by waste pickers as a warehouse, in Bostancı, Istanbul, where I resided for over 20 years, then a network of garbage containers (fig 3,4), and then a larger formation (fig 5) that embodies these fragments as the collective memory and habitat of the discarded commons in Istanbul.

Waste pickers rummage through Istanbul’s dumpsters, picking plastic, cardboard, metal, and other recyclable materials. Çekçek is the main if not the only tool that the pickers are using. It is a hand-pulled metal structure on wheels with a big sack attached.
The word çek-çek is derived from the verb stem çek- in Turkish, which means to pull. By adding the suffix -çi, the word çek-çek-çi commonly used by waste pickers to identify themselves would emerge. Waste picking in the city is embodied through çekçeks, which blend with the urban texture and flow through time and space.

The research asks the question of how waste picking transforms the city of Istanbul and offers insights into our collective uncertain future. It evaluates the waste ecosystem as the subtle transformative agency for learning broken world thinking, weaving it together with spatial biographies, oral histories, subaltern knowledge, my personal archive, and conversations with waste pickers and urbanites of Istanbul.

The elements of the city that are associated with waste embody society’s disdain, yet its transformation into economic value dictates its visibility.
At the point when we stop thinking about the journey of waste that no longer has any value for us, the survival practices of living and non-living begin.

For me, in my neighborhood in Istanbul, this point of encounter is mostly the two garbage containers in front of our house and a seemingly vacant land that is actually a warehouse and shelter for waste workers.
Designed to become a shopping mall at the beginning of the millennium, the complex consisting of 5 blocks sits as a sanctuary of waste rather than a capitalist monument of consumerism for 25 years due to unresolved lawsuits between its stakeholders.

Waste pickers rely on their own tools and organizational structures to carry out their work, as in how they define their habitats’ spatial qualities. The basement and parking lot initially designed for the mall now greet çekçeks, waste, and its pickers. Inside, materials are sorted, categorized, weighed, stacked, and prepared for transport to recycling factories.

The gallery openings, once designed for escalators, now facilitate quick transfer of sorted material from the upper floors to the ground floor (fig 43).

For many, waste picking is both a means of survival and a space for autonomy. Precarity defines not just labor conditions but also the existential experience of the waste pickers. In other words, waste pickers see their stay at the warehouse and waste picking not only as an obligation but also as a space to take refuge from societal norms and the systematical radical exclusion that they are subjected to.

From the garbage thrown into the Sea of Marmara until the ‘60s, to the explosion claiming 39 lives at Hekimbaşı landfill in 1993, to the labor strikes of the ‘90s and 2000s that transformed streets into towering heaps of refuse, and into the present time of waste pickers facing threats to their livelihoods through confiscations of their çekçeks and materials; Istanbul’s waste history reflects a half-century narrative of struggles and transformations.

The Hekimbaşı landfill was converted into a sports complex decades after the explosion, covered with soil, and ventilation pipes were installed. The invisible waste landscape served as a stark reminder of how deeply our desire and drive to ignore our garbage had taken root within us- from the metal panels that hide the warehouse at Bostancı to the people changing their ways when they see a çekçek on the street. And yet, despite all of our efforts, the garbage is here to stay.

Elements of waste, waste work and discarded ecology move beyond their physical forms, defining a fluid dimension: a ‘landscape that keeps rewriting its memories.’ These stories reveal how waste pickers navigate identity, relationships, and belonging within marginalized afterlives. They translate into spaces acknowledging social exclusion, resilience and precarity.
We imagine the concept of precarity and uncertainty to be an exception to how the world works and relate it with terms like crisis and what ‘drops out’ from the system. What if as Anna Tsing suggests, precarity is the condition of our time, rather than an exception?

Neither tales of progress nor of ruin tell us how to think about collaborative survival. A çekçek’s-length lets the çekçekçis and the ecology of waste speak, not because they will save us, but perhaps because they are the imaginative forces of a future we do not yet know, of a world we do not yet recognize.

1
Going through the book
Video by the author

2
Approved site plan proposal of the shopping mall complex
From the municipal archive, reproduced by the author

3
Regular garbage container
No scale, created by the author

4
Underground container
No scale, created by the author

5
Ventilation pipes and the waste topography of Hekimbaşı landfill
No scale, created by the author

6
Waste ecology through the hole in a metal sheet
Video by the author

7
The visual archive, printed
Video by the author

8
Çekçeks in formation
From the author’s archive, 2024

9
A çekçek parked at one of the warehouses in Ümraniye district
From the author’s archive, 2022

10
A customized çekçek
No scale, created by the author
In the big bag or FIBC there are cardboard, plastics, and packaging; a number or a sign to make the specific çekçek distinguishable is mounted to one of the handles; 4 Metal or rubber handles; a smaller sack is attached to sort out items that might have more value; hanged to the metal frame are personal items; metal frame platform and wheels holding the çekçek together

11
A çekçek parked in a vacant lot 500 meters from the author’s house, in the background a recently built luxury shopping mall and residential complex
Collage with photos from the author’s archive, 2024 and 2019

12
An extension cord getting picked
From the author’s archive, 2023

13
A bottle’s plastic qualityy is being tested
From the author’s archive, 2023

14
Time to slide downhill with çekçek
From the author’s archive, 2024

15
It is one of the most effective ways to fit more material in the sacks: Foot stomping
From the author’s archive, 2024

16
Testing the wheels of çekçek
From the author’s archive, 2024

17
A dumping site undergoing different encounters, recorded for apx. 6 hr.
From the author’s archive, 2023

18
Work and leisure blending
Fragment created by the author

19
A fragile abstraction:
Agglutination of discarded and built environment, inspired by plastiglomerates

20
What is left of the structure of the shopping mall project
Photos from the author’s archive, 2023

21
From top to bottom:
Fostering a jumbled museum
From the author’s archive, 2022
Site’s topography communicating with other lives from the point where its left unfinished
From the author’s archive, 2023
The office with PVC window
frames, leading to the road in the middle of the complex where a truck is being loaded for materials to be transferred to the recycling companies
From the author’s archive, 2022

22
Terrain vague
Facade diagrams
See the scale bar, created by the author

23
Terrain vague
Floor plan diagrams
See the scale bar, created by the author

24
1997 dated first basment floor plan of the shopping mall project, once ssigned for cars and service spaces, currently where recyclable material is heavily accumulating
No scale, from the municipality archive, accessed by the author in 2022

25
Garbage heaps and modern-day middens: Bostancı warehouse’s waste landscape re-imagined
No scale, created by the author

26
A fragile abstraction:
Agglutination of discarded and built environment, inspired by plastiglomerates
Collage created by the author

27
1997 dated block B1 (later revised as block A) front entrance facade elevation
No scale, from the municipality archive, accessed by the author in 2022

28
1/50 South-east block physical model, with other components articulated to the main structure

29
An assembly of bags full of recyclable materials lined up side by side waiting for their turn to be sent to recycling factories, an electric hoist to lift them, fuse box(es), cables, and water supply, located in the south-east block of the complex
Fragment created by the author

30
Warehouse entrance for collectors, “No trespassing!” sign on the front
Fragment created by the author

31
Electric hoist assembly installed for the bags, sometimes weighing above 500 kg
Fragment created by the author

32
From top to bottom:
Arranging the contents: Cardboard boxes are flattened and palced to the edges to stiffen the form of the bag.
Search for another container begins.
From the author’s archive, 2024

33
The gathering space and narghile corner waste pickers built, re-imagined
Fragment created by the author

34
Patched wall (fig 36) elevation
No scale, created by the author

35
One of the backgammon boards of the warehouse re-imagined: Some lost checkers are replaced with electronic bits
Fragment created by the author

36
Axonometric view of a wall from the warehouse built with various materials patched together
No scale, created by the author

37
Our family’s old vacuum cleaner, which we threw next to the container in front of our house and which led me to meet at least 3 waste collectors
From the author’s archive, 2024

38
From top to bottom:
The vert.cal openings space and piles of materials.
Sorted materials inside sacks.
From the author’s archive, 2023

39
Video showing how vertical openings that are supposed to hold escalators and staircases for the shopping mall, is now used
From the author’s archive, 2023

40
Çekçek’s and waste picker’s journey from within the warehouse to the streets
From the author’s archive, 2023

41
The scales and accounting units of the warehouse, where the material is being weighed and priced
From the author’s archive, 2023

42
Elements of the warehouse getting sorted and arranged
From the author’s archive, 2023

43
A section perspective cutting through the vertical gap originally designed for the stairs and escalators of the shopping mall
No scale, created by the author
The billboard that used to showcase an interior view of the mall design; conveyor tube to transfer the materials; big trash containers for materials to accumulate

44
Aerial view of the warehouse, location undisclosed
Google maps

45
The domestic waste and its connections
No scale, created by the author
Random discard, domestic discard, waste collection point, waste picked up

46
Waste accumulating at the warehouse forming a wasteland, material stacks sorted out by the waste pickers are later being transfered to legal recycling companies
No scale, created by the author

47
Aerial view of the Hekimbaşı landfill, now a sports complex
41°03'20.3"N 29°06'27.4"E
Google maps

48
From top to bottom:
Vertical ventilation pipes.
A fragment of old Hekimbaşı dumpʼs terrain.
The old Hekimbaşı landfill, no trespassing sings.
The names of some of those who died in the explosion can still be read at the neglected memorial.
From the author’s archive, 2024

49
Stratification of Hekimbaşı landfill: The piling up of waste, the explosion and the ‘rehabilitation’
See the scale bar, created by the author

50
The old monument, almost unrecognizable
From the author’s archive, 2024

51
Waste picker collecting scrap metal after the dismantling of the interior of a shop that changed owners
Ataşehir, from the author’s archive, 2023

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