A Building Does Not Collapse by Itself

Dear Young Comrades,

Six years ago today, on Friday 30 October 2020, at 14:51, I was on the third floor of Emrah Apartment in Bayraklı. An earthquake of magnitude 6.6 struck off Samos, and the building I was in, dozens of kilometres from the epicentre, collapsed within a few seconds. About 45 minutes later my cousins pulled me from the rubble. I survived. Thirty neighbours in the same building did not. That day 117 people died in İzmir.

A few days after I came out of the rubble, on 2 November 2020, I told what had happened to me on a live broadcast on Tekno Politik. Then, in many interviews and from many platforms, I tried to say the same thing: the earthquake did not kill us; the order of rent killed us. An earthquake is a natural event. Whether a building stays standing in that earthquake is decided years earlier, at the zoning-plan desk, the permit desk, the inspection desk, and in the chamber of Parliament where the amnesty law is voted.

Six years later we want to tell this technically, not emotionally. We want to show, link by link, how a building becomes "legal" and "safe" on paper, where rent enters each link of this chain, and which article of which law protects that rent. Because our thesis is this: no step towards preventing earthquake deaths is realistic until these relations are broken. A new code, a new drill, a new assembly-area sign: as long as the chain of rent stays in place, each of them is a cover pulled over the next rubble.

First the summary, then the detail.

---

Summary: Ten Theses

1. The earthquake is natural; the destruction is social. On 30 October 2020 the buildings in Bayraklı did not fall on the fault. They fell on alluvial ground and on bad building. The same earthquake, the same distance: one building stood, the one beside it collapsed. The difference was set not by nature but by the relations of production.

2. A building exists through a chain of seven links: the zoning plan, the soil survey, the project, the permit, building inspection, the occupancy permit, and the period of use. In Türkiye, at every link of this chain, the side that decides and the side that profits from the decision are the same.

3. A zoning amnesty is the legal acquittal of an unsafe building. Since 1948, by the count of the Union of Chambers of Turkish Engineers and Architects (TMMOB), fourteen amnesties have been passed. The 2018 "zoning peace" received about 10 million applications and collected 24.7 billion lira; building safety was left to the owner's declaration. In the ten provinces destroyed on 6 February, 294,166 buildings had taken a certificate under this amnesty.

4. A plan change is the tap of rent. Every storey a municipal council adds to a plot by its decision transfers a fortune, free of charge, to the owner of that plot. The ground stays the same, the load increases; the rise in value goes to a private pocket, and the risk stays with the public.

5. Building inspection is inspection on paper. Since 2001 inspection has been given to private companies; for many years the contractor being inspected paid the inspector's fee. The inspecting engineer signs as a precarious wage-earner; the owner of the building they sign for is their client.

6. The code is written for the new building; death happens in the old one. Türkiye's earthquake codes are at world standard. But most of the existing stock was built before those codes, or in spite of them. The problem is not the text. It is application and property.

7. The period of use is uninspected. The column of the shop on the ground floor is cut, a storey is added to the roof, a balcony is enclosed; nobody looks. There is no periodic examination throughout the life of the building.

8. Urban transformation turns the earthquake into an opportunity for rent. In the flats-for-construction model, transformation happens where it yields a profit to the contractor; the poor neighbourhood, the small plot, the old building where no profit appears waits. Risk is queued by property value.

9. There is no reckoning, because the law prevents the question. The contractor is tried for "conscious negligence"; the public official stands behind the shield of permission in Law 4483; those who passed the amnesty are never tried. For 30 deaths in Emrah Apartment the sentence was 14 years, 5 months and 10 days; in Rıza Bey Apartment, where 36 people died, there is still no verdict six years later.

10. The solution is not technical but political; but technical knowledge is the weapon of politics. A permanent ban on zoning amnesties, the public capture of the rise in value created by a plan change, public and independent building inspection, open building data, transformation carried out by the public and protecting the tenant, the repeal of Law 4483. Without these, "earthquake preparedness" is a slogan.

---

I. What Happened in Bayraklı? A Technical Photograph of an Earthquake

A distant earthquake, a nearby collapse

The epicentre of the 30 October 2020 earthquake was at sea, north of the island of Samos. The coast of Seferihisar shook, and the sea flooded Sığacık. But most of the deaths were much farther from the epicentre, in Bayraklı and Bornova. Why?

The first part of the answer is the ground. The day after the earthquake, Alim Murathan, chair of the İzmir branch of the Chamber of Geological Engineers, told Evrensel this: the damage in Bayraklı had nothing to do with the fault line; there was a thick layer of alluvium in Bornova and Bayraklı, and the buildings had not been built for that ground. Murathan said something else: soil borings were being made in the region, but the institutions that examined and approved the results had no geological engineer.

Young comrades, there are two technical concepts you need to know here:

• Site amplification. When an earthquake wave passes from hard rock into soft, water-saturated alluvium, it slows down and its amplitude grows. A shaking that has come from far away and weakened in the rock strengthens again in the alluvial basin. The eastern end of the Gulf is exactly such a basin.
• Resonance. Every ground and every building has its own period of vibration. If the period of the ground is close to that of the building, the building absorbs the shaking and amplifies it. Reinforced-concrete buildings of medium height are especially exposed to this danger on soft ground.

These were not discovered in 2020. They are taught in the second year of engineering faculties. The ground of Bayraklı was not unknown either; the Chamber, in Murathan's words, had foreseen the damage and said so in public.

The same ground, a different fate

But the second part of the answer matters more: on the same ground some buildings stood and some collapsed. The ground is a condition, not the cause of death. If the ground is known, the foundation is chosen for it, the structural system is chosen for it, the number of storeys is chosen for it. If they were not chosen, someone decided not to choose. This essay asks where that decision was made, by whom, and for whose benefit.

Today: one in three of 60,000 buildings

Four years after the earthquake, the İzmir branch of the Chamber of Civil Engineers and İzmir Metropolitan Municipality inventoried about 60,000 buildings in Bornova and Bayraklı. The result was announced in January 2025: about 35 per cent of the buildings have a high probability of being unsafe in an earthquake. Bengi Atak, chair of the İzmir branch of the Chamber of Civil Engineers, drew attention to two further details: in the high-priority group, buildings from before 2000 predominate; and İzmir's humid, salty air speeds the decay of concrete that is not resistant to sulphate. There are 950,490 buildings in İzmir in total.

So six years later, in the two districts where the most lives were lost, one building in three still faces the same question. Keep this number in mind; at the end of the essay we will return to the question of why it was not solved in six years.

---

II. How Does a Building Become "Legal"? A Chain of Seven Links

For a building to stand, it needs a structural system set against gravity. For a building to be legal, it needs a chain of documents. In Türkiye these two chains have been separated from each other: the chain of documents is completed, the structural chain is left incomplete. Let us examine the links one by one, and at each link write what should happen technically, what actually happens, and where rent enters.

Link 1: The zoning plan

What should happen? Under Zoning Law 3194, how the city will grow is set by plans in stages: at the upper scale an environmental layout plan, then a 1/5000 master zoning plan, then a 1/1000 implementation zoning plan. The plan determines where, at how many storeys, at what density, and for what use a building may be made. Technically, the plan rests on the ground, infrastructure capacity, transport, green space and disaster risk. Before planning, a geological-geotechnical study and microzonation are carried out; how much load each ground can carry is mapped.

What actually happens? The plan turns into a chain of changes voted in the municipal council. By single decisions called "plan amendments", the number of storeys, the floor-area ratio (the ratio of built area to plot area) and the type of use of a single parcel are changed. These piecemeal changes, contrary to the principle of planning as a whole, are so common that to know a city's plan in force in Türkiye one must read hundreds of council decisions.

Where does rent enter? When the floor-area ratio is raised from 1.5 to 3, the area that can be built on a plot of 1,000 square metres rises from 1,500 to 3,000 square metres. This rise in value, which the plot owner obtains without spending any labour, is, in Marx's words, the pure form of absolute and differential rent: society creates the value (the road, the metro, the school, the urban population), and a council decision transfers it to a single property owner. The ground has not changed; the load to be placed on it has doubled.

A plan change is the creation of a private fortune by a public decision. In every country where this fortune is not taken back by the public, the plan is a commodity for sale.

Link 2: The soil survey

What should happen? A boring is made for each parcel, the soil class is determined, and the risk of liquefaction and settlement is calculated. Geological and geophysical engineers prepare this report; the municipality or the relevant institution approves it by a specialist's hand.

What actually happens? The soil survey is a service paid for by the parcel owner or the contractor. The client of the person who prepares the report is the person who will be affected by the report's result. If the result is "the ground is bad, the foundation will be expensive", that means a cost for the client. Murathan's finding for İzmir, that "the approving institutions have no geological engineer", shows that public supervision is in practice absent at this link of the chain.

Where does rent enter? The cost of the foundation is a large item in the total cost of the building. On bad ground a raft foundation, bored piles and ground improvement are required. Every lira cut from these is written into the contractor's profit.

Link 3: The project

What should happen? Architectural, structural (reinforced-concrete), electrical and mechanical projects are prepared according to the earthquake code in force. The structural project calculates which columns, beams and shear walls will carry the building's earthquake load. The municipality's zoning and project units examine these projects and approve them.

What actually happens? There are two typical problems. The first is the gap between project and construction: the shear wall that is in the approved project is not built on site; the project specifies 16-millimetre bar, and 12-millimetre bar is placed. The second is that the examination of the project is for show: think how many structural projects an engineer in a municipal zoning directorate can really examine, with a check of the calculations, in a year. The person who was zoning director of Bornova Municipality when Emrah Apartment was permitted, and the civil engineer at the desk that examined the reinforced-concrete project, were the subject of a separate case opened by the prosecutor's office on the claim that they approved the project despite its defects. This case is the official record that the project link of the chain is broken too.

Where does rent enter? The contractor commissions the project and pays for it. The author of the project wants the next job from the same contractor. An engineer who proposes an "expensive" structural system does not get the next job. The market rewards the cheap project.

Link 4: The building permit

What should happen? If the plan, the soil survey and the projects are consistent, the municipality issues a permit. The permit is the public permission that a building may be built.

What actually happens? In Türkiye the permit is local politics' most expensive signature. The speed, the conditions and the "flexibility" of the permit are a measure of the relation between the municipality and construction capital. When a building starts without a permit, or contrary to its permit, the municipality has the power to seal it and to demolish it; this power is rarely used in the face of voters and of capital. Because demolition is a cost, and looking the other way is an investment.

Link 5: Building inspection

We will treat this link in detail in a separate section (Section IV). Here let us note only this: the system that should inspect on site the pouring of the concrete, the tying of the reinforcement and the striking of the formwork has been a commercial service since 2001.

Link 6: The occupancy permit

What should happen? When the building is finished, the municipality establishes that it was built in accordance with the permit and the project, and issues a permit to use it.

What actually happens? In Türkiye millions of buildings have no occupancy permit; that is, it was never established that they "were finished in accordance with the project". People live in these buildings for years, and electricity and water subscriptions are connected one way or another. The fate of a building without an occupancy permit is to wait for the next zoning amnesty.

Link 7: The period of use

What should happen? If a building is to be used for 50 years, for 70 years, it needs periodic examination. There is a requirement of periodic control for lifts, for the natural-gas installation, for fire systems. There is none for the structural system.

What actually happens? Throughout the life of the building, every intervention that touches its structural system is in practice uninspected. A column is cut to enlarge the shop on the ground floor, a shear wall is removed; a storey is added to the roof; balconies are enclosed and added to a room, and the load increases. In the case of Yılmaz Erbek Apartment, which collapsed in the İzmir earthquake, the claim that a column was cut in the supermarket on the ground floor was debated. On 6 February there were also shops under Ezgi Apartment and Manolya Sitesi in Kahramanmaraş; the expert reports wrote that load-bearing walls had been removed. We told this in detail in our essay on the families in front of the Ministry of Justice.

In engineering this is called a soft storey: the upper floors are stiff with walls, while the ground floor is open and weak for a shop window. The earthquake's energy piles up on the weakest floor, and the building collapses from there. This mechanism of collapse, known everywhere in the world, is reproduced in every neighbourhood in Türkiye for the sake of commercial rent. Profit comes out of the column.

Rıza Bey Apartment: strengthening on paper

The building in which the most lives were lost in the İzmir earthquake was Rıza Bey Apartment, where 36 people died. According to a report BirGün published yesterday, the claims in the case show how the last link of the chain broke: it is argued that the strengthening carried out on the building in 2003 was cosmetic; in 2012 the municipality marked the building as third-degree risky, but nothing was done. The building was on record both as "strengthened" and as "risky", and neither record saved anyone.

---

III. The Zoning Amnesty: Legalising Insecurity

A history: fourteen amnesties in seventy years

According to the Zoning Amnesty Report published by TMMOB in 2018, the first zoning amnesty in Türkiye was passed in 1948, and from that date to 2018 fourteen amnesties became law. Let us make a short periodisation:

Period	Basic regulation	Class content
1948–1966	The first amnesties; the Gecekondu Law, No. 775 (1966)	The state not solving the housing problem of the worker who migrated to the city; the gecekondu as the dwelling the cheap labour force built for itself
1983–1986	Laws 2805 (1983), 2981 (1984), 3290 and 3414 (1986)	The neoliberal turn after 12 September; the gecekondu becoming a title deed, the title deed an apartment, the apartment an object of rent; the passage from "gecekondu amnesty" to "zoning amnesty"
Expansion after 1980	The amnesties extending to agriculture, industry, tourism, the coast, forest, pasture and protected sites	The subject of the amnesty shifting from the poor migrant to capital
2018	Law 7143, Temporary Article 16 added to Law 3194 (the "zoning peace")	An election year; the wholesale acquittal of the existing unsafe stock for votes, fee income and construction capital

Young comrades, see a transformation in this table. In the 1960s the typical owner of an unlicensed building was a worker who came to the city and put up a one-room dwelling in a night. The state did not give that worker housing, but it looked the other way at what the worker had put up; because that worker meant cheap labour for the factory. From the 1980s on, that one-room dwelling passed, through the amnesty laws, to a title deed and then to a contractor in exchange for flats; the contractor turned it into an apartment of four, five, six storeys. The subject of the amnesty passed from the poor migrant to small and medium construction capital. The unlicensed building was no longer a need for shelter. It was a method of accumulation.

The 2018 "zoning peace": the technical mechanism

Law 7143, which entered into force on 18 May 2018, added Temporary Article 16 to Zoning Law 3194. The mechanism was this:

1. The owner of every building made before 31 December 2017, contrary to the plan or to the permit, could apply through e-Devlet.
2. In the application, the building's area, number of storeys and type of use were entered by the owner's declaration.
3. A fee calculated on the value of the plot and the building was paid.
4. In return a "building registration certificate" was issued; the building was counted as "legal" until it was rebuilt or entered urban transformation.

Now look at what is absent from these four articles: there is no engineer. There is no soil survey, no structural calculation, no examination on site. The law also left responsibility for building safety to the owner of the building. The sentence of the TMMOB report falls exactly into place: "A citizen's life has been entrusted to another person's declaration." The report also recalled this: that buildings which had been inspected could also benefit from the amnesty is a confession that the inspection was not done.

The figures

• Applications: About 10 million (Sözcü, February 2023).
• Independent units whose fee was paid: 7,393,413; income collected, 24.74 billion lira (Ministry of Environment and Urbanisation data, January 2020).
• The earthquake region: 294,166 building registration certificates had been issued in the ten provinces destroyed on 6 February 2023: Adana 59,247, Hatay 56,464, Gaziantep 40,224, Kahramanmaraş 39,058, Şanlıurfa 25,521, Malatya 22,299, Osmaniye 21,107, Diyarbakır 14,719, Adıyaman 10,629, Kilis 4,897 (Sözcü).
• Past earthquakes: The TMMOB report, relying on data from a parliamentary research commission of the Grand National Assembly, reports that 80 per cent of the buildings damaged or destroyed in earthquake regions were buildings that had benefited from zoning amnesties.

The political economy of the amnesty

A zoning amnesty does three things at once:

First, it valorises property. An unlicensed flat cannot be sold, cannot be mortgaged, cannot be the subject of credit. A flat tied to the title deed by a building registration certificate enters the market. The amnesty puts millions of dwellings into the circulation of commodities in one move. This is an injection of liquidity given to the construction sector and to the banking system.

Second, it provides income to the state. 24.7 billion lira was a serious budget item in the Türkiye of 2018. The state obtained income by selling an insecurity it could not inspect, or did not want to inspect.

Third, it encourages the next unlicensed building. Every amnesty gives the message "build without a licence, wait for the next amnesty". Fourteen amnesties in seventy years is an amnesty every five years on average. For a contractor, the expected cost of breaking the rules is lower than the expected profit. This is not a moral problem. It is a price signal.

And the one who pays the price of these three is the tenant and the worker who live in that building; that is, not the one who received the certificate, but the one who sleeps inside the building.

A zoning amnesty is not a "peace". In TMMOB's words, it is at most a peace made between rentier groups and the state. The dead were not a party to that peace.

The expectation of an amnesty today

Since 2018 the rumour of a "new zoning amnesty" goes back into circulation in every election period, in every debate on an omnibus law. Articles titled "will a zoning amnesty be passed?" never disappear from property websites. That this question is asked every year shows that the amnesty is not an exception in Türkiye but an expected institution. There is no constitutional obstacle to a new amnesty being passed on top of those we lost in İzmir six years ago and the more than 53,000 we lost on 6 February.

---

IV. Building Inspection: The Inspector Who Inspects Their Client

From 1999 to Law 4708

The Marmara earthquake of 17 August 1999 caused the death of about 17,000 people by the official figures. After the earthquake it was accepted that municipalities had been inadequate in building inspection, and in 2001 Law 4708 on Building Inspection was passed. Inspection was given to private "building inspection firms".

In appearance this was a professionalisation. In reality it was to hand inspection to the market. For many years the system worked like this:

• The building owner or the contractor makes a contract with a building inspection firm of their own choosing.
• The contractor pays the inspection fee.
• The firm inspects the site and approves the progress-payment certificates; it hopes to take its next job from the same contractor.

Imagine that in a football match the home team chooses the referee, and the home side also pays the referee's salary. However honest the referee is, if they want to be called to the next match they will have trouble awarding a penalty against the home side. This is the structural contradiction of building inspection: the inspector's client is the person being inspected.

With the change in 2019, in order to soften this contradiction, it was arranged that inspection firms would be assigned by the Ministry through an electronic system, and that fees would be paid not directly by the contractor but through the system. This is a step; but inspection is still the business of profit-making companies, and the millions of buildings put up before 2019 were "inspected" under the old system.

The labour of the inspecting engineer

Let us not pass here without seeing a class relation. The young civil engineer who works in a building inspection firm is a precarious wage-earner. They have dozens of sites on their hands; they cannot go to all of them on the same day. If they are not there when the concrete is poured, they are expected to sign that "it was poured". If they do not sign, they lose their job. In the Ezgi Apartment case in Kahramanmaraş, the responsible engineer's defence, "I have 35 buildings in Kahramanmaraş", is this relation as it fell into the court record.

The engineering chambers have for years called this "signature engineering". This is not the moral weakness of individual engineers. It is the result of professional labour being subordinated to capital. The engineer's knowledge is harnessed to the calculation of profit; the power to say "no" is taken from their hands together with job security. We told this for our own line of work in The Computing Worker's Handbook: if knowledge labour is unorganised, knowledge is capital's weapon.

The cooperative period and İzmir

In the Emrah Apartment case, the person tried as the building's contractor said in court, "I was not the contractor, I was only the director of the cooperative". This sentence is a summary of İzmir's housing production in the 1980s and 1990s. An important part of the apartments that filled the slopes of Bayraklı and Bornova was built in those years by housing cooperatives. A cooperative is in principle a good thing; but in buildings that are a cooperative on paper and in practice run by a contractor, responsibility scatters: the cooperative member says "we trusted the contractor", the contractor says "I was only the director"; and inspection in those years was nothing but the municipality's signature for show.

---

V. The Codes: The Text Is World-Standard, the Building Is Not

Türkiye's earthquake codes are technically advanced texts. The codes of 1975, 1998 and 2007 were followed by the Turkish Building Earthquake Code (TBDY 2018), which entered into force on 1 January 2019. TBDY rests on AFAD's new earthquake hazard map; it sets out soil classes, performance targets, and special methods of calculation for tall buildings.

So where is the problem? In three places.

First, the code does not apply backwards. The new code applies to new permits. A building made in 1998 may have been designed to the 1975 code; the 2019 code has nothing to do with it. The finding of the İzmir Chamber of Civil Engineers says exactly this: in the high-risk group, buildings from before 2000 predominate. After 1999 the requirement of ready-mixed concrete and the changes in the code brought an improvement; but the existing stock is still there.

Second, complying with the code is expensive. The concrete class the code wants, ribbed reinforcement, close stirrups, stirrup ends hooked at 135 degrees, the strong-column weak-beam principle, the ratio of shear walls: all of these are a cost. If inspection is weak, each of them is an item that can be cut for profit. The images that come out of the rubble are always the same: concrete that can be broken by hand, plain bar, sparse stirrups bent at 90 degrees, sea sand, a cut column.

Third, material and climate. İzmir's humid and salty air speeds the corrosion of reinforcement in concrete that is not resistant to sulphate. Rusting steel swells, cracks the concrete, and weakens the section. This requires maintenance and periodic inspection; but as we saw above, nobody looks at the structural system during the period of use.

Türkiye's problem is not "being unable to write the right code". The problem is that, in a market where complying with the code is a cost and not complying is a profit, there is no independent power to enforce the code.

---

VI. Urban Transformation: Ordering Risk by Property Value

Law 6306 and the flats-for-construction model

Law 6306 of 2012, on the Transformation of Areas under Disaster Risk, was born on paper as an answer to exactly the question of this essay: risky buildings would be identified, demolished, and safe buildings put in their place.

But the mechanism left the financing largely to the flats-for-construction model. That is: the contractor demolishes the old building and builds the new one; gives flats to the owners, and takes their profit by selling the extra flats. For transformation to happen in this model, a source of surplus value is required; that is usually an increase in the floor-area ratio, that is, more storeys.

Let us list the results technically:

1. Transformation proceeds not by the order of risk but by the order of profit. Areas where the plot value is high and an increase in the floor-area ratio is possible are transformed first. Risky buildings in poor neighbourhoods, on small parcels, where no profit appears, wait.
2. Density increases. An eight-storey building comes in place of the old four-storey one. The same ground, the same road, the same infrastructure, twice the population. Evacuation after an earthquake, assembly areas and infrastructure capacity fall.
3. The tenant is displaced. In transformation the right-holder is the property owner. The tenant cannot pay the rent of the new building and leaves the neighbourhood. Transformation in this sense is a class sorting.
4. The "risky building" label turns into an instrument of rent. The identification of a risky building can also be used to empty buildings on a sound but valuable plot. Buildings that are truly risky, but that nobody is interested in, are not even identified.

With the change made by Law 7471 in 2023, the Presidency of Urban Transformation was established, and the decision quorum in risky buildings was lowered from two thirds to a simple majority. This speeds transformation; but it also weakens the power of objection of the minority right-holder and of the tenant. Is what speeds up safety, or rent? The answer depends on who carries out the transformation, with what financing, and by whose decision.

Six years later in İzmir

After the İzmir earthquake, 5,061 dwellings and 357 workplaces were built in Bayraklı by TOKİ and delivered to the right-holders. We do not belittle this; it matters that a survivor of the earthquake finds a home to put their head under. But let us note two things. First, immediately after the earthquake, the proposal in the Bayraklı Municipal Council to declare the district a disaster zone was rejected by the votes of the members of the People's Alliance; think of the effect of a disaster-zone decision on right-holding and on support. Second, putting new buildings in the place of collapsed ones does not change the fact that one third of the 60,000 buildings in Bornova and Bayraklı is still at high risk. Filling the place of the rubble is not transformation; transformation is preventing the next rubble.

---

VII. There Is No Reckoning, Because the Law Prevents the Question

We have seen every link of the chain. Now let us look at what happens when the chain breaks, that is, when the building collapses and people die.

Emrah Apartment: 30 dead, 14 years, 5 months and 10 days

The building I lived in. On 5 May 2023 a verdict was issued in İzmir. The contractor, the author of the structural reinforced-concrete project and the technical application officer were first sentenced to 17 years and 4 months in prison for "causing the death and injury of more than one person by conscious negligence"; with the "good conduct" reduction the sentence became 14 years, 5 months and 10 days. They were banned from the profession for three years. The site chief died while the trial was going on. The families' request for detention was rejected. A separate case was opened against the zoning director of Bornova Municipality at the time, who issued the permit, and against the engineer who examined the project.

Thirty people. "Good conduct." Not detained.

Rıza Bey Apartment: 36 dead, six years, no verdict

The case of the building in which the most lives were lost in İzmir continues at the İzmir 5th Heavy Penal Court with 19 defendants. Among the defendants are contractor and subcontractor officials, the zoning director of Bayraklı Municipality, and the responsible engineer. According to BirGün, the first expert report was a text the families called a "grey report"; a new panel was appointed; by the court's latest interim decision a new report is requested from Middle East Technical University. Hüseyin Bilgin Yücel, who lost his mother, his two children and his two nieces, warns that the case is approaching the statute of limitations. Requests for detention pending trial were rejected.

Six years, three expert panels, zero verdicts.

Three locks

Why is it like this? Because impunity is not a judicial accident. It is a system with three locks. We told these in detail in our essay on the Families in Pursuit of Justice Platform; let us recall them briefly:

1. The "conscious negligence" lock. In probable intent each death is a separate crime; in conscious negligence it is counted as "one act, many results", and the upper limit of the sentence is a handful of years. The great majority of earthquake cases in Türkiye are heard as conscious negligence. That is, the law shrinks a death that was foreseen.
2. The Law 4483 lock. Under Law 4483 on the Trial of Civil Servants and Other Public Officials, permission from the administrative superior is required before an investigation can be opened against a public official. The prosecutor tries the contractor; the superior tries the civil servant. Reaching the public official who issued the permit, who did not inspect, who shelved the risky-building finding therefore takes years.
3. The lock of political responsibility. The parliamentary majority that passed the zoning amnesty, the municipal council that voted the plan change, the Treasury that wrote the amnesty's income into the budget: none of them becomes a defendant, because what they did is "in accordance with the law" by statute.

When you place these three locks on top of one another, what emerges is this: punishment is distributed not by fault but by position. The lowest link of the chain is (sometimes) tried; the middle link is protected by permission; the top link never appears.

---

VIII. Why Is Earthquake Prevention Not Realistic Until These Relations Are Broken?

We have now come to the essay's main thesis. Every earthquake anniversary, similar measures are discussed: a new code, more drills, assembly areas, an earthquake bag, a campaign to identify buildings. None of these is bad. But let us set side by side how each of them falls empty as long as the relation of rent stays in place.

Proposed measure	What happens as long as the relation of rent stays in place?
"A stricter earthquake code"	The code is already advanced; complying is a cost, not complying is a profit. Without independent inspection the new text is a new piece of paper
"Let us strengthen building inspection"	As long as inspection stays in profit-making companies and the inspector stays a precarious wage-earner, the pressure to sign continues
"Let us identify risky buildings"	The identification is made, and the building that yields no profit is not transformed; Rıza Bey was marked risky in 2012 and collapsed in 2020
"Let us speed urban transformation"	In the flats-for-construction model, speed means an increase in the floor-area ratio; density rises, the tenant leaves, the poor neighbourhood waits
"Assembly areas and drills"	As green areas and empty parcels are opened to building by plan changes, the assembly area stays on paper
"Let the citizen become aware and have their building checked"	The tenant, the pensioner, the worker has no money to strengthen their building; the risk is loaded onto the individual, and the structural cause becomes invisible
"Let those responsible be punished"	As long as the locks of conscious negligence, Law 4483 and political immunity are not opened, punishment stays at the lower link of the chain
"There will not be another amnesty"	Fourteen amnesties in seventy years; without a constitutional ban this promise lasts until the next election
"An earthquake tax / a disaster fund"	If where the fund is spent is not open to public audit, the money collected goes not to safety but to the budget deficit

Let us gather the right-hand column of the table in a single sentence: rent reshapes every measure in its own favour. Transformation becomes an opportunity for rent, inspection a service sector, the code a cost item, punishment the problem of the lower link. This is why earthquake prevention is a problem of property and power before it is a problem of engineering. The engineering knowledge exists; what is missing is the social power that will put that knowledge in front of profit.

---

IX. What Is to Be Done? A Technical Programme, a Class Ground

A diagnosis is not a programme. Let us be concrete. The articles below are a compilation, from our class window, of demands that the chambers of engineers and planners, the earthquake families, and those who struggle for the right to the city have voiced for years.

1. A constitutional ban on the zoning amnesty

The zoning amnesty should be constitutionally banned for buildings that concern the safety of life. For buildings that received a certificate under the 2018 zoning peace, an engineering examination should be made obligatory; a building registration certificate should not have indefinite validity without a structural-system report.

2. The expropriation of planning rent

All, or the greater part, of the rise in value created by a plan change should be taken back by the public and transferred to a public disaster-transformation fund. Plan changes, together with their justification, should be tied to the approval of a public and technical board (including representatives of the chambers). When rent returns to the public, most of the demand for plan changes ends of itself.

3. Public and independent building inspection

Building inspection should be taken from profit-making companies; it should be carried out by a public inspection institution, or within municipalities, by public engineers with job security. The inspector's fee should be paid from a public fund that has no relation to the party being inspected. Independent powers of inspection and objection should be given to the chambers of engineers and architects. The inspecting engineer's right to say "no" should be protected by job security and by union organisation.

4. A building identity card and open data

Every building's zoning status, permit, approved projects, soil survey, inspection reports, occupancy status, building registration certificate if any, and risky-building identification should be in an open database that everyone can reach. A worker who rents a flat has the right to know to which code that building was built, and whether it benefited from an amnesty. This is the application to the city of Knowledge Commons' basic principle: the city's data belongs to the people of the city. Capital gains from knowledge being scattered; knowledge that is gathered and opened is our power.

5. Periodic examination of the structural system

As with the lift and with natural gas, obligatory examination of the structural system should be brought in at set intervals (every three to five years, as the İzmir Chamber of Civil Engineers proposes); the cost should be loaded not onto the tenant and the low-income owner but onto the public fund. Every alteration that touches the structural system should be subject to a permit and to inspection; cutting a column should be counted a heavy and deterrent crime.

6. Transformation by the public that protects the tenant

Transformation should be taken out of the contractor's flats-for-construction model; the order of priority should be set not by property value but by the order of engineering risk. It should be done with a public fund, by municipalities and housing cooperatives, without an increase in the floor-area ratio. The tenant's right to remain in the same neighbourhood after transformation, at a rent suited to their income, should be given legal guarantee.

7. Opening the locks of impunity

In crimes of zoning, permitting and inspection that concern the safety of life, the permission system of Law 4483 should be removed. Case law of probable intent should be developed in earthquake trials; the chain of responsibility should be tried as a whole, from the contractor to the municipality, from the inspection company to the one who made the planning decision. The statute of limitations should either be removed for these crimes, or should not run during the trial.

8. The testimony of the construction worker

The person who best knows who built the building, under what conditions, and with what material is the worker who ties the reinforcement and pours the concrete. The union organisation of construction workers, and the right to say "this column is missing" on site, are part of building safety. A mechanism should be set up by which the worker can report this without losing their job.

---

X. Two Readings: The Official Narrative and the Class Reading

Official narrative	Class reading
"An earthquake is a natural disaster"	The earthquake is natural; the destruction is the result of the column, the concrete and the soil survey that were cut for profit
"The zoning peace put the citizen at ease"	The unsafe building stock was acquitted in exchange for votes and fees; the engineer was taken out of the circuit
"A plan change is the city's need"	It is the creation of a private fortune by a public decision; the ground is the same, the load is doubled
"Building inspection was professionalised"	Inspection was handed to the market; the inspector's client became the person inspected
"Our code is at world standard"	The text is at standard; there is no independent power to inspect the application
"The risky stock is being renewed by urban transformation"	Transformation proceeds by the order of profit; the tenant leaves, the poor neighbourhood waits
"Those responsible are being tried"	The lower link is tried for conscious negligence, the upper link by permission under Law 4483, and the political link is not tried at all
"The process is working"	At Rıza Bey there is no verdict in six years, and the statute of limitations is approaching

---

Concrete Tasks

1. Learn your building. Learn the year your building was built, its permit and occupancy status, and whether it received a building registration certificate in 2018. Gather the information that can be found on e-Devlet and in the municipality's zoning unit. A building you do not know is a risk nobody has told you about.

2. Keep a neighbourhood notebook. Record the buildings in your neighbourhood whose ground floor is a shop, whose column you have seen touched, whose roof has had a storey added. Keep this not as a list of denunciations but as a collective memory; speak of it in neighbourhood assemblies, together with the chambers.

3. If you are a computing worker, gather the data. Turn the plan changes in municipal council decisions, the risky-building identifications, and the course of the earthquake cases into a regular open data set. Building, province, district, year of construction, amnesty status, case status. Scattered data belongs to capital; gathered data belongs to us.

4. If you are an engineer or an architect, hold on to your chamber. The Chamber of Civil Engineers, the Chamber of Geological Engineers, the Chamber of Architects and TMMOB are the organised memory of building-safety knowledge in this country. Speak, at the workplace, on site, in the building inspection firm, of the demand to widen the chamber's power of inspection and objection. Stand organised against "signature engineering".

5. Follow the hearings. The Rıza Bey Apartment case continues at the İzmir 5th Heavy Penal Court. Follow the hearing days, be in the courtroom. Every chair that sits beside the families tells the court that this case is being watched. Multiply the warning about the statute of limitations.

6. Watch the municipal council. Read the municipal council agendas in your own district. On which parcel is the floor-area ratio being raised, who is asking, what is the justification? The time to object to a plan change is short; the one who does not follow it cannot object.

7. Be ready against the rumour of an amnesty. In the next news that "a zoning amnesty will be passed", use the figures in this essay: fourteen amnesties, 294,166 certificates, 80 per cent, 24.7 billion lira. A figure does more work than an hour of argument.

8. If you are a tenant, you are not alone. In the processes of transformation and of risk identification, the rights of tenants are the weakest link. Join or set up networks of tenant solidarity; ask "what will happen to the tenant" in every meeting.

9. Tell it. Tell the chain of seven links to everyone who narrates 30 October, 6 February and 17 August as a "natural disaster". The earthquake is natural; the destruction has a name, an address and a signature.

10. Organise. Not a single article of the list of demands in this essay is won by a petition alone. Remember that the families of 6 February changed an article of law by a three-day sit-in in December 2025. The safety of the city is as much as the organised power of the people of the city.

---

Dear Comrades,

When I came out of the rubble of Emrah Apartment six years ago, the first thing I thought of was luck. That my cousins were there, that the rubble had not crushed me, that 45 minutes was as long as a lifetime and still short enough. Then, over the years, I understood this: luck is an individual explanation. But the death of my thirty neighbours was not individual. How that building was built, how it was inspected, how it was kept standing or not kept standing, was the product of an order.

The name of that order is rent. Rent is the transfer into private hands of the value the city created by social labour. The same logic works in the council decision that adds a storey to a plot, in the shop alteration that cuts a column, in the amnesty law that takes the engineer out of the circuit, in the contractor who is the inspector's client, in the permission system that protects the civil servant: profit is privatised, risk is socialised. And the greatest share of the risk falls on those who live in those buildings as tenants, who have no money to go elsewhere, who live by their labour.

This is why earthquake prevention is, for workers, a struggle for the right to life. Engineering knowledge is the weapon of this struggle; but the hand that will hold the weapon is organised society. Every "earthquake preparation" made before these relations are broken will be a cover pulled over the next rubble.

A building does not collapse by itself. What collapses it is the order of rent. Until that order is changed, neither a code, nor a drill, nor transformation protects us. What will protect us is taking the city's knowledge, its decision and its inspection into our own hands.

I remember with respect those we lost in İzmir on 30 October 2020, in eleven provinces on 6 February 2023, and in Marmara on 17 August 1999. We will not forget, we will not let it be forgotten; we will call it to account, and we will build safer cities together.

In comradeship.

---

Related writing

• I Do Not Want to Seek My Right; Give Me My Right: What Do the Families in Front of the Ministry of Justice Want?: the ledger of Law 4483, conscious negligence, the zoning peace and the 6 February cases
• Reading the İHD 2025 Report Through a Class Lens: class justice as impunity
• Whose Is the Public? The Council of State Day at Akbelen: knowing where the decision was made
• 12 September: The History, Balance Sheet, and Present of a Class Coup: the roots of the neoliberal turn after 1980
• The Computing Worker's Handbook: the organisation of knowledge labour and the task of open data

---