Capitalism's Rent Is Taking Its Revenge

Capitalism's Rent Is Taking Its Revenge

The Class Anatomy of the Istanbul Flood: From the Stream Bed to the Zoning Amnesty, from the Plan Amendment to the Basement

Dear young comrades,

The rain that began on the morning of Wednesday 14 October turned Istanbul, towards midnight, into a lake of a city. The next morning two sentences kept turning on the television: "the record of 84 years" and "a natural disaster". This piece was written to open the fact squeezed between those two sentences. The rain was natural; but nature did not decide where the water would go, whose house would stand in the water's path, who would live in the basement and who on the thirtieth floor.

The figures are compiled from official statements and press reports as of the morning of 16 October 2026. The search for the missing continues; the toll may change.

---

Summary: What Happened in Five Minutes, and Why?

What happened?

• On 14 October, in the words of Governor Davut Gül, Istanbul received the highest rainfall measured since 1942. According to the governor's office, 261 kg fell per square metre in Beykoz; according to the measurements of the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality (İBB), 273.1 kg. In Sarıyer and Eyüpsultan it passed 200 kg (Turkish Minute, Sabah, in Turkish).
• According to the governor's office's latest statement, 4 people lost their lives, and there is still no news of 4 or 5 people in Ayazağa (Hürriyet live, in Turkish).
• According to the Ministry of the Interior, 12,372 reports were received in total; more than 2,700 people were evacuated or rescued; the electricity of about 40,000 subscribers was cut. In Ayazağa damage was recorded at 300 workplaces and 200 vehicles; 53 retaining walls collapsed, and there were 48 landslides.
• Schools were closed for two days; education was also suspended in Kocaeli, Sakarya, Düzce, Yalova and Zonguldak. In Sapanca a villa built beside a stream collapsed into the stream.

Why does it always happen this way?

• Because the water returns to its own bed. The places hit hardest — Ayazağa, Kemerburgaz, Cendere, Kağıthane, Alibeyköy, Vadistanbul — are settlements built on the bed and the floodplain of the Kağıthane and Alibeyköy streams.
• According to the inventory of İSKİ, Istanbul's water and sewerage administration, there are 2,772 streams and 5,247 km of watercourse in Istanbul. According to a 2015 doctoral study, 64 per cent of the 168 main streams examined are physically degraded; the number of streams that keep their natural character from source to sea is only 60 (bianet).
• The 100-metre building ban beside streams was introduced in 1990 and reduced in 2013 to a 10-metre "maintenance corridor". The strip that protected the stream was narrowed tenfold.
• More than ten zoning amnesties issued since 1948, the latest the 2018 "zoning peace" (3.6 million applications, 23.5 billion lira collected), legalised unlicensed and risky buildings in exchange for money (Diken, in Turkish).

Who is responsible?

• The central government: the political will that passed the zoning amnesties, gathered planning authority in the ministry and in TOKİ, the housing administration, and tied growth to the triangle of construction, credit and rent.
• The municipalities, those of the government and those of the opposition: council decisions that, by plan amendments, opened the stream edge, the industrial plot and the forest edge to housing and shopping centres.
• Construction and real-estate capital: the class that turns a factory plot into a tower and a stream bed into a residence, and passes the risk on which it made its profit to the public and to the poor.
• The institutions of inspection and of technical control: the chain of building inspection and approval that ignored the opinion of the DSİ, the State Hydraulic Works, the 2006 circular, and court rulings.
• Fossil capitalism: the real authors of the climate crisis that makes extreme rainfall more frequent.

The main thesis: This is not a natural event. It is the bill of land rent. Rent privatises the profit and socialises the risk. Water, for its part, is not classless: those who die, those who go missing, those whose homes are flooded are, in overwhelming majority, people who live in basements, workers kept at work in the hour of the flood, labourers left on the road. As Engels wrote 150 years ago, for every "victory" over nature, nature takes its revenge on us. In Istanbul today it is not nature that is taking its revenge, but the order that turned nature into a commodity.

---

Part One: What Happened on the Night of 14 October?

The rainfall: behind the word "record"

The rain began on the morning of Wednesday 14 October, grew violent in the afternoon, and continued through the night. The measurements differ by source; that itself is a sign, because the city has no single shared disaster data system:

Source	Highest figure announced	Place
Istanbul Governor's Office (Governor Gül)	261 kg/m² — "the highest since 1942"	Beykoz
İBB / AKOM	273.1 kg/m²	Beykoz
Environment Minister Murat Kurum	273 kg/m² — "the greatest rainfall in 83 years"	—
Interior Minister Mustafa Çiftçi	272 kg/m² in places	—
İBB Deputy Mayor Nuri Aslan	"The highest in the last 45 years"	—

For comparison: Istanbul's average annual rainfall is around 800 kg/m². In one day, a third of a year fell. This is truly an extraordinary rainfall. But we have to stop for a moment here: an extraordinary rainfall does not, by itself, produce an extraordinary disaster. Whether rainfall turns into a disaster depends on whether the water's path is open or closed, on whether the soil can absorb it, and on whether people live in the water's path. Whether it turns into a disaster is a wholly social question.

The deaths: names and stories

Figures abstract; so let us name the people first:

• Mahmut Işıldak, 14 years old. In Fatih, Balat, he stepped into a pool of water near a car-park entrance and was killed by electric current. A cable left under the water, unlicensed or unmaintained, became the cause of a child's death (Takvim, in Turkish; Al-Monitor).
• S.Y., 34 years old. In Sarıyer, Ayazağa, he fell while trying to cross a street under water and struck his head on the pavement; he died in hospital.
• Ahmet Usta, 56 years old. His family had filed a missing-person report in Sarıyer the day before. His body was found in Kağıthane, at the foot of a bridge pier over the stream near Sadabad Park. The water carried him from Ayazağa to Kağıthane (Gerçek Gündem, in Turkish).
• Faik Şentürk, a worker. He fell into a shaft on a school construction site in Beykoz and died. On the day of the record rainfall, work on a building site was still going on (Hürriyet, in Turkish).

Missing-person reports were filed for five people in Ayazağa. An overturned vehicle was found under the bridge over the Kağıthane stream. The search continues.

The rest of the city

• Sarıyer was the district hit hardest: a hospital was flooded, vehicles were swept along the streets, and the Hacıosman metro station went under water.
• The Kağıthane stream overflowed; the Sadabad Mosque and the workshops in Sadabad Garden were left under water.
• The car park of Vadistanbul shopping centre was flooded. That its name is "vadi", valley, is no coincidence; we will come back to it.
• In Esenyurt, residents pulled a woman from the current as she was swept along a road that had become a lake. In Küçükçekmece, firefighters and UMKE medical-rescue teams rescued a person who had gone back for medicine in a building whose basement was flooded (Medyascope, in Turkish).
• In Başakşehir a stream overflowed. In Eyüpsultan a bridge was damaged, and water, electricity and natural-gas lines fell into the stream. In Sultangazi a landslide hit the line that carries water to the historic Bulakbaşı Aqueduct.
• Fifty-one aircraft due to land at Istanbul Airport were diverted to other airports, and 19 flights were cancelled. Motorcycles and two-wheeled vehicles were banned from the traffic.

The rest of the Marmara

The system did not hit only Istanbul. The meteorology service issued a yellow warning for 42 provinces and an orange warning for 6. One person is missing in Kocaeli. In Sapanca, Sakarya, a two-storey villa built beside a stream collapsed into the stream as the water rose (Haberler.com, in Turkish). There was a landslide on the Cumalıkızık stream in Bursa, and a 45-minute downpour in Adana left the roads under water.

The state's response

The Ministry of the Interior announced that more than 46,000 personnel were on duty and that more than 55,000 were on alert. The Ministry of Family transferred a resource of 200 million lira. The Minister of Justice said a judicial investigation had been opened and that "possible neglect and fault" would be examined. Governor Gül announced that the damage assessment would be completed by Monday and that payments would begin.

These are necessary things. But notice: all of these statements are about what comes after the flood. There is not a single sentence about the thirty years before the flood, which is the real question. Whether the "neglect and fault" of which the investigation speaks will be sought on a manhole cover, or in municipal council chambers and at ministry desks, is the real subject of this piece.

---

Part Two: Why Did the Water Go There? The City's Hydrological Memory

Place names do not lie

There is an engineering saying attributed to Süleyman Demirel: "Water takes its due from the soil." This week that was the sentence most repeated in Istanbul (Yetkin Report, in Turkish).

Look at the map: Ayazağa, Cendere, Kağıthane, Alibeyköy, Çukurbostan, Vadistanbul, Vadişehir, Dereboyu, Ayamama. As the specialists remind us, places whose names contain "valley", "stream", "lake", "cendere", "hollow" give away the land's real geography. Cendere means the narrow gorge where water is squeezed between two slopes. The old Istanbulites who gave these names knew where the water passed. Today's planners know it too; the difference is that today this knowledge is treated as knowledge that lowers the value of the plot, and is ignored.

2,772 streams, thousands of kilometres of concrete

According to İSKİ's 2023 master plan, Istanbul has 2,772 streams and 5,247 km of watercourse in total. The 2015 doctoral study by the landscape architect Hülya Dinç examined 168 main streams and their branches outside the drinking-water basins (bianet):

• About 80 per cent of the 168 streams are connected to settlement areas; only 33 lie wholly outside settlement.
• Physical alteration has been made on 64 per cent of the streams; the number of streams that keep their natural character from source to mouth is only 60.
• 14 different land uses were found in the Kağıthane–Cendere–Kemerdere corridor, and 20 in the Alibeyköy–Küçükköy corridor. Along the stream, industry, housing, road, shopping centre, office and warehouse stand side by side.
• In the İBB's 2008 report, degradation and loss of branches were seen in all 28 basins that carry a flood risk, including Kağıthane, Alibeyköy and Ayamama.

The degradation works like this. The stream is "regulated", that is, straightened and put into a concrete channel. The channel is covered, and a road or a car park is built on top. Seasonal branches, the small streams that look dry in summer but gather water in the rain, are filled in and opened to development. The floodplain, the flat land over which the stream spreads when it overflows, becomes a "valuable plot". Soil is covered with concrete and asphalt; instead of absorbing the rain, it sends it straight into the channel. The result: the same rain loads a narrow channel, in a much shorter time, with a much higher discharge than before. The channel overflows. The water looks for its old bed. And in the old bed, people are now living.

A short history of the protection strip beside the stream

This section matters because it shows that the problem is not a party matter. Please read it carefully:

Year	Mayor	Decision
1988	Bedrettin Dalan (ANAP)	In the İSKİ Regulation on Drinking-Water Basins, the protection strip beside the stream was removed
1990	Nurettin Sözen (SHP)	A 100-metre building ban was introduced on both sides of the stream
1994	—	The 100-metre absolute protection belt was kept
2013	Kadir Topbaş (AKP)	The 100 metres was reduced to an operation and maintenance corridor of at least 10 metres
2021	Ekrem İmamoğlu (CHP)	On canalised sections, outside forest and agricultural land, a building setback of 13 metres was set

Source: bianet

Let us read the table. The 100 metres of 1990 was a scientific logic of flood protection. The 10 metres of 2013 is only a strip wide enough for a machine to enter the stream edge and do the cleaning; it is a measure of maintenance, not of flood protection. The 13 metres of 2021 is not a return to 100 metres either. The 87 to 90 metres in between is land whose square metre is worth thousands, tens of thousands of lira. The narrowing of the protection strip is the widening of rent itself.

---

Part Three: What Is Rent, and Why Does It Take Its Revenge?

A short note of theory for young comrades

In everyday speech we use the word "rent" to mean "unjust gain". But in Marx, land rent has a more exact meaning: the share that the landowner takes from the social surplus value without spending any productive labour, merely because he holds the ownership of the land. Land is not produced and cannot be multiplied; so as space grows scarce in the city, the one who holds the land takes an ever larger share of the value created by the labour of others.

In the city, the real source of rent is the planning decision. When a field, a factory plot, a stream edge becomes a "housing area" or a "commercial area" by a municipal council decision, its value rises tenfold, a hundredfold, without a single nail being driven. What creates this increase is neither the landowner's labour nor the contractor's. What creates this increase is the whole of the city, the common labour of millions of workers who produce the road, the metro, the school, the hospital, the city itself. The planning decision transfers, with a signature, the value created by this common labour into a private pocket. For this reason planning rent is the seizure of the urban commons.

In David Harvey's term: when the rate of profit falls in industry, capital directs the surplus for which it cannot find a field of investment into the built environment, into the building, the road, the shopping centre, the residence. He calls this "the secondary circuit of capital". Turkey's last twenty years are the textbook example of this secondary circuit: growth fed on construction, construction on credit, and credit on planning rent. The triangle of construction, credit and rent became a model of accumulation built not on industrialisation but on the commodification of land.

Where did "revenge" come from?

The word "revenge" in the title is not a literary ornament. It is a quotation. In the text he wrote in 1876, "The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man", Engels says:

"Let us not praise ourselves too much for our victories over nature. For every victory of this kind, nature takes its revenge on us. Every victory yields, in the first place, the results we expected, but in the second and third places it produces quite different, unexpected effects, which often cancel the first results."

In the same text Engels recalls that those who cut down the forests in Mesopotamia, in Greece and in Asia Minor in order to open fields condemned those lands to the barrenness of today. And he makes the point that matters: the question is not humanity's relation with nature, but under which mode of production this relation is established. Individual capitalists pursue only the nearest and most immediate profit; the distant social and natural consequences of their actions do not concern them. For the one who sells the plot, the one who puts up the building, the one who markets the flat, that the building will be under water fifteen years later is not a problem. The profit has long since entered the pocket, and the risk has been passed to the buyer, the tenant, the municipality, the state, that is, to society.

This is why what takes its revenge is not in fact nature, but the logic of rent itself. Profit is privatised, risk is socialised. When the water comes, the bill is made out not to the one who took the profit, but to the one who was left holding the risk.

---

Part Four: The Chain of Those Responsible

To lay the responsibility on a single person, a single institution, a single party conceals the structural character of the problem. But seeing the structure does not mean failing to see the perpetrators. Let us take the chain apart, link by link.

1. The central government and the tradition of the zoning amnesty

Turkey's history of zoning amnesties begins in 1948 and repeats almost every ten years. Law No. 2981, passed in the Özal period in 1984, opened the door to the mass production of urban rent by tying the gecekondu and the unlicensed building to a title deed. The latest, passed before the 2018 general election, was the one whose name was skilfully chosen: the "zoning peace".

According to the reply that the Minister of Environment and Urbanisation, Murat Kurum, gave in 2019 to a parliamentary question, 3,599,867 applications were made to the zoning peace and 23.5 billion lira was collected; the minister of the time had said that 40 billion lira was expected (Diken, in Turkish).

Let us open the logic of the zoning amnesty. Instead of demolishing or strengthening a building that is unlicensed or contrary to its project, the state takes a sum of money from the owner and legalises it. This does three things:

1. It provides short-term income for the treasury.
2. It is offered to the voter as a "title deed" promise, and it brings votes.
3. Most important: it makes the risky building "safe" in law, not in engineering. However much the building stands in a stream bed, however much it stands on fill, it is now "legal".

It had reached the public that, among the buildings that collapsed in the earthquake of 6 February 2023, there were structures that had benefited from the zoning peace. Water and earthquake are different disasters, but the mechanism is the same: a zoning amnesty is the purchase of risk in exchange for money. The state takes the money, the citizen carries the risk.

The zoning amnesty has an unseen effect as well: the expectation of the next amnesty. Every amnesty institutionalises the feeling that "it will be pardoned one day anyway", and encourages new unlicensed building. Thus the planning legislation ceases to be a rule to be obeyed and becomes a price to be bargained over.

2. The centralisation of planning authority

In the last twenty years planning authority has gathered more and more in the ministry, in TOKİ, and in areas of special status. Kanal Istanbul, the motorways that cut the northern forests, the airport, the "reserve building areas"... These are projects taken out of the oversight of local councils, projects whose environmental-impact processes have been turned into a formality.

Ekrem İmamoğlu, the detained mayor of the İBB, criticised in his defence in his own case, the day after the flood, "the destruction, by a single signature, of a water basin of about 136 million square metres" in the basin of the Sazlıdere Dam, and the planning of a settlement of about 2 million people before the technical infrastructure was prepared. He said that on the Kağıthane–Ayazağa line, over the last 10 to 15 years, hundreds of thousands of people had been placed, in the form of towers, in the stream bed (Sondakika/ANKA, in Turkish). These observations are correct and important. But, as we will see in a moment, they remain incomplete when they are directed at only one side.

3. The municipalities: a plan-amendment machine

The place where planning rent is actually produced is the zoning commissions of the municipal councils. With a "plan amendment", an industrial area becomes housing, a green area becomes commerce, a stream edge becomes a residence. These decisions are often taken on midnight agendas, without being announced to the public, without the objections of the professional chambers being taken into account.

The Vadistanbul example: Vadistanbul, whose car park was flooded, was built right beside the Kağıthane stream, on the plot of Evyap's soap factory of 40 years in Ayazağa. According to the claim of Hüseyin Sağ, a former member of the İBB council, the opening of the plot to development was made possible by plan changes that began in 2004, in the period of Kadir Topbaş; Sağ also claims that Topbaş's son-in-law was among the partners in the project (Sözcü, 12punto; both in Turkish). These claims need to be verified independently; but the pattern is familiar: deindustrialisation and the making of rent meet on the same plot. The factory closes, the workers are dispersed, the plot "gains value", and a tower is put up in the stream bed.

As Yetkin Report compiled, the first permits for the dense and high building in Ayazağa, Kemerburgaz, Cendere, Kağıthane, Çukurbostan and Alibeyköy, the places hit hardest, date largely to 1997–2014. The same piece also recalls President Erdoğan's warnings, in 2009, 2020 and 2023, that building should not be done in stream beds (Yetkin Report, in Turkish). This gap between speech and practice is the rent order itself: on the rostrum the stream is protected, in the zoning commission the stream is sold.

4. The limit of opposition municipalism

We have to be honest here. Dalan, who removed the protection strip in 1988, and Topbaş, who reduced 100 metres to 10 in 2013, were both of parties of the right; Sözen, who brought in the 100 metres in 1990, was a social democrat. But the CHP administration that has run the İBB since 2019 did not return the protection strip to 100 metres either; in 2021 it settled for 13 metres.

In September the İBB and Deputy Mayor Nuri Aslan announced that, since 2019, 300 billion lira of infrastructure investment had been made at current value, and that they had "erased from Istanbul's memory the flood images that happened with every rain". A month later Istanbul was under water (Takvim, in Turkish). Media close to the government used this contradiction at once; of course without a word about the thirty-year planning record of their own government.

The lesson, from the standpoint of class, is this: infrastructure investment, without changing the rent order, only tries to manage its results. A bigger channel, a bigger collector, more pumps... These are necessary, and they are not sufficient. To leave the towers in the stream bed where they are, and to enlarge the channel, is to postpone the problem to the next record rainfall. A real solution requires touching the property relation, that is, whose hands the land is in, and in whose interest the planning decision is taken. No municipalism that compromises with capital, however well-intentioned, can cross this limit.

This observation does not legitimise the government's trustee and judicial operations against the İBB; on the contrary, we should not forget that the real aim of those operations is to gather the control of Istanbul's rent machine back into a single hand. What we are doing is to show, in the middle of two blocs of capital accusing each other, the common ground that neither of them touches.

5. The law exists, the practice does not

The table of legislation compiled by Haberler.com is striking (Haberler.com, in Turkish):

• Turkish Civil Code, article 715: waters open to the public benefit are no one's property, and cannot be the subject of private ownership.
• Cadastre Law, article 16/C: general waters such as the sea, the lake and the river are not subject to registration; but "exceptions are reserved."
• Prime Ministry Circular No. 2006/27: compliance with the opinion of the DSİ is obligatory in development plans; without DSİ approval, streams cannot be covered over and land gained; structures that narrow the stream section cannot be permitted, and if they have been permitted they must be removed by the municipality or the special provincial administration.

On paper, the law protects the stream. But the phrase "exceptions are reserved" is the door through which rent enters. And no one asks how many of the structures that the 2006 circular said "must be removed" have been removed. In the capitalist state, when law contradicts the interest of capital, it produces an "exception".

6. Fossil capitalism and the climate crisis

A warming atmosphere holds more water vapour; that means very intense rainfalls in a short time become more frequent. The IPCC reports state plainly that urbanisation increases rainwater runoff and that extreme rainfall events are becoming more frequent. The World Bank counts Turkey among the countries most vulnerable to climate risks (Turkish Minute).

The irony is that this flood happened less than a month before COP31, the climate summit that Turkey will host in Antalya on 9–20 November. A government that gives incentives to coal plants and opens the northern forests to a concrete motorway will, a month later, play host at a climate summit.

The climate crisis cannot be used to acquit those responsible locally. But the two feet have to be seen together: on the global scale fossil capital intensifies the rainfall, on the local scale construction capital closes the water's path. Both feet step on the same logic: short-term profit, long-term social cost.

---

Part Five: Water Is Not Classless

Who drowns, who watches?

The flood wets everyone at the same time, but it does not hit everyone to the same degree. The most striking call the governor's office made on the night of 14 October was this: "Those who live in basements should move to upper floors or to safer places."

Who lives in the basement? Those pushed to the very bottom of Istanbul's rent crisis: minimum-wage earners, migrants, students, pensioners, single-parent families. The housing market rents the riskiest square metre to the poorest. While the flat on the thirtieth floor of the same building takes a premium because it is "with a view", the basement is marketed as "affordable". Risk is priced in the market and sold to the cheapest buyer.

Look again at the deaths we have named in this piece:

• Faik Şentürk died in a shaft on a building site on the day of the record rainfall. Why was he working that day? The governor's office closed the schools and banned the motorcycles; it did not stop the building sites. The body of the construction worker was tied to the calendar of construction capital. This is one link in the workplace murders that, in the reports of the Human Rights Association (İHD), make up the overwhelming majority of the deaths.
• Mahmut Işıldak died of the electricity under the water, at a car-park entrance. The city's unmaintained infrastructure kills children and poor neighbourhoods most of all.
• Of the 31 people who died in the Ayamama flood of 2009, seven were women workers who drowned in a service minibus on the way to work. The bed of the Ayamama stream had been filled with the TEM motorway, the Basın Ekspres road and industrial estates. Seventeen years later the same scene is repeated, in the same city, on another stream.

The losses that are not seen

The cost of the flood to the worker is not measured only by the loss of life:

• For couriers and two-wheeled workers, the motorcycle ban means a day without income. The ban, which is right from the standpoint of safety, is, for the worker in the "tradesman-courier" status, a direct loss of wages, with no mechanism of compensation.
• Most of the 300 workplaces damaged in Ayazağa are small workshops, shops and warehouses. The boss insures, or does not; but the worker who works there has no "damage assessment". From whose pocket will the wages of the days the workplace is closed be paid?
• Tenants are often invisible in the damage assessment. State aid is directed to the owner; where is the right of the tenant whose belongings are under water, who is put out with the words "there is renovation"?

Two languages, two worlds

What is said to us	What actually happens
"The record rainfall of 84 years, a natural disaster"	The rainfall is extraordinary; the disaster is the product of thirty years of planning decisions
"We erased the flood images from memory"	The channel was enlarged, the towers in the stream bed stayed where they were
"The zoning peace solved the citizen's problem"	The risky building was legalised in exchange for money, and the risk was passed to the citizen
"We will not permit building in stream beds"	The protection strip was reduced from 100 metres to 10
"An investigation has been opened into those who were negligent"	The investigation stops at the manhole cover and does not reach the zoning commission
"Our citizens should come up out of the basements"	The basements are rented to the poorest victims of the rent crisis
"Water took its due from the soil"	Water asked back for the common space that capital had seized
"Damage will be assessed and payment made"	The tenant, the worker, the courier remain outside this assessment

---

Part Six: Why Is the Lesson Not Drawn? The Logic of Accumulation

After every flood the same question is asked: "Why is the lesson not drawn?" The question is innocent, but it looks in the wrong place. Because it is not that the lesson is not drawn; it is that the cost of drawing the lesson is not wanted to be paid.

Think: what should have been done after Ayamama in 2009? The buildings in the stream bed should have been removed, the protection strip widened, the floodplains expropriated and turned into green space. And what would the price of that have been? The "disappearance" of billions of lira of land value. That is, to draw the lesson was to destroy the rent. And the rent order does not destroy itself.

This is why what is done after every flood is aimed at the image of the problem, not at the problem itself. The channel is enlarged, the grate is cleaned, a pump is bought, aid is distributed. These are techniques of managing the risk while protecting the rent. And every new project adds a new layer of rent on top of the old one: in 2008 the İBB listed 28 risky basins; in 2013 the protection strip was narrowed. In 2009 Erdoğan warned about the stream bed; in 2018 the zoning peace came out. The warning and the building accumulate at the same time.

This is the urban counterpart of what Marx said of the accumulation of capital: capital, in order to overcome the obstacles it has created, creates new obstacles. Every record rainfall shows the limit of the previous "regulation"; and the next tender begins as a new cycle of rent. Even the flood is turned into an investment opportunity: regulation tenders, urban-transformation projects, declarations of a "disaster-risk area"... What Naomi Klein called the "shock doctrine" has, in Turkey, been made law under the name "disaster-risk area".

---

Part Seven: Examples from the World, and What They Say to Us

The comparisons compiled by Haberler.com show that another way is possible (Haberler.com, in Turkish):

• The Netherlands, "Room for the River": the 2006–2015 programme, begun after more than 200,000 people were evacuated in the Rhine floods of 1993 and 1995, contained 40 projects of about 2.2 billion euros. The logic is this: instead of imprisoning the water in a channel, give back the land where the river will overflow. Dykes were set back, floodplains were lowered.
• England, the "Sequential Test": planning permission is not given for high-risk land when low-risk land is available; sensitive buildings such as housing are forbidden on functional floodplains.
• The EU Floods Directive (2007/60/EC): risk maps and flood-management plans, renewed every six years, are obligatory.
• The "sponge city" approach: it is also among the proposals of the Chamber of Environmental Engineers: the separation of rainwater and wastewater lines, permeable surfaces, the closing of stream beds and basins to building, early-warning systems, the revision of planning legislation (BirGün, in Turkish).

Let us not idealise these examples. The Netherlands and England are capitalist countries too, and there too rent pushes the poor onto risky land. But this lesson matters: making room for water is technically possible; the obstacle is political, not technical. Making room for water means taking room from capital.

---

Part Eight: What Is to Be Done? Concrete Tasks

Dear young comrades, anger is a good beginning, but it is not a programme. Here is what can be done, concretely:

From the standpoint of the knowledge commons

1. An open stream map. An open map, which everyone can reach, comparing the historical beds of the 2,772 streams in the İSKİ inventory with old maps and satellite images. Which stream was covered when, what was built on it, by which council decision? This can be the common work of computing workers, map engineers and city planners.
2. A network that watches plan amendments. Volunteer networks that regularly follow the planning changes on municipal council agendas and announce them at the scale of the neighbourhood. Rent grows in the dark and on midnight agendas; shining a light is the first form of resistance.
3. The planning record of those elected. Which council member said "yes" to which plan amendment? The compilation of voting records that are open to the public.

From the standpoint of labour and organisation

4. A ban on work on the day of a disaster. A trade-union demand that, on days of orange and red warning when schools are closed and motorcycles are banned, building sites and open-air work be stopped and wages not be cut. The death of Faik Şentürk is the name of this demand.
5. An income guarantee for couriers on the day of a disaster. That the platforms pay couriers a minimum income on the days of the ban.
6. The inclusion of the tenant and the worker in the damage assessment. State aid should reach not only the property owner, but also the tenant whose belongings are damaged and the worker whose workplace has closed.
7. Basement solidarity networks. Organisation, at the neighbourhood level, that keeps a list of those who live in basements and knocks on the door when a warning comes. What the state does not do, the people can do with their own organisation.

From the standpoint of political demands

8. No more zoning amnesty. A campaign for a regulation that prohibits the zoning amnesty in the constitution.
9. The raising of the stream protection strip to 100 metres, and the removal of the buildings inside this strip by a programme financed not by their owners but by those who took the planning decision and those who collected the rent.
10. The socialisation of planning rent. The transfer to the public, as the product of social labour, of the increase in value created by a planning decision. This is a principle discussed in the world too, under the name of a "betterment levy"; even where it has been made law here, it is not applied.
11. The widening of the investigation. The judicial investigation should not stop at the manhole cover and the maintenance crew; it should reach the decision-makers who gave a permit in the stream bed, who approved the plan amendment, who ignored the opinion of the DSİ.
12. A say at COP31. The climate summit in Antalya should not pass without speaking of the Istanbul flood. The climate-justice movement should expose, in the same sentence, local planning rent and global fossil capital.

---

The Water Wants Its Due; We Want Our City

Dear young comrades,

A stream is a city's common memory. For centuries it carries the water, feeds the soil; people plant market gardens on its edge, turn a mill, wash clothes, and children play on its bank. The stream is no one's; even the Civil Code says so. Capitalism does not like what has no owner. It turns the stream first into a channel, then into a pipe, then under a road, and at the end into the car park of a shopping centre. It turns the common into a commodity, collects rent from the commodity, and puts up a tower from the rent.

Then one night it rains. The water remembers its old bed. And the price is paid neither by the one who put up the tower nor by the one who signed. The price is paid by the one sleeping in the basement, the one working on the building site, the one waiting at the bus stop.

So when "natural disaster" is said on television this week, please correct it: this is not a natural event, it is a property event. Water took its due from the soil; now it is the turn of the workers to take their due from the city. We want the streams back, we want the shores back, we want the planning decisions back. We want the city back for those who produce it anew every day.

As we remember Mahmut, Ahmet Usta, Faik Şentürk, and the missing whose names we do not yet know, the word to be said is not mourning. It is organisation.

For the right to the city, for the commons, all together.

---

Sources

The toll of the flood, and what followed

• Al-Monitor, "Turkey: Flash floods kill 3, paralyze Istanbul after record downpour", 15 October 2026 — al-monitor.com
• Turkish Minute, "İstanbul flood death toll rises to 3, with 4 missing", 15 October 2026 — turkishminute.com
• Sabah, "Downpour and flood disaster in Istanbul! The rainfall record of 84 years was broken" (live), 15 October 2026 — sabah.com.tr (in Turkish)
• Hürriyet, "The flood hit Istanbul, the damage appeared at dawn" (live), 15–16 October 2026 — hurriyet.com.tr (in Turkish)
• Medyascope, "The Istanbul flood disaster: what happened, in photographs and video", 15 October 2026 — medyascope.tv (in Turkish)
• Gerçek Gündem, "The flood toll in Istanbul grows heavier: the names of the missing are known" — gercekgundem.com (in Turkish)
• Euronews, "At least two killed after heavy rain and widespread flooding causes Istanbul shutdown" — euronews.com

Stream beds, planning, and the argument over responsibility

• bianet, "Istanbul's streams overflow during rainfall: How has urban development reshaped the city's waterways?" — bianet.org
• Yetkin Report, "The flood hit Istanbul hard: water took its due from the soil, bitterly", 15 October 2026 — yetkinreport.com (in Turkish)
• BirGün, "The revenge of the stream beds was heavy: it was not the rain that struck, it was the lack of planning", 16 October 2026 — birgun.net (in Turkish)
• Sözcü, "The foundation of the disaster in Istanbul was laid 22 years ago" — sozcu.com.tr (in Turkish)
• 12punto, "After the flood, Vadistanbul's planning process is on the agenda again" — 12punto.com.tr (in Turkish)
• Haberler.com, "The flood disaster has put stream beds back on the agenda! The law is clear, but the building does not stop" — haberler.com (in Turkish)
• Sondakika / ANKA, "On the second day of his defence in the İBB case, İmamoğlu criticised the flood and the planning", 15 October 2026 — sondakika.com (in Turkish)
• Takvim, "The İBB said we erased the flood images, and Istanbul was left under water", 15 October 2026 — takvim.com.tr (in Turkish)
• Diken, "In the 'zoning peace', where 40 billion lira was the target, the income stayed at 23 billion", 21 October 2019 — diken.com.tr (in Turkish)

Theoretical sources

• Friedrich Engels, The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man (1876), in the Dialectics of Nature.
• Friedrich Engels, The Housing Question (1872).
• Karl Marx, Capital, Volume III, Part Six: "The Transformation of Surplus-Profit into Ground-Rent".
• David Harvey, The Limits to Capital and Rebel Cities (urbanisation and the secondary circuit of capital).
• Henri Lefebvre, The Right to the City (1968).