Installing Seismic Risk of Istanbul
Calculated surprise and torn-down slabs. An introduction to the art-science project Installing Seismic Risk of Istanbul. Supported by the German Research Centre for Geoscience GFZ Potsdam and presented at the Forecast Forum, HKW 2015.
I want to start by introducing a pervasive image (Figure 1), whose complexity, composition, and emotional impact will assist in understanding my art-science experiment titled Installing Seismic Risk of Istanbul. The photograph is by Idris Bedirhanoglu,1 a structural engineer who is researching at Dicle University in Diyarbakır, Turkey. The photograph shows a breathtaking scene shot in the aftermath of a catastrophic earthquake that occurred 2011 in the city of Van in eastern Turkey. It depicts the ruins of an apartment building. In the background, part of the building has moved into complete instability, held only by the arm of the crane (in the right-hand corner/ Figure 2). However, the front of the building has pancaked completely, which means that all the floors have piled tightly one on top of another, and the walls have fallen away completely. What comes to the fore in this image is a broad concrete slab, the top of the building, burying everything underneath it. This scenario may produce feelings of shock and powerlessness. It is heart-wrenching when one realizes that between those tons of masonry that were the floors, walls, and ceilings of the building lay the bodies of the occupants, crushed to death.2 It is far beyond the everyday experience of being at home and looking up at neatly plastered ceilings, that these ceilings could become weaponized. But here in this photograph, against this background of normal perception, these violent slabs come to the forefront as very dominant and visible. However, the deep transformation of the form and aesthetics of the building into something that is no longer recognizable, into bare concrete fragments leaving sparse remains and signs of everyday life, may produce a feeling of the uncanny. This building, constructed to protect and to shelter has turned ultimately into a violent object, acting almost as if it were alive and producing complete disorder. In the face of this disorder, helpless against the tightly piled up concrete, the small group of emergency rescue staff in their shiny red workwear signals the danger, and a warning that comes too late.
Figure 1. Van earthquake, collapse of an apartment building. Photo by Idris Bedirhanoglu, Dicle University, Diyarbakır, Turkey, 2011. Figure 2. Van earthquake, collapse of an apartment building.
However, if Istanbul, a megacity of 18 million people, were to be hit by a major earthquake, the scenario of collapsing buildings as seen in the photograph would be multiplied by an incredible number. The city is a candidate for an urban earthquake in the near future, a direct hit right underneath this large, often poorly constructed city, with catastrophic consequences. Due to Istanbul’s recent history of reinforced concrete constructions, which has facilitated the city’s rapid growth, large parts of the so-called Gecekondu settlements have little or no earthquake resistance.3 Despite its beauty and presence, Istanbul is located on one of the most seismically active plate boundaries on the planet—the NAF or North Anatolian Fault system—which is ready to rupture and shake the city.
But what do we really know about the future we face? Accurate prediction is a cornerstone of scientific knowledge, but earthquakes cannot be predicted in a deterministic way. Despite this evidence, earthquakes are forecast over the long term and seismic risk is assessed. But what is seismic risk?
Risk is a very complex and paradoxical concept with no final definition. It can be said that risk is not real; it is not the disaster. It is the anticipation and imagining of a possible future disaster. Therefore, risk only exists in a permanent state of possibility and virtuality.4
In the scientific language of risk, a possible future disaster is anticipated in a particular way. It is quantified and calculated in terms of probabilities. For seismic risk, the probabilities assessed are very low, but they result in very significant consequences. Seismic risk is characterized by calculating two main dynamic elements: first, the recurrence and strength of future earthquakes on fault lines (as ground motion accelerations); and second, the building’s response to a seismic event and its vulnerability to collapse or damage—two dynamics whose interface is frequently catastrophic.5
Thus, the disaster is not only attributed to an external natural agent, the earthquake, but also to human decisions. Humans are constructing buildings of variable earthquake resistance. And the way in which they are constructed depends, for example, on knowledge or ignorance, economics, building codes, and the builder’s integrity. Corruption is a very big problem: the most corrupt sector worldwide is the construction industry.6
The risk of an urban earthquake has increased worldwide due to the rapid growth of poorly constructed megacities near active fault zones. In the 1999 earthquakes in Turkey, for example, which resulted in approximately 30,000 deaths, “it was the newest buildings in the damage district that suffered the most damage.”7 A new term has emerged in recent years to describe the problem, not with old buildings, but with new reinforced concrete buildings: “pancake collapse.”8 While concrete
has the appearance of an advanced technology, based upon theoretical understanding of stresses and chemistry of cements and knowledge held by trained experts, reinforced concrete is also at the same time a simple process that can be, and in many parts of the world is, executed by people with no theoretical knowledge what so ever.[…] It is the ease with which concrete lends itself to [nontransparent] self-building that makes it hard to sustain the notion that we are dealing with an advanced material.9
Instead, concrete buildings rely heavily on their internal structure being hidden, on the physical distribution of forces remaining invisible, and on their ability to mask weak spots resulting from weak choices. This poses the very old and highly explosive question of who or what is responsible for earthquake disasters. That is the second paradox—to a large extent, seismic risk is produced by humans themselves.
Another paradox related to risk is that risk starts where certain knowledge ends. This means that uncertainty is always on the reverse side of all scientific knowledge about the future. To complicate the problem, earthquake science faces both the different levels as well as the characteristics of uncertainty. In the physical world, the probabilities assessed remain uncertain, imprecise, or completely unknown, hard or impossible to calculate or decrease—unlike in a casino, where one deals mostly with known and calculable probabilities.
With the help pf “constant advances in technologies of data collection, analysis and interpretation,”10 scientists expect that some uncertainties can be reduced with more research and data. When faced with a lack of data—and this is normal, because large earthquakes are very rare or hidden in the Earth’s history—then an interesting scientific approach could be applied: the so-called subjective probability judgment. This reveals another paradox related to risk. In the philosophy of statistics, probability can be divided into either a physical property, like mass or distance, or just a degree of belief. So, parts of earthquake science are very close to science “fiction”; this is referred to as intersubjectivity.11
In other words, earthquake science is operating at the limits of knowledge and at the limits of calculation, because the deepest uncertainty of all involved, represents a complete absence of knowledge. It cannot be measured or reduced. What could happen in the future is beyond imagination and experience, a surprise—where we don’t even know what we don’t know. Which means that, everything is now possible. Maybe Fukushima was an example of this uncertainty, or maybe it was just pure ignorance. So can we peer into the darkness and approach the unknowable risk? Ulrich Beck, the well-known German sociologist and risk scientist, said in this regard: “[T]o knowledge, therefore, drawn from experience and science there now also has to be added imagination, suspicion, fiction and fear,”12 in order to cope with the future.
Installing Seismic Risk of Istanbul, therefore, deals with the installation of a paradox, the installation of a calculated virtuality and possibility. It means to create a vision of the future disaster and then to enable the possibility of violence to occur through uncertain calculations. How is this being realized?
Here, I want to return to the photograph showing the collapse of a building during the Van earthquake and the uncanny concrete slabs that tear through the foreground. To anticipate and visualize the future violence, this background, in form of the concrete fragments are now shifted to the front and hang under the ceiling of the venue. The concrete slabs exhibit not only the aesthetics of violence, but also its force. A real force that could do real harm. Now, in order also to provide a possibility of a violence occurring due to uncertain calculations, every slab is coupled with, and animated by the “uncertain” probabilities of earthquakes and building collapse calculated by scientists. This means that the uncertain knowledge of the scientific calculation is brought into a real-time performance. This simulation is carried out by calculating engines (random number generators) that are performing the so called aleatoric uncertainty (Latin: alea = dice) every second or every tenth of a second (this is the type of uncertainty that occurs when throwing a dice). In the simulation, time is not modeled by accelerating the time line; instead, the simulation and performing probabilities operate in durations of real time.
The slab fragments that are at risk remain in a permanent state of possible collapse. A real possibility exists that the slabs could come crashing down into the venue. A falling 200-kg slab could produce 2 tons of dynamic force, which means that a proper risk is created in the venue. But the probability of a slab falling down into the venue is very low. One example of the long-term probability of a major earthquake in Istanbul would be 60 percent over thirty years.13
A mathematical conversion of this thirty-year forecast into a probability over one year, results in a probability of 2 percent, and per second, results in a 10-8 probability. The probability occurring seems negligible, but not over a longer time span.
For testing purposes and in order to establish an emotional relationship, the famous experimental animal—a flock of live cockatoos—will linger under the slabs, protagonists of the canonical experiment on a bird in an air pump and of the construction of facts by technical instruments and scientific observations.
The project considers the historical and cultural role of concrete in the installation of risk in Istanbul, owing to the quality and practices of the city’s construction industry, and to the material characteristics of the reinforced concrete structures themselves. Concrete is a popular material in modern architecture, but it is also emerging as an extremely vulnerable and uncertain substance especially in cases where seismic activity impacts the surface of widespread non-engineered (Gecekondu) or concrete structures built by corrupt contractors. The project will illustrate these ambiguities of reinforced concrete. Distinct building practices and material strength are used to calculate the probabilities of seismic building collapse in Istanbul, represented by the hanging concrete slabs. Each slab represents a different level of concrete-building resistance and a type of construction practice in Istanbul.
To complicate things even more, the performance also embeds higher-level uncertainties of seismic risk, such as the elicitation of expert judgments, part of the so-called epistemic uncertainty. The performance will use and visualize the various model approaches, argued beliefs, and narrations of experts (with distinct reputation, experience, etc.). This provides an evaluation of confidence in these experts.
I will now summarize some characteristics of the installation. In this experiment, the risk of a future disaster is produced not only by reality or a “natural environment,” but by artifacts and human calculations of reality, with a calculated future and a calculated surprise. It somehow reflects the contemporary technological condition and the perversity of the notion that risk is mainly produced by humans themselves and by their calculations and technologies, which form the basis and the result of our decisions.
The animated slabs could be seen as three-dimensional maps, tracing back on the causes and relations responsible, and participating in the collapse or resistance of buildings, from the earth underground to the construction practices and decisions made by scientists, politicians, or building companies, among other stakeholders, etc.
Maybe the installation is also a metaphor, a kind of Damoclean sword, which is not connected to reality, but to the calculation of reality, emphasizing that construction always comes with responsibility. The installation also represents a time experiment, the interface of geological time with human time. For seismic risk, that means facing slight probabilities with great consequences.
And finally, it is not about the collapse as such, here, it is about the possibility of collapse.
The past acts as the scientific basis for looking into the future. It might offer a clue to what lies ahead for Istanbul. A guaranteed seismically active Turkey. In the venue, the installed risk has to be managed. The falling down of a slab is a real seismic event for the building. Under the conditions of the city, Istanbul’’s settlements and its citizens have to be protected, and society and politics have to be involved in risk reduction, resilience, and decision making. The scientific risk assessments and anticipations serve here as the knowledge base for these decisions. As an unanticipated and surprising consequence, the scientific anticipation of future earthquakes in Istanbul’s built environment has mobilized state-directed urban renewal of vulnerable communities in the city. This has established stricter building codes, and also a new law that allows the government to survey, demolish, and rebuild homes at risk of damage; which allows the involuntary displacement of residents who have no legal possibility of protesting, leading to an increase in real-estate speculation and the destruction of social communities.14 This process is an example of the way in which knowledge produced by science—once it is captured by the quantification procedures and algorithms that model the Earth’s future—could become both the basis and motor for ambiguous new forms of decisions and disputes, measured through capitalist modes of valorization.15
