Three years on from the Antakya earthquake: reconnecting people to places
Where do you start to rebuild a city when it’s been all but erased? This question was on everyone’s minds after multiple large-scale earthquakes hit the ancient city of Antakya, in southern Türkiye, in 2023 leaving tens of thousands dead and most of the urban area in ruins.
After the Antakya earthquake, a seed shop reopens as an open-air shop in front of where it used to be in an old building (Photo: Francesco Pasta)
Beyond a gravely inadequate post-disaster response from the authorities, it soon became clear the government’s longer-term reconstruction plans were set to cause another catastrophe for the city’s social and urban fabric.
This reconstruction agenda pursued two intertwined goals: profit-making for the construction sector, often at the expense of community heritage, and socio-spatial restructuring favouring a state-sponsored urban identity.
In Antakya, one of Turkey’s most culturally diverse cities with many minority communities, these dynamics were particularly visible and destructive.
Instead of building livable temporary housing, the government placed people in hastily conceived ‘container cities’ (using shipping containers), while dashing to raze what remained of the city. This included its historic centre and even ‘official cultural heritage sites’, and concreting over agricultural land on the hills for mass housing – vastly expanding the city’s footprint.
Where to start?
Against this backdrop, when Architecture Sans Frontières UK (ASF-UK) began working in Antakya in summer 2023, our tentative answer to the question ‘where to start rebuilding a city?’ was to look at what people were already doing.
With minimal external support, and often in spite of official plans, residents had begun, individually and collectively, to repair, reinhabit and sustain fragments of their pre-earthquake worlds – quietly rebuilding their environments and communities.
Under the slogan 'Ma rihna, nehna hon', which in local Arab dialect translates as 'We haven’t gone, we are here', people resisted displacement and linked their determination to remain with broader claims for cultural rights, presence and identity.
What we began recognising as yaşayan miras (living heritage) became a thread stitching together dispersed initiatives and demands across the city – from informal repairs and mutual-aid networks to small-scale livelihoods and cultural practices that reconnected people to places.
This was in stark contrast to the state’s mass-produced housing on the outskirts, and heritage-oriented restoration of a few historic sites – both of which sideline the everyday spaces and relations that hold Antakya together.
What makes Antakya is its people
In the earthquake’s aftermath, Antakya witnessed an extraordinary mobilisation of civil society. While the government pressed ahead with an opaque, top-down approach, grassroots neighbourhood groups, volunteer networks, and professional and local organisations all stepped in – yet often with little coordination and with diverging agendas.
To create a shared space for collective analysis, ASF-UK and local partners organised a public forum on living heritage, bringing together grassroots, neighbourhood-based activist associations with more official actors such as the Chambers of Architects and Urban Planners. Our aim was to reach a common position on what should guide recovery.
The city’s challenges were overwhelming: mass depopulation, infrastructural breakdown, environmental degradation, encroachment on green and agricultural land, and the near-total destruction of whole neighbourhoods.
But across two days of site visits, workshops and debates, a central principle emerged: Antakya cannot be repaired without its inhabitants as active agents. The forum’s collective statement, summarised in the slogan ‘What makes Antakya is its people’, proposed a way forward grounded in cooperation between organised communities, accountable public institutions and supportive technical experts.
Post-disaster shelters used by residents in Çekmece, Antakya in spring 2024, showing the ways local people assembled shelters to stay within neighbourhoods (Photo: Francesco Pasta)
People-led reconstruction was already underway
Forum participants agreed the next step was to demonstrate how community-led planning might work in practice. ASF-UK partnered with Hatay Deprem Dayanışması, a grassroots initiative born after the disaster, and Herkes İçin Mimarlık, a Turkish NGO specialising in participatory design.
We focused on Çekmece, a neighbourhood stretching from the city centre to rural outskirts, home to a politically-mobilised community. It covered severely-damaged zones, partially intact homes, container camps and encroaching mass housing on farmland.
“The government says: ‘If you want support, move to the container city’. But we want to stay here,” residents of Çekmece told us, highlighting the mismatch between state policy and local needs. For many, the priority was to remain in their neighbourhood and community, even if that meant camping in public parks or beside the ruins of their old homes.
Our work began by documenting the challenges residents faced and the individual and collective strategies they were deploying, with minimal support from NGOs and state agencies. Residents were repairing homes, sharing water and electricity, setting up improvised community clusters, recreating communal spaces, re-establishing micro-economies, and maintaining social ties at risk of being lost through displacement. Taken together, these practices were expressions of living heritage as a form of planning.
Through mapping workshops and modelling exercises, residents articulated shared needs as well as collective demands for how the neighbourhood could be rebuilt. This culminated in a community exhibition at Çekmece’s neighbourhood house, one of the few public buildings still standing, where residents and municipal representatives discussed the future of the area on their own terms.
In this process, talking of ‘living heritage’ was instrumental in bringing residents to the table as experts in their own right, because everyone holds deep insights grounded in their own everyday experiences. Local teyzes (aunts) have as much to contribute as public officials or technical planners, and their perspectives should be recognised as a primary source of knowledge for rebuilding the city.
Living heritage as community-led planning
As part of the project, the Çekmece Community Centre, designed by Herkes İçin Mimarlık and now run by Hatay Deprem Dayanışması, opened its doors in December 2024. The inauguration brought together neighbourhood residents, Antakya’s civil society networks and district mayors. The event was both a celebration and a demonstration – the opening of a collaboratively-built space already functioning as a hub for community activities.
But beyond the delivery of a built structure, our aim was to show that residents were not only engaged in reconstruction, but also willing and ready to take a more proactive role as agents shaping their city’s future. It is not possible to repair or carry forward Antakya’s living heritage without actively-mobilised communities. Urban planning cannot be meaningful if it sidelines or destroys the very practices by which people are already bringing their city back to life.
As the third anniversary of the February earthquakes reminds us, Antakya continues to face escalating, seemingly intractable challenges. To many, the city re-emerging today is barely recognisable.
Yet as the government inaugurates new highway overpasses and mass housing blocks, reconstruction is far from over, and the recovery of the city’s living heritage is only just beginning. It unfolds in the minute work of people rebuilding their routines and neighbourly interactions, and in the slow, delicate practices through which collective urban life persists.
If Antakya is to heal, we need to find ways to support and expand these practices, rather than overwrite them.
Further reading
Report: Repairing living heritage in Çekmece (December 2024)
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