In the early two-thousands, Turkey’s Ministry of Transportation began construction on an airport in Hatay Province, in southern Turkey. The new Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, had run on a platform of religious freedom, social services for the poor, and housing and development; he had promised to put an airport in every region. The plans had caught the attention of a local architect named Ercüment Kimyon. Kimyon’s family had grown wheat on one of the many small farms near the drained bed of Lake Amik, the proposed site of the airport. When Kimyon was a child, his parents moved to İskenderun, the second-largest city in Hatay. In the mid-eighties, he opened an architecture firm, designing small apartment buildings in middle-class neighborhoods. Kimyon became a board member of the local Chamber of Architects, one of the many associations in Turkey—there are chambers of engineers, of geologists, of urban planners—that serve as citizen advocates: they monitor public-infrastructure projects, campaign for the protection of the environment and of cultural-heritage sites, and insure that buildings follow earthquake-safety codes.

In time, this advocacy work consumed Kimyon. He studied zoning laws, looking for signs of rant, money made from illegal construction schemes and kicked back to politicians. He took the municipality to court for everything—for employing thuggish private-security companies, for raising the price of water, for overcharging for photocopies. He joined the C.H.P., the party of modern Turkey’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, and he talked to the press incessantly. The main issue was “the integrity of the city,” he said. He knew that many buildings were dangerously tall, or built on soft soil, making them vulnerable to collapse. “My father used to tell us about the swampy ground in İskenderun,” he told me. Then “the swamp areas were being opened for housing construction.”