Earthquakes are a looming threat to Athens and Istanbul’s residents, and yet no one can truly know which buildings will survive or collapse in the disaster, fueling speculation and unpredictable socio-economic behaviors that threaten to fray the city’s social fabric.
Most data on building risk and preparedness reaches the public in crumbs. The main challenge the team had to overcome was that raw data are nearly impossible to obtain, and citizens can’t have the full picture because access is carefully gatekept. The team investigated the cities’ quake plans and asked what—and who— gets left out of its safety plans.
The journalists attempt to bridge that gap by scraping data from the web and reproducing official risk maps, then using them to tell a clear, data-driven narrative about Istanbul and Athens—something never done before.
A journey through Istanbul and Athens’ neighborhoods that tests the authorities’ promise of safety. It is a story about these cities’ present—and future—but it speaks to all major cities besieged by real-estate speculation at the expense of safety and social justice.
Key findings:
Athens:
- The investigation found similar socio-economic behaviours and real estate patterns in cities facing a consistent earthquake threat with no concrete preparation to the disaster.
- As a response to an ongoing rental crisis, data acquired by real estate agents show that residents in Athens shift, due to lower prices, to renting apartments in older, and more dangerous, buildings– a vast majority of which has been never inspected for antiseismic protection.
- Public buildings such as schools, public libraries, gyms had to close in the past year after preliminary antiseismic inspections found them inadequately prepared. They had operated for decades without any inspection.
- Over the course of the investigation, public buildings flagged potentially dangerous were recorded to still be of use. Agencies in local municipalities of Athens said they work with the bare minimum personnel. Other agencies remain understaffed.
Istanbul:
- For decades, experts have agreed: the earthquake to come will flatten Istanbul. Over the past twenty years, the central government of Erdoğan’s party has favored urban-transformation projects that they promise will halt Istanbul’s destiny of rubble. Instead, they have turned the city into an open-air construction site: neighborhoods are emptying out while endless rows of newly built, expensive apartments remain vacant.
- A detailed description of the Turkish findings will be added once the main investigation is published.
Image by Federico Ambrosini. A close-up of Istanbul’s crowded neighborhoods.
