MIND THE GAP: The Hidden Engine

MIND THE GAP / ARADAKİ BOŞLUK is a ten-page zine on gender, ethnicity and urban mobility in Turkey, with a focus on female domestic workers commuting from Esenyurt to the gated housing estates of Bahçeşehir, Istanbul. It is organised around four themes. The first is set out as a myth against reality: the assumption that low-income mothers work close to home, against evidence of long cross-city commutes. The second is the self-organised minibus (“servis”) networks that women built where public transport failed. The third is the gendered design of streets, illustrated by women’s zigzag routes and a participatory street experiment in Maltepe. The fourth is the effect of the COVID-19 lockdown on women who could not stay home. A closing section considers what a woman-friendly city might look like. The zine draws on peer-reviewed research on mobility and labour in Turkey, OECD data, and publicly available posts from the Instagram accounts @kadin_isci and @mor.merdiven.agi. This record contains both the English and the Turkish version. Prepared under the supervision of Dr. Nihan Akyelken. Third-party images and social media screenshots reproduced in the zine remain the property of their respective owners and are not covered by the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence applied to this work.