Dolmuş as a ‘collective’ on-demand urban infrastructure
The dolmuş is a novel urban mobility model that is found across all cities in Turkey. The word dolmuş can be literally translated as ‘stuffed’ from colloquial Turkish, referring to a vehicle that would only leave when ‘stuffed’ with people. Minibuses which are specifically produced by local factories as dolmuş vehicles offer both flexibility and affordability across contemporary urban Turkey: you can get on or off wherever you need on a certain circuitious route and pay a negligible cost in comparison taxicabs’ fares in doing so. These two value-adds render dolmuş robust and vital in urban contexts.
Dolmuş drivers have constantly faced regulatory trouble due to their tendency to follow a theoretically set, yet practically discretionary pricing and their ‘own traffic rules’, invoking social unpopularity due to their characteristic reckless driving, loud arabesque music and hyper-masculine attitude. The dolmuş model, however, shows no signs of disappearing from the landscape of urban Turkey any time soon given its practical indispensablity*. Indeed, dolmuş’ history (which goes back around a century to the early 1930s), is one of antifragility. The more it was tried to be banned, regulated, ridiculed or ignored, the more mainstream dolmuş became in both physical settings and also in the collective imagination of Turkish people**.
The rise of arabesque music in Turkey from 1960s onwards, for instance, has long been associated with the emergence of dolmuş drivers (often first-generation immigrants from rural areas) and has long been a contentious theme in political debates. Dolmuş became such a key urban actor that, who became famous in the music sphere was influenced primarily by dolmuş drivers’ collective tastes. At a time with little radio and TV penetration in Turkey due to import restrictions, dolmuş’ were in a sense mobile billboards of the contemporary music industry during the 1970s and ’80s. The best methodology to follow what was “in” or “out” in Turkish pop music was to attend to which tracks dolmuş drivers tended to play at a given time***.
An essential feature of any type of infrastructure is its shared nature — be it physically, psychologically or virtually. In a dolmuş, there is a key element of ‘shared randomness’, which perhaps no other mode of transportation in Istanbul boasts (It is worth noting that there are similar models of urban mobility in the Global South, such as the ‘angkot’ in urban Indonesia, ‘peseró’ of Mexico City, ‘matrushka’ of former Soviet Union nations such as Ukraine and the ‘jeepney’ of Manila in the Philippines; hence the model is not exclusive to Istanbul or Turkey).
If you take a taxi for example, what it simply does is that it takes you from A to B. That particular two-node journey is formed at your discretion and in terms of duration, is dependent on a rather predictable traffic density, per the time of the day. Alternative and formal modes of public transportation are even more ‘predictable’, as a ferry or metro train have set schedules and frequencies, in which a passenger is ‘dictated’ certain options of when and where to get on and off. The itinerary of a ferry, public bus or tram is hence determined independently of who boards the ride. Dolmuş however, takes you from A to B to C to D… to W to Y to Z — depending on who gets on and off and where. The stops and duration of a given journey on a dolmuş does not depend on a pre-determined schedule, as a daily commute on dolmuş may sometimes take 30 minutes or it may take up to an hour, varying on the amount of people that happen to take the particular dolmuş you do. A dolmuş may whiz past certain checkpoints in a city on some circuits, spend quite a bit of time in others, on demand of its passengers.
Dolmuş therefore, can be read as a collective form of ‘on-demand urban infrastructure’. As much as dolmuş’ have pre-determined lines which they circuit in a city — the temporal function of its exact itinerary is improvised on each and every tour. Boarding the dolmuş therefore requires a tacitly agreed upon mutual tolerance and respect for each other’s unrelated (yet temporarily synced) schedules****.
Ojek as an ‘independent’ on-demand infrastructure
In urban sprawls such as Jakarta, mayhem in traffic is the norm, not the exception, due to a lack of robust public transport and insufficient infrastructure. So much that, any everyday conversation in regards to this particular city tends to deviate towards the topic of traffic and ‘unorthodox’ mobility options, hence steps in the ojek. The key value-add of the ojek is its savvy efficiency, as its precision beats horse-power and its flexible timing beats the speed of public transportation. Ojek has a decades-old business model that is rather simple: a potential passenger of an ojek hails a motorcycle driver from the street, mentions a destination, they agree upon a price and the ojek drivers straight to the arrival point without making any other stops. An ojek has considerably less horsepower, seating capacity and potential velocity than a car — hence upon crude comparison with a taxi, it would have little chance of being the preferred mobility device for bringing passengers from A to B. However, ojek owes its high rate of adoption to its slick simplicity, as the particular context it operates is one of ‘incessant crisis’ that demands non-complicated solutions.
Notorious for its gridlocked traffic since the early 1980s, the urban mobility crisis in Java is known to be never ‘solved’, but rather, ‘maintained’. The most reliable method for Indonesians to maintain their daily routines within this gridlock is the ojek. Ojeks flow through cars and taxis desperately stuck on expressways and alleys like water flows through seemingly merged layers of stone. Instead of boasting physical size, motor-power or predictable schedules and fares, the ojek turns these lacks into advantages:, as it is precisely its small size which enables it to find space through the maze of automobiles. It is indeed its modest motor allows it to be sustainably affordable to a working class which requires some form of mechanised transport within their daily routines. An ojek would not be able to compete with a taxicab in an open highway in terms of ‘speed’, but in a traffic jam, the taxicab could only watch it pass by, as the ojek is superior in ‘timing’.
Dolmus vs. Ojek: Urban infrastructures with distinct temporalities
The key feature that differentiates the experience of the ojek and the dolmuş is the diverse sense of temporality they respectively espouse as apparently similar domains of urban infrastructure. That positions dolmuş somewhere between an ojek and a bus line — its geographic itinerary is pre-determined just like a bus, but its temporal itinerary is discretionary per its users, just like an ojek. The element of ‘shared randomness’ in a dense urban setting can be observed live when one takes a dolmuş. Experiencing ‘the city’, hence, is done within different temporalities in the domains of ojek and dolmuş. In the ojek model, the notion of time, or more specifically duration of a journey is an individual affair. In the domain of dolmuş however, the duration and the itinerary of the journey is determined collectively — depending on a rather improvised and unpredictable average of schedules of the passengers aboard.
- Kuyucu, Michael. “Dolmuş Müziği Kavramı ve Arabeskin Tarihi”, 45lik Sanat ve Nostalji, June 2018.
- **It is not a rare case to find urban Turks, who often self-proclaim to be ‘the elite’ to believe arabesque should be outright banned or at least be rendered completely marginal, as it invokes Middle-Eastern connotations — a region which a significant portion of the Turkish society does not want to be associated in any shape or form (especially the political contingent that identify as Liberal Social Democrats, which represent around 25% of the population). World-famous pianist Fazıl Say is a outspoken cynic of arabesque — finding support from a vast contingent of people who subscribe to rather elitist/Europhile world views, most visibly on Twitter. An analysis of the post-colonial roots of such an ironic and peculiar societal proclivity within a non-negligible chunk of the Turkish society is a promising area of potential sociological research.
- ***Playing music in dolmuş were banned in the 1990s all through out Turkey — essentially banning public exposition of arabesque. ‘Coincidentally’, arabesque music went on a downfall in terms of popularity since the 1990s as well. Arabesque tunes made a comeback during the late 2010s, this time though embedded with suburban hiphop, referred to as ’RnBesk’, predominantly appealing to a chronically unemployed and disillusioned youth; and proliferating through social media channels such as Soundcloud, Youtube and Spotify.
- ****Dolmuş drivers themselves as well, often design and embellish their vehicles in certain ways, that at first glance may seem completely random and individual yet often observed to be collective. The same tags tend to be sticked on same parts of the vehicle, the same type of photos are featured and so on. A detailed analysis: Cengiz, Alim Koray. “Dolmus Içi ve Dışı Nesneler ve Yazılar Aracılığıyla Kimliğin Ifşası”, Ankara Üniversitesi Antropoloji Dergisi, 2013.
