Скачать или смотреть Contested trajectories of urban renewal in Istanbul

With the pretexts of increasing earthquake resilience and housing quality, the Justice and Development Party (AKP) administration in Turkey has initiated an ambitious program of urban renewal. This program targets not only low and middle income residential areas in the outskirts (largely areas that initially emerged as squatter settlements), but also decaying neighborhoods in central locations. The renewal model rests essentially on property-led redevelopment driven by authoritarian and increasingly centralized interventions of the state. Key agents of this effort are the Ministry of Urbanism and Environment, the Turkish Housing Development Administration (TOKI), and municipalities. The projects are typically announced without any prior consultation with or participation of the residents. Using examples from Istanbul, this paper will first explain the spatial and temporal aspects of disciplinary marketization through urban renewal, and contextualize the latter within the AKP's urbanization-led growth strategies. I will then talk about grassroots mobilizations against different types of renewal schemes. My focus will be on the extent to which these are able to subvert planning interventions that are based on a strong ownership ideology and rent maximization and redistribution. I argue that there is no clean-cut opposition between grassroots resistance and neoliberal urban renewal, as the coercive core of urban renewal is often supplemented with efforts to incorporate existing property owners as development partners. I conclude with remarks on emergent popular mobilizations around
claiming urban commons.

Ozan Karaman is Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Glasgow. He studied Architecture at the Middle East Technical University, Ankara. He received his Ph.D. in Geography from the University of Minnesota in 2010 with specializations in urban political economy, economic geography, and critical social theory. He has published research papers on neoliberal urban renewal, urban poverty, housing, and social justice in Istanbul. As an advisor to the Urban Sociology Research Module at the Singapore ETH Centre for Global Environmental Sustainability (SEC), he is currently co-supervising a project on global comparative urbanism engaging with debates on -- among other themes -- urban informality, gentrification, housing, and suburbanization, with case studies from eight large metropolitan regions across the world. Ozan is also a co-editor of Jadaliyya's Cities Page.