Spaces & Flows: Ninth International Conference on Urban and ExtraUrban Studies

Abstract

Inspired by the debates on global urbanisms and diversity of neoliberal urbanisation processes, this articles aims to provide an overview of the Istanbul’s radical and speedy urban transformation over the last decades. As is typical in globalising cities, Istanbul has undergone an extensive commodification based on construction, real estate development, and infrastructure investments largely fueled by tourism and branding of the city. Istanbul is, however, also a laboratory for studying the fragility and contingency of these processes as the city has entered into a relative economic slow-down since 2015. These oscillations help reveal socio-spatial tensions, encounters, and dangerous proximities as well as competing rights to the city that this urban transformation is constantly generating. We argue that a simultaneous focus on the socio-spatial dislocations, dispossessions on the one hand, and rent creation, accumulation and embourgeoisement on the other, is necessary since it enables us to explore the multiple mechanisms and layers of exclusion and inclusion. Constant mutations of the socio-economic space, the (re)creation and redefinition of boundaries of inside and outside, and normalisation of uncertainty in everyday life, we suggest, both constitute serious challenges to and create possibilities for living together and differentially. Finally, Istanbul’s urban transformation also raises interesting questions on what creates the urban ‘political’. The analysis of tensions as well as collusions allows us to explore how the micro-political processes on the ground can produce very different political subjectivities underscoring the constantly blurring lines between disruptive politics and the police order a la Ranciere.