Politics of “waiting for transformation” in protracted urban renewal projects in Turkey

Abstract

This paper explores the politics of ‘waiting’ as a mode of governance in large-scale urban redevelopment projects. In designated renewal areas, residents/landowners are often subject to several episodes of waiting: waiting for the public authority for information on redevelopment visions; waiting for the plans and projects to become public; waiting for the court ruling if they appeal the plans; waiting for demolition upon plan approvals; and, finally, waiting for the constructions to be completed. Given the complexity of actors and institutions involved in the waiting, it becomes a conflictual political process. This prolonged waiting leads to an ongoing temporariness and precarious spaces of urban renewal. The course of waiting affects the reorganization of the city space “ now” and in the future. We analyze two protracted urban renewal projects from Turkey, Fikirtepe in Istanbul and Karabaglar in Izmir, to explore how residents’ decade-long waiting for urban change are shaped and how these diverse waiting experiences lead to different outcomes for the progression of the state-imposed urban renewal agendas. While Karabaglar residents have unified around active bottom-up resistance from the beginning to challenge the project-based plans the central government imposed, Fikirtepe residents pursued individual-level negotiations with developers to maximize private returns following the zoning incentives the public authority gave. Despite the socio-spatial similarities between these designated urban renewal project sites, variances in residents’ collective waiting strategies have led to different urban politics around project-based urban change.