Right to the city and urban resistance in Turkey

Since 2000s, Turkey witnesses an intensive urban transformation in metropolitan cities. This transformation led by the AKP government itself with neoliberal perspectives of urbanisation targets generally informal and/or old, dilapidated neighbourhoods located in the city centre with high estate values but occupied by low-income inhabitants belonging often to ethnic and religious minorities. Against this massive urban transformation, many local resistances flourished with different motivations and claims but the common point is that they reclaimed all a right to the city, a right to exist in the city with their everyday life habits and to access to the city’s amenities by refusing to be relocated in the peripheral areas. The objective of this chapter will be to study the dynamics of these urban resistances, the perception and the appropriation of the space by inhabitants and how the concept of the right to the city is mobilised by them. I propose to study the case of May Day neighbourhood in Istanbul which is an informal and autonomous neighbourhood created by extreme-left political organisations in 1970. The second example is the case of Dikmen Valley in Ankara created also in the same manner of May Day in 1970s but lost progressively its political identity. This neighbourhood ethnically diverse mobilised also against an urban transformation project. My aim will be to compare these two case in their comprehension of the right to the city, tools of mobilisation and perception of their neighbourhood and everyday life in the city.