Move from Coerced to Consented Urban Transformation in Istanbul: Absence of Collective Mobilization and Framing of Complicity

Existing literature on Turkey’s authoritarian neoliberal urban landscape has so far paid attention to urban transformation projects enacted through a top-down mechanism that involves forced evictions and displacement usually met by local resistance on the one hand, and urban transformation projects that generate revenues for the government’s political constituencies and in return popular and economic support for the government on the other. Yet, this research demonstrates what the existing literature cannot adequately account for: How and why local residents and institutions standing against and outside of the government’s redistribution mechanisms consent to urban transformation in their communities. This research displays the mechanisms through which the government’s authoritarian neoliberal politics are leveraged and reproduced by a local community in Istanbul, for whom the execution of the urban transformation is an economic mechanism of maintaining elite status by channeling capital investment into the region, while condemnation of the urban transformation is a cultural mechanism of signaling elite status by self-distancing from the government’s authoritarian neoliberal urban policies. Hence, in order to generate a better understanding of how urban inequality is reproduced, this research stresses the need to pay attention to urban actors with more complex relations to authoritarian neoliberal urbanism that can involve tacit approval or covert authorization of such practices, most often as a mechanism for upward mobility.