Challenges of Neoliberalism on Quality of Life in Turkey’s Cities

During the campaigning period of local elections held in March 2014, the political slogan of the AKP was “New Turkey, New Cities” which epitomizes the significance the AKP government attributed to the cities as the key actors of urban development and local governance. In the late AKP period, the construction-sector led policies to vast and widespread areas of the country and the authoritarization of those government-led processes, particularly through the far-reaching administrative and legal restructuring attempts have been the defining features of the ruling party’s govermentality (Alkan, 2015: 850). One such legal restructuring is the Law No. 6360 (issued in December 2012) which metropolitanized artificially 77% of Turkey’s population. This rapid urbanization created serious challenges to the quality of life in Turkey’s cities. In this vein, drawing on the findings of a three-year project funded by TÜBİTAK (218K355), the aim of this paper is to critically investigate the challenges of over-developmentalist and centralist local governance predominant since the 2000s in the quality of life in Turkey that subordinates human and nature factor. Within the scope of the project, the quality of life in ten cities in Turkey (Adana, Mersin, Bursa, Konya, Kayseri, Eskişehir, İzmir, Samsun, Gaziantep, and Diyarbakır) have been examined through a field research based on qualitative (in-depth interviews and focus groups) and quantitative (survey carried out in Konya and İzmir) methods. Hence this paper will attempt to reflect on to what extent it is possible to develop a “new urban politics” in Turkey for a progressive and just local governance in terms of Henri Lefebvre's “right to city”.