Cultures of assemblage, resituating urban theory: A response to the papers on ‘Assembling Istanbul’

Abstract

The articles in this special issue extend research on urban space and politics in Istanbul with approaches that explorate the relationships between urban form, urban change, and political processes as assemblages of things, beliefs, institutions, and landscapes. They share a commitment to extended ethnography and thick description in urban studies, and contribute to research that destabilizes universalizing urban theory produced in Europe and America. The dramatic state-led project of neoliberal urban transformation in Istanbul has generated an important body of work that focuses on the consequences of creative destruction, urban displacement, and urban social and political exclusion. These papers contribute to that research with additional questions that incorporate understudied material and cultural elements of the urban political economy. What role do material elements (concrete, plexiglass, signs, maps) play in the practices that propel urban dynamics: that justify, for example, the rebuilding of some properties and the destruction of others? How do the subjective dimensions of human life (memory, belief, emotion, art, suspicion, and imagination) propel particular forms of urban development? Istanbulites' theories of why, where, and to whom destruction or fortune happens – and of what particular material things mean, or what they're meant to be used for – are crucial elements of the total urban situation. Istanbulites' theories cohere disparate elements into assemblages which, in turn, work to transform the city's material realities and social worlds. These papers invite us, as scholars, to resituate our urban theories and to bring urban residents' theories into assemblage with our own.