Diverging community responses to state-led urban renewal in the context of recentralization of planning authority: An analysis of three urban renewal projects in Turkey

Abstract

This study explores how the division of governing power between central and local governments affects the local community's political responses to state-led urban renewal. The study is based on Turkey as an extreme case, where the central government commits to the renewal of one-thirds of the existing national housing stock in the course of twenty years. This paper presents a comparative analysis of the local community responses to the urban renewal projects in three neighborhoods that are located in different metropolitan areas; Adana, Bursa, and Izmir. The variation among the local community's political response to the top-down imposition of large-scale urban renewal projects is analyzed in the context of ostensibly arbitrary delegation of planning authority. This paper concludes that grassroots mobilization in the form of neighborhood associations has a complex relationship with the recentralization of planning authority. These sporadic bottom-up responses to government-led urban redevelopment provide an alternative “unplanned” participatory mechanism for the officially neglected urban denizens.