Local Entrepreneurialism and State Rescaling in Turkey

Abstract

The paper examines the links between the rise of local entrepreneurialism and state rescaling in a neo-liberal context. The thrust of the article is that the agency of localities, increasingly manifested in the form of local entrepreneurialism, emerges through the political activism of a local bourgeoisie, in pursuit of a multiscalar local accumulation strategy. The article focuses on the spatial interest representation strategies of the local bourgeoisie introducing the concept of scalar strategies of representation, to examine in what ways the broader state rescaling process contributes to the formation of local agency and how this agency influences state rescaling. The city of Gaziantep, Turkey, constitutes its empirical focus.