‘Our city is our identity!’: a field study on Kurdish local government experiences in Diyarbakır

Abstract

In this paper, I analysed the neoliberal and socio-spatial transformations occurring in Diyarbakir, the largest Kurdish city of Turkey. Rather than discussing the involvement of various national and international actors in those transformation processes, I tried to focus on the attitudes of the local social and political dynamics that create strong discursive counter-arguments against these processes. The study aims to demonstrate that dissident libertarian and egalitarian local groups can also become the supporters of and the actors in the neoliberal space strategies. In this regard, I examined the transformation of space in Diyarbakir considering the tense and opposed relationship between neoliberal strategies and the local political formations mobilized by the demands for collective identity. Data acquired from the field study on the local governance experience in Diyarbakir demonstrate that populist calls based on cultural existence became the focal point of local government. The slogan of “Our city is our identity!” functions as a meta-narrative that articulates the different class identities into neoliberal urban reality and becomes a discursive centre which normalizes the exclusive occupations over space.