Technologies of inclusion in the frontier of urban renewal: State responses to community resistance in Abkouh neighborhood, Mashhad, Iran

Abstract

ABSTRACT Abkouh, an informal settlement in the center of Mashhad, was designated as an urban renewal zone in order to be integrated functionally and economically with its surrounding. In the context of community’s resistance to the project, this article investigates different tactics adopted by the local state to manage residents’ discontents. The latter is described in different “technologies of inclusion” from compensation to cooperation and empowerment, which could be at the same time pro-market and communitarian. Each tactic was in response to community’s discontents with the aim of advancing the renewal plan on the one hand and (peacefully) demobilizing residents on the other hand. The case of Abkouh indicates that grassroots mobilization against urban renewal does not necessarily fall into the dichotomy of either opposing or aligning with neoliberalism, because these two trajectories often converge through the state’s technologies of inclusion. This fact limits the collective mobilization capacity of the community and enables the local state to control the particularistic concerns of residents through the use of divide-and-conquer tactics.