City Debates 2024 Abstracts
Nadi Abusaada
Interrupted Futures: Planning Modern Jaffa, 1936-1948
Abstract
Throughout the nineteenth century, Jaffa was the primary port city in Palestine and the main link connecting it to the world. In 1909, the colonial city of Tel Aviv was built in its vicinity. The spatial proximity of the two cities shaped both their material trajectories and their perceptions in colonial imaginaries. Tel Aviv, the ‘White City’, turned into symbol for colonial modernity and progress whereas Jaffa, the ‘Black City’, was lost in its shadow. British colonialism in Palestine (1917-1948) exacerbated this contrast. The most vivid expression of this schism was during the 1936-39 Great Arab Revolt in Palestine, when the British commenced a planned demolition attack against Jaffa, forcibly cutting ‘good wide roads’ through its historical fabric under the pretense of ‘urban improvements’.
Taking the 1936 British demolition of Jaffa’s Old City as its starting point, the first part of this talk investigates the construction of Jaffa’s ‘non-modernity’ in colonial urban designs in the first half of the twentieth century. In the second part, the talk explores a counter-narrative to this colonial frame, by foregrounding overlooked historical Arab visions for Jaffa’s modernity. These are exemplified by a 1945 masterplan for the city, prepared by an Egyptian planner hired by the Palestinian-run Jaffa Municipality. Though unrealized due to the 1948 Nakba, the masterplan sketched the outlines of a Palestinian modern city oriented towards its broader Arab regional setting. The 1945 Jaffa Masterplan is one of the earliest and most comprehensive masterplans of its kind by an Arab urban planner for an Arab city under colonial rule. Despite its significance, and contrary to the plethora of scholarship on Tel Aviv’s masterplan by Patrick Geddes, the 1945 Jaffa masterplan and its underlying visions for the city’s modernity remains absent from historical record.
Howayda Al-Harithy
Interrogating Recovery: The Case of Gaza
Abstract
This paper reflects on the current engagement of the Beirut Urban Lab with Gaza, and the process of documenting the violent urbicide that is unfolding there. The paper takes the deliberate destruction of both symbolic and mundane elements of the built environment as an act of political violence but aims to interrogate recovery as a construct in this context.
The documentation process involved gathering data from various sources using diverse digital tools to build a base map and track the destruction over time; to buildings, institutions, green and open spaces, infrastructural utilities, as well as heritage and archeological sites. Through the documentation process, it became evident that the central and pressing inquiry pertains to recovery and how it happens given the scale of the traumatic violence and forced displacement endured over an extended period of time!
Drawing upon existing literature and the Lab’s own position on recovery, the paper interrogates recovery as a construct in face of massive violence of this scale. It advocates for “unarchiving” as a catalyst for the process of recovery. It therefore asks the following questions: how can archiving and unarchiving aid the process of recovery? Where does recovery start? How can unarchiving foster a shared vision for the urban recovery? How can unarchiving, which is defined a process that disrupts and re-organizes archival collections, leads to the formation of new narratives and future imaginaries?
Asseel Al-Ragam
Endowments and Transnational Networks: The Urban Politics of al-Jam’iyyat al-Khayriya in Kuwait
Abstract
The multi-scalar relationship between al-jam’iyyat al-khayriya (charitable organisations) and urban development has not received sufficient research attention in the field of urban studies, despite the direct impact of Donation-Funded Projects (DFPs) on the built environment. In the specific context of Kuwait, al-jam’iyyat al-khayriya offer diverse DFPs that donors can support to fulfil compulsory zakat or voluntary sadaqa obligations. These charitable contributions endorse projects spanning education, religion, and infrastructure aimed at enhancing community development and basic infrastructure both locally and on an international scale. These efforts not only foster network expansion but also establish a sustainable operational model, encouraging modern development that extends beyond state-sponsored welfare initiatives. Through these development-oriented strategies, al-jam’iyyat al-khayriya emerge as influential non-state actors, significantly impacting urban governance and addressing service and infrastructure deficiencies overlooked by the State. The paper contributes to understanding the ways these private charities leverage urban environments to expand political, economic, and social networks. It explores their use of modern technologies, visual representations, and architecture to produce conditions of al-tanmiya (development) and al-hadatha (modernity). Religion is examined in these processes as an interlocutor in shaping spatial realities and constructing social identities within urban contexts. The paper relies on linguistic nuances inherent in the studied context to decolonize the literature, offering a more inclusive understanding of the interactions between religion, urban development, and non-state actors that shape Global South cities.
María José Alvarez-Rivadulla
Making the State Care: The Role of Political Willingness and Brokerage in Bogota’s New Feminist Care Policy
Abstract
This article, co-authored with Friederike Fleischer and Adriana Hurtado, examines the crucial role of political willingness and brokerage in the implementation of walteBogotá’s new feminist care policy, the “System of Care,” which aims to address gender and class inequalities and alleviate care burdens on women. Through a combination of ethnographic data and stakeholder interviews, we analyze the intricate political and social processes that underpin the policy’s effectiveness. Drawing on academic literature on care work, best practices, and policy implementation in weak states, we provide a comprehensive understanding of the policy’s development and operation, from the inception of the System of Care to its day-to-day functionality within the local Care Blocks. Our findings underscore the significance of political willingness and brokerage at the macro level, along with the importance of debureaucratization and trust-building at the micro level, as key factors contributing to the policy’s success. However, this policy innovation also faces several challenges, primarily political uncertainties and the risk of burnout among local Care Block coordinators. We argue against simplistic narratives of “Best Practices” that overlook the intricate political and social dynamics necessary for successful policy implementation. Instead, we emphasize the need to consider unique contextual factors that play a critical role in the effectiveness of policy innovations, particularly those that prioritize care as a central urban infrastructure.
Maryame Amarouche
Thinking the City-Region from the Periphery: Spatial and Political Reconfiguration in Morocco
Abstract
Based on peripheral territories, this paper explores the making of the city-region in the light of political reconfigurations in Morocco. Strategically located at the gateway to the major cities, these territories are a magnifying mirror for the reconfiguration of the instruments of power (such as urban planning documents), the ideologies which drive urban policies (in Morocco, i.e. the tension between authoritarian control and an investment-led approach), the actors (role of the State, power relations between stakeholders, centre-periphery relations) and the various interests (public and private).
Muna Dajani
The depoliticization of aid as a colonial practice in Palestine
Abstract
In Palestine, there has been consistent normalisation and depoliticization of climate change and international aid interventions, reducing Palestine, a struggle for liberation and self-determination to a humanitarian case necessitating conditional aid and foreign interference. Under the current global climate change financing mechanisms, this damaging discourse prevails. In order to engage and address Climate injustice in the region, colonial and settler colonial legacy and its disruption of way of life and meaning needs to be foregrounded. Re-politicizing the climate and environment, and challenging discourses of peacebuilding and collaboration are crucial steps in cantering climate justice within Palestinian popular mobilization.
Ayham Dalal
Syrian Refugee Camps in Jordan: From Shelters to Dwellings
Abstract
In Jordan, and in the hope of releasing pressure from the underdeveloped cities of the north, two main camps were constructed as an urban policy response to the Syrian refugee crisis: Zaatari and Azraq. This paper investigates how Zaatari camp was planned following humanitarian universal standards, and how it was gradually appropriated by refugees. It also shows how Azraq camp was planned following “lessons learned” from Zaatari, resulting into what the UN called the “best planned refugee camp in the world”. Based on spatial analysis and ethnographic research, the paper argues that the planning of both camps is disciplinarian at heart despite all claims. Particularly, it shows how the planning of Azraq camp was used to enforce securitization, producing a panopticon-like impact on refugees in space. Furthermore, the paper argues that refugees need for a dignified dwelling cannot be suspended or reduced to “temporary shelters”. Instead, it shows that dwelling – as a daily practice, and in the Heideggerian sense – has the capacity to gradually dismantle and reassemble the camp. Evidence of this process is shown in the transformation of shelters into dwellings, and in the ways in which refugees negotiate privacy, social spaces, infrastructures, materiality and the economics of the caravans, producing complex urban realities in contrast to the ones originally provided. Finally, the paper suggests that any urban policy targeting refugees and forced migrants needs to consider their “right to dwell” beyond imposed political and temporal frameworks.
Momen El-Husseiny
Urban Governance and Cityness: New Egypt and the Financialized Afterlives of Planning Traditions
Abstract
This article engages with Walter Benjamin’s conceptualization of the “traditions of the oppressed,” whereby tradition “teaches us” (belehrt uns), offering critical knowledge we must “attain to” (zu kommen). Thus, we must learn from past struggles to reach an emancipatory time-to-come. I examine the ongoing developments of Cairo’s New Administrative Capital in the desert to investigate the postcolonial afterlives of the Hamayouni Decree and its role in city-making. Issued in 1856 to control the Coptic community, I show how different regimes of rule continued resorting to the decree to facilitate urban extensions onto the desert. As such, a variety of urban governance instruments, strategies and tactics (acts of exception, mediations and negotiations over class politics, religious practices, political allegiance and means of inhabitation), were used to shape an urbanization of the oppressed. By understanding the past and how postcolonial subjectivities navigate atrocities in their everyday search for meaning and the good life, I question what kind of cityness persists when basic rights are usurped. Drawing on the essence of urban sustainability, as past, present and future continuum of what is yet-to-come, I suggest learning from chronopolitics, whereby the constructive reconfiguration of time and production of space may enable us to rethink the power of transformative agency and collective empowerment.
Omar Jabary Salamanca
Between Land and Live: Insurgent Geographies of Reproduction in Palestine’s Frontiers
Abstract
Drawing on the experiences and material conditions of frontier communities in Palestine, this presentation explores how infrastructures are constitutive of the logics of settler colonialism and racial capitalism as well as a vital terrain for land-based practices of anti-colonial resistance. In foregrounding frontier infrastructures, it considers the ways insurgent geographies of social reproduction in the margins speak to contemporary social and political life in the face of eliminatory violence.
Keynote Address
Nour Joudah
Mapping as Decolonial Praxis: Indigenous Imagination amidst Settler Destruction, from Algeria to Palestine and Hawaii
Abstract
In the last several months as we have watched Israel commit a genocide in Gaza, we have understandably been focused on death, destruction, and loss. When we look back, we know this genocide did not start in October 2023, nor is it limited to the occupied Gaza Strip.
We also know and must remember with every historical exploration we conduct, that the Palestinian experience and landscape is characterized by much more than loss. At its core, the Palestinian story is one that continuously redefines survival across borders and generations. Like indigenous duration around the world, the sumoud of Palestinians in and out of Gaza is one with its eye to the future.
This talk will give a glimpse into Dr. Joudah’s ongoing research and book project which focuses on how indigenous communities use mapping as an imaginative decolonial praxis. Starting with the remapping of pre- and post-independence Algeria as inspiration and a nodal point of inquiry, the study grows to a comparison of contemporary countermapping efforts for Palestine and Hawaii. These various creative processes range from archiving, the design of reconstructing destroyed villages, to the embodied imagining of protest and land restoration – all of which stand as testaments to indigenous duration.
By fusing indigenous political theories of resurgence and critical cartographic perspectives on how maps are wielded as tools of power, this work encourages conversations in settler colonial studies (and societies) that do not dismiss the idea of decolonization as impossible, but rather engage with indigenous aspirations as guides for decolonial thought as well as action. Whether textual or performative, indigenous cartographies are not merely “alternative” spatial representations or knowledge systems, they are affirmations of indigenous survival and visions of being – in a place structured to outlast them.
Sarah El-Kazaz
Politics in the Crevices: Urban Design and the Making of Property Markets in Cairo and Istanbul
Abstract
In this talk, I discuss my newly released book Politics in the Crevices, which examines the politics of redistribution under neoliberalism through an ethnographic account of urban transformation in contemporary Istanbul and Cairo. Neoliberalism is almost defined by its attack on welfare states and reliance on free markets not states as the best arbiters of the distribution of a society’s resources. In the face of dismantled welfare states, most scholars have concluded that redistribution is on the wane in neoliberalizing economies. Rather than accept that conclusion, Politics in the Crevices asks: What happens if we shift our gaze and open up our search for redistributive politics beyond familiar politicized sites? Turning to the arena of housing and property markets, the book argues that redistributive battles over housing are alive and well in neoliberalizing Istanbul and Cairo. Rather than agitate for familiar redistributive policies, however, urban protagonists are relying on the subtle, quiet machinations of urban planning and design to secure affordable housing on the one hand and corner luxury real estate on the other. Careful urban design is being mobilized to transform how property is valued in a neighborhood so as to manipulate the workings of “freely traded” real estate markets, creating what I term “particularistic value.” The talk will focus on unpacking the mechanics of “particularistic value” and its political ramifications as protagonists agitate for redistribution within the machinations of “the market” as a practice and logic. Ultimately, the book argues that the enactment of redistributive politics through subtle, quiet practices of urban design and planning displaces weighty political struggles onto contests over intimate and private urban crevices that are difficult to recuperate and negotiate as a polity.
Gökçe Günel
A Seascape of Power: Turkish Energy Infrastructure in Ghana
Abstract
In addressing urgent electricity demands, many countries are looking toward quick power generation systems. One emerging system is powerships: floating power plants that anchor in a harbor, plug into a national grid, and generate electricity with heavy fuel oil or natural gas. The Turkish company Karadeniz Holding—or Karpower, as it is known to many of its customers—has become an increasingly prominent producer of power-ships in the past decade. This talk will explore how Karpower’s ships have emerged and analyze their implementation in Ghana. It will show how the producers of power-ships frame them as liminal devices that come with the promise of their own obsolescence, enabling a vision of linear development. Yet this liminal era is often stretched indefinitely to suit a wide range of financial and political interests, forestalling the capacity for such progress. In advancing their geopolitical interests, Turkish businesspeople and diplomats suggest that a country like Ghana may experience the same stages toward development that Turkey has undergone in the twentieth century, employing a certain grammar of capitalist relations that differentiates Turkey from other actors in the region. An examination of these multiscalar connections illustrates how the tenuous and makeshift qualities of temporary infrastructure might belie the social and political relations that catalyze this seascape of power.
Sandi Hilal
Refugee Heritage
Abstract
In tracing, documenting, revealing and representing refugee history beyond the narrative of suffering and displacement, Refugee Heritage is an attempt to imagine and practice ‘refugeeness’ beyond humanitarianism. Such a process requires not only rethinking the refugee camp as a political space: it calls for redefining the refugee as a subject in exile and understanding exile as a contemporary political practice that is capable of challenging the status quo. The recognition of “the heritage of a culture of exile” constitutes a new perspective from which social, spatial and political structures can be imagined and experienced, beyond the idea of the nation-state.
Ozan Karaman
Transnational Speculations on Urban Land: A Comparative Approach
Abstract
There are indications that real estate, infrastructure, and megaprojects are increasingly – albeit selectively – assembled, designed, and produced at the global scale via diverse financial instruments. New forms of globalized, financialized, rent-intensive urbanisms challenge our understanding of some of the key notions in urban political economy such as urban land rent, growth coalitions, or the urban commons. I will present the theoretical framework of and findings from an ERC funded project entitled “The Urban Revolution and the Political.” I will then elaborate on a specific site of the research team, namely the international property fair MIPM (le Marché International des Professionnels de l’Immobilier) in Cannes, France. This event is an important meeting ground for many influential actors in the global real estate industry including developers, consultants, investors, local authorities, and data providers. I will discuss its role in shaping patterns of speculative urban development at the global scale.
Zhigang Li
Financialization and the Making of New Wuhan
Abstract
The miraculous growth of China, particularly in its large cities, has received much attention in recent decades. Most literature, however, concentrates on large and developed coastal regions or globalizing cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen; far less is known about central or western cities, where the un- precedented growth and new construction are also taking place. Moreover, little is known about the way of the city making, especially from a financial perspective. To address these gaps, in this article we examine the making of the new Wuhan, capital city of central China, to interrogate the process by which underdeveloped or developing cities resort to financialization to achieve planning aims, build new spaces, and fund infrastructures. Through case studies, fieldwork, and interviews conducted during the past several years in the contexts of three typical projects – Zhongshan Avenue (ZA), East Lake Greenway (ELG), and 27 Riverside Business District (RBD) – we examine their modalities, evaluate their effects, and articulate specific institutional arrangements: the local financing platform (LFP), the project land package, and various actual efforts to construct these projects. Through these case studies, we contribute to the literature on urban China by highlighting the close relationship between planning strategies and urban financialization. Our findings highlight China’s ‘state entrepreneurism’, especially the active role of the local states when producing new spaces. We call for further attention to the variegated modalities and effects of financialization across different contexts, that of emerging Chinese cities.
Keynote Address
Eduardo Cesar Leão Marques
The governance and politics of Latin American metropolises in comparative perspective
Abstract
A substantial literature has analyzed the urban governments, governance, and policies of cities of the global North. Southern metropolises remain characterized as places of ungovernability, dysfunctionality, and exception. It is true that they host intense inequalities and poverty and did not universalize basic policies but also thriving development production for the elites. It is also true that their governments rely on less consolidated party systems based on territorial networks of political mobilization, count on weaker administrative procedures, forebear informality, and non-state actors control territories and even provide services. At the same time, social participation tends to be higher and States are usually more central relatively. All these elements do not match the cookbook of efficient, democratic, and fair local governments. However, recent studies demonstrate that these cities are governed daily and sometimes even manage to advance toward reducing inequalities and facing their challenges. How is this possible?
The answer demands a deeper understanding of what really happens in city politics and urban institutions in the South. To contribute to this effort, this paper develops comparative historical arguments about urbanization and State formation to specify the politics and institutions present in Latin American cities. The analysis discusses how these metropolises’ existing political and institutional conditions dialogue with recent urban government changes and helps to explain how and by whom they are governed.
Azadeh Mashayekhi
Revolutionary Islamic Organizations and Land Ownership Conflicts in Urban and Peri-Urban Areas of Tehran
Abstract
This presentation looks at the role of Islamic revolutionary organisations in land ownership and land use conflicts and the resulting power struggles that have emerged in the urban and peri-urban areas of Tehran. Since the 1979 Islamic revolution in order to consolidate and expand the power of Islamic Sharia ideology nationwide, Ayatollah Khomeini and his followers initiated new mechanisms to generate and distribute resources through founding new revolutionary organisations (labelled as charitable foundations). These Islamic charitable organisations were established parallel to the state machinery and took control over the confiscated wealth and property of the royal family and the assets of landowners and industrialists who fled the country.
In the past decades, these organisations have played a significant role in shaping urbanisation and transferring public (confiscated) land into private hands, including poor lower-income communities and private developers. Within the redistribution process, these organisations acquired considerable recourses and political power, turning them into dominant actors in the land market deeply entangled with land grabbing and confiscation activities, legitimised by religious principles of social justice and equity. Furthermore, as significant landowners, these organisations wield considerable influence and are instrumental in driving speculative practices around land use change. These practices include orchestrating the transition from agricultural land use to residential use and exerting their influence on local planning decisions in peripheral townships. This presentation shows cases of land grabbing, confiscation, and redistribution tactics used by the selected Islamic revolutionary organisation in Tehran and its periphery, and it unpacks the mechanisms through which these actors interfere with the broader regimes of land governance and distribution and disrupt state-society relations around land transaction.
Walter Nicholls
Insurgent Bureaucrats: Mobilizing for Social Justice within the Local State
Abstract
During the second half of the 2010s, municipal bureaucrats in the United States have shown a growing willingness to engage in battles within the bureaucracy, connect with social movements, and construct oppositional identities centered on social and racial justice. In various cases, bureaucrats became insurgents and mounted campaigns to change the local state from within. This presentation outlines a theoretical framework to unpack the process of making disparate municipal administrators into an “insurgent bureaucrat.” I draw on extensive research performed on bureaucratic conflicts in “Mayville, California” over “sanctuary city” (2016-2018) and “racial reconciliation” (2020-2021) policies. I draw on the case to make a three-pronged argument: 1) The hierarchical structure of the bureaucracy creates perennial conflicts between stratified bureaucrats over positioning and power. 2) Aggrieved bureaucrats form networks with other colleagues and allies in civil society, form oppositional identities, and maneuver to improve positioning and advance their agenda within the bureaucratic field. 3) Crises (e.g., the election of Donald Trump, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the uprising in response to the murder of George Floyd) destabilize a bureaucratic order and provide insurgents an opening to advance positioning and power. I conclude that such advances are often reversed when they are not sufficiently institutionalized, and insurgents fail to achieve hegemony within the bureaucratic field.
Kareem Rabie
National Plans for the Day After: the State Process, Capital, and Distribution of Precarity and Stability across Palestine
Abstract
Based on my ethnographic work on large-scale private housing developments, urban and national planning, and the state idea in the West Bank, in this presentation I will discuss the ways the future is understood, practiced, and shaped through interventions into the built environment. I will analyze the shift from Oslo-era national planning for a future sovereign government, to contemporary planning emphasizing the state, essentially, as a scale of market organization to ensure future economic growth.
As the international scaffolding of conflict is oriented away from public governance as a primary objective, Palestinians and international organizations work to shape government priorities to enhance private investment and reform laws to enable it. In the peculiar West Bank market, housing and the idea of scarcity are at the center of national planning as a scale of investment and container for ideas about the future. Housing acts as precedent for changing property regimes, relationships to the land, and typology. It tangibly expresses priorities in the landscape. Homes are sites of family life and social reproduction, and places where Palestinians shape personal politics, possibilities, and aspiration. New housing presupposes, produces attachments among, and incorporates Palestinians into new contexts and plans.
New planned housing is fundamental to shaping the future of Palestine as a legal entity, a form of economic organization, topography, and a social formation. By combining ethnographic material on housing and with planners, with discussion of national planning priorities as they changed from a kind of technocratic state-orientation around Oslo to a more immaterial and ideological framework for market organization, I ask how national planners, private developers, and ordinary Palestinians in the West Bank envision priorities for a future and the distribution of precarity under present conditions of occupation and state violence across Historic Palestine.
Maha Samman
Rhythms of Disruption: Palestinian everyday life encounters of spatio-temporal injustice
Abstract
Palestinian everyday life encountering imposed systems of Israeli colonial urban planning is characterized by spatial segregation that aims for domination and control. With differences of pace, Palestinians living in 1948 lands, Jerusalem, West Bank or the Gaza Strip all encounter imposed systems of control that affect their spatio-temporal dynamics of everyday life. The increasing pace of impacts results in continuous disruptions of everyday life that becomes a daily rhythm. Using an array of examples of these rhythms, the paper discusses how these disruptions develop spatio-temporal injustices whether in their distributive, procedural, or recognitional dimensions. These increasing injustices through rhythms of disruptions correspond to Patrick Wolfe’s concept of elimination as a structure in the settler colonial systems. Depending on the pace and intensity of these rhythms, impacts on everyday life of Palestinians could affect the management of the daily schedule or reach fatal outcomes. Palestinians on their part and despite of all odds continue to practice their own ways of resilience by their “Art of Being” encompassing the art of presence and art of persistence.
Zeinab Shuker
The Changing Face of Baghdad: Corruption, Urbanization, and Environmental Degradation
Abstract
Established in 762 CE and located on the Tigris River, Baghdad has borne witness to the glory and collapse of the different political powers that came to call it home. A city, which has renovated itself after each crisis and the many critical moments of its long history, is part of the identity and historical memory of Iraq and the Middle East. However, today, Baghdad is experiencing the dual threats of corruption and environmental degradation in what can be considered one of the city’s more devastating eras, and it remains to be seen if Baghdad will recover this time around. In the aftermath of the post-2003 political scene in the country, where multiple centers of power came to dominate the political and economic spheres, eroding state capacity in the process, the urban landscape of cities all across Iraq began to change to accommodate the rise of population, the political and economic ambitions of the new elites and to provide an outlet for corruption and money laundering. Gone are the sand-colored historical brick buildings with arched walkways and the palm trees that characterized cities like Baghdad for generations, and instead, concrete skeletons of poorly constructed apartment buildings and shopping malls made the city unrecognizable. Baghdad, which was already ranked low on Mercer’s quality of life index, has lost its architectural heritage and urban fabric as the once eight-hundred-square-meter or more homes are divided and subdivided, and every existing greenspace is destroyed to build smaller homes, using unsustainable material and outdated infrastructure. In doing so, the quality of life of those within the city is declining, a culturally significant location in the region and the country is disappearing, and most importantly, as climate conditions worsen, historical communities are losing their capacity to withstand these changes. I argue that rural locations have long been the arena for environmental and climate struggles; the future of the climate crisis will be felt and fought in cities like Baghdad as these cities become more unlivable.
Omar Sirri
Securing Hinterlands: Troubling State and Space in Baghdad
Abstract
For most of this century, Baghdad has been plagued by physical insecurity, precarious everyday life brought about by the actions of militants and militias, and the practices of state security personnel. But two decades of persistent instability has not taken place in a political-economic vacuum. These mercurial conditions are greatly shaped by attempts to control, privatise, and financialise territory, land, and property—efforts advanced by elites, some of whom at once deploy and contest state power. How do state and space converge through Iraq’s capital?
The area of al-Bou‘aitha offers some answers. Located on the southern edge of Baghdad, the subdistrict hugs the western bank of the Tigris River. Al-Bou‘aitha helps comprise the city’s once-green belt—fertile lands where orchards and vast tracts of palm trees have increasingly been felled in the name of war and development. By foregrounding urban hinterlands, this paper explores how assorted authorities in Baghdad compete over the control of space, and the extraction of value from it. State power matters; but certain coordinates help reveal the variable intensity of its hold, and what is at stake for potent forces wrestling with its rule.
Tuna Tasan-Kok
Piecing together Istanbul’s puzzle of oddities: Navigating financialization, populist authoritarianism, regulatory ambiguity, municipal dysfunction, and burgeoning entrepreneurial communities
Abstract
This presentation delves into the entrepreneurial governance of Istanbul amid an authoritarian state regime, interlinked with populist opportunism (Bogaert, 2018). The city’s financialization is in constant evolution, driven by property-driven forms of urban development. This evolution encompasses an unusual fusion of state authoritarianism, municipal dysfunction, legal ambiguities, and emerging entrepreneurial communities, contributing to groundbreaking trajectories of change (Kurt-Özman, Taşan-Kok, and Enlil, 2023). The state adeptly maneuvers around local democratic urban planning and spatial governance channels, harnessing them for the property-driven regeneration of the city. It capitalizes on regulatory ambiguity, a product of central political powers, enabling the continuous modification and circumvention of established local planning regulations. The municipality tries to gain more power, supported by the recent electoral victory but struggles to establish legal certainty. Amidst this power struggle, the formerly flexible and intricate arrangements are being supplanted by a more rigid and less adaptable system, aimed at imparting clarity and security to property rights. Often, this involves the (ab)use of legal ambiguities and arbitrary actions by both state and private actors (Kuyucu, 2014). On top of all these, as I will argue in this presentation, to address top-down interventions that threaten local planning and neighborhood dynamics, entrepreneurial communities are burgeoning particularly in former informal areas confronting state-led property-driven regeneration processes. These self-organized community initiatives skillfully navigate multiple spatial interventions through entrepreneurial strategies. Although do not appear as progressive political movements, these self-organized initiatives re-politicize the residents who are involved in policy networks, as I will present with some case studies.