Selected Publications
THE CAPITALIST LOCAL STATE, URBAN CHANGE, AND SOCIAL CONFLICT
The chapter explores local state theory within the broader context of state theory, providing a framework to understand local governance and decision-making dynamics. It examines four approaches—pluralist, managerialist, elite, and structuralist—that contribute to the ongoing debate on the local state. All four approaches are analyzed through the lens of three common characteristics: growth, localism, and social struggle. Given the increasing significance of cities and city regions as hubs of capital accumulation and growth, the concept of growth is central in all approaches. Localism, on the other hand, emphasizes the role of local actors, institutions, and the scale of the state in each approach. Social struggle reveals conflicts, the impact of local struggles on decision-making, and power dynamics. The chapter also explores recent debates, incorporating feminist, Lefebvrian, commons, and libertarian perspectives. The conclusion discusses future directions for the financialization debate and the development of local state theory.
CRACKING THE HOUSING CRISIS: FINANCIALIZATION, THE STATE, STRUGGLES, AND RIGHTS
By bringing three perspectives as a lens – financialization, the state, and struggles for rights – this special issue seeks to contribute to a new set of discussions on how the GFC has affected housing and how the measures shaped by the crisis are responded to and impacted by housing movements. This issue brings together eight original articles from a variety of scholars at various career stages, geographical locations, and disciplines that collectively seek to understand the underlying mech-anisms of housing movements against financialization and their impact on change in housing policy towards a more equal right to housing. The chosen cases illustrate everyday and organized activism. The articles provide an opportunity to hear activ-ists’ voices in order to create influence within the GFC constraints
THE ROLES OF THE STATE IN THE FINANCIALISATION OF HOUSING IN TURKEY
What is the relationship between the state and housing financialisation? Much of the literature describes the state playing a role to promote the regulatory, legislative, and financial conditions needed to allow global financial capital to penetrate land and property markets. I build on these arguments to develop in what ways the state is playing an active role in housing financialisation in Turkey. I suggest that the Turkish national state has deliberately, actively, and forcefully pursued housing financialisation by (i) introducing new legislation; (ii) creating financial frameworks to encourage speculation by domestic and international capital on land and housing as assets (iii) enclosing public land and exploiting informal types of tenure; (iv) assetising land and housing by developing revenue-sharing urban regeneration projects; and (v) using coercive legal and penal force to criminalise informal development, and to quell resistance to state-led regeneration. My conclusions add weight to Christophers’ contention that the role of the state needs to be reconceptualised to capture its direct involvement in housing financialisation.
URBAN NEIGHBOURHOOD FORUMS IN ANKARA AS A COMMONING PRACTICE
The neighbourhood forums in Ankara began to convene during the Gezi protests in 2013 and lasted about three years. The activities of Ankara Gezi forums are urban commoning practices in terms of a new set of demands and methods. This paper conceptualises urban commoning practices as method, content, and demand. This framework offers an understanding of urban commoning that is not based on monetary transaction, but focuses on seeing commoning as a social process. Commoning is not ahistorical, rather it is engaged with the historical political potential of urban spaces. Commoning as method discusses organising in commons, commoning as content focuses on the form and meaning of political action, and commoning as demand emphasises the discursive use of right to the city. The case selection of this research enables us to reflect on how urban commoning is experienced in a city under less financial investment pressure, but at the centre of national-level politics.
CHANGING MODALITIES OF URBAN REDEVELOPMENT AND HOUSING FINANCE IN TURKEY: THREE MASS HOUSING PROJECTS IN ANKARA
This study aims to critically analyze the transformation of the Turkish state’s role in urban redevelopment and housing finance by focusing on 3 mass housing projects from Ankara in 3 different historical political conjunctures. The analysis reveals that the Turkish state, with its peculiar institutional artifices, not only creates rent gaps in varying forms but also increasingly coordinates appropriation of them. This involved not only reformulation of strategies to cope with the social problem of continuing expansion of urban population by planning efforts of various scope but also incorporating low-income households into the dominant logic of urban space redevelopment.