1

THE INVISIBLE CRISIS? “Unveiling the urban crisis and its containment strategies”

Mustafa Kemal Bayırbağ and Mehmet Penpecioğlu1

Prepared for

Interrogating Urban Crisis Governance Contestation and Critique Conference (Stream 3: Critical Research on Urban Crises)

9-11 September, De Montfort University, Leicester, the UK.

An Introductory Note From the Authors

We, the authors of this work-in-progress, are from Turkey, which has

recently witnessed one of the most fervent and geographically widest urban

protests ever seen in the history of the country. What has been going on in

Turkey especially since the beginning of the month of June 2013, now

publicly known as the Gezi Park Protests, stands a perfect case to examine

the nature (causes and forms) of “urban crisis”, which this conference is all

about. It looks like this crisis will change the course of history in our

country, as well as the course of urban studies there. Given its political

significance, it deserves voluminous case studies to explicate its nature, and

we wish we could present an in-depth case analysis here.

The political scene in our country, however, has not settled yet, and any

analysis – at this stage – will have to suffer a certain degree of

carricaturisation and/or over-generalisation (both theoretically and

politically). And, alas, the paper proposal we have submitted to this

conference promised to contribute to the third stream concentrating on the

questions of theory and methodology, thereby allowing us only to present a

1 Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey. To contact the authors: bayirbag@metu.edu.tr;

mpembeci@gmail.com

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rather initial (and primitive) sketch of what have learnt from the recent

events in Turkey.

Nevertheless, the mind-opening effects of “tear gas”, as well as scary

encounters with the riot police on the public squares and streets; sleepless

hours in front of computers/smart phones following the events/news from

social media (the mainstream TV stations and newspapers were not helpful!)

and alternative news sources; long hours of endless discussions on the

events with friends and colleagues; and participation to many (local) public

forums that were initiated by the protesters ensuing the first, heated, wave

of protests (to discuss the nature of the events and to get better organised to

sustain the protests) helped us a lot to formulate the ideas presented in this

humble effort. Of course, in the midst of all this hurry, we have had less time

than we originally planned to dedicate to writing this paper.

The protests started as a reaction to the violent intervention of the men of

the municipality, and then of the riot police, to a peaceful civilian resistance

(organised by a number of NGOs and professional associations) to an urban

plan amendment in İstanbul. The amendment was about redesigning the

Taksim Square (the heart of İstanbul), which involved re-building Topçu

Kışlası (The old Ottoman Military Barracks that were demolished during the

early periods of the republic, to open up that square). And a rather

authoritarian Prime Minister insisted that this replica of the old barracks

would serve as a shopping mall and a luxurous residence building (even

despite the earlier declaration by the Mayor of İstanbul that that would not

be the case). And this amendment also involved destroying an urban park

(the Gezi Park – involving cutting the trees there) by the square...

Here, at first sight, one might be tempted to label these protests as an urban

crisis, given that it has been about an urban issue and that they have taken

place in metropolitan centres of the country. Yet, we argue, an account

remaining at this level of analysis would be pre-occupied with the

“detonator” of an urban crisis (see the following section), but not its causes.

To a more experienced student of urban studies, the role played by “urban

rent” and authoritarianism would appear to be the key categories of analysis.

Yet, this formulation, too, might not be that helpful in explicating the causes

behind these events, as it will have to concentrate on the characteristics of

political-economic arrangements peculiar to a certain period in the history of

a country, which might well be conjunctural in nature.

Then, how to proceed to make an urban crisis visible in theoretical and

political terms? Apparently, an endeavour to make sense of “urban crisis”

requires an open epistemological engagement with the concept “urban crisis”

in the first place. This is what we set out to do in the first section of this

paper.

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I – EPISTEMOLOGICAL CONCERNS

A potential answer to the question “what is urban crisis?” could be developed

by concentrating on the components of the term “urban crisis”, and what we

can make of these concepts once they are combined. These two concepts, we

argue, actually do refer to two constituting dimensions of social reality: time

(crisis) and space (urban). Now, it is time to deal with the former:

1(a) Temporality: Structure and agency

Employing the concept “crisis” as an analytical category suggests that we are

employing the language of time, looking for turning points and/or moments

of rupture in history. But how to approach the question of temporality, and

to establish the link between the cause(s) and consequence(s) of a crisis?

Does the term “crisis” only refer to a point/moment in time marking the end

of a certain pattern of human affairs in history, and initiating yet another

one? And, in that regard, should we seek the causes of a crisis only in the

pattern of human affairs that immediately preceded it? In other words, could

crises be simply understood as “temporary events” reflecting the failure of

the preceding model of organisation of political-economy, such as the failure

of neoliberalism?

We argue that the above sort of a conceptualisation will fall short of

detecting the links between the structural causes of a crisis and the socio-

political form that it takes (albeit at a certain point in time). To develop a

more comprehensive analysis of crisis, we propose to add a second

dimension to conceptualisation of “temporality of crisis”: Crisis as a “rather

permanent state of existence”, while stability refers to a rather temporary

state of affairs. And given that it is experienced/felt, we could reason that its

effects/perception will be uneven in nature, and also that “being in a crisis”

is a matter of perception.

To further develop our perspective, we benefit from the analytical distinction

Mandel makes between “appearance, detonator(s), deeper cause and

function of a crisis”:

... the detonator does not cause the crisis. It merely precipitates it in

as much as it triggers the cumulative movement ... In order for it to be

able to trigger this chain of events, however, a whole series of

preconditions must coincide, and these in no way flow automatically

from the detonator itself” (Mandel, 1989: 33-34).

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If we are interested in crises in capitalist societies, Mandel’s insight on

preconditions, and thus the deeper cause, lead us to concentrate on the

cumulative effects of past policies regulating capital accumulation (regimes

of accumulation). In other words, examining the story/failures of neoliberal

policies (spanning some thirty years), and asking questions about how the

current regime of accumulation came to an end will not suffice. Then, where

can we observe these cumulative effects? We offer two domains of research:

“geography” and “daily life”.

Geography of capitalism bears the cumulative effects of its history, and also

frames the potential paths of its evolution (Şengül, 2009 [2001]). Secondly,

we find these effects condensed into the social fabric of now an urban society

(product of capitalist urbanisation and a class based social order) which are

experienced and reproduced in daily/urban life. The uneven geography of

capitalism and the existence of social classes tell us that the costs of co-

existence under capitalist order are rather fixed onto certain geographies and

classes (encompassing the largest segment of a given population), thereby

turning the question of crisis into a rather permanent state of existence,

albeit selectively (cf. Peck, 2012: 650-651).2

Especially in this second regard, crisis thus gains a different meaning, that

of a rather permanent state of uncertainty (cf. Yiftachel (2009) in McFarlane,

2012), implying suffering, helplesness, a frantic search for alternatives to get

out of the iron bars of life/society imprisoning the person. It is about

continuous personal struggle, a state of injustice, where the individual is

against an order of life. Crisis, in that sense, is about being entrapped by

uncertainty damaging the very prospects of survival. Thus, we are talking

about a political problem of existential nature (cf. Bayat, 2000). It does not

come suddenly, but instituted slowly, over time, from one generation to

another; and/or it is hard to get out of it in a lifetime. A baby is born into

permanent crisis, for example, if her/his parents are of a certain social class,

dispossessed, unemployed, without social security... Or from one generation

to another, it gets deeper. A young university graduate, also born into

parents with university diplomas, is much more vulnerable to the

instabilities of the labour market today, than her/his parents were in the

past.

Apparently, the preceding discussion points the finger at structural factors,

the ground upon which a crisis emerges. Such sort of a structural analysis,

2 While Jones and Ward (2002: 480-481) attribute this selectivity to neoliberal era (and neoliberal urban policy),

we argue that this very logic of crisis/cost displacement (including the transfer of crisis into the state

mechanism) has been at work throughout the history of capitalism (see Brenner, 2013: 102-104, 108-109. Also

see Bayırbağ, 2013).

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of course, would not tell us the whole story. There is also a need to

concentrate on the question of (political) agency to elaborate our analysis, as

moments of crisis do refer to moments in history when “things get out of

control”, when the reactions to the socio-economic order established on the

basis of a particular regime of accumulation, etc. cannot be contained

anymore. It is only then a crisis becomes visible and a matter of contention.

Thus, examining “urban crisis” requires an exercise in political analysis,

requiring us to deal with the question of how things had been kept under

control, and how it all ended up with chaos when the established political

balances in the society have been shattered, and the political mechanisms

governing/sustaining a given socio-economic order failed.

To summarise, we could identify two different dimensions to temporality of

crisis, the structural dimension and the agency dimention. The former could

be understood by examining a much longer time span, stretching back into

even centuries. It leads us to concentrate on the cumulative causes of a set

of events which are publicly recognised and labeled as a crisis today. The

latter, refers to the realm of politics and policy where the power holders and

their opponents act/struggle to give meaning to and to contain/ride the

deeper currents of history in a given (and rather short) period of time, mostly

a few decades. We argue that current accounts of “urban crisis” fall within

either of these two categories, and that there is a need to establish links

between these accounts falling into these two categories.

1(b) Urban as an analytical tool

What do we mean by urban, once we set out to make sense of “urban crisis”?

Apparently, we are talking about the spatial dimension to a crisis (felt

and/or politically constructed). One might rush to think that the term

“urban crisis” does refer to crises hitting (or about) a particular type of

human settlement. Yet, we need to take Brenner’s thesis into account that

“The urban is a theoretical construct”:

The urban is not a pregiven site, space, or object... [Q]uestions of

conceptualization lie at the heart of all forms of urban research, even

the most empirical, contextually embedded, and detail oriented. They

are not mere background conditions or framing devices but constitute

the very interpretive fabric through which urbanists weave together

metanarratives, normative- political orientations, analyses of empirical

data, and strategies of intervention (2013: 96; for a broader survey of

these fabrics see Macleod and Jones, 2011: 2445-2445İ cf. Dikeç,

2007).

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A note of caution is due here, though. That emphasis on “questions of

conceptualization” could not, and should not, be read as an exercise in post-

positivism (especially see, ibid 102-104). Here we follow Şengül’s insight that

different theorisation attempts in the field of urban studies tend to

concentrate on different dimensions to urban processes (pursuing an

implicit division of labour), and that they could be linked (and thus re-read)

around the concept of hegemony (2009 [2001]: 66). We think that we could

operationalise this perspective further by concentrating on temporal

references of these “interpretive fabrics”, which – once read together – could

help us extract the relations of causality out of the complexity of social

reality.

Then, how is “urban” conceptualised in different accounts of (especially

current) urban crisis? We could identify four distinct uses of “urban”,

pointing the finger at different research problematiques, with different

temporal references:

Long term/Structural

a) Crisis of a particular sort of a social order, the urban social order (urban

society): Enter (Political) Sociology (and alienation).

b) Crisis which is about, or hits mainly, big urban settlements (metropolises,

global cities, city regions): Enter (Economic) Geography (and uneven

development).

Short term/Agency

c) Crisis of a particular regime of accumulation (established and sustained

by public authorities) that has been living on the urban space for a long

while: Enter public policy-political economy (and urban rent).

d) Crisis of administrative mechanisms ruling and serving urban areas

(cities, metropolises, global cities): Enter public administration (and

governance approach/urban governmentality)

Of these accounts, while the first two correspond to the structural dimension

(long term) to temporal analysis of crisis, the last two are about the question

of agency (short term). Given that we are talking about the story of

capitalism, we further suggest that the accounts falling within the former

category have to do with “dynamics of dispossession and extraction of

surplus value”, while those in the second are about “politics and

management of dispossession”, which work through an active pursuit of

containment strategies.

An endeavour to establish a fruitful dialogue among these interpretive

fabrics via an open engagement with the problematic of hegemony (Şengül,

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2009 [2001]), amounts to linking the questions of everyday life with those of

political-economy:

Following Gramsci and Lefebvre, searching for the sources of a

counter-hegemonic politics and explaining capitalist survival are not

mutually exclusive but internally related projects. Today, the reactions

to the bombings of the World Trade Centre underscore the centrality of

the urban not only for the imagination and spatial strategies of

oppositional forces but also the symbolic and material reorganization

of capitalism and imperialism. Analyzing the urban dimensions of

capitalist reconstruction is essential if street protest is not to become

dissociated from everyday life. This analysis is already under way.

"Neo-Gramscian" theorists have tried to fuse Harvey's neo-classical

urban marxism with middle-range concepts from state and regulation

theory to analyze urban hegemony after Fordism. What the orientation

excavated from Gramsci and Lefebvre suggests is that an analysis of

urban hegemony must go beyond urban political economy and state

theory and extend to matters of everyday life. Only such an extension

makes it possible to grasp "the materiality of the urban" as a

component of hegemony/counterhegemony in the integral terms

suggested by Gramsci and Lefebvre (Kipfer, 2002: 147-148; also see

Macleod and Jones, 2011: 2450-2453).

Yet, beside the questions of everyday life, and thus the question of

alienation, there is also a need to bring the geography of capitalism to our

centre of attention. This requires going beyond focusing on “territorial and

jurisdictional boundaries” as units of analysis, and also concentrating on the

very dynamics of alienation (via fixing the cost of an accumulation regime

onto certain regions/cities/neighbourhoods/bodies):

while a focus on territorial and jurisdictional boundaries might help to

uncover the institutions ‘responsible’ for a certain territorially

demarcated neighbourhood, an ontological focus on mobile networks

or secessionary networking infrastructures will help to trace the

sources of disconnection that render some neighbourhoods

disconnected or bypassed (MacLeod, 2011: 2651; also see Bayat and

Biekart, 2009: 823).

In that regard, Brenner’s thesis - following Lefebvre, that “Urbanization

contains two dialectically intertwined moments — concentration and

extension” (2013: 102-104) is of great value here, for it brings the question of

uneven development to the centre of analysis. To reiterate, once we set out to

make sense of the question of alienation – being most visible in the urban

setting and being furthered through urbanisation, we are forced to tackle

with the dynamics of dispossession and extraction of surplus value. And the

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spatial logic of these dynamics point the finger at the relations between the

(metropolitan) cities and the rest of the geography of capitalism. To quote

Brenner at length:

Current debates on the right to the city have productively drawn attention to the politics of space and the struggle for the local

commons within the world’s giant cities, the densely agglomerated zones associated with the process of concentrated urbanization.

However, the foregoing analysis suggests that such struggles must be linked to a broader politics of the global commons that is also being fought out elsewhere, by peasants, small landholders, farmworkers,

indigenous populations, and their advocates, across the variegated landscapes of extended urbanization. Here, too, the dynamics of

accumulation by dispossession and enclosure have had creatively destructive effects on everyday life, social reproduction, and socioenvironmental conditions, and these are being politicized by a

range of social movements across places, territories, and scales (2013: 108).

II – THE HEGEMONY QUESTION AND CONTAINMENT STRATEGIES

The containment strategies we are referring to are actually those strategies

pursued to sustain a hegemonic project. We should note that producing

consent does not simply amount to convincing the largest segment of society

that the current political project is benefical to them (employing discourses

and redistribution mechanisms), but is also about veiling the costs of this

project by displacing them to those sections of society/certain geographies

that are suppressed by force, while marginalising them at the level of

discourse. Hence, what we are talking about is uneven employment of

consent and coercion (cf. Penpecioğlu, 2013) and keeping these sections of

society and cities/regions separated from each other through the

employment of divisive political tactics and discourses (such as formulating

the urban poverty problem as a cultural one, blaming the victim), while

sentencing them to a permanent state of crisis.

Below, we list these strategies widely discussed in the relevant literature on

the basis of the epistemological categories we have established in the

preceding sections. Thus, we hope to produce a base map to build a

categorisation of “urban crises” later. To establish the links between the

structural and agency dimensions to crisis analysis, for each structural

domain, the containment strategies pertaining the question of agency

(namely “public policies regulating the accumulation regime” and “(urban)

governmentality)” are listed separately. We will discuss how they are linked

in the following sections.

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Table 1a: Keeping urban social order under control

Containment strategies (politics/management of dispossession and

surplus value extraction)

Urban social

order (A)

Alienation under check via

Public policies regulating the accumulation regime (C)

- (selectively) inclusive state policies, such as welfare state or roll-

out neoliberal policies (containment of commodification of labour,

land and money) (cf. Pieterse, 2008; Peck and Tickell, 2002)

- protection of private property (and selective distribution of benefits

of urban rent by neo-liberal urbanism (Swyngedouw et. al., 2002;

Peck et. al., 2009; Şengül, 2013; Kuyucu and Ünsal, 2010)

- alternative sources to fund public policies (other than taxation:

sale of public assets/institutions that are not directly involved in

service provision; parallel budgeting – central budget plus others;

charity based service provision)

(Urban) governmentality (D)

- local democracy, autonomy and developmentalist discourse

(participation and entrepreneurialism) (Harvey, 1989; Purcell,

2006)

- reliance on social capital (communal ties), religion, identity politics

(Putnam, 1993; Lowndes & Wilson, 2001; Kurtoğlu, 2004).

- boosting consumer culture (Urry, 1995; Goodman et al., 2010)

- tolerating informal survival mechanisms of citizens (Bayat, 2000;

Işık and Pınarcıoğlu, 2001)

- city branding/image building by place marketing and mobile

policies(Hall and Hubbard, 1998; Gonzales, 2011; Roy, 2011 Ward

and Mccann, 2012)

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Table 1b: Keeping uneven development under control

Containment strategies (politics/management of dispossession and

surplus value extraction)

Geography of

capitalism (B)

Uneven development (and geographical concentration of costs/crisis)

under check via

Public policies regulating the accumulation regime (C)

- new regionalism (competition + cohesion policies) (Amin & Thrift,

1995; Macleod, 2001; Macleod & Jones 2007)

- state rescaling (including regionalisation (Brenner, 2003, 2004;

Jones and Ward, 2002, 2004; Ward & Jonas, 2004; Peck, 2012)

- favouring global cities and formulation of a policy discourse of

national/global wealth production centred upon those cities (if

they fall, we all lose) (Taylor, 1999 - world system approach;

Sassen, 2001)

- post-Fordist production model (transfer of environmental costs to

developing countries/regions) (Massey, 1995; Eraydın, 2002)

- entrance of global financial capital to developing countries (cities)

(Smith, 2002)

(Urban) governmentality (D)

- nationalism

- increasing/promoting spatial mobility of population (leading to

further urbanisation, keeping the door open for social

mobilisation via spatial mobility) (Garcia, 2006)

- blaming the victim (particularistic policies, culturalism in policy

discourses) (Atkinson, 2000)

- recognition of regional/ethnic identities (Bollens, 2007; Ireland,

2008)

- fiscal federalism (Careaga and Meingast, 2003; cf. Peck, 2012)

- urban oriented regional governance structures (enhancing the

political grip of the big cities over their own rural areas)

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III - LIMITS TO CONTAINMENT STRATEGIES

Then, when and where does “crisis” enter the picture? The most common

answer is when the containment strategies, i.e, public policies regulating the

accumulation regime and associated urban governance arrangements (and -

- urban- governmentality) fail. Yet, that answer would not give us the whole

picture, if in particular, we are concerned with the internal

contradictions/inconsistencies of these strategies (say dissatisfaction of the

citizens with an increasingly authoritarian form of urban governance). We

should take a closer look at the cumulative impacts of the costs created (and

displaced) by these strategies. To be more specific, we should investigate the

moments when the cost transfer from the relatively wealthy sections of

society and/or cities/regions to the relatively worse off ones surpasses the

point of saturation (that it would not possible to dispossess/exploit them any

further, i.e, when they cannot be alienated any further).

3(a) What happens when the cost transfer comes to a halt?

Once socio-spatial transfer of costs of the accumulation regime stops, we

should expect, first, that the costs fixed unto the worse-off sections of

society/regions-cities begin to flow back into the major centres of wealth

(such as migration of the rural poor to the metropolitan cities, claiming their

share from the national wealth accumulated there or violent urban riots

targeting the rich and/or public/private institutions controlling the wealth),

i.e, when the dispossessed become visible. That is how roll-back

neoliberalism came to an end, and how the roll-out neoliberal policies (and

associated state rescaling, as well as rather divisive, mostly identity based

political discourses) were introduced to handle this problem (For roll-back

and roll-out phases of neoliberalism, see Peck and Tickell, 2002).

Then, those holding the power will have to take a second step: To broaden

the social and geographical basis of dispossession and surplus value

extraction. Where to go and whom to target?: Apparently, now, the very

centres of wealth, metropolitan cities (along with the previously exploited

regions) and those sections of society/classes with possessions, inhabiting

those urban centres of wealth (read middle classes). The urban-rent based

accumulation regime, directly targeting the private property (land property),

as well as local commons (Şengül, 2013); and proleterianisation of the white

collar workers (enhancing controls over their labour via increased job-market

insecurity, etc) do constitute two pillars of this new strategy.

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Apparently, these strategies do have a direct impact on the daily lives of the

population: loss of jobs, increased periods of unemployment and social

insecurity (coupled with the weakness of solidarity networks the middle class

individuals are part of), privatisation of local commons that those individuals

have benefited in their daily lives. Such strategies do have a dehumanising

effect in the urban context, further exacerbating the alienation problem. In

the urban transformation projects, for example, the meanings attached to

the houses/neighbourhoods (targeted by such projects) by their residents

are destroyed, killing their memories and lifestyles while turning a deaf ear

to the “stories at the micro-scale” (Şengül, 2013: 22, 25; cf. Kuyucu and

Ünsal, 2010), which amounts to committing “some sort of ‘urbicide’ – that is

killing the city by fragmenting or parcelizing it...” (Bayat and Biekart, 2009:

821).

3(b) Accumulation by dispossession and limits to the containment

strategies

Harvey defines “accumulation by dispossession” as continuation and

proliferation of accumulation practices which Marx referred to as “primitive

accumulation” (during the rise of capitalism). There are various forms of

dispossession in the global context of capitalism. These include

commodification and privatisation of land; displacement and expulsion of

urban and rural populations, conversion of property rights, commodification

of labour power and the suppression of indigenous forms of production,

monetisation of exchange and taxation of land, the national debt and the use

of the credit system as a means of long term dispossession to labour (Harvey,

2005).

These various forms of dispossession are facilitated via four strategies, which

exacerbate class inequalities (Harvey, 2005): a) Privatisation and

commodification of public assets including natural resources and land,

public services and institutions; b) “Financialisation” also plays a key role in

dispossessing the labour, which could be observed through the operation of

credit system and results in long term dispossession of middle and low

income populations; c) Crisis containment strategies sustain accumulation

by dispossession through depoliticizing potential social discontent and

manipulating public opinion towards neo-liberal political stability; d) The

state, particularly during the neo-liberal era, has become the leading agent

of redistribution that favours privatisation schemes, cutbacks state

expenditures, sets out taxes and by these ways gives rise to the

accumulation of surplus in the hands of capitalists.

Apparently, the dispossession strategies outlined by Harvey have become

intensified especially during the roll-out period of neoliberalism. This second

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move of neoliberalism is a response to the problems it has created by

deepening and widening itself (Aalbers, 2013: 1085; also see Peck, 2012:

651), which, indeed, resembles much like the snake eating itself. To quote

Aalbers:

The ideological project hides what neoliberalism actually wants and does. Redistribution is inherently part of this — redistributing like

water running up the hill, not trickling down... [T]he policies and practices of privatization are more central to neoliberalism than the ideology of free markets. The giant corporation, not the market,

becomes the model to which both government and the market have to adapt... Now, it is important to note that... the practice of neoliberalism (i.e. actually existing neoliberalism) and the ideology of

free markets, and by extension the ideology of neoliberalism, have less in common that one may think (2013: 1084).

These strategies could prove to be much more explosive as they add a better

organised and politically more conscious middle class (once compared with

the already dispossessed and marginalised urban poor) to the ranks of the

victims of the hegemonic project (cf. Bayat, 2007); while also attacking the

very principle of private property, which constitutes one of the foundations of

the discourse of freedom and democracy in capitalist societies. Apparently,

maintenance of such strategies, especially when you are to take on private

property and labour of a politically conscious and better organised section of

society, could become only possible with the rise of more authoritarian

police state (cf. Şengül, 2013), as well as selective employment of a more

flexible/nebulous legal framework to legitimise unjust practices of

dispossession targeting “private property” (Kuyucu, 2013a, 2013b;

Penpecioğlu, 2013).

Under these conditions, the theoretical illusion of “post-political urban

condition” will remain insufficient to explain “urban crisis” in general, and

the crisis of urban politics in particular, as these strategies are re-politicising

the cities (cf. MacLeod, 2011: 2652; see Swyngedouw, 2002), impelling us to

concentrate on “urbanisation of politics” along with the politics urbanisation

(Şengül, 2013: 22). This urbanisation of politics, in a way, could be

interpreted as urbanisation of crisis in the domain of current (financial)

accumulation regime: “In the course of just a few years, a financial crisis has

been transformed into a state crisis, and now that state crisis is being

transformed into an urban crisis” (Peck, 2012: 651).

Yet, we should note that Peck’s insight could be more helpful in explaining

the Northern/Western context, where urban crisis takes the form of a crisis

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of urban governance – austerity urbanism3 and of local democracy (localism)

(2012: 650-651), rather than the crisis of an urban social order (a systemic

crisis). Here, the national policy-makers could well avoid the political costs of

urban crisis, while enjoying the opportunity to put all the blame on the

ineptitude and incompetence of -now – “over-responsibilised” city elites (cf.

Peck et al, 2013: 1097). In that regard, Purcell’s (2006) caution that the right

to the city discourse could well fall into the “local trap” becomes meaningful

in that it could miss the roots of the crisis of urban governance in the

dominant accumulation regime, as well as its relevance to the crisis in the

urban social order.

3(c) Dispossession, global uneven development and limits to

containment strategies

As noted earlier, the uneven geography of capitalism serves well to spread

the costs of neoliberal hegemonic practices. This is especially true for global

uneven development under the global dominance of financial capital. As a

geographical mechanism of cost displacement, for example, broader

privatisation policies and urban regeneration projects in developing

countries (Global South/East) played a key role in sustaining capital

accumulation in the major financial centres of the world, mainly located in

the Global North/West. Remembering Smith’s (2002) argument is crucial in

this respect as he emphasizes urban regeneration has become a “dirty world”

in developing countries that mobilises developers, politicians and financiers,

dispossessing the low income populations, expelling them from transformed

urban space. Behind this global capitalist urban strategy, one could observe

the circuits of global capital, operation of which results in exacerbated class

inequalities and socio-spatial segregation.

A closer look at the cases from the Global South/East suggest the presence

of a rather universal scheme of dispossession and similar containment

strategies cutting across different developing countries. For instance Harvey

(2008) notes, in the case of Seul, since the 1990s, construction companies

have invaded city’s hillsides and constructed high rise luxury and gated

towers in these places. In Mumbai there has been an enormous urban

regeneration operation displacing millions of slum dwellers through the use

coercive power of the state. As another Indian city, in Bangalore land

speculation and dispossession of the people living in city’s rural periphery

has become the market-driven priority to make Bangalore a world city

3 Peck (2012: 648-649) lists the emergent features of austerity urbanism as follows: leaner

local states, rollback redux, fire-sale privatisation, placebo dependency, risk-shifting

rationalities, tournament financing, austerity governance.

15

(Goldman, 2011). Indian state aggressively uses its coercive mechanisms in

line with this market-driven operations and acquire land from low income

populations. As Goldman further emphasizes, many Bangaloreans are being

actively dispossessed as part of the effort to build up a world city based on

the speculative reproduction and reappropriation of space.

Chinese cities are no exceptions to these dispossession processes in relation

to urban regeneration. Approximately three million people living in China are

being dispossessed of the spaces they have long occupied. The state can

simply displace them from their territories since there is no private property

rights in the county (Harvey, 2008). As a leading Asian practice of neo-liberal

urbanism, Fu (2002) explicates the case of Shanghai and explores how state

uses land lease as a mechanism to dispossess public land and allow it for

the development of construction and finance sectors to make Shanghai a

global city. In dispossessing publicly owned land, Chinese-style urban

growth coalitions are very strong owing to the powerful position of the state

in policy-making (Fu, 2002). Like Shanghai, in Taipei neoliberal urbanism

facilitates and attracts investments through large scale urban development

projects. As Jou et al. (2011) highlight, behind the accumulation by

dispossession these has been a dramatic change in the private property

rights in Taipei. Land acquisition via the privatisation of public land has

played a key role in dispossession and four large scale urban projects in

Taipei were formed and implemented in that regard. In this East Asian way

of neoliberal urbanism, there has been a consensus among central state,

local state and private capital over establishing private property on public

land (Jou et al., 2011).

Neoliberal urbanism and its associated practices of dispossession not only

came to dominate urban policy in Asian countries; but they have also

constituted the main motive behind the reproduction of urban space in Latin

American countries. As Harvey (2008) points out all the favelas in Rio are

being covered by high rise condominiums and luxury gated residents.

Furthermore, as Lopez-Morales (2010) observes, in Chile there has been a

state-led strategy of urban regeneration in progress, which has become a

form of social dispossession of the ground rent and has given rise to the

gentrification of urban space.

Dispossession has also become one of the main market-driven motives

behind the restructuring of Turkish cities since the 1980s, when the

neoliberal policies were introduced. In the Turkish story of neo-liberalisation,

capital accumulation process has heavily relied on urbanisation of capital,

dramatically altering the socio-spatial fabric of the cities, while increasingly

rendering class (and socio-spatial) inequalities in the cities permanent

(Şengül, 2009 [2001], 2012; Işık and Pınarcıoğlu, 2001). In this process, the

built and non-built environment, public resources and land, historically and

16

culturally valuable sites, forests, squatter areas have all come to be

subordinated in to the logic of urban rent (Şengül, 2013). As Balaban (2012)

points out, the state has played a leading and interventionist role in the

development of construction sector in Turkish cities and facilitated the

dispossession process via various legislations reorganising planning powers,

transferring property rights and empowering state institutions as the leading

actor. This process has been associated with further centralisation of

decision-making powers at all levels of public institutions (Şengül, 2012). In

the context of such an authoritarian policy scheme, urban regeneration

projects serve to “forced marketisation” (Kuyucu and Ünsal, 2010; also see

Aalbers, 2012) that intensify the displacement and dispossession of the

urban poor, while also subordinating a broader segment of the society (now

mainly the middle class) to the financialisation of housing market, rendering

their labour captive to finance capital (thus further dispossession of labour

power) (cf. Karaman, 2012). This forced marketisation process resulting in

property transfer could also be read as yet another round of “fencing

movement”4 this time led and implemented by the state.

It could be argued that, unlike the past global exploitation schemes mainly

relying on commerce and industry, “privatisation and commodification of

public assets including natural resources and land, public services and

institutions” (Harvey, 2005) - and especially urban rent based global

accumulation practices - in the Global South/East are more risky, and more

prone to export the political costs of dispossession right back into the

heartlands of financial capital (North/West). This is so mostly because the

political containment strategies in the Global South/East are much more

fragile - mostly leaning upon the use of force, rather than consent - thereby

leading to sudden and much more violent outbursts of discontent.

What is more, those sorts of neoliberal accumulation practices in the Global

South/East tend to consume the informal arrangements that have long

insured the survival of urban citizens (mostly immigrants from rural areas)

of those countries (in the midst of deep unemployment and housing

problems caused by rapid urbanisation) (cf. Şengül, 2009 [2001]; 2013;

Buğra, 1998). Here, the ambiguity of the legal frameworks demarcating the

boundaries between the public and private property which facilitated the

containment in the past, keeping the poor’s resistance at the level of “quite

encroachment” (cf. Bayat, 2000) could quickly turn into the very weapon

that destroys those survival mechanisms: this time a reverse and loud

encroachment policy pursued by the state, speeding up the dispossession

process faster while deepening existing inequalities, and yet creating new

4 For a rich set of case studies indicative of this trend see Poyraz, 2011; Yılmaz, 2011; Danışan, 2012.

17

ones (Roy, 2011; McFarlane, 2012; Kuyucu, 2013a: 1-4, 10, 16 - also see

Kuyucu, 2013b).

In such countries, the prospects for containing the emergent crises (based

on alienation) via state reforms are rather dim as the politics of

representation is not constructed on the basis of the idea of formal

citizenship, but rather on the basis of clientelism (cf. Bayat and Biekart,

2009: 819-820, 824; also see Kuyucu, 2013: 12) and identity politics. Hence,

it will take a much shorter period of time for alienation effect to translate

into a major (nation-wide) systemic crisis than it would be the case in

Northern/Western countries.

IV - CONCLUSION: A CATEGORISATION OF CRISES?

Ours has been an exercise to lay down a research map, based on an attempt

to produce analytical categorisations engaging with the epistemological

questions revolving around the concept “urban crisis”. Given the volume of

this paper, and given the breadth of the issues to be covered in a rich

comparative study, we choose to offer a tentatively sketched comparison

(and categorisation of) some recent instances urban crisis from different

countries, concentrating on causal factors and containment strategies, to

initiate further discussion in this vein (Table 2).

And departing from our earlier emphasis on “cumulative effects”, impelling

us to develop a historical analysis of the dialectical tensions between crisis

and containment strategies, we also offer an example of how this perspective

could be operationalised in the case of Turkey (Table 3).

18

Table 2: Different forms of urban crisis at a given point in time (and

some current examples)

Public Policies (C) Governmentality (D) Public policies +

Governmentality (C+D)

A

L

I

E

N

A

T

I

O

N

(A)

Labeled as an economic

crisis:

Widespread protests in

the country against the

national government (in

smaller cities and rural

settlements as well as in

metropolitan centres).

Partly checked by broader

decentralisation reforms

(downloading the

responsibility to local

policy makers) + political

marginalisation of

protesters (selective use

of coercion)

(BRASIL in June-July

2013)

(Occupy movement in

the USA)

Labeled as a political crisis:

Bottom up (local) democracy

oriented protests (against one

man rule) targeting the local

authorities: In major

metropolitian cities. Checked

by roll-out neoliberal policies

and the emphasis of the need

to protect economic stability

(Gezi Protests in Turkey) +

Two nations discourse

(setting the metropolitan

centres against the rest of

the country in political

terms: the seculars vs the

conservatives)

(TURKEY, Gezi Protests in

June-July 2013)

Austerity Urbanism in the

USA and responses?

Labeled as an uprising

against the government:

Violent urban riots

(sometimes associated

with looting) targeting

the public institutions

and/or major private

institutions (companies,

banks, etc).

Limited prospects for

containment (State

brutality + Fragile state)

(EGYPT, Tahrir

Resistance + and the

Coup in 2013)

U

N

E

V

E

N

D

E

V

(B)

Labeled as a social crisis:

In-migration (from poor

rural areas to

metropolitan cities,

concentrating poverty

there) + Regional poverty

+ Mafia rooted in poor

regions dominating the

metropolitan areas

(South-ITALY)

Labeled as a regional/ethnic

crisis:

Ethnic violence and/or

ethnic (identity based)

separatism

(Catalonia in SPAIN; Lega

Nord in ITALY)

Labeled as a national

unity crisis:

Separatism/Ethnic

violence (resistance

organised in the urban

centres of such regions,

and also spreading to

all metropolitan

regions):

(Kurdish movement in

TURKEY)

(A+B)

Total collapse of capitalism and/or total political chaos

19

Table 3: A historical perspective (cumulative effects and the Gezi Park

Protest in Turkey)

Public Policies (C) Governmentality (D) Public policies +

Governmentality (C+D)

Alienation (A)

Uneven

development (B)

Alienation +

Uneven

development (A+B)

Cumulative

effects (TURKEY)

STAGE 1 (50s

and 80s) Neolib1

Cumulative

effects (TURKEY)

STAGE 2 (90s and

2000s) Neolib2

Future Cumulative

effects (TURKEY)

Today (2013)

Cumulative

effects (TURKEY)

STAGE 1

Alternative Path

1 (Government

brutality)

Alternative Path 2

(Political-economic

reform)

Alternative Path 3

(Constitutional –

economic reform)

Alternative Path 4

(Civil War)

20

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