SHAPING THE CITY WITH PROJECTS: THE CASE OF AKP GOVERNMENTS IN THE 2000S

Date

2024-6

Author

Çakar, Ece

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Cities are places where political actors establish their hegemony by shaping (urban) space through strategic interventions. By transforming space materially and symbolically, governments also establish some form of relationship with society. This thesis focuses on the AKP’s urban strategy as a part of construction of its hegemonic project by paying attention to the methods of its realization and the political approach it embodies. In order to make this assessment, concepts such as antagonistic and agonistic politics, one-city and two-cities are included in the thesis while the concept of populist strategy is also utilized. Through these concepts, the impact of the government's urban strategy on cities and society in general is analyzed. In this direction, a general situation analysis is attempted by focusing on some urban (large-scale) urban projects realized by the AKP government in different cities from the 2000s to the present day, the ways in which they were realized, the discourses produced about these projects and their reception in society. Analysis shows that such a strategy was quite successful in sustaining the AKP’s hegemony in social and political domains throughout the last two decades. Such an antagonistic strategy was not without its problems as it resulted in a highly divided urban society especially in large metropolitan areas. So-called large-scale projects analyzed in this thesis have shown that they contributed to the creation of socially and politically divided cities while also arguing that these urban projects produce different results depending on the level of social and political exclusion.

Subject Keywords

Antagonism, two-nations, one-nation, liminality, populist strategy

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/110063

Collections

Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis