State-led Urban Regeneration: Transforming Cities and Citizens

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While cities all around the world are going through a process of urban regeneration promising prosperity, not everyone equally benefits from these developments. What is even more alarming is state involvement in facilitating this exclusion through hard and soft measures. Within this context, my PhD examined the state role in implementing urban regeneration in Turkey, focusing on a municipal squatter transformation project in Ankara during 2006-2015. It had been a turbulent decade of growing state power and the housing policies were radically revised with the initiatives of the ruling government. This led to mass demolitions of vast squatter settlements, and resettlement of the inhabitants in the mass housing units in the city's peripheries, rather than their displacement. The ethnographic and documentary research demonstrated that squatter dwellers were invited to benefit from state-led urban regeneration should they remain allegiant to state policies, while opposing/alternative claims to urban regeneration were criminalized and punished. Thus, urban regeneration was linked to the government's political project of creating an obedient citizenry, which underpins the growing authoritarianism over the last decade in Turkey. There are three core objectives of the fellowship, which contribute towards my goal of an academic career that informs research and activism. The first is to contribute to and extend the academic scholarship by disseminating, through 3 publications, conference presentations and an overseas visit to urban researchers in the Netherlands, my PhD research in a new area of scholarship investigating the role of urban redevelopment in facilitating the growing authoritarianism. The second aim is to apply for research funding for a comparative project that builds on a key theme on my PhD that urban regeneration influences remaking of citizenship as well as the built environment of cities. During the fellowship, I will develop a proposal for the three-year fully-funded postdoctoral research fellowship of Urban Studies Foundation (October, 2021). This post-fellowship project will explore state-sponsored regeneration of public/squatter housing in Turkey, UK and the Netherlands through ethnographic research. Investigating urban regeneration from the perspective of the state in European and non-European settings will take the contribution of my PhD further and enhance the scholarship of urban regeneration through combining insights from western and non-western cases. The third aim of the fellowship is to inform and impact on the work of activists and community organizations working in housing and urban policy. The ethnographic fieldwork in my PhD project provided insight into the potential -as well as limits- of housing struggles in mobilizing citizens as rights-claimers who can contest authoritarian state practices. Building on prior contacts in Ankara and York, I will organize a panel session within the Turkish Social Sciences Association annual conference (November, Ankara); and a public panel in York (May 2021) that will generate coalitions of likeminded activists and practitioners across different regions. Both will lead to publication of open-access online reports outlining the research findings and outcomes of these public engagements. These reports can assist activists and community organizations to understand the mediating role of housing policies and struggles in reframing citizenship in line with the global resurgence of populist authoritarianism and nativist claims, and mobilize more effective activism.