Rethinking urban transformation and contested spaces: The case of Diyarbakı

Abstract

The literature on contentious politics tends to explain the dynamics of collective political struggle on the ground of sequential events in national and international politics. This time-centered perspective in contentious politics usually discards the spatial dynamics of contention. This thesis draws from the growing literature on the geography of contentious politics and examines how the production and transformation of the place witness and produce multiple layers of contention by focusing on Diyarbakır as a crucial case. As the Diyarbakır case demonstrates, the city is not just a stage for contention. Particularly when it comes to the production and transformation of space, micro political dynamics, i.e., local institutional politics over urban transformation projects and everyday politics embedded in local spaces, can co-constitute multi-layered contestations along with macro political dynamics in the city.