Producing confrontational alterity: urban regeneration in Tarlabaşı, Istanbul

Abstract

This thesis is concerned with large-scale urban regeneration, and its impact on the socialization and behaviour of the populations who suffer through its mechanisms of exclusion. The field research is focused on the Istanbul neighbourhood of Tarlabaşı, where a renewal project in the name of historical preservation has displaced approximately 3,000 residents. While the local community was already living on Turkish society's margins to varying degrees, the presence of the project under investigation is found to be necessitating or encouraging the performance of a confrontational form of alterity. Control mechanisms are rendered ineffective, and individual subjectivities distorted, by the visible confirmation of the status of the neighbourhood's residents in the eyes of official power, and by the examples of individuals temporarily reclaiming their rights to the city in the spaces of the project itself.