Azat Zana Gündoğan (Université Mardin Artuklu)
Peripheral Urbanization and Social Movements: The Case of Gebze, 1965-2015
Vendredi 29 mai 2015 à 19h à l'IFEA
Intervention en anglais

Peripheral Urbanization and Social Movements: The Case of Gebze, 1965-2015

Thanks to international marketing campaigns, and recently because of the Gezi protests at its heart, Istanbul has been more central than ever in the global scene. From an imperial court through the primate city of the 1970s to today’s global-city or mega-city under globalization, Istanbul has acquired a place in the second or third tier global cities hierarchy. During this transformation, The Gebze area has become a primary node of industrialization since state’s decentralization of Istanbul-based industry in the 1960s and provides us with a case of peripheral urbanization. I argue that the predominant emphasis of centrality in the studies of global cities and city-regions puts the socio-spatial and political transformations in the peripheries at the background. Despite being labeled as merely the “backwater” of Istanbul, this satellite city has always been a hotbed of social and political contestations, ranging from unionized labor movement in the 1970s to the recent protests against top-down urban regeneration projects.

In my presentation, I will touch upon three emblematic cases from Gebze’s history of contention: the “strikes of 15-16 June 1970,” the “1994 Gebze Resistance” and political collective actions against recent phase of what David Harvey (2003) calls ‘accumulation by dispossession’: Anti-urban transformation projects. In each of these ‘moments’ (Lefebvre 1996) Gebze’s residents reclaimed the spaces of the city and turned the ‘backwater’ of Istanbul into a space of resistance and hope. My insights are based on the findings of a multi-disciplinary ethnographic and archival research that I conducted in a total of 14 months with funding from Foundation for Urban and Regional Studies and Middle East Research Competition.