the invisible crisis? unveiling the urban crisis and its
TRANSCRIPT
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THE INVISIBLE CRISIS? “Unveiling the urban crisis and its containment strategies”
Mustafa Kemal Bayırbağ and Mehmet Penpecioğlu1
Prepared for
Interrogating Urban Crisis Governance Contestation and Critique Conference (Stream 3: Critical Research on Urban Crises)
9-11 September, De Montfort University, Leicester, the UK.
An Introductory Note From the Authors
We, the authors of this work-in-progress, are from Turkey, which has
recently witnessed one of the most fervent and geographically widest urban
protests ever seen in the history of the country. What has been going on in
Turkey especially since the beginning of the month of June 2013, now
publicly known as the Gezi Park Protests, stands a perfect case to examine
the nature (causes and forms) of “urban crisis”, which this conference is all
about. It looks like this crisis will change the course of history in our
country, as well as the course of urban studies there. Given its political
significance, it deserves voluminous case studies to explicate its nature, and
we wish we could present an in-depth case analysis here.
The political scene in our country, however, has not settled yet, and any
analysis – at this stage – will have to suffer a certain degree of
carricaturisation and/or over-generalisation (both theoretically and
politically). And, alas, the paper proposal we have submitted to this
conference promised to contribute to the third stream concentrating on the
questions of theory and methodology, thereby allowing us only to present a
1 Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey. To contact the authors: [email protected];
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rather initial (and primitive) sketch of what have learnt from the recent
events in Turkey.
Nevertheless, the mind-opening effects of “tear gas”, as well as scary
encounters with the riot police on the public squares and streets; sleepless
hours in front of computers/smart phones following the events/news from
social media (the mainstream TV stations and newspapers were not helpful!)
and alternative news sources; long hours of endless discussions on the
events with friends and colleagues; and participation to many (local) public
forums that were initiated by the protesters ensuing the first, heated, wave
of protests (to discuss the nature of the events and to get better organised to
sustain the protests) helped us a lot to formulate the ideas presented in this
humble effort. Of course, in the midst of all this hurry, we have had less time
than we originally planned to dedicate to writing this paper.
The protests started as a reaction to the violent intervention of the men of
the municipality, and then of the riot police, to a peaceful civilian resistance
(organised by a number of NGOs and professional associations) to an urban
plan amendment in İstanbul. The amendment was about redesigning the
Taksim Square (the heart of İstanbul), which involved re-building Topçu
Kışlası (The old Ottoman Military Barracks that were demolished during the
early periods of the republic, to open up that square). And a rather
authoritarian Prime Minister insisted that this replica of the old barracks
would serve as a shopping mall and a luxurous residence building (even
despite the earlier declaration by the Mayor of İstanbul that that would not
be the case). And this amendment also involved destroying an urban park
(the Gezi Park – involving cutting the trees there) by the square...
Here, at first sight, one might be tempted to label these protests as an urban
crisis, given that it has been about an urban issue and that they have taken
place in metropolitan centres of the country. Yet, we argue, an account
remaining at this level of analysis would be pre-occupied with the
“detonator” of an urban crisis (see the following section), but not its causes.
To a more experienced student of urban studies, the role played by “urban
rent” and authoritarianism would appear to be the key categories of analysis.
Yet, this formulation, too, might not be that helpful in explicating the causes
behind these events, as it will have to concentrate on the characteristics of
political-economic arrangements peculiar to a certain period in the history of
a country, which might well be conjunctural in nature.
Then, how to proceed to make an urban crisis visible in theoretical and
political terms? Apparently, an endeavour to make sense of “urban crisis”
requires an open epistemological engagement with the concept “urban crisis”
in the first place. This is what we set out to do in the first section of this
paper.
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I – EPISTEMOLOGICAL CONCERNS
A potential answer to the question “what is urban crisis?” could be developed
by concentrating on the components of the term “urban crisis”, and what we
can make of these concepts once they are combined. These two concepts, we
argue, actually do refer to two constituting dimensions of social reality: time
(crisis) and space (urban). Now, it is time to deal with the former:
1(a) Temporality: Structure and agency
Employing the concept “crisis” as an analytical category suggests that we are
employing the language of time, looking for turning points and/or moments
of rupture in history. But how to approach the question of temporality, and
to establish the link between the cause(s) and consequence(s) of a crisis?
Does the term “crisis” only refer to a point/moment in time marking the end
of a certain pattern of human affairs in history, and initiating yet another
one? And, in that regard, should we seek the causes of a crisis only in the
pattern of human affairs that immediately preceded it? In other words, could
crises be simply understood as “temporary events” reflecting the failure of
the preceding model of organisation of political-economy, such as the failure
of neoliberalism?
We argue that the above sort of a conceptualisation will fall short of
detecting the links between the structural causes of a crisis and the socio-
political form that it takes (albeit at a certain point in time). To develop a
more comprehensive analysis of crisis, we propose to add a second
dimension to conceptualisation of “temporality of crisis”: Crisis as a “rather
permanent state of existence”, while stability refers to a rather temporary
state of affairs. And given that it is experienced/felt, we could reason that its
effects/perception will be uneven in nature, and also that “being in a crisis”
is a matter of perception.
To further develop our perspective, we benefit from the analytical distinction
Mandel makes between “appearance, detonator(s), deeper cause and
function of a crisis”:
... the detonator does not cause the crisis. It merely precipitates it in
as much as it triggers the cumulative movement ... In order for it to be
able to trigger this chain of events, however, a whole series of
preconditions must coincide, and these in no way flow automatically
from the detonator itself” (Mandel, 1989: 33-34).
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If we are interested in crises in capitalist societies, Mandel’s insight on
preconditions, and thus the deeper cause, lead us to concentrate on the
cumulative effects of past policies regulating capital accumulation (regimes
of accumulation). In other words, examining the story/failures of neoliberal
policies (spanning some thirty years), and asking questions about how the
current regime of accumulation came to an end will not suffice. Then, where
can we observe these cumulative effects? We offer two domains of research:
“geography” and “daily life”.
Geography of capitalism bears the cumulative effects of its history, and also
frames the potential paths of its evolution (Şengül, 2009 [2001]). Secondly,
we find these effects condensed into the social fabric of now an urban society
(product of capitalist urbanisation and a class based social order) which are
experienced and reproduced in daily/urban life. The uneven geography of
capitalism and the existence of social classes tell us that the costs of co-
existence under capitalist order are rather fixed onto certain geographies and
classes (encompassing the largest segment of a given population), thereby
turning the question of crisis into a rather permanent state of existence,
albeit selectively (cf. Peck, 2012: 650-651).2
Especially in this second regard, crisis thus gains a different meaning, that
of a rather permanent state of uncertainty (cf. Yiftachel (2009) in McFarlane,
2012), implying suffering, helplesness, a frantic search for alternatives to get
out of the iron bars of life/society imprisoning the person. It is about
continuous personal struggle, a state of injustice, where the individual is
against an order of life. Crisis, in that sense, is about being entrapped by
uncertainty damaging the very prospects of survival. Thus, we are talking
about a political problem of existential nature (cf. Bayat, 2000). It does not
come suddenly, but instituted slowly, over time, from one generation to
another; and/or it is hard to get out of it in a lifetime. A baby is born into
permanent crisis, for example, if her/his parents are of a certain social class,
dispossessed, unemployed, without social security... Or from one generation
to another, it gets deeper. A young university graduate, also born into
parents with university diplomas, is much more vulnerable to the
instabilities of the labour market today, than her/his parents were in the
past.
Apparently, the preceding discussion points the finger at structural factors,
the ground upon which a crisis emerges. Such sort of a structural analysis,
2 While Jones and Ward (2002: 480-481) attribute this selectivity to neoliberal era (and neoliberal urban policy),
we argue that this very logic of crisis/cost displacement (including the transfer of crisis into the state
mechanism) has been at work throughout the history of capitalism (see Brenner, 2013: 102-104, 108-109. Also
see Bayırbağ, 2013).
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of course, would not tell us the whole story. There is also a need to
concentrate on the question of (political) agency to elaborate our analysis, as
moments of crisis do refer to moments in history when “things get out of
control”, when the reactions to the socio-economic order established on the
basis of a particular regime of accumulation, etc. cannot be contained
anymore. It is only then a crisis becomes visible and a matter of contention.
Thus, examining “urban crisis” requires an exercise in political analysis,
requiring us to deal with the question of how things had been kept under
control, and how it all ended up with chaos when the established political
balances in the society have been shattered, and the political mechanisms
governing/sustaining a given socio-economic order failed.
To summarise, we could identify two different dimensions to temporality of
crisis, the structural dimension and the agency dimention. The former could
be understood by examining a much longer time span, stretching back into
even centuries. It leads us to concentrate on the cumulative causes of a set
of events which are publicly recognised and labeled as a crisis today. The
latter, refers to the realm of politics and policy where the power holders and
their opponents act/struggle to give meaning to and to contain/ride the
deeper currents of history in a given (and rather short) period of time, mostly
a few decades. We argue that current accounts of “urban crisis” fall within
either of these two categories, and that there is a need to establish links
between these accounts falling into these two categories.
1(b) Urban as an analytical tool
What do we mean by urban, once we set out to make sense of “urban crisis”?
Apparently, we are talking about the spatial dimension to a crisis (felt
and/or politically constructed). One might rush to think that the term
“urban crisis” does refer to crises hitting (or about) a particular type of
human settlement. Yet, we need to take Brenner’s thesis into account that
“The urban is a theoretical construct”:
The urban is not a pregiven site, space, or object... [Q]uestions of
conceptualization lie at the heart of all forms of urban research, even
the most empirical, contextually embedded, and detail oriented. They
are not mere background conditions or framing devices but constitute
the very interpretive fabric through which urbanists weave together
metanarratives, normative- political orientations, analyses of empirical
data, and strategies of intervention (2013: 96; for a broader survey of
these fabrics see Macleod and Jones, 2011: 2445-2445İ cf. Dikeç,
2007).
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A note of caution is due here, though. That emphasis on “questions of
conceptualization” could not, and should not, be read as an exercise in post-
positivism (especially see, ibid 102-104). Here we follow Şengül’s insight that
different theorisation attempts in the field of urban studies tend to
concentrate on different dimensions to urban processes (pursuing an
implicit division of labour), and that they could be linked (and thus re-read)
around the concept of hegemony (2009 [2001]: 66). We think that we could
operationalise this perspective further by concentrating on temporal
references of these “interpretive fabrics”, which – once read together – could
help us extract the relations of causality out of the complexity of social
reality.
Then, how is “urban” conceptualised in different accounts of (especially
current) urban crisis? We could identify four distinct uses of “urban”,
pointing the finger at different research problematiques, with different
temporal references:
Long term/Structural
a) Crisis of a particular sort of a social order, the urban social order (urban
society): Enter (Political) Sociology (and alienation).
b) Crisis which is about, or hits mainly, big urban settlements (metropolises,
global cities, city regions): Enter (Economic) Geography (and uneven
development).
Short term/Agency
c) Crisis of a particular regime of accumulation (established and sustained
by public authorities) that has been living on the urban space for a long
while: Enter public policy-political economy (and urban rent).
d) Crisis of administrative mechanisms ruling and serving urban areas
(cities, metropolises, global cities): Enter public administration (and
governance approach/urban governmentality)
Of these accounts, while the first two correspond to the structural dimension
(long term) to temporal analysis of crisis, the last two are about the question
of agency (short term). Given that we are talking about the story of
capitalism, we further suggest that the accounts falling within the former
category have to do with “dynamics of dispossession and extraction of
surplus value”, while those in the second are about “politics and
management of dispossession”, which work through an active pursuit of
containment strategies.
An endeavour to establish a fruitful dialogue among these interpretive
fabrics via an open engagement with the problematic of hegemony (Şengül,
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2009 [2001]), amounts to linking the questions of everyday life with those of
political-economy:
Following Gramsci and Lefebvre, searching for the sources of a
counter-hegemonic politics and explaining capitalist survival are not
mutually exclusive but internally related projects. Today, the reactions
to the bombings of the World Trade Centre underscore the centrality of
the urban not only for the imagination and spatial strategies of
oppositional forces but also the symbolic and material reorganization
of capitalism and imperialism. Analyzing the urban dimensions of
capitalist reconstruction is essential if street protest is not to become
dissociated from everyday life. This analysis is already under way.
"Neo-Gramscian" theorists have tried to fuse Harvey's neo-classical
urban marxism with middle-range concepts from state and regulation
theory to analyze urban hegemony after Fordism. What the orientation
excavated from Gramsci and Lefebvre suggests is that an analysis of
urban hegemony must go beyond urban political economy and state
theory and extend to matters of everyday life. Only such an extension
makes it possible to grasp "the materiality of the urban" as a
component of hegemony/counterhegemony in the integral terms
suggested by Gramsci and Lefebvre (Kipfer, 2002: 147-148; also see
Macleod and Jones, 2011: 2450-2453).
Yet, beside the questions of everyday life, and thus the question of
alienation, there is also a need to bring the geography of capitalism to our
centre of attention. This requires going beyond focusing on “territorial and
jurisdictional boundaries” as units of analysis, and also concentrating on the
very dynamics of alienation (via fixing the cost of an accumulation regime
onto certain regions/cities/neighbourhoods/bodies):
while a focus on territorial and jurisdictional boundaries might help to
uncover the institutions ‘responsible’ for a certain territorially
demarcated neighbourhood, an ontological focus on mobile networks
or secessionary networking infrastructures will help to trace the
sources of disconnection that render some neighbourhoods
disconnected or bypassed (MacLeod, 2011: 2651; also see Bayat and
Biekart, 2009: 823).
In that regard, Brenner’s thesis - following Lefebvre, that “Urbanization
contains two dialectically intertwined moments — concentration and
extension” (2013: 102-104) is of great value here, for it brings the question of
uneven development to the centre of analysis. To reiterate, once we set out to
make sense of the question of alienation – being most visible in the urban
setting and being furthered through urbanisation, we are forced to tackle
with the dynamics of dispossession and extraction of surplus value. And the
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spatial logic of these dynamics point the finger at the relations between the
(metropolitan) cities and the rest of the geography of capitalism. To quote
Brenner at length:
Current debates on the right to the city have productively drawn attention to the politics of space and the struggle for the local
commons within the world’s giant cities, the densely agglomerated zones associated with the process of concentrated urbanization.
However, the foregoing analysis suggests that such struggles must be linked to a broader politics of the global commons that is also being fought out elsewhere, by peasants, small landholders, farmworkers,
indigenous populations, and their advocates, across the variegated landscapes of extended urbanization. Here, too, the dynamics of
accumulation by dispossession and enclosure have had creatively destructive effects on everyday life, social reproduction, and socioenvironmental conditions, and these are being politicized by a
range of social movements across places, territories, and scales (2013: 108).
II – THE HEGEMONY QUESTION AND CONTAINMENT STRATEGIES
The containment strategies we are referring to are actually those strategies
pursued to sustain a hegemonic project. We should note that producing
consent does not simply amount to convincing the largest segment of society
that the current political project is benefical to them (employing discourses
and redistribution mechanisms), but is also about veiling the costs of this
project by displacing them to those sections of society/certain geographies
that are suppressed by force, while marginalising them at the level of
discourse. Hence, what we are talking about is uneven employment of
consent and coercion (cf. Penpecioğlu, 2013) and keeping these sections of
society and cities/regions separated from each other through the
employment of divisive political tactics and discourses (such as formulating
the urban poverty problem as a cultural one, blaming the victim), while
sentencing them to a permanent state of crisis.
Below, we list these strategies widely discussed in the relevant literature on
the basis of the epistemological categories we have established in the
preceding sections. Thus, we hope to produce a base map to build a
categorisation of “urban crises” later. To establish the links between the
structural and agency dimensions to crisis analysis, for each structural
domain, the containment strategies pertaining the question of agency
(namely “public policies regulating the accumulation regime” and “(urban)
governmentality)” are listed separately. We will discuss how they are linked
in the following sections.
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Table 1a: Keeping urban social order under control
Containment strategies (politics/management of dispossession and
surplus value extraction)
Urban social
order (A)
Alienation under check via
Public policies regulating the accumulation regime (C)
- (selectively) inclusive state policies, such as welfare state or roll-
out neoliberal policies (containment of commodification of labour,
land and money) (cf. Pieterse, 2008; Peck and Tickell, 2002)
- protection of private property (and selective distribution of benefits
of urban rent by neo-liberal urbanism (Swyngedouw et. al., 2002;
Peck et. al., 2009; Şengül, 2013; Kuyucu and Ünsal, 2010)
- alternative sources to fund public policies (other than taxation:
sale of public assets/institutions that are not directly involved in
service provision; parallel budgeting – central budget plus others;
charity based service provision)
(Urban) governmentality (D)
- local democracy, autonomy and developmentalist discourse
(participation and entrepreneurialism) (Harvey, 1989; Purcell,
2006)
- reliance on social capital (communal ties), religion, identity politics
(Putnam, 1993; Lowndes & Wilson, 2001; Kurtoğlu, 2004).
- boosting consumer culture (Urry, 1995; Goodman et al., 2010)
- tolerating informal survival mechanisms of citizens (Bayat, 2000;
Işık and Pınarcıoğlu, 2001)
- city branding/image building by place marketing and mobile
policies(Hall and Hubbard, 1998; Gonzales, 2011; Roy, 2011 Ward
and Mccann, 2012)
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Table 1b: Keeping uneven development under control
Containment strategies (politics/management of dispossession and
surplus value extraction)
Geography of
capitalism (B)
Uneven development (and geographical concentration of costs/crisis)
under check via
Public policies regulating the accumulation regime (C)
- new regionalism (competition + cohesion policies) (Amin & Thrift,
1995; Macleod, 2001; Macleod & Jones 2007)
- state rescaling (including regionalisation (Brenner, 2003, 2004;
Jones and Ward, 2002, 2004; Ward & Jonas, 2004; Peck, 2012)
- favouring global cities and formulation of a policy discourse of
national/global wealth production centred upon those cities (if
they fall, we all lose) (Taylor, 1999 - world system approach;
Sassen, 2001)
- post-Fordist production model (transfer of environmental costs to
developing countries/regions) (Massey, 1995; Eraydın, 2002)
- entrance of global financial capital to developing countries (cities)
(Smith, 2002)
(Urban) governmentality (D)
- nationalism
- increasing/promoting spatial mobility of population (leading to
further urbanisation, keeping the door open for social
mobilisation via spatial mobility) (Garcia, 2006)
- blaming the victim (particularistic policies, culturalism in policy
discourses) (Atkinson, 2000)
- recognition of regional/ethnic identities (Bollens, 2007; Ireland,
2008)
- fiscal federalism (Careaga and Meingast, 2003; cf. Peck, 2012)
- urban oriented regional governance structures (enhancing the
political grip of the big cities over their own rural areas)
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III - LIMITS TO CONTAINMENT STRATEGIES
Then, when and where does “crisis” enter the picture? The most common
answer is when the containment strategies, i.e, public policies regulating the
accumulation regime and associated urban governance arrangements (and -
- urban- governmentality) fail. Yet, that answer would not give us the whole
picture, if in particular, we are concerned with the internal
contradictions/inconsistencies of these strategies (say dissatisfaction of the
citizens with an increasingly authoritarian form of urban governance). We
should take a closer look at the cumulative impacts of the costs created (and
displaced) by these strategies. To be more specific, we should investigate the
moments when the cost transfer from the relatively wealthy sections of
society and/or cities/regions to the relatively worse off ones surpasses the
point of saturation (that it would not possible to dispossess/exploit them any
further, i.e, when they cannot be alienated any further).
3(a) What happens when the cost transfer comes to a halt?
Once socio-spatial transfer of costs of the accumulation regime stops, we
should expect, first, that the costs fixed unto the worse-off sections of
society/regions-cities begin to flow back into the major centres of wealth
(such as migration of the rural poor to the metropolitan cities, claiming their
share from the national wealth accumulated there or violent urban riots
targeting the rich and/or public/private institutions controlling the wealth),
i.e, when the dispossessed become visible. That is how roll-back
neoliberalism came to an end, and how the roll-out neoliberal policies (and
associated state rescaling, as well as rather divisive, mostly identity based
political discourses) were introduced to handle this problem (For roll-back
and roll-out phases of neoliberalism, see Peck and Tickell, 2002).
Then, those holding the power will have to take a second step: To broaden
the social and geographical basis of dispossession and surplus value
extraction. Where to go and whom to target?: Apparently, now, the very
centres of wealth, metropolitan cities (along with the previously exploited
regions) and those sections of society/classes with possessions, inhabiting
those urban centres of wealth (read middle classes). The urban-rent based
accumulation regime, directly targeting the private property (land property),
as well as local commons (Şengül, 2013); and proleterianisation of the white
collar workers (enhancing controls over their labour via increased job-market
insecurity, etc) do constitute two pillars of this new strategy.
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Apparently, these strategies do have a direct impact on the daily lives of the
population: loss of jobs, increased periods of unemployment and social
insecurity (coupled with the weakness of solidarity networks the middle class
individuals are part of), privatisation of local commons that those individuals
have benefited in their daily lives. Such strategies do have a dehumanising
effect in the urban context, further exacerbating the alienation problem. In
the urban transformation projects, for example, the meanings attached to
the houses/neighbourhoods (targeted by such projects) by their residents
are destroyed, killing their memories and lifestyles while turning a deaf ear
to the “stories at the micro-scale” (Şengül, 2013: 22, 25; cf. Kuyucu and
Ünsal, 2010), which amounts to committing “some sort of ‘urbicide’ – that is
killing the city by fragmenting or parcelizing it...” (Bayat and Biekart, 2009:
821).
3(b) Accumulation by dispossession and limits to the containment
strategies
Harvey defines “accumulation by dispossession” as continuation and
proliferation of accumulation practices which Marx referred to as “primitive
accumulation” (during the rise of capitalism). There are various forms of
dispossession in the global context of capitalism. These include
commodification and privatisation of land; displacement and expulsion of
urban and rural populations, conversion of property rights, commodification
of labour power and the suppression of indigenous forms of production,
monetisation of exchange and taxation of land, the national debt and the use
of the credit system as a means of long term dispossession to labour (Harvey,
2005).
These various forms of dispossession are facilitated via four strategies, which
exacerbate class inequalities (Harvey, 2005): a) Privatisation and
commodification of public assets including natural resources and land,
public services and institutions; b) “Financialisation” also plays a key role in
dispossessing the labour, which could be observed through the operation of
credit system and results in long term dispossession of middle and low
income populations; c) Crisis containment strategies sustain accumulation
by dispossession through depoliticizing potential social discontent and
manipulating public opinion towards neo-liberal political stability; d) The
state, particularly during the neo-liberal era, has become the leading agent
of redistribution that favours privatisation schemes, cutbacks state
expenditures, sets out taxes and by these ways gives rise to the
accumulation of surplus in the hands of capitalists.
Apparently, the dispossession strategies outlined by Harvey have become
intensified especially during the roll-out period of neoliberalism. This second
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move of neoliberalism is a response to the problems it has created by
deepening and widening itself (Aalbers, 2013: 1085; also see Peck, 2012:
651), which, indeed, resembles much like the snake eating itself. To quote
Aalbers:
The ideological project hides what neoliberalism actually wants and does. Redistribution is inherently part of this — redistributing like
water running up the hill, not trickling down... [T]he policies and practices of privatization are more central to neoliberalism than the ideology of free markets. The giant corporation, not the market,
becomes the model to which both government and the market have to adapt... Now, it is important to note that... the practice of neoliberalism (i.e. actually existing neoliberalism) and the ideology of
free markets, and by extension the ideology of neoliberalism, have less in common that one may think (2013: 1084).
These strategies could prove to be much more explosive as they add a better
organised and politically more conscious middle class (once compared with
the already dispossessed and marginalised urban poor) to the ranks of the
victims of the hegemonic project (cf. Bayat, 2007); while also attacking the
very principle of private property, which constitutes one of the foundations of
the discourse of freedom and democracy in capitalist societies. Apparently,
maintenance of such strategies, especially when you are to take on private
property and labour of a politically conscious and better organised section of
society, could become only possible with the rise of more authoritarian
police state (cf. Şengül, 2013), as well as selective employment of a more
flexible/nebulous legal framework to legitimise unjust practices of
dispossession targeting “private property” (Kuyucu, 2013a, 2013b;
Penpecioğlu, 2013).
Under these conditions, the theoretical illusion of “post-political urban
condition” will remain insufficient to explain “urban crisis” in general, and
the crisis of urban politics in particular, as these strategies are re-politicising
the cities (cf. MacLeod, 2011: 2652; see Swyngedouw, 2002), impelling us to
concentrate on “urbanisation of politics” along with the politics urbanisation
(Şengül, 2013: 22). This urbanisation of politics, in a way, could be
interpreted as urbanisation of crisis in the domain of current (financial)
accumulation regime: “In the course of just a few years, a financial crisis has
been transformed into a state crisis, and now that state crisis is being
transformed into an urban crisis” (Peck, 2012: 651).
Yet, we should note that Peck’s insight could be more helpful in explaining
the Northern/Western context, where urban crisis takes the form of a crisis
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of urban governance – austerity urbanism3 and of local democracy (localism)
(2012: 650-651), rather than the crisis of an urban social order (a systemic
crisis). Here, the national policy-makers could well avoid the political costs of
urban crisis, while enjoying the opportunity to put all the blame on the
ineptitude and incompetence of -now – “over-responsibilised” city elites (cf.
Peck et al, 2013: 1097). In that regard, Purcell’s (2006) caution that the right
to the city discourse could well fall into the “local trap” becomes meaningful
in that it could miss the roots of the crisis of urban governance in the
dominant accumulation regime, as well as its relevance to the crisis in the
urban social order.
3(c) Dispossession, global uneven development and limits to
containment strategies
As noted earlier, the uneven geography of capitalism serves well to spread
the costs of neoliberal hegemonic practices. This is especially true for global
uneven development under the global dominance of financial capital. As a
geographical mechanism of cost displacement, for example, broader
privatisation policies and urban regeneration projects in developing
countries (Global South/East) played a key role in sustaining capital
accumulation in the major financial centres of the world, mainly located in
the Global North/West. Remembering Smith’s (2002) argument is crucial in
this respect as he emphasizes urban regeneration has become a “dirty world”
in developing countries that mobilises developers, politicians and financiers,
dispossessing the low income populations, expelling them from transformed
urban space. Behind this global capitalist urban strategy, one could observe
the circuits of global capital, operation of which results in exacerbated class
inequalities and socio-spatial segregation.
A closer look at the cases from the Global South/East suggest the presence
of a rather universal scheme of dispossession and similar containment
strategies cutting across different developing countries. For instance Harvey
(2008) notes, in the case of Seul, since the 1990s, construction companies
have invaded city’s hillsides and constructed high rise luxury and gated
towers in these places. In Mumbai there has been an enormous urban
regeneration operation displacing millions of slum dwellers through the use
coercive power of the state. As another Indian city, in Bangalore land
speculation and dispossession of the people living in city’s rural periphery
has become the market-driven priority to make Bangalore a world city
3 Peck (2012: 648-649) lists the emergent features of austerity urbanism as follows: leaner
local states, rollback redux, fire-sale privatisation, placebo dependency, risk-shifting
rationalities, tournament financing, austerity governance.
15
(Goldman, 2011). Indian state aggressively uses its coercive mechanisms in
line with this market-driven operations and acquire land from low income
populations. As Goldman further emphasizes, many Bangaloreans are being
actively dispossessed as part of the effort to build up a world city based on
the speculative reproduction and reappropriation of space.
Chinese cities are no exceptions to these dispossession processes in relation
to urban regeneration. Approximately three million people living in China are
being dispossessed of the spaces they have long occupied. The state can
simply displace them from their territories since there is no private property
rights in the county (Harvey, 2008). As a leading Asian practice of neo-liberal
urbanism, Fu (2002) explicates the case of Shanghai and explores how state
uses land lease as a mechanism to dispossess public land and allow it for
the development of construction and finance sectors to make Shanghai a
global city. In dispossessing publicly owned land, Chinese-style urban
growth coalitions are very strong owing to the powerful position of the state
in policy-making (Fu, 2002). Like Shanghai, in Taipei neoliberal urbanism
facilitates and attracts investments through large scale urban development
projects. As Jou et al. (2011) highlight, behind the accumulation by
dispossession these has been a dramatic change in the private property
rights in Taipei. Land acquisition via the privatisation of public land has
played a key role in dispossession and four large scale urban projects in
Taipei were formed and implemented in that regard. In this East Asian way
of neoliberal urbanism, there has been a consensus among central state,
local state and private capital over establishing private property on public
land (Jou et al., 2011).
Neoliberal urbanism and its associated practices of dispossession not only
came to dominate urban policy in Asian countries; but they have also
constituted the main motive behind the reproduction of urban space in Latin
American countries. As Harvey (2008) points out all the favelas in Rio are
being covered by high rise condominiums and luxury gated residents.
Furthermore, as Lopez-Morales (2010) observes, in Chile there has been a
state-led strategy of urban regeneration in progress, which has become a
form of social dispossession of the ground rent and has given rise to the
gentrification of urban space.
Dispossession has also become one of the main market-driven motives
behind the restructuring of Turkish cities since the 1980s, when the
neoliberal policies were introduced. In the Turkish story of neo-liberalisation,
capital accumulation process has heavily relied on urbanisation of capital,
dramatically altering the socio-spatial fabric of the cities, while increasingly
rendering class (and socio-spatial) inequalities in the cities permanent
(Şengül, 2009 [2001], 2012; Işık and Pınarcıoğlu, 2001). In this process, the
built and non-built environment, public resources and land, historically and
16
culturally valuable sites, forests, squatter areas have all come to be
subordinated in to the logic of urban rent (Şengül, 2013). As Balaban (2012)
points out, the state has played a leading and interventionist role in the
development of construction sector in Turkish cities and facilitated the
dispossession process via various legislations reorganising planning powers,
transferring property rights and empowering state institutions as the leading
actor. This process has been associated with further centralisation of
decision-making powers at all levels of public institutions (Şengül, 2012). In
the context of such an authoritarian policy scheme, urban regeneration
projects serve to “forced marketisation” (Kuyucu and Ünsal, 2010; also see
Aalbers, 2012) that intensify the displacement and dispossession of the
urban poor, while also subordinating a broader segment of the society (now
mainly the middle class) to the financialisation of housing market, rendering
their labour captive to finance capital (thus further dispossession of labour
power) (cf. Karaman, 2012). This forced marketisation process resulting in
property transfer could also be read as yet another round of “fencing
movement”4 this time led and implemented by the state.
It could be argued that, unlike the past global exploitation schemes mainly
relying on commerce and industry, “privatisation and commodification of
public assets including natural resources and land, public services and
institutions” (Harvey, 2005) - and especially urban rent based global
accumulation practices - in the Global South/East are more risky, and more
prone to export the political costs of dispossession right back into the
heartlands of financial capital (North/West). This is so mostly because the
political containment strategies in the Global South/East are much more
fragile - mostly leaning upon the use of force, rather than consent - thereby
leading to sudden and much more violent outbursts of discontent.
What is more, those sorts of neoliberal accumulation practices in the Global
South/East tend to consume the informal arrangements that have long
insured the survival of urban citizens (mostly immigrants from rural areas)
of those countries (in the midst of deep unemployment and housing
problems caused by rapid urbanisation) (cf. Şengül, 2009 [2001]; 2013;
Buğra, 1998). Here, the ambiguity of the legal frameworks demarcating the
boundaries between the public and private property which facilitated the
containment in the past, keeping the poor’s resistance at the level of “quite
encroachment” (cf. Bayat, 2000) could quickly turn into the very weapon
that destroys those survival mechanisms: this time a reverse and loud
encroachment policy pursued by the state, speeding up the dispossession
process faster while deepening existing inequalities, and yet creating new
4 For a rich set of case studies indicative of this trend see Poyraz, 2011; Yılmaz, 2011; Danışan, 2012.
17
ones (Roy, 2011; McFarlane, 2012; Kuyucu, 2013a: 1-4, 10, 16 - also see
Kuyucu, 2013b).
In such countries, the prospects for containing the emergent crises (based
on alienation) via state reforms are rather dim as the politics of
representation is not constructed on the basis of the idea of formal
citizenship, but rather on the basis of clientelism (cf. Bayat and Biekart,
2009: 819-820, 824; also see Kuyucu, 2013: 12) and identity politics. Hence,
it will take a much shorter period of time for alienation effect to translate
into a major (nation-wide) systemic crisis than it would be the case in
Northern/Western countries.
IV - CONCLUSION: A CATEGORISATION OF CRISES?
Ours has been an exercise to lay down a research map, based on an attempt
to produce analytical categorisations engaging with the epistemological
questions revolving around the concept “urban crisis”. Given the volume of
this paper, and given the breadth of the issues to be covered in a rich
comparative study, we choose to offer a tentatively sketched comparison
(and categorisation of) some recent instances urban crisis from different
countries, concentrating on causal factors and containment strategies, to
initiate further discussion in this vein (Table 2).
And departing from our earlier emphasis on “cumulative effects”, impelling
us to develop a historical analysis of the dialectical tensions between crisis
and containment strategies, we also offer an example of how this perspective
could be operationalised in the case of Turkey (Table 3).
18
Table 2: Different forms of urban crisis at a given point in time (and
some current examples)
Public Policies (C) Governmentality (D) Public policies +
Governmentality (C+D)
A
L
I
E
N
A
T
I
O
N
(A)
Labeled as an economic
crisis:
Widespread protests in
the country against the
national government (in
smaller cities and rural
settlements as well as in
metropolitan centres).
Partly checked by broader
decentralisation reforms
(downloading the
responsibility to local
policy makers) + political
marginalisation of
protesters (selective use
of coercion)
(BRASIL in June-July
2013)
(Occupy movement in
the USA)
Labeled as a political crisis:
Bottom up (local) democracy
oriented protests (against one
man rule) targeting the local
authorities: In major
metropolitian cities. Checked
by roll-out neoliberal policies
and the emphasis of the need
to protect economic stability
(Gezi Protests in Turkey) +
Two nations discourse
(setting the metropolitan
centres against the rest of
the country in political
terms: the seculars vs the
conservatives)
(TURKEY, Gezi Protests in
June-July 2013)
Austerity Urbanism in the
USA and responses?
Labeled as an uprising
against the government:
Violent urban riots
(sometimes associated
with looting) targeting
the public institutions
and/or major private
institutions (companies,
banks, etc).
Limited prospects for
containment (State
brutality + Fragile state)
(EGYPT, Tahrir
Resistance + and the
Coup in 2013)
U
N
E
V
E
N
D
E
V
(B)
Labeled as a social crisis:
In-migration (from poor
rural areas to
metropolitan cities,
concentrating poverty
there) + Regional poverty
+ Mafia rooted in poor
regions dominating the
metropolitan areas
(South-ITALY)
Labeled as a regional/ethnic
crisis:
Ethnic violence and/or
ethnic (identity based)
separatism
(Catalonia in SPAIN; Lega
Nord in ITALY)
Labeled as a national
unity crisis:
Separatism/Ethnic
violence (resistance
organised in the urban
centres of such regions,
and also spreading to
all metropolitan
regions):
(Kurdish movement in
TURKEY)
(A+B)
Total collapse of capitalism and/or total political chaos
19
Table 3: A historical perspective (cumulative effects and the Gezi Park
Protest in Turkey)
Public Policies (C) Governmentality (D) Public policies +
Governmentality (C+D)
Alienation (A)
Uneven
development (B)
Alienation +
Uneven
development (A+B)
Cumulative
effects (TURKEY)
STAGE 1 (50s
and 80s) Neolib1
Cumulative
effects (TURKEY)
STAGE 2 (90s and
2000s) Neolib2
Future Cumulative
effects (TURKEY)
Today (2013)
Cumulative
effects (TURKEY)
STAGE 1
Alternative Path
1 (Government
brutality)
Alternative Path 2
(Political-economic
reform)
Alternative Path 3
(Constitutional –
economic reform)
Alternative Path 4
(Civil War)
20
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