MAKING AND MAINTAINING METROPOLISES:
ENTREPRENEURIAL MUNICIPALISM IN TURKEY
by
Sude Bahar Beltan
A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements
for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
Department of Political Science
University of Toronto
© Copyright by Sude Bahar Beltan 2018
Making and Maintaining Metropolises: Entrepreneurial Municipalism in Turkey
Sude Bahar Beltan
Doctor of Philosophy
Department of Political Science University of Toronto
2018
Abstract
This dissertation explores the implications of the public administration and local governance reforms that took place in Turkey in the mid-2000s with a comparative focus on three major metropolitan cities: İstanbul, İzmir, and Diyarbakır. Engaging with the literatures on state rescaling and urban entrepreneurialism, the author analyzes how reforms transformed municipalities into entrepreneurial organizations primarily concerned with territorial competitiveness of their jurisdictions while the central state repositioned itself as a critical actor in urban policy-making.
The dissertation research is guided by three critical aspects of urban governance in Turkey: the changing dynamics of intergovernmental relations (national/local and metropolitan/district), the institutional transformation of municipalities (New Public Management restructuring), and emergent urban policies (city branding initiatives, urban transformation projects, and social services). The author argues that variations across three cities indicate how intergovernmental relations imbued with party politics and the local political context are critical in conditioning the scope and content of entrepreneurial action. The author proposes that studies of neoliberal urbanism, which analytically prioritize the political economy perspective, should put cities back into their national context to capture the political and institutional embeddedness of contemporary neoliberal urban governance.
ii Acknowledgments
It takes a great deal of hard work, patience, and perseverance to complete a Ph.D. In this journey, writing my dissertation was probably the most challenging task. But although it is a lonely job, I was never alone. I was able to do it because of all the exceptional people in my life.
I want to start by thanking Edward Schatz for believing in me and my project, and continuing to act as my supervisor even after my dissertation took an “urban” turn. From the beginning, he made it a priority in his busy schedule to read my proto-chapters, chapters, and full drafts, providing substantive and quick feedback. His expertise and analytical approach improved the comparative aspect of this dissertation tremendously. I am grateful for his support and guidance in this journey. I also want to thank my committee members, Richard Stren and Theresa Enright, whose brilliance and expertise in urban politics elevated my analysis exponentially. Richard read my drafts very closely, challenged my arguments only to hone them, took time to patiently edit my writing, and met with me in person several times to discuss and helped me strategize next steps. Theresa played a remarkable role in my engagement with the literature and situating of focus. Her pointed comments and suggestions helped me uncover what it was that I was arguing. I want to thank my internal examiner, Paul Kingston, for taking the time to read my dissertation, his genuine interest in my project, and his constructive comments, which were critical in bringing this dissertation to its next step. I want to thank Patrick Le Galès for agreeing to be my external examiner; his engagement with the content of my dissertation and his excellent comments and constructive criticisms will be instrumental in revising this work for future publication. And I thank Colette Stoeber for her brilliant editorial work; I could not have asked for a better copy editor.
My special thanks go to Joseph Carens for being my mentor and my anchor in this journey. He helped restore my faith in my project and encouraged me to complete it after coming back from maternity leave. Leaving aside his brilliance, his humanity and the genuine care and interest he showed me played an essential role in my success.
This dissertation would not have been possible without the people I interviewed during my fieldwork in İstanbul, İzmir, and Diyarbakır. I appreciate the time and sincerity of my interviewees, who shared their experiences and the visions and dreams they have for their cities. I am grateful to Azize Yılmaz for being my guide in Diyarbakır on my first-ever visit to the city and connecting me to several interviewees. I also thank Ayşe Sipahioğlu for introducing me to Azize. I thank Yılmaz Gönen in Izmir who played a key role in my interview with the metropolitan mayor.
It was Carolynn Branton who navigated me through the administrative stages and hurdles of the Ph.D. program with utmost empathy, calmness, and reassurance. She makes the Department of Political Science a better place. I also want to thank Louis Tentsos for his support in the days leading to the defense.
I had the pleasure to work with great people in my time at the University of Toronto. I am especially thankful to Beverly Lewis at the Faculty of Arts and Science; Norma Dotto and Terri Winchester at the Department of Political Science at UTM; and the Trinity College community. I thank my students in POL346 at UTM who made my last year of Ph.D. a much more meaningful one.
iii
I want to thank my friends in Turkey and Canada who encouraged and supported me in various ways: Ali Arvas, Begüm Uzun, Daniella Levy-Pinto, Dragana Bodružić, Elinor Bray-Collins, Filiz Tutku Aydın, Gizem Pınar Ünveren, Lilian Abou-Tabickh, Lindsey Shorser, Mehtap Kural, Olga Kesarchuk, Serdar Tekin, Süheyla Nil Mustafa, and Zeynep Başkurt. I am grateful for their friendship and cherish the times we spent together.
Özlem Aslan has been more than just a friend I have had since my undergraduate years. She became my confidant, sounding board, mentor, and a sister I trust. She closely read chapters in this dissertation, helped me to better organize my ideas, calmed me down before my deadlines, babysat my daughter so that I could write, and helped me solve my everyday problems with utmost empathy, sincerity, and charm. My heartfelt thanks to her for being by my side in this journey.
I am blessed in this life to have a family like mine. Words cannot express my gratitude to my parents, Suzan and Mehmet Beltan, my sisters, Arzu and Nihal, and my niece Fulya who have believed in me, supported me, cheered on me, and loved me unconditionally. My parents always believed in the power of education, and perhaps because their own schooling was cut short because of circumstances and responsibilities, they made sure we never had to give up on our right to education. Annecim ve babacım, ben ikinizin yerine de okumuş oldum. My father has been my role model with his work ethic and sense of duty. My mother has been a constant source of inspiration with her strength, unwavering hopefulness, and dedication. She also showed me how you can never retire from being a mother when she took care of my daughter in Turkey and Canada so that I could finish writing the dissertation. I am happy that she was by my side when I completed it all. My sister Arzu always knew how to cheer me up with her infectious laugh and uplifting praise. My sister Nihal, who has the biggest heart of anyone I know, supported me in so many caring ways: from sending gifts to emailing me municipal news and websites and helping me with her outstanding computer skills. I am looking forward to sharing the convocation ceremony with her— just as we shared my first reading festival in grade one. Fulya, the best niece an aunt can ever ask for: I am especially grateful for her support in the summer of 2017. Her presence and calmness made the finishing stages more bearable.
This Ph.D. was not just an educational episode in my life. My coming to Canada brought two special people into my life. I want to thank my husband, Mohamed Masoud, for being such a loving father to our daughter and his continuous support even from the other side of the continent. His motivation and love pushed me to the finish line. And to my daughter Saranur, the light of my life, I owe you the biggest thanks. You were so understanding and so helpful for a toddler when I went to the library to write for long hours. Being your mother is the best thing that ever happened to me. You are the reason I now have this degree—because you inspire me to be a better version of myself. I love you.
I dedicate this dissertation to all my family.
iv Table of Contents
List of Tables and Maps vi
List of Acronyms vii
List of Appendices viii
Chapter One – Introduction 1
Chapter Two – Restructuring Local Governance in Turkey 38
Chapter Three – İstanbul, The “National Champion” of Cities 100
Chapter Four – İzmir, The Lagged or Obstructed Metropolis? 143
Chapter Five – Diyarbakır, The Politicized Metropolis 188
Chapter Six – Conclusion 227
Bibliography 260
Appendices 273
v List of Tables and Maps
Table 1 – Urban Entrepreneurialism Map 1 – İstanbul Province in Turkey Map 2 – İstanbul Metropolitan Municipality and District Municipalities Map 3 – İzmir Province in Turkey Map 4 – İzmir Metropolitan Municipality and District Municipalities Map 5 – Diyarbakır Province in Turkey Map 6 – Diyarbakır Metropolitan Municipality and District Municipalities
vi List of Acronyms
AKP – Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (Justice and Development Party) ANAP – Anavatan Partisi (Motherland Party) BDP –Barış ve Demokrasi Partisi (Peace and Democracy Party) CHP – Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi (Republican People’s Party) DAs – Development Agencies DPT – Devlet Planlama Teşkilatı (State Planning Organization) DTP – Demokratik Toplum Partisi (Democratic Society Party) EU – European Union FP – Fazilet Partisi (Virtue Party) IMF – International Monetary Fund IMM – İstanbul Metropolitan Municipality İSMEK – İstanbul Büyükşehir Belediyesi Sanat ve Meslek Eğitimi Kursları (IMM Courses on Arts and Crafts Education) MÜSİAD – Müstakil Sanayici ve İşadamları Derneği (Independent Industrialists’ and Businessmen’s Association) NPM – New Public Management OECD – Organization for Economic Cooperation and Democracy OHAL – Olağanüstü Hal Yönetimi (state of emergency rule) RP – Refah Partisi (Welfare Party) TOKİ – Toplu Konut İdaresi Başkanlığı (Housing Development Administration) TÜSİAD – Türk Sanayicileri ve İş İnsanları Derneği (Turkish Industry and Business Association) UCLG – United Cities and Local Governments UN – United Nations
vii List of Appendices
Appendix A – List of Metropolitan Provinces in Turkey Appendix B – Photographs from fieldwork in Diyarbakır
viii
CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
Twenty-first century Turkey is marked by a rate of urbanization unprecedented in its history. Skyscrapers, shopping malls, convention centers, sports stadia, state-of-the-art office buildings, luxury residential complexes, and gentrified neighborhoods have mushroomed not just in major metropolitan regions like İstanbul, but in other cities across the country. These globally familiar urban manifestations are indicators of a crystallizing neoliberal urban regime, the foundation of which was laid with the public administration and local government reforms in the mid-2000s, authored by the AKP-led national government. The reforms marked a paradigm shift: they modernized the administrative organization of the state, institutionalized market-oriented norms, and empowered municipalities.
This new governance paradigm downloaded to municipalities a great deal of authority and many resources, along with new responsibilities and expectations. There were high expectations that municipalities would transform their cities into competitive and globally/regionally integrated metropolises. But, unlike before, municipalities now had the means to fulfill such ambitions: bureaucracy was loosened, new avenues to find revenues were introduced, and public-private partnerships proliferated. In the public eye, if municipalities failed to live up to these expectations, then it was mostly because of their lack of skills and vision to carry their jurisdictions to the next level.
In fact, contemporary studies of urban governance conceptualize urban entrepreneurialism either as a function of the city’s own assets (such as entrepreneurial strategies, local coalitions, or geopolitical significance) or as a function of the broader macroeconomic context (such as the logic of capital accumulation, imperatives of global economy, or local sectoral configuration). While policy-oriented approaches tend to focus more on the former, critical urban approaches bring in a political economy perspective. In both camps, the role played by the national context is often downplayed. By focusing on a subnational comparison of three metropolitan cities in Turkey, this dissertation aims to explore the ways national institutional frameworks and competing political agendas condition urban entrepreneurial prospects and practices.
Research Questions
It is central for the purposes of this research to investigate the ramifications of the public administration and local governmental reform process that took place between
2004 and 2012/14 on urban governance in Turkey. In so doing, I will pay particular attention to the political and economic context within which the reforms occurred when they did. Therefore, the role of the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma
Partisi , henceforth, AKP)-led central government in shaping the framework of reforms and their implementation is of paramount importance for depicting the particularities of transition to urban entrepreneurialism in Turkey.
This research is guided by three critical aspects of urban governance in Turkey: the dynamics of intergovernmental relations (national/local and metropolitan/district); the institutional transformation of municipalities as entrepreneurial actors; and emergent urban policies. Accordingly, I pursued the following questions: To what extent and in what ways did intergovernmental relations affect urban governance after the reforms?
What is the role of the central government in urban governance? What kind of
2 transformations do municipalities undergo to become entrepreneurial? How do mayors situate themselves within multileveled urban governance? In what ways are cities imagined, made, and maintained in this new urban regime? What are the staple policies and practices of this urban regime? And what is the role of mayors’ political agendas in urban governance?
Theoretical Framework
This dissertation explores state restructuring and the resulting urban entrepreneurialism in the context of Turkey in the 21st century. The following discussion is based on three parts.
In the first, I will address how state restructuring in the neoliberal era is understood through various theoretical approaches, namely decentralization, governance, and state rescaling. I will argue that both decentralization and governance approaches have significant shortcomings in explaining state restructuring processes. The decentralization framework—with its inherently teleological and categorically binary outlook—cannot account for the complex and incoherent ways in which states reorganize their functions. On the other hand, the governance framework —which gives analytical primacy to the proliferation of decision-making actors in a multi-level environment and to the predominance of globalization—significantly downplays the otherwise still relevant decision-making actor, that is, the national state. Instead, I will adhere to the analytical framework provided by the state-rescaling approach, which explains state restructuring, following Neil Brenner (2003), as a “rehierarchization of modern statehood” as various state functions are being “upscaled and downscaled towards a variety of (pre-existent and newly created) institutional levels within an increasingly
3 multitiered political architecture” (307). Moreover, the analytical attention this framework pays to processes and institutional configurations enables us to trace the complexities of rescaling episodes in various contexts and thus avoid deterministic readings of global macroeconomic shifts while maintaining the relevancy of the state as an actor.
In the second part, I will discuss how, in the context of the increased importance of the city as a scale for global and national economies, metropolitan reforms converged around entrepreneurial forms of urban governance. Before discussing the content of such reforms, I will first emphasize the need to put the cities back into their national contexts despite the general tendency to disassociate them from these (as in global city approaches). Then, I will discuss the notion of urban entrepreneurialism with respect to how it originally emerged and its defining characteristics that have been reflected within metropolitan reform experiments since the 1990s. I will discuss how this entrepreneurial shift generated a qualitatively different set of policies and practices that transformed institutional structures and urban governance in profound ways. Moreover, I will emphasize how such entrepreneurial practices have become a significant playing field for both national and local governments.
In the third part, I will discuss the challenges of studying neoliberal urbanism in general and the problematic aspects of the literature on urban entrepreneurialism in particular. Regarding the former, I will emphasize the need to retain contextual thickness while tracing meaningful resemblances across cases in order to avoid a homogenizing and economistic reading of neoliberal urbanism. Here, I put forward path-dependency as a crucial analytical tool to differentiate various restructuring processes from one another
4 while signifying their commonalities. Regarding the literature on urban entrepreneurialism, I will caution against the pitfalls of reification of (1) cities and (2) of inter-urban competition, the latter of which is deemed as a “coercive external power.” I will suggest contextualizing urban policy and practices so as to reveal (1) the role played by political and institutional factors in generating, shaping, and defining the scope of entrepreneurial urbanism, and (2) the functions and meanings that urban practices serve beyond laying a wager in inter-urban competition.
State Restructuring in the Post-1980s
Concurrent to the onset of neoliberal economic policies in the 1980s, states (both unitary and federalist types with varying degrees of centralism in their organizations) started to experiment with their administrative and governmental structures in various ways. At the time, many scholars, policy makers, and civil society activists alike welcomed the proclivity of such experimentations towards more decentralized arrangements of state functions and authority, seeing it as a linear progression on the way to a more efficient and democratized state structure (Cheema and Rondinelli 1983). As such, many considered decentralized governance models as a means to achieve efficient and effective service delivery in the face of a deregulated economy and minimized state
(Osborne and Gaebler 1992).
The argument that decentralized service provision was more effective was based on two claims. The first was that local governments, empowered with more fiscal and administrative autonomy, would make more informed policy decisions primarily because the bureaucratic processes of a decentralized setting would not over-filter the demands of the local population, as typically occurred in centralized, hierarchical settings. Therefore,
5 decentralized arrangements would score better in terms of responsiveness. Moreover, local governments would have more “capability” to deliver these services, not only because of their proximity to the citizens, but more so because most of these services are delegated to the private sector and civil society (through practices such as privatization and public-private partnerships). As such, decentralized arrangements would score better in efficiency. The second claim for the argument of efficiency was that decentralized arrangements would create channels for citizens to voice their needs and demands, thereby enhancing democracy beyond the ballot box.
The promises and potential of decentralized structures found widespread appeal in various nation states (developed and developing) in the face of political and fiscal crises they were experiencing (Stren 2003). Decentralization reforms around the world took on various forms and degrees, making any definition or comparison across the cases analytically challenging.1 In retrospect, experiments with decentralization proved to be neither consistent nor coherent, on both the normative and institutional level.
Normatively, decentralization reforms did not always engender more democracy and could lead to “elite capture” of local governments, corruption, authoritarianism, and
1 Accordingly, the literature on decentralization reflects a taxonomical inflation of types and degrees of decentralization: types of decentralization are considered as political, administrative and fiscal. Some scholars use fiscal and administrative aspects of decentralization interchangeably (Schneider 2003), others use the term “functional decentralization” to signify the revenue and expenditure aspects of fiscal decentralization (Montero and Samuels 2004). Some stretch the term decentralization to include any democratizing political and institutional reforms and phrase it as democratic decentralization (Manor 1999; Parker 1995). Degrees of decentralization are mainly considered deconcentration, delegation, and devolution (and even privatization). Scholars also argue that the extent to which decentralization is experienced is a matter of degree that could be distinguished according to the “extent of power that is delegated” (Canel 2001, 27; Treisman 2002). In this regard, the terms deconcentration, delegation and devolution are used to signify, respectively, weak, functional, and radical delegation of power to lower levels of government. However, in the literature deconcentration is also used to signify administrative decentralization when the transfer of the authority regarding services delivery to the subnational units of government is not coupled with commensurate transfer of fiscal authority. Or we see the usage of the term devolution to match full delegation of political power, fiscal authority, and services delivery responsibilities to the subnational governments.
6 nepotism (Keaton 2006; Noori 2006). From an institutional point of view, various cases showed states could oscillate between decentralization and (re)centralization on a spectrum; or they could even exhibit both tendencies at the same time (Dickovick 2011;
Eaton 2004). Scholars, therefore, started to conceptualize decentralization more as a process than an end state, and thus chose to theorize such reforms from an institutionalist perspective (Dickovick 2011; Eaton 2004; Falleti 2010; Garman, Haggard, and Willis
1999, 2001; O’Neill 2003). Indeed, decentralization reforms (or any restructuring reforms for that matter) are highly contextual processes, which are determined by specific politico-institutional arrangements. These arrangements reflect socio-economic structures and transformations embedded within a multilevel (global, national, local) governance matrix. However, I contend that decentralization as a conceptual framework, with its inherently teleological and categorically binary aspects, fell short of providing a holistic analysis of such complex and often incoherent reform processes.
Decentralization was not the only restructuring process that nation-states were undergoing in the post-1980s. The increasing globalization of the world economy starting in the late 1970s and the proliferation of various transnational and supranational economic and political actors (such as TNCs, NAFTA, and the EU) challenged the regulatory authority of states over the economy as well as their territories. Many scholars of globalization (Ohmae 1996; Strange 1996) interpreted such pressures and limitations on state sovereignty by these global institutions as a “hollowing out” of the nation-state as we know it. Others described this phenomenon as a transition from government to governance as the state becomes one among a plethora of governing actors (McCarney
2003). In sum, the 20th-century nation state was undergoing a fundamental
7 transformation domestically and internationally as the political and economic conditions that made it possible and plausible changed in profound ways.
As an alternative approach to understand the complexity of state transformation, urban geographers (such as Neil Smith) introduced the state-rescaling framework in the
1990s, which gained momentum and wide interdisciplinary application in the 2000s. The appeal of this approach lay in the explanatory power of its main analytical tool—the notion of rescaling—in situating the transformations the states were undergoing within the larger changing economic and territorial/spatial dynamics that constitute such transformations. Accordingly, instead of erosion of its form and capacity, the 20th- century state was undergoing a sea change of sorts that could be deciphered—following
Neil Brenner (2003)—as “a rehierarchization of modern statehood as the basic functions of Fordist-Keynesian national states are being upscaled and downscaled towards a variety of (pre-existent and newly created) institutional levels within an increasingly multitiered political architecture” (307). The notion of rescaling thus escapes (1) the dichotomy of the decentralization-centralization framework by emphasizing “the multiform and often incoherent ways in which the state divides and spatializes its functions in a non binary manner”; and (2) “an economistic reading of globalization by maintaining a focus on the nation-state as a powerful actor within the formation of new regionalism” (Enright 2016,
167).
From this perspective, both decentralization and the EU processes are considered to be scalar configurations. Erik Swyngedouw (2004) formulates scalar configurations, either as regulatory order(s) or as networks: “regulatory order refers to geographical- institutional arrangements (like states, regional/local forms of governance, or
8 transnational organizations like the European Union); networks refer to the spatial or geographical arrangements of interlinked economic activities” (26). He argues that
“[t]here is a continuous tension between ‘scales of regulation’ and ‘scales of networks’.
As the latter contract and expand through processes of de- and re-territorialization, the former emerge as institutionalized territorial compromises” (33). Hence, central to the notion of rescaling is the organic and transformative link between state-restructuring processes and the political economy of spatial scales. It follows that scales are never fixed but are constantly being reworked and that the scalar organization of state power is understood as a result of a “constitutive, contested, and therefore potentially malleable dimension of political-economic processes” (Brenner 2004, 449).
Indeed, one of the merits of the state-rescaling framework is this emphasis on
“processual analysis” that goes beyond deploying the notion of scale for generic labeling of various state regulatory forms. In New State Spaces, Brenner (2004a) applies a process-oriented methodology to examine scalar configurations of western European states over a span of four decades between 1960 and 2000 through the lens of urbanization processes. His cross-examination of western European states reveals four distinct2 but interrelated phases of spatial reorganization unfolding in a path-dependent and dialectical fashion, evidenced in differing urban locational policies (Brenner 2004a,
450). The crisis tendencies of earlier forms of spatial organizations pave the way for subsequent forms of state rescaling to overcome the regulatory failure of prior scalar arrangements. For instance, in western Europe, the crisis of the post-war Keynesian state and Fordist economy in the 1970s engendered a qualitative supersession of spatially
2 Brenner (2009) identifies these phases as follows: Spatial Keynesianism (early 1960s–early 1970s); Fordism in Crisis (early 1970s–early 1980s); Glocalization Strategies, Round I (1980s); and Glocalization Strategies, Round II (1990s) (128).
9 redistributive urban/regional policies (read: welfare compromise) with ones that “position major city and city-regions strategically within supranational (European and global) circuits of capital accumulation” (Brenner 2009a, 128). While post-war state policies
“promoted the entire national territory […] for balanced economic growth” (Brenner
2004, 453), by the late 1970s the state spatial strategy downscaled to the urban level, prioritizing territorial competitiveness rather than redistributive concerns, which I will discuss further below. Similar rescaling processes took place on the other side of the
Atlantic, in North America, as documented by many studies (Brenner 2002; Harvey
1989; Hall and Hubbard 1998).
Despite the fact that the origin of state rescaling literature rests on the empirical cases of North American and Western European contexts, a growing number of scholars have applied the framework to state-restructuring processes in non-Western contexts
(Bayırbağ 2013; Hayashi 2013; Park 2013). Research in this area suggests that the rescaling in these contexts “cannot be easily derived from pre-given conceptual frameworks developed in the specific context of Atlantic Fordism” (Park 2013, 1118).
Because of various differences in regulatory processes and capitalist development, the contradictions and crises that gave rise to new scalar configurations have been quite different from those occurring on both sides of the Atlantic.
One major difference is the lack of a welfare compromise in the developmental state model in non-Western contexts. The concern for nationalization of the economy was prevalent—as it was in the Western contexts—in countries such as Brazil, Korea, and
Turkey, and moreover was instrumental in their consolidation of territorial integrity and
10 internal homogeneity; however, such nationalization was framed without “significant political and institutional efforts at redistribution and social welfare” (Park 2013, 1119).
Without a welfare compromise or consensus between state and society, urban spatial policies in Western and non-Western cases during the 1960s and the 1970s diverged substantially. State policies on housing, for example, provide great insight into these differences. One characteristic of Keynesian welfare state in the Fordist economy was state policies providing affordable housing for workers and low income populations; in Turkey during the 1960s and 1970s, on the other hand, the developmental state—an ardent follower of the ISI (import substitution industrialization) economic model—failed to provide any housing for the growing number of workers (who were essential for the reproduction of that economic model) and low-income populations in urban regions. The lack of such a policy gave rise to what is commonly known as “gecekondu” (informal, self-help housing on public land) in metropolitan regions of Turkey, a prevalent instantiation of the redistributive failures of the developmental state (Buğra 1998). It is, therefore, not surprising that one of the first policies in the most recent process of state rescaling in Turkey (during the AKP era) concerned housing, specifically ending gecekondu in metropolitan regions. Meanwhile in the West, following the crisis of welfare compromise and with the onset of the post-Fordist economy, states have been somewhat ambivalent with regard to the issue of affordable housing, and homelessness remains a problem in major metropolitan regions. The lesson here is that contextual differences condition the various paths and forms that state-rescaling processes take, and thus their role should not be downplayed by deterministic readings of macro shifts in global economy.
11 In sum, the state-rescaling framework, with its explanatory potential to unpack complex cases without falling into the extremes of universalism or particularism, provides a more convincing narrative (compared to, for example, frameworks of decentralization and governance) for “a general trend of worldwide sociospatial restructuring that nonetheless involves intensely patterned, yet contextually specific, forms of spatial differentiation” (Brenner 2009a, 131).
Revitalization of the City and Urban Reforms
The concurrent rescaling of the world economy as a “scale of network” and of states as “scales of regulation” have found material expression in the simultaneous restructuring and revitalization of the urban form, both physically and institutionally. It was, therefore, much to the surprise of early globalization enthusiasts—who anticipated the end of cities and the irrelevance of spatial concentrations in the new economy—that a new era dawned in the history of cities in the last decades of the 20th century. The deterritorialization of the global capitalist economy was accompanied by increasingly territorial economic production, competition, and consumption in the spatial scale of cities (Brenner 2002; Harvey 1985; Sassen [1991] 2006; Scott 2002; Storper 1997). As mentioned above, the “national scale,” the operational apparatus of the Fordist economy, no longer functioned in the new global economy. Swyngedouw (2004), a scholar of the rescaling framework, fine-tuned the catchphrase “globalization” to better capture the essence of the phenomenon, suggesting the notion of glocalization, which refers to
(1) the contested restructuring of the institutional level from the national scale both upwards to supra-national or global scales and downwards to the scale of the individual body or the local, urban or regional configurations and (2) the strategies of global localisation of key forms of industrial, service and financial capital (Swyngedouw 2004, 37).
12 The notion of global city captures the epitome of such global localizations of industrial, service, and financial capital.3 Sassen, in her 1991 seminal work, argues that global cities (of which she counted three at the time, and later forty) covered a broad variety of specialized roles in the global economy: such as “(1) command points in the organization of world economy; (2) key locations and marketplaces for leading industries—finance and specialized services for firms; (3) major sites of production
(innovation) for these industries and networks of cities” ([1991] 2006, 7). In Sassen’s analysis, the new strategic role played by global cities in the world economy delinked them from their national contexts: richer countries have poorer cities and poorer countries have richer cities. Here, the “global integration–national disintegration” angle revises the traditional center-periphery framework of political-economy analyses of international capital accumulation, such as world systems theory. However, Sassen’s framework also falls into the trap of economic determinism and misses the role nation states play in spatial configurations of glocalized economy.
The new strategic role of the urban, in fact, suggests that national economies rely heavily on cities for economic production, capital accumulation, and global market competition.4 As a result, glocalized forms of state restructuring (be they global cities, metro regions, or urban agglomerations) could prioritize certain city-regions over others within national territories. In the European context, Patrick Le Galès and Colin Crouch
(2012) argue that states choose certain cities over others as “national champions” of the economy (such as Paris instead of Marseilles in France, and London instead of
3 It is, however, important to note that “global city” is one of the many forms of such global localizations and that there is a myriad of state regulatory rescaling. Moreover, even under the category of “global city” there is a variety of regulatory governance structures (Kantor et al. 2011). 4 Katz and Bradley (2014) go further than this: “There is, in essence, no American (or Chinese, or German, or Brazilian) economy; rather, a national economy is a network of metropolitan economies” (1).
13 Manchester in the United Kingdom). The idea of “cities as national champions,” which the authors define as a form of economic patriotism, signifies a shift away from “regional development policy aimed at assisting backward areas to one aimed at improving further the performance of the most successful” (406). If cities are the scale at which economic competition takes place, then favoring certain cities over others in terms of infrastructural investments, regulatory practices, and urban policies is a way for states to defend their national economic interests and secure their national competitiveness (Le Galès and
Harding 1998). In line with the rescaling framework, “cities as national champions” escapes from the economic determinism of Sassen’s approach to the global city and situates cities back within their national contexts. Thus, cities and national states are not necessarily in a zero-sum relationship in globalization: it does not always follow that the stronger the cities are, the more autonomous they become from their national governments.
Given the rising importance of cities for national economies, various governments were in fact directly involved in reforming the administrative and territorial structures of their urban regions. From the 1990s onwards, metropolitan reforms experienced an upsurge in the US and western Europe, as well as in the global South.5 It is, however, important to note that metropolitan reforms and debates over the optimum model for governing bodies are nothing new. Such discussions were part of policy debates and academic literature as early as the 1940s. Victor Jones (1945), in the face of evolving
5 See the writings of Brenner (2002 and 2003) for an analysis of resurgence in metropolitan reforms and rising importance for city economies for nation-states in the American and European contexts. For metropolitan reforms in Global South, see the special issue in Public Administration and Development 25 (4) in 2005. This is however not to claim that the only motivation for urban reforms has been related to the changes in the economy in the post-1980 period. Various urban restructuring cases reveal that the local context is of paramount importance and manifests a variety of reasons that affect urban reform processes (Stren and Cameron 2005).
14 metropolitan regions of the United States during 1940s, criticizes the lack of a corresponding body of government that oversees “what is to be built, where it is to be located, whom it is to serve, how its functions will be affected by existing facilities and services, and how, in turn, it will affect the solution of other communal, regional, and national programs” (79). Jones’ proposition for an integrated and overarching body with planning, coordination, and taxation authority over the entire metropolitan jurisdiction was primarily to overcome inefficient and ineffective government financing and delivery of essential and ever-growing urban services. It was also about resolving city–suburban tensions. Indeed, at the heart of experiments with metropolitan governments lie issues of making urban services more efficient, planning urban growth, and resolving jurisdictional and fiscal tensions among various local authorities within the confines of metropolitan region. The appeal of a single metropolitan government, therefore, derives from the inability of individual local authorities in fragmented systems to handle large-scale urban services, planning, and finances (Stren and Cameron 2005).
Experiments with metropolitan governments to date highlight significant variations across models, suggesting that no single model is applicable to all metropolitan contexts. James Sharpe (1995) suggests conceptualizing an analytical spectrum spanning
“the two extremes of ‘voluntary non-institutional’ cooperation between units vs. a
‘formal’ metropolitan government” (13).6 Across this spectrum, the most popular metropolitan government formulation has been the two-tiered model, of which Toronto
6 Considering the fact that there is only one formal metropolitan authority in the US context (Metro in Portland metropolitan area), Sharpe’s proposal for “informal cooperation-formal government” spectrum is analytically helpful to understand how various metropolitan regions operate.
15 served as a much-celebrated example between 1954 and 1998.7 This model’s appeal originates in the solution it provides to the inherent antagonism between the city core and the peripheral municipalities: two hierarchically nested levels enable the survival of individual municipalities without compromising the overarching authority of an area- wide entity. As such, this model offers a seemingly optimal solution to the often- conflicting functions of self-government, ensuring democratic participation while seeking efficient service provision (Sharpe 1995).
Without going into further details of various metropolitan government models, it is important to note that the challenge of finding the right balance between service efficiency and jurisdictional representation was at the center of reform debates and attempts up until the 1990s. However, metropolitan reforms since the 1990s represent a different chapter in such restructuring. While cities still need to tackle issues related to service costs and delivery, planning urban growth, and resolving central city and suburban tensions, metropolitan restructuring since the 1990s is also about how cities can stimulate economic growth and create jobs, build partnerships with various actors, and capitalize on their local potential and positionality to compete with other cities and urban regions.8
7 Turkey established its first metropolitan authorities in 1984 in three of its provinces (İstanbul, Ankara, and İzmir) after the two-tiered model of Toronto. I thank Professor Richard Stren for bringing to my attention this link between İstanbul and Toronto and connecting me with Lionel Feldman who provided consultations to Turkish authorities during the 1980s for the working of the two-tiered metropolitan model. There is, however, a slight difference between the two models. In İstanbul, the metropolitan authority was superimposed over the existing district municipalities within the agglomeration. In the case of Toronto, the lower tier was restructured some time after the metro authority itself was created (Sharpe 1995, 18). 8 For instance, in the most recent debates on metropolitan governance, Katz and Bradley (2014) go further and conceptualize “metropolitan” as a “sovereign” (not just as in the form of a metropolitan government but as a combination of various metro authorities including mayors, businesses, universities, philanthropists) as the savior of national economies, as a revolutionary new frontier for growth, prosperity and progress. The authors argue that at the heart of metropolitan leadership is a pragmatic caucus that is above party politics and one that puts collaboration over conflict (6). In contrast, during the 1960s and 1970s the “debates on metropolitan governance focused predominantly upon the issues of administrative
16 Urban Entrepreneurialism
David Harvey (1989), in his much-acclaimed article, captured the early stages of this shift in the North American and UK contexts. He identified the change in urban policies at the time (the 1970s and the 1980s) as a shift away from managerialism to entrepreneurialism and from “urban government” to “urban governance.” Harvey’s observation of urban practices in cities on both sides of the Atlantic (Baltimore, New
Orleans, Glasgow, and Sheffield, to name a few) documented the change from managerial approaches to “initiatory and ‘entrepreneurial’ forms of action” executed by both local governments and local capital to foster economic development (4). He related this change in urban policy and the emergent multiplicity of agents in undertaking such policies (government as well as capital) to the fiscal crises that the states (at the national and local levels) were undergoing during the 1970s in advanced capitalist countries.
Besides fiscal austerity, deindustrialization and rising unemployment levels set the backdrop for urban governments in their search for new ways to generate revenue and increase territorial competitiveness in the face of a reviving inter-urban competition. In fact, Harvey’s (1989) analysis explains the emergence of entrepreneurial practices as a re-alignment of urban governance with the changing requirements of capital accumulation. To put it simply, the crisis of the Fordist economy led to restructuring of the Keynesian state system, which resulted in “a radical reconstruction of central to local state relations” and the accompanying end of the local state’s redistributive function in the American and British contexts (Harvey 1989, 15). In a way, state rescaling, as such, engendered an entrepreneurial shift in urban governance. As a result, urban policies
efficiency, local service provision, regional planning and spatial redistribution within the nationally organized frameworks of the Keynesian welfare national state” (Brenner 2003, 300).
17 shifted priorities: from a politics of redistribution and territorial development to one of economic growth and territorial competitiveness.
From the 1990s onwards, what was “symptomatic of a reorientation in attitudes to urban governance” (Harvey 1989, 4) consolidated into a “dull compulsion of inter urban competition” (Peck 2014, 399) beyond the Atlantic also known as neoliberal urbanism.9
In what follows, I will discuss the main features of such entrepreneurial urban reforms and practices, also summarized in Table 1. It is, however, important to note here the following three observations about the literature on urban entrepreneurialism that is heavily built on the experiences of North Atlantic cities in the UK and the US. The first observation is about the role of the central state in urban reforms and urbanization processes as well as the conditioning role played by the intergovernmental relations in cities’ prospects for entrepreneurial action. The literature on urban entrepreneurialism usually overlooks and often downplays the national institutional contexts that the cities are situated in. The second observation is about how the literature, in documenting the transition to urban entrepreneurialism, tends to leave out the (continuing or emerging) redistributive functions of the local governments. The final observation is about how the literature on urban entrepreneurialism—that analytically prioritizes the political economy perspective—disregards the functions and meanings of entrepreneurial actions by cities beyond laying a wager in inter-urban competition. In the ensuing chapters, I will show how the above overlooked aspects of urban entrepreneurialism are in fact of critical import in understanding Turkey’s experience with entrepreneurial urban governance.
9 In fact, instead of neoliberal urbanism, the term “neoliberal urbanizations” is a better alternative as the latter notion gestures to variations in processes and contextual complexities, whereas the former notion implies a homogenous, static form and processes of urban practices. I will come to this discussion and critique later on in the chapter.
18
Table 1: Urban Entrepreneurialism
Features Justification / Rationale Implications Public-private partnerships are Public-private partnerships are • P-p partnerships lead to commonplace practices in reflective of the transition from shifting power relations in entrepreneurial urban government to governance. They urban politics. governance. arise out of the idea that • Previous policy influencers “government action alone is not (e.g., working class sufficient.” electorate) lose status to business groups and property developers, who have become an essential aspect of p-p partnerships. The activity of public-private The high volatility of inter urban • The risk is usually absorbed partnerships is speculative in competition is the main reason by the public sector, whereas design and execution. behind such speculative the benefits are usually undertakings. Nobody really collected by the private knows “which package will sell.” sector. Urban entrepreneurialism focuses Growth-first policy is based on • Economy of place engenders on a political economy of place the argument that attracting city-branding activities, rather than of territory.10 investment and capital will create which attempt to build an jobs and employment that will attractive urban image. . have a trickle- down effect for the • Quintessential examples of a urban population at large in the political economy of place long term. include hosting mega-events (e.g., sports, culture, conventions). • City diplomacy (which has a long tradition) is mobilized to encourage place-selling activities. Urban entrepreneurialism upholds Stakeholder participation is • Could imply selective a normative discourse praising promoted as a more inclusive and representation of certain participation among stakeholders. democratic approach to urban interest groups governance. • Could imply issues around accountability and transparency. Urban entrepreneurialism works Projects provide flexibility and • Project orientation could on a project-oriented basis rather enhance capacity. generate a piecemeal than a plan oriented one. approach to urban governance. • Two major archetypes of project-oriented governance are mega-scale infrastructural projects and urban transformation projects. Source: Author’s compilation from cited works.
10 In the North Atlantic context, the political economy of place is very often accompanied by a withdrawal from welfare policies by the local governments. However, as I argue in the next chapter, the transition to entrepreneurial urbanism in Turkey is accompanied by social policies rescaled at the municipal level.
19
OECD defines urban entrepreneurialism as “positive and strategic measures based on a pro-active approach, rather than a problem-solving one, together with new institutional structures of urban governance” (OECD 2007, 18–19 quoted in Peck 2017,
13). This definition borrows considerably from business models operating in market economies. Indeed, the New Public Management approach, which gained momentum in public policy debates in developed countries starting in the late 1980s, was emblematic of this normative shift in public administration. In their influential book Reinventing
Government, David Osbourne and Ted Gaebler (1992) discuss the emergence of
“entrepreneurial governments” in the US context at the local level in the wake of fiscal crises in late 1970s, which “pushed local governments to develop alternative ways to deliver services such as public-private partnerships and enterprise management” (16).
They argue that the hierarchical and centralized bureaucracies of the early 20th century were no longer functional—and, in fact, anachronistic—in the dynamic, information- driven society of the 1980s. The authors present an inductive analysis based on various cases across the US that are successful examples of local governments creatively finding new ways to overcome administrative and fiscal predicaments. The analysis depicts a rather sharp contrast between the so-called bureaucratic and entrepreneurial models, conceptualized to some extent as Weberian ideal types. The bureaucratic model is fixed, centralized (hierarchical), rule-oriented (proceduralist), top-down, and risk-averse; whereas, the entrepreneurial model is flexible, decentralized, result-oriented, bottom-up and risk-taking (opportunity seeking). While the former models concentrate on how things are done, the latter focus on the results. While bureaucratic models spend money,
20 entrepreneurial models find ways to make money and generate resources. While bureaucratic models try to solve problems after they happen, entrepreneurial models anticipate problems before they happen (proactive). Moreover, entrepreneurial models are innovative, promote competition, and focus on measuring performance (success as well as failure). They encourage participation in that they do not single-handedly try to solve a community’s problems; rather, they catalyze all sectors of society into action
(Osborne and Gaebler 1992). This black and white depiction of bureaucracies and entrepreneurial organizations proved to be very influential in public administration debates and reform attempts from the 1990s onwards, in both the developed world and, later, the developing context.11
This normative shift in governance transformed local governments in fundamental ways. In a world of competing cities and scarce resources, heavily bureaucratic local governments that remained in their comfort zones had no chance for success.
Municipalities, in particular, gained an essential role in promoting their jurisdictions to attract capital and investment that would generate economic growth and development
(Brenner 2003). This meant going above and beyond providing an enabling and appealing spatial environment to business. Municipalities engaged in businesslike activities themselves and thus jurisdictions were to be managed like a firm, and cities/districts were to be actively marketed as a product (Harvey 1989; Kråtke 1999
[quoted in Brenner 2003]; Swyngedouw et al. 2002). Accordingly, municipalities restructured their operational activities by emulating firms: they institutionalized strategic
11 It goes without saying that in actuality organizations are not so black and white and the transition from bureaucratic type to entrepreneurial type is not so smooth. From a path-dependent perspective, entrepreneurial reforms do not alter the entire bureaucratic structures they are imposed on. In fact, institutional legacies determine the scope for reforms.
21 plans and progress reports, measured staff performance, and cooperated with other public and private organizations to generate new resources and revenues for their projects. In particular, public-private partnerships became the practice in most municipal projects, so much so that it became “harder to detect the boundaries between the private and public sectors” (Hall and Hubbard 1998, 9; Harvey 1989). What sets these public-private partnerships apart is that they are distinctly speculative. Scholars agree that local civic boosterism has a long tradition in American cities (Hall 1998; Harvey 1989). However, earlier boosterism was qualitatively different in that it was based on non-risky promotional endeavors that would bring about territorial development. Harvey (1989) argues that “[t]he speculative qualities of urban investments simply derive from the inability to predict exactly which package will succeed and which will not, in a world of considerable economic instability and volatility” (11). Moreover, convergence between public and private sector interest for economic growth on a territorial base destabilized the foundations of voting power of the working classes and strengthened the influence of business and property interest groups (Hall and Hubbard 1998).
Such entrepreneurial urban practices, as discussed above, imply inter-urban competition on national, regional, and global scales. However, there has not been one definitive answer to the question of “what makes a city competitive.” Iain Begg (2002), in an edited volume on policies to enhance urban competitiveness, argues that many factors are at play for a city to be dynamic and attractive. Because competitiveness entails being attractive to businesses and investors, cost efficiency becomes an important feature.
But a competitive city is also considered to be one that raises the standard of living for its residents and workforce. Besides socioeconomic indicators, cultural and environmental
22 factors that define the urban context play a significant role in urban competitiveness, especially for high-skilled workers who seek an enriching social life. Cohesion—that is, a city that is not disturbed by marginalization and social unrest—is also deemed as a significant asset. Moreover, innovation and creativity and advanced urban infrastructure
(airports, smart technologies) are crucial for a city to flourish.
The pursuit of these competitive traits through contemporary urban practices reveals that urban entrepreneurialism prioritizes a “political economy of place rather than of territory” (Harvey 1989, 7). Municipalities, just like businesses, employ marketing strategies for their cities through various branding projects. Municipalities, indeed, take tourism advertising to a whole new level: cities and districts are branded, framed in a certain “image” reflecting their most competitive advantages (Anttiroiko 2014): in other words, their “marketable ingredients” (Harvey 1989). From promotional videos to city souvenirs and three-dimensional signs spelling city/district names in central squares, city governments and other boosters try to create an attractive urban image, which
(un)intentionally becomes an attempt to build an urban identity. Such a search for local identity has social and political consequences, as Harvey (1989) underlines. On a positive note, an urban identity can provide a sense of belonging and thus counteract the alienation associated with modern urban life: it can enhance a sense of social solidarity and civic pride. On the other hand, an impeccable urban image and identity could mask the failings of such entrepreneurial urban undertakings, financially as well as socially.12
In sum, city branding projects are not solely for attracting tourists in the short term.
12 However, studies on urban entrepreneurialism often overlooks how this search for identity in cities is more than a search for a “marketable ingredient.” The case studies in this dissertation will show that articulation of urban identities and characterization of cities are inherently political undertakings and therefore has significant resonance within the national political context beyond their entrepreneurial functions.
23 Through branding, municipalities set long-term visions and agendas for their cities and districts that create a trajectory for potential investors, stakeholders, and residents alike.
City branding, therefore, is intimately related to place selling. Hosting big cultural and sports events (e.g., the Olympics, Formula1, EXPO, international music and film festivals) and large international conventions (e.g., the World Economic Forum, the
World Water Forum) is instrumental in inter-urban competition (Stren 2012). The fact that national governments are an important part of such place-selling projects (e.g., the bids for the Olympics) shows how important city competition is for a vibrant national economy (Le Galès and Crouch 2012). Events of such scale are also known for their urban regeneration effects (Viehoff and Poynter 2015). Furthermore, in the playing field of these city branding and place selling activities, culture has become a strategic asset for municipalities. Museums of any scale (from large modern art museums to small niche ones) have proliferated in metropolitan cities to boost historical and touristic districts as part of place-selling strategies. Through various forms of city diplomacy—such as sister- city protocols and twinning operations, or economic co-operation agreements—cities have been re-establishing historical and cultural connections across continental and transnational networks. Mayors, as the faces of their cities, usually use these platforms to rewrite their municipal histories according to their own political agendas (Le Galès and
Harding 1998). The entrepreneurial normative shift was thus a game changer for city governments and municipal organizations, generating a qualitatively different set of policies and practices (i.e., an updated repertoire of action comprising both new practices and old ones [e.g., city diplomacy] utilized in new ways) that profoundly transformed institutional structures and urban practices.
24 Contemporary metropolitan reforms recognize the existence of multiple regional actors and institutions as a positive development toward a more inclusive, participatory, and democratic form of governance (Brenner 2003; Swyngedouw et al. 2002). The shared goal of increasing territorial competitiveness coupled with entrepreneurial approaches generated a normative discourse that praises “cooperation” among the so-called stakeholders. Accordingly, stakeholder cooperation, best exemplified in public-private partnerships, became a central feature of contemporary urban governance, as discussed above. The idea that “government action alone is not sufficient” was recognized not just in urban governance but also in the field of international development, in areas such as poverty reduction, education, and emergency relief (Smillie and Helmich 1999).
Proponents defend cooperation as enhancing democratic participation and reflecting societal synergy at the local level. And yet in reality, stakeholder participation entails a high degree of selectivity and “a significant deficit with respect to accountability, representation, and the presence of formal rules of inclusion or participation”
(Swyngedouw et al. 2002, 566). In the European urban context, Patrick Le Galès and
Alan Harding (1998) argue, “Considering the importance of the stakes for large-scale urban development operations, the elites in big cities often do better to play at secrecy than transparency, or to move between the two depending upon the audience” (135).
Therefore, despite the rhetoric of democracy, the relationship between stakeholder type participation through partnerships and more transparent, accountable urban processes is not straightforward. Besides, such collaborations are not inherently inclusive of all groups; in fact, they might at times lead to physical environments reflecting the vision of
25 the “proper urban” aspired to by the select few who participated and financed such initiatives (Swyngedouw et al. 2002).
In order to create competitive metropolitan regions capable of integrating with the global economy, contemporary urban governance overwhelmingly operates on a project- oriented basis. Projects present a more convenient and advantageous way (compared to plans in the Fordist/developmentalist era) to solve place-specific urban problems and to achieve place-selling goals. Given the proliferation of actors (with stakeholder cooperation as an accepted form of governance) taking part in urban restructuring and metro-region (trans)formation, projects offer not only flexibility but also significant capacity in both physical and symbolic terms (Swyngedouw et al. 2002, 567). There are two major archetypes of such urban projects: (a) mega-scale infrastructural projects, and
(b) various types of urban renewal projects.
As Bent Flyvbjerg et al. (2003) suggest, the meaning of infrastructure in contemporary capitalism goes above and beyond the basic necessities for economic activities. Infrastructure is “the great space shrinker, and power, wealth and status increasingly belong to those who know how to shrink space, or know how to benefit from space being shrunk” (2). Starting in the 1990s, infrastructural projects are increasingly realized on a mega-scale, supported extensively by national governments and private capital (Flyvbjerg et. al. 2003, Le Galès and Crouch 2012). These infrastructural mega- projects mostly involve transit and transportation, such as building airports, fast trains, subway systems, expressways, tunnels, and bridges, which are critical to facilitating and enhancing global/regional integration for any given region in terms of connectivity, access to global/regional networks and corridors, and heightened mobility. Moreover, the
26 monumental size, massive budgets, and ambitious completion times of these projects reflect the developmentalist aspirations of involved power groups, such as national governments, metropolitan authorities, municipalities, and private capital.13
If not always as large in scale as infrastructural projects, urban renewal projects are of equal importance and are constantly employed by urban actors in contemporary metropolitan governance. Urban renewal projects come in all shapes and sizes, from restoration to gentrification, from revitalization to new development. But what is usually common to such projects is the market-oriented objective to transform the urban environment in a way that increases its appeal for businesses, capital, and investment that generate employment and commercial activity. That is mostly why in these “creative destructions” we witness “the localization of the global and the globalization of the local” expressed in place-specific forms (Swyngedouw et al. 2002, 552). The go-to prescription is to re-present and re-construct what is locally authentic in globally consumable ways.
And yet, these articulations reflect the particular urban visions and imaginaries of project makers.
Urban rent production—that is, to increase social and economic returns from urban land—is central to urban renewal projects (Swyngedouw et al. 2002, 557), especially gentrification and new development projects in central city districts. For that reason, such projects usually target high-end consumers of global life-styles, rather than ordinary dwellers. Such revalorizing of urban land requires a particular built environment
13 Despite positively framed publicity of these projects by its stakeholders, in reality most of them end up performing poorly because of wrong forecasts, huge cost overruns as well as falsely projected revenues. This, according to Flyvbjerg et al. (2003), is the main paradox of megaprojects: that they repeatedly perform poorly but keep being employed in practice. Project makers usually overrate the developmental consequences of such megaprojects and miscalculate or misrepresent their environmental and social effects. Furthermore, megaprojects are marked by an inherent democratic deficit in that “[p]roject promoters often avoid and violate established practices of good governance, transparency and participation in political and administrative decision making” (Flyvbjerg et al. 2003, 5).
27 that would yield significant returns in terms of real estate values. Urban transformation projects thus become playing fields for zoning decision-makers, property developers
(construction companies), and real estate brokers. But these projects are marked by their speculative character (costs are mostly financed based on possible future returns through rents and sales), which makes them highly risky undertakings. Instead of enhancing cohesion and facilitating urban dialogue, then, such urban transformation projects usually reinforce already-existing urban segmentation.
As the quintessential practices of contemporary metropolitan governance, infrastructural projects and urban transformation projects are “the material expressions of a developmental logic that views megaprojects and place marketing as means for generating future growth and for waging a competitive struggle to attract investment capital” (Swyngedouw et al. 2002, 551). Theresa Enright (2016) describes this mega- project–driven regime as grand urbanism: “a particular manner of governing bigness that relies upon the use of megaprojects to restructure metropolitan political, economic, and social relations in pursuit of speculative growth and generalized gentrification” (24).
Grand urbanism, Enright argues, is a reincarnation of the 20th-century modernist strong state in a postmodern form, where the borders between public, private, and civil sectors are fluid and flexible. And in stark contrast to the neoliberal discourses of least government, the state—both national and local governments—is the primary carrier of this developmental and modernist logic, and is actively involved in such projects
(Swyngedouw et al. 2002). Indeed, studies on urban governance should pay more attention to how this developmental logic is mobilized by various state actors (central and local) in relation to the contextual dynamics and positionality of individual cities.
28 - - -
In the above account, I discussed the main features and implications of entrepreneurial urban governance that qualitatively transformed urban structuring episodes in the last three decades. Ultimately, despite the various forms, agendas, and configurations of urban restructuring experiments around the world since the 1990s,14 it is somewhat safe to say that notable commonalities exist in terms of norms, strategies, policy, and practices that are inspired by the imperatives of neoliberal inter-urban competition.
However, an important criticism needs to be addressed here in relation to deterministic readings of urban restructuring reforms, as well as the inescapable influence of global neoliberal economy. It is easy to fall into the trap of rolling everything in relation to contemporary urban policies into the broad category of neoliberal urbanism, which could attribute singularity and homogeneity to urban restructuring processes and their respective agendas.15 Such an approach is often bereft of conceptual tools to explain inconsistencies or incoherencies or to account for contextual complexities. The lure of criticizing neoliberalism, more often than not, prompts dry analyses that victimize contextual cases as passive receivers of a unilateral neoliberal agenda. The challenge of studying neoliberal urbanism, then, is to avoid glossing over contextual complexities in order to impose a coherent narrative and still be able to trace meaningful resemblances across various cases.
14 The typology provided by the World Bank Group in the 2011 paper called International Metropolitan Governance: Typology, Case Studies and Recommendations indicates no one singular form or arrangement in metropolitan governance (namely, metropolitan government, metropolitan council, territorial polycentrism, single purpose district, and inter-local cooperation). The World Bank categorizes all such formations under the term “new regionalism.” 15 I thank Richard Stren for challenging my analysis in this respect.
29 To overcome this challenge, Jamie Peck (2017) advocates “‘mid-level theorizing”’ that explores “the constitutive connections and family resemblances” (8) across cases. He formulates conjunctural urbanism as an attempt to travel between universalist and particularistic dynamics and “to theorize with and across difference rather to reduce and foreclose it” (Peck 2017, 18).16 In order to generate such mid-level theoretical formulations, we must pay special attention to contextual, historical, and institutional specificity of cases that accentuate the embeddedness of neoliberal restructuring processes. Contextual thickness, indeed, derives from “the path-dependent interactions between neoliberal projects of restructuring and inherited institutional and spatial landscapes” (Peck, Brenner, and Theodore 2009, 49). Path-dependency shows how history and other “established institutional arrangements significantly shape the scope and trajectory for reform” (Peck, Brenner, and Theodore 2009, 54). Therefore, path-dependent analyses do not necessarily postulate variations as “divergences” from an absolute neoliberal reference point that assumes consistency and integrity. In fact, from a path-dependent point of view, pure neoliberal model/project/policy does not even exist except in the form of a conceptual abstraction.
From this analytical standpoint, the following observations are in order regarding the literature on urban entrepreneurialism. The first pertains to what Harvey calls “the reification of cities” as a conceptual challenge for inquiries on entrepreneurial urbanism:
[T]he reification of cities when combined with a language that sees the urban process as an active rather than passive aspect of political-economic development poses acute dangers. It makes it seem as if “cities” can be active agents when they are mere things. Urbanization should, rather, be regarded as a spatially grounded social process in which a wide range of different actors with quite different objectives and agendas interact through a particular configuration of interlocking
16 I thank Theresa Enright for bringing to my attention Peck’s conjunctural urbanism and for guiding me to highlight the contextual complexities of my own research.
30 spatial characteristics. […] The difficulty is to find a way of proceeding that can deal specifically with the relation between process and object without itself falling victim to unnecessary reification. (Harvey 1989, 5-6)
Despite Harvey’s warning, within the literature on urban entrepreneurialism it is fairly common to see cities being conceptualized as active agents and, moreover, atomistic entities that exist almost in a geopolitical vacuum, partaking in inter-urban competition much resembling to a kind of Hobbesian state-of-nature. In fact, not only are cities reified, but inter-urban competition among cities often is as well. It could well be that the it is the emphasis on the “reality” of such competition, which operates “as an
‘external coercive power’ over individual cities” (Harvey 1989, 10), that is responsible for such analytical challenges in conceptualizing contemporary cities. In that sense,
Harvey himself fails to suggest a way to analytically evade this problem. I argue that the centrality of inter-urban competition in the literature on urban entrepreneurialism, therefore, masks (1) the internal dynamics of cities that include various agents and institutions with often-competing interests and agendas (which materialize/mobilize those interests and agendas through urban policies and practices); and (2) the various scales of governance and institutional configurations (particularly the national and local scales, and the interplay between the two) that filter the imperatives of inter-urban competition into the contexts of individual city cases.
The need to ground cities in their historical, geopolitical, and institutional contexts means recognizing that, despite the overwhelming similarities in terms of entrepreneurial practices and urban forms across various cities around the world17, these
17 Peck (2014) aptly describes the banality of contemporary urban entrepreneurialism as follows: “At this, the saturation stage of entrepreneurial urbanism, what is remarkable is how utterly unremarkable these competitive manoeuvres have become […]. The spectacles no longer seem spectacular. The vision statements have become formulaic. Urban governance ‘innovations’ are variations on a familiar theme, or
31 practices and forms could and do have meanings and serve functions apart from being wagers in global inter-urban competition. It would be a mistake to gloss over underlying processes of political contention and institutional configuration that interpret, author, and mobilize entrepreneurial urban actions simply as examples of the centripetal force of neoliberal urbanism. Likewise, to approach cities in inter-urban competition the way liberal theory conceptualizes individuals in a free market society would miss the conditioning effect of interscalar relations of governance on cities’ performance, in particular the role played by intergovernmental relations.
From this point of view, “urban policy is never ‘just’ urban” (Temenos and
McCann 2013, 347). Urban policies reflect socioeconomic, political, and spatial relations, and how they are reproduced and reconfigured by ongoing power struggles in various scales of governance—local, regional, national, and global. As such, urban policy and practices reflect a nexus of political contentions, economic agendas, social struggles, and cultural projects, all of which are tied together and come to life in the spatial scale of cities. It follows that inter-urban competition, while crucial, is but one among many reasons behind entrepreneurial policy and practices.
Such an inquiry further suggests examining processes that facilitate the shift to urban entrepreneurialism and how that shift is interpreted and executed at the urban level, as these processes provide insights into the particularities, contextual meanings, and functions of otherwise prosaic expressions of neoliberal urbanism.
presentational makeovers. Life on the neoliberal plateau is dominated by the prosaic churn of routinized, ‘everyday’ entrepreneurialisms” (397).
32 Case Selection
I chose to explore the experience and implementation of urban entrepreneurialism in three intrinsically different metropolitan provinces of Turkey, namely İstanbul, İzmir, and Diyarbakır. İstanbul, as the biggest metropolitan region of Turkey, has proven to be the epitome of metropolitanization. From early on, İstanbul’s AKP-led metropolitan government set an agenda to become a global city, and as a result is a trendsetter for metropolitan policies and practices and an example for other metropolitan municipalities in the country to emulate. İzmir, as the third biggest metropolitan province in Turkey, has long been a fortress for the main opposition party, the Republican People’s Party
(Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi, henceforth CHP), on both national and local levels. the CHP’s self-identification as a social democratic party is usually contrasted with the AKP’s center-right politics. With its considerable potential in industrial, agricultural, tourism, and service sectors on the one hand, and its political significance on the other, İzmir presents an interesting case in examining the effects of intergovernmental relations on urban entrepreneurialism. Finally, Diyarbakır is the bastion of the pro-Kurdish political parties (at the time of research, this party is the Peace and Democracy Party [Barış ve
Demokrasi Partisi], henceforth BDP), and therefore has significant potential to realize the pro-Kurdish agenda on a local level. The BDP’s leftist and multicultural overtones, coupled with its grassroots capacity to mobilize, can generate municipal practices that speak beyond the confines of the urban.
Fieldwork
Studying local governmental reforms could be viewed as somewhat straightforward at first. Basically, such reforms are composed of legal (re)framing and
33 institutional changes that reconstitute jurisdictional authorities and responsibilities and therefore, could be studied in reference to municipal acts and various related regulations.
My objective, however, is to go beyond such descriptive analyses of local governmental reforms that had already populated academic writings on public policy and decentralization/democratization in 21st century Turkey. I am primarily interested in the way this profound legal and institutional fix is interpreted, experienced, and implemented at the local level by the leaders of municipal organizations.
Therefore, I employed qualitative data collection methods of which in-depth interviews with municipal authorities constituted my primary data. Open-ended and semi- structured questions marked the character of these interviews. The in-depth interview method allowed me to understand how changes in the legal political realm were perceived, experienced, and implemented by municipal authorities that hold positions which considerably affect the direction and fate of the cities. Semi-structured and open- ended questions enabled the interviewees to author their reflections and narratives while allowing me to keep the conversation within the confines of my research themes. The interviews took place in 2011 and 2012 in three cities. The interviewees were metropolitan mayors, district mayors, deputy mayors and municipal councilors at metropolitan and district levels; as well as municipal consultants. I conducted in-depth interviews that lasted anything from forty minutes to two hours with a total of 35 individuals in three cases combined.
Mayors, deputy mayors, and councilors are essentially public servants. And especially in the case of mayors, they are public figures. Thus, the interviews I conducted during my fieldwork are categorically elite interviews. The notion of elite is generally
34 used to imply individuals “who hold, or have held, a privileged position in society and, as such, as far as a political scientist is concerned, are likely to have had more influence on political outcomes than general members of the public” (Richards 1996,
119). One of the most common challenges associated with elite interviewing is related to issues of accessibility of which my fieldwork experience was a testament. Elites are known to be less accessible and their time is usually more limited (read: more important).
Being able to reach the interviewees (in most cases, their executive assistants) and secure a meaningful time slot (i.e. more than thirty minutes) often times required persistence on my part as well as several visits to the interviewees’ offices.
In general, I found it easier to reach district mayors than metropolitan mayors, and easiest to secure an appointment with mayors in Diyarbakır and most difficult in İstanbul.
The explanation for the former is related to the weight and prestige of the office in question. Metropolitan mayors are usually treated as “prime ministers” of their cities.
Their agendas are usually packed. Everybody stands up when they enter the room. In other words, they are “the boss” at the city hall. District mayors, in contrast, are more accessible and easier to approach. In fact, they take pride of their affability and used it to showcase what they accomplished in their districts. For instance, I was having trouble to book an appointment to interview Beyoğlu Mayor, Ahmet Misbah Demircan. His executive assistant kept dismissing my requests. I, then, tried to reach the mayor personally on his Twitter account. Within a couple of minutes, the mayor forwarded my request to his executive assistant and I was able to secure an appointment with the mayor.
Still, in İstanbul, I was unable to talk to the metropolitan mayor. I had to rely on his public speeches, media statements, and his articles in municipal publications such as
35 strategic plans and progress reports. In İzmir, the metropolitan mayor was also very difficult to reach. My multiple requests for an interview was avoided and dismissed on a consistent basis by his executive assistant. After a thorough search for a personal connection (through a high school friend’s second cousin) to the metropolitan mayor, I was able to secure an appointment, but on the condition that I visited the metropolitan mayor with my personal connection. In Diyarbakır, I was able to book an appointment with the metropolitan mayor on my first try with the indirect help of an informant.
The fact that it was considerably easier to meet with interviewees in Diyarbakır than in İzmir or İstanbul has partly to do with the scales of the municipal jurisdictions.
After all, İstanbul is a megacity of 14 million whereas Diyarbakır is a city of one million.
However, it also has something to do with the attitudes of Diyarbakır’s mayors. As a pro-
Kurdish (and alternative) political party, they are more willing to reach out and enter into dialogue with others, and they choose to engage in as many platforms as possible to talk about their agendas, aspirations, as well as obstacles. Therefore, my requests for interviews were welcomed and facilitated.
I supplemented these interviews with archival research and analyses of municipal strategic plans, municipal performance and progress reports, municipal newspapers, bulletins, magazines, and development agencies’ regional plans, and national newspapers. These documents were crucial in situating the normative transformation of municipal governance in substantive institutional documentation. Other sources of data were reports and plans of central government agencies regarding urban governance such as the Ministry of the Interior, the Ministry of Environment and Urbanization, and the
Housing Development Agency.
36 Summary of Chapters
Chapter two starts with a historical and contextual overview of the state administration and local governmental tradition in late Ottoman and Republican Turkey.
The chapter then provides a detailed account of the local governmental reforms in 2004–
2012 under the AKP governments. In what follows, the chapter illustrates the emergent entrepreneurial municipalism, exploring the intergovernmental relations in which it is embedded, its normative and institutional framework, and its quintessential practices of
21st-century urbanism in Turkey.
In chapters three, four and five, I explore the cases of İstanbul, İzmir, and
Diyarbakır respectively. In all the cases, I first analyze how municipal authorities experience and reflect on intergovernmental relations in their localities—relations with the central government as well as those on the metropolitan and district levels. Next, I explore how municipal authorities understand, adjust, experience, and implement the new governance approach emerging with the reforms. I discuss their normative preferences, their priorities in the municipal agenda, and their strategies of urban governance. Lastly, I consider how municipal authorities promote and define their roles in the implementation of two municipal practices institutionalized during this time, namely urban transformation projects and social services.
Chapter six begins with an analytical reflection on the significance and contribution of this study. It then draws comparative conclusions of the three metropolitan cities and discuss some of the limitations of the research. The chapter ends with a discussion of this dissertation’s implications for the study of urban entrepreneurialism in particular and policy making in general.
37 CHAPTER TWO
RESTRUCTURING LOCAL GOVERNANCE IN TURKEY
When the AKP came to power as a majority government in November 2002, the party had two major goals in its agenda for Turkey: economic growth and democratization. To achieve these goals, the government’s ambitious program called for a major rescaling of the state and its institutions and the creation of the necessary conditions for better integration with the world economy.18 In this regard, the government’s program was in line with its then commitment to the EU accession process, which had taken an important turn when the country gained candidacy in the Helsinki
Summit of 1999.
The AKP government framed the goal of democratization as three processes: the end of military tutelage over civilian rule, the resolution of the Kurdish issue, and the decentralization of local governments.19 For a state with a hard-core centralist tradition and a highly bureaucratic and hierarchic administration, decentralization meant profound restructuring of the state organization that would (and did) meet with backlash from central state institutions.20 Nevertheless, the AKP government in the early 2000s had the political will—that was strongly backed by a broad-based domestic coalition21 for economic liberalization and EU reforms—to embark on a reform process that significantly transformed governance in Turkey in the 21st century.
18 The government program in reference here is the 59th Government of Turkish Republic, also known as the First Erdoğan Government that was in office between 2003 and 2007. 19 See the AKP Website. 20 The Office of the Presidency under Ahmet Necdet Sezer vetoed earlier drafts of laws concerning local governments as well as the Framework Law on Public Administration. The Framework Law on Public Administration was never legislated because of continuous vetoing. 21 Major parties to this domestic coalition on behalf of economic and EU reforms at the time were both secular, İstanbul-based large business conglomerates as well as conservative and provincial small to medium size enterprises (Öniş 2009). Without doubt, the pro-Kurdish political movement as well as other underrepresented minority groups welcomed the democratization agenda that an EU process would bring. In 2004 and 2005, a series of reforms took place that signified a “paradigm shift” in public administration and local government in Turkey (Bayraktar and Massicard 2012,
29).22 First and foremost, the reforms aimed at restructuring the state’s heavily bureaucratic, hierarchic, and cumbersome organization. The AKP government repeatedly described the system in Turkey as a “bureaucratic republic” and identified its bureaucracy as the main enemy of progress and development in the state organization and of democracy at large.23 In light of this, the reforms reflected a transition from an old public administration approach to a new public management model that would better meet the contemporary needs of modern Turkish society. Thereby, the principles of efficiency, productivity, entrepreneurialism, and competitiveness, along with democratization and participation, made their debut in the laws that restructured public and local administration in Turkey. Second, the local government reforms of 2004 and beyond marked a new era in the central state’s policy towards the local. The reforms prioritized the urban over other forms of the local, such as the rural. In other words, cities became the main focus of the government’s decentralization discourse. The AKP government formulated urbanization as “the solution” to Turkey’s economic and developmental problems. More specifically, state-rescaling processes centered on the metropolitan scale
22 The reforms in question here are the Framework Law on Public Administration, the Law on Public Finance Management and Control (#5018), the Law on Metropolitan Municipalities (#5216), the Law on Municipalities (#5393), and the Law on Provincial Administrations (#5302). More discussion on these laws will follow later in the Chapter. 23 One notable remark was made by Hüseyin Çelik, who served as the vice president of the AKP and as the Minister of Education between 2003 and 2009. Çelik described Turkey before the AKP era as a “bureaucratic republic” that was “as repellent as a caterpillar” and argued that Turkey has transformed into a “democratic republic” with the AKP, which is “as beautiful as a butterfly” (7 April 2013, Milliyet, Bürokratik cumhuriyet tırtıl gibi tiksindirici).
39 with the objective of creating competitive metropolitan cities that attract capital, business, and investment from regional and global markets.24
Therefore, the public administration and local government reform process in the early years of the 21st century institutionalized—albeit informally—an urban governance regime in Turkey that profoundly transformed municipal practice.25 The central government, as the author of the reforms in line with its neoliberalizing agenda, institutionalized a language of market rationality, prescribed entrepreneurial action, and prioritized the development of metropolitan regions. In this way, urban governance in
Turkey underwent a qualitative change: from a classic bureaucratic model to what I would call “entrepreneurial municipalism.” This emergent entrepreneurial municipalism may be defined as a market-oriented approach to municipal practice that prioritizes economic growth and development of municipal jurisdictions, that adopts business models and strategies in urban processes, that is geared for urban competition, but at the same time that is invested in delivering social policies that address pressing local issues.
It should be noted that the seeds of such entrepreneurial municipalism were first sown in Turkey with the 1984 local government reforms that created a two-tiered metropolitan municipal system, introduced public-private partnerships, and gave rise to project-based urban practices. But it was through the AKP government’s reformist rescaling agenda that entrepreneurial municipalism was crystallized into an
24 Some of the indicators of territorial and administrative restructuring at the metropolitan scale: Since 2004 to date, the number of metropolitan municipalities rose from 16 to 30 with the changes in the administrative qualifications that define a metropolitan province. The jurisdiction of metropolitan municipalities grew from their metropolitan cores to the entirety of their provinces in 2004 for İstanbul and İzmit and for all other metropolitan provinces in 2012. In particular, metropolitan municipalities gained more authority in planning and decision making. These points will be discussed further in detail later in the chapter. 25 Previously the central state never had a systematic urban policy on the national scale except the ad-hoc solutions to pressing urban issues, for instance in the form of legal arrangements regarding gecekondu settlements.
40 institutionalized municipal approach in Turkey. The AKP, as a national government, recognized that it was cities—rather than nation states—that compete for economic growth and investment on a global scale. The AKP—with its successful municipal legacy during the Welfare Party (Refah Partisi, henceforth RP) years in the 1990s—was also cognizant of the need to restructure the heavily bureaucratic and hierarchical local government in order to facilitate such competition on the urban scale. The reform process was a deliberate and concerted effort by the central government to take the country out of crisis and attain economic growth and development, and it did this by rescaling the country’s territorial and administrative organization according to the needs and demands of the global economy and contemporary governance trends.
The reform process that started in 2004 and evolved throughout 2012/14 manifested the basic features and trends (or following Peck [2017], constitutive connections and family resemblances) of urban restructuring in contemporary global capitalism.26 Very broadly, these features are as follows:
• Urban governance is multilevel and multiactor: State rescaling not only
acknowledges the existence of a plethora of public and private actors at multiple
levels, but also creates new actors of urban governance (such as the Ministry of
Environment and Urbanization, the Housing Development Administration,
Development Agencies, and the like.).
26 Scholars of Turkey have approached local governmental and public administration reforms mostly from the Europeanization literature, decentralization and democratization literatures, or from the new public management literature (see, for example, Çelenk 2009; Eliçin 2011; Ertugal 2010; Özcan and Turunç 2008, Parlak et al. 2008). There are, however, those scholars who have analyzed the repercussions of this restructuring process from a political economy perspective and as a critique of neoliberalism (see Eraydın 2013; Sahin 2013; Savaskan 2013).
41 • Collaboration and cooperation among these actors are encouraged and celebrated
as a more inclusive/pluralistic/democratic form of governance: hence, we see a
proliferation of various public-private partnerships as well as privatization
practices. The discourse of stakeholder participation entered into the protocols of
urban governance.
• Municipalities are transformed from administrative appendages of the central
government to initiative-taking and entrepreneurial local agents. Mayors and
municipal authorities prioritized improving the territorial competitiveness of their
jurisdictions. The cities’ global ambitions found material expression in numerous
urban transformation projects (implemented through collaboration among the
municipalities, the central government agencies, and private sector agents) aimed
at attaining competitive success.
• Urban-rescaling reforms are an ongoing process, and yet these reforms took more
of a pro-consolidation turn in terms of metropolitan authority. Arguments for a
consolidated metropolitan jurisdiction were justified by principles of efficiency,
effectiveness, and integrated decision making.
Nevertheless, the reform process was also characterized by the following features which differentiated the case of Turkey from the North Atlantic accounts of such urban reform processes:
• Municipalities started to cope with place-specific socio-economic problems and
undertake programs to address issues related to health, education, unemployment,
security, and recreation in their jurisdictions. The introduction of social service
42 provision and its institutionalization through municipal community centers
represented a crucial addition to municipal functions.27
• Last, but not least, the central state continued to be an important actor that
partakes in governing urban spaces, not only through regulating the institutional
configurations governing urban social, economic, and political relations, but also
through authoring mega-scale infrastructural projects in transit and transportation
and through interventions in the urban housing market.
This chapter has two parts. In the first, I will present a brief historical overview of the evolution of local governmental structure in Turkey. In the second part, I will discuss in detail how the reforms of 2004 and beyond transformed urban governance and municipal practice in Turkey. In doing this, I will explore three aspects of the emergent entrepreneurial municipalism: (1) the intergovernmental relations in which it is embedded; (2) its basic operating norms and principles; and (3) its quintessential urban policies and practices.
Part 1: Historical Background to Local Governmental Reforms in Turkey
In a brief historical overview of the local governmental structure in Turkey, the early republican period is important, as it institutionalized the centralist tradition
(inherited from the late Ottoman Empire) that infiltrated every aspect of the state and public organization. Following the Second World War and until the late 1970s, Turkey underwent unbridled urbanization accompanied by feeble economic and infrastructural
27 As I will argue later in the chapter, this new municipal function represents how urban entrepreneurialism in the case of Turkey differs from the North American context. In the latter context, as a result of the fiscal crisis of the state in late 1970s the local state withdrew its redistributive functions as urban governance shifted from managerial to entrepreneurial form. However, in the case of Turkey, local governments never had such a function to begin with before the entrepreneurial turn. It was only after the state-rescaling reforms that municipalities took on social service provision as a sphere of activity.
43 development, which, in turn, generated the context of Turkey’s entrance into the neoliberal era. The 1980s saw Turkey’s first attempts at urban restructuring (albeit limited in scope) in the form of the creation of the new administrative and territorial category of “metropolitan municipalities.” The emergence of entrepreneurial metropolitan mayors, project-based governance, and public-private partnerships around this time sowed the seeds of an urban regime that eventually crystallized into the public administration and local government reforms of early 21st- century Turkey.
From the Empire to the Republic: Centralist State Tradition
Although the Republic of Turkey in many ways represented a major delinking from and disowning of its Ottoman past, we also see a critical continuity between Turkey and its predecessor: that is, in the centralism of the state administration and bureaucracy.28 In the early years of the 20th century, despite attempts to reform and centralize the state to save its territorial integrity, the Ottoman Empire collapsed in the face of nationalist movements and military defeat of the First World War. Allied forces occupied what was left of the Ottoman Empire, leaving only a small portion of Anatolian territory to the already dwindling Empire. Mustafa Kemal, an Ottoman commander, then unified and led the resistance movement in Anatolia, which culminated in 1923 at the end of Allied occupation and the establishment of the Turkish Republic.
Republican founders formed the new state following a unitary model along with a highly centralized administrative and bureaucratic system. Concerns for territorial
28 For an extensive discussion of centralization and decentralization in the Ottoman Empire as well as local political and economic power holders, see Halil İnalcık’s 1977 piece “Centralization and Decentralization in Ottoman Administration” in Studies in Eighteenth Century Islamic History (27-52). According to Mümtaz Soysal (1967), Ottoman administration was neither truly centralized nor decentralized. Rather, he prefers the term “deconcentration” defined as “a system whereby the authority was delegated to field administrators of the central government. In general, the provinces had no legal status separate from the main body of the state nor do they enjoy any positive autonomy” (3).
44 integrity (read: fear of regional autonomy)29 and ambitions of political modernization
(read: secularization) eliminated decentralization as a possible model for state organization and administrative structure. Moreover, as the founders of the Republic were from the military and reformist cadres of the late Ottoman State, they endorsed the centralized administrative model of the late Ottoman Empire (imported from France), which they transferred almost intact into the Republic. Therefore, administrative tutelage of the center-over-local governments characterized the intergovernmental relations of the
Republic well into the 1980s. Similar to the French model until 1981, the local governments in Turkey are organized under the Ministry of the Interior. Administrative tutelage involves the “authority to approve, annul, postpone, or approve with corrections the acts of local government bodies.” Such powers are normally exercised through locally appointed central state agents, such as provincial governors (vali) and district governors
(kaymakam) (Özbudun 2011).
In 1930, the Republican state elite framed the Law on Municipalities (#1580), which was very similar to the Ottoman Municipalities Law dated 1877. The municipalities were conceptualized as “extensions” of central government.
Unsurprisingly, the law also opted for a uniform administrative structure for the entire country, with no regard for geographical, cultural, or economic differences. The Ministry
29 Ulusoy (2009) argues that the Republic of Turkey emerged out of the Independence War (1919–1923) “as a Hobbesian state of security. This security discourse, arising from the fear of an external plot to dismantle Turkey, became an integral part of the governmental discourse and strategy of the Kemalist regime in the following decades” (371). The Treaty of Sèvres that was signed after the First World War in 1920, and partitioned the Ottoman Empire and brought it under the Allied administration was one major justification for such security discourse. “Although the treaty was never ratified, it had a number of long- term consequences, notably through the collective traumatism (or “Sèvres syndrome”) that it engendered, in the form of fear of territorial dismemberment and secession, and suspicion of even the vaguest aspirations to autonomy” (Bayraktar and Massicard 2012, 14).
45 of the Interior appointed the mayors, and the central government allocated financial resources to the municipalities (Çelenk 2009, 46).
The year 1946 marked the first multi-party elections. However, the transition to a multi-party era in post-war Turkey did not alter the central government’s tutelage over local governments. In other words, democratization of the system fell short at the local level. Practices such as the approval of elected city councilors by the Ministry of the
Interior and the appointment of mayors and governors by the central government continued (Ersoy 1992, 327). Meanwhile, the post-war era in Turkey witnessed massive rural-to-urban migration, which culminated in rapid and unbridled urbanization from the
1960s onwards (Bayraktar and Massicard 2012, 18).
Turkey started the 1960s with a military coup and, subsequently, a new constitution. As a progressive attempt, the 1961 Constitution30 introduced decentralization (along with centralization) as one of the organizing principles of the administrative structure (Article 112). This was partly due to the increasing need for better functioning administrative bodies in growing urban areas flooded with surplus labor force from the rural regions. The constitution also recognized that local administrations were to be allocated resources proportional to their duties and functions
(Article 116). Despite these constitutional improvements on behalf of local governments, no legal action was taken to implement these changes in reality. In fact, the only gain was the popular election of mayors, as the constitution laid down the principle that “the control of acquisition or loss of status by an elected organ would be exercised only by
30 The 1961 Constitution was drafted after the military coup of 1960s. It is regarded as a one of the most democratic constitutions of Turkey. It upheld and protected individual rights and liberties as well as introduced institutional mechanisms to improve checks and balances on the executive power. The independence of the judiciary and the rule of law were emphasized for the first time.
46 courts” (Article 116) (Ersoy 1992, 328). Previously, the elected city councilors selected a mayor either from among themselves or from outside of the council, and this selected mayor had to be approved by the central government in order to take office (Oktay 2016,
100). The central government also reserved the right to terminate the incumbency of mayors at will. With the constitutional changes in 1961, these practices were abolished; and since the local elections in 1963, mayors in Turkey have been elected by universal suffrage.
The drive for centralization in state bureaucracy, on the other hand, became more pronounced as Turkey transitioned to a planned economy, also known as “Import
Substitution Industrialization,” by the 1960s (Ersoy 1992, 332; Bayraktar and Massicard
2012, 18). The State Planning Organization (Devlet Planlama Teşkilatı, henceforth
DPT)— established to devise five-year development plans—was the epitome of the top- down, centralist, and interventionist mentality of the Turkish state at the time. The development plans were sector-specific, with no consideration for regional, geographical or local particularities. Overall, this economic policy prioritized “industrialization over urbanization—and over the needs of in-migrants from rural areas, increasingly concentrated in the metropolitan centers of Turkey” (Bayırbağ 2013, 1129). This
“developmentalist” episode of the Turkish state, with its central planning and control, experienced difficulties near the end of the 1970s, during a time of dual crisis in state and economic models around the world. The crisis of the centralist state was thus exacerbated by the crises in the major economic development models at the time: that is, import substitution industrialization in the developing world and Keynesian economics in the advanced industrialist countries.
47 On the societal level, the demands for more powerful local governments were voiced only after the insurmountable effects of industrialization and urbanization could no longer be ignored. The increasing mechanization of agriculture since the 1950s had been drawing the surplus labor created in rural areas into the urban centers. In the absence of a welfare compromise between the state and society (unlike the Keynesian compromise in the advanced capitalist world at the time) and given the prioritization of industrialization over urbanization, the state in Turkey turned a blind eye to rural migrants’ practice of informal (and illegal) self-help housing on public land, also known as gecekondu, in metropolitan centers. This was a tacit compromise, as these new migrants made up the cheap domestic labor that was essential to sustain the ISI economy.31 Because they did not have to support housing expenses, employers could keep the wages low (Buğra 1998; Karaman 2008). In the 1970s, for example, İstanbul, deeply affected by decades-long massive migration from the rural areas, saw extensive gecekondu development in its built-up areas, with resulting infrastructural problems providing services such as water, electricity, and sewerage. These gecekondu areas became instrumental in national and local elections, as patron-clientelistic networks mobilized voters in return for favors such as providing water, electricity and sewerage infrastructure or granting building titles to gecekondu holders (Eder 2010, 162).
The unforgiving urbanization of the 1970s eventually gave rise to the
“Association of Progressive Municipalities,” a movement proposing a model for democratic and autonomous local governments (Heper 1987). This movement was led by leftist mayors from the CHP (Republican People’s Party), who won most of the
31 Gecekondu literally means “landed overnight,” capturing the actual process of the making of these buildings. According to Buğra (1998), “In the first half of the 1960s, 59 percent of the population in Ankara, 45 percent in İstanbul and 33 percent in İzmir lived in irregular settlements” (307).
48 municipalities in major cities during the local elections in 1973, along with political groups demanding self-governance, social justice, and democratic participation in local governments. The latent inspiration was the cooperative, independent towns and villages of Latin America at the time. By developing alternative local policies targeting the urban poor and working class in gecekondu areas, the municipalities presented a major critique of the right-wing central government (Bayırbağ 2013, 1134). However, the movement did not mature to a national scale, as the military coup of 1980 crushed all political movements at the time.
Neoliberal Restructuring: The First Wave of Decentralization Reforms (1980s, 1990s)
Turkey started the 1980s with yet another—and perhaps the fiercest—military coup in its history. The military regime that took over civilian politics on 12 September
1980 lasted almost three years and represented a radical break in political and economic terms (Ulusoy 2009). The pre-coup political parties were banned and their political leaders were imprisoned. The military junta redefined the Kemalist ideology (the founding ideology of the state) along ethno-religious lines by instrumentalizing the
Turkish-Islamic heritage. In economic terms, the junta opted to liberalize the Turkish economy adhering to the decision made on 24 January 1980, famously known as “the
24th of January Resolutions” in the economic history of Turkey. It was the future prime minister to be, Turgut Özal (a consultant to Prime Minister Suleyman Demirel before the coup), who authored the policy prescriptions suggesting a neoliberal restructuring of the
Turkish economy: replacing the policy of import-substitution industrialization (hence the end of protectionist policies) with export-oriented industrialization, and the fixed exchange rate system with a floating exchange rate policy. It was thus not the civilian
49 government but the military that implemented this sharp turn in the country’s economy
(Bayırbağ 2013, 1135; Akan 2011).
The military cadres at the time also drafted a new constitution, which was ratified with a referendum in 1982 and is still in effect (although a series of amendments was ratified with a referendum in 2007 under the AKP government). Despite the ongoing practice of administrative tutelage from the foundation of the Republic, it was the 1982 constitution that for the first time stipulated “administrative tutelage” in a constitutional text in Turkey (Güner 1995):
The central administration has the authority to exercise administrative tutelage, within the principles and procedures specified in laws, over local administrative bodies with the aim of ensuring the performance of local services in conformity with the principle of the unity of administration, ensuring unity in public functions, protecting public interest and ensuring the proper satisfaction in local needs. (Article 127, 5th paragraph, 1982 Constitution, translation by Özbudun, 2011)
The Motherland Party (Anavatan Partisi, henceforth ANAP)—which, with its charismatic leader Turgut Özal as prime minister, came to power in the first national elections after the coup in 1983—utilized a discourse around democracy, economic liberalism, and efficient service provision. In line with worldwide trends of downsizing central government and increasing bureaucratic efficiency at the time, the ANAP government embraced a managerial approach to decentralization (Özcan and Turunç
2008). Therefore, the 1984 Law on Metropolitan Municipalities (#3030) came as an institutional fix with dual goals of (1) tackling long-standing urbanization and service provision problems in major cities and (2) restructuring the state administration in line with neoliberal principles. The Law on Metropolitan Municipalities had administrative, fiscal, and political implications for urban governance in Turkey. In the new metropolitan
50 municipal model that was introduced, the metropolitan mayor emerged as a powerful political authority at the local level; the fiscal share of municipalities from national tax revenue was significantly increased; and central government transferred decision-making authority for urban planning to the metropolitan municipalities (Bayraktar and Massicard
2012, 18).
The new category of “metropolitan municipality” completely restructured the administration in the largest cities at the time: İstanbul, İzmir, and Ankara. The criterion to become a “metropolitan province” was based on whether the municipal jurisdiction of a province encompassed more than one district municipality.32 The new model introduced a two-tiered system composed of metropolitan and district-level municipalities, modeled on Toronto’s two-tiered metropolitan system at the time.33 There is, however, a slight difference between the two models: in İstanbul, the metropolitan authority was superimposed over the existing district municipalities within the agglomeration; in the case of Toronto, the lower tier was restructured some time after the metro authority itself was created (Sharpe 1995, 18).
The metropolitan municipality was designed as an organization in which metropolis-wide functions were centralized under the direct authority of the metropolitan mayor. Multiple agencies that were previously controlled by the central government
(such as the Master Plan Bureau and the Water Supply and Sewerage Authority) came under the control and authority of the metropolitan mayor. Lionel Feldman, who provided consultations to the İstanbul Metropolitan Municipality (IMM) through OECD grants,
32 İstanbul, Ankara and İzmir had respectively 15, five, and three district municipalities within their municipal jurisdictions at the time. 33 I thank Professor Richard Stren for bringing to my attention this link between İstanbul and Toronto and connecting me with Lionel Feldman who, through OECD, provided consultations to Turkish authorities during the 1980s for the implementation of the two-tiered model.
51 emphasized that the Turkish authorities at the time were extremely “business oriented” and keen to master “how things are getting done” in this new model.34 The second tier of district municipalities, on the other hand, was responsible for delivering “a range of municipal services from refuse collection, street repairs and maintenance to surveillance activities” (Keyder and Öncü 1994, 405).
Fiscal decentralization reforms accompanied this new administrative model. The
ANAP government began a process for enhancing fiscal shares of municipalities, such that within the span of seven years (1983–1990) the proportion of the national taxes received by the local governments doubled. By 1990, local governments were eligible for
13.3% of the national tax revenue. Moreover, central government allowed for new revenue sources for metropolitan municipalities such as levying or increasing local taxes, fees, and charges on a variety of activities ranging from sports and entertainment to advertising. In the 1990s, metropolitan municipalities also started to benefit from international credit markets’ financing of municipal projects. One such example was the
Golden Horn rehabilitation project of the İstanbul Metropolitan Municipality, which was supported by a major loan from the World Bank (Keyder and Öncü 1994, 400-402).
However, increased financial capabilities resulted in municipalities having very little financial autonomy in relation to the central government (Bayırbağ 2013, 1136).
Politically, the decentralization of urban planning decisions was perhaps the most significant aspect of the 1984 reforms. Metropolitan municipalities emerged as key authorities in deciding and implementing detailed land use planning, and in managing building controls as well as building permits (Keyder and Öncü 1994, 405). The power of making decisions about urban land use was critical to restructuring municipalities as
34 Personal correspondence with Mr. Feldman in February 2017.
52 urban actors with political efficacy. Cities and local authorities became more attractive to investors and contractors alike. The profiles of municipal councilors changed rapidly as more entrepreneurs, investors, and contractors entered local politics. The authority to make urban plans brought the power to create, speculate, and distribute urban rent to municipal authorities. By the 1990s, however, as municipal corruption scandals surfaced and favoritism infiltrated municipal halls, municipalities had acquired a bad reputation
(Bayraktar and Massicard 2012, 19).
Scholars agree that the reforms of the 1980s transferred the administrative tutelage of the center—albeit to a limited extent35—to the hands of the metropolitan municipality, which in turn exercised this authority over district municipalities (Güney and Çelenk 2010). In particular, the office of metropolitan mayor emerged as the embodiment of this administrative tutelage over the rest of the elected local authorities, such as city councilors and district mayors. Metropolitan mayors became reluctant to grant more control and resources to district municipalities (Esmer 1988, 49; İncioğlu
2002, 76). Many argued that this model ironically replicated the “strong center” syndrome among the lower-level elected offices (Bayraktar 2006; Heper 1987). Indeed, this hierarchical design among the elected local authorities created a tug of war among the metropolitan and district municipalities, especially when they were affiliated with different political parties.
In essence, the two-tiered metropolitan government model demonstrated three major characteristics: a strong mayor, a weak council, and a lack of technocratic
35 The central government still continued to exercise tutelage as municipal council decisions had to be approved by governors, or the ministry of the interior. Moreover, in extreme cases the central government could suspend mayors from their offices or impose bans on travelling abroad.
53 influence (Alıcı 2007; Erder and İncioğlu 2008).36 Scholars have argued that these combined to create a “wide and opaque space for macro level decision making process”
(Uzun 2010, 766) in which the much-needed technocratic insight on urban issues requiring expertise was either marginalized or excluded (Alıcı 2007; Erder and İncioğlu
2008). Another implication of this model was the lack of democratic channels for citizen engagement in decision-making processes. Therefore, the very important decisions regarding the fate of the cities could only be accessed and discussed by citizens and civil society in general after the fact (Erder 2009; Uzun 2010).
It was in this context (around the mid-1990s) that we witnessed the Islamist episode in local politics. At a time when the urban public viewed municipal authorities as poor managers and municipalities as corrupt institutions, the RP, a marginalized Islamist party, swept the majority of votes in the 1994 local elections in 22 cities and six (of 15) metropolitan cities across Turkey including İstanbul and Ankara. Being marginalized on the national scale as an anti-systemic (read: anti-secular) party, the RP succeeded in garnering support with an extensive organizational strategy at a grassroots level, known as tesbih modeli,37 especially from among the urban poor in metropolitan peripheries who
36 In this model, the metropolitan mayor and the general secretary of metropolitan municipality—who is centrally appointed—emerged as the most influential and powerful figures in metropolitan governance amongst the other elected authorities and high ranking bureaucrats in municipalities. Note that there are no deputy mayors in metropolitan municipalities whereas there are deputy mayors in district municipalities. The general secretary works closely with the metropolitan mayor (Alıcı 2007). 37 Tesbih modeli could be translated as the “rosary model,” denoting the Islamic beads for prayer and recitation. In this organizational model, the party heavily depended on a controlled network of activists and volunteers. For instance, the RP had a council (divan) for every district composed of 50 regular and 50 alternate members. Within every district, neighborhood representatives were responsible for maintaining a database on everyone and every family living in their areas. Certain neighborhoods where conservative electorate was the norm, there were even representatives for each apartment building. These people would visit households and spread the party agenda through dialogue and distribution of audiovisual party material. Headmasters and teachers, on the other hand, facilitated conversations and discussions in local coffee houses and at other informal local gatherings (Yeşilada 2002b). Despite being an Islamist party, it was well known that the RP activists and politicians campaigned in Alevi (a heterodox sect of Islam) populated districts as well as in brothels (Çakır 1994).
54 were long alienated from the systemic center-right and center-left parties. Moreover, a significant aspect of the RP’s Islamist politics was its critique of the injustices and inequalities brought about by the capitalist economy—summarized in the party motto
“Just Order” (Adil Düzen). Indeed, “[t]he RP spent ‘more time and energy discussing equality, social security, welfare, and social justice than any other political party, including the leftist parties’” (Nicole and Hugh Pope 1997, 333 quoted by Akıncı 1999,
76).
On both discursive and practical levels, the RP municipal authorities brought novel notions and social services to urban politics in Turkey. The notions of social justice and effective governance were communicated through Islamic values such as being charitable and keeping oneself and the environment clean. In particular, the Islamic teaching that “serving people is serving God” (Halka hizmet Hakk’a hizmettir.) became the slogan of the RP municipalities. Another slogan was “cleanliness derives from faith”
(Temizlik imandan gelir.), which the RP municipalities printed on garbage collection trucks. These normative and cultural references succeeded in building rapport between the urban population and the RP municipalities. Certain municipal practices increased the popularity of the RP: such as revitalizing the traditional Ramadan entertainment events; serving free dinners for breaking the fast in huge Ramadan tents built in neighborhood squares; providing free funeral services and meal support for the deceased’s family during grievance; and providing elder care and free healthcare services for women and children. These eventually, in the 2000s, became regular practices of every municipality irrespective of political party affiliation.
55 Resolving the so-called three Ç’s of metropolitan cities—çöp, çamur, and çukur
(garbage, mud, and potholes, respectively)—was the key to the RP metropolitan success
(Akıncı 1999, 77), along with solving the water shortage issue that reached unprecedented levels in İstanbul during the first half of the 1990s.38 Before becoming prime minister in 2003 and president in 2014, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan took office as the metropolitan mayor of İstanbul in the 1994 local elections, representing the RP. His mayoralty marked a watershed in the history of İstanbul and in municipal practice in
Turkey. Mayor Erdoğan came up with an alternative water supply plan for the city: collecting the river water from the Istıranca Mountains located in the northwest of
İstanbul in a dam to be delivered to the city. In a short amount of time, the taps were flowing again, uninterrupted, every day of the week. Mayor Erdoğan’s solution to
İstanbul’s deep-rooted and longtime neglected urban problems and his substantial improvements to urban services garnered profound support for him from all walks of life and facilitated his later ascendancy in national politics. Erdoğan’s mayoral experience was also critical in developing his vision later on in reforming local governments and in understanding the potential of urban governance for the economy at large. It should be noted that despite his municipal success, Erdoğan’s mayoralty was terminated in 1998 by a judicial court order because of the content of a poem he recited (due to the poem’s
Sharia-suggesting phrases) during a public meeting in an Eastern province of Turkey. He
38 Water level at Lake Durusu (also known as Terkos), the main water supply of the city then, was so low in early 1990s that even taking a daily shower was a luxury for most İstanbulites. Storing water in bathtubs and big containers whenever tap water was available was a common practice. Needless to say, companies selling water in “water stations” mushroomed all across the city. People would go to these stations with their plastic containers, pump water, and carry them back to their homes. Most of the times, the parents would mobilize their kids to the job on a daily basis (author’s personal experience).
56 was banned from running for political office and was incarcerated for four months during
1999.39
In the local elections of 1999, the RP claimed another victory as the wider urban electorate normalized the party and practiced vote-splitting. İncioğlu (2002) argues, “one of the hallmarks of the 1999 elections concerns the emergence of significant ticket- splitting among the Turkish voters regarding their choices for national and municipal elections” (89). This meant that an electorate that usually votes for the secular CHP in parliamentary elections voted for the pro-Islamist RP in local elections. Indeed, the municipal service records of the RP lies at the heart of vote splitting. In the long run, the
RP’s municipal track record in metropolitan cities resulted in normalizing Islamist / conservative politics in the average electorate, eventually paving the way for the AKP’s
(formed in 2001 by soft liners of the RP, such as Erdoğan, Abdullah Gül and Bülent
Arınç) winning of the national elections in November 2002.
To conclude, the decentralization reforms of 1980s improved municipalities’ authority to govern and introduced metropolitan municipalities into urban politics in
Turkey. Metropolitan municipalities emerged as actors with more fiscal, political, and administrative authority than other elected local bodies. Moreover, with the introduction of public-private partnerships and the first examples of project-based governance in metropolitan cities, the first seeds of entrepreneurial municipalism were sown during this
39 The controversial poem read as follows: “The mosques are our barracks / the domes our helmets / the minarets our bayonets / and the faithful are our soldiers.” In the aftermath of the “postmodern” coup of 28 February 1997, a major purge took place targeting the Islamist academics, schools, civil society organizations as well as politicians. The national political climate reflected the polarization between the secularists/Kemalists and Islamists. Erdoğan recited this poem during such a political context, criticizing the marginalization and discrimination of Islamists in the country by the republican establishment (the military and the secular elite). One of Erdoğan’s strong discursive tools after becoming a prime minister in 2003 was his promise to rectify the “unjust treatment” of many conservatives during the so-called February 28 process.
57 time. Meanwhile, with the dramatic upsurge in urban population across Turkey during
1990s, the number of metropolitan municipalities increased from three to 15 by the end of the decade.40
Decentralization 2.0 (2004 and Beyond)
Turkey was in crisis politically and economically in the years leading up to the
21st-century. Politics in Turkey in the 1990s were consumed by what Metin Heper calls
“high politics,” which postponed the resolution of real issues the country was experiencing. The coalition governments that were the rule for over a decade reflected profound instability (nine governments between 1991 and 2001) and lack of a coherent national agenda to address pressing economic and political issues (Akan 2011, 368).
National politics were exhausted by challenges to the ideological foundations of the state (that is, secularism and unitary nation-state): both Islamist and Kurdish political movements grew to be more resilient despite the constant penalties and dismissals enforced by the Turkish state. The 1997 military intervention into civilian politics (the so- called postmodern coup) and subsequent party closures of the RP and its successor the
Virtue Party (Fazilet Partisi, henceforth FP) did more to strengthen than to weaken the
Islamist parties in the long term. On the other hand, the decades-long armed conflict between the Turkish armed forces and the Kurdish insurgents in southeastern Turkey worsened prospects for the resolution of the Kurdish issue. Meanwhile, the pro-Kurdish politicians and activists who chose to pursue a legal political route constantly faced party
40 The criterion to be qualified as a metropolitan province from 1984 up until 2012 was in fact not directly related to population. In order to become a metropolitan city, harbouring more than one district within the municipal jurisdictional borders was sufficient. Therefore, during the latter half of 1980s, Adana, Bursa, Gaziantep, Konya and Kayseri became metropolitan with the creation of new district municipalities. These were followed by Antalya, Diyarbakır, Eskişehir, Erzurum, Mersin, İzmit, and Samsun in the year 1993. In 2000, Sakarya became a metropolitan province, the last one before the criterion was changed to the population mark of 750,000 in 2012 with the Law #6360. Please see Appendix A for a list of metropolitan provinces in Turkey.
58 closures and incarcerations. The systemic responses of the Turkish state to Islamist and
Kurdish issues did not eliminate or resolve these political movements, but eventually contributed to both movements’ transformation. While the Islamist movement generated the AKP from the softliners/reformists of the FP (the successor to the RP), the Kurdish movement redefined its strategy and entered into legal local politics with local elections in 1999 (Bayırbağ 2013).
On the economic front, the Turkish economy was struggling with persistent fiscal deficits, high rates of inflation and interest rates, and high levels of structural unemployment (Akan 2011, 368), which amounted to dual macroeconomic crises in 2000 and 2001. In fact, preceding these crises, in 1999, Turkey attempted to implement an
International Monetary Fund (henceforth IMF) stabilization program, which entailed—in contrast to the previous IMF programs—long-term structural and institutional reforms
(read: more regulatory mechanisms). However, as Ziya Öniş (2009) argues, these reforms were not fully implemented due to (1) the fact that the economy was not in an explicit and full-blown crisis and the IMF funds in the program were limited; and (2) the electoral base of the coalition government at the time was mostly made up of the left and right wing low income groups that did not support such a neoliberal restructuring process.
Nevertheless, the approach in this stabilization program shaped economic policy in the decade to follow, as the AKP fully endorsed its premises and moreover was able to fully implement it (Öniş 2012; Güven 2016).
Meanwhile in 1999, in the international arena, Turkey experienced a turning point in its relationship with the EU when the Helsinki summit announced the country’s candidacy status. This marked the beginning of a new episode for Turkey: a long and
59 hard road of constitutional amendments, reforms, and adjustments in line with the EU directives. In fact, the coalition government at the time implemented an initial series of legislative reforms that expanded human rights and political freedoms in the country (one of the controversial reforms was the abolishment of capital punishment) (Öniş 2009).
The crises in 2000 and 2001, however, negatively affected all sections of the
Turkish society: rich and poor, educated and uneducated, skilled as well as unskilled workers. Within the course of these crises, one million people became unemployed; many small enterprises went bankrupt; large enterprises faced significant reductions in profits; and banking sector underwent considerable downsizing (Öniş 2009). Politically, a major consequence of the economic crisis was “to wipe out the established parties of the left and the right of the political spectrum represented in the parliament” (Öniş 2009, 416). It also meant the end of coalition politics which public deemed as the main culprit of political and economic instability in the country. And yet it was the magnitude of this economic crisis as well as the tangible developments on the EU process created the context for the ensuing reforms (Öniş and Keyman 2003; Öniş 2012; Güven 2016).
All in all, democratization, economic recovery and growth, and EU membership were the top issues Turkey needed to address at the turn of the new millennium, albeit with no leading political party or leader to undertake them. Nevertheless, crisis situations are also known to carry creative potential and openings for state restructurings, following
Brenner’s (2009) conceptualization of state rescaling as a process for resolving “systemic crises” (127).
The AKP entered the Turkish political arena at such a point in August 2001, as a newly established political party formed by the soft liners or modernists of the RP and the
60 FP. It should be noted that, unlike its predecessors, the AKP did not position itself as an anti-capitalist party. While the hard liners endorsed protectionism against neoliberalism and were ardent Euro-skeptics, the soft liners were pro-globalization, pro-EU, and endorsed neoliberalization of the economy (Bayırbağ 2013).41 The previous metropolitan mayor of İstanbul, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, was the founding president of the party. The party logo, an illuminated light bulb, emblemized the public yearning for a political leadership that “gets the country right.” In contrast to the tired old parties from left and right, the AKP had a tangible agenda and reform promises that appealed not only to the diverse Turkish public but also to the international community, especially the EU, which was closely monitoring the developments in Turkey. The AKP, despite identifying itself as a conservative political party, was able to position itself as a catch-all party and garner support from all walks of society: from liberal intellectuals to peasants, from secular business groups to ethnic and religious minorities. It should be noted that the type of neoliberalism that the AKP endorsed—what political economists call “post-Washington
Consensus” defined as a neoliberal agenda that “recognized the regulatory and social failures of free-market liberalism” (Öniş 2012, 141)—was critical in bringing such a diverse electorate (and thereby, a domestic reform coalition) together. Indeed, state restructuring process under the AKP rule proved to entail not only implementing the IMF reforms but also creating and enhancing redistributive mechanisms. Among the latter were increased spending in health and education as well as improving public services at both national and local government levels.42 Therefore, the party was able to satisfy the
41 Also, see the works of Tuğal (2009) and Atasoy (2009) regarding the difference between the AKP and its predecessors’ approach to neoliberal capitalism. 42 Indeed, in the second section of this chapter, I will argue that “entrepreneurial municipalism” has an important social policy component.
61 expectations of the secular, İstanbul-based large business conglomerates (represented by
TÜSİAD) and the conservative, Anatolian-based small to medium sized businesses
(represented by MÜSİAD),43 both of whom were advocating the IMF reforms at the time, while significantly improving the quality of life for low income groups and the poor
(Öniş 2012).
In the general elections of November 2002, the AKP came to power as a solid majority government, a welcome change for many after more than a decade of unstable and unsuccessful coalition governments.44 The AKP cleverly deployed the political and economic conjuncture on its behalf by pushing for a rather ambitious reform agenda of explicit state rescaling as a way out of the systemic crisis (Bayırbağ 2013, 1139). In other words, the stars were aligned for the AKP: the political will of a majority government
(read: a broad-based electorate), the EU process that legitimized the democratization and modernization of the state, and the economic crises of 2000 and 2001 that necessitated the implementation of the IMF reforms.45
43 For a discussion on how conservative Islamist entrepreneurs emerged in Turkey and transformed the Islamists’ approach to neoliberal capitalism, see Demiralp (2009). 44 However, due to the political ban Erdoğan was facing, he could not run for office in November 2002 elections. Abdullah Gül, another founding member of the AKP, established the government and became the Prime Minister instead. After the political ban was lifted, Erdoğan was able to enter into the Grand National Assembly of Turkey (the Parliament) as an MP through a by-election held in the province of Siirt in March 2003. Two days after Erdoğan was elected an MP, Gül resigned from Prime Ministry and Erdoğan established the 59th Government of Turkey, the first of his three consecutive terms as Prime Minister. 45 Scholars are somewhat divided when it comes to the exact role of the EU Community acquis in terms of shaping the reform process during this time. Some who study Europeanization argue that the EU played a pivotal role in shaping public administration and decentralization reforms. These scholars give the examples of the SIGMA and NUTS projects of the EU that had a substantive effect in terms of institutional framing of development agencies, which will be discussed later on in the chapter. In contrast, other scholars who study public policy would argue that the inevitability of reform was already extant for a long time. As such they give the examples of MEHTAP, KAYA, and YERYON reports of earlier decades, which highlighted the problems with the state organization (however, none of these reports did have specific proposals for how to reform the state administration). These scholars also argue that the EU acquis does not impose a specific territorial or administrative structure to the member nations, as it would be against the EU principle of subsidiarity. I would argue that it was the political and economic conjuncture at the time combined with a powerful majority government’s will, tangible agenda, and vision to capitalize on that conjuncture that enabled and shaped the reform process. Thus, the EU negotiations—at the very least—
62 The AKP formulated the overly bureaucratic and hierarchical character of the state organization as a major obstacle to the country’s democratization and economic development. The party cadres, among whom were academics, called for a major overhaul of state administration to modernize its archaic legal and organizational framework. They called for more privatization, use of market rules and mechanisms in the public sector, empowerment of local governments, enhancement of civil society, and public participation (Gül 2016). Here, it is important to note a report published by the
Prime Ministry on the eve of the reform process in 2003, penned by two academics in the government, entitled Değişimin Yönetimi İçin Yönetimde Değişim [Changing government in order to govern change]. This document presented a comparative analysis of governance trends around the world and proposed a profound restructuring of state administration and organization, emphasizing decentralization and the principles of New
Public Management (Dinçer and Yılmaz 2003). Moreover, the Minister of the Interior once stated, “Our understanding of governing is situated around the axes of democratization, decentralization, and demilitarization.”46 Decentralization reforms, therefore, constituted an essential part of the government’s rescaling agenda from early on. The talk of decentralization was a welcome development for various groups— businessmen as well as Kurdish politicians and activists, although for different reasons.
Moreover, long-standing structural issues regarding urbanization signaled the need for better organized and performing local governments. created a favorable environment, or acted as a catalyst, for the AKP’s reform agenda. With respect to the content of the reforms, that is the normative and institutional framework, the reforms reflect the language of international governance trends that infiltrated the country from the 1980s onwards through the affiliations and agreements with various international and supranational agencies, including—but not limited to—the World Bank, the IMF, the OECD, the UN, and the EU (Özden 2016; Gül 2016). However, their implementation reflects the selective formulation and adaptation of such principles based on existing institutional legacies. 46 Muammer Güler, September 2013.
63 Reforming local governments, and in particular rescaling at the metropolitan level
(as I will discuss below), was strategic for the AKP government for many reasons.
Addressing long-neglected urban infrastructural issues was a pressing agenda in itself, yet the AKP’s strong political base in metropolitan cities (with the exception of a few, including İzmir) since the 1994 local elections made it even more meaningful to invest in these cities. Moreover, building cities and activating urban development would bring in significant construction sector involvement and its cluster industries, which would in turn fire up the economy and attract hot money into the country. In fact, construction was one of the rising real sectors under the AKP rule along with mining and energy (Güven 2016).
Creating attractive cities would also pull in global capital and investment, much needed to maintain long-term economic growth. On the international stage, having competitive cities would support the AKP’s goal of turning Turkey into a regional soft power in
Eurasia and the Middle East (Kalın 2011). In the face of Russia’s increasing economic and political power, Turkey needed to elevate its authority economically and diplomatically in the region. Situating itself as a model of Muslim democracy and a beacon of hope to Arab nations, the AKP’s initial foreign policy of “zero problems with neighbors” rekindled relations with Middle Eastern countries, making Turkey an attractive and much-frequented tourist destination from the region.
In such a political and economic context, the AKP undertook a comprehensive public administration and local government reform plan from the outset. The plan’s legal framework was arranged, for the most part, through the following laws, from 2004 to
2006:47
47 Some of these laws were vetoed by the office of Presidency or the Constitutional Court and therefore drafted several times. For instance, the Law on Development Agencies was originally called “regional
64 • Law on Metropolitan Municipalities (#5216) effective in July 2004
• Law on Municipalities (#5393) effective in July 2005
• Law on Special Provincial Administrations (#5302) effective in February 2005
• Law on Development Agencies (#5449) effective in January 2006
• Law on Public Finance Management and Control (#5018) effective in January
2006
Overall, these laws aimed at increasing the capacity of local decision-making processes by modernizing organizational, managerial, and information systems in public administration, as well as creating conditions for a more professional public service with updated working environments and communication procedures (Parlak et al. 2008).
The archaic law on public finance (Muhasebe-i Umumiye Kanunu) dated back to
1927, and had seen little change until it was replaced with Law #5018, which took into account the contemporary needs, methods, and terminology of public finance management.48 The new law introduced concepts such as financial transparency (mali saydamlık), accountability (hesap verme sorumluluğu), and strategic planning and performance-based budgeting (stratejik planlama ve performans esaslı bütçeleme), along with efficiency (etkinlik) and effectiveness (etkililik), to the legal and administrative realms for the first time.49 Strategic plans, progress reports, and performance programs became mandatory for all public offices including municipalities. Furthermore, with the development agencies.” However, because of concerns over implications for regional autonomy the name of these institutions was changed to “development agencies.” The Framework Law on Public Administration, on the other hand, was never legislated because of continuous vetoing of the then President Ahmet Necdet Sezer from the secular and Kemalist establishment. Scholars argue that The Framework Law on Public Administration was indeed the most radical proposal for reform and although annulled and never fully implemented, it set the modernizing tone for other laws (Bayraktar and Massicard 2012). 48 Law #5018 (Kamu Mali Yönetimi ve Kontrolü Kanunu) was ratified in December 2003 and entered into effect in January 2006. It required two years of preparation to adjust the old system and put the law into effect. (kontrol.bumko.gov.tr) 49 Translated by the author from www.mevzuat.gov.tr/MevzuatMetin/1.5.5018
65 Law on the Right to Information (#4982), new mechanisms enabled universal access to public offices, with e-government applications proliferating as a result (Oktem and Ciftci
2016). Moreover, the reforms upheld and institutionalized partnerships with civil society in public administration and local governments along with arrangements that facilitated proliferation of privatization practices (Güney and Çelenk 2010, 254; Parlak et al. 2008).
Municipalities emerged as more powerful and modernized local government bodies through this reform process. Previously, municipal council decisions (on budget, loans, construction, and so on) became valid only after approved by the provincial or district governor. This practice, representative of administrative tutelage, was abolished; instead, municipalities were only required to inform governors of municipal council resolutions when necessary. Municipal council meetings were increased from three times a year to 11 times a year, and were made open to the public (Oktay 2016). To increase the efficiency of decision-making processes, municipalities were also required to establish expert commissions. Finally, related laws authorized metropolitan and district municipalities to build affiliations with national and regional local government associations (Demirkaya 2016).
The Law on Metropolitan Municipalities added new powers and duties of metropolitan municipalities to the existing ones: these included to generate development and subdivisional plans for lower-level municipalities; to carry out and license all types of development practice; to establish geographical and urban information systems; to construct buildings for health, educational, and cultural services; to repair and maintain public buildings; and to protect, maintain, and repair cultural and natural assets, which included reconstructing in conformity with the originals when necessary. It should be
66 noted that services related to health, culture, and education were introduced for the first time (Tekel 2016).
The decentralization reforms of the mid-2000s were also institutionally innovative. Inspired by the EU’s regional policy, development agencies (DAs) (not located in the capital) were established with the objective to devise and promote decentralized development policies that would eventually contribute to eliminating regional disparities across Turkey. DAs were designed to stimulate the local potential by facilitating mediation and cooperation among local actors (public, private, and civil society) in a region. In doing so, their main target was to produce sustainable socioeconomic development policy proposals and to improve the competitiveness of the region. Although coordinated by the State Planning Organization, a central government institution, DAs represented a step towards decentralized planning in the state’s approach to development. 50
The local administration reform packages of 2004 also introduced the concept of participatory governance to the political discourse in Turkey. The EU accession process pressured Turkey to accept the idea that enriching representative democracy with participatory practices was essential in order to reach an advanced level democracy that was required for EU membership. It is recognized that citizen inclusion in politics beyond the ballot box and into the actual decision-making processes starts at the closest level possible to the citizen, primarily turning attention to local governments. The idea of citizen participation at the local level was introduced with the UN’s Local Agenda 21 projects in select cities of Turkey after Habitat II was held in İstanbul in 1996. These
50 Initially two DAs, in İzmir and Çukurova (Adana and Mersin metropolitan areas combined) regions, were founded as pilot agencies. By 2009, 26 regional DAs were launched in total under 12 designated regions across the country (Eliçin 2011).
67 pilot projects served as a template to implement citizens’ democratic participation at the local level. Accordingly, Article 76 of the Law on Municipalities introduced the formation of Kent Konseyleri (city councils) with the objectives of developing an urban vision and urban identity, protecting the urban rule of law, and realizing the norms and principles of decentralization, transparency and accountability. Different from elected municipal councils, city councils are based on voluntary membership with no executive or agenda-setting powers. City councils function as a platform for representatives from public institutions, civil society organizations, universities, and trade associations at the local level to come together and discuss relevant local issues. The organizational structure of these councils is based on working groups with sub-councils dedicated to women, children, youth, and people with disabilities. As such, city councils opened new opportunities for previously marginalized groups to voice their needs and demands as well as engage in awareness campaigns, leading municipalities to address issues such as domestic violence, substance abuse among youth, and accessibility in their districts.
However, their direct effect on day-to-day municipal decision-making processes is limited and usually depends on mayors’ willingness to engage with their agenda.
In sum, the decentralization reforms of 2004-05 marked a paradigm shift in many respects. First and foremost, the reforms signaled a transition from government to governance by incorporating public, private, and civil society sectors into the decision- making processes; by enabling municipalities to engage with actors in horizontal as well as vertical governance levels, domestic and international; and by establishing new institutional actors of governance, as in the case of development agencies. Secondly, the reforms marked a shift from old public administration approach to new public
68 management. In doing so, they particularly aimed at reducing the bureaucracy of the administrative structure and modernizing the state organization with market-based managerial principles. Moreover, the reforms introduced the language of good governance (such as participation, accountability, transparency, and sustainability) into the legal and municipal discourse.
Later on, with Law #6360’s approval in December 2012, major changes were made to the metropolitan and municipal structures to be effective after the 2014 local elections. Law #6360 was significant in that it represented the culmination of the rescaling process over the course of a decade (2004–2014). First of all, Law #6360 increased (almost doubled) the number of metropolitan provinces across Turkey from 16 to 30. The law declared those provinces with populations over 750,000 as metropolitan provinces. Second, the law enlarged metropolitan municipal jurisdiction to overlap with provincial borders. Hence, it abolished the former “radius principle” in determining the metropolitan jurisdiction.51 As a result, Special Provincial Administrations were eliminated in all metropolitan provinces, ending the so-called duality in these provinces.52
Instead, a new institution—the Directorate of Investment Coordination—was established that is solely under the authority of the Governor. Third, they abolished the legal entities of villages and townships within metropolitan provinces. Villages became neighborhoods
51 The radius principle worked in the following way: in provinces where population was over 2 million mark, the metropolitan jurisdiction was determined by drawing a 50-kilometer radius from the governor’s residence. Although the radius principle was obviously an arbitrary formula, the new approach of equating the provincial borders to the metropolitan jurisdiction was equally arbitrary, as it did not take into account of any geographical or demographical qualities of provinces. 52 Local governmental system in Turkey is divided into three categories: special provincial administrations, municipalities, and villages. Special provincial administrations are “public corporate entities with administrative and financial autonomy. Each is established at the provincial level, to meet the common local needs of inhabitants living within the borders of the province” (Local Governments in Turkey, p. 8 in http://www.migm.gov.tr/en/Publications.aspx). Therefore, SPA governs the entirety of the province, rural as well as urban areas, in 51 provinces that are not metropolitan. With the changes in 2012, in 30 metropolitan provinces special provincial administrations are abolished to end “duality” in governance.
69 and were integrated into the jurisdiction of the closest district municipalities, and existing township municipalities were integrated as neighborhoods into the closest district municipalities. In those provinces that were not metropolitan, township municipalities with populations less than 2000 were also abolished.
In short, Law #6360 indicated a major territorial and administrative re-scaling of metropolitan areas in Turkey: while 52% of the surface area of the country became metropolitan, 75% of Turkey’s population (56 million) came to live under metropolitan rule. The legislators’ justifications for a consolidated and simplified model of metropolitan government were (a) to improve efficiency in the quality and quantity of services; and (b) to create an integrated approach to metropolitan zoning that would positively affect urban development in provinces. The law, in other words, reinforced the already existing powerful position of metropolitan municipalities, especially with regard to metropolitan tutelage over district municipalities in urban planning and infrastructure.
Law #6360 generated much controversy over scaling arrangements and efficiency promises. Moreover, it raised concerns about the substantial decrease in subsidiarity and consequent deficit in democratic representativeness of local governments: 30 Special
Provincial Administrations and 1076 township municipalities located in metropolitan provinces were closed. Over 16,500 villages in new metropolitan provinces lost their legal identity and became neighborhoods. On the other hand, 503 township municipalities in non-metropolitan provinces were dissolved. Therefore, as the scale was simplified and increased, the distance between citizens and their representatives also increased.
Moreover, the quantitative decrease in the total number of local governments (as a result of the closing of special provincial administrations, township municipalities, and villages)
70 was not counteracted with a proportionate increase in the remaining municipal council seats.
The reforms that took place over the course of a decade (2004–2014) in Turkey under the AKP governments manifest administrative and territorial rescaling that prioritized the metropolitan scale and that institutionalized a market-oriented
(entrepreneurial) form of urban governance within public and local administrative bodies, in particular municipalities. The restructuring process over the course of this decade, however, presents a number of inconsistencies, which will be discussed in the next part.53
Some scholars interpret the inconsistencies between later reforms and the initial ones as the AKP’s withdrawal from the initial agenda of democratization and decentralization.
This line of argument implies that as the AKP’s power is consolidated, the central government’s need to stay committed to its initial promises of democratization and decentralization diminishes. Others interpret the changes in reform direction as part of the incoherencies in neoliberalization with respect to state involvement, and even see policy reversals as a way to overcome neoliberal economy’s crisis-laden nature. I, however, argue that such “inconsistencies” demonstrate that rescaling is a process, and just like any other (neoliberal) restructuring, it is shaped by institutional legacies laden with historical and contextual specificities. I will unpack this in detail in the next part of the chapter.
53 For instance, the fact that municipalities are empowered did not put an end to the practice of administrative tutelage, as I will discuss in the next section. In fact, the institutional legacy of administrative tutelage continued to prevail in the form of interventions to urban processes through the institution of TOKİ, a central state agency for housing development, and through mega infrastructural projects that are authored by the central state that transform urban environment in profound ways. Another example is the consolidation of metropolitan authority over district municipalities. The democratizing and decentralizing rhetoric of the initial reform process was later outweighed by efficiency and economies of scale justifications that favor consolidated metropolitan governments at the expense of democratic representation.
71 Part 2: Entrepreneurial Municipalism
I conceptualize entrepreneurial municipalism as a mid-level notion (Peck 2017) that describes the entrepreneurial shift in municipal practice in Turkey, institutionalized through the AKP’s rescaling reforms, discussed above. As a mid-level notion, entrepreneurial municipalism sheds light on how municipalities—embedded in specific political and institutional frameworks—transformed their organizations and services in their own ways while undergoing a so-called neoliberal restructuring.
I define entrepreneurial municipalism as a market-oriented approach to municipal practice that prioritizes economic growth and development of municipal jurisdictions, adopts business models and strategies in urban processes, and is geared for urban competition, but that at the same time is invested in delivering social policies addressing local issues with a commitment to increasing the quality of life. As such, entrepreneurial municipalism is a form of urban entrepreneurialism (Harvey 1989). However, it differs from the North Atlantic context—in which the notion largely originates—in two ways.
First of all, in Turkey, the central state did not radically devolve responsibility to local governments as an attempt to deal with fiscal crises. Entrepreneurial urban governance emerged as a result of a top-down reform process designed to modernize and rescale the outdated administrative structure. It did not emerge out of combined efforts of local governments and local capital to overcome revenue crises, as it did in the US and
UK contexts. Accordingly, the role of the central state in enabling entrepreneurial action on the part of local governments is a crucial aspect of entrepreneurial municipalism in
Turkey. This is, however, not to say that municipalities are passive followers of an entrepreneurial agenda imposed from above, as the ensuing analysis will demonstrate.
72 Second, unlike the local state in the US and the UK, local governments in Turkey did not have a redistributive function prior to the transition to urban entrepreneurialism.
In the absence of fiscal federalism and a welfare compromise, municipalities were mere appendages of the center, attending to basic urban issues mostly related to infrastructure and maintenance. Social service provision actually became an institutionalized part of municipal practice after the transition to entrepreneurialism in urban governance.54
In what follows, I will explore entrepreneurial municipalism with respect to (1) the intergovernmental relations within which it operates; (2) its normative and organizational framework; and (3) its staple policies and practices in the urban realm.
Intergovernmental Relations: Old Ways, New Meanings
In this dissertation, I propose problematizing intergovernmental relations in
Turkey from a perspective other than decentralization. As mentioned in the previous section, the reform process that spanned over a decade (2004–2014) manifested rather inconsistent features and dynamics. Scholars (Erder and İncioğlu 2013; Gül 2016) have argued that the central government’s commitment to decentralization was later interrupted and even reversed with centralized configurations and implementations. The overly dichotomous analyses of center-local relations, however, contribute little to our comprehension of contemporary urban phenomena. Instead of focusing on the unyielding centralist character of the state in Turkey that leaves little to no room for local autonomy, or the presumed inconsistencies of decentralization reforms accompanying centralist interventions, I suggest looking at how the centralist character of the state in Turkey has
54 The exceptional episodes to this are the leftist municipalities of the 1970s and the Islamist municipalities of the late 1990s. I distinguish these earlier episodes as exceptional as they were politically mobilized struggles and the social policies they practiced were experimental, not institutionalized by the legal framework. In entrepreneurial municipalism, these practices have become institutionalized or rescaled at the municipal level with accompanying legal frameworks.
73 found new meanings within a new set of policies and practices that involved empowering of local governments. The central state’s administrative tutelage over local governments is not new in Turkey, as discussed in detail in the first part of this chapter. What is new
—and this is one of main contributions of this dissertation—is how this tutelage has found a new rationale within a new approach to urban governance that fundamentally transforms cities and urban politics in Turkey in the 21st century.
In Chapter 1, I discussed how state-rescaling theories explained territorial and administrative restructuring of state organization as a key aspect of creating globally and regionally competitive metro regions. Such restructuring on the urban scale reflected how states55 promoted their cities as sites of capital accumulation and global flows of investment, goods, and services. As such, cities became critical to the wellbeing of national economies. The increasing importance of the urban scale required more powerful governing bodies at the local level. This, however, did not mean the withdrawal of the central state as an actor from urban processes. States continued to intervene in urban processes in a variety of ways.
In the case of Turkey, the central government since 2004 demonstrated a concerted effort to empower local governments, in particular metropolitan municipalities, and prepared the conditions for a market-oriented urbanization across the country. By market-oriented urbanization, I mean creating economically productive cities that would attract investment, capital, technology, and human resources. The creation of such
“centers of attraction” (cazibe merkezleri), as the catch phrase goes among national and local politicians, required overhauling of not only the local government system but also a central state that intervenes heavily in urban processes. In this way, the old legacy and
55 Here, I use state, central state, and national government interchangeably.
74 practice of administrative tutelage found new meanings and functions under the new urban regime.
One of the ways the central state in Turkey got involved in making such metropolises attractive was through large-scale, mega infrastructural projects—mainly focused on transit and transportation. The key to creating globally competitive metro regions begins with the infrastructure, increasing the global appeal of the metro region as a place of investment and settlement. Quality of life, mobility within the city, and global connectivity are benchmarks for global firms when choosing headquarter locations. A truly global city offers an integrated, accessible, and simplified transit system to its residents and visitors. Mobility is crucial in creating and sustaining a metropolitan area with different regions geared for different functions (tourism, financial services, shopping, residential, and the like). Collaboration with private and civil sectors is the common practice in these mega projects with legitimizing functions—national and local state executives will often celebrate how public-private partnerships in such projects cultivate “synergy” and “sense of ownership” in society.56 Because of their monumental scales and budgets, these mega projects transform the metro regions in profound ways, thereby determining other metro planning processes around them.
The so-called “mad projects” for İstanbul of then Prime Minister and current
President Erdoğan best exemplify this phenomenon. Kanal İstanbul is the controversial ongoing project of constructing an artificial sea-level waterway (a second strait, so to speak) on the European side of İstanbul connecting the Sea of Marmara and the Black
Sea for the passage of commercial and military ships. With a budget of ten billion USD and a bold timeline to completion, Kanal İstanbul represents global ambitions of a
56 Reflection from the interviews with mayors and deputy mayors from the field.
75 “daring” national government. As I will discuss in the following chapter on İstanbul, other such mega projects include the building of a third airport that would be the biggest in the world with an annual capacity of 200 million passengers; the building of a much controversial third bridge in northern İstanbul (75% of the project would affect forest land) to relieve congestion in the other bridges;57 Marmaray, a rail transportation project that comprises an undersea rail tunnel under the Bosporus and the modernization of existing suburban railway lines along the Sea of Marmara from Halkalı (Europe) to
Gebze (Asia); Metrobus, a closed 50-kilometer transit system with a rapid transit bus route with 45 stations; and Metro İstanbul, a subway system with five currently active lines and more under construction. Similar large-scale transit and transportation projects led by the central government have taken place in other metropolitan provinces, including the İzmit Bay suspension bridge (Osmangazi Köprüsü), the İstanbul-İzmir expressway,
Port İzmir, and Diyarbakır International Airport. These monumental projects are major drivers of metro region transformation, where global mobility and connectivity is key to elevating the productive potential of the metropolis. The central state carries out these projects in close collaboration with metropolitan municipalities. Especially where there is political alignment between central government and municipalities, projects are implemented without delays and with major media coverage.
Another way the central government continued to intervene in urban decision- making was through the revitalization of a dormant central government institution: the
Housing Development Administration, also known as TOKİ (Toplu Konut İdaresi
57 The key characteristics of these projects, especially of Kanal İstanbul, Third Airport, and Third Bridge, is that cost-benefit calculations are mostly based on speculation. According to the decision makers, the cost of losing significant amounts of forest-land seems to be negligible compared to the speculated benefits of being the biggest international aviation hub and of increasing land value due to development potential in nearby project locations.
76 Başkanlığı). Despite the fact that municipalities (especially metropolitan municipalities) gained significant power and authority over urban planning after 2004, with the revitalization of TOKİ, much of this power became contingent on close collaboration with this central government agency. TOKİ was originally founded in 1984 to address housing needs and demands of low and middle-income households in Turkey. However, the agency stagnated in the early 1990s because of financial and administrative problems.
Soon after the AKP came to power, TOKİ was reinstituted under the government’s
Emergency Action Plan to mobilize for “planned urbanization and housing development” in 2003.58
In its new form, the institution was designed to report only to the Office of the
Prime Minister, raising accountability and transparency issues. From social housing and urban transformation projects to historical restoration, landscaping projects, and the building of recreational facilities, TOKİ has command over the vast majority of urban land in Turkey. TOKİ thus represents a significant rescaling of urban policy related to housing and zoning at the central government level. Despite the agency’s claims to be
“an umbrella rather than a competing body in the housing sector of Turkey”
(www.TOKİ.gov.tr), TOKİ’s command over the housing market and urban rent, along with its collaboration with select private construction companies, propelled this dormant agency of the 1990s into a powerful urban authority. TOKİ undertakes its housing projects in cooperation with municipalities. Municipalities operate as middlemen that represent the urban electorate as well as negotiate with them. Under current design, TOKİ
58 The AKP government targeted to realize one million housing units by the end of 2023 (for the 100th anniversary of the Republic).
77 is indispensable for municipalities to implement urban transformation projects in their districts and cities. These processes will be discussed in detail in case chapters.
It is important to mention that administrative tutelage is at work within the two- tiered metropolitan municipal structure as well. As discussed in the first part of this chapter, metropolitan municipalities were established as an upper tier over district municipalities for the first time in 1984. The model that emerged out of this design favored the “strong mayor–weak council” type that paved the way for metropolitan mayors like Bedrettin Dalan59 in the 1980s. The reforms of 2004 and beyond reinforced this model at the expense of district mayors. Metropolitan tutelage over district municipalities increased as urban planning decisions were centralized at the metropolitan level, leaving district plans and decisions to the approval of the metropolitan mayor. This reinforced role of metropolitan mayoralty gave rise in the last two decades to powerful mayors who were reelected several times. One clear example is Melih Gökçek, the outspoken metropolitan mayor of Ankara, the capital of Turkey, who has been the incumbent since 1994 (resigned in late 2017 while serving his fifth term in the office). In the case chapters to follow, I will discuss how intense the metropolitan tutelage is even when the two tiers are politically aligned.
In conclusion, the market-oriented urban governance at work since the first AKP government was based not only on empowered and able (read: entrepreneurial) local governments but also on a significant amount of central state interventionism. The legacy of administrative tutelage thus found new meanings and functions in this new urban governance. Despite decentralized powers and responsibilities of municipalities, the
59 Bedrettin Dalan, who served as the mayor of İstanbul from 1984 to 1989, was the first example of a strong and politically prominent mayor who undertook a series of bold projects that opened a new chapter for İstanbul in terms of integrating with the world market.
78 central government continued to exercise administrative tutelage in new ways by intervening and determining urban processes through large-scale projects in transportation and transit, as well as through revitalizing the Housing Development
Administration. Meanwhile within the two-tiered metropolitan system, metropolitan municipalities were empowered at the expense of district municipalities.
Seeing Like a Firm: Normative and Institutional Change in Municipalities
As discussed in detail above, the reform process in Turkey reflected a paradigmatic shift in governance that transformed public institutions, including municipalities. Norms such as efficiency, effectiveness, transparency, accountability, and participation entered the legal discourse for the first time. The reforms thus reflected the language of international governance trends (NPM) that infiltrated the country from the
1980s onwards through affiliations, agreements, and collaboration with various international and supranational agencies, such as the World Bank, the IMF, the OECD, the UN, and the EU (Özden 2016; Gül 2016)—for instance, the UN was critical in promoting projects that aimed to increase participatory practices (e.g., Local Agenda 21).
Through structural adjustment programs and stand-by agreements with the World Bank and the IMF, policies such as privatization and public-private partnerships were already being practiced in the 1980s. The EU process has been signaling Turkey to modernize its administration and adjust its legal system to harmonize with the EU’s standards, particularly after 1999 when it had achieved candidacy status. It was the AKP’s strong- willed majority government that capitalized on these already-existing needs and demands for reforming the state organization and administration in Turkey.
79 This normative shift, through the reform process, institutionalized entrepreneurial municipalism in Turkey. To reiterate, I define entrepreneurial municipalism as a market- oriented approach to municipal practice that prioritizes economic growth and development of municipal jurisdictions, that adopts business models and strategies in urban processes, and that is geared for urban competition, but that at the same time is invested in delivering social policies that address local issues. Thereby, “seeing like a firm” is central to entrepreneurial municipal practice, capturing the transformation of mayors and municipalities from administrative officers and public institutions into entrepreneurs and market-oriented organizations respectively.
I have selected the phrase “seeing like a firm” in reference to the notion my interviewees used that emphasized the importance of likening the managing of a municipality to the running of a firm (corporation). They argued that they needed to run the municipality with a “firm mentality” in order to succeed, not only in governing their organizations and jurisdictions (read: organizational and service performance) but also in competing with other cities and districts. These performance- and competition-conscious mayors uphold an entrepreneurial approach to municipal practice, where day-to-day bureaucracy is simplified (signifying an intense dislike for red tape emblematic of municipal practice prior to reforms), working conditions are modernized, efficiency is prioritized, and the mayor’s leadership in guiding the city/district is deemed essential. As such, the notion of “seeing like a firm” has significant managerial, organizational, and service implications for urban governance.
According to the mayors I interviewed, for a municipality to see like a firm, a major overhaul in organizational, budgetary, and human resources terms was essential: as
80 a result, municipalities downsized their workforces by implementing early retirement packages to their personnel. Furthermore, acquiring new computer and hardware systems to implement e-municipality programs enabled them to operate with fewer personnel.
Legal changes facilitated widespread use of practices like outsourcing of municipal services and privatization, which substantially decreased municipal spending on workers’ insurance and benefits. Metropolitan municipal firms grew in size, sector, and budget.
Urban services of various kinds were opened for bidding. Moreover, strategic plans emerged as pivotal documents that guided municipal actions and established multi-year budgetary spending programs. Heavily influenced by business terminology, these lengthy strategic plans established municipal mission and vision statements, institutional principles, and situation and SWOT (strong, weak, opportunity, threat) analyses.
Seeing like a firm, therefore, signified a fundamental shift in the institutional culture of municipalities. Mayors were no longer regarded as just the heads of municipal administration (as they were in the past); they were expected to act as managers/leaders of their organizations and jurisdictions. Just as in the world of business, municipal leadership came to mean entrepreneurship, innovation, and strategic vision. They were henceforth expected to navigate different layers of governance (horizontal and vertical, domestic and international); to mobilize networks into resources for potential projects; and to engage in public discussions and assume active roles in governance-related organizations. Mayors, as the “faces” of their cities, were expected to be visionary leaders and to chart the most effective path for the city’s future in surviving the tough competition among cities.
81 In such a competitive-conscious context, the concept of “brand city” (marka
şehir) emerged as one of the salient buzzwords within municipal circles.60 The idea that fierce urban competition requires cities to distinguish themselves and find their competitive advantage (or marketable ingredient) through branding projects gained prominence among municipal authorities. All of a sudden, local and national conferences and workshops on city branding proliferated. Universities and municipalities started to collaborate in newly crafted degrees (at the BA and MA levels) on local governance with a specialization on city branding.61 Metropolitan municipalities, in particular, made conscious efforts to find their “competitive edge” in branding: they organized workshops with local stakeholders and experts; they reserved separate budgets for branding activities
(such as promotional videos and festivals); and they included branding as a priority objective openly stated in websites, mission/vision statements, and strategic plans. What most of the municipal branding approaches had in common was to market the “authentic” aspects of cities by (re)presenting in a modern way that would appeal to global consumers. In these (re)presentations, municipalities constructed an image of the city in line with their worldviews and ideologies. The vision for and images of the city thus had resonance and function beyond their prima facie wager in the inter-urban competition.
Two observations are in order concerning the practice of city branding that emerged as a key component of entrepreneurial municipalism in Turkey. First of all, becoming a “brand city” (marka şehir) came to be almost synonymous with becoming a
“world city” (dünya şehri), especially in major metropolitan settings. Such world city
60 The AKP program targets “making every city a brand with by capitalizing on every city’s one or a few features” by the year 2023 (AKP Website). 61 Some examples include Aydın Doğan University in collaboration with Beyoğlu Municipality on Brand City Academy (Marka Şehir Akademisi); School of Local Politics (Yerel Siyaset Okulu); and İzmir Ege University research group on city branding.
82 ambitions gave rise to metropolitan practices such as bidding for major cultural and sports events (e.g., the World EXPO, Olympics, and Formula1) or building huge convention centers to host high-profile governance and professional conferences (e.g., the
World Economic Forum, the World Water Forum, and the International Architectural
Summit). Bidding for these major events, let alone hosting them, defined the direction of the metropolitan agenda. Place selling for such events meant crafting an urban space that was polished, secure, classy, modern but at the same time authentic and true to its
“heritage” (however that was defined). This meant removing anything that did not belong to these characteristics, such as squatter housing areas and low-income neighborhoods; and gentrifying and/or restoring what was left of those areas. On such a level, city branding and urban transformation projects were closely related in metropolitan settings to world city ambitions.
Secondly, city branding redefined the relationship between the elected and urban electorate in Turkey. In the past, politicians tried to win urban elections by promising to deliver infrastructural services, or resolving long-standing issues as in the case of squatter housing for the benefit of select groups, such as urban poor. In contrast, in the last decade, local and national politicians alike promised the collective benefit of becoming a
“brand city” to the entire urban electorate.62 In other words, city branding as such redefined urban populism in Turkey as a prospective place selling of the city to its existing residents. Over the course of a decade, brand city promises proliferated in local
62 This is in line with Eleanora Pasotti’s (2010) comparative findings on urban political and institutional change in Bogotá, Naples and Chicago, in particular on the transformation of patron-client relations and urban representation. She argues that cities are increasingly adopting political branding strategies to differentiate themselves from other cities. Such branding strategies are usually accompanied by the weakening of patronage politics at the local level, the consolidated image of the mayor through direct elections, and a mass communication strategy that offers collective rather than particularistic benefits to the urban electorate.
83 and national elections alike across the political spectrum. Even for Anatolian cities, which have limited or no prospects of successful urban competitiveness, MP and mayoral candidates addressed their constituencies with sentences such as “Why (enter a city name in Anatolia such as Çorum or Yozgat) would not become a brand city?” The appeal of brand city slogans for the electorate signified an underlying assumption that only by becoming a brand city of something (e.g., sports, health, tourism, food, trade, finance), would the city in question attract investment and increase employment opportunities, thereby eventually improving living standards and quality of life for its residents.
As part of the normative and institutional transformation in municipalities, it is important to mention the different ways in which participation as a governance norm is utilized. Entrepreneurial municipal practice constructed itself extensively as pro- participation (read: inclusive, citizen-focused). Here, participation could mean a number of things: (1) participation as citizen feedback; (2) participation as mobilization of various stakeholders; and (3) participatory practices in decision making. For municipalities that see like firms, the first two forms of participation are essential and the most commonplace. Participation as citizen feedback is the litmus test for a well- performing municipality. As such, mayors put a great deal of emphasis and energy into citizen surveys and being accessible to the public. They are particularly observant to ongoing local issues and committed to address them via a broad range of services. As I will discuss in the case chapters, the extensive improvements in municipal social services in the last decade exemplify how mayors and municipalities addressed local needs and demands.
84 Participation as the inclusion and mobilization of stakeholders, on the other hand, is not only the new way of doing things but also entrepreneurialism at its best.
Municipalities consider themselves as “synergy generators” that bring stakeholders together in ways that most benefit their jurisdictions. In this sense, public-private partnerships have become an organic and indispensable part of municipal practice.
Participation as incorporating participatory practices into the decision-making processes, on the other hand, depends on the political agenda of mayors as well as on contextual specifics. The reform process actually presented new democratic openings in this regard, in the form of city councils. However, mayors’ political agendas determined the extent to which these new democratic mechanisms are taken seriously. As such, entrepreneurial municipalism maintained a rather vague relationship to facilitating participatory mechanisms.
Making and Maintaining Metropolises
Entrepreneurial municipalism comes to life through two key policy tools that were institutionalized for the first time in the reform process in the mid-2000s: urban transformation projects and municipal social services. Urban transformation projects, by themselves, tell us a lot about the competition-driven and market-oriented aspect of entrepreneurial municipalism. They are also indicative of how metropolises are imagined and created; the kind of partnerships and alliances that are at work; and the maps of urban belonging that are drawn and contested. On the other hand, via increasingly diversified and improved social services, municipalities took up the role of a welfare-distributing agent at the local level, especially (but not limited to) the disadvantaged and low-income populations. Municipal social services started to cover a broad range from after-school
85 tutoring for children of low-income neighborhoods, to homecare for the elderly and sick; from vocational training of the unemployed to home visits for expectant and post-partum mothers; from free funeral services for all to summer camps for people with disabilities; from free health scans to language courses. Not only is the list of services diverse, but the quality of these services also improved significantly, and its beneficiaries increased in number over the last decade.
Although urban transformation projects and municipal social services might not seem to be closely related, I contend that they both represent (cater to) the populist promise of entrepreneurial municipalism: that is, the promise to raise the “quality of life” for urbanites. Moreover, I argue that social services rescaled at the municipal level, by providing a social safety net for the most disadvantaged, function as a counterbalance to the inequalities and problems that emerge out of urbanization processes. One of these problems is urban transformation. In many cases, the displaced populations of inner metro regions have been placated by “modern” housing options in the peripheries. These
“socially responsible” municipalities offer free health scans, arts and crafts workshops for homemakers, and vocational courses for the unemployed. In this sense, municipalities replace some of the welfare functions of the central state in their localities.
Urban transformation projects
In a symposium on urban transformation in Turkey in 2012, the then Prime
Minister Erdoğan stated, “We are the inheritors of a civilization where it is not the cities that shape the humans, but it is the humans that shape the cities.”63 Besides its populist homage to the Ottoman urban and architectural heritage, the quote sums up how crucial
63 “Şehrin insanı değil, insanın şehri şekillendirdiği bir medeniyetin mirasçılarıyız.” (ibb.gov.tr April 2, 2012)
86 urban transformation projects were to the AKP governments’ approach to urban policy in the last decade. Indeed, the scale of activity and intervention in the spatial geography of cities from the mid-2000s onwards was unprecedented in the history of the Turkish
Republic. The creation of competitive metropolitan cities required urban transformation in every sense of the term: from urban renewal of historic districts to restoration of historical monuments, from gentrification of inner city slums to urban development in metropolitan suburbs.
The laws that paved the way for the prevalence of urban transformation projects in the last decade date back to 2005. The Law on Restoration and Renewal of Historical and Cultural Monuments kickstarted a series of urban restoration and renewal projects, especially in İstanbul, which was declared the European Capital of Culture for 2010.64
From historical monuments to historical neighborhoods, the old city center of İstanbul was flooded with scaffolds and construction signage five years prior to the year-long festival. But the restoration and renewal work did not stop short at historical sites; the vicinity of these areas started to undergo transformations as these sites were expected to become attractive for tourists, businesses, and residents alike.
Following the Law on Restoration and Renewal of Historical and Cultural
Monuments, Article 73 of the Law on Municipalities65 gave exclusive powers to municipalities in deciding, planning, and implementing urban transformation and development projects. This article opened up a new area for municipalities, especially the metropolitan tier, to exercise their newly acquired powers in creating the competitive metropolises that would attract investment and produce economic growth. Municipalities
64 Yıpranan Tarihi ve Kültürel Taşınmaz Varlıkların Yenilenerek Korunması ve Yaşatılarak Kullanılması Hakkında Kanun (Law #5366) became effective in June 2005. 65 Law #5393 became effective in July 2005.
87 in cooperation with TOKİ (the central government) carried out these transformation projects. Considering that a great majority of residents in major metropolitan areas of
Turkey live in squatter housing as a result of decades-long nonexistent national housing policy,66 the aforementioned article, which granted executive power to municipalities and the reinstitution of TOKİ, laid out major metropolitan areas as an open canvas for numerous and dramatic urban transformation projects.
To reiterate, the major objective of these urban transformation projects was to create globally competitive metropolises by upgrading the built environment into marketable spaces for real estate, business, tourism, and investment. For instance, in the case of İstanbul—the centerpiece of urban transformation projects—the objective was to elevate the city to “global city” status. This required a profound spatial fix of the metropolitan area, which affected thousands of residents for each transformation project.
Therefore, the official discourse of the municipalities and that of the Housing
Development Administration emphasized improving the “quality of life” of those affected. Municipalities portrayed urban transformation projects as simple win-win situations where a squatter dweller could upgrade to a modern apartment in a high rise
66 Ozan Karaman (2008) aptly explains the change in the state’s attitude to housing as follows: “Gecekondus have been a major thorn in the side of İstanbul’s urban planners since the early 1960s. Because this form of ‘self-help housing’ has absolved the state from providing housing for the millions of migrants who flocked to İstanbul in search of jobs in thriving manufacturing industries, pre-1990 policies ignored—and even covertly encouraged—gecekondu settlements via frequent ‘gecekondu amnesties.’ Legal deeds or other documents giving them right to stay were periodically granted to squatters in return for their votes. This tacit contract between state authorities and squatters proved difficult to maintain in the post-1980 context of neoliberalization. […] As a result, the main rationale for legitimization of the gecekondus was lost. This is evident in both the İstanbul Metropolitan Municipality’s and the mainstream media’s portrayal of the gecekondus and their dwellers as shameless occupiers of the most valuable lands of İstanbul” (521).
88 while the municipality cleans up the city’s eyesores and disreputable neighborhoods and turns them into attractive places where “prosperity thrives.”67
Urban transformation projects reveal how this new urban regime conceptualizes urban residents from a market-oriented perspective, a significant departure from earlier.68
First of all, urban transformation in the last decade revealed that for municipalities, the principal interlocutors were property owners, not necessarily residents including tenants as well. It was only in cases in which there was substantial neighborhood resistance
(physical or associational) and media coverage that municipalities included tenants in negotiations and catered to them by offering solutions such as temporary rent aid.
Secondly, the main feature of negotiations preceding the projects was their extremely speculative nature. Municipalities set the tone of these negotiations through a cost-benefit calculation that was based on pure speculation. Thirdly, municipalities emphasized the
“consensual” nature of these urban transformations—that all was done not “despite the citizens” but with the “consent of the citizens.” However, it should be noted that consensual did not necessarily mean participatory, as those who were affected by such projects were excluded from the planning processes. Consensual, in this sense, referred to a “proper market transaction” rather than the democratic and participatory nature of these processes.
Ozan Karaman (2012) argues that in the case of Turkey, urban transformation projects are not simply about dispossession and displacement. He suggests that urban transformation processes do not necessarily try to displace the urban poor (even though in
67 Beyoğlu district mayor’s description of controversial Tarlabaşı urban transformation project. 68 During the 1960s and 1970s as a result of rural to urban migration of great magnitudes, informal housing on public land became the norm. The state turned a blind eye on informal housing in cities, as these migrants were a big component of industrial labor at the time (Erder 2001; Karaman 2008).
89 most cases they end up doing so), but instead to incorporate them into a budding mortgage market. Indeed, it could be said that urban transformation projects have almost put an end to informal housing in major metropolises of Turkey. “Urban renewal aims to incorporate spontaneously developed and partially regulated spaces into formal circuits of capital accumulation by replacing unauthorized substandard housing with fully legal and certified housing units” (Karaman 2012, 2). One of the justifications of reinstituting
TOKİ was to turn low and middle-income householders into homeowners by offering them a government-administered mortgage plan that extends over a period of up to twenty years with no down payments (AKP 2011, 42). As a result of urban transformation of this kind, not only has urban space appreciated in its value and potential for place selling, but low and middle-income people, hitherto excluded from the housing market, have become active and long-term participants.
With the most recent Law on Transformation of Areas Under Threat of Natural
Disasters in 2015,69 urban transformation has expanded to include all areas that are at risk of natural disaster (e.g., earthquakes) and any built environment that is at risk of collapsing due to old age or substandard structure. Given that the most of Turkey lies in earthquake zones, this law came to be popularly referred to as the “urban transformation law.” The law has enabled the establishment of “directorates of urban transformation” in metropolitan municipalities—especially of İstanbul, İzmir, and Bursa—that lie in serious earthquake zones. These directorates, in cooperation with TOKİ and the Ministry of
Environment and Urbanization, are authorized to conduct research, plan, and implement projects on district and metropolitan levels.
69 Afet Riski Altındaki Alanların Dönüştürülmesi Hakkındaki Kanun (#6306)
90 Finally, one peculiar aspect of urban transformation in Turkey is the fact that parties across the political spectrum are in agreement on the market-oriented principles that characterize these projects. There is consensus not only on the necessity of transforming the urban space, but also on transforming it to be more attractive for global markets. All parties also agree that the moral primacy be given to property-owners as interlocutors, and not necessarily to tenants who would be affected by these projects. The absence of critique or alternative models of urban transformation in the legal political realm further contributes to narrowing the platforms available for resistance groups on the ground.
Municipal social services
In Turkey, the idea that municipalities should provide services beyond conventional urban services (e.g., infrastructure, transit, and garbage collection) first originated within the leftist movement in the late 1970s, as discussed earlier in this chapter. Social democratic aspirations such as social justice and welfare, as well as democratic participation of citizens in decision-making processes beyond the ballot box, found support in a number of the leftist municipalities particularly inspired by Latin
American examples at the time. “The Association of Progressive Municipalities,” as the movement was called, believed in municipalities’ potential role for democratization, being the closest level of government to the people (Heper 1987). A few leftist municipalities in the late 1970s experimented with social cooperatives, solidarity networks, even participatory budgeting in their localities.70 Such municipalities found appeal especially with the estranged urban poor and working classes in metropolitan
70 Examples include a few districts in Black Sea region where mining workers mostly resided (such as Fatsa), and slums of İstanbul and Ankara populated by workers and low-income groups.
91 slums. However, with the political disruption of the 1980 coup, the movement, along with all the other political groupings at the time, came to an end. Bayırbağ (2013) analyzes state rescaling in Turkey as the result of systemic crises in the country. In line with this, it is not surprising that this episode in Turkey’s municipal history took place during a time when—in the absence of a welfare contract between state and society—the uneven consequences of ISI economic policies were largely felt by the working classes and low-income groups, and also a time of heightened political instability and ideological mobilization. The Association of Progressive Municipalities hence can be seen, to a great extent, as a product of economic and political crises of the state system in Turkey.
As I discussed earlier in the chapter, it was within the Islamist movement in the
1990s that the concept of “social municipalism” revived once again in Turkey. Despite being labeled as a marginal political party and conceived as a threat to the state and the regime, the Islamist RP mobilized groundbreaking support in the local elections of 1994 by addressing real concerns and everyday needs and demands of the urban electorate.
Utilizing Islamic values of solidarity, kindness, cleanliness, and honesty, the RP addressed long-standing urban issues of social injustice, the lack of communal solidarity and support networks, environmental sanitation, and institutionalized corruption in municipalities. The party’s ideological stance—captioned as Adil Düzen (Just Order)— was an Islamist critique of the capitalist economy and unequal distribution of wealth, and particularly resonated with urban poor and low-income groups. The RP communicated this agenda to the electorate through an unprecedented organizational structuring that combined grassroots mobilization and door-to-door propaganda.71 As a result, the RP had
71 For a detailed discussion of the Refah Party’s success in local elections and municipalities in the mid- 1990s, see the works of Akıncı 1999, and Yeşilada 2002a and 2002b.
92 a breakthrough in the local elections of 1994, winning more than 19% of the votes across the country and a total of six metropolitan municipalities, including İstanbul and Ankara
(Çakır 1994). The key to the further success of RP municipalities was the fact that they turned electoral promises into institutionalized services during their incumbency. Not only did the RP episode contribute to the normalization of Islamist politics in Turkey by helping its successor, the AKP, to become a national player, it also, by incorporating social services into municipal agendas, changed the way municipalities of all political affiliations redefined urban services from the late 1990s onwards. Similar to the episode in the late 1970s, the RP episode signifies how the urban as a scale is mobilized to address the failures of economic policies and consequences of political instability, and therefore rescaling agendas has the potential to engender alternative policies that could eventually become mainstream policies.
The AKP, building on the legacy of RP’s municipal track record, institutionalized what is conveniently called “social municipalism” in Turkey for the first time with the reforms of mid-2000s. The Law on Municipalities (#5393) and the Law on Metropolitan
Municipalities (#5216) specified the role played by municipalities and metropolitan municipalities respectively in terms of social services and social support. Article 14 of the
Law on Municipalities stipulated the areas of culture and arts, youth and sports, social services and social support, and vocational and hobby-related education would henceforth fall under the responsibility of municipalities to provide for their citizens. It also gave the responsibility to municipalities exceeding the population mark of 50,000 to establish shelters for women and children. The Law on Metropolitan Municipalities regarded municipalities as the primary carriers of social policies at the local level. Article
93 7 of the Law on Metropolitan Municipalities assigned responsibility to provide for mobile health units as well as any social and cultural services for adults, senior citizens, people with disabilities, women, youth, and children. Municipalities were expected to establish and operate facilities to deliver these services along with vocational and hobby-related courses. Moreover, municipalities became responsible for providing social support to disadvantaged groups—such as the unemployed, sick, and poor—under their jurisdictions.
It should be noted that the need to set a legal framework for social municipal practice in Turkey took place in parallel with the larger rescaling of social policy (or welfare provision) of the AKP, which scholars have characterized as a “ragtag collection” of social policies or an “institutional welfare mix” (Akan 2011, 376; Eder 2010, 152), denoting the simultaneous centralization and decentralization/privatization of welfare provision schemes. In this context, municipalities as social service providers at the local level indicated how the redistributive sentiment in the party’s Islamist stance (borrowed from the RP’s “Just Order”), coupled with its strong municipal standing, meshed with discursive narratives of neoliberal rescaling praising decentralization.
I would contend that the social municipalism institutionalized with the reforms of the mid-2000s (albeit imperfectly applied due to resource and agenda issues) serves a pivotal role in providing buffer solutions for estranged and disadvantaged urban populations that are affected by urbanization processes such as urban transformation projects. In many cases, municipalities of newly developed residential areas in the peripheries of metropolitan cities actively promote municipal social services in these newly created neighborhoods. In the face of an ever-changing metropolis that reflects
94 increasing inequalities, municipalities are expected to engage in community outreach activities, build social solidarity networks, provide basic healthcare and educational services especially for the poor and unemployed, and even try to cultivate a sense of
“urban communal identity” among these groups through “urban consciousness” activities that have become popular in the last decade. These social services, considered by municipalities as practices that increase their constituencies’ quality of life, are among the most promoted services in progress and activity reports and during election campaigns. Thus, municipal social services present a kind of redistributive compromise in the face of an increasingly competitive-driven urban governance and as such differentiate the Turkish context from the Western cases, as in the latter the redistributive function of the local governments was abandoned with the transition to urban entrepreneurialism. The differences are, of course, mostly attributed to differences in state-society structures as well as the nature of crises that preceded state-rescaling processes, as discussed in Chapter 1.
To conclude, both urban-transformation projects and municipal social services are integral to entrepreneurial municipalism in Turkey. While competitive and attractive cities are imagined and recreated with dramatic and large-scale undertakings of urban transformation and renewal projects, diversified social services aim to provide safety nets for the most disadvantaged groups in an effort to deal with the resulting inequalities of urbanization. As such, both of these key policy tools—by enhancing the quality of life for urban dwellers—reflect the populist promise of entrepreneurial municipalism.
95 Conclusion
Governance in Turkey underwent a major transformation after the AKP came to power as a majority government in November 2002. The local government and public administration reforms of 2004 and beyond were a key aspect of the democratization package of the first and second terms of the AKP’s incumbency. The AKP government promoted these reforms as Turkey’s decentralization agenda. However, the aftermath of these reforms and their repercussions render an imperfect, incomplete, and most of all inconsistent track record with regard to decentralization. Local governments in Turkey certainly became more powerful actors with more command over resources and more responsibility over services. Yet, this did not mean that the central government’s tutelage over local governments ceased to exist; this old practice has found new meanings under the new urban governance regime, seen in the case of large-scale transit and transportation projects.
On the other hand, local government reforms in the last decade resulted in major territorial and administrative rescaling at the metropolitan level. With the doubling of metropolitan provinces across the country, 52% of Turkey’s surface area and 75% of its population came under metropolitan rule irrespective of geographic and demographic contingencies. The increase in the number of metropolitan provinces is far from an organic response to national, regional, or global interactions. Moreover, with the elimination of a significant number of small-scale municipalities and Special Provincial
Administrations in metropolitan provinces, a more consolidated model of metropolitan government was established without addressing the decline in democratic representativeness of the new model (as the number of seats that were lost by closing
96 down small-scale municipalities were not compensated for in the remaining elected offices).
Instead of analyzing Turkey’s reforms from the perspective of decentralization, or the lack thereof, we should explore how reforms have restructured administrative and territorial organization of the state and what kind of urban regime they facilitate, focusing on the municipal policies and practices they gave rise to. I have proposed that the public administration and local government reform process, with its entrepreneurial outlook and rescaling at the metropolitan level, institutionalized—albeit informally—an urban governance regime that transformed municipal practice in Turkey. I have defined emergent entrepreneurial municipalism as a market-oriented approach to municipal practice that prioritizes economic growth and development of municipal jurisdictions, adopts business models and strategies in urban processes, and is geared for urban competition, but that at the same time is invested in addressing local issues via a number of innovative and diversified social policies. As such, I have argued that urban entrepreneurialism took a different path compared than seen the North Atlantic context, where the local state and local capital engendered entrepreneurial practices in the face of fiscal crises of the state. In the Turkish case, urban entrepreneurialism was institutionalized as a result of a series of top-down reforms.
I have proposed the notion of “seeing like a firm” to capture the market-oriented turn in municipalities as they transformed from mere administrative appendages of the central state into initiative-taking, entrepreneurial organizations that aim for competitiveness and prioritize efficiency and effectiveness. The emergence of strong mayors who liken leading a municipality and governing a city to managing a firm and
97 selling a product manifests this shift in governance mentality. As a result, place selling and city branding emerged as important components of the municipal agenda.
Furthermore, participation as a norm of governance gained considerable significance in entrepreneurial municipalism. The emphasis on enhancing participation—although this could have a variety of meanings, from customer-citizens to being citizen-centric to mobilizing stakeholders—became mayors’ claim to legitimacy beyond the ballot box.
I have also argued that entrepreneurial municipalism, defined as above, comes to life with two key policy tools: urban transformation projects and municipal social services. With the introduction of laws that place municipalities as the executives of urban transformation projects, metropolitan regions are re-created, expanded, and diversified. As low and middle-income groups (which are most affected by these projects) are incorporated into a budding housing market, metropolises are “cleaned up” and endowed with state of the art buildings, shopping malls, and gentrified neighborhoods that appeal to global consumers of high end lifestyles. Such creative destructions, though, bring about new inequalities and reinforce existing ones among urban dwellers. I have argued that in an attempt to counteract the frustrations of low- income groups and to fabricate an urban identity and consciousness in a persistently alienating metropolis, municipalities take on a welfare-distributing role in their localities by providing a diverse array of social services from health to recreational activities.
Entrepreneurial municipalities have thus emerged as actors that cope with place specific socio-economic problems—such as security, education, creation of employment—as well as undertaking projects that improve the territorial competitiveness of their cities.
98 Entrepreneurial municipalism and its growth-first agenda and competition-driven logic gained acceptance across the political spectrum in Turkey. However, it also harbors the means through which mayors can promote their political ideologies, agendas, and worldviews in the spatial scale of the cities. By focusing on a tripartite analysis of intergovernmental relations, municipal institutional transformation, and municipal policies and practices, the ensuing chapters will demonstrate how entrepreneurial municipalism reveals the political and institutional embeddedness of neoliberal urban processes.
99 CHAPTER THREE
İSTANBUL, THE “NATIONAL CHAMPION” OF CITIES
Map 1: İstanbul Province in Turkey
Map 2: Administrative Map of İstanbul Metropolitan Municipality and District Municipalities Sources: www.worldatlas.com and www.turkey-visit.com İstanbul has been a world city since the 4th century, when it was founded as the capital of Eastern Roman Empire (also known as Byzantine Empire). This city, cutting across strategic trade and transportation routes, served as the capital through two world empires, the Byzantine and Ottoman, for almost sixteen centuries. Thus, İstanbul has long had political and economical importance.
During the 20th century, following the foundation of Republic, İstanbul lost its capital status. But it continued to be a magnet for people across the country seeking jobs and opportunities. From the 1950s to the 1970s, as a growing industrial city, it attracted waves of rural migrants in search of employment. By the end of the 1970s, the city grew to be a metropolis, but without proper urban planning or functioning urban infrastructure.
İstanbul thus became an odd patchwork of shantytown zones, old established neighborhoods that no longer held their previous appeal, small to medium size manufacturing workshops, and a handful of factories. İstanbul, at this time, was far from living up to its legacy.
With the shift in the 1980s to an open-market economy and the introduction of a metropolitan municipal system, İstanbul’s transformation into a globally integrated metropolis began. Yet, it was not until the AKP government’s reforms in the mid-2000s that İstanbul jumpstarted its project of becoming a globally competitive city: a hub for transnational business and tourism and a “playing field for cosmopolitan consumers of global lifestyles” (Keyder 2009, 45). In the 21st century, İstanbul revived its legacy and became the “window” of Turkey that opens to the world.
İstanbul, representing the epitome of urban entrepreneurialism in Turkey, set the stage for other major cities in the country. However, I argue that the unprecedented
101 growth and rising competitiveness of the metropolis in the 21st century is to a great extent due to the perfect alignment of political and institutional factors in which the metropolitan government was embedded. Therefore, İstanbul’s rise as a competitive metro region is the product of the central government’s informal designation of the city as a national champion for reviving the economy. Along with İstanbul’s metropolitan municipality, the central government sponsored mega transit and transportation projects to turn the city into a globally competitive metropolis and a transnational hub connecting
East and West, Asia and Europe. The urban fabric underwent unprecedented transformation. Municipal authorities completely changed their institutional approach to market-oriented norms and strategies. Mayors became more like entrepreneurs, and municipalities like firms. Priorities were competition, innovation, and efficiency that would render the city ever-more attractive to global flows of capital, business, trade, and visitors. In this picture, the citizens of İstanbul became more like customers to be satisfied with better products in the form of urban and social services, and less like equal partners in planning the city’s future.
In what follows, I will explore entrepreneurial municipal practice in the case of
İstanbul with respect to (1) the intergovernmental relations in which it is embedded, (2) the normative and institutional transformation of municipalities, and (3) its two quintessential policies, namely urban transformation projects and municipal social services.
Intergovernmental Relations: The Designated National Champion
As discussed in the previous chapter, despite the decentralizing reforms that empowered municipalities politically and financially, the central government continued
102 to be a critical urban actor and retained the centralist legacy of the state. In Turkey, intergovernmental relations are deeply imbued with party politics, and acted out through the practice of administrative tutelage that situates the final say at the center. The entrepreneurial turn utilized this centralist tradition in a way that enabled the central government to favor certain cities over others. Thus, administrative tutelage in the case of
İstanbul is visible through its absence due to the city’s import for the national economy and the city’s political positionality with the central government. The AKP, as a central government committed to a neoliberalizing economic agenda, designated the city as a
“national champion” (Le Galès and Crouch 2012) from the very start. It ardently promoted the city’s growth, competitiveness, and integration to the global economy through authoring, sponsoring, and supporting various projects—from large-scale infrastructural projects to initiating İstanbul’s transformation into a hub for world conventions, congresses, and major cultural and sports events. Following Le Galès and
Crouch (2012), the idea of “cities as national champions” explains how states that are committed to both neoliberalism and national economic success can promote a policy of favoring certain cities over others. This specific policy, however, significantly differs from the developmentalist approach, which favors backward or declining regions in order to achieve a more equitable and even territorial development. Cities that are designated as national champions are usually “already strong and well performing” (405): the aim is to make them even stronger and more prominent. İstanbul’s integration into the global economy and its economic strength was thus vital to the national government’s agenda of economic recovery and growth, and İstanbul’s projection as a “world city” had a momentous impact on its metropolitan scale.
103 The AKP had strong reasons for designating İstanbul as its champion city. First,
İstanbul was (and still is) the largest and most significant metropolitan area in Turkey72 and as such it presented the best potential to revive the country’s crisis-infused economy in the early 2000s. Located in northwestern Turkey and straddling both European and
Asian continents, İstanbul is the commercial as well as the financial center of the country.73 This makes the city attractive for both domestic and foreign businesses, as well as for internal migrants from the rest of the country seeking employment.74 Secondly, the city has been a political stronghold for the AKP (and its predecessors) since the local elections in 1994. In the national elections of November 2002, the AKP received 37% of the İstanbul vote.75 Furthermore, the political alignment with the metropolitan authority facilitated easier implementation of the agenda on İstanbul. A final reason for AKP to choose İstanbul is that the city had always been a model for other cities in Turkey, and therefore any developments in İstanbul would have eventual downstream effects for other metropolitan areas and cities.
72 With a population nearing 13 million and a land area of 5,313 square kilometers divided into 39 district municipalities, İstanbul is one of the largest municipal footprints of the world (İstanbul Area Plan, p. 44 with TUIK figures, City of Intersections, p. 26). With a population density of 2,314 person/km², İstanbul is one of the most populated regions in Europe (İstanbul Area Plan, p. 19). According to figures supplied by the İstanbul Metropolitan Municipality (IMM), migration from other provinces of Turkey to İstanbul in the last fifty years was 11 million people (IMM Website). It is estimated that the population of the city will amount to 23 million by 2025 if the city continues to grow at the current rate (Dossick 2012). 73 İstanbul produces almost 30% of the GDP of Turkey. While the GDP per capita in Turkey (in 2013) is $8.688, GDP per capita in İstanbul is $11.292. In terms of the sectors that contribute to the GNP in İstanbul, the services sector by a contribution of 70,6% is the forerunner among the other sectors, namely industrial and agricultural, with contributions of 29,1% and 0,3% respectively. The volume of services sector that takes place in İstanbul is significantly over the national average of 62,4%. Services sector employment in the region marks 61,8% of the overall employment in the region. Related sectors such as finances, culture and tourism, as well as logistics offer the most promising potential for development (İstanbul Area Plan p. 20). 74 Sassen (2009) underlines, “Of the more than 19,000 foreign firms operating in Turkey, well over half are headquartered in İstanbul” (City of Intersections p. 5). 75 YSK Website (http://www.ysk.gov.tr/ysk/docs/2002MilletvekiliSecimi/turkiye/Cevre/İstanbul1.htm)
104 For all the above reasons, İstanbul’s dramatic transformation from 2004 onwards has been the product of a process whereby the central government prioritized İstanbul’s agenda. The political alignment between the central government and the metropolitan municipality thus generated a chain reaction of fast-paced, big-budget, and grand-scale projects. As a prime minister who was a former metropolitan mayor of the city, Erdoğan often emphasized his knowledge of the city’s needs and his desire to realize the projects that he dreamt of when he was a mayor (such as rehabilitating the Golden Horn, Kanal
İstanbul, or hosting Olympics). Erdoğan expressed his love and admiration for İstanbul publicly many times, in particular by reciting poems such as “My Dear İstanbul” by
Necip Fazıl Kısakürek, an Islamist poet. At the same time, Erdoğan’s consultant during his mayoralty, Kadir Topbaş, became the metropolitan mayor of İstanbul in the 2004 local elections and stayed in office for 13 years. This teaming up prioritized the city’s agenda of becoming a globally competitive metropolis that supports the whole nation. In the words of Mayor Topbaş, “There are cities that carry countries and İstanbul is a city that carries Turkey on its shoulders.”76
Urban infrastructure, transit, and transportation projects were at the top of the agenda for İstanbul since 2004 onwards, as the city was struggling heavily with failing infrastructure and traffic congestion.77 In order to facilitate and maintain surging commercial, financial, and human activity and the resulting urban growth, municipal authorities shifted their thinking to metro-region terms. The İstanbul Metropolitan
Municipality adopted a polycentric approach to urban planning in an attempt to
76 Ülkeleri taşıyan şehirler vardır, İstanbul da Türkiye'yi taşıyor (Metropolitan council meeting on annual budget of 2011). All translations are by the author unless otherwise stated. 77 According to İstanbul, Metropolitan Municipality’s figures between 2004 and 2010, 55% of municipal investment was realized in the area of transportation (İstanbul Metropolitan Council 2011 budget meeting minutes).
105 harmonize regional development within the Greater İstanbul Region (IUAP 2011).78
Accordingly, the global city that the metropolitan municipality envisioned required well- functioning infrastructure, increased mobility, and heightened connectivity that would link various specialized hubs (financial, commercial, touristic, residential, etc.) within the greater metropolitan area. It also required the use of smart technology in urban spaces and high quality urban living standards (IMM 2010 strategic plan). However, abandoning patchwork-style solutions to infrastructure and transit issues meant working with a metropolitan master plan that would lead to big budget and grand scale projects taking place at once. Hence, collaborations between the central government and the metropolitan municipality in such projects became the usual practice. The returns from building a competitive İstanbul with a strong and modernized infrastructure would benefit both the national government and İstanbul’s local governments.
This generated an incentive structure for the district municipalities of İstanbul and also catered to the agenda of making İstanbul a world city and a hub for Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Central Asia. For instance, Mayor Demircan of Beyoğlu District expressed his awareness of the strategic importance of İstanbul for Turkey’s economy and commerce, along with noting how much “luckier” they were as municipalities than other cities in Turkey:
We are, as İstanbul, luckier than the others because we have a prime minister [referring to Erdoğan] who thinks about İstanbul’s needs; therefore the İstanbul Metropolitan Municipality has a very strategic place. For instance, investments such as the Third Bridge are important. İstanbul is growing, and investments like
78 It should be noted that metropolitan transit and transportation planning go hand in hand with metropolitan-wide urban transformation projects. For instance, projects such as the İstanbul Financial Center in Ümraniye District manifest the objective of creating a polycentric metropolitan region in İstanbul that divides the city into multiple zones (or hubs) that serve different functions, all planned to be connected with urban transit that offers easy access, wider coverage, increased mobility, and connectivity (IUAP 2011).
106 the Third Bridge are not exclusively for İstanbul: İstanbul’s access to import and export networks is also Turkey’s access to all of this. İstanbul is such a city: it is Turkey’s brain and center of commerce. A city is valuable insofar as it integrates [to the world economy] and as long as it solves these import-export access points. And because it is a valuable city, it attracts investment. And we [as elected municipal authorities] are here to show how our performance keeps these dynamics big and strong.79
The story of İstanbul’s phenomenal and aggressive growth since the early 2000s is therefore also the story of the national government’s specific agenda for İstanbul.
Municipal authorities were obliged to respond to this pressure to make İstanbul a competitive world metropolis. Among the many mega-scale projects of transit and transportation that aim to make İstanbul a global hub, the following are the most notable:
• İstanbul Metro: İstanbul’s first modern subway line began operations in 1989, but
the real development of the system took place after 2004. Currently, there are five
active subway lines with more under construction (The delays are due to the
discovery of historical and archeological sites.). İstanbul Metro is owned and
operated by the IMM.
• Metrobus: A 50-kilometer closed system of transit with a rapid transit bus route
(45 stations) opened in 2007. It was introduced to bypass especially rush hour
traffic and provide an alternative to increase connectivity within the greater
İstanbul area.
• Marmaray: One of the prides of the central government in İstanbul is a partially
operational rail transportation project comprising a rail tunnel running under the
Bosporus and the modernization of existing suburban railway lines along the Sea
of Marmara from Halkalı (European side) to Gebze (Asian side). Construction
79 Interview with Ahmet Misbah Demircan by the author in 2012.
107 was awarded to a Japanese firm in 2004. Marmaray first opened in 2013. It is
owned by TCDD, a central state rail transportation institution.
• The Third Bosporus Bridge (Yavuz Sultan Selim Bridge): This is one of the central
government’s most controversial projects in İstanbul because of its chosen
location—of which 75% was forest land. Located north of the two existing
bridges (connecting Sarıyer on the European side and Beykoz on the Asian side),
the construction of the third Bridge was completed in three years (2013–2016).
The opening of the bridge soon after the July 15th coup attempt had significant
symbolic value for the central state in reclaiming power and authority. As one of
the longest bridges in the world, it has become a symbol of national pride in a
politically sensitive time.
• Sabiha Gökçen International Airport: Contracted and constructed within two
years (opening in 2009) because the Atatürk International Airport could not meet
passenger demands, this second international airport (located on the Asian side)
had an annual capacity of 28 million passengers in 2015.
• Third International Airport: İstanbul serves as one of the largest aviation hubs in
the world, with two international airports that, as of 2014, handle over 80 million
passengers annually. The Atatürk Airport’s capacity is nearing 60 million
annually (the fourth largest in Europe after London, Paris, and Frankfurt airports).
In order to keep up with the volume of passengers and to make İstanbul the most
competitive global hub in Euro Asia, the central government proposed building a
new international airport in İstanbul, to open in 2018. This third airport is one of
Erdoğan’s boldest projects; located in İstanbul’s northern forests, it is currently
108 being constructed with a planned annual capacity of 150 million.80 It is also
important to note the national government’s support in branding Turkish Airlines
as a global airline company (Turkish Airlines’ Globally Yours Campaign) starting
from the early days of the AKP incumbency. In a campaign booklet for the
national elections in 2011, the AKP proudly reported the increase in the number
of Turkish Airlines’ direct flights since they came to power—from 25 destinations
from two centers in 2002 to 130 destinations from 46 centers in 2011(AKP 2011,
66). Turkish Airlines also partake in global branding by sponsoring FC Barcelona
and Hollywood movies such as Batman vs. Superman.
• Osmangazi Bridge: This suspension bridge over İzmit Bay is another example of
the national government’s mega infrastructural projects. The bridge significantly
decreases the travel time to and from İstanbul to other metro regions such as
İzmit, Bursa, and İzmir.
• Kanal İstanbul: It was Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent in the 16th
century who first proposed the idea of an artificial waterway that would create a
second strait between the Sea of Marmara and the Black Sea—an idea that was
never realized. In 2009, then Prime Minister Erdoğan began a series of research
initiatives for a possible canal on the European side of İstanbul, and publically
announced his self-identified “mad project” during the 2011 campaign for general
elections.81 A number of justifications/arguments for the Kanal İstanbul project
80 For instance, Heathrow Airport’s annual capacity is 75.7 million passengers while La Guardia Airport handled 28.4 million passengers in 2015 (http://www.heathrow.com and http://laguardiaairport.com). 81 When it comes to İstanbul, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who served as the mayor of the metropolis from1994 to 1998, almost always described the “sentimental” value of these projects as “realizing his dreams for İstanbul as a lifetime resident and previous mayor.” Erdoğan’s mayoral legacy and influence of İstanbul continued under his prime ministry and presidency.
109 have been put forward. An alternative canal would enable the Turkish state to
bypass the Montreux Convention Regarding the Regime of the Straits82 in
controlling the passage of military vessels. A canal would also be a safer
alternative for the passage of commercial vessels, especially those carrying fuel,
which account for the majority of them. It would thus also give Turkish
authorities more efficient control of the passage of commercial ships. Moreover,
Kanal İstanbul would create a brand new “world city” in “the world city of
İstanbul.”83 Although its construction, still in the planning and zoning phase, has
yet to begin, the central government argues that Kanal İstanbul will create the “the
world city of the 21st century” when finished in 2023, the hundredth anniversary
of the Turkish Republic.
In almost all the realized projects, the opening ceremonies were high profile public events attended by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan himself (in his role as both the prime minister and the president) photographed hand in hand with İstanbul Metropolitan Mayor
Topbaş as a demonstration of strength, unity, and achievement. Both the national
82 The Montreux Convention Regarding the Regime of the Straits is an international agreement signed in 1936 that gives Turkey control over the Bosporus and the Dardanelles and regulates the passage of naval warships. The convention is considered an essential element of Black Sea security and stability and has been implemented successfully by Turkey for more than eight decades. “According to the Montreux Convention, merchant vessels enjoy freedom of passage through the Turkish Straits […], while passages of vessels of war are subject to some restrictions which vary depending on whether these vessels belong to Black Sea riparian States or not. Besides some general restrictions applicable to all, vessels of war belonging to non-riparian States are subject to specific restrictions such as those regarding maximum aggregate tonnage and duration of stay in the Black Sea” (Ministry of Foreign Affairs Website www.mfa.gov.tr). 83 According to the promotional video for Kanal İstanbul, the project will be 10 kilometers in width and 42% of its area is reserved for green space. The length of the canal itself will be about 50 kilometers. It will include ten bridges each having its own unique design. It will have high-end residential buildings of various kinds, from Manhattan-style skyscrapers to detached villas. The new city will also include conference and recreational complexes. Along the shores of the canal, commercial buildings that will represent the architectural character and traditions of various countries (such as China, Japan, Argentina) will be built. According to the project, the citizens from those countries will operate these spaces as international cultural centers, restaurants, and offices.
110 government and the metropolitan municipality claimed these projects as part of their accomplishments during election campaigns (local and national).
Another way in which the central government intervened in the metropolitan governance of İstanbul was through TOKİ’s role in numerous urban transformation and renewal projects that took momentum from the mid-2000s onwards in İstanbul. I will discuss these projects later in the chapter (in the “urban transformation” section).
In sum, the central government devoted a great deal of attention to İstanbul, investing a large portion of its budget to numerous mega-scale projects. What all these projects had in common was to increase the relevance of İstanbul as a metropolis not only nationally but also regionally and globally. The political alignment between the central government and the IMM thus posed a win-win situation for both parties and facilitated the ease of networking and momentum in realizing these projects.
On the other hand, within the metropolitan system, the upper tier has consolidated its authority at the expense of district municipalities in İstanbul since 2004. As discussed in Chapter 2, the two-tiered metropolitan municipal structure introduced in 1984 had created a strong mayor and a weak council. Given that district mayors comprised the majority of the metropolitan council, the appointed municipal posts in this model—such as the General Secretary, who works closely with the metropolitan mayor—came to have more influence over urban decisions than to a popularly elected district mayor. The reforms under the AKP governments only reinforced this model at the expense of district municipalities. Moreover, rescaling of jurisdictional authority of the IMM to the provincial borders dates back to 2004, as an exceptional ruling to enhance integrated planning of İstanbul at the time. This became the model for all metropolitan provinces
111 after 2014. In an interview in 2012, Deputy Mayor Erhan Oflaz of Fatih District commented on how—despite being from the same political party—many of their projects are rejected or put on hold by the metropolitan municipality:
Of course, the metropolitan municipality says no, he [the metropolitan mayor] is the boss! Their jurisdiction is bigger than ours. You have to accept that. Even though we are from the same political party, they did not approve many of my projects that waited at their door for approval. For instance, we want to build a center for arts and culture at Yenikapi. We say, if the Oscars were to be distributed in Turkey, it should take place in here. That is the level of our ambition for this project. Granted, this project will include many attractions to finance itself. However, the metropolitan municipality is not giving me permission to do this even though the project will take place on my municipality’s own property. They don’t tell the reason why, of course.84
The consecutive election of metropolitan mayors is another indication of their consolidated authority. İstanbul has witnessed seven local elections and five mayors in the post-1980 period to date. For the last two decades, conservative (Islamist) political parties (first the Welfare Party then the Justice and Development Party) have been governing İstanbul. Incumbent mayor Kadir Topbaş was elected for a third time in office in March 2014. Bearing in mind the IMM’s 2015 consolidated budget of 32 billion TL
(15 billion CAD), Mayor Topbaş controls one of the most important governing posts in the country. Furthermore, he is internationally renowned for his presidency in UCLG.85
84 Interview with Erhan Oflaz by the author in 2012. Two years after the interview, İstanbul Metropolitan Municipality turned this huge plot of land (673,000 square meters) into an arena for public meetings and demonstrations (the arena is called İstanbul Metropolü Miting ve Gösteri Alanı). The then Prime Minister Erdoğan held the first-ever public meeting in the arena while campaigning for 2014 local elections. He claimed that there were two million attendants that day on the arena. This is another instance of how crucial İstanbul was for the central government. 85 UCLG—United Cities and Local Governments—is an umbrella organization for cities, local governments, and municipal associations around the world. Founded in 2004, it is considered to be the largest organization for local governments in the world (in other words, a “United Nations” for cities). The organization’s mission reads: “To be the united voice and world advocate of democratic local self- government, promoting its values, objectives and interests, through cooperation between local governments, and within the wider international community.” İstanbul Metropolitan Mayor Kadir Topbaş served as the UCLG President for two consecutive terms between 2010 and 2016 (www.uclg.org).
112 To conclude, I have argued that despite the decentralizing reforms that empowered municipalities, politically and financially, the central government continued to be a critical urban actor in the case of İstanbul by designating the city as a “national champion.” Accordingly, the AKP as the national government ardently promoted the city’s growth, development, and integration to the global economy through various transit and transportation projects undertaken in close collaboration with the IMM. The central government also intervened in urban decision-making processes (such as zoning arrangements) through the revitalization TOKİ, which will be discussed later in the chapter. Moreover, in the last decade, the shift to urban entrepreneurialism in Turkey reinforced the administrative tutelage of the metropolitan tier over the district tier. The emergence of strong metropolitan mayors elected for consecutive terms and governing budgets even larger than national ministries, and the expansion of metropolitan jurisdiction to provincial borders (since 2004, in the case of İstanbul), have favored a consolidated metropolitan governance structure at the expense of the individual needs and interests of district municipalities. The argument for consolidated metropolitan governance is that it prioritized fast-paced and integrated decision-making and efficiency in issues of urban development and infrastructure. On the other hand, such governance also raises questions about democratic deficiency, representation, and transparency in metropolitan processes.
Entrepreneurial Transformation: Seeing Like a Firm
I argue that the reforms of 2004 and beyond institutionalized urban entrepreneurialism in Turkey. The so-called evils of the past in local administration, such as bureaucratization and proceduralism, were counteracted with the market-oriented
113 values of entrepreneurialism, efficiency, and effectiveness. Below, I will discuss how this paradigm shift was experienced in municipal halls and how it affected the governance of
İstanbul.
As I discussed earlier in Chapter 2, the spirit of entrepreneurialism first infiltrated municipal practice in Turkey with the decentralization reforms of 1984. The introduction of public-private partnerships and rise in the fiscal share of local governments, as well as the newly acquired authority to decide and implement urban plans, planted the first seeds of a culture of entrepreneurialism among the mayors and municipal councilors of
İstanbul. Bedrettin Dalan, who served as the metropolitan mayor of İstanbul from 1984 to
1989, was the first example of such an entrepreneurial mayor, initiating bold projects in the city such as the rehabilitation of the Golden Horn. As Caglar Keyder and Ayse Öncü
(1994) argue, “Now, under the new system the political prominence of the office was coupled with the scope for administrative action, as well as new financial resources, to render the mayor of İstanbul a very powerful figure indeed, who could act in the tradition of entrepreneurial public servants such as Baron Haussmann and Robert Moses” (404-
405). Nevertheless, it was not until the 2004 reforms that the entrepreneurial mindset and market-oriented norms and strategies were institutionalized in municipalities—such that mayors and high-ranking municipal authorities I interviewed in İstanbul did not hesitate to compare running a mayoral office to running a firm. This was a significant departure from the earlier approach of being a “public servant” administering a “public office.”
Perhaps, the clearest articulation came from Küçükçekmece Mayor Aziz Yeniay, who explicitly stated that although they are not “running a business” (which implies profit-
114 seeking behavior and hence has a pejorative connotation), they “have to run the municipality with a firm mentality.”86
As I argued earlier in Chapter 2, such a “firm mentality”—or what I prefer to call
“seeing like a firm”—has significant managerial, organizational, and service implications for urban governance. Managerially, municipal authorities of İstanbul believe that leadership and vision are essential to succeed in urban competition. In the case of
İstanbul, this meant an arduous city branding campaign on all levels, from hosting big political and sports events to promoting İstanbul-themed designer products.
Municipalities capitalized on İstanbul’s already-extant geopolitical, cultural, and commercial potential in branding the metropolis as a “world city.” Organizationally,
“seeing like a firm” meant running the municipality as efficiently and effectively as possible, from both budgetary and human resources perspectives. Interviewed mayors identified the institutional overhaul they made when they came to office as a significant part of their success. Finally, “seeing like a firm” articulates municipal service within a language of supply and demand, conceptualizing it as the “end product” of the municipality, in this way redefining the relationship between the municipality and the citizen as a market transaction. If “seeing like a firm” turns mayors into entrepreneurs, the urban electorate becomes one among the many customers (stakeholders) to be satisfied (others including the central government, investors, and construction companies).
86 Interview with Aziz Yeniay by the author in 2012. (“Biz ticarethane değiliz ama biz şirket mantığıyla yönetmek zorundayız.”)
115 Leadership: “We Are Not Administrators; We Are Executives!”87
Without exception, leadership and vision were the two most commonly used
“buzzwords” by all the interviewees. Mayors especially stressed how leadership was essential in order to understand the world trends and setting the right vision for their city.
Much like a good CEO who gets the market competition right, they too, as leaders of their cities/districts, believe that they have to get the competition among cities right and eventually determine a fitting vision and action plan for their metropolises.
Most of the interviewees started by defining leadership, making a clear distinction between administrators (idareci) and executives (yönetici). Mayor Demircan of Beyoğlu
District, who proudly mentioned that he had been giving leadership courses for many years, recounted his definition of leadership by contrasting it to the mere act of administering. He defined idareci88 as “administrators” in the neutral and pejorative senses of the word. In the former sense, these types of leaders are neutral because they simply follow procedures, rules, and regulations, and prioritize avoiding conflict over taking initiative; administrators are thus risk averse and are not interested in taking the organization to the next level. In the latter pejorative sense, this type of leadership runs things with the least effort and accommodates getting by and covering up at times. Mayor
Demircan contrasted this type to yönetici—“executives” who not only run their organizations according to procedures, rules, and regulations, but also aim to take their organizations to the next level. They aim to outdo their predecessors; are not afraid to take initiative and responsibility; and are risk-takers. They have short-term objectives as
87 Interview with Aziz Yeniay by the author in 2012. 88 “idare etmek” does not only mean managing or administrating, but also has a pejorative meaning in Turkish language: Depending on the context, it might also mean getting by, covering up, or managing with the least effort.
116 well as long-term strategies. Most of all, they set the “right vision” for their organizations and fulfill the missions needed to realize those visions. Mayor Demircan underlined that this executive type—that is, “those who have dreams and visions for their cities”—must govern metropolises.89
In Beşiktaş District Municipality, a Republican People’s Party (CHP)–governed municipality known for its center-left ideology, the municipal consultant to the district mayor offered a more radical idea: in his view, the mayor should be a professional CEO who is appointed by elected councilors and who has the experience and capability to work with big budgets.90 In a less radical tone, Mayor Yeniay of Küçükçekmece claimed that his approach is based on “executive” leadership:
Now, our approach is this: we are not administrators, we are executives! We are not in a position to administer; we have to perform leadership. This is the biggest difference in mentality. We are especially talking about a process of transition from just fulfilling the basic day-to-day activities or administering day-to-day managerial affairs to an approach that is more based on information, strategizing, planning, and most of all visionary leadership.91
Executive leaders, therefore, are also visionaries that base their decisions on facts, reliable information, and reason. Visionary leadership, in municipalities, means the ability to understand the existing global trends and to predict future ones in urban governance. According to the interviewees, visionary leadership is indispensable to be able to compete among the community of cities around the globe.
Branding İstanbul as a Competitive World City
Interviews with mayors and high-ranking municipal authorities of İstanbul suggest that “visionary leadership” in the context of metropolitan governance primarily
89 Interview with Ahmet Misbah Demircan by the author in 2012. 90 Interview with Yüksel Türkili by the author in 2012. 91 Interview with Aziz Yeniay by the author in 2012.
117 means understanding how the global system works—that is, how global competition among cities works. Mayors argued that their vision of metropolitan governance is primarily linked to the idea that the global economy operates through “world cities” that function as hubs (or nodal points of interaction and exchange) that attract and harbor business, capital, trade, investment, and people. In their view, cities, rather than countries, are competing to become commercial, financial, and cultural centers. In order to grow, prosper, and compete, cities need to weigh their own potential (i.e., areas they can thrive in, be a center of) and determine their vision and objectives accordingly. In other words, a city had to have a “brand value” to survive in this highly competitive world, to strive for world-city status.
Currently, every municipality in Turkey, no matter how small or how remote, has published mission and vision statements on its website, in its yearly strategic plan, and in its performance reports. A quick browse through the websites of the IMM and major district municipalities of İstanbul reveals the concept of “world city” as a keyword in these statements. The IMM’s vision statement (in the English version of its website) reads as follows:
It is the vision of the Municipality to make the city a sustainable world city which has a high quality of life for its citizens, as a pioneer and leader the Municipality makes a claim to the unique legacy of İstanbul, which is a city of Turkey’s very visible face and the window opening to the world.92
This quest for global connectedness and competitiveness has penetrated to the districts, especially those that are tourist destinations. Mayor Demircan proudly stated how he projected the District of Beyoğlu as the center of the world:
Where do leaders of local governance construct themselves? Are they governing a simple, unassuming city on the margin of the world? Or do they see themselves at
92 http://www.ibb.gov.tr/en-US/Organization/Pages/ourvision_mission_andprinciples.aspx
118 the center of the world, as one of the biggest fifty? Or what? I see Beyoğlu as a worldwide district. Our accesses are already worldwide; and maybe that’s why when you Tweeted me, I got excited, having seen Toronto […] because we are competing with them.93
Similarly, Mayor Yeniay of Küçükçekmece, explained how he planned his district’s first ten-year strategy (2004–2014) with the objective of being able to compete with the other districts of İstanbul as well as with the other cities in Turkey. For the years 2014–2029, his main objective was to be able to compete with all the other cities and districts of the world. With an ambitious tone, he said, “In the next fifteen years, we should be able to compete with Toronto or with Amsterdam!”94
How then does a city become competitive? What is the best strategy for success?
According to the high ranking municipal authorities, being a competitive city means first and foremost having a “brand value” that is reliable and attractive to global networks of capital, trade, and business. Mayor Demircan argued that Beyoğlu’s brand value attracted investment from service industries and businesses, and boosted tourism:
I have been here for eight years [as mayor] and I have 13 years of experience in the tourism sector. Therefore my business relationship with this city started 21 years ago and that’s how I look at it. Knowing that the service and IT sectors are promising more than the agricultural and industrial sectors, and knowing that they are indeed dominating the global economy, we made serious efforts to target these sectors in our vision. […] Ultimately we were able to assert Beyoğlu as a brand, and being a determined government gave us the opportunity to gather both executive entrepreneurs and intellectual entrepreneurs in our district as well as investors. Therefore, if somebody wants to invest in a hotel in İstanbul, they want it to be a hotel in Beyoğlu. If you own a hotel in Beyoğlu, your hotel name is not that important because Beyoğlu has a brand value. The Beyoğlu brand represents fineness, and it is backed by a local government that does not tolerate mediocrity or bad quality. Therefore, when all this comes together, the customer and the world come to Beyoğlu because they know the Beyoğlu brand is good. And that is a truly entrepreneurial city! […] This is planning the future. That’s our take on the issue. If there is a success, it’s coming from this vision.95
93 Interview with Ahmet Misbah Demircan by the author in 2012. 94 Interview with Aziz Yeniay by the author in 2012. 95 Interview with Ahmet Misbah Demircan by the author in 2012.
119
Much like a brand manager deciding on the marketing strategy for a product, mayors in İstanbul are deciding on how to market their districts/city to the investors and visitors—foreign and domestic. According to Mayor Demircan’s quote above, branding cities is key to making a city truly entrepreneurial. Pertinent to this is notion is the national government’s Marka Şehirler (brand cities) project: on the AKP website, under its objectives for the year 2023,96 AKP aims to make “every city a brand.”97 Indeed, there has been a considerable amount of intellectual production around the concept of “brand cities” via conferences across the country attended by municipal authorities (e.g., the city branding conference in Konya in October 2013). Notions of city branding prevail in academic programs as well: for example, a collaboration between Beyoğlu Municipality and İstanbul Aydın University98 in the “Brand Cities Academy,”99 which offers a Masters
Program in Public Administration targeting professionals who will serve in local governments, public institutions, or the private sector. The MA program is aimed to produce new philosophies and strategies to create brand cities and increase their contribution to the country’s economy at large.
Mayors and other municipal authorities are now working in collaboration with academics, private-sector stakeholders, and civil society organizations to figure out the best strategies to “market” their districts—to turn their cities into brands in an attempt to grab their share of the global competition for investment and business. This signifies a
96 “Target 2023” (2023 being the 100th anniversary of the Turkish Republic) is the most current slogan of the party at the time of writing. Urbanization (city development) is among the critical targets of the party for 2023. 97 http://www.akparti.org.tr/site/hedef/473/her-sehir-bir-marka 98 İstanbul Aydın University is a private university established by the media mogul Aydın Doğan. 99 Brand Cities Academy Masters Program first started in 2012. One-year degree program is designed to offer academic as well as applied education and various renowned academics and local government officials participate in the program as instructors or guest lecturers. (Source: http://www.kulturkentivakfi.org/projeler)
120 big change in mentality and in municipal practice that started to take place in the mid-
2000s.
In İstanbul, the claim of being a global city is mostly based on the long imperial past of the metropolis, the Ottoman episode in particular. The world city narrative presents İstanbul as a perfect blend of past and present, East and West, old and new, traditional and modern, as well as secular and Muslim. In all its authenticity, İstanbul is seen as Turkey’s window to the world. In a way, the metropolis of İstanbul is the embodiment of the AKP’s conservative but modern model to the world. As such, it represents a marriage of Islam and market economy.100 It reflects the belief that Turkey can become a powerful political and economic player, just as its predecessor the Ottoman
Empire once was (especially between the 15th and 17th centuries). An emboldened
İstanbul in all its glory and authenticity also represented the revival of this legacy for modern day Turkey. This notion, however, was not nostalgia for the old ways; it was the belief that tradition and religion were not obstacles to be modern, to integrate with the global economic networks, and to utilize state of the art technology to promote one’s authenticity.101
Place selling in order to host global-scale events has been instrumental in branding İstanbul as a world city contending to reclaim its heritage as a “world capital.”
Starting in the mid-2000s, İstanbul has been hosting such high profile international governance meetings and conferences as the World Economic Forum, the World Summit
100 Ideologically, the AKP suggested to address inequalities generated by market economy in reference to the notion of Islamic charity. It was basically the idea that by mobilizing and informally institutionalizing Islamic charity practices, the less fortunate groups could be looked after and a better income distribution among the population could be reached. For a detailed discussion on this topic, see Atasoy 2009 and Tuğal 2009. 101 Indeed this line of thinking gave rise to various socioeconomic and cultural production in twenty-first- century Turkey, from İstanbul being a hub for “modest fashion” to the rise of a Muslim “bourgeoisie” class, and so on.
121 of Mayors, the World Water Forum, the World Congress of Architects, and the UCLG
World Council. In reference to these events, Metropolitan Mayor Kadir Topbaş proudly stated, “İstanbul has become a place where global decisions are taken” (IMM Strategic
Plan, 2010). İstanbul’s municipalities also concentrated on branding the city as a center for arts and culture, sponsoring numerous festivals, museums, and art galleries around the city. İstanbul was the European Capital of Culture in 2010 and hosted World Culture
Expo in 2013. İstanbul’s bid for Olympics 2016 and 2020, albeit both unsuccessful, contributed to the city’s reputation as a global contender for sports events. İstanbul was the European Capital of Sports in 2012 and hosted many high-profile sports organizations and events, for example, Formula 1, motoGP, İstanbul Cup, UEFA Champions’ league final, and the World Basketball Championship. İstanbul’s involvement with city diplomacy also dramatically increased after the beginning of 2000s with the establishment of 39 sister cities and over 20 cooperation protocols. This is another indication of the municipality’s deliberate attempt to situate İstanbul on a world platform of cities, to deepen the city’s global networks, and to increase its reputation.
Behind every competitive city is a competitive municipality, according to the municipal authorities of İstanbul I interviewed. They argued that for a municipality to be competitive, it has to be a pioneer in municipal projects and services. Deputy Mayor
Oflaz of Fatih district proudly noted how they pioneered certain projects in order to compete on a world level:
If there is something to be done in the name of municipalism,102 it has to be realized first in Fatih, that’s our vision and mission. That is, Fatih should be a
102 It is important to note that municipal authorities in İstanbul understand “belediyecilik”—that is municipalism or municipal practice—as a “profession” or “trade” not necessarily as a political post. This is in part in reference to the process that started with the RP’s municipal performance in mid-1990s, which then culminated into the AKP municipal performance in the twenty-first century.
122 pioneer in Turkey as well as in the world! For instance, in terms of technology, we are the first to use mobile municipality. We are the second municipality after Quebec to use electronic signature. In that sense, I am competitive. Microsoft America has mentioned the projects we are going to realize in city information systems. If there is to be an application [that is, in terms of municipal practice], it first has to take place here. In doing our research for projects, we travelled everywhere in Europe.103
In sum, mayors and other municipal authorities of İstanbul celebrate and internalize market-oriented norms such as entrepreneurialism, competition, strategizing, and branding in their municipal practice. This is a major departure from previous notions of upholding bureaucratic proceduralism in municipal halls.
Efficiency and Effectiveness
Organizationally, “seeing like a firm” dictates that a municipality has to seek efficiency and effectiveness when dealing with two basic resources: human and budgetary. Municipal authorities in İstanbul stressed that part of being a successful leader is to make smart decisions on how to manage the organization of the municipality, its personnel and its budget.
Interviewees stated that when they first came to the office (2004) one of the biggest challenges they faced was the lack of qualified personnel in the municipal organization. While there were more than enough workers, the majority of them had no competency in using computers and/or managing databases. When they first came to the office, then, the AKP mayors reshuffled municipalities’ human resources. Through forced retirement and hiring of new qualified younger officers, they brought down the overall number of municipal employees. Mayor Yeniay proudly underlined how he reduced the number of municipal personnel in his district from over a thousand to below
103 Interview with Erhan Oflaz by the author in 2012.
123 three hundred.104 Interviewees claimed that their organizational success also depended on the principle of meritocracy (as opposed to the previous favoritism) in hiring municipal personnel. Mayor Yeniay stressed that he hired employees according to their competence in fulfilling municipal tasks, not the other way around.105 Deputy Mayor Oflaz emphasized that he, even as a bureaucrat, was also “elected”—in other words, handpicked—by the mayor to serve as a deputy mayor in Fatih Municipality, one of the most important and central districts of İstanbul, because of his successes in other district municipalities.106
Professional training courses and certificate programs became mandatory as the municipalities started to use online database systems and e-municipality applications. The introduction of these, such as smart city management systems, not only helped reduce the number of needed municipal office workers, but it also helped municipalities register their districts more thoroughly—and eventually helped them to increase their municipal income (e.g., from taxes through issuing shop plates, as well as from municipal warrants).
Mayor Yeniay stated that when he came to office in 2004, the district was almost entirely informal and unregistered. This enabled the construction of illegal residential buildings, also known as gecekondu, resulting in lack of comprehensive urban planning in the district, as well as poor delivery of basic municipal services such as water and sewerage.
He proudly stated that every residential building and every shop in every zone of his jurisdiction was now registered in his municipal database. He argued that this not only prevented the construction of illegal buildings, but it also helped them to more efficiently zone the district, eventually attracting development investors to the area. According to his
104 Interview with Aziz Yeniay by the author in 2012. 105 Interview with Aziz Yeniay by the author in 2012. 106 Interview with Erhan Oflaz by the author in 2012.
124 calculations, comprehensive registration also increased their revenue collection by almost
300%.107 The use of computerized systems also increased effectiveness in handling municipal paperwork. Mayor Yeniay said he could now trace any document in the municipality—that is he could identify the precise officer handling the document and the how long it had been in process—because all documents being processed are only the tap of a button away.
The number of municipal workers has been reduced significantly as well. In most cases, municipal workers were obliged to retire and no new hiring was done. Instead of hiring syndicated and full-time construction and maintenance workers, municipalities began to outsource on a contractual basis. Interviewed municipal authorities argued that they achieved huge savings in their operating budget, as they could have the same work done for a significantly lower price through outsourcing. After discussing his strategies of managing personnel, Mayor Yeniay concluded, “As I said earlier, we are managing here with a firm mentality, according to the principle of efficiency.”108
Indeed, the main rationale behind organizational efficiency with respect to municipal personnel and modernized IT systems was to optimize the use of the municipal budget. In the 1980s and 1990s, operating budgets of municipalities barely covered the salaries of the municipal employees, let alone any kind of municipal investment.
Municipalities were (and some still are) notorious for their debts to the national government, as well as other creditors. In the mid-2000s, the national government initiated a new law to restructure municipal debts. In interviews, AKP’s municipal authorities in İstanbul emphasized their skillful use of this legislation to overcome the
107 Interview with Aziz Yeniay by the author in 2012. 108 Interview with Aziz Yeniay by the author in 2012.
125 debt burden left by previous terms. Deputy Mayor Oflaz contrasted his efficiency in paying back debt to the incompetence or unwillingness other municipalities (e.g.,
Diyarbakır):
We took over Fatih in 2004 with a debt of 115 million TL [82 million USD]! After the law on debt restructuring—and this is valid for all 81 provinces, meaning everybody can benefit from this law—I benefited from it and I restructured my debt and it came down to 70 million [46 million USD]; the rest was accumulated interest. I ordered the Bank of the Provinces to process monthly cuts from my allotment. When we come to year 2009, the debt was down to 47 million TL [31 million USD]. […] There is a rule in state affairs, as long as you pay your debts to the state, the state will not cut more than 25% of your allotment, okay? But if you create problems in paying back your debts [implying Kurdish municipalities, which complain that the state has cut their monthly allotment up to 40%], the state will increase this cut up to 40%! Now, the state sees you as a firm. That is, if you, as a firm, do not pay your taxes, what would a taxman do in Toronto? He does the same here. And while doing that, there is no discrimination. […] I work hard but they don’t. Who will differentiate between us? The citizen! It is as easy as that.109
It is interesting to note here the analogy of the firm again. The AKP mayors’ accounts distance the management of municipalities and governance of cities from politics, framing these inherently political issues from a purely managerial perspective.
This discourse is thus in line with Erdoğan’s usual critique of the other political parties
(especially the CHP) with regard to municipal practice and governing cities. One such notable remark was heard during the debates preceding Law #6360 in 2012, a law that extended metropolitan jurisdiction to the entirety of provincial borders and dissolved
Special Provincial Administrations (elected councils at the provincial level in metropolitan provinces). During the debate, then Prime Minister Erdoğan stated,
If you ask the opposition [referring to the CHP], “What is a metropolitan city?”, they cannot answer! In their world, they don’t have a definition of “metropolitan.” They cannot do it in municipal office beyond one term. But the ideology [referring to the secular opposition to his party] enables them to stay longer than that. We say, “Let’s include the entire provincial territory under municipal
109 Interview with Erhan Oflaz by the author in 2012.
126 jurisdiction so that we can achieve zoning integrity.” We have to think big. We will not make it with those who think small. When we pass the law, in all metropolitan provinces, there will be one council [referring to the end of dual authority].110
Along with restructuring their debts to national government, interviewees explained how they mobilized resources through municipal projects and in this way significantly improved the amount of the realized budget. Deputy Mayor Oflaz stated that by initiating approximately 212 projects, his municipality realized nearly one billion dollars worth of investment in their first term (2004–2009):
Once you create projects, you start to search for resources to fund that project. And when you find that resource, you also use it to your advantage: because this is İstanbul’s central municipality and therefore the land value, that is urban rent, is extremely high. So whenever you initiate a zoning movement here, the return on the project is increasingly feasible.111
Mayor Yeniay also proudly underlined how far his district had come from muddy streets with no pavement to a district that now attracted investment and entrepreneurship in
Turkey. He also pointed out that his municipality improved the realized budget from 52 million TL [37 million USD] in 2004 to 235 million TL [138 million USD] in 2012. He concluded, “The people are the same people. The region is the same region. Money didn’t rain on us from the sky, nor did Ankara send us more money. We used our district’s own resources but our different approach created these new resources.”112
However, neither the mayor nor the deputy mayor reflected on how their organic ties to the central government facilitated these projects and zoning initiations.
110 “Boğazın suyu Haliç'le Buluştu,”Radikal, October 21, 2012. 111 Interview with Erhan Oflaz by the author in 2012. 112 Interview with Aziz Yeniay by the author in 2012.
127 Participation as Customer Satisfaction
As discussed in Chapter 2, the shift to urban entrepreneurialism in Turkey was facilitated by decentralization reforms that normatively upheld participatory governance and institutionally created new avenues to enhance people’s participation in local governments. The AKP defines local governments “as essential for democracy to flourish and for citizens to participate in decision making processes.”113 However, the definition of people’s participation in local governmental processes is limited mainly to people’s satisfaction with services. The AKP slogan, “Our job is service, our strength is people,”114 signifies the direct relationship the party builds between public service and legitimacy.
I contend that “seeing like a firm” redefined the scope of municipal service (I will discuss this in detail below) and the recipients of that service: that is, citizens. In other words, entrepreneurial municipalism in İstanbul implemented a rather limited and selective interpretation of this new normative framework. The interviewees identified municipal service as an “end product” of the municipal organization and the recipients of municipal service as “customers.” Mayor Yeniay explicitly stated, “We see citizens as customers. This is our difference. Our approach to service is centered on customer satisfaction. This is because we produce a service here, and the recipient is the citizen; and my existence will mean only as much as citizen’s satisfaction and happiness.”115
Although seeking citizens’ satisfaction and happiness is a quintessential democratic sensibility, Mayor Yeniay’s approach potentially reduces citizen involvement to mere feedback on surveys or the ballot box every five years.
113 The final declaration of the AKP Symposium on Local Governments, 2011. 114 İşimiz hizmet, gücümüz millet. (http://www.akparti.org.tr/ and www.yerelyonetimlersempozyumu,com) 115 Interview with Aziz Yeniay by the author in 2012.
128 Indeed, in a purely entrepreneurial fashion—similar to Osborne and Gaebler’s
(1992) description of the term in relation to measuring success as well as failure—the municipal authorities of İstanbul pride themselves on how connected and accessible they are to their citizens: the former in terms of gauging public opinion and sentiment with regular surveys, and the latter through regular neighborhood visits and public relations desks (available online as well as physically), which collect comments and complaints.
Although these have the potential to be effective channels of communication between the elected and the citizen, this form of citizen inclusion limits their involvement in municipal affairs to a post-facto analysis. And yet municipal authorities are confident that they know what people want. As Mayor Yeniay said, “If you go and ask the people of
Küçükçekmece, ‘What do you want?’, they would answer, ‘The municipality, which would know better than us, should decide on behalf of us.’”116
Customers and their satisfaction matter in a market economy; however, the customers are not involved in boardroom decision-making processes. Just like in a market environment, the notion of customer-citizen does not include citizens in the decision-making process, silencing the value of deliberation. They are involved only in the aftermath of the production process. Citizen satisfaction (municipal performance) is important for municipal authorities because citizens are voters. Although this “presumed” give and take between the urban citizenry and the municipalities might have advanced the quality of municipal services over the last decade, it definitely restricts citizen inclusion to mere “making sure we hear citizen complaints and demands.”
In sum, entrepreneurial municipalism transformed the institution of the municipality inside and out. It marked a paradigm shift in minimizing bureaucracy,
116 Interview with Aziz Yeniay by the author in 2012.
129 prioritizing efficiency, and introducing business strategies to municipal processes. Urban competition defined the direction of municipal agendas in İstanbul. Moreover entrepreneurial mayors prioritized norms of efficiency and effectiveness in making decisions and choices about organizational and budgetary issues. Citizen participation was gauged against people’s satisfaction of municipal services.
Urban Transformation Projects and Social Services: “Quality of Life”
Entrepreneurial municipalism in Turkey engendered two key quintessential practices: urban transformation and municipal social services. Neither of these was under municipal jurisdiction until after the AKP local government reforms in mid-2000s, which institutionalized both practices. Although urban transformation and municipal social services might not seem related at first, I contend that both practices are inherently connected to the discourse of “quality of life,” a central promise of entrepreneurial municipalism in İstanbul. İstanbul’s municipalities claim that their main objective is to deliver “higher standards of living” to their citizens. With respect to social services, higher standards of living mean anything from improved accessibility, healthcare services, and daycare services to community outreach projects. With respect to urban transformation, increasing quality of life means clearing city eyesores, such as gecekondus, and relocating the affected dwellers to modern high rises in the outskirts of the city. Through such processes, it promises to elevate the quality of life for both replaced populations and upper-class urban dwellers, who will take possession in newly transformed/gentrified areas. It also means creating various zones/hubs that attract different interests—from business and financial districts to tourism and shopping areas— as well as high-end residential areas. While urban transformation is the key to creating a
130 competitive metropolis that is physically attractive, municipal social services are crucial in dealing with the negative effects of urbanization, from offering social safety nets to the most disadvantaged to creating a sense of place-based identity and belonging in an alienating metropolis.
Urban Transformation Projects
İstanbul epitomizes what urban transformation projects can do to an urban fabric within the span of a decade. As discussed in Chapter 2, four main categories exist under the rather broad heading of urban transformation: projects that transform squatter housing zones into modern residential high rises; projects that restore and renew historical monuments and sites; construction of extensive shopping malls and complexes; and gentrification of old (in some cases, even historical) city neighborhoods (Uzun 2010).
İstanbul experienced all these kinds of projects over the last decade in its arduous journey to become a “world city.”
The announcement of İstanbul as the “2010 European Capital of Culture” in 2006 was a watershed moment for the metropolis, as the city embarked on a series of urban transformation projects to prepare itself for the year-long cultural events. The passing of the Law on Protecting and Restoring Degraded Historical and Cultural Heritage (#5366) around the same time further enabled many big-budget projects, including renovation and restoration of historical sites and monuments, and demolition and regeneration projects around those historical surroundings. Collaboration among public institutions and civil society associations, EU funding, and active involvement and leadership of the IMM and district municipalities alike marked the character of these projects leading up to the year
2010. It is important to note again that the political alignment between the central
131 government and the IMM increased the ease and speed in undertaking these projects. The
“2010 European Capital of Culture” title worked as a catalyst for branding İstanbul as an attractive destination and a contending world city.
Amidst all these urban renewal and development projects, the public institution
TOKİ, controlled by the central government, re-emerged as a significant urban actor.117
As mentioned in Chapter 2, besides constructing low-income housing and infrastructure,
TOKİ has the authority “to prepare and modify zoning plans, expropriate property and develop financial arrangements for large projects with little to no local public engagement requirements” (Dossick 2012, 15). TOKİ administered and sanctioned numerous urban renewal projects that have been underway in İstanbul since the mid-
2000s. Considering İstanbul’s land value in preferred neighborhoods, which is equivalent to Manhattan levels (Keyder and Öncü 1994, 403), TOKİ’s top-down involvement in undertaking these urban regeneration projects has generated much controversy, specifically between officials and the affected public. Furthermore, TOKİ’s high-handed behavior in these projects has raised public concern regarding transparency and accountability of the institution. Indeed urban transformation projects have become significant tools in the hands of the central government (more specifically the Prime
Ministry, as TOKİ reports only to the office of the PM) to define, control, and manipulate alliances over urban rent.
Municipalities, on the other hand, functioned more as middlemen in maintaining these alliances and facilitating these projects within their jurisdictions, rather than representing and defending citizens’ interests and demands as elected officials. Top-down and fast-paced decision making for the sake of effectiveness was prioritized over norms
117 TOKİ Website
132 of democratic governance such as transparency and participatory decision-making. The stakeholders—TOKİ, big construction businesses, and international capital—had more of a say over the future of the city than the city-dwellers who were directly affected by demolition and relocation projects. Affected neighborhood communities were rarely consulted during the project phase, and were incorporated into the process only after the projects were approved and the permits were given. At that point, municipalities informed occupants and contacted real estate owners in order to persuade them to sign off their properties and accept the deals presented to them by project managers and municipalities.
Zoning, in this sense, became the most important tool in the hands of the center in carrying out the politics of urban transformation. Dramatic zoning decisions primarily made by TOKİ not only re-shaped the way the city is organized but also categorized urbanites according to where they belonged. Zoning decisions thus ended up drawing the maps of belonging in İstanbul’s metropolitan space. As a result, the politics of urban transformation became an act not only of spatial engineering to create an attractive and competitive world city, but also of demographic engineering around the axes of urban rent, zoning, and construction business.
Urban transformation projects set to renew/gentrify old historical neighborhoods into posh residential and commercial areas have been the most controversial because of their aggressive alteration of the urban fabric. Sulukule in Fatih District and Tarlabaşı in
Beyoğlu District are two examples that engendered much publicity and controversy. In both cases, municipalities skillfully manipulated public sentiment about the deadly impact of a possible earthquake in ramshackle quarters, the “embarrassingly” outdated
133 and neglected look of the neighborhoods, and the threat of its inaccessible streets as a breeding ground for ever-rising criminal activity. The big construction companies and high-ranking municipal authorities planned the projects of renewal behind closed doors without involving urban civil society groups. The public was usually informed only after the fact, leaving no room for negotiating with the investing stakeholders or for contributing to the project. Moreover, municipalities only regarded title-holders
(landlords) as interlocutors to persuade. The leaseholders—the ones who were in reality most affected—had no say during this process. In the words of one mayor, “We consider private property and private property owners as essential in this process. As for leaseholders, they can rent somewhere else! But we warned them all five years before the project started. As a matter of fact, we let some of those live there rent-free for three years to support their transition.”118
Although there is no doubt that, like any other neglected city quarter, Tarlabaşı needed to be renewed for the sake of the safety and livelihood of its residents, as well as to revive its historical buildings and architecture, the Tarlabaşı project (aka Tarlabaşı
360) headed by Beyoğlu Municipality chose to relocate its residents (lease holders as well as property owners) to the outskirts of the city and to offer high-end residential and office spaces in the area to upper-class urbanites. Known for its squatters, dangerous quarters, illegal networks, informal economy, and rundown buildings, Tarlabaşı had long been perceived as a diseased area at the heart of the district that needed to be cured.119
For an ambitious municipality anxious to turn Beyoğlu into a “globally competitive”
118 Interview with Ahmet Misbah Demircan by the author in 2012. 119 For instance, in year 2000, Tarlabaşı district suffered from an unemployment level of 20%. For an extensive discussion on the history of economic, social and spatial marginalization in Tarlabaşı, see Yılmaz (2006).
134 urban center, Tarlabaşı simultaneously presented a do-or-die challenge and a fertile ground for urban rent alliances amongst big construction companies close to the AKP, international capital, and consumers of high-end lifestyles. Mayor Demircan was proud of his project on Tarlabaşı: “As I said, for those who have ambition like us, it is a must to make this district shiny, number one, therefore we had to cleanse the bad parts of this city so that affluence will arrive and everybody will live in prosperity.”120 However, Mayor
Demircan did not explain the selective process of these projects in providing affluence and prosperity for certain groups and not for others.
In the summer of 2013, an urban transformation project in the district of Beyoğlu spurred great discontent and upheaval among the urban public. The metropolitan municipality announced that the only green space (38,000 square meters) in the district, also known as Gezi Parkı, was to be the subject of a great transformation—that is, the rebuilding of the Ottoman Military Barracks (Taksim Taksim Topçu Kışlası) that stood there before the space turned into a park in the early years of the Republic during the
1930s. The municipality would rebuild the barracks true to its original model, and the building would be used as a shopping mall as well as for cultural and recreational purposes. It reflected the AKP’s (read: Erdoğan’s) will to recreate Taksim by reclaiming and reviving its Ottoman past, at the expense of its visible Republican secular formation.
The discontent with the project quickly turned into a public upheaval, with police forces brutally intervening in the demonstrations that took place in the park. Soon after, the protests spread to other squares in İstanbul, and then to other urban areas across the country. What started as a demonstration targeting an urban project quickly became a full-blown, countrywide anti-government protest. As such, it brought together a plurality
120 Interview with Ahmet Misbah Demircan by the author in 2012.
135 of oppositional groups that—while not all in harmony with each other (e.g., Kemalists,
Turkish ultranationalists, Kurdish nationalists and socialists, and Muslim leftists)— shared discontent over the authoritarian tendencies of Erdoğan’s third term in the office.
It would be inaccurate, then, to claim that most Gezi protestors were exclusively concerned about the direction of urban policies. But it would be accurate to say that Gezi events were inherently urban protests reflecting the intersectionality between the political and the urban/public (for more on the origins and implications of Gezi Park Protests see
Karaman 2013 and Kuyumlu 2013). It enabled a new way of thinking about the meaning of citizenship beyond the conventional national definition: the majority of citizens in
Turkey were first and foremost city dwellers. It thus created new openings for the politics and practices of the city dwellers. This inception of an alternative understanding of citizenship within the context of the local, or more specifically the city, resonated with an already-existing base of urban oppositional groups (such as the victims of urban transformation projects, academics, and city planners).121 The Gezi Park protests reflected how politicized metropolitan spaces could become, and the potential the city had for generating grassroots mobilization.
İstanbul’s decade-long journey with urban transformation is far from over. For a city that is more than two millennia old, renewal and development is essential. However, the ends of urban transformation can always be questioned. For more than a decade, urban governance in İstanbul has geared the city’s transformation to the objective of
121 One novel grassroots movement that emerged during the protests was the emergence of “neighborhood forums.” When the demonstrations in Gezi Park were brutally targeted by the police causing deaths and numerous casualties, calls for neighborhood meetings started to spread around the social media. It was a twist in the strategy of the unrest in the face of escalating police violence, but also was a grassroots attempt to create an open forum for deliberation and participation—to be able to politically and ideationally connect on a collective level.
136 becoming a global city that attracts global flows of capital, goods, services, and people.
As the urban façade is becoming more presentable and polished, the urban fabric is re- sown in a way that makes the urban community more segregated and polarized—while perhaps more connected physically through transit, less connected in spirit.
Social Services: “Municipalism with Adjectives”
As discussed early in Chapter 2, “social municipalism”—as it is often called among Turkish political circles—was first practiced by the Islamist RP municipalities in the 1990s. Since then, social services have slowly become an integral component of municipal practice—indeed, to the point that “vote-splitting” (İncioğlu 2002) became a trend in local elections starting mid-1990s. Basically, the voters who would not vote for conservative parties in national elections chose to vote for such parties in local elections primarily because of the scope and quality of municipal service they offer. Therefore, the notion of “service” (hizmet) has been pivotal to the municipal discourse in AKP-led municipalities (and its predecessors in 1990s). While urban sanitation was one of the services that Islamist municipalities became famous for in mid-1990s, the scope of what municipal service means has improved significantly since then. Enhanced social services in terms of quality and repertoire became the usual practice rather than the exception to the rule (such as during elections campaigns) during the 2000s in İstanbul’s metropolitan and district municipalities. As discussed in Chapter 2, the AKP local government reforms institutionalized social services under municipal jurisdictions for the first time. The
AKP’s success in local elections consolidated because of their performance not only in delivering but also in improving the scope of municipal services.
137 The Department of Health and Social Services122 delivers the social services in
İstanbul’s metropolitan municipal organization. Under the category of education, the services delivered include, but are not limited to, continuing education, university entrance exam preparation courses for high school students, supplementary education for low-income family students, and foreign language courses. In particular, İstanbul
Büyükşehir Belediyesi Sanat ve Meslek Eğitimi Kursları (İSMEK, henceforth), founded by then Metropolitan Mayor Erdoğan in 1996 as an arts and crafts center, has grown from giving education in three subjects in three centers to 540 subjects in over 200 centers across the metropolis, with an alumni of over two million. The IMM identifies İSMEK as
“People’s University” and a model for life-long education to the world.123 Under the category of health, the services include health at home, women’s health, lab services, disability services, health centers and clinics, veterinarian services, elderly care, pest control, and anti-smoking campaigns. The free services provided to women for screening breast and cervical cancer through mobile trucks, as well as numerous municipal health centers spread around the metropolitan area, have especially been a great success in
İstanbul. Other health services range from screening for colon cancer to counseling services. These services are free and easily accessible through a three-digit phone number
(153), online services (e-municipality), and in-person applications. The simplified application process in requesting these services has made it easier to reach the targeted— usually disadvantaged—populations (i.e., women, the elderly, people living in poverty, and people with disabilities).
122 IMM Website: http://www.ibb.gov.tr/sites/SaglikVeSosyalHizmetler/Pages/AnaSayfa.aspx 123 İSMEK Website: http://www.İSMEK.ist/tr/kurumsal.aspx
138 One of the main themes that all interviewees mentioned in discussing their approach to municipal practice was increasing the standards of living for the urban population. Mayor Yeniay of Küçükçekmece, who served for two consecutive terms between 2004 and 2014, proudly claimed they “raised the standards” in their district since they came to office and created new “demands”:
We are not satisfied with just the service we produced or with just fulfilling their expectations as per services. We, here, create new demands. For instance, until yesterday, in 2004, this district had no cultural center, theaters, or even a movie theater. But today, this district has the most modern theatres in Turkey. We have approximately 100 arts and culture organizations and there is no municipality that can compete with us at the moment. What I am trying to say is that five years ago people had no expectation regarding theatres or seeing actors. They didn’t have the luxury to ask for plays because there was no theatre. But now we receive criticism over the quality of plays or about the wait time in ticket lines. Well, that’s creating demand. This means raising standards. […] This is our approach to service delivery.124
Mayor Yeniay traced the development of his approach to municipal practice back to
Erdoğan’s time as metropolitan mayor, when he served under him as the president of the metropolitan zoning commission of İstanbul. According to Mayor Yeniay, Erdoğan’s approach meant “catching up with contemporary global urban standards.”125 Incumbent
President Erdoğan’s one-time mayoral term (1994–1998) was indeed a milestone for
İstanbul and for grounding the AKP’s approach to governing cities. Since then, the municipalities, led by the IMM, began to target the objective of bringing İstanbul to
“world standards.” The district municipal slogans such as “360 degrees municipalism” or
“synergic municipalism” pop up as buzzwords to capture the spirit of “We don’t just simply meet the demands, we create demands.” Mayor Yeniay explained that his “360
124 Interview with Aziz Yeniay by the author in 2012. 125 Interview with Aziz Yeniay by the author in 2012.
139 degrees municipalism” was an all-encompassing approach to the everyday life of the urban citizen:
Although it seems slogan-like, it actually is not a slogan. “360 degrees municipalism” is an approach to local government that encompasses all phases of life and meets every expectation. Therefore it is an approach that understands and responds to all our needs and expectations from birth till death, from waking up until going to sleep. Within this framework, we invested in environment, in health, in education, in culture, in sports, in employment and so on. Our objective is not to “play the mayor,” our objective is to serve. This is a visionary approach. This is “total planning.”126
The way municipal authorities explain their approach to “municipal practice” reveals how much they think municipalities can undertake. One notable remark by Erhan Oflaz of Fatih district reflects the deputy mayor’s idea of the potential and political power of municipalities: “Municipalities now can do everything except enact capital punishment and print money!”127 He continued with a typology of municipalism before elaborating on his own approach to municipal practice: (1) minimum municipalism; (2) maximum municipalism; (3) social municipalism; and (4) synergic municipalism. He described minimum municipalism as a municipal practice that delivers only the basic infrastructural services for the urban areas, such as water, sewerage and electricity. Maximum municipalism aims to provide advanced infrastructural services: therefore, not only the quality of roads but also pedestrian walkway standards (such as accessibility for the handicapped and the elderly) is of primary concern in this type of municipal practice.
Social municipalism’s agenda is geared towards delivering social services ranging from education and health to community building. In synergic municipalism—which Deputy
Mayor Oflaz underlined was his approach—the primary aim is to design projects in close collaboration/communication with the urban citizenry and civil society. He argued that
126 Interview with Aziz Yeniay by the author in 2012 127 Belediyeler bir para basamaz, bir de adam asamaz! Interview with Erhan Oflaz by the author in 2012.
140 capturing a synergy with citizens and civil society on municipal projects would increase the sense of ownership of those projects by the citizens, facilitate longevity of the municipal projects, and enhance the reputation of the municipal authorities. The deputy mayor also stressed that their synergic municipalism does not exclude maximum municipalism and social municipalism, but is rather a combination of all types into an advanced form where primary concern is to capture synergy with other urban actors while serving the citizens.128
I call the above accounts “municipalism with adjectives.” This approach to municipalism definitely carries elements from mayors’ worldviews, originating in their political ideologies, as well as from urban entrepreneurialism—along with a claim to reaching all parts of life (“day to night,” “cradle to grave”129). The ideological aspect centers on hizmet (service), a sacred duty and an honorable occupation (serving people is serving God). Hizmet, along with istikrar (stability), has made up the backbone of AKP political discourse since the mid-2000s. The entrepreneurial aspect has connotations of professionalism, which is a blend of experience and skill: experience refers to the legacy of municipal success since the mid-1990s; skill refers to being market-oriented (as opposed to being bureaucratic) and keeping up with global trends. As such, entrepreneurial municipalism in İstanbul’s AKP municipalities reflects the marriage of conservative ideology with market imperatives in urban governance.130
128 Interview with Erhan Oflaz by the author in 2012. 129 References to these phrases were common among the interviewees as well as in the AKP’s symposium on local governments. 130 Unlike its predecessor’s (the RP) anti-capitalist stance and pro-statist economic propositions, the AKP established its ideology on compatibility of Islam and capitalist economy and Western democracy. Thus, the AKP believed in the necessity of integrating with the world economy, whereas the RP was pro- isolationaist. Therefore, the AKP has more similarities to the ANAP (Motherland Party) of the 1980s that implemented neoliberal restructuring of the Turkish economy. For a detailed discussion on the AKP’s approach to market economy, see Atasoy (2009).
141 Conclusion
This chapter showed how the case of İstanbul is the centerpiece of entrepreneurial municipalism in Turkey. İstanbul has undergone unprecedented transformation since
2004. Various factors were at work in this process: the central government designated the metropolis as a national champion, and sponsored its ascension into a world city through various means, including large-scale transit and transportation projects. The political alignment between the central government and the IMM was an important factor in facilitating the city’s rapid transformation. Municipalities on the other hand, both metropolitan and district tiers, demonstrated a market-oriented approach in urban governance and were agile in implementing the local government reforms of the mid-
2000s. Mayors acted like entrepreneurs and managed their organizations like firms. Their priorities were competition, innovation, and efficiency that would make İstanbul more attractive to global flows of capital, business, trade, and visitors. Their approach redefined the relationship between their elected office and the electorate: citizens were conceptualized as customers to be satisfied in the form of better services that increase quality of life. Through various sorts of urban transformation projects, municipalities redefined and reconstructed the metropolitan area in a way to make it more attractive, modern, and safe, with the underlying promise of delivering a higher quality of life. On the other hand, through diversified and improved social services, municipalities acted like welfare distributing agents, addressing the adverse effects of urbanization. However, the city’s quest to become a competitive world city dominated the direction of urban processes in the last decade, and as such created an uneasy tension between efficient governance versus public engagement, and global competitiveness versus public interest.
142
CHAPTER FOUR
İZMİR, THE LAGGED OR OBSTRUCTED METROPOLIS?
Map 2: İzmir Province in Turkey
Map 3: İzmir Metropolitan Municipality and District Municipalities Sources: www.worldatlas.com and www.turkey-visit.com
143 Pearl of the Aegean; City of the Republic; Modern face of Turkey: these are some of the popular portrayals of İzmir, a port city located on the western coast of Turkey, which is the third biggest province of the country with a population of just over 4 million.131 Popular culture is filled with references to its well-groomed women and secular lifestyle at large. One derogatory term for the city, however, is “infidel İzmir,” referring to its Greek majority population during the Ottoman era. In contrast, İzmirians define their city as “Turkey’s window to the West,” or “the most European city in
Turkey.” For the secularists in Turkey, İzmir represents the quintessential republican
Turkey—a city that stayed true to Atatürk’s legacy.
Administratively, İzmir has been classified as a metropolitan city since 1984.
With the changes in law in 2012, the jurisdiction of the metropolitan municipality grew to cover the whole of the province, with a total of 30 districts. The CHP (Republican
People’s Party) has dominated the local governments of İzmir since 1999 and the current metropolitan mayor, Aziz Kocaoğlu, has been the incumbent since 2004, reelected twice.132 In local and general elections alike, İzmir has been the bastion for the CHP since late 1990s.
The case of İzmir provides interesting insights for the purposes of this study for several reasons. First of all, despite being the third biggest metropolitan area in Turkey, it has not been the focus of academic studies dealing with metropolitan governance.
Second, İzmir has been the target of political rivalry between the governing AKP and the
131 İzmir is expected to reach a population of 4.5 million by the year 2023. 132 Aziz Kocaoğlu was elected as a district mayor of Bornova in 2004 local elections. After the sudden death of Ahmet Priştina, the elected metropolitan mayor of İzmir since 1999, following the elections in 2004, the metropolitan council elected Aziz Kocaoğlu to serve as metropolitan mayor. Mayor Kocaoğlu was re-elected as metropolitan mayor in 2009 and 2014 local elections. He has been in office for over ten years at the time of writing.
144 main opposition, the CHP. The main opposition has been governing the city’s municipalities since 1999 (with the exception of a handful of district municipalities switching back and forth between the two parties). As a political party situating itself vis-
à-vis the governing AKP with claims of social democracy, social state, and republicanism, İzmir presents a prolific context for its mayors to showcase alternative solutions to common metropolitan challenges like urban poverty, urban sprawl, local economic development, and participatory governance—to name only a few. Last but not least, İzmir presents an ideal case to consider the effects of the shift to urban entrepreneurialism given the city’s significance for the country as the third biggest metropolis and its potential for economic integration as a port city.133
In what follows, I analyze how the shift to urban entrepreneurialism played itself out in the case of İzmir conditioned by its specific political and institutional context. I argue that intergovernmental relations had a substantial effect in defining the scope of entrepreneurial activity. Heavily imbued by partisan politics and rivalry, the center challenged the legitimacy and performance of metropolitan authority in İzmir in various ways, as the ensuing analysis will show. Despite being an economically promising city,
İzmir was not designated as a national champion like İstanbul. This, however, does not mean that the national government neglected the city as an area of investment: indeed, it sponsored many large-scale transit and transportation projects, targeting İzmir’s connectivity with its hinterland as well as with other metropolitan areas such as Manisa,
Bursa, and İstanbul. The center used these projects to display their commitment to transforming İzmir into a competitive metropolitan city and to indicate their potential performance if they were to takeover the metropolitan authority. On the other hand,
133 The metropolitan province accounts for 6% of GDP in Turkey (TUIK Website).
145 İzmir’s mayors claimed that the central government intentionally delayed or obstructed many of their own projects. The rivalry between the AKP and the CHP thus functioned as a structural discord over İzmir’s governance.
Meanwhile, reflective of the shift to urban entrepreneurialism, İzmir’s mayors and other municipal authorities set their priority as elevating the city’s status to that of a
“world city,” a reputable and competent destination in the Mediterranean basin. Mayors have given primacy to agendas that deliver economic development and foster an
“attractive investment climate” that would make İzmir “more competitive” nationally and globally. This market-oriented municipal agenda has shaped how municipalities understand governance principles like participatory governance as well as how they address issues such as urban transformation. İzmir’s mayors, as self-proclaimed social democrats, experimented with a few alternative policies, for example, ending subcontracting. However, these experimentations revealed the inherent tension between market-oriented imperatives of urban governance and such basic social democratic principles as upholding worker rights. Thus, the competitive and growth-oriented urban agenda in İzmir did not prove to be significantly different than İstanbul. As in İstanbul, mayors in İzmir believe city governance should be approached from a
“professional”/“business-oriented” perspective. As in İstanbul, İzmir mayors believe that branding the city would bring about the economic growth needed to solve the city’s pressing issues.
Intergovernmental Relations: Partisan Rivalry
İzmir Metropolitan Municipality’s relations with the center have been laden with tensions between the governing (AKP) and the main opposition (CHP) parties. Because
146 national political parties are represented at the local level in municipal elections in
Turkey, partisanship affects the relations between central and local governments. İzmir as a province has long been referred to as the stronghold of the republicans; since the mid-
1990s, the province has dominantly elected center-left parties (DSP and CHP) in the general and local elections. Winning over İzmir at the national and local elections has thus been an ongoing ambition of the governing AKP since the early 2000s. For the main opposition party (CHP), promoting İzmir and defending its metropolitan municipality is a constant public relations campaign. Therefore, İzmir has been a constant focus of the center for takeover on the one hand, and a bastion for the opposition party to defend on the other. This tug of war between the two parties marked the character and severity of administrative tutelage.
In this atmosphere, İzmir and the performance of İzmir’s municipalities have been a major topic of disagreement between the two parties, as well as between İzmir’s metropolitan municipality and the central government. Famous for their track record for improving municipalities and municipal services in Turkey, the governing AKP has focused public attention on İzmir’s metropolitan municipalities in various ways—from demeaning statements by the government officials on the city’s status to ongoing municipal inspections, auditing raids, and highly publicized corruption allegations aimed at high-ranking municipal authorities, including the metropolitan mayor. In return,
İzmir’s municipalities and the CHP leaders have claimed that the central government has been highly biased and inconsistent towards their municipalities and others across the country. They argued that the central government’s dealings with İzmir’s municipalities
147 have been far from objective and fair, accusing the center of a campaign to defame their municipalities in order to win over the city in the future elections—national and local.
A statement by then Minister of National Education, Hüseyin Çelik, in December
2010 is a striking example of the central government’s view of İzmir. On an official visit, the minister described the city in the following words:
İzmir is like a car that has brakes in all its four wheels. İzmir is like a cherubic child but with a runny nose and dirty clothes. […] Nobody can deny what the central government did in İzmir. İzmir is like Turkey’s index, a city of industry, agriculture and tourism. İzmir does not deserve being in this situation despite having this much potential.134
The minister then compared İzmir unfavorably to the metropolitan cities of Konya and
Kayseri, which were under AKP municipal rule and popularly known as “Anatolian
Tigers,” referring to their remarkable economic growth and thriving performance in commercial and industrial sectors. The minister’s controversial statement was highly publicized in the national media, generating much public discussion on the status of İzmir as a metropolitan city, particularly whether the fact it was not living up to its potential could be blamed on the metropolitan authority or the center’s bias against the local government. The minister’s above comments thus represent the gist of the tension between the central government and İzmir metropolitan municipality over the years.
In response to the above criticisms of a “lagging metropolis,” Metropolitan Mayor
Aziz Kocaoğlu had two main arguments/complaints: the first concerned the approval process of municipal projects at the ministerial level (in particular the urban transformation projects) and the second referred to relations between the metropolitan municipality and the provincial governorate. Regarding the former, Kocaoğlu argued that
134 “İzmir dört tekerine fren takılmış araba gibi. Burnu akmış, kir pas içinde bir çocuk gibi,” Cumhuriyet, December 23, 2010.
148 the central government was inconsistent and incoherent in its practices with the municipality:
Our national government, the AKP, is composed of very different structures. You go to one ministry, you solve your problem, even a very difficult one. But you go to another, they don’t even listen to you. I request a treasury land for a cemetery. They don’t give it to you. What can we do? […] Yes they do approve many things but at the same time I have had nine outstanding files on urban transformation stuck at the ministry for over 15 months with no approval yet.135
Other municipal officials complained along similar lines that the central government was slowing down the approval process for the projects presented by İzmir municipalities.
Furthermore, the center was also reluctant to financially support their projects, while acting much more collaboratively with the AKP municipalities in other cities.136
The central government rejected these claims. The then Prime Minister Ahmet
Davutoglu, in one of his visits to the city, stated that the metropolitan mayor never communicated demands for a specific project, investment, or financial support from his office. He asserted that the central government, far from neglecting İzmir, had
“expectations of the local governments to be more dynamic.” He continued that it was the central government “that produced grand projects for İzmir such as Çandarlı Port, and
Konak Tunnel projects as well as the İzmir-İstanbul expressway and the İzmir-Ankara rapid train.”137 Indeed, while campaigning for a third term in office in early 2011, then
Prime Minister Erdoğan proclaimed his “mad projects” for İzmir with great pride and commitment. He explained that the objectives of the Çandarlı Port project and the
Northern Aegean Port were to transform İzmir into one of Turkey’s most important logistical headquarters. The Sabuncubeli Tunnel, located between İzmir and Manisa,
135 Interview with Aziz Kocaoğlu by the author in 2012. 136 Interview with Konak Deputy Mayor and Balçova Mayor in 2011. 137 “Ne istedi de vermedik,” Yeni Asır, October 25, 2015.
149 would not only significantly decrease travel times from İzmir to southern metro regions but also make travelling much safer on an otherwise highly dangerous and winding highway. Moreover, the IZKARAY project, an underwater tunnel across İzmir’s Bay, would decrease the travel distance between the north and south of the metropolitan region from 35 kilometers to ten kilometers. According to Erdoğan, these projects, along with other transit and transportation projects, would realize İzmir’s potential and help turn the otherwise “neglected city” into a “globally known brand city.”138
With regard to the governorate level, the metropolitan mayor argued that the
İzmir governorate obstructed many of the metropolitan council decisions on urban planning and transformation by taking the council decisions to court.139 He stated that by late 2015, the number of lawsuits in İzmir surpassed 170, while during the same timeframe the number was three in Ankara and one in İstanbul. He described this as a
“problem of politicizing the application,”140 referring to the partisan bias in procedural applications of intergovernmental relations. Balçova District Mayor Mehmet Ali Çalkaya described this practice as follows: “Normally, governors [vali] and district governors
[kaymakam] have to be the governors of the State [referring to the organization that governs the whole country]; now the system is such that they are the governors of the
138 http://www.ntv.com.tr/turkiye/İzmir-ve-Diyarbakıra-cilgin-projeler,cK0wqOt9bkWS1b4vqATqYQ 139 As discussed in detail in Chapter 2, the central government appoints a governor for each province to represent the state at the provincial level. Constitutionally, governors, known as vali in Turkish, are considered the administrative chief (mülki âmir) of provinces. Until the reforms of mid-2000s, every municipal council decision had to be approved by the governor to be finalized and implemented. The reforms changed the approval clause and required the municipalities to send the municipal council decisions to the governorate to “inform” the governor. Any decision that is not sent to the governor cannot be implemented. The governor, though, still has the authority to carry council decisions to the judiciary if s/he sees it as against the law. 140 “Kocaoğlu’nun dava isyani,” Hürriyet, November 7, 2015.
150 government [referring to AKP partisan bias]. Therefore, they could pressure you or obstruct you.”141
Relations between the central government and the metropolitan municipality were bitter for yet another reason, namely, corruption allegations against the metropolitan mayor and 129 other public officials for rigging municipal bids and forming a crime organization. The process started with a highly publicized police raid on the metropolitan municipality in May 2011 and continued over five years through 25 trials dealing with the corruption lawsuit. The proponents of Metropolitan Mayor Kocaoğlu and the CHP interpreted the lawsuit as part of the defamation campaign that the central government waged against İzmir’s Republican municipalities. The vexing relations between İzmir
Metropolitan Municipality and the central government therefore emanated mainly from partisan politics and the rivalry between the two parties over the city, which in turn determined how the administrative tutelage of the center was practiced. Accordingly, criticism of decentralization in Turkey, or the lack thereof, was common in the mayor’s accounts, as I will discuss below.
Mayors of İzmir were in unison in their skepticism of the center’s willingness to devolve more power to local governments in Turkey. They all argued that national governments, irrespective of their political partisanship, were never eager to give up on their power over local governments. Metropolitan Mayor Kocaoğlu argued that governments in Turkey never really mean their “sweet talk” on decentralization:
In countries like ours, there is always this talk that “we are decentralizing,” in the old phrase adem-i merkeziyetcilik, that is, giving initiative and authority to the local. And everybody loves to hear it. But no government would like to give authority to the local. They pass down the responsibilities, but no real power to
141 Interview with Mehmet Ali Çalkaya in 2011.
151 take initiatives. They do not want to lose that power. The governments see that as sine qua non of being in power.142
Likewise, the Balçova district mayor explained that the political culture in Turkey always empowered the center, not the local.143 Within this skepticism, the mayors of İzmir emphasized that the decentralization reforms of post-1980s were inadequate. The
Balçova mayor, who had been a Marxist political activist in the late 1970s, interpreted the decentralization reforms in the post-1980 period as follows:
Infrastructural services like road, water, and sewerage were always among the constitutive duties of municipalities. It was like that before September 12 [referring to the coup in 1980]. It is like that now. We are obligated to do those things. In my opinion, in the post-1980s, because of the rapid move away from social state policies, municipalities have been handed another function, which is to replace the social state functions in urban areas. Because in the budget I use, I have to take care of people who are seriously affected by these general policies. I have to support education substantially, and the same goes for health and security, because they make up the essential pillars of the social state.144
Mayors were also critical of level of fiscal decentralization in Turkey. As discussed in Chapter 2, the AKP’s local-government reforms institutionalized municipal social services for the first time as part of municipal duties and functions starting from the mid-2000s. Mayors that I interviewed in three cities were all proud of the social services they provided for their electorate. They take those services very seriously, and engage actively in public relations campaigns to promote them. However, the mayors in
İzmir argued that despite this jettisoning of social services from the central government to municipal governments, the reforms fell short at the level of fiscal decentralization. In their view, administrative decentralization without fiscal decentralization increased the burden on local governments: “When you give duties, you need to provide the resources
142 Interview with Aziz Kocaoğlu by the author in 2012. 143 Interview with Mehmet Ali Çalkaya by the author in 2011. 144 Interview with Aziz Kocaoğlu by the author in 2012.
152 along with them. That is, you need to give authority over how to allocate those resources from that city. The center could give other powers to local governments, such as taxing power. If you give me a duty, you also need to provide the support for that.”145 A municipal authority from Konak, one of the central districts at the heart of İzmir, was also frustrated that fiscal revenues were calculated by the center according to the settled population of the district during winter:
Konak has a population of 500,000; however, during the summer days the district population increases to 1.5 million. This is the heart of İzmir, but the allowance is calculated according to 500,000. This is the difficulty in all shore cities. They calculate according to the winter population, but during the summer we experience hardship. Taxing power lies with the central government in Turkey; however, this city has to give its taxes to this city and spend its taxes in this city. But the opposite is the case in Turkey. Who will be accountable to the citizen: The municipality or Ankara?146
According to the Balçova mayor, fiscal decentralization was essential for bottom-up development. Reflecting on the controversial Kurdish self-government/autonomy
(ozerklik) discussions at the time,147 he argued that political self-government was meaningless without economic (fiscal) autonomy. Although he strongly defended empowering local governments in principle, he argued that it was not the answer to the
Kurdish question, because in his view, the area was entrenched with feudal land relations with no contribution to the national economy. However, in the case of İzmir—“which pays 26 billion in taxes to the center only to get 5 billion back”—fiscal autonomy was, in his opinion, the answer for bottom-up development.148
Last but not least, as a critique of decentralization (or the lack thereof) mayors interpreted the emergence of new institutions concerning local governance, such as TOKİ
145 Interview with Aziz Kocaoğlu by the author in 2012. 146 Interview with anonymous municipal officer by the author in 2011. 147 See Chapter 5 for a discussion of Kurdish proposal for “democratic autonomy.” 148 Interview with Mehmet Ali Çalkaya by the author in 2011.
153 and the Ministry of Environment and Urbanization, as new tools of the center to bypass the authority of local governments on the ground and to further “politicize” the system of intergovernmental relations.
In sum, the mayors’ evaluation of decentralization reforms in particular and
Turkey’s decentralization agenda in general focused on criticism of the center’s partisan treatment of municipalities, skepticism of any national government in its sincerity to further reforms, and incommensurability of administrative and fiscal reforms. In particular, the mayors’ emphases on the necessity of fiscal empowerment for development is an important indicator of how much decentralization—as a governance concept—was internalized by local governments, a significant move away from the centralist tendencies of local elected authorities in previous periods (as documented by
Ergüder 1987 and Kalaycıoğlu 1989).
Despite the fact that the majority of district municipalities have been under CHP rule in İzmir—hence the presumed alignment with the metropolitan municipality along party lines—the relations of the district and metropolitan municipalities were not free from tensions, reflected in disagreements over urban governance. In my interviews with officials in İzmir’s district municipalities, the rise of metropolitan authority as a locally centralized power was a common theme. Balçova Mayor Çalkaya reflected on this dual municipal system as follows:
I mean, municipalities like mine [district level] actually are like a regional director of the metropolitan municipality. The only difference between the secretary-general of the metropolitan municipality and myself is that I have a car with flags. That’s the only cool thing. I am serious! I mean, every resolution that Balçova municipality takes has to be approved by the metropolitan municipality. I am finished if my budget is not approved! There is a center at the local as well. In
154 Turkey, big powers never share that power. That’s why democracy and development is deficient in Turkey.149
Bornova district Mayor Kamil Okyay Sındır, along with a municipal official150 from Konak district, revealed considerable frustration over this two-tiered structure because of the jurisdictional confusion and collision it created between two levels. As the
Bornova mayor explained:
I have no jurisdiction on the infrastructure, water, sewerage, natural gas, electricity, etc. I mean I cannot go underground in my own district! When citizens have a problem or complaint about these services in my district, they come to me and see me as the source of the problem. They say, “The mayor doesn’t do anything to solve this.” However, I have zero jurisdiction over water and sewerage; they are completely under the metropolitan municipality. This is a big issue here and in all metropolitan cities. Unfortunately, we pay the price for it.151
He stated that the metropolitan municipality rejected his requests to renew the main square or to build a new municipal complex in his district. In İzmir, district municipalities stressed that they were at the “mercy of the metropolitan municipality” and it was up to the latter’s own agenda and priorities to attend to these requests in a timely manner.
The Bornova mayor’s frustration over this system was exacerbated because of intra-party politics. He argued that being from the same political party was ironically working against his district’s interests, as he had to refrain from criticizing the metropolitan municipality in order to avoid harming the party’s and metropolitan mayor’s reputation. He said, “Even when you pose your fair criticism not to the persona of the metropolitan mayor but to the bureaucrats of the metropolitan municipality, this is still interpreted as a crime against the party and therefore you end up harming the party in
149 Interview with Mehmet Ali Çalkaya by the author in 2011. 150 Interviewee requested anonymity. 151 Interview with Kamil Okyay Sındır by the author in 2011.
155 front of public opinion. This is our distress in İzmir.”152 Despite all this, the mayor of
Bornova declared that he and seven other district mayors of İzmir had been meeting privately to discuss and work on a file of recommendations and demands that they plan to present to the metropolitan mayor. “We, the district municipalities of Çiğli, Karşıyaka,
Bayraklı, Bornova, Konak, Buca, Karabağlar, and Menderes, serve a total population of three million. We, the mayors, have been working on a report to take to the metropolitan municipality. Because we say ‘Enough!’”153 In August 2011, the above-mentioned district mayors requested an appointment with Metropolitan Mayor Kocaoğlu, which was rejected. The media publicized this as a “crisis” in İzmir and within the CHP.154 District mayors attempt to deal with public frustrations over unresolved infrastructural issues by raising awareness about the realms of jurisdiction through their own publications.
Columns titled, for example, “Who has jurisdiction in municipalities?” aimed to communicate the message to the public that they needed to appeal to the metropolitan municipality for most urban infrastructural services.155
In sum, with regard to metropolitan governance in İzmir, party alignment between the metropolitan and district levels does not necessarily translate into more harmonious intergovernmental relations. The strong mayor–weak council model reinforces the metropolitan municipality at the expense of lower-tier municipalities, and partisanship does not ease the consolidated authority of the upper tier. Although the metropolitan mayor Kocaoğlu emphasized the importance of decentralization in local governments, he failed to practice what he preached when it came to metropolitan–district relations.
152 Interview with Kamil Okyay Sındır by the author in 2011. 153 Interview with Kamil Okyay Sındır by the author in 2011. 154 “CHP İzmir’de karıştı!,” Radikal, August 15, 2011, 155 For an example see Konak Municipality Newspaper dated Nisan 2011, column entitled “Belediyelerde yetki kimde?,” p. 6.
156 Market-Oriented Turn in Urban Governance
I argue that the paradigm shift in governance that took place with the 2004 reforms and beyond was pivotal in the institutionalization of entrepreneurial municipalism in Turkey. In İzmir’s CHP-run municipalities, mayors repeatedly claimed that they practice what they called “social democratic municipalism.” They used this notion to differentiate themselves ideologically from the AKP and its policies. In what follows, I will show how mayors in İzmir understand and implement this paradigm shift and amalgamate it with their claim to social democracy. I will discuss the three main components of a new market-oriented approach to metropolitan governance in İzmir: (1) an efficient municipality, (2) a competitive city, and (3) participating citizens. In the discussion, I will explore how mayors interpret the principles of efficiency, competitiveness, and participatory governance and put them into play in governing İzmir.
Municipal Effectiveness and Efficiency
Mayors in İzmir described their municipal practice in reference to what they call
“social democratic municipalism” (sosyal demokrat belediyecilik). When asked what social democratic municipalism means, Mayor Kamil Okyay Sındır of the Bornova district stated, “If you are a social democratic party, you have to put forward social democratic municipalism. That is to say, to be more on the part of labor—of course without excluding capital—but supporting the rights of workers.”156 Mayor Sındır wanted to underline that being on the side of labor should not mean excluding capital. This intentional emphasis was the line he wanted to draw between being pro–worker’s rights
156 Interview with Kamil Okyay Sındır by the author in 2011.
157 and being anti-capitalist.157 Metropolitan Mayor Aziz Kocaoğlu defined social democratic municipalism as “being fair towards people” and he gave an example of how this approach translated into municipal policies:
Moreover, [social democratic municipalism means] to support those groups that need to be supported. I will give an example: I abolished the practice of subcontracting in the municipality. I don’t have subcontracted workers in my municipality. Everywhere else in Turkey, subcontracting is on the rise. Who is a subcontractor? A guy with no vehicle, nothing, only a cell phone, and that’s his company. I need 100 people. He enters the bidding with 100 people. What does he do? He is trading men. In other words, this is slavery! And everybody [meaning municipalities] in Turkey is increasingly practicing this. But I, in contrast, end this practice and as such I set an example in Turkey.158
Metropolitan mayor Kocaoğlu thus uses the notion social democratic municipalism to ideologically distance himself from mainstream (read: neoliberal, the AKP) municipal policies such as outsourcing and subcontracting. After his first term in the office, he publicly declared that he no longer had subcontracted laborers doing municipal assignments, and that he had hired 2,500 previously subcontracted workers as full-time municipal workers with benefits. However, in a later regional meeting of municipalities, he publicly declared that he regretted his decision to hire those workers because of the high wages the syndicate was demanding:
I am against subcontracting; but what is holding me back, what is fettering me, is the syndicate. I took all those workers but I regret it now! The reason is the wages. There cannot be six times difference between two people doing the same work. As we set a minimum, there should also be a maximum. There has to be a legal framework for this. Yes, subcontracting is going back to first ages [meaning before civilization] and there should not be such a practice. But it is extremely challenging for municipalities to recover from the burden of personnel expenses. Municipalities should not be abused as an employment farm.159
157 Mayors also define social democractic municipalism in relation to delivering social services for the disadvantaged and aiming for building a sustainable and livable urban space. I will elaborate on this later in the chapter. 158 Interview with Aziz Kocaoğlu by the author in 2012. 159 “Taşeron firma demek ilk çağa gitmek demek,” Yeni Asır, March 11, 2010.
158 The metropolitan mayor’s reprimand reveals the challenges he faces in finding a balance between municipal budgets and worker rights. The mayor is frustrated over being
“punished” (fettered) for his noble action of standing up for workers’ rights.160 As the discussion below will also demonstrate, social democratic municipalism in İzmir does not in actuality mean a disowning of market-oriented approaches to urban governance.
Because of this, social democratic municipalism seems nothing more than amalgamated notions of center-left practices in a market-oriented institution.
As discussed in Chapter 2, the Law on Public Finance Management and
Control161 radically changed the way public institutions are run in Turkey. The law was part of the reform package during the EU accession period and introduced the “new public management” approach to public institutions. The objective of the law was “to ensure effective, economic, and efficient control and use of public resources” in public institutions. To achieve this, the law introduced financial transparency (mali saydamlık), accountability (hesap verme sorumluluğu), and strategic planning and performance-based budgeting (stratejik planlama ve performans esaslı bütçeleme) as the basic principles in the management and use of public resources.162
The introduction of new language and principles of public financial management clearly meant that the old way of doing things was over in municipalities. Municipalities had to undergo a reform within their organizations to adjust to the new system of public finance—with serious organizational and budgetary implications. In this new system,
160 It should be noted that district mayors in İzmir did not end the practice of subcontracting altogether. 161 Law #5018 (Kamu Mali Yönetimi ve Kontrolü Kanunu) was ratified in December 2003 and entered into effect in January 2006. It required two years of preparation to adjust the old system and put the law into effect. The previous law that organized the public finances was Law #1050 (Muhasebe-i Umumiye) that dated back to 1927 and underwent only a few changes over the years until the new law. (kontrol.bumko.gov.tr) 162 Translated from www.mevzuat.gov.tr/MevzuatMetin/1.5.5018
159 “strategic plans” were mandated as pivotal documents guiding municipal actions and multi-year budgetary spending. When the new law came into effect in 2006, municipalities across Turkey had to compose and publish their first-ever strategic plans within that same year. Currently, the İzmir Metropolitan Municipality has published three strategic plans for İzmir covering the periods 2006–2017, 2010–2017, and 2015–2019.
Heavily influenced by business terminology, these lengthy strategic plans include municipal mission and vision statements; municipal principles; situation analyses; SWOT analyses for the municipality as an institution as well as for each designated municipal sector; and stakeholder analyses. Municipalities designate strategic sectors that will be targeted through projects and activities. Municipal objectives and goals in each strategic sector are substantiated by performance measuring criteria that could also be quantified in budgetary terms for a multi-year period.
Prepared to ensure accord with five-year national development plans as well as regional development plans, strategic plans have gone beyond a legal obligation for municipalities since 2006. The preparation process, which is required to be participatory, came to be seen as an opportunity to start a dialogue among municipalities and other actors in local governance—public institutions, universities, civil society organizations, and the private sector. These documents also initiate organizational restructuring of municipalities in line with the new principles of efficiency and effectiveness, influencing the management of municipal personnel: for example, the wave of retirements and the hiring of new employees competent in modern office technologies; educational workshops for employees; and so on.
160 İzmir Metropolitan Municipality’s strategic plans over the course of a decade indicated increasing comfort with management techniques and terminologies. The lengthy municipal mission and vision statements of the first plan were revised to shorter ones. Strategies for each municipal sector were based on more thorough SWOT and stakeholder analyses. While the initial plan did not have a bibliography, later plans had lengthy one, including strategic plans not only of other metropolitan cities in Turkey, but also of cities such as Barcelona, Salonika, Athens, London, and Paris—hinting at where the İzmir Metropolitan Municipality aspired to situate the city.
The new public finance management and control system emphasized efficient and effective use of resources, raising the notion of “financial credibility” as a measure for success in municipalities—in the eyes of the center as well as the public. Metropolitan
Mayor Kocaoğlu, at the very beginning of our interview, wanted to clarify how well they were doing as an institution financially: “We had debts. We cleared them all. We had a significant amount of overdue debts to the Treasury; we dealt with them. Now as an institution, we have our feet on the ground with high credibility while trying to solve the city’s infrastructural problems for eight years. We have come a long way.”163
Besides strategic plans and progress reports, columns were published in the municipal newspapers164 and bulletins on municipal budgetary efficiency and credibility.
One such news column read as follows:
The İzmir Metropolitan Municipality has been found outstanding compared to all municipalities especially with respect to its “debt-free municipalism” applications. İzmir Metropolitan Municipality’s international reputation has been further solidified in 2011 by credit rating agencies such as Moody’s and Fitch Ratings with rating AA that represents performance, stability, and credibility in
163 Interview with Aziz Kocaoğlu by the author in 2012. 164 Municipal newspapers are monthly publications by municipalities covering their agenda, ongoing projects and policies. They are distributed freely within municipal jurisdictions.
161 financial management. Its credibility grade has increased by two points. One of the reasons for that was the absence of any overdue debts to the Treasury.165
The İzmir Metropolitan Municipality, in particular, has been working with Moody’s and
Fitch Ratings since 2008.166 District municipalities of İzmir have also been working with credit rating agencies.167 Indeed, the financial credibility of municipalities measured by international credit rating agencies has become an important institutional asset within a world of fund-seeking, credit-hunting, and project-pursuing municipalities. Especially because municipal financial resources are scarce, with demands outweighing revenues, a good credit rating opens doors to international lending agencies and ensures that the state treasury’s guarantorship will unlock those potential loans.
Financial performance in terms of credibility, manageable borrowing, and raising revenue has close links to productivity in terms of project making. Expertise in generating projects that would draw funding from international organizations such as the
EU, World Bank, and UN, or attract investments from public or private sectors, became another measure for institutional efficiency for municipalities in Turkey. Therefore, mayors made a conscious effort to promote brainstorming within municipal offices and to create incentives for employees in order to increase efficiency in generating new projects.
This is a huge departure from the previous bureaucratic mindset, which expects only the procedural minimum from appointed public officers.
One such effort to incentivize municipal officers to generate innovative projects came from the mayor of Konak in the form of a competition among the directorates of the municipality, with the grand prize of a car for the winner. The second and third prizes
165 “İzmir Metropolitan is the most credible municipality,” İzmir Metropolitan Municipality Newspaper, June 2011. 166 İzmir Metropolitan Municipality Strategic Plan 2015-2019, p. 58. 167 Bornova District Municipality Newspaper, July 2011, p. 5.
162 were an LCD television and a laptop, respectively. The municipal newspaper announced the competition in the following words:
Konak Municipality held a competition that was unprecedented among the public institutions in Turkey. The “innovative projects” competition aimed to increase institutional efficiency, provide cultural and social production, and personal motivation. Slogans of the competition were “Now is the time for your ideas” and “Show yourself.”168
Carrying out projects in collaboration with the EU and UN require a great deal of knowledge, expertise, and networking on the part of municipalities. Internationally funded and promoted projects also transfer new repertoire of practices and terminology to municipalities. In most cases, projects turn into practices, which might in time turn into policies.169
Mayors, as heads of their institutions, are an integral part of this multileveled governance world. And as such, they are expected to be up-to-date with trending projects in international institutions and other local governments. They are also expected to have good public relations to sustain the image of a productive municipality. In other words, they are expected to be leaders of a competent team that can manage it all—from project writing to public relations campaigning.
The mayors in İzmir I interviewed were aware of this pressure. According to
Mayor Sındır, of Bornova, a mayor had to “act like a strategist” and have duties such as observing and supervising the efficiency of the personnel, and deciding on reassignments
168 “Konak’ta yenilikci projeler yarisacak,” Konak Municipal Newspaper, March 2010. 169 A couple of examples on such projects: a European Commission funded project to increase sustainability in urban transportation through integrating bicycle roads. Projects included exchange programs for municipal officers to attend a training program in Bremen, Germany. Another EU-funded project built partnership across municipalities of İzmir, Lisbon, and Bologna regarding urban museum development. Another example of an EU-funded municipal project was training professionals to give psychiatric support to female and children victims of domestic abuse (Source: İzmir Metropolitan Municipality Website, Completed Projects).
163 when needed.170 He also proudly mentioned that his municipality was awarded “the most productive municipality” by the Association of Local Administrations in Turkey.171 The mayor of Balçova, Mehmet Ali Çalkaya, emphasized how he revolutionized seating arrangements within municipal offices by bringing in an “open bank order,” where all employees have visible access to one another without separators.172 Proud of his experience as an executive in the tourism sector for many years prior to his incumbency,
Mayor Çalkaya argued that it is his “professional approach to governing” that enables him to “sell what he does.” He explained: “I have experience from my business life. I know teamwork well. I have a good team. It is not enough to produce. You need to create buyers for what you produce. Politics is just like that too.”173 The words of both mayors indicate what these men understand from managing a municipality. In their view, neither the administrative nor the political aspect of their municipal posts overwhelms the need to manage the municipality professionally. Professionalism, according to them, is not just about delivering services. Professionalism includes thinking like a strategist, hiring competent personnel, and having a good public relations campaign.
Quest for Branding İzmir as a World City
As I discussed earlier, urban competition lies at the heart of entrepreneurial municipalism. One of the results of a competitive-oriented municipal approach is city branding: cities need to be positioned strategically among a sea of competing brand- cities, not only nationwide but also worldwide. Mayors in Turkey know that competition is real and that branding is the answer to having a chance in that competition. Indeed, it
170 Interview with Kamil Okyay Sındır by the author in 2011. 171 Interview with Kamil Okyay Sındır by the author in 2011. 172 Interview with Mehmet Ali Çalkaya by the author in 2011. 173 Interview with Mehmet Ali Çalkaya by the author in 2011.
164 was the AKP that initiated branding as a strategy in urban governance in Turkey. One of central government’s goal for 100th anniversary of the Republic, as noted above, is to make every city in Turkey a brand city. The concept of “brand city” in fact has become a campaign slogan in national as well as local elections.174 Despite the criticism of the CHP
(the main opposition) of the AKP’s “neoliberal” approach to governance, the CHP municipalities did not problematize city branding.
However, branding does not come easy. First, an “educated” decision needs to be made regarding how the city will be positioned. The notion of “world city” seems to be the most desirable status for many metropolitan cities in Turkey, including İzmir.175
Metropolitan Mayor Kocaoğlu, in fact, claimed that İzmir had “an exceptional place among world cities.”176 But what kind of a world city was İzmir? What was unique about
İzmir? How could İzmir become a brand that is recognized worldwide?
The metropolitan municipality of İzmir was a latecomer to the branding journey compared to İstanbul. The first strategic plan in 2006 included no notion of “brand city” or branding, and the second one, published in 2010, mentioned the term only once under tourism sector. However, in the third plan, published in 2015, the term was mentioned six times: in the institutional SWOT analysis as a weakness (branding in tourism); the external stakeholders’ SWOT analysis as an opportunity (making İzmir a brand); the tourism sector SWOT analysis as a weakness (branding in tourism and lack of publicity); and the discussions of urban planning and local economy.177 Indeed this delay or failure
174 One recent example is the case of the 2015 snap national elections, Binali Yildirim, AKP’s MP candidate from İzmir promised to “build brand city İzmir together with the people” (“Marka kent İzmir'i birlikte kuracağız,” Sabah, October 18, 2015). 175 See İzmir Metropolitan Municipality Strategic Plan 2015-2019, p. 13, on “dünya kenti olmak,” and p. 185, on “önemli dünya kenti,” as examples among many others. 176 Strategic Plan 2015-2019, Foreword 177 İzmir Metropolitan Municipality Strategic Plan, 2015-2019, pp. 135-137, 185-186
165 of efficient branding of İzmir was a main criticism that the central government leveled against İzmir’s municipal authorities.
The İzmir Metropolitan Municipality’s first substantive attempt at branding strategies was the İzmir Cultural Workshop in October 2009. The main subject of the workshop was “How do we make a brand out of İzmir?”—with the main objective defined as “making İzmir a World City.” The municipality invited several local stakeholders to brainstorm about the city’s future and potential for branding. The municipality’s aim was for the workshop to be the very “first step within a participatory cultural mobilization project towards making İzmir a Culture, Arts, and Design
Metropolis once again.” Several references to İzmir’s “Mediterranean identity” and its potential to be a destination for culture and arts in the Mediterranean region were the main highlights of this workshop.178
It is interesting to note that city-branding discussions first focus on establishing an
“urban identity” and creating an “urban awareness.” Forming an urban identity is all about reimagining the past, rediscovering the multiple histories of the urban space selectively, and inventing traditions for today. City branding, in this sense, is engineering at its best. Just like any brand in the consumer sector, brand-cities (the actual spaces) and city-brands (derivative commodities, from t-shirts to food) should make you feel a certain way and offer a certain lifestyle. Building urban identity, therefore, seems to be the foundation of any urban-branding strategy.179
178 İzmir Elele Website. 179 As mentioned in the opening section of this chapter, popular culture in Turkey describes İzmir as the city of the Republic, pearl of the Aegean, and frequently refers to its well-groomed women and secular lifestyle at large. One derogatory term for İzmir in popular culture, however, is “infidel İzmir,” referring to its Greek majority population during the Ottoman era. On the other hand, İzmirians define their city as “Turkey’s window to the West,” “Turkey’s modern face,” or “the most European city in Turkey.” For such
166 Besides the İzmir Cultural Workshop (2009), a series of brainstorming events were held to find the right marketing strategy for İzmir: the İzmir Design Forum (2011) and the Brand City İzmir Symposium (2014) being the most important. All of these were spearheaded by the metropolitan municipality with collaborations from local stakeholders—universities, trade associations, and civil society organizations. As a result,
“Mediterraneanness” emerged as the most globally marketable identity for İzmir.180 This concept seemed to provide a more global appeal, serving as an overarching term for everything İzmir was aspiring to be known for: the cradle of civilizations, its ancient
Greek heritage, the birthplace of democracy, creative arts, and design, and a free and laid- back lifestyle.
Once an urban identity is determined, what follows is to establish and market it within the relevant sectors, which, in İzmir’s case, were mainly tourism, arts, and design.
The metropolitan municipality and local stakeholders believed that tourism—in particular cultural and historical tourism—was the best sector to establish İzmir as a brand with its
Mediterranean identity.181 Re-presenting Homer,182 for instance, “as the most famous
İzmirian who wrote the great ancient epic Iliad” was a central theme of this cultural campaign. There were recurring debates over building a grand Homer statue on the hills
uses see İzmir Metropolitan Municipality Strategic Plan 2015–2019, pp. 47-48; and also interviews with Konak and Bornova municipal authorities. 180 See the discussions during the İzmir Cultural Workshop (2009), the İzmir Design Forum (2011), and the Brand City İzmir Symposium (2014), as well as documents such as İzmir Metropolitan Municipality’s 2015–2019 Strategic Plan and İzmir Development Agency’s Regional Plan for 2014–2023. 181 For audiovisual references, see promotional videos by İzmir Development Agency entitled İzmir: Pioneers’ City (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbCw2PbfxJo) and İzmir: A Mediterranean Legend (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTtEZGbzUqI). Also see 2015 promotional video by the İzmir Chamber of Commerce entitled İzmir Livable City (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHgqoL_MHFc) 182 The strategic plan of 2015–2019, as opposed to the previous ones, begins with a page of quotations from historical figures about İzmir, including Herodotus, Aristotle, Homer, and Victor Hugo, besides Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, whose words appear in all of strategic plans.
167 of Kadifekale183 that could be visible from all of İzmir. Tourism experts also recommended refinishing the facades of downtown streets, which had been completely destroyed in the big fire of 1922, with Levantine adornments as a tribute to the Greek urban past in the Ottoman era.184 UNESCO’s approval for the Ancient City Ephesus, located in the Selcuk district of İzmir, along with Bergama as cultural heritage sites in
2015 was much publicized, contributing to İzmir’s brand positioning as “the heir of ancient Mediterranean civilizations for 8500 years.” The metropolitan municipality applied for Foça and Çandarlı fortresses to be certified as a UNESCO cultural heritage as well in 2015.
Other attempts to fire up İzmir’s cultural and historical appeal included founding
“boutique museums”; revitalizing downtown historical street-bazaars; and signing sister- city agreements with cities abroad that would generate international publicity and cultural collaborations.185 The mayor of Konak argued that boutique museums in his district (e.g.,
Dolls and Toys Museum, Mask Museum, Press Museum, Women’s Museum, and City
Museum) were major contributions to making İzmir a “cultural capital.”186 Revitalized street bazaars (such as Kemeraltı and Alsancak Sevgi Yolu) were publicized as “being no different from their European counterparts.”187
Regarding arts and design sectors, the İzmir Metropolitan Municipality chose to invigorate the city’s declining exhibition tradition. The İzmir International Exhibition
183 It should be noted that Kadifekale was also home to one of biggest urban transformation projects that the metropolitan municipaity undertook in İzmir. Kadifekale is situated on a hill overlooking Aegean sea and became an inner-city slum (a gecekondu neighborhood) during the 1990s as a result of migration from Eastern Turkey due to armed conflict between Turkish security forces and Kurdish militants. 184 The Big Fire took place in the immediate days following the independence of the city from Greek and British invasion in September 1922. The origin of the fire has been a controversial topic in the history of the city. 185 İzmir Metropolitan Municipality Strategic Plan 2015-2019, pp. 185-186 186 Konak Municipal Newspaper, March 2010 187 Konak Municipal Newspaper, October 2010
168 (popularly known as İzmir Fuarı or Fuar) dates back to the establishment of the Republic
(1923) and has been hosting international exhibitions of arts, crafts, and concerts every
September since the late 1930s, under a different theme each year.188 The exhibition site is also used for trade exhibits, concerts, congresses, and recreational activities throughout the remainder of the year. The Exhibition’s popularity as a center of attraction, locally and nationally, seemed to dwindle in the late 1980s. The İzmir Metropolitan Municipality thus undertook a grand project (2013–2015) to build a cutting-edge complex to host international exhibitions. FUARİZMİR, as this complex is called today, was built on
337,000 square meters of land in the Gaziemir district and constitutes the largest complex for exhibitions in Turkey. Mayor Kocaoğlu defended the cost of this project (450 million
TL [173 million USD]), claiming it would make İzmir a world brand in the arts, exhibitions, design, and innovation.189 This modern take on an old republican legacy, with its unprecedented grandiosity, was one of İzmir’s strengths in the city’s candidacy for EXPO 2015 and 2020. Although both attempts were unsuccessful (the city lost to
Milan for 2015 and Dubai for 2020), the candidacy created much hype nationwide and publicity abroad.190
Another notable big budget project of the metropolitan municipality aiming to establish İzmir as an international brand in the arts is the Ahmed Adnan Saygun Center for Arts, designed by the same firm that designed the Sydney Opera House and the Royal
Opera House in London. The center is said to be the highest quality center for arts in
Turkey with respect to technique and acoustics. The metropolitan municipality also
188 İZFAŞ Website. 189 “İzmir'de tarihi gün,” İzmir Metropolitan Municipality Website news, March 25, 2015 190 “İzmir’i Dünya tanıyacak,” İzmir Metropolitan Municipality Monthly Newspaper June 19, 2011.
169 announced the building of a grand Opera House in Karşıyaka district starting in 2016 with a budget of 50 million TL (18 million USD).191
Although the jury is still out over whether the branding of İzmir has been successful or not, the project has been underway under the leadership of metropolitan and district municipalities.192 The municipal discourse around branding reflected a selective choice of urban heritage that highlighted the Republican and the Greek aspects of the city. It was thus an ideological choice to market the city roots in the “Western” world, as opposed to the increasing references to the Ottoman heritage in the AKP-governed cities.
Participatory Governance: Stakeholders and Citizen Satisfaction
Urban entrepreneurialism praises and promotes participation as a governance norm, as I discussed extensively in Chapter 1. Mayors in İzmir often celebrated their collaborations with universities, chambers, civil society organizations, and other public and private actors as exemplars of their “participatory governance” understanding, a new normative value added to their municipal approach. However, as I will discuss below,
İzmir’s entrepreneurial mayors had a selective approach to participation.
In order to promote citizens’ democratic participation at the local level, the Law on Municipalities193 introduced the formation of Kent Konseyleri (city councils).194 İzmir
Metropolitan Municipality founded İzmir City Council in 2010 and, interestingly enough, the metropolitan mayor was elected as the first president of the council. District municipalities founded their own city councils, as set out by the law. The mayor of
191 “Aslan payi Ulasima,” Hürriyet, November 26, 2015. 192 A recent graduate thesis by Yaşar University argues that İzmir was unsuccessful to establish its name as a brand among tourists (“Yabancı turistlerin İzmir'i tanımadığı ortaya çıktı,” Hürriyet Ege, October 29, 2015). 193 Law #5393 (Article 76) 194 As discussed in Chapter 2, the idea of citizens’ local participation was first introduced with the UN Local Agenda 21 projects in Turkey after the Habitat II conference that was held in İstanbul in 1996.
170 Bornova, who founded the first Bornova Kent Konseyi in 2009, admitted that city council was limited in its ability to facilitate participation at the local level: “We try to make these effective but I cannot say they are. However this is not because of the municipality.
Unfortunately, it is because of civil society organizations’ own handicaps. I think they do not experience democracy within their own organizations, let alone carry this to the council.”195 The Balçova mayor was also skeptical of civil society organizations’ interest in facilitating democracy at the local level. He argued that the heads of civil society organizations always had personal agendas, such as “jumping to the national assembly” or “being elected to municipal councils.”196
The notions of participation or participatory mechanisms entered the political discourse beyond city councils. In İzmir, participation had three major meanings and usages: participation was defined as (1) “input from stakeholders,” as (2) “feedback from citizens,” and as (3) “citizen satisfaction.” In what follows, I analyze the mayors’ definitions and examples of participatory governance through the following questions:
What do mayors understand as participation? In what contexts do they talk about participation? Who is participating? And what are they participating in?
The view of participation as input (contribution) from stakeholders to municipal initiatives indicates a conceptual shift from government (yönetim) to governance
(yönetişim) in Turkey.197 Municipalities in İzmir recognized that the job of governing cities had transformed into a multi-actor process. It is no longer imaginable or
195 Interview with Kamil Okyay Sındır by the author in 2011. 196 Interview with Mehmet Ali Çalkaya by the author in 2011. 197 It is important to note the change from the use of the word “government” to “governance” in İzmir Metropolitan Municipality’s strategic plans. While 2006 and 2010 Strategic Plans make no mention of governance, the 2015 Strategic Plan uses the concept of governance and more specifically “participatory and democratic governance” several times, for instance: “İzmir is a city of democracy, freedom, and independence. What is befitting to this city is to be governed by participatory and democratic governance” (Strategic Plan 2015-2019, p. 143).
171 manageable to govern a city without mobilizing local actors and resources to undertake the kind of projects municipalities have been doing in the last decade. It is, indeed, desirable that mayors have support—financial or otherwise—from local “stakeholders.”
A successful and strong mayor is perceived as the one who leads stakeholders to contribute to urban projects, creating win-win scenarios.
Metropolitan Mayor Kocaoğlu, in an interview about economic growth in İzmir, stated, “We would like to govern İzmir together, with our participatory governance understanding.” He added, “To economically grow, there should be unity, togetherness, and synergy in the city.” He emphasized further how hard he had been working to make the city attractive not only to local investors, but also to outside investors: “[It doesn’t matter] wherever it [investment] comes from. My duty [as a mayor] was to make this city a center of attraction. I succeeded in this duty.”198
The mayor’s words suggest that participation in city governance is primarily understood as investing in the city or contributing to making the city a better place for investors. The primacy of economic growth and attracting investment implies that
“stakeholders” in municipal documents are not a group of equal actors that would have equal say—through their participation—to city governance. While İzmirians constitute one group of stakeholders, the individual private businesses (local or otherwise) with interests in İzmir are also stakeholders. It is important to note that unequal stakeholder participation here is due to fundamental differences in the economic power and privileges each stakeholder holds, as well as in the organizational capabilities they enjoy. It is important to question the implications of participation through economic input for
198 EGİAD Yarın, July 2014
172 democracy at the local level, and ask whether calling this “participatory governance” is a political misnomer.
During the campaign for local elections in 2009, Mayor Kocaoğlu promised to put into practice what he called a “model for city democracy” that had two organizational entities.199 One was the İzmir Economic Development Coordination Board (İzmir
Ekonomik Kalkınma Koordinasyon Kurulu), which would consist of “pioneers in economic development” of İzmir, such as investors, trade associations, and civil society organizations. The board would provide a platform for representatives from the said groups to come together, reason, evaluate, and discuss issues relating to economic growth and development. The second entity was the İzmir Cultural Workshop (İzmir Kültür
Çalıştayı), which would be the initiator of a broader cultural mobilization project. The primary objective of this workshop was “to make İzmir a World City” that would eventually function as a “metropolis for Culture, Arts, and Design” with its
Mediterranean identity. The said stakeholders were mostly “opinion leaders” (kanaat
önderleri) and leading figures in the fields of art and design. The metropolitan mayor emphasized that this workshop would help İzmir to find the right cultural strategy and a roadmap that would elevate İzmir to the level of other Mediterranean cultural destinations such as Barcelona, Marseilles, Venice, Rome, and Athens.
Participation (or participatory governance) in this sense is more about sharing the workload200 with an exclusive set of stakeholders, who mostly happen to constitute the urban elite, with the primary aim being economic growth and development. “Governing
199 For an excerpt from the election manifesto on “city democracy” and discussions of “participatory democracy”, go to www.İzmirelele.com. 200 One such example of sharing the workload is during the preparation of municipal strategic plans. Municipalities ask stakeholders to submit their own analyses or opinion polls for relevant sectors.
173 together,” for the municipal government, means brainstorming on topics and projects that require dialogue with local actors who will cooperate with the municipality and financially contribute to the marketing of the city.
This kind of participation is very different from facilitating mechanisms for a wider range of citizens to influence the municipal agenda and have access to decision- making processes. Although it is a step forward for municipal governments to facilitate dialogue with other local actors, this kind of participation does not necessarily generate citizen participation in decision-making beyond the ballot box. As for the majority of citizens, especially the urban poor, finding the right marketing strategy for the city might not be a top priority. Nor would the majority of citizens have access to these high-profile workshops, symposiums, and conferences to put forward their opinions.
The second usage of participation in İzmir—as “feedback from citizens”— suggests the use of public opinion polls and questionnaires in the strategic plans of municipalities. Strategic plans, mandatory for municipalities since 2006, are required to be prepared with participatory planning techniques. This might take the form of situation analyses from stakeholders, public opinion surveys, or Internet questionnaires. While situation analyses are basically reports from stakeholders that are public, private or civil organizations, public opinion surveys and questionnaires comprise feedback from municipal employees and the people of İzmir.
Questionnaires designed for municipal employees, who are referred to as “internal stakeholders,” measure the degree of institutional identification of the personnel, their views about the mayor and other high-ranking bureaucrats, and their level of support for municipal projects. The survey designed for the people of İzmir, who are referred to as
174 “external stakeholders,” aims to reach a representative sample from each district of the city. The number of people surveyed rose from 3,001 in 2006 to 8,000 in 2015.201 The survey’s questionnaire is in the form of propositions that participants either strongly agree, agree, disagree, or completely disagree with. The questions aim to measure the level of people’s awareness or interest in municipal projects, the level of their satisfaction with municipal services, and the municipality’s relations with the public. The questions also target the public’s reaction to propositions such as, “I am pleased to live in İzmir;” “I see İzmir as a modern city;” and “I think of İzmir as a world city.”202 The interpretation of the results in the discussion section of strategic plans demonstrated a moderate approach focusing on the overall “strongly agree” and “agree” responses rather than the disagreements. The discussion also drew unsurprising conclusions, such as, “It has been understood that the primacy should be given to infrastructural and transit projects.”203
Finally, participation in terms of “citizen satisfaction” has been listed as one of the principles of İzmir Metropolitan Municipality in all the strategic plans since 2006.
Participation seen as ensuring citizen satisfaction of municipal services is probably the most commonplace understanding of citizen inclusion, according to the mayors in İzmir.
In most cases, mayors discuss citizen satisfaction within the context of what they call
“human-focused municipalism” (insan odaklı belediyecilik) or “human-focused service mentality” (insan odaklı hizmet anlayışı). Mayors explain human-focused municipalism as part of the broader concept “social democratic municipalism” (sosyal demokrat belediyecilik), which I will elaborate in the next section. According to the mayors
201 İzmir Metropolitan Municipality 2015-2019 Strategic Plan, p. 128 202 İzmir Metropolitan Municipality 2010 Strategic Plan, pp. 137-138 203 For an example, see the discussion in İzmir Metropolitan Municipality Strategic Plan 2010, pp. 135- 140.
175 interviewed, human-focused municipalism means going beyond traditional municipal services (urban infrastructure, roads, and transit) and delivering services that would reflect the needs and demands of urbanites, and, in doing so, improving the quality of life for the people of the city.204
Mayors argued that because they listen to the people on street, and because they are constantly in touch with the reality of people’s lives, they know what people need and they serve accordingly. They present this as key to citizen satisfaction. In particular, district mayors proudly speak of their regular visits to neighborhoods within their jurisdiction and how accessible they are to people: Bornova Mayor Sındır told me,
I do everything depending on peoples’ demands. I am doing the bazaar because there has been a demand for it for 25 years and nobody has delivered until now. The people wanted the bazaar there and I will do it there. Immigrants demanded the Balkan Community Center and I did it. I did neighborhood tours twice every week on Tuesdays and Thursdays continuously until the general elections. […] I walk on every street and go to neighborhoods and talk to shopkeepers, women, and children. There is not a street that I haven’t set foot on. We talk about people’s demands. For instance they ask me to make a park for kids in an empty area and I explain that it is private property and that I cannot do anything about it. Otherwise, they would blame the municipality for not delivering services. I experience all these things first-hand.205
Balçova Mayor Çalkaya also proudly emphasized how frequently he is on the ground keeping in touch with his people: “I visit everyday! There is a booklet over there showing my visits on New Year’s Eve. While every mayor attends parties in hotels on New Year’s
Eve, I visit the sick, 29 households, until 11:30 pm. I do house visits and street visits. I don’t have a bodyguard.”206 He explained how much he enjoyed this work, and how good he is at organizing people and leading teamwork. He claimed to have 960 female street
204 Interviews with Metropolitan Mayor, Bornova District Mayor, and Balçova District Mayor in 2012 and 2011. 205 Interview with Kamil Okyay Sındır by the author in 2011. 206 Interview with Mehmet Ali Çalkaya by the author in 2011.
176 representatives in 410 streets under his jurisdiction who report to his municipality on street happenings (e.g., births, deaths, sickness, and medical operations) so that they cane forward the relevant services to those in need. He proudly stated (albeit in somewhat of a paternalistic manner): “I have organized people. I govern the streets with those people. I provide the paint, and women paint. We build the city together. I make them [the women] decide on matters.”207 It is interesting to note that the mayor somehow equates facilitating social solidarity networks with participatory governance.
In sum, being accessible to citizens, providing social services based on local needs and demands, and ensuring satisfaction are all conceptualized as people’s participation in city’s governance. This rather limited interpretation of citizen participation seemed to be the most prevalent definition of participation in İzmir’s municipalities.
Delivering Development
Entrepreneurial municipalism institutionalized two key municipal practices: diversified and improved municipal social services and urban transformation projects of various kinds. I have argued that these two municipal practices are organically tied to making and maintaining competitive cities. Usually—as the metropolis is being recreated into a modern, advanced, polished space that reinforces existing segregations through urban transformation projects—municipal social services function to provide a safety net for those groups that are at a disadvantage or excluded.
Social Services
Mayors in İzmir considered themselves to be agents of development. They took this role seriously. As discussed above, mayors described their municipal practice as
207 Interview with Mehmet Ali Çalkaya by the author in 2011.
177 “social democratic municipalism.” They argued that social democratic municipalism meant more than just carrying out traditional municipal functions, that is, delivering infrastructural and transit services. Metropolitan Mayor Kocaoğlu explained:
We do not see the city as a place to deliver water, operate the buses, build a park or a garden. We see the city, or even a small district, as a place where municipalities have a responsibility to carry out development, to increase peoples’ life standards and income. […] With respect to urban planning, our aim is to create livable, sustainable cities.208
Increasing life standards and carrying out development indeed emerged as central notions in municipal social services. The Bornova district mayor also defined social democratic municipalism as positively discriminating on behalf of disadvantaged groups such as the poor, women, elderly, people with disabilities, and children: “These are among our missions.”209 Therefore, just as in the case of İstanbul, where social services were central in defining “360 degrees municipalism,” social services also take a central role in the social democratic municipal practice in İzmir. Mayors do believe in their social projects, and they put great emphasis on their publications on these services. While metropolitan municipalities carry out most of their responsibilities in the areas of urban and infrastructural services, social services are much more significant in terms of municipal prestige and public relations.
Taking a critical stance, mayors argued that municipalities had to deliver social services to the people because of the declining social state since the 1980s and given the central government’s inability to take care of those falling through the cracks of national education or public health systems. The mayor of Balçova stated, “In my opinion, in the post-1980 period, because of the rapid move away from social state policies,
208 Interview with Aziz Kocaoğlu by the author in 2012. 209 Interview with Kamil Okyay Sındır by the author in 2011.
178 municipalities were handed another function: that is to replace the social state functions in urban areas.”210 And the mayor of Konak explained the rationale for local government’s involvement in educational services: “Because of the government’s inability to fully ensure equality of opportunity in education, it falls to the local governments to provide equal opportunities for those coming from different clusters of society and different income groups.”211 These social services, though, matter a great deal for district mayors in their relations with their electorate, as Mayor Çalkaya told me:
Before the 2009 elections, other candidates fibbed a lot. I said one thing: We are going through [an economic] crisis. I will neither undertake big investments nor build big buildings. That is to say, when people are hungry, unhappy, and unhealthy, it doesn’t matter if you layer the city streets with gold. [...] This approach of mine earned me 70% of the votes. I was elected with 70% in my second term! My first term, it was 38%. I keep up with my social policies and will continue doing that.212
Municipal social services range from education, health, and cultural activities to sports, services for people with disabilities, women’s shelters, and milk aid for babies and toddlers. There are also other seasonal services, such as festivals, delivering Ramadan meals during Holy Month, and providing free public entertainment in the form of concerts, trips, etc.
Educational services are probably the most prevalent institutionalized social services under municipal control in İzmir. They include vocational training courses, hobby and personal development classes, literacy courses, and after-school classes for the children of low-income families. Vocational and hobby-related training includes a wide range of courses in over 40 subjects areas: including mask making, glass making, miniature handcrafts, folkloric doll making, chef apprenticeship, optician training,
210 Interview with Mehmet Ali Çalkaya by the author in 2011. 211 Konak Municipal Newspaper, January 2011. 212 Interview with Mehmet Ali Çalkaya by the author in 2011.
179 childcare, table d’hôte cooking, and executive assistantship. Hobby courses, in particular, aim at raising revenues for poor women by selling the end products in district fairs.
Another notable area of vocational training is “local governments and school of politics,” which aims to “raise tomorrow’s young, experienced, dynamic, and cultivated politicians and leaders who have a vision for democratic participation and local economic development.”213 Konak Municipality, one of the very active municipalities in vocational education, promotes these courses as “university-level vocational training” or a “people’s university.” In the years 2009 and 2010 combined, 3,000 people received certificates of completion from vocational courses. As the Ministry of National Education certifies most of these courses, certificates constitute valid documents for job applications.
These educational services take place in buildings called “district centers” (semt merkezleri) or “neighborhood houses” (semt evleri), which are owned and maintained by the municipality. Such neighborhood houses are also used for carrying out municipal services related to free health scans and consultancy for women, and they also serve as public relations offices for municipalities. The main targeted groups in neighborhood houses are women and children.214 On a political level, mayors present these centers in the tradition of the “People’s Houses” (Halkevleri)215 that were built by the Republican state elite in the early 1930s to undertake social and cultural modernization and
Westernization of the nation. Beyond the primary aim of increasing literacy, these community centers, contain public libraries and offer free courses in various topics
213 Konak Municipal Newspaper, March 2010 214 Konak Municipality Monthly Newspaper, September, 2010 215 See Konak Municipality Monthly Newspaper, April 2010, p. 6.
180 ranging from literature to drama and music.216 İzmir’s mayors thus emphasize these community centers as a continuation of this Republican project and homage to Atatürk’s vision for a modern Turkey.
Municipalities are also heavily invested in health services, especially for women, children, and the elderly. Free health scans (via travelling buses or district centers) for breast cancer and osteoporosis, home visits for expectant and postpartum mothers and newborns, regular visits to senior citizens who need homecare, ambulance support for those without healthcare, and raising public awareness of certain diseases through information sessions are among the many health services offered by the municipalities.
The Bornova Municipality’s award-winning project for “Expectant, Postpartum, and
Newborn Care” targeted women from disadvantaged groups and provided physical examinations, check-ups, guidance, and educational sessions at home by professional midwives.217 Mayor Sındır of Bornova noted that this Egebel218 project was one of his favorite services and the reason his municipality was awarded as the most productive municipality across the nation. He also asserted that his homecare health service for the elderly was a first in Turkey, and others followed suit. According to him, his health team could reach close to 10,000 households every year.219 Mayor Çalkaya of Balçova, on the other hand, suggested that his campaign to raise awareness for osteoporosis, including free bone scans and medicinal and nutritional support, made a big difference for women in his district with no healthcare security. He argued that as the state moved away from
216 Following the transition to multi-party era in 1950, halkevleri were severely criticized for center-right parties on the grounds that these community centers were used for ideological brainwashing of the public by the CHP. 217 Bornova Municipality Newspaper, July 2011 218 Egebel is an acronym, which is a fusion of three words, Ege (Aegean), gebe (pregnant) and belediye (municipality). 219 Interview with Kamil Okyay Sındır by the author in 2011.
181 protective public healthcare, fueling more privatization, it has fallen onto him to provide support for disadvantaged groups. He claimed that he provided up to 800,000 TL
(500,000 USD) every year for medicinal support in his district.220
In sum, social services make up an important part of municipal services, especially at the district level. İzmir’s municipalities demonstrate a good track record in improving and institutionalizing social services, particularly in education and health.
Short-term practices and internationally funded projects became policies in the long run.
Social services are significant for municipalities in İzmir. They constitute an intimate contact with the electorate, making them of great importance in the re-election of local officials. But on a higher level, the content and framing of social services in İzmir reflect how mayors’ political ideologies, agendas and worldviews shape their approach to city as a scale of governance. Through social services, urban becomes a site where broader political and ideological contentions are expressed.
Urban Transformation Projects
As discussed in Chapter 2, urban transformation projects have been on the agenda of municipalities in Turkey since the mid-2000s, with the advent of laws221 that gave significant authority to local governments to make decisions and implement plans for urban projects (from urban renewal to restoration, from urban development to gentrification). İzmir, as a city in the earthquake zone with a significant urban sprawl,
220 Interview with Mehmet Ali Çalkaya by the author in 2011. 221 As discussed in Chapter 2 relevant laws are as follows: Law on Municipalities (#5393), Article 73 (July 2005) “urban transformation and development areas” gave exclusive powers to municipalities (especially to metropolitan municipalities) in deciding, planning and implementing urban transformation and development projects. Law #5366 “Yipranan Tarihi ve Kulturel Tasinmaz Varliklarin Yenilenerek Korunmasi ve Yasatilarak Kullanilmasi Hakkinda Kanun” (June 2005). Law #6306 “Afet Riski Altindaki Alanlarin Donusturulmesi Hakkindaki Kanun” (May 2015). This law is publicly referred to as “Law on Urban Transformation.” With this law, “directorates of urban transformation” were founded in metropolitan municipalities of İstanbul, İzmir and Bursa.
182 always had great potential for urban transformation. The first notable urban transformation project took place in İzmir during the first decade of the 2000s (following the above-mentioned laws in mid-2005). This was Kadifekale, a neighborhood located on a hill in downtown İzmir that housed a historical castle (hence the name, which in
Turkish means “velvet castle”) and an extensive slum (gecekondu) settlement. The neighborhood’s residents were mostly Kurdish citizens who had moved to İzmir in the infamous 1990s forced migrations from villages in Southeastern Turkey. Following the categorization of Kadifekale as a “landslide site” by the Ministry of Environment and
Urbanization, the İzmir Metropolitan Municipality in 2007 started its largest urban transformation project, which would affect 44 hectares of land and 20,000 citizens. By
2012, the metropolitan municipality had demolished a total of 2,000 buildings to transform the area into green spaces that housed parks and recreational areas for the public. The municipality offered two options to the property owners: to sign up for a low rate mortgage to an apartment in a TOKİ222 building in Uzundere (a neighborhood for new developments away from the city center)223 or to accept the price of their lands (It is notable, however, that the “landslide zone” status significantly depreciated the land value in the area.224). Metropolitan Mayor Kocaoğlu talked about the project as “an exemplar of urban transformation” for the rest of Turkey’s metropolitan areas:
We have never had a problem in Kadifekale. […] It was a critical case but we realized that project. No one’s nose bled. First, we put an office there, and from there we announced what we would do, what we think. And with solid criteria we
222 As discussed in Chapter 2, municipalities work in cooperation with TOKİ (Housing Development Administration), a central government agency reporting directly to the Office of Prime Ministry. “TOKİ has the target group of low and middle-income families, who are not able to own a housing unit within the existing market conditions in Turkey” (TOKİ Website). Therefore, slum settlers are offered to move to TOKİ high-rises in these urban transformation projects. 223 The distance between Kadifekale and Uzundere is 13 kilometers, approximately a 30-minute car drive. 224 The metropolitan mayor stated during the interview, “44 hectares of land had no economic value because it fell under the landslide zone. Therefore, we completely financed the project” (Interview, 2012).
183 calculated everybody’s assets, their dues and debt. We treat everyone equally. We educate. We undertake social projects with women. We give vocational training. That is, urban transformation is not about demolishing a building and building a new one. Urban transformation is founding a city all over again. If there are no social recreational areas, there is no point in doing urban transformation. We could have just fortified the slums and could have completed it much more cheaply. But wide roads, parking lots, urban forests, sports facilities, parks, school areas, health, whatever—if you could place them all and create a developed city, then it would be an urban transformation.225
Although the mayor drew a problem-free picture of the project, some groups of residents argued against the status of the area as being under threat of landslide. Some residents reported that the municipality ignored expert reports that their houses in fact did not fall within the landslide zone. Those citizens argued that the main point was “to get rid of the
Kurds” living in the area, suggesting that this was “second forced migration” (the first one being the 1990s’ forced migrations from Southeastern Turkey) for them. Others complained about the assessments of their properties, arguing that they were significantly lower than the real value of the land. Those put forward that “the landslide threat” was a pretext for urban rent seeking.226
For the metropolitan municipality, the Kadifekale transformation epitomized urban transformation: a landslide zone at the center of the city was transformed from slum housing to green space before the natural disaster hit it. There was no “urban rent” except to make the appearance of the city more attractive. For the residents of Kadifekale, it signified a major change in their lives, moving from a self-built house with a sea view at the center of the city to a standard apartment building away from the sea and the city center, at best with a balcony view of the highway. It signified not only a change in their physical environment, but also the end of the “neighborhood,” a close-knit community
225 Interview with Aziz Kocaoğlu by the author in 2012. 226 “Heyelan Bahane Rant Şahane,” Yüksekova Haber Website,
184 life that they will not find/construct easily again elsewhere in the city. While the citizens were uprooted and replaced in the suburbs, the city became more attractive.
Irrespective of the consequences to the parties involved, urban transformation projects became defining processes in the relationship between municipalities and citizens. While mayors argued that the most important part of the matter was “the consent of the citizen,”227 the citizen, here, was exclusively of the property owner kind, not necessarily the residents. Moreover, municipalities emerged as the mediators in this process between citizens and building contractors:
Our citizens involved at the places of urban transformation might be weak in terms of protecting their rights vis-à-vis a group of contractors. Contractors, as well, might be in a weaker position vis-à-vis the citizens, even to a smaller degree, theoretically speaking. We, in this case, by using all our initiative, both protect the interests of our citizens and at the same time are a guarantor to contractors with whom we made an agreement. That is to say, we are the authority!228
The role of municipalities as guarantors—as mediators protecting the rights of the parties involved—has thus emerged since mid-2000s. This is a completely new way that municipalities relate to its citizens, and one that profoundly shapes the latters’ lives.
Urban transformation projects are important tools for municipalities in recreating a city that fits with their visions for that city. Metropolitan Mayor Kocaoğlu, after speaking about Kadifekale, added, “We also are doing a skyscraper zone as an urban transformation project in Bayraklı. Here [at the city center] we do not give a license for more than four stories, but over there it’s unconstrained. We also have a zone exclusively for health and thermal spa hotels.”229 The İzmir Metropolitan Municipality announced the
Bayraklı transformation project as building “İzmir’s Manhattan,” which would become
227 EGIAD interview with Metropolitan Mayor in July 2014, Issue 42. 228 Interview with Aziz Kocaoğlu by the author in 2012. 229 Interview with Aziz Kocaoğlu by the author in 2012.
185 an “attraction for domestic and foreign investors.”230 Furthermore, the İzmir Metropolitan
Municipality has organized an “urban design and architectural ideas” competition (with a winning prize of 500,000 TL/190,000 USD) for its largest urban transformation project in
Gaziemir (affecting 122 hectares of land), demonstrating an interest in engaging the public in these processes in novel ways.231
In sum, municipalities, particularly metropolitan municipalities, have become leading actors (both politically and economically) in transforming, developing, and recreating city spaces. In İzmir, municipalities parcel the city with a vision determined by marketing strategies and engage in big budget demolition and construction projects. As a result, municipalities transform the city and its urban fabric and affect the lives of thousands of its residents in profound ways.
Conclusion
Local administration reforms, starting in the mid-2000s, signified a new era in urban governance in Turkey that is characterized by urban entrepreneurialism. In İzmir, mayors welcomed this shift and changed from administrators to entrepreneurs with the aim of turning İzmir into a “competitive world city.” Throughout above, I detailed how mayors of İzmir pursued this agenda through various policies and practices that became available to them with decentralization reforms. Overall, İzmir’s mayors embraced the national government’s neoliberalization agenda in urban governance. However, intergovernmental relations, imbued heavily with party politics and rivalry, conditioned entrepreneurial urbanism in İzmir through the use of administrative tutelage, a long-time state tradition and practice. Through various interventions, the national government
230 İzmir Metropolitan Municipality Newspaper, June 2011. 231 “Yoğurdu Üflüyoruz,” Hürriyet Ege, October 5, 2015.
186 instrumentalized administrative tutelage in its critique of İzmir’s metropolitan governance.
Moreover, the case of İzmir shows how the political ideologies, agendas, and worldviews of mayors are expressed through entrepreneurial actions and strategies that attempt to make İzmir a “World City.” Entrepreneurial governance, with its secular/Republican/Kemalist packaging, thus has meaning and function beyond laying a wager on an attractive Mediterranean metropolis. İzmir’s urban scale becomes a site where national political contentions are glocally materialized.
187 CHAPTER FIVE
DİYARBAKIR, THE POLITICIZED METROPOLIS
Map 5: Diyarbakır Province in Turkey
Map 6: Diyarbakır Metropolitan Municipality and District Municipalities Sources: www.worldatlas.com and www.turkey-visit.com
188 The predominantly Kurdish city of Diyarbakır, with a population of 1.6 million, is one of the most important metropolises in Southeastern Turkey. Diyarbakır had suffered through many decades of neglect, in terms of investment and infrastructure, by the central state after the founding of the Republic. Especially in the first two decades of the
Republic, Kurds rebelled against a highly centralized state structure that did not fulfill the promises of autonomy made during the Independence War.232 They also rebelled against the abolishment of caliphate, which rendered the newly founded state illegitimate in the eyes of Kurdish people. In response, the Republican state violently suppressed Kurdish rebellions with military interventions in the Eastern provinces. The Turkish state never recognized Kurdish people as an ethnic identity and regarded Kurdish rebellions as reactionary and backward riots by tribal groups, bandits, and sheikdoms (Yeğen 1999).
Moreover, just like other Southeastern provinces, Diyarbakır suffered heavily from the prevalent terror and armed conflict between the Turkish security forces and the illegal PKK (Partiya Karkaren Kurdistan in Kurdish—Kurdistan Workers Party) from the 1980s onwards. However, the city experienced a new episode in its local governance in the early years of the 21st century as a result of democratic openings as well as the lifting of the decades-long state of emergency rule in the region. Since the 1999 local elections, pro-Kurdish political parties gained remarkable ground around Southeastern
Turkey in general and Diyarbakır in particular. The pro-Kurdish mayors of Diyarbakır capitalized on decentralization reforms and started to implement novel policies and practices at the local level, reflective of their broader agenda at the national level, that is
232 Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the Republic and the leader of the Turkish Independence War, skillfully gained the support of the Kurdish groups in the eastern provinces who were at some point driven towards the British scheme to build an independent Kurdish state at the time. For a detailed discussion of the relationship and communication between Atatürk and the Kurdish tribal leaders and sheikhs during the Independence War (1919–1922) refer to Andrew Mango’s (1999) article entitled “Atatürk and the Kurds.”
189 the constitutional recognition of Kurdish identity and language and accompanying state reforms such as regional autonomy. Therefore, the shift to urban entrepreneurialism rendered Diyarbakır a site where contesting regional and national ideologies, agendas, and worldviews materialize and are sought after through various policies and practices that are new to the metropolis.
In what follows, I will first provide a brief review of the particularities of the local governmental structure in Diyarbakır, in particular how the state of emergency rule that continued for over almost two decades was initiated and then lifted. This episode is important for understanding the specific dynamics that shaped the local politics and governance in Diyarbakır. I will then discuss how intergovernmental relations, acted out through double tutelage (administrative and that of perception), condition urban governance in Diyarbakır. I will also discuss how urban entrepreneurialism engendered novel urban practices in Diyarbakır that speak to a pro-Kurdish agenda, which is not urban-bound. In the last section, I will explore how, through social services and urban transformation projects, mayors in Diyarbakır juggle two divergent dynamics that all contemporary cities are confronted with: “their internal contradictions and their external integration” (Brenner and Keil 2014, 13).
Background on Diyarbakır’s Local Administration Post-1980
The Republic of Turkey has a unitary administrative structure, but this structure has definitely not always been uniform. The state’s relationship to the provinces in predominantly Kurdish-populated Eastern and Southeastern Regions in general is a case
190 in point. Diyarbakır, as one of the major Kurdish metropolitan areas in Southeastern
Turkey, historically had its share from the exceptions to the rule.233
The 1982 Constitution introduced a new type of governance, Olağanüstü Hal
Yönetimi (OHAL), translated as “state of emergency rule,” besides the already-existing normal rule (Normal Yönetim) and martial rule (Sıkıyönetim). Very simply, the constitution stated that in times of civil war, martial law would govern the country; however, in situations of armed violence and public order violations, the state of emergency rule will govern the concerned regions/provinces.234 Related arrangements legalized the armed conflicts that the Turkish armed forces had with the PKK in the struggle against the Kurdish armed insurgence. OHAL was governed by a special governorate, called OHAL Valiliği, which was headed by a state appointee governor, called OHAL Valisi. Therefore, in the provinces that were proclaimed as OHAL regions, there was not only the usual governor of the province, but also the OHAL governor, who was informally referred to as “super governor” in public discourse because of the extra power and authority exercised by his office. OHAL could be determined by the central government through decree laws (Kanun Hükmünde Kararname), and it had to be renewed every four months. This state of emergency law, which gave extreme powers to not only the OHAL governorate but also to the army, the police and the gendarme, lasted from 1987 until the year 2002 when the governing AKP lifted the state of emergency rule soon after it came to power. Considering the fact that Diyarbakır was under martial law
233 Diyarbakır became a metropolitan area in 1993. Its current population is over 1.5 million people. (Diyarbakır Metropolitan Municipality Website: http://www.Diyarbakır-bld.gov.tr/default.aspx) 234 Law #2935 (Ministry of Justice Website: http://www.mevzuat.adalet.gov.tr/html/652.html)
191 from 1978235 until 1987, Diyarbakır’s locale was not governed by civilian/normal rule for a total of 24 years. In other words, the popularly elected local bodies had no authority, let alone autonomy, over the governance of their jurisdictions. This hierarchical and antagonistic relationship between the state and the local was further exacerbated by the violence of state personnel (e.g., army and police officers) towards the local (Kurdish) population during the infamous decade of 1990s.
The first local elections, after the abolition of the state of emergency rule in 2002, took place in 2004. To clarify, the local elections took place during the state of emergency rule as well; however, as indicated above, the local elected bodies had the significantly reduced role of merely providing basic municipal services. Pro-Kurdish party236 candidates have often been successful in local elections in the Kurdish populated regions. However, after the abolishment of state of emergency rule, the population’s sense of ownership of local governments significantly increased, as did the prominence of pro-Kurdish237 political parties and independent candidates in the local elections. The
235 The last years of the 1970s were marked by armed conflict among the civilians across the country. Society was highly polarized into two factions: the ultranationalists and the leftists. Martial law was implemented because of “intense public violence” in almost 20 provinces across Turkey in the late 1970s. 236 Since the beginning of 1990s, there have been eight political parties defending Kurdish rights and liberties. Most of these parties were banned from the system soon after they were founded on the grounds that their agenda was unconstitutional (Erşanlı 2011, 69). These parties belong to the grand pro-Kurdish social movement called Demokratik Toplum Hareketi, translated as Democratic Society Movement. Within the time frame of this dissertation, the pro-Kurdish political party was Demokratik Toplum Partisi (DTP), translated as Democratic Society Party and Barış ve Demokrasi Partisi (BDP), translated as Peace and Democracy Party. Although the metropolitan and district mayors interviewed during fieldwork entered the 2004 and 2009 elections as DTP, at the time of interviews, they affiliated themselves with BDP. 237 I use the term pro-Kurdish for three reasons: (1) Legal political parties such as the BDP that support the Kurdish agenda do not particularly identify themselves as a “Kurdish” party, as that would have nationalistic and separatist connotations. The multicultural ideological turn of the movement in the early twenty-first century moved the Kurdish political movement away from the separatist agendas and closer to constitutional solutions within the territorial integrity of the country, such as federalism or confederalism. (2) Not all the politicians in this movement are ethnically Kurds. One of the district municipalities in Diyarbakır (Bağlar), for instance, had an ethnically Turkish mayor from the DTP. (3) There are many ethnically Kurdish politicians in other political parties including the governing AKP, the main opposition CHP. However, their ethnic roots do not necessarily define their political agenda. Therefore, I use the term pro-Kurdish to specifically denote politicians that engage with the Kurdish movement’s agenda.
192 local elections of 2004 in particular mark a breakthrough in the legal political struggle of the Kurdish movement at the municipal level. The metropolitan mayor of Diyarbakır at the time of this dissertation’s fieldwork was Osman Baydemir, who was elected for two consecutive terms, in 2004 and 2009, from the pro-Kurdish political party called
Demokratik Toplum Partisi (DTP) (Democratic Society Party). All the district mayors of
Diyarbakır are also elected from the same political party. In the 2009 local elections, DTP had won about 100 municipalities across the Eastern and Southeastern regions.238
Therefore, the post-OHAL decade in the region witnessed a dramatic expression of local political will on behalf of pro-Kurdish political parties. It is important to note that the local administration reforms of the mid-2000s had a significant role in this transformation: municipalities of the region became politically engaged bodies that could enjoy legal political means to express a pro-Kurdish agenda and implement novel policies and practices at the local level. Pro-Kurdish municipalities criticized the state’s approach to the Kurdish issue by being vocal about “democratic autonomy” that offers a regional/federalist solution to the problem. Municipalities in the region bypassed the central government at times by signing politically motivated sister city protocols, for instance with the Palestinian city of Ramallah. Moreover, pro-Kurdish municipalities used their authority to reclaim spaces by restoring/giving Kurdish names to streets, parks, and squares in their jurisdictions. Municipalities also capitalized on the reforms regarding
238 There were in total 2903 municipalities in Turkey at the 2009 elections. (Higher Council of Elections http://www.ysk.gov.tr)
193 language rights239 by offering municipal services in different dialects of Kurdish (e.g.,
Zaza and Kırmancı), Armenian, Arabic, and so on.
Thus, the local government reforms in 2004 and the removal of the state of emergency law earlier in 2002 enabled the Kurdish movement to exercise its agenda within the legal-political realm (via municipalities and provincial councils). In doing so, it engendered meaningful venues for Kurdish political activists to carry on their struggle against the state’s policies within the state’s own legal apparatus.
However, soon after the 2009 elections, many Kurdish mayors, municipal councilors, and party members in the region were arrested on the grounds that they were affiliated with the PKK.240 Mayors and provincial councilors interpreted these arrests as
“the state’s violation of people’s political will”241 and protested with black banners on municipal buildings reading, “Do not touch my will.”242 Later on, after the failure of the
Kurdish peace process, the PKK restarted its activities, this time in the urban areas of the region. Especially in the aftermath of the June 2015 general elections, tension and violence escalated in urban areas, where the PKK dug several trenches in critical neighborhoods, such as Sur District of Diyarbakır, in an attempt to protest the recent political developments. Armed conflict between Turkish security forces and the PKK lasted for weeks, leaving the affected areas in wreckage with many casualties and thousands of displaced civilians. It is claimed that pro-Kurdish municipalities assisted the
PKK in digging trenches by providing them with municipal vehicles such as dipper
239 Until 2001, the constitution had the clause “language banned by law.” The removal of this clause was an important step for the Kurds in Turkey. In the year 2004, the state broadcasting company (TRT) started to broadcast in languages other than Turkish (Ergin 2010). 240 This trial was also known as KCK Davası. (BDP Website: http://www.bdp.org.tr/tr/kck-adi-altinda- yapilan-operasyonlar-dosyasi). 241 Interview with Abdullah Demirbaş (Mayor of Sur District) in 2011. Demirbaş, himself, was arrested on the same grounds and later released but was banned from leaving the country during his incumbency. 242 See Appendix B for photographs taken during the fieldwork in 2011.
194 draggers.243 As a result, many elected municipal authorities were arrested and detained in the region.
In the aftermath of the coup attempt in July 2016, the national government declared OHAL rule in the entire country for a three-month period. At the time of writing, OHAL rule was renewed for a fourth time on the grounds of the continuing fight against the Gülenist terror organization that infiltrated state institutions. In September
2016, the central government appointed state officials, also known as kayyım244 in
Turkish, to replace mayors in 29 municipalities, of which 25 were from pro-Kurdish DBP
[Demokratik Bölgeler Partisi, the successor to the BDP], in Eastern and Southeastern
Turkey. In December 2016, a total of 53 mayors were replaced with state appointees; 49 of which were pro-Kurdish.245 This move by the central government was on the grounds that municipal authorities abused municipal powers and resources to assist the PKK in its activities. Once again, the black banners reading “Do not touch my political will” appeared in the municipal buildings of the region—protesting the central government policy of annulling the power and authority of popularly elected local representatives.
The above account shows how “state of emergency rules”—under the pretext of exceptionality—operate as tools for state intervention and domination that would otherwise be deemed unlawful, illegitimate, or illiberal. State of emergency rules are, in fact, institutionalized contingencies that debunk the myth of the unitary state system and
243 The PKK’s operations usually take place in rural areas. It was a change of strategy for the PKK to take their operations into the urban areas. It took mainly the form of digging trenches around the inner city gecekondu neighborhoods (such as Bağlar and Sur) in an attempt to blockade the area for the passage of Turkish security forces, to claim such neighborhoods as “rebel zones.” There were allegations that pro- Kurdish municipalities helped the PKK by lending them municipal vehicles such as dipper draggers to dig trenches in these neighborhoods. 244 The kayyım phenomenon first emerged in the fight against FETO in the aftermath of the December 2013 process, when the Gülenists first attempted to crack down the Erdoğan Government. Kayyım literally means trustee. 245 “OHAL’de belediyelere yönelik kayyım işlemleri,” Bianet, January 9, 2017.
195 that unveil the arbitrariness engraved in modern state formation and its foundation, the rule of law.
The above account also shows that it is extremely difficult to disassociate local politics from national politics or the Kurdish issue when studying municipalities in southeastern Turkey. Municipalities in Diyarbakır are intersectional institutions: their legal character as Turkish state’s administrative organs at the local level crosscut their political character as representing local people’s will. Mayors and municipal councilors identify themselves as first and foremost defenders of the Kurdish political struggle.
Intergovernmental Relations: Double Tutelage
Intergovernmental relations in the case of Diyarbakır could be best described as a never-ending tug of war between the central state and its local agents (such as governorate) on the one side and the municipalities and elected local representatives on the other.246 It is important to emphasize the asymmetric, hierarchical, and politically incongruous nature of the relationship between the two sides.
The most common disagreement between the central government and the municipalities (both tiers) of Diyarbakır was over the municipal performance in service delivery and Diyarbakır’s standing as a metropolitan province. The central government criticized the metropolitan and district municipalities of Diyarbakır over not being competitive and efficient enough to govern a metropolitan area. Urban services such as the maintenance of roads and pavement, garbage collection, the creation of presentable
246 Intergovernmental relations are more tension-ridden in Diyarbakır than, for example, in İzmir. In the case of İzmir, we find a political rivalry between the governing party and the main opposition. In the case of Diyarbakır, intergovernmental relations are laden with an inherited legacy of skepticism of the center towards the region because of its Kurdish dynamics. Therefore, it cannot be reduced to a difference of political parties at two levels. I will discuss this in detail below, especially in reference to the metropolitan mayor’s comments on “perception tutelage” alongside the administrative tutelage.
196 urban squares, and recreational areas were the focus of attention in these criticisms. The city of Diyarbakır, according to the central government, was in a pitiful condition and not even close to living up to its full and glorious potential. The then Prime Minister Erdoğan promoted and kick-started a series of urban projects for Diyarbakır during the 2011 general election campaign and its aftermath. In line with his vision for development, among these projects was building an international airport in Diyarbakır with an annual five million passenger capacity; building a motorway between Şanlıurfa and Diyarbakır that would complete the uninterrupted expressway connecting the west and the east of the country; restoring and renewing the old city center (known as Suriçi) enclosed with
Diyarbakır’s famous city walls; creating a big urban park and recreation area in Tigris
Valley; building two major city hospitals, one of which specialized in children’s and women’s health; and building a stadium with a capacity of 30,000. Prime Minister
Erdoğan argued that his was the first national government to deliver real development to the region that is meaningful in increasing the territorial competitiveness of the neglected geography.247
The municipalities of Diyarbakır, on the other hand, disagreed with the claim that they were performing poorly, and claimed that if there was a problem of service delivery and performance, it was because the central state deliberately obstructed municipal processes in Diyarbakır just because of their pro-Kurdish political affiliations.
Diyarbakır’s metropolitan and district municipalities claimed that the state (via its local agents, vali or kaymakam) did not approve or put on hold many of their projects and cut their spending by obstructing the release of foreign funds for municipal projects. This brings us once again to one of the most problematical concepts regarding local
247 “İstanbul, İzmir ve Diyarbakır’a çılgın projeler,” Vatan, June 1, 2011.
197 governance in Turkey: the administrative tutelage of the center over local governments.
As discussed in detail in Chapter 2, Article 127 of the 1982 Constitution contains the principle of administrative tutelage. Paragraph 5 of Article 127 reads:
The central administration has the power of administrative trusteeship over the local governments in the framework of principles and procedures set forth by law with the objective of ensuring the functioning of local services in conformity with the principle of the integral unity of the administration, securing uniform public service, safeguarding the public interest and meeting local needs, in an appropriate manner.248
In the very beginning of my interview with the Metropolitan Mayor of Diyarbakır
Osman Baydemir, he handed me a photocopy of the press release and proceedings of the
20th Session of the Congress of Local and Regional Authorities, Council of Europe. He told me that the press release outlined the source of their major problems as elected local authorities: how the administrative tutelage (contained by Article 127) of the central government and local appointed governors over local elected authorities remains an obstacle to the general decentralization project in Turkey and therefore should be abolished; and how languages other than Turkish should be permitted in the provision of public services. He argued that Turkey urgently needed to lift the reservations to the
European Charter of Local Self Government249 in order to really reform the local governments. 250
As a member of Council of Europe since 1949, Turkey signed the European
248 Although numerous amendments to the Constitution have been made in the post-EU candidacy period, there has been no amendment of Article 127 (Source: http://www.byegm.gov.tr/Content.aspx?s=tcotrot) 249 The recognition of decentralization of state power as a norm in the European context dates back to 1985, when the Council of Europe signed the European Charter of Local Self Government. According to the charter, “Local self-government denotes the right and the ability of local authorities, within the limits of the law, to regulate and manage a substantial share of public affairs under their own responsibility and in the interests of the local population.” (Part I, Article 3). The charter defines and recognizes the administrative, financial and the associative rights of the local self-government bodies. The charter can be accessed at the following link: http://conventions.coe.int/Treaty/en/Treaties/Html/122.htm. 250 Interview with Osman Baydemir by the author in 2011.
198 Charter of Local Self Government in 1988 and ratified in 1992 (Law #3723) albeit with nine reservations251 making Turkey one of the few countries that entered the largest number of reservations to the charter.252 The reservations to the charter were mainly to the articles that promote local governments’ autonomy to determine their internal administrative structures in order to adopt for local needs; to the articles that ensure the autonomy of the local governments in applying their own policies even with the fiscal revenue coming from central government; to the articles that promote the freedom of the local governments to found their own associations, to participate in international associations alike, and to cooperate with local governments in foreign countries to defend their rights without the permission of the center; and to the articles that uphold the active participation of the local governments in the decision-making processes regarding the distribution of national resources to the local governments (Parlak et al. 2008, 35-36).
On several occasions—during the interviews as well as in municipal reports and publications—mayors and municipal authorities in Diyarbakır made references to the charter and to the above reservations to criticize the constitutionally protected administrative tutelage of central government over local governments and to identify the impediments to decentralization in Turkey. Şeyda Aslan, a municipal councilor from Sur, argued that although there were local governance reforms in the post-EU candidacy period, those reforms were subordinate and futile unless complete compliance to the
251 The charter was signed during the Prime Ministry of Turgut Özal, who had an agenda to better integrate Turkey into the world economy as well as improve relations with the European Community. Turkey put these reservations on the charter due to the skepticism that those articles could be abused to threaten the territorial unity and integrity of the country. The reservations are on the following articles of the charter: 4.6; 6.1; 7.3; 9.4; 9.6; 9.7; 10.2; 10.3; and 11. 252 From the 21st Session of the Chamber of Local Authorities on 28 September 2011: Reservations and declarations to the European Charter of Local Self-Government (downloaded from https://wcd.coe.int/ViewDoc.jsp?id=1842077&Site=COE)
199 charter was achieved.253 Hafize İpek, Deputy Mayor of Diyarbakır, argued that the reservations to the charter were most probably put in specifically with municipalities of the Kurdish region in mind. She continued: “Think about it: You have 65% of the votes in a city and your say in that city could be less than the central government. This is against universalism as well. Therefore, when the reservations are lifted, I believe local governments will truly be able to exercise their authority.”254
Indeed, the hierarchical, asymmetric and dysfunctional nature of the relationship between the appointed state officials at the local level, such as vali (provincial governor) and kaymakam (district governor), and the local elected authorities was a recurring theme in all the interviews that I conducted in Diyarbakır. Mayors and councilors alike all emphasized how the mentality that upheld superiority of the appointed over the elected is outrageous, undemocratic, and against universal values of decentralized governance.
Moreover, they underlined how the lines of communication with the governor and his office were not very open. According to the interviewees, the governors (who are appointed for a three-year term by the Ministry of the Interior and are never originally from the Kurdish region) usually obstruct the implementation of the projects and policies of the local elected authorities, and they did not approach to engage in partnerships with them in the governance of the city. Metropolitan Mayor Baydemir argued that this was
“double tutelage” that the Kurdish local elected authorities suffer from: apart from the administrative tutelage, municipalities of the Eastern Turkey are under, what he calls, an informal, perception tutelage. He argued that the way the center perceives the Kurdish region does not really change from government to government. In his words:
253 Interview with Şeyda Aslan by the author in 2011. 254 Interview with Hafize İpek by the author in 2011.
200 For instance the relationship between İstanbul Governorate and the İstanbul Metropolitan Municipality is so much different than the relationship between Diyarbakır Governorate and the Diyarbakır Metropolitan Municipality. It really does not matter who the central government is politically, the appointed governors, if they want to stay as governors, have to act like state agents. […] Therefore we, as local stakeholders, have a hard time coming together. 255
One way this perception tutelage manifested itself, according to my interviewees, was in the budget cuts from the center. Bank of Provinces,256 İller Bankası, is the central state organ that distributes each province and all municipalities across Turkey their share from the state revenue: in other words, shares from the general budget tax revenue of the central government. On average, these shares usually make up the most significant portion, 50% of the municipal revenue. Other than these shares, municipalities have their own tax revenues, enterprise and ownership revenues, revenues coming from interests, shares and fines, and capital revenues.257 The Bank of the Provinces distributes these shares according to a fixed formula. There are three factors in this tax sharing formula: population criterion, type of local government, and distribution rate determined by law.258
Article 7 of Law 5779 contains a provision stating that in the case of a municipality having a budget deficit, that is, owing money to the state, the Bank of the
Provinces has the power to implement cuts to the local government in question without exceeding 40% of their share from the general budget tax revenue for that year. My interviewees claimed that the Bank of Provinces implemented these cuts more strictly to pro-Kurdish municipalities than to the other municipalities (in particular, the governing party’s municipalities). As Deputy Mayor Zeki Dugrul of Yenisehir explained in frustration:
255 Interview with Osman Baydemir by the author in 2011. 256 Bank of Provinces Website: http://www.ilbank.gov.tr/index.php 257 Local Governments in Turkey, p. 41 (Mahalli Idareler Publications). 258 Law #5779, Article 5
201 Every month from our municipalities’ shares, the center executes 40% cuts, mostly because of what we owe in the past, such as tax debts, insurance debts, all the debt accumulated over the years… For the last ten years, we have been paying our workers their full wages, without exception unlike previous municipal governments that paid either half of the wages or held payment for up to 3 months. So, our shares are reduced up to 40% now. But if you look at the municipalities in İstanbul or Ankara, you would see that they are in debt many times more than Diyarbakır but still, their shares are paid in full without cuts. These are the municipalities who are close [politically] to the government. But when it comes to us, 40% does not change. And it is the center’s legal right to do so, up to 40%. If there were no such legal limitation, it would cut the rest as well and would leave us to starve. Believe me the revenue coming from the center is not even enough to cover our wages. We are trying to make up to it either from our own revenues or from here and there…259
However, pro-Kurdish municipalities found a way to circumvent the already minimal shares from the central government’s revenue by engaging in projects that are funded by the EU or other social funds. Note that by-products of these projects involved not only having a way out of the financial dire straits but also gaining recognition and publicity in the international public sphere: “After 1995-98, we saw the alternative to this in going after the EU funded projects and various social entrepreneurial funds. We seriously improved ourselves in this issue. We form teams that are proficient in writing grants and projects; we come together, brainstorm and engage in lobbying and networking.”260
According to my interviewees, another way in which pro-Kurdish municipalities experienced this double-layered (formal and informal) tutelage is when the central government did not agree to be a financial guarantor for taking up loans on projects and services. Metropolitan Mayor Baydemir pointed out how the center is reluctant and has turned down their municipalities’ requests from the treasury to be their guarantor for loans applications from development agencies:
259 Interview with Zeki Doğrul by the author in 2011. 260 Interview with Şeyda Aslan by the author in 2011.
202 Ankara’s metropolitan municipality has a five billion dollar public debt. Diyarbakır metropolitan municipality has none! It’s because they don’t let us be in debt. Under normal circumstances, the Treasury has to be the guarantor for a municipality to receive loans from outside resources such as European Development Bank or other development agencies. Their consent is required. Treasury does not give consent to us. But I know for a fact that İstanbul Metropolitan Municipality got ten billion dollars worth of loan finance. This is another form of tutelage. Yes, in Turkey local governments are not decentralized. However, the municipalities in the region [Kurdish] work under a complete repression. Even though we are not fighting and there is no conflict, their outlook towards us is as negative as it can be. 261
The comparison to other metropolitan municipalities in this regard recurred often in interviews. Altan Tan, pro-Kurdish MP from Diyarbakır, compared how Ankara, although it is just four times bigger as a metropolitan municipality, so far received 50 times more outside loans (in which the Treasury was the guarantor) than Diyarbakır. He said, “Ankara is enjoying fifty times more opportunities than Diyarbakır. 262 Moreover, on various occasions my interviewees pointed out how the Ministry of the Interior either put the approval of many municipal projects on hold for a long period or rejected their proposals outright.
In sum, according to the pro-Kurdish politicians, this “discrimination of the pro-
Kurdish municipalities by the center” through formal (administrative) and informal
(perception) mechanisms of tutelage is deeply embedded within the state structure in
Turkey. The coexistence of the constitutionally protected administrative tutelage on the one hand and the political openings that came with the local government reforms of mid-
2000s on the other led pro-Kurdish municipalities to critically engage in public discussions of alternative decentralization models such as “democratic autonomy”
(Demokratik Özerklik in Turkish).
261 Interview with Osman Baydemir by the author in 2011. 262 Interview with Altan Tan by the author in 2011.
203 For all the obvious reasons, decentralization as a governance norm has been crucial for the aspirations of the Kurdish movement in Turkey. Starting in 2010, legal pro-Kurdish political parties in conjunction with the wider Kurdish political movement, represented by Democratic Society Congress,263 suggested a governance model called
“democratic autonomy” for the resolution of the Kurdish issue in Turkey.264 Indeed, the pro-Kurdish parties (namely, BDP, HDP, and DBP) endorsed the model of democratic autonomy explicitly in their party covenant.265 The concept—first defined by Abdullah
Ocalan, the incarcerated leader of the PKK, in 2007—states quite vaguely that this model is “a means of enabling local interests to be represented within the state,” is “a structure that would enable the Kurds to meet their own demands that would be operate in conjunction with existing state institutions” and finally, is “a system which substitutes centralized administration with local administration” (Yeğen 2011).
It was not until BDP’s “Policy Paper Concerning Democratization of Turkey and the Resolution of the Kurdish Issue” that this vague set of ideas acquired some clarification and tangible structural suggestions for implementation.266 Overall, although
263 The Democratic Society Congress (Demokratik Toplum Kongresi) is a pro-Kurdish umbrella organization composed of 850 members across Turkey. The Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) is represented by five members in the organization. 264 This suggestion culminated into a unilateral declaration of democratic autonomy by the DSC for the Kurdish populated Southeastern Turkey on July 11, 2011, just hours after a deadly clash between the Turkish army and the PKK which cost 13 lives on the Turkish Armed Forces side and seven on the PKK (Cizre, 2011) 265 The BDP’s covenant Article C states that BDP recognizes that the Republic of Turkey was established by Turks, Kurds, and other ethnic groups, and BDP sees the future of the people and the resolution of Kurdish problem in a common homeland, in free togetherness, in Democratic Autonomy and in Democratic Republic. 266 BDP’s policy paper suggested a fundamental restructuring of the provincial units (20–25 regions as opposed to the current 81 provincial units) across Turkey that would be autonomous with their own regional assemblies. These regional assemblies would exercise shared administrative powers over certain policy areas along with the central government. These policy areas include “education, health, culture, social services, agriculture, marine affairs, industry, construction, the environment, tourism, telecommunication, social security, women’s affairs, the issues of young people, sports and other policy areas related to the provision of services” (Yeğen 2011, 5). Policy areas such as foreign policy, revenue,
204 BDP’s suggestions marked a step forward in applying the idea of democratic autonomy to a governance model, when it comes to reaching a consensus within the Kurdish movement on the specifics and horizons of the model (such as federation or confederation and legal guarantee against secession), the jury was out. Nevertheless, the idea of democratic autonomy signified a cornerstone in the Kurdish struggle at the time, as it embodied somewhat of a consensus on three staple objectives: (1) recognizing the
Kurdish language as an official language (the major implication being the right to education in one’s own language); (2) resolving the Kurdish issue within the territorial unity of Turkey267 (the major implication being non-secessionism); and (3) empowering decentralized local governments and enhancing participatory democracy mechanisms along with the conventional representative democracy.
Perhaps the most prominent expression of the idea of democratic autonomy by pro-Kurdish municipalities was embodied in the slogan, “Hem kentimizi hem kendimizi biz yöneteceğiz,” which translated is “We will rule our town as well as ourselves.”
Playing on almost identical pronunciation of two words “kentimiz” (our town) and
“kendimiz” (ourselves) in Turkish, this slogan represented not only the unprecedented success of winning 100 municipalities (this was almost all of the municipalities in the southeastern provinces and out of 2903 municipalities across Turkey) in the 2004 local elections, but also the constant struggle for more autonomy with a centralist state. Many
and defense would be administered by the central government. In addition, the central government and regional assemblies would jointly administer security and justice services (Yeğen 2011). 267 When the Democratic Society Congress unilaterally proclaimed democratic autonomy in July 2011, BDP’s MP Aysel Tuğluk said: “The Kurdish people do not want to be a non-status population anymore. […] We, as Kurdish people, are declaring our democratic sovereignty, holding to Turkey’s national unity on the basis of an understanding of a common motherland, territorial unity and the perspective of a democratic nation.” (Source: http://www.Hürriyetdailynews.com/default.aspx?pageid=438&n=dtk- declares-democratic-sovereignty-2011-07-15)
205 municipal authorities that I interviewed claimed that democratic autonomy was actually underway in the region to a certain extent. In the words of Mayor Demirbaş of Sur:
As a matter of fact, one of the institutions that wanted to declare democratic autonomy was the municipality. BDP’s local governments are actually exercising democratic autonomy. For instance, the people could participate directly to the governance. Municipalities don’t receive much from the central government financially anyway. They sustain themselves barely by their own resources. You know, it’s actually not that different from autonomy. It’s the slogan of the metropolitan municipality: “We rule our town as well as ourselves.”268
Putting aside the political partisanship of the above statement, one could argue that municipalities in the region since the mid-2000s enjoyed an unprecedented political expression as well as experimentation with novel policies and practices despite all the centralist reflexes of the state in Turkey.
A Politicized Approach to Municipal Practice
As discussed in detail in Chapter 2, the reforms of the mid-2000s marked a paradigm shift in the public administration system in Turkey: a transition from an old public administration approach to a new public management one that would better meet the contemporary needs of Turkish society. As such, the reform process institutionalized entrepreneurial urban governance in Turkey. Modernization of Turkey’s public administration system meant first and foremost applying processes that could achieve efficiency, productivity, transparency, and accountability. It also meant democratization, as we saw in the case of institutions (e.g., city councils) that target enhancing citizen participation. Pro-Kurdish municipalities welcomed many aspects of these reforms and capitalized on the democratic openings the reform process provided in novel ways that I will discuss below. I argue that entrepreneurial municipalism in the case of Diyarbakır created new municipal practices and policies that primarily reflected the political
268 Interview with Abdullah Demirbaş by the author on July 2011.
206 ideologies, agendas, and worldviews of the mayors. These novel practices were more about how they used the urban as a site for their political contentions and broader struggles than they were about efforts to become a competitive metropolis.
“Multilingual Municipalism”
Legal pro-Kurdish parties in Turkey’s political history—of which there have been a few since the 1990s due to party closures—mostly positioned themselves on the left. As the objectives and discourse of the Kurdish movement shifted away from nationalist/secessionist tones with the appropriation of human rights language in the early
2000s, we witnessed a parallel shift in pro-Kurdish parties to a multicultural/rights and liberties–focused agenda within the left. Municipalities capitalized on the mid-2000s reforms and reflected this multicultural shift in their political orientation through the practice of multilingual municipalism (çokdilli belediyecilik in Turkish). According to my interviewees, because of the multicultural and multiethnic demographics of the region, offering the public the opportunity to receive services in their own native languages was important to realize the democratic essence of local governments. In particular, Mayor
Demirbaş of Sur was popularly known for delivering municipal practice in various languages of the region such as Kurdish, Armenian, and Assyrian. He explained his motivations to do so as follows:
I took the decision to practice multilingual municipalism. Look, this is an important aspect of democratic autonomy. I could have gone with bilingual for Kurdish and Turkish only, or I could have gone with only Kurdish. But that would mean I am denying the existence of others just like the Republic denied my existence for 80 years. That’s why I chose multilingual. […] For instance there was this academic once who asked me, “Why Armenian? There are only two of them here.” I said even if there were two, they are different and I have to protect them. They have a right as well because they are citizens. […] Even if there is no demand for it, I have to prepare the ground for that kind of demand to occur. Therefore, the lack of demand does not mean I will do nothing about it. For
207 instance, I published Kurdish storybooks. I also published in Armenian and Assyrian. If a Kurd has the right to read in their own language, so does an Armenian or an Assyrian.269
Mayor Demirbaş proudly showed me copies of his municipal publications in various languages. He also mentioned that he opened a municipal preschool where the education is exclusively in Kurdish and that he supported volunteers who could tutor children in learning Kurdish. He also stated that in his municipality’s education support center, 400 adults attend Kurdish language courses. He argued that through such practices they helped the public rediscover, learn, and revive their native languages. Mayor Demirbaş also mentioned that he wanted to name a street after a departed local writer of Assyrian descent (Faik Naim Palak); however, the central government wanted to investigate whether the said writer was originally a citizen of the Republic.270 He continued sarcastically, “On the other hand, nobody questioned whether John F. Kennedy or Simon
Bolivar was a citizen of Turkey or not! Or Salahaddin Eyyubi for that matter. What I want to say is the communication channels between the center and the locality is extremely politicized, extremely bureaucratized and we are really struggling.”271
Mayor Demirbaş also got into trouble with the central government when he implemented compensation for municipal employees who know Kurdish, Armenian, and
Assyrian just like the state gives higher salaries to employees who know English,
German, French, and Arabic. Moreover, he also made knowing Kurdish, Armenian, and
Assyrian a requirement for employees of his municipality. Having done this, he faced a huge backlash from the center, and an investigation was ordered on the grounds that what
269 Interview with Abdullah Demirbaş by the author in July 2011. 270 Interview with Abdullah Demirbaş by the author in 2011. 271 Interview with Abdullah Demirbaş by the author in 2011. There are many streets in Turkey named after these historical figures.
208 he did was unconstitutional and against the principle of equality.272 More positively,
Yüksel Aslan Acer of Bağlar District mentioned how municipal health services improved in recent years in terms of reaching out to women when they hired Kurdish-speaking medical personnel:
Previously, women could not express themselves; the doctor does not know Kurdish and women do not know Turkish. They could not even tell them what’s wrong with their health. Now there are more Kurdish-speaking health personnel so that women could comfortably tell their problems. Therefore we could reach more women.273
Indeed, municipal signboards of Diyarbakır written in Kurdish would have been unthinkable less than a decade ago. Some of the signage was bilingual (Turkish and
Kurdish), some was only in Turkish, and some only in Kurdish.274 Definitely, a municipal policy was underway all around the city. In line with all this, the metropolitan municipality of Diyarbakır hired a linguistics and sociology professor who had academic publications on multilingualism as their main municipal consultant.275 Moreover, on the metropolitan municipality’s website, there is an audio library of Kurdish tales and stories.276
Besides recognizing different ethnic and linguistic identities of Diyarbakır, municipal authorities made a conscious effort to recognize and celebrate the various religious heritages of the city, including Armenian Orthodox Christianity, Assyrian
Christianity, Judaism, Yazidi, and the Alawite creed, alongside mainstream Islam. The metropolitan municipality restored a few very important historical places of worship that
272 Interview with Abdullah Demirbaş by the author in 2011. 273 Interview with Yüksel Aslan Acer by the author in 2011. 274 Please see appendices for related photographs from the field. 275 See the profile of municipal consultant: http://www.Diyarbakır.bel.tr/birimler/diger- birimler/danisman.html 276 See http://www.Diyarbakır.bel.tr/galeri/seslikutuphane.html
209 had deteriorated, such as the Surp Gregos Armenian Church, which is considered the biggest Armenian church of the Middle East. Metropolitan Mayor Baydemir identified the restoration project as one of the most exciting projects during his mayoralty. Another restoration the metropolitan municipality sponsored was the Mother Mary Assyrian
Church in the historical district of Sur. Mayor Baydemir said he equally cared for all faith groups and their heritage in the city and that is why they planned to rebuild a synagogue on the same land where the temple once stood. The metropolitan municipality also built a cemevi277 “even though there are not many Alawites living in Diyarbakır.”278 Moreover, the metropolitan municipality publicizes a Yazidi New Year (also known as Çarşema
Sor) each year and the mayors celebrate along with the Yazidi community. Metropolitan
Mayor Baydemir explained his motive: “We are at the service of all faiths and I say from the very beginning “O people of Diyarbakır, your ethnic and religious identity, your language, color, and gender is not an obstacle for receiving the best quality service. Nor is it an obstacle for you to express yourselves.”279
The recognition of diverse ethnic, linguistic, and religious identities currently extant in Diyarbakır—or historically associated with the city—by the municipal authorities was a politically significant and deliberate move. It reflected how mayors used the urban as an experimental site to show what it would look like if Turkey had a multicultural constitution. As such, these novel practices of celebrating various cultures and ethnicities were not urban-bound; they had national resonance. And yet, such practices surely spoke to the metropolitan project of turning Diyarbakır into “an attraction
277 The literal meaning of cemevi is “house for gathering.” The followers of the Alawite sect of Islam in Turkey do not attend mosques for prayers. Rather, they assemble in these places, which also serve as cultural community centers. 278 Interview with the BDP’s Local Governance Unit Representatives (Oya O) by the author in 2011. 279 Interview with Osman Baydemir by the author in 2011.
210 center for arts, culture, tourism and commerce in the Middle East” as well.280 The metropolitan municipality identifies Diyarbakır as “the Middle Eastern capital of arts and culture.”281 Therefore, incorporating a multicultural sensitivity to municipal practice contributed to the promotion of the city as a culturally and historically dense metropolis in order to increase its appeal and competitiveness. Without the use of the word
“branding,” municipal authorities of Diyarbakır stressed conceptualizing their city as historically multicultural and a cradle of civilization. Municipal projects in appreciation of different cultures, rituals, and faiths, as well as restoration of the old city walls and other historical buildings, all thus contribute to increasing the city’s competitiveness in terms of tourism and sending a message of identity politics to the larger Turkish public.282
“Citizen-focused” Municipalism
As discussed earlier in Chapter 2, participation was one of the norms that entered into the state discourse with the shift to urban entrepreneurialism. Lawmakers presented empowering local governments as essential for better service to citizens and for democracy at large. The idea that local governments are the closest unit of government to the people was emphasized in highlighting their great potential to channel citizens’ demands into the decision-making processes. In this vein, and as noted in earlier chapters, local government reforms of the mid-2000s in Turkey introduced the concept of citizens’ participation beyond the ballot box for the first time by encouraging the establishment of
280 Interview with Osman Baydemir by the author in 2011. Mayor Baydemir emphasized many times that he wanted to turn Diyarbakır into a center for “culture, arts, tourism and trade” and that his approach to everything related to municipal services was “to realize this four-sided perspective” 281 Metropolitan Municipal Website’s front page greeting. 282 Promoting and reinventing dormant traditions—such as women’s pasta-cutting gatherings and dengbejlik (a Kurdish oral and musical story telling tradition)—were also among the municipal projects in service of this goal. Moreover, the metropolitan municipality applied to the UNESCO to name the historic city walls one of the wonders of the world.
211 Kent Konseyleri (city councils) with Municipality Law #5393 in 2006.283 Town councils and their sub-assemblies (constituted for women, youth, children and those with disabilities) do not have veto power in municipal decision making; however, they constituted a preliminary step in institutionalizing citizen participation and involvement in local affairs.
Capitalizing on this democratic opening of the reform process, pro-Kurdish municipalities started to incorporate participatory mechanisms into the governance of their localities. The BDP’s covenant, (Paragraph K) endorses citizens’ participation as follows:
In opposition to Turkey’s strict centralist and uniform284 system, BDP advocates a deep-rooted reform to derive democratization in political and administrative structure. It endorses the model of democratic autonomy where the people have voice as well as decision-making power and where all differences could be expressed freely. It executes comprehensive undertakings to realize this model. It develops scientific research and discussions towards this aim.285
The BDP municipalities’ self-identification as being “citizen-focused” was a recurring theme in all my interviews. The claim of being “citizen-focused” was usually twofold.
First—as I discussed in detail above—it meant recognizing and promoting the existence of various ethnic, linguistic, and religious identities publicly through municipal policies and services. Second, being “citizen-focused” meant facilitating formal and informal
283 As discussed in Chapter 2, among the objectives of the establishment of these town councils were developing an urban vision and urban identity, protecting the urban rule of law, and realizing the norms and principles of decentralization, governance, transparency and accountability (Law #5393). The regulation of town councils also enabled the founding of sub-assemblies, such as the women’s assembly, the youth assembly, the children’s assembly, and the assembly of people with disabilities. Town councils are composed of representatives from the central state administration; from the local administration (elected as well as appointed); from professional associations (e.g.. lawyers, medical doctors, architectures, and engineers), from civil society associations; from trade unions and universities; and from the above- mentioned sub-assemblies. 284 I chose to translate “tekçi” as uniform and not unitary because the party does not propose secession. 285 BDP Website: https://bdpblog.wordpress.com/parti-tuzugumuz/
212 mechanisms through which citizens’ everyday needs and demands are incorporated into decision making.
Mayors and municipal councilors that I interviewed claimed that their approach was truly a bottom-up and decentralized one. The examples they gave revealed that bottom-up governance meant being in touch with people through neighborhood visits, and surveys, as well as receiving people’s feedbacks in local meetings.286 Here, it is important to dwell on the concept of neighborhood or mahalle in Turkish. Mahalle is the building block of municipal governance in Turkey: an urban area is composed of districts, and districts are composed of neighborhoods. In Southeastern Kurdish provinces, mahalles are not just administrative units composed of electorates that have certain needs and demands from the local elected authorities but also are significant sites of socialization, politicization, and propaganda for the Kurdish movement. In this regard, pro-Kurdish municipalities’ approach to neighborhoods was distinctive. Mayor
Demirbaş, while defending decentralization ardently, warned against centralizing the municipal power at the expense of neighborhoods:
Decentralization is important and authority should be transferred to the local […] but local should not be centralized. This is important as well. I am not saying that everything should be centralized at the municipality. The municipality as well must decentralize the service; carry the service to the people. If I have 16 neighborhoods, in every neighborhood people should be able to have access to the municipality.287
BDP’s municipal councilors claim to maintain this accessibility through what they call
“neighborhood works” (mahalle çalışmaları). Every councilor is assigned a certain
286 In this sense, citizen participation was not that different from practices in İstanbul or İzmir. The only difference was the fact that Diyarbakır is less populated compared to the former two and therefore it is much more easier to touch base with more people. For more discussion on this issue please refer to Chapter 6. 287 Interview with Abdullah Demirbaş by the author in 2011.
213 neighborhood where they are required to do in-depth research to identify the major issues, urgent needs, and residents’ demands. The deputy mayor of Diyarbakır, Hafize
İpek, indicated how they used methods such as questionnaires and surveys to identify and calibrate the needs and demands of a neighborhood. She added, “The more the communication with the people, the more democracy there is.”288 Fatma Kızılkaya, a provincial councilor from Bağlar district, emphasized how “the Europeans” appreciated their inventory-based bottom-up approach:
For instance, I go to Bağlar and identify what the needs and priorities are and then we decide accordingly. There isn’t anyone else [implying other municipalities across Turkey] in another place who visits the citizen personally. We are in constant dialogue with the people. Once we had a mission from Europe visiting here and we met a foreign woman from that mission and she told us that what we were doing was the same as the European experience. They, too, find out about citizens’ ideas and demands from bottom-up and then make their investments accordingly.289
Kizilkaya claimed that gathering inventory regarding the needs and demands of the public by talking to them was a “scientific” approach and therefore the main proof of how efficient they were in service delivery. Indeed most municipal and provincial councilors with whom I spoke, contended they did “more service to the region in ten years than the Republic did in 80 years.” I will discuss this further later in the chapter.
For the purposes of discussion here, it is important to note that not only in Diyarbakır but also in other cases of this research, citizen participation is first and foremost understood in terms of gathering data about people’s needs and demands, be it through survey questionnaires or through door-to-door interactions.
Another way in which municipalities in Diyarbakır encourage citizen participation highlighted more of the deliberative aspect of participatory governance.
288 Interview with Hafize İpek by the author in 2011. 289 Interview with Fatma Kızılkaya by the author in 2011.
214 With the legal establishment of town councils, every neighborhood could also be organized around what is called mahalle meclisleri (neighborhood assemblies).290 BDP capitalized on this concept most efficiently, as neighborhoods are already politicized sites of public deliberation and discussion. Every neighborhood assembly congregates physically in mahalle evleri (neighborhood houses), where participation is voluntary.
Especially in predominantly squatter areas, where living conditions are too low to provide “modernized” public spaces, these neighborhood houses became important sites for public gatherings and political meetings.291 However, to what extent the deliberations in these spaces actually shape policies or services is beyond the scope of this research.
But it is important to note that participation as a notion of governance (introduced with decentralization reforms) was filtered through mayors’ political ideologies, agendas, and worldviews and operationalized at the urban scale through locally specific means. As such, Diyarbakır stood out compared to the rest of the cases in its participatory outlook.
Social Services and Urban Transformation
“Porto Alegre” Aspirations
One of the turning points in Diyarbakır’s urban history was the involuntary migration from the rural areas of the province to its urban core during the 1990s. The escalation of violence between the Turkish armed forces and the PKK at the time in southeastern Turkey resulted in numerous village burnings and evacuations that ended up in an influx of migrants to the urban cores of the region. This involuntary migration of
290 Refer to Law 5393, Article 9. 291 These neighborhood houses also serve as mourning houses (yas evleri) when required. Death can be a very political phenomenon in Diyarbakır. When there is a death among the guerilla, neighborhood houses became sites not just for expressing the grief but also for reproducing the claims of the Kurdish movement. During my fieldwork, when municipal hallways were empty during regular office hours, it was because there was a “martyr” from the guerilla and everybody was in the mourning house visiting the departed’s family.
215 the 1990s left indelible marks on the urban fabric of Diyarbakır, but it also came to constitute its major problems today. To begin with, the uncontrolled and intense gecekondu formation in the urban core gave way not only to destruction of the historical heritage but also to overpopulation and a failing infrastructure. In the old town of
Diyarbakır, the Sur district, gecekondus choked the historical city walls, which are considered one of the world’s longest uninterrupted protected walls to date. Bağlar and
Yenisehir districts also underwent a huge transformation because of gecekondu formation, to the point that “you can shake hands across from one balcony to another.”292
In the words of Metropolitan Mayor Baydemir, Diyarbakır turned into “a metropolis that is stuck between the rural and the urban.”293 It is little wonder that these dramatic upheavals in the urban format soon manifested themselves in other forms of socio- economic distress: structural unemployment, poverty, substance abuse, and violence against women, to name a few. As a result, at the beginning of the 21st century,
Diyarbakır presented a messy but rich ground to apply and experiment with various social policies for municipalities. Indeed “social municipalism” became an important self-identifying aspect of municipal practice in Diyarbakır.
In order to tackle the deep-rooted social and economic urban problems in
Diyarbakır, one of the first projects the metropolitan municipality undertook was
Sümerpark, a community “social support center” that provided free educational, recreational, and health services, mainly targeting, women, children, youth, and those with disabilities. The “Women’s Support Center” offers basic educational courses (in particular for literacy), psychological counseling and consultation, arts and crafts
292 Interview with Yüksel Aslan Acer by the author in 2011. 293 Interview with Osman Baydemir by the author in 2011.
216 workshops, a fitness center, a Laundromat, and social and cultural activities. A “Child
Support Center” offers education and counseling services to parents on children’s rights and children’s social and psychological development. The center has play areas, arts and crafts studios, and a reading room for children and parents. The Health Center provides free protective and healing healthcare for mothers and children. Under the youth category, the center offers various social, cultural, and fitness activities ranging from modern dance to soccer tournaments. For people with disabilities, the center offers counseling services to families, sporting activities, and various educational courses designed to increase their quality of life. Sümerpark also is known for the free vocational education it provides to the people of Diyarbakır. Among the areas of education are accounting, web design, graphic design, natural gas operations, carpentry, printing, entrepreneurship, sales and marketing, hairdressing, baby sitting, and English language courses.294 The programs are designed to help attendees find employment after the successful completion of courses. According to 2011 data, in the first two years of the community center, more than 30% of trainees had found employment. For Metropolitan
Mayor Baydemir, Sümerpark was the “university for the disadvantaged.” After being awarded by Metropolis in 2011295, Mayor Baydemir argued that Sümerpark was their pride in social municipalism and ought to be known as the “Diyarbakır model”—and that it could compete with the Porto Alegre model, which was famous for its application of participatory budgeting.296
Diyarbakır’s municipalities—metropolitan and district—prioritize women’s issues in municipal social services and practices. From counseling services, health clinics,
294 http://www.Diyarbakır.bel.tr/tr/hizmetler/sosyal/sumer-park.html 295 http://www.metropolis.org/members/Diyarbakır#awards 296 Interview with Osman Baydemir by the author in 2011.
217 and shelters to a “women’s only” marketplace, women’s empowerment was an agenda- setting concern. This is in part a result of the gender conscious approach taken by the pro-
Kurdish political parties and the understanding that democratization required a gendered perspective.297 Accordingly, pro-Kurdish municipalities began to experiment with gender-conscious policies. One notable practice was the fight against violence against women. Mayor Demirbaş of Sur District took a decision with his municipal council in
2005 to implement the practice of giving a municipal employee’s salary to his wife if he abused her physically or he took a second wife. This soon became a widespread practice in other pro-Kurdish municipalities and started to be included in municipal job contracts.298 One Sur District municipal councilor called this practice part of a larger social engineering project, underlying the leftist and feminist strands in the broader
Kurdish movement.
Perhaps, a less striking municipal practice in Diyarbakır with regard to women’s economic empowerment was establishing women’s cooperatives: small-scale and neighborhood-based applications of micro-finance. Municipalities provide initial funds for women to bake breads or make tomato paste in bulk, which they could sell via a municipal platform (in a women’s product bazaar or community centers). Depending on the nature of the project, the revenue is either divided equally or according to another criterion, and a part will be used for the next round of production. Municipal authorities claimed that these cooperatives reached out to various poor families and especially empowered women by turning them into breadwinners:
Men cannot treat women like they did in the past. Women developed financial self-esteem; now men cannot behave like in the old days. Women say, “You get
297 Indeed their slogan is “democratic, ecologic and gender equality local governments.” 298 Interview with Abdullah Demirbaş by the author in 2011.
218 up and bring!” Maybe they fight, but then this happens: women redefine the roles within the family and this is reflected in the children. Look, this is the democratization of family.299
According to many pro-Kurdish municipal councilors, the cooperative model put to work by their municipalities has provided a left-leaning economic alternative to mainstream capitalism. It is important to note, however, that these small-scale municipally funded cooperatives are not uncommon in other cities across Turkey irrespective of political party affiliation.
All in all, social municipalism in the case of Diyarbakır is practiced with a gender-conscious mindset and targets women’s issues primarily. So much so that, since
1999, it has become a party convention to assign a female mayoral candidate to Bağlar district, one of the most troubled urban core regions with respect to violence against women, unemployment, and substance abuse. As a result, Bağlar became a pilot area in experimenting with new frontier policies and practices regarding women’s issues.
“Diyarbakır, the Capital of the Middle East”
As discussed above, the compulsory rural to urban migration during the 1990s
(due to armed conflicts between the Turkish security forces and the PKK guerilla) altered
Diyarbakır’s urban core tremendously. Illegal gecekondu sites where migrants settled and built flooded the unique historical heritage sites of Diyarbakır—the famous city walls
(Sur) and the area enclosed by the walls (Suriçi). The urban sprawl affected other inner city districts, such as Bağlar and Yenisehir. Failing infrastructure, hazardous buildings, and high density populations soon became the reality for the core metropolitan area.
In line with the metropolitan municipal project of turning Diyarbakır into “a center of attraction” for arts, culture, tourism, and commerce, the core city, also known as
299 Interview with Abdullah Demirbaş by the author in 2011.
219 Suriçi, had to be tackled from an urban transformation point of view. Under Metropolitan
Mayor Baydemir, the metropolitan municipality restored many historical buildings (e.g.,
Surp Gregos Kilisesi, Meryem Ana Kilisesi, Cemil Paşa Konağı) and revitalized city squares (e.g., Dağkapı Meydanı) and main streets and arteries (e.g., Gazi Caddesi and
Melik Ahmet Caddesi) within Suriçi. However, the gecekondu dwellings constituted a much more a difficult task to tackle because of the number of people living in the area and the convoluted physical structures. Since 2009, the central government, the metropolitan municipality, and the Sur municipality collaborated to relieve the city walls of the gecekondu settlements. Indeed, in many instances, then Prime Minister Erdoğan mentioned how it was part of his government’s agenda on Diyarbakır to restore the city’s famous walls to their former glory and increase Diyarbakır’s appeal to tourists. Needless to say, Erdoğan’s imagining of a revitalized Sur district differed from the metropolitan and district mayors’ imagining: whereas the former highlighted the Islamic legacy of the district, the latter highlighted the multifaith character of the district. Nevertheless, the small-scale projects that took place between 2009 and 2012, while providing partial improvements, have not, at the time of this writing, seen enough overall development to create the desired effect.300
300 Unfortunately, Suriçi’s transformation later took a dramatic turn. The Sur district from the late 2015 till early 2016 was where the PKK armed groups positioned themselves and declared “autonomy” by digging trenches all around the district, resulting in Turkish armed and security forces intervening to impose curfews in the area. Weeks-long armed conflict left the district in desolation and uprooted thousands of people from their homes. Following the end of conflict and the PKK’s departure from the area, the central government declared they would clean up the torn and dangerous buildings and renovate and rebuild the district so that the historical heritage of the city walls and many other monuments would be reborn. The central government also declared that the affected residents of the district would be offered other housing options located elsewhere built by TOKİ. In TOKİ’s promotional video for Sur’s revitalization, the Islamic architecture and legacy set the main character and theme of the district’s restoration, with no explicit reference to its multifaith and multicultural legacy. This is also characteristic of the AKP’s approach to the Kurdish issue, finding the common denominator between the Turks and the Kurds as belonging the nation of Islam, that is ümmet. However, the analysis of this time period is beyond the scope of my research in this
220 In Bağlar, another gecekondu-stricken district of Diyarbakır, municipal councilors stressed the near impossibility of completely transforming these areas, for both financial and technical reasons. Yüksel Aslan Acer explained that they could only find isolated solutions for the most risky buildings, offering housing of better standards elsewhere to the affected residents. She noted that as a municipality they could target these buildings by undertaking community projects and providing various social services to the residents of this poverty-stricken area. She also mentioned they received advice from a visiting EU delegate to avoid completely demolishing the slums, as they represented “authentic urban fabric.”301
On the other hand—and in stark contrast to the above examples—after the 2000s the increasing housing demand of the upper-middle classes gave way to urban development in newer districts of Diyarbakır. In Kayapınar, for example, one can see modern high rises, luxury condominiums, state of the art shopping malls, parks and recreational areas, and suburban style villas (detached houses with gardens and pools).
The Kayapınar deputy mayor told that they were a “luckier municipality” compared to others in Diyarbakır; zoning and urban design were not issues there because they had no gecekondu dwellings and could start from “a clean slate.”302 Accordingly, Kayapınar municipality promoted their district as the “New face of Diyarbakır.”303 In particular, real estate in the Diclekent neighborhood of the district became famous not only for their ultra modern appeal, but also their competitive prices with İstanbul’s real estate market.
dissertation. (To view TOKİ’s audiovisual for Sur district called Sur Yeniden (Sur, Again): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=keOlu2fY7NM) 301 Interview with Yüksel Aslan Acer by the author in 2011. 302 Interview with Mahmut Dağ by the author in 2011. 303 http://www.Kayapınar.bel.tr/
221 Similarly, a residential neighborhood with high-end villas emerged in late 2000s along the Tigris River, on the outskirts of the city. Called Dicle Vadi Evleri (Tigris
Valley Houses), this new residential area was formerly owned by the Tigris University
(Dicle Universitesi). In my interviews with Metropolitan Mayor Baydemir, he complained about the central government’s obstructive attitude towards his municipality’s project to turn a large part of Tigris Valley into a recreational urban park.
He claimed: “They are selling university property to build villas in exchange for personal benefit. Dicle Valley Houses is now becoming a big residential area here, but—and I have to make this clear—I am definitely not against building of villas.”304 His frustration was more about the central government obstructing his own project, and less about the emergence of a high-end lifestyle villa neighborhood. It is interesting to note how even a leftist (and activist) mayor did not problematize the increasing polarization of
Diyarbakır’s urban fabric, let alone begin addressing it.
The above-mentioned Tigris Valley Project needs further elaboration. The vast uninhabited area along the east and west of the River Tigris, flowing just outside the city center, has been the subject of many projects and proposals by various local and central institutions since the mid-2000s, none of which had come to fruition. Almost all of these proposals and projects were developed around the idea of turning the Tigris Valley into a massive urban park and recreational area, which would make Diyarbakır “one of the world’s brand cities.”305 However, certain aspects about this location made complicated this seemingly easy and harmless proposal. First of all, the Tigris Valley includes the
304 Interview with Osman Baydemir by the author in 2011. It should be noted here that the Dicle Valley Project and the Dicle Valley Houses are not competing for the same area; they are located in two separate areas. The Dicle Valley is a vast region. 305 https://www.projepedia.com/emlak-haberleri/Diyarbakır-da-kentsel-donusum-sur-da-basliyor,470.html
222 famous Hevsel Gardens, which is 8000 years old and part of UNESCO’s list of World
Cultural Heritage. Hevsel Gardens is the fertile green belt that on 700 hectares land, representative of Diyarbakır’s authentic flora and fauna and including various migratory bird species of Mesopotamia. Second, Tigris Valley is also home of the iconic 10 Gözlü
Köprü (10 spanned bridge), preserved intact since the 11th century. Third, Tigris
University’s campus is located in the valley, making the university a significant property holder to be involved in a potential project. Given these natural, historical, and legalistic aspects, proposals for a massive metropolitan park and recreational area have been mired in political contestation and competition among the central government, the Governorate, the university, and the metropolitan municipality. First, the metropolitan municipal project was not settled because the university did not agree to give up its land; the later central government proposal was contested by local civil society organizations and various local chambers on the grounds that it would violate the ecologic integrity of the valley. While it is still not clear what kind of project will take place and in what form, all the local stakeholders agree that the Tigris Valley needs attention and care in order to be preserved and incorporated into urban life in Diyarbakır. All the stakeholders are also aware that the potential touristic and commercial contributions of such a project can make Diyarbakır a more competitive city (While the central government agencies refer to this as “brand city,” the pro-Kurdish municipalities call it “center of attraction”). And yet, these prolonged disagreements represent not only the varying urban perspectives, but also broader political contentions and competing agendas and interests wired within the structural governance of the region.
223 Conclusion
Turkey entered a new phase in its democratization when it achieved the EU candidacy status at the 1999 Helsinki Summit. The ensuing constitutional reforms306 and the first two Erdoğan governments’ reconciliatory approach towards the Kurdish issue resulted in an onset of normalization of Kurdish politics in Turkey. The AKP’s local administration reforms starting in 2004 and the lifting of decades-long state of emergency rule in the Eastern Kurdish populated regions opened up local governmental spaces for pro-Kurdish political parties. Indeed, starting first with the 1999 local elections and then later with the 2004 and 2009 local elections, we see a surge and then a consolidation of pro-Kurdish political parties’ rule in Kurdish-populated provinces of Turkey. Diyarbakır as the biggest and politically most significant metropolis of southeastern Turkey came to national attention with its outspoken metropolitan and district mayors from the mid-
2000s onwards.
Pro-Kurdish political parties (DTP, BDP, and HDP) welcomed the local government reforms that modernized the administrative structure and empowered municipalities financially and politically. However, they remained highly critical of the double tutelage (administrative and perception) the central government had over locally elected representatives. They argued that “perception tutelage,” which was based on the idea that pro-Kurdish municipalities’ agendas threatened national unity and integrity, was endemic to the political system in Turkey and is not necessarily particular to the AKP governments. Mayors and other municipal authorities in Diyarbakır complained that the
306 After its candidacy, Turkey started to implement a series of reforms in its constitution. Before 1999, there were only three amendments to the 1982 constitution. However, after the candidacy, 14 major amendments took place, the majority of them under the AKP governments.
224 central government and its local agencies, the most important being the Governorate, obstructed many municipal actions on a consistent basis because of political concerns.
Still, pro-Kurdish municipalities welcomed the entrepreneurial shift in governance and moreover capitalized on political opportunity structures by implementing novel practices in Diyarbakır in accord with their political ideologies, agendas, and worldviews, as in the case of multilingual practices. Multilingual municipalism, however, was not just about language rights. Mayors put forward the multicultural heritage of the city to elevate Diyarbakır’s standing as a regional “center of attraction” for tourism and commerce. Through (re)presenting Diyarbakır “as part of Mesopotamia” and “a cradle of civilization” and investing in Diyarbakır’s multiethnic and multifaith dynamics in the local context (e.g., restoring and rebuilding multiple faith centers, reviving dormant traditions such as dengbejlik, and celebrating otherwise forgotten cultural events such as
Çarşema Sor) and in international platforms (e.g., UNESCO applications for listing
Hevsel Gardens and city walls as cultural heritage), municipalities found new ways to give Diyarbakır a reputation as a historical world city at the heart of the Middle East. On the other hand, despite the governing pro-Kurdish BDP’s leftist ideological standing, mayors did not problematize the growing segregation between the lower and upper class residential areas, let alone offer an alternative vision for urban development and transformation that enhance cohesion. Mayors and other municipal authorities underscored the free social services they provided—as in the other cases of this study—in their fight against urban ailments such as poverty, illiteracy, unemployment, violence against women, and substance abuse among youth.
225 Despite ideological differences between the central government and the local government, mayors in Diyarbakır welcomed the changes to urban governance. The disagreements or conflicts over certain projects (e.g., Tigris Valley) were more about the competing political agendas between the central and local governments and less about the content of the projects. While the central government calls it “turning Diyarbakır into a brand city,” municipalities call it “turning Diyarbakır into a center of attraction.”
Therefore, the shift to urban entrepreneurialism rendered Diyarbakır as a site where contesting regional and national ideologies, agendas, and worldviews are materialized and sought after through various entrepreneurial actions and strategies. Urban entrepreneurialism, therefore, engendered urban policies that are not only concerned with territorial competitiveness but also with broader ideology and interests associated with a pro-Kurdish agenda that has regional and national resonance.
226 CHAPTER SIX
CONCLUSION
Part 1: Contribution to the Literature
If the case of Turkey in general (and the three metropolitan city cases in particular) is just another instantiation of neoliberal state restructuring and urban entrepreneurialism, then the question becomes, “Why do we need another case study at all?” Is it to confirm the pervasiveness of neoliberal urban policies and the inescapable validity of urban entrepreneurialism as a form of governance? Or is it just to add one more case to “expand the repertory of sites” (Dawson and Edwards 2004, 1)? The answer to both questions is, clearly, negative.
To begin with, the case of Turkey sheds light on how the shift to urban entrepreneurialism followed a different path than the North Atlantic context, where the concept originally emerged. Here, the approach of state rescaling provides significant insights with regard to, first, depicting the particularities of rescaling processes and second, accounting for differences in resulting urban policies. Regarding the former, a closer look at rescaling processes reveals the central state’s significant role in the shift to urban entrepreneurialism in Turkey. The latter pertains to the institutionalization of social services as a domain of municipal practice after the shift to entrepreneurial urban governance. I will discuss each below.
In the Anglo-American experience, as discussed in Chapter 1, it was the local state–local capital duo that led the shift to entrepreneurial forms of urban governance in the face of fiscal austerity. The search was for new ways to generate revenue and foster economic revival and growth at a local scale. This transition took place in the 1970s, at a time of major tectonic movements in Fordist economy (read: deindustrialization and structural unemployment) and its political modus operandi, the Keynesian state. In advanced capitalist states, the welfare compromise of the Keynesian state system was the backbone of the Fordist economic model. With the fiscal crises of the state and transformations in the economy at large, the welfare compromise was no longer sustainable. Austerity measures radically restructured the state (on both central and local levels) and significantly curtailed its welfare function. Consequently, the redistributive logic of the local state gave way to boosterist practices that are primarily concerned with attracting capital and investment, working in close collaboration with local capital in a context of intensifying inter-urban competition. Thus, urban policies reflected the shifting priorities from a politics of redistribution and territorial development to one of economic growth and territorial competitiveness.
In the Turkish case, the shift to urban entrepreneurialism took a different course.
First of all, the central state (national government) spearheaded the shift to urban entrepreneurialism both during its first phase in the mid-1980s and its second phase in the mid-2000s, the latter of which is the main focus of this study.307 Therefore, urban entrepreneurialism in Turkey did not originate from a local coalition (of municipalities and capital) as a way to get out of economic crisis, as was the case in the North Atlantic contexts. In the case of Turkey, while state rescaling and the resulting urban entrepreneurialism took place because of political and economic crises, it was nevertheless the central government that orchestrated the shift. The role of the central
307 As I underlined in Chapter 2, the seeds of urban entrepreneurialism were sown in 1984 when the two- tiered metropolitan municipal system was established. Metropolitan municipalities gained significant authority, especially in urban planning, along with new practices such as public–private partnerships and the emergence of project-oriented governance. However, it was with the AKP reforms in the mid-2000s that urban entrepreneurial governance was crystallized.
228 government in institutionalizing urban entrepreneurialism through these reforms, therefore, differentiates the Turkish context from the Anglo-American experiences.308
As discussed in detail in Chapter 2, state rescaling in Turkey in the mid-2000s took place within a specific political and economic conjuncture defined by three major dynamics: democratization of state and politics, the need for recovery from economic crisis, and the need to address long-standing structural issues in urban areas. Problems related to democracy, economy, and urbanization were products of previous state scalar arrangements that reached a peak at the turn of the millennium. The AKP governments
(in particular the first and second Erdoğan governments) addressed this crisis-ridden conjuncture with a major reform agenda that (1) overhauled the heavily bureaucratic and hierarchic state organization inspired by new public management norms and principles, and (2) empowered municipalities—in particular metropolitan municipalities—by transferring considerable political, administrative, and financial authority. As such,
Turkey saw a major scalar overhaul of the administrative and territorial organization of the state.
Although the central government utilized a discourse of decentralization and democratization to define the spirit of these reforms, scalar arrangements of various state functions revealed their incoherent and complex nature. For instance, through revitalization of the Housing Development Administration (TOKİ)—a central state agency—housing policy was rescaled at the central level. And yet, housing policy is inherently an urban policy. Therefore, while on the one hand municipalities gained
308 However, this does not suggest that municipalities in Turkey are passive implementers of urban entrepreneurialism. In fact, the detailed case study accounts of three metropolitan cities reveal how mayors and bureaucrats, embedded in their own localities and politics, perceive and implement entrepreneurial actions and strategies. I will return to this discussion below.
229 considerable authority to devise urban development plans and undertake urban transformation projects, on the other hand, the implementation of such policies required close collaborations with TOKİ. Moreover, through mega-projects of transit and transportation, the central government significantly intervened in processes of urbanization and in the urban form. Last but not least, the central government continued to practice administrative tutelage—a deep-rooted centralist legacy—in ways that could facilitate or obstruct actions of municipalities, favoring certain cities over others along party lines. Therefore, unlike its previously ambiguous position vis-à-vis the urban as a scale of activity, the central state in Turkey actively intervened in urban processes, prioritizing the metropolitan level. This shift in policy was based on the understanding that the contemporary global economy operates on an urban scale rather than a national one, as well as the recognition that metro regions are critical for national economies in the global competition to attract capital, investment, and financial and commercial activity.
The state’s role in and active pursuit of urbanization in the case of Turkey is far from being an exception. In fact, in the global South, states (central and local) do play a vital role in contemporary neoliberal urbanization. Neither economic liberalization nor decentralization reforms in contexts such as China, Russia, India, and South Korea have meant a retreating (read: hollowing out of) state, or a relaxation of state control and surveillance over local/urban processes (See Lin 2014; Bercht 2013; Yu and Zhu 2009;
Golubchikov et al., 2014; Joo 2015; Dupont 2011).309 On the contrary, states both at the
309 The widely held assumption that neoliberalization goes with decentralization as well as with a retreat of the state is substantially challenged in non-Western contexts: China’s transition from a centrally planned economy to a market economy since 1980s was accompanied with decentralization reforms that gave local states more power in terms of decision making and more incentives in pursuing entrepreneurial policies at
230 national and local levels, have been integral to entrepreneurial urban policies and practices.
In countries such as China, Russia, and India, central states—despite marketization and decentralization policies—determine to a great extent the direction of urbanization processes on a national scale. For instance, in the case of China, urbanization policy is developed at the national level and promoted through Five Year
Plans that “guide city politics and reorientations in local city planning” (Bercht 2013,
133).310 Similarly, in Russia, the federal government adopted the “Concept for Long-
Term Development of Russia” (Vision 2020) in 2008, which “envisages that the regional development will be structured around a few growth poles, which therefore require particular national support” (Golubchikov et al. 2014, 628). Thus, the federal government has strategically supported certain cities over others: while Moscow was designated as an international financial center, St Petersburg was promoted as a world city (Golubchikov et al. 2014). Moreover, through such a policy, the federal government expects cities to develop their own “territorial programme on the basis of which cities are supposed to
the local level. As a result, Chinese urbanization has been propelled to great heights. Examples include cities such as Beijing, Changchun, and Guangzhou among others (Lin 2014; Bercht 2013, Yu and Zhu 2009). However, decentralization of responsibilities was not accompanied with fiscal power. The 1994 ruling on fiscal recentralization in China significantly stripped local governments of their fiscal income, pushing them to use land as a major source of revenue generation (hence, the concept of landed urbanization) (Lin 2014). In South Korea, the developmentalist state model and economy underwent major neoliberal restructuring in the late 1980s, which was accompanied by decentralization reforms in the 1990s. However, the interventionist state, a legacy of the developmentalist episode, was rescaled at the local level. Urbanization policies prioritized economic growth and commodification of urban spaces, as we can see in the cases of Busan and Seoul. Increasing presence of corporate interests aligned with popularly elected mayors with political ambitions in Korean metropolises (Joo 2015). In recent studies on gentrification, the role of the state as a main driving force for gentrification in post-recessionary stages of neoliberal economy is emphasized as a distinct feature in the Western context (see Hackworth 2002). However, as López- Morales (2010) argues, in the Chilean case, the heavy role of the state in rent-seeking real estate activity has been a regular feature of urbanization throughout the twentieth century. 310 In China, urbanization policy has been explicitly pushed forward since the Tenth National Five Year Plan (2001–2005). In the Twelfth Five Year Plan, the central state advocated a specific policy of “transforming coastal regions from being the world factories towards becoming hubs of research and development” (Bercht 2013, 133).
231 create their image and compete between each other” (Golubchikov et al. 2014, 629).
Likewise, India’s federal government established a centrally funded programme
(Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission) in 2005 that provides subsidies to major metropolises on the condition that local governments and municipalities initiate reforms, produce city development plans, “project themselves into the future and improve productivity and efficiencies of cities” (Dupont 2011, 537).
Federal policies along these lines indicate not only the crucial role played by the state in processes of urbanization, but also how fierce the subnational inter-urban competition is in countries like China, Russia, and India. Therefore, local states and their ability to mobilize federal support emerge as integral aspects of cities’ entrepreneurial performance. At this point, the various paths that individual cities can take and the prospects they can envision and enjoy are determined by institutional legacies from socialist and developmentalist pasts as well as the manipulations of a number of actors
(local and national). Thus, studies of neoliberal urban entrepreneurialism should give due consideration to the role of local and institutional contexts “imbued with the requirements of the current capitalist system” and yet deeply “embedded in the pre-eminence of national politics” (Golubchikov et al. 2014, 621). The preconceived notions of state, market, and entrepreneurialism that are derived from a specific spatiotemporal phase in
Western history (Fordist/Keynesian) should be revisited to reveal their multiform and complex character, not just in the global South but also in the global North.
A second way in which the shift to urban entrepreneurialism in Turkey is different from the Western context pertains to the institutionalization of social services in municipalities. Unlike the US or UK, local governments in Turkey never had a
232 redistributive function to begin with, before the entrepreneurial turn. On the contrary, it is only after the reforms of the mid-2000s that municipalities gained somewhat of a profile and legitimacy as a welfare-distributing agency, especially with respect to free social services in areas such as education, health, and recreation. By contrast, in the North
Atlantic contexts, the local governments jettisoned their redistributive functions as they transitioned to urban entrepreneurialism.
Here it is important to reiterate that the notion of “socially responsible municipalities”—or what is commonly referred to as “social municipalism”—is rooted in two episodes of Turkish urban history: in the leftist municipalities of the 1970s; and in
Islamist municipalities of the 1990s. These movements emerged as a critique of state redistributive policy—or the lack thereof—in the face of unplanned and uneven urbanization. As such they were exceptional episodes. However, the AKP’s institutionalization of the socially responsible municipal practices of the Refah Party era explains how the problems and crises associated with previous state scalar arrangements are usually addressed with policies in subsequent rescaling processes. Therefore, state rescaling as it took place in Turkey generated a kind of urban entrepreneurialism that is entrepreneurial but at the same time attuned to locally relevant social issues. Such a perspective further gestures to the analytical position (which I describe in Chapter 1) that there is no such thing as a purely neoliberal regime or project. The reality is rather incoherent, fragmented, and complex. Thus, it is more grounded to talk about “neoliberal urbanizations” (rather than neoliberal urbanism) (Peck, Brenner, and Theodore 2009) that could trace “family resemblances and constitutive connections” (Peck 2017) without foreclosing differences as variations from a norm.
233 Therefore, while the imperatives of inter-urban competition (and neoliberal economy in general) could be quite similar across the globe, as could be the urban built form and entrepreneurial practices that cater to the imperatives of such competition, the institutional configurations and contextual specificities that filter these imperatives to the individual city cases differ significantly. And it is worthwhile to study these contextual differences through comparative lenses (both intra-country and inter-country) to trace the limitations and potentials of urban entrepreneurial governance.
Granted, if the case of Turkey sheds light onto how the rescaling processes unfold and resulting entrepreneurial urban policies differ, then the question becomes why we would study three different city cases within Turkey to make this argument? The answer to this question lies in the need to “put cities back into their national contexts” in the literature on urban entrepreneurialism, which is “squarely rooted within a political economy perspective” (Doucet 2012, 2048) that, more often than not, reifies cities and inter-urban competition.
As I discussed in Chapter 1, urban entrepreneurialism literature has a tendency to conceptualize cities as active agents and atomistic entities in a geopolitical vacuum, engaging in Hobbesian inter-urban competition. In such conceptualizations, variables such as logic of capitalist accumulation and economic production, local sectoral configurations, marketable characteristics, and local coalitions mainly account for a city’s performance for better or worse. The reality and fierceness of inter-urban competition
(exhibited in its quintessential form in city rankings and policy papers for city success) more often than not gloss over the impact of the national scale on “city competitiveness.”
I argue that any analysis of urban entrepreneurialism has to take into account the specific
234 influences of the national context on the reality of cities, which are as significant as the imperatives of inter-urban competition. In fact, national contexts operate as filters, mediators, and translators of global processes into urban positionalities.
Therefore, putting cities back into their national contexts goes back to the earlier discussion on the role of the state—specifically, institutional city–state configurations
(such as intergovernmental relations) that condition (facilitate or impede) entrepreneurial prospects of any given urban setting. As such, states could select (favor) certain cities as their “national champions” over others and actively promote their integration. For instance, in the case of Turkey, intergovernmental relations are deeply imbued with party politics, acted out through the practice of administrative tutelage that can mean anything from revenue cuts and audit raids to national support for an international event bid. The political alignment between national and local governments plays a significant role in determining cities’ entrepreneurial prospects and their integration into the global market.
Putting cities back into their national contexts also means viewing the city as a site where national/local political (ideological and worldview) contentions are expressed in glocalized forms. This study, with its in-depth exploration of mayors’ perceptions and municipal practices, shows that urban becomes a scale through which national rivalries of competing party ideologies and worldviews are waged. Through entrepreneurial municipal practices and glocalized materializations, competing political agendas, ideologies, and worldviews are expressed in the spatial scale of cities. Such entrepreneurial practices, laden with specific political sensibilities and agendas, are urban-based but not necessarily urban-bound: that is, they have resonance on a broader national level. The repertoires for entrepreneurial municipal practices and policies,
235 therefore, might be overwhelmingly similar, but the meanings and messages communicated—and the interests and agendas served—through these could be different and have meanings beyond wagering in inter-urban competition.
I have offered entrepreneurial municipalism as a concept that can capture the political and institutional embeddedness of urban entrepreneurialism. It borrows from the latter in that it also denotes a market-oriented approach to municipal practice that prioritizes economic growth of municipal jurisdictions, adopts business models and strategies in urban processes, and is primarily geared for urban competition. But it fine- tunes the notion by highlighting it (1) as a glocal practice by political actors entering inter-urban competition while upholding specific (national and local) political agendas and interests, and (2) as a municipal practice that is conditioned to a great extent by intergovernmental relations and urban’s positionality within national context. As a “mid- level notion” (Peck 2017), entrepreneurial municipalism sheds light on how municipalities transformed their organizations and services in relation to their specific contexts while undergoing a so-called neoliberal restructuring. As such, I tried to convey that while similar restructurings and municipal reforms were taking place around the world at the same time, their local applications are to a great extent shaped by existing institutional frameworks, political contestations, and local specificities.
Part 2: Comparative Conclusions
Throughout the dissertation, I explored entrepreneurial municipalism with respect to (1) the intergovernmental relations it is embedded in, (2) its normative and organizational framework, and (3) its staple policies and practices in the urban realm. I chose three metropolitan cities that are substantially different from one another
236 politically, demographically, and geographically: İstanbul, İzmir, and Diyarbakır. All three metropolises’ local governments have been represented by the AKP, the CHP, and the BDP respectively between 2004 and 2014 (the time-frame of this dissertation).
Therefore, it is fair to speak of a consolidated metropolitan authority in all cases for at least a decade. I aimed to explore how different and rival political parties approach and implement the urban regime that has been crystallizing within this time period; to what extent each city’s positionality made a difference in terms of their entrepreneurial leap forward; and in what ways urban becomes a site for political contestations that are not necessarily urban-bound. In what follows, I will present comparative conclusions from these cases.
Intergovernmental Relations
As discussed in Chapter 2, the state tradition and organization in Turkey is a centralist one. Despite the improvements towards empowering local governments, the concept of administrative tutelage continues to be a constitutionally protected aspect of local governmental apparatus. Because the national political parties are also represented at the local level, the political alignment between the national government and municipalities determined to what extent administrative tutelage would affect the day-to- day municipal operations. This changed very little in the 2000s. What did change was how this administrative tutelage was put to work for entrepreneurial purposes in shaping urban processes.
In the case of İstanbul, I argued that the AKP, as the national government, designated the city as a “national champion” from the very start. The AKP ardently promoted the city’s growth, development, and integration to the global economy through
237 authoring, sponsoring, and supporting various projects. These ranged from large-scale infrastructural projects to initiating İstanbul’s transformation into a hub for world conventions, congresses, and major cultural and sports events. Since the 2000s, İstanbul’s integration into the global economy has been central to national government’s agenda of economic recovery; and İstanbul’s projection as a “world city” had momentous impact on the metropolitan scale. Moreover, since İstanbul’s metropolitan authority and national government belong to the same political party, intergovernmental relations have been quite amicable, a situation that facilitated numerous collaborations between the two in
İstanbul. Good relations meant fast tracking and resourcefulness for projects. The success of İstanbul meant the success of the national government, and success of metropolitan authorities meant consolidation of the national government’s authority on the urban scale.
None of my interviewees mentioned any obstruction from the center. On the contrary, they emphasized how “lucky” they were to have a prime minister with mayoral experience and who could understand the needs of İstanbul.
In the case of İzmir, the metropolitan municipality and the majority of district municipalities are from the main oppositional party, the CHP. The interviewees claimed that because of their political affiliation, the central government could slow down their municipal processes by withholding council decisions at the governor or ministerial levels. Moreover, they argued that corruption allegations against the metropolitan municipality and excessive audit raids were used by the center to erode the political authority and prestige of the CHP in İzmir. This is largely due to the fact that İzmir, as the third-largest metropolis, has long been a target for takeover by the center and a bastion for defence by the opposition party. Still, İzmir’s mayors noted that the relations,
238 while affected by political rivalry from time to time, were not completely antagonistic.
The center also invested in İzmir—as the metropolitan city had great economical import for Turkey—through a number of transit and transportation projects. However, it definitely was not designated a national champion, as İstanbul was.
In the case of Diyarbakır, my interviewees observed that the administrative tutelage had an added political bias—perception tutelage—in the region. In their accounts, this perception tutelage was nothing new and not particular to a specific national government. As discussed in Chapter 2, the center’s fear of regional autonomy was historically institutionalized. Moreover, the center’s fear of the potential consequences of a pro-Kurdish agenda (secession or federalist propositions) kept the center–local relations tense. For instance, in the aftermath of the 2009 elections, numerous elected local representatives from the pro-Kurdish BDP, including mayors, were arrested on the grounds that they had organic links with the PKK. The center could also impede certain projects by refusing to act as guarantor for municipal credit applications or by withholding/rejecting approvals. Revenue cuts, according to mayors, were political moves by the center rather than procedural means to restructure municipal debts. While the center made a few important infrastructural investments to the metropolitan area, such as an international airport and an expressway, which were the first in the history of Diyarbakır, this was more to address the national government’s concerns to communicate an “unbiased” image of development and to integrate the region into global markets than it was to empower the metropolitan authority of
Diyarbakır.
These large-scale projects authored by the national center are the main drivers of
239 metro-region transformation, where global/regional mobility and connectivity are critical to elevate the productive and competitive potential of cities. In all three cases, numerous such projects took place to increase the competitive edge of the metro regions in question. These “bigger is better” projects range from building expressways, bridges, intercity fast trains, subway systems, international airports, seaports, marinas, and underground/underwater tunnels, to infrastructural overhauls restructuring inner-city traffic, revitalizing and restoring historical city centers and squares, and building giant sports complexes, conference/exhibition complexes, and specialized city hospitals.
Urbanization in this way operates on a strong central state that defines its main objective as delivering extensive and “unbiased” (meaning not politically motivated) development in the country. The competitive metropolises imagined by the central state have sound and strong infrastructures and are globally and regionally connected. They enjoy increased mobility, both inside and outside the city, and benefit from smart technologies.
Finally, they are “historically conscious”—so as to market their authenticity in universal terms for global consumer markets. The national government also used these projects to showcase its entrepreneurial ability, vision, and determination in delivering development across the country. These projects thus served as a rhetorical tool for the central government in its critique of the ability of rival parties to govern and elevate metropolitan cities in the same way.
Within the metropolitan scale, the urban entrepreneurial shift in Turkey reinforced the tutelage of the metropolitan tier over the district tier. In the cases of İstanbul and
İzmir, irrespective of political alignment between the metropolitan and district levels, district mayors emphasized the existence of a metropolitan authority having the last say
240 over district decisions. Metropolitan mayors exhibited an attitude of superiority over the elected district mayors. The words of a district mayor from İzmir describing his political significance within the larger metropolitan government are worth repeating: “I mean municipalities like mine [district level] actually are like regional directors of the metropolitan municipality. The only difference between the secretary-general of the metropolitan municipality and myself is that I have a car with flags.”311 As the strong mayor–weak council model is reinforced under the new urban regime, we have witnessed the emergence of mayors with consolidated incumbencies. In all three cases, the metropolitan mayors between 2004 and 2014 were reelected at least twice. Despite the rhetoric of decentralization in the reform process and metropolitan mayors’ discursive praise of decentralized arrangements in general, the urban entrepreneurial shift took a centralizing and consolidating turn at the expense of district municipalities.
Normative and Institutional Transformation of Municipal Governance
Seeing like a firm
As discussed in Chapter 2, with the public administration and local government reforms of 2004-5, the state organization and administrative apparatus underwent a paradigm shift that was heavily inspired by new public management approach. The AKP cadres held the heavily hierarchic, bureaucratic, and proceduralist administrative and organizational structure of the Turkish state accountable for falling behind politically, economically, and socially. The recipe for progress and advancement was to overhaul public institutions with market-oriented norms such as efficiency, competitiveness, and entrepreneurialism; and managerial approaches such as visionary leadership and strategic planning. In other words, state rescaling by the central government in mid-2000s
311 Interview with Mehmet Ali Çalkaya by the author in 2011.
241 institutionalized an entrepreneurial form of urban governance in Turkey. This, nonetheless, does not suggest that municipalities were passive implementers of urban entrepreneurialism. By considering mayors’ reflections on notions like entrepreneurialism, executive management, growth, and efficiency, this study showed how perceptions of governing have transformed along with the reforms, expressed through glocal materializations in urban form as well as through municipal policy and practices imbued with distinct political agendas in each city.
“Seeing like a firm” is central to entrepreneurial municipalism and as such captures the transformation of mayors and municipalities from administrative officers and public institutions into entrepreneurs and market-oriented organizations respectively. I developed the phrase “seeing like a firm” in reference to the notion my interviewees used that emphasized how essential it was to liken managing a municipality to running a firm
(şirket).312 Through the analogy of firm, mayors—most of whom underlined their business pasts—could make sense what entrepreneurialism would look like in municipal arena. They argued that they needed to run the municipality with a “firm mentality” in order to succeed not only in governing their organizations and jurisdictions (read: organizational and service performance) but also in competing with other cities and districts. These performance- and competition-conscious mayors uphold an entrepreneurial approach to municipal practice where day-to-day bureaucracy is simplified, working conditions are modernized, efficiency is prioritized, and mayor’s leadership in guiding the city/district is deemed essential. The analogy of firm also meant knowing how to generate income rather than just using municipal money and making
312 The word şirket can be translated as firm or company.
242 projections into the future. As such, “seeing like a firm” has significant managerial, organizational, and service implications for urban governance.
In order to create cities that can compete for capital, investment, commercial and financial transactions on a regional and global scale, municipalities came into the spotlight to adapt to these organizational and visionary changes. İstanbul epitomizes this paradigm shift in municipalities. Not only did the metropolitan and district level municipalities implement this shift in institutional and organizational culture swiftly and wholeheartedly, but they were also the most outspoken about the superiority and indispensability of a market-oriented approach in municipalities. İstanbul’s mayors underlined the stark difference between administering a public office and executing an organization that manages an entire city/district. The mayor of Küçükçekmece neatly summed up their approach: “Although we are not running a business here, we have to run the municipality with a firm [business] mentality.”313 İstanbul’s mayors and municipal authorities identified efficiency, competitiveness, entrepreneurial outlook, and visionary leadership as key principles to achieving municipal success and attaining a competitive city.
In İzmir, despite the criticism from the central government that they are not as professional as the AKP-led municipalities, mayors and municipal authorities also embraced a market-oriented shift in institutional and organizational culture. Interviewees defined mayors’ role as leaders and strategists who were expected to act proactively and manage the organization effectively. Mayors, time and again, emphasized the importance of previous business experience as an asset for success in running the municipality.
313 Interview with Aziz Yeniay by the author in 2011.
243 In Diyarbakır, the market-oriented outlook is much less pronounced, discursively in line with their party’s leftist political stance. Interviewees highlighted their performance more than their level of professionalism in managing municipalities: that is, they emphasized how much more they delivered to their city under their party’s rule compared to previous times, rather than their executive style. Still, Diyarbakır mayors and municipal authorities emphasized the difference that efficiency and proactive planning made in municipal service under their incumbency. Metropolitan Mayor
Baydemir proudly stated that the first thing he did when he came into office was to create a comprehensive master plan for Diyarbakır envisioning urban development of the metropolitan region for the next 25 years.
In terms of organizational efficiency with respect to municipal personnel,
İstanbul’s mayors came forward as the most eager to decrease the number of officers and workers in order to cut down organizational costs. Mayors emphasized their overhaul of the personnel structure when they took office in 2004—retiring old personnel, decreasing the total number of officers, employing new ones more qualified in office programs and language skills, and integrating institutional training for municipal personnel. In İzmir, the metropolitan mayor ended subcontracting as a practice and employed these workers as full-time syndicated municipal employees, emphasizing that his social democratic approach to municipal practice required him to do so. However, his decision had consequences (higher wages and higher municipal expenses) that he deeply resented, as he declared publicly on many occasions. This instance revealed the uneasy tension between cost-efficiency principles of a market-oriented municipal practice and principles of a social democratic approach that İzmir’s mayors identified themselves with.
244 For institutions like municipalities, infamous for borrowing huge sums of money from the treasury or otherwise to maintain their operations, budget management is a sensitive topic. Especially during the 1990s, municipalities were popularly identified as corrupt and highly inefficient organizations when it came to managing money. Almost all municipalities emphasized that they had come a long way from the past, claiming they now had a sustainable and efficient approach in managing their budget. İstanbul’s and
İzmir’s municipal authorities emphasized most their efficiency and responsibility in paying their debts to the treasury and benefiting from the laws restructuring municipal debts. In İzmir, mayors cited their municipalities’ financial credibility grades from international credit rating agencies as proof of their budgetary efficiency. Financial credibility, they argued, was critical in attracting stakeholders to fund new projects. In a world of fund-seeking and credit-hunting municipalities, proficiency in generating projects that will attract sponsors and funding agencies is critical, and in all cases studied in this research mayors and municipal authorities strongly emphasized it. Whereas for
İstanbul’s municipalities, attracting investors was comparatively much easier because of the possible benefits and by-products that came with such partnership for any given sponsor, it could be much harder for a metropolitan municipality like Diyarbakır.
Therefore expertise in writing projects that would attract funding from international organizations (e.g., the EU, WB, and UN) or investments from public or private sectors was highly valued. Diyarbakır’s Metropolitan Mayor Baydemir stated that creating a project office was one of the first things he did when he took office in 2004. It is notable, however, that in Diyarbakır, writing projects that could receive funding from
245 international organizations had an added motivation of raising awareness and political support abroad for a pro-Kurdish agenda.
To reiterate, “seeing like a firm” captures how perceptions of governing changed alongside the reforms in Turkey. Through the analogy of firm, mayors and other municipal authorities could make sense of what entrepreneurial governance would look like in urban arena.
City branding as a municipal strategy
As discussed in detail in Chapter 2, one of the novelties that came along with competitive-oriented urban governance in 21st-century Turkey was the concept of “brand cities.” A concerted effort to build brand cities led by the AKP governments soon resonated at the local levels and changed the way actors of urban governance think about cities once and for all. If the global economy was composed of cities competing for resources and investment, then it only made sense for local governments to stand out in this fierce competition by developing a brand out of their cities. Similar to a market environment, where a good product needs the right branding strategies to be discovered and to increase in demand, municipal authorities started their own search for how to best market their cities. Branded cities come to life in glocal materializations that profoundly transform urban spaces, but these materializations are also laden with specific political statements and therefore are not just functioning as wagers for inter-urban competition.
City-branding strategies redefined municipal practice in two major ways. First of all, municipalities started to devote a considerable amount of their municipal budget to branding activities. In the cases of İstanbul and İzmir, these activities included, but were not limited to, organizing workshops and seminars with various local and national
246 stakeholders (from both public and private sectors), attending or hosting national and international conferences, collaborating with universities in specialized academic programs, and producing high quality audiovisual presentation tapes of cities for global consumption. In these intellectual productions and public relations campaigns, municipal authorities approached the concepts of “brand city” and “world city” almost interchangeably. Becoming a brand included first and foremost a bold claim to exceptionality that would qualify İstanbul/İzmir/Diyarbakır as world cities. In all the cases studied here, the claim to exceptionality is usually derived from the geopolitical significance or cultural and historical background of each city.
I argue that municipalities situated their branding campaigns around a selective
(re)presentation and ideological reading of historical and cultural capitals of their cities.
In İstanbul, the claim to being a world city was mostly based on the long imperial past of the metropolis, the Ottoman episode in particular. The world city narrative presented
İstanbul as a perfect blend of past and present, East and West, old and new, traditional and modern, as well as secular and Muslim. In all its authenticity, İstanbul was Turkey’s window to the world. In a way, the metropolis of İstanbul was the embodiment of the
AKP’s conservative but modern model to the world. This image was communicated in various ways: from restoring Ottoman monuments and integrating them back into urban life, or revitalizing the Ottoman tulip tradition to introducing promotional themes during mega event hostings for arts, culture, and sports.
In İzmir, on the other hand, branding took a different reading of the city, in which the city’s Republican, secular and ancient Greek aspects were most pronounced. The
CHP-led municipalities positioned the city as part of a laid-back Mediterranean culture,
247 where secular lifestyles were celebrated. İzmir prided itself as Turkey’s window to the
West. For the CHP, İzmir was the epitome of Atatürk’s Republic, with a competitive edge as a center for arts, culture, and design in the Mediterranean. This image was communicated through various means: from boutique museums to Homer statues, from revitalizing early Republican legacies such as Fuar İzmir (by building the biggest exhibition place in the country), to undertaking homage to Atatürk’s legacy (by building the biggest concert hall in the country as well as an opera house). In a purely entrepreneurial fashion, for example, the İzmir Metropolitan Municipality signed a contract with the “starchitects” of Sydney Opera House.
In Diyarbakır, municipal authorities refrained from using the concept of brand city. Instead, they chose to use the concept of “attraction center” (cazibe merkezi).
However, their representation of the city and vision of Diyarbakır emphasized the multilingual, multifaith, and multicultural character of the city along with the historical heritage, dating back to pre-Islamic and pre-Turkish times. Multicultural representation of Diyarbakır was perfectly in line with the BDP’s identity politics. Along with Kurdish culture, the municipalities of Diyarbakır celebrated Armenian, Assyrian, and Yezidi cultures, delivered services in various local languages, and celebrated and revitalized traditions of different local cultures. As a response to the years-long Republican project of Turkification, municipalities referred to Diyarbakır’s ancient pre-Islamic past as a
Mesopotamian center of civilizations, identifying it as the contemporary Middle Eastern capital for arts, culture, tourism, and commerce.
Another way in which city branding changed municipal practice in Turkey was by generating place-selling agendas for municipalities to host big international events.
248 Especially in the cases of İstanbul and İzmir, municipalities allocated a great deal of attention and budget to hosting mega-scale international conferences, governance meetings, and cultural and sports events (e.g., World EXPO and the Olympics). The race to become a world city thus included continuous bidding for major events in both cases.
Bidding for and potentially hosting these major events intervened in, and even defined, the metropolitan agenda. Place-selling required the city to craft an urban space that is polished, secure, smart, and modern, but at the same time authentic and true to its
“heritage”—however that was defined. Anything that interrupted this image—urban slums, for example—became disposable. In this way, city branding and place-selling as municipal strategies are organically linked to the urban transformation projects witnessed extensively in İstanbul and İzmir.
Finally, I argued that the concept of a brand city redefined urban populism in
Turkey. In both the general and local elections, politicians, especially from the AKP, promised to make any city a brand city in their campaigns. Successful branding, or the lack thereof, for a given city thus became the ground for appraisal or critique in the campaigns and beyond. Prior to the 2000s, urban populism operated on building clientalistic networks with certain urban groups (as in the case of gecekondu dwellers) by offering them favors (issuing legal titles, delivering infrastructure) in return for votes: however, in 21st-century Turkey, urban populism operated on the promise to voters of creating brand cities. This latent promise is thus highly speculative: brand cities might attract investment and therefore create employment and increase the quality of life in general.
249 Participation
As discussed in Chapter 2, the paradigm shift in public administration and local governance also introduced the concept of participation into the political discourse. This accorded with the worldwide trends of integrating participatory practices into various levels of decision making. From Latin America to South Asia, countries introduced new institutions to their local governments in an attempt to enhance local democracy beyond the ballot box (McCarney and Stren 2003). In Turkey, in order to promote citizens’ democratic participation at the local level, the Law on Municipalities introduced the formation of Kent Konseyi (city council)—councils based on voluntary membership providing representation from public institutions, civil society organizations, universities, and trade associations at the local level. City councils have no executive or agenda- setting powers; and all municipalities (metropolitan and district) are obligated to form them by law. Interviewees had mixed opinions about these platforms’ effectiveness and democratic contribution. İzmir district mayors were skeptical, primarily because they thought the civil society organizations that dominate these platforms were not democratic themselves. Mayors also claimed that civil society leaders took advantage of city councils to create their own political clout, which would elevate them to superior positions at the local or national levels. In İstanbul, on the other hand, mayors had no strong opinions about city councils: the founding of city councils was a legal obligation to be fulfilled and supported. In Diyarbakır, city councils and their lower level councils at the district and neighborhood levels were utilized more efficiently because of the already existing organizational local momentum. City, district, and neighborhood councils organize forums on current political local and national issues. In particular, the active involvement
250 of women’s organizations in these councils created lively political conversations and local projects. The leftist agenda of the pro-Kurdish BDP and its local political organization took these councils as an opportunity to experiment with grassroots mobilization.
However, in all the cases studied here, mayors and other municipal authorities defined citizens’ participation / participatory governance / democratic participation
(whichever combination of the concept) to a great extent as (1) citizen feedback and (2) citizen satisfaction from municipal performance. Citizen feedback meant, primarily, being accessible to citizens, engaging in active communication, asking them about their needs and demands, and listening to what citizens have to say about their localities.
Mayors and municipal councilors in all the cases exhibited pride over their regular visits to homes, neighborhoods, streets, and bazaars. Mayors in İstanbul and İzmir also hold weekly office hours where ordinary citizens can come and talk about their concerns freely. In Diyarbakır, every councilor is delegated a certain neighborhood, where they need to regularly check in with residents and prepare feedback reports (mahalle
çalışmaları). Citizen feedback also meant conducting regular surveys and questionnaires, especially during the preparation of strategic plans and performance reports.
In İstanbul and İzmir, mayors also defined citizen participation along the lines of customer satisfaction. Mayors claimed that their existence was meaningful only as long as their services satisfied citizens. In the words of one of the district mayors of İstanbul,
“we see citizens as customers. […] Our approach to service is centered on customer satisfaction.”314 In this way, mayors equated democratic participation of citizens beyond the ballot box with satisfactory municipal performance. This delimits citizen inclusion to
314 Interview with Aziz Yeniay by the author in 2011.
251 decision-making processes only post-facto. This concept of participation as feedback or satisfaction is another example of the rising professionalism and market-oriented approach in municipal halls, where municipal services are seen as products, the electorate as customers, and feedback as market research.
Another framing of participation within the municipal organizations was through the discourse and practices related to “stakeholders.” This was particularly in line with urban entrepreneurialism’s praise of public–private partnerships and stakeholder cooperation. It reflected the idea that government (local or central) should not and cannot be the sole decision maker and doer in matters of governing (Smillie, Helmich and
German 1999). Stakeholders should brainstorm, network, and cooperate in matters affecting all of them. In all cases, then, mayors framed working with stakeholders as proof of participatory governance in their jurisdictions without problematizing the prominence of certain groups over the others.
Mayors’ selective conceptualization of participation further reveals that, while norms of governance travel across contexts, they are filtered through existing institutional frameworks and political ideologies. Therefore, participation as people’s deliberation is more celebrated and highlighted in contexts like Diyarbakır; whereas in İstanbul and
İzmir, it is conceptualized and highlighted more as a professionalized method (i.e., gauging public opinion through surveys and questionnaires), a performative democratic sensibility (i.e., neighborhood visits), and a stakeholder collaboration (i.e., public–private partnerships). That is why in the latter cases, city councils carried little rhetorical weight in mayors’ discourses.
252 Making and Maintaining Metropolises
As explained in detail in Chapter 2, with the entrepreneurial shift in urban governance, two key practices were institutionalized in municipal governance: urban transformation projects and social services. I argued that these two practices are organically intertwined in that both claim to deliver development through raising the quality of life for urbanites. Urban transformation projects came not only as a spatial fix to turn tired and disorganized cities of the past into modern and competitive metropolises of the future; they also offered “modern living standards” to urbanites in general and residents of urban slums in particular. On the other hand, municipal social services, which have become highly diversified and increasingly accessible over the past decade, delivered not only a social safety net (especially to the most disadvantageous groups) but also “development” through various free educational and recreational activities.
Moreover, I argued that these two municipal practices are intertwined on a deeper level: municipal social services also served the purpose of counteracting the inequalities, distresses, and discontent that emerge out of urban transformation. The displaced populations of inner metro regions were placated with “modern” housing options in the peripheries, where “socially responsible” municipalities would offer free health scans, arts and crafts workshops to homemakers as well as vocational courses for the unemployed. In this sense, municipalities took on the welfare functions of the central state in their localities.
Urban transformation projects that took the cities of Turkey by storm starting in the mid-2000s defined a critical new role for municipalities as the middleman between the construction companies and the public in facilitating these projects. In this
253 intermediary role, municipalities not only represented, supported, or defended the public but also acted on behalf of the construction companies or contractors carrying out the projects. The words of the metropolitan mayor of İzmir are telling: “We, in this case, by using all our initiative, both protect the interests of our citizens and at the same time are a guarantor to contractors that we made an agreement with.”315 Irrespective of political party or ideology, in all the cases studied here this new role of the municipality was accepted. Furthermore, the mayors all emphasized that they undertook these projects not despite the people, but with the consent of the people. The fairness of these projects, they all claimed, derived from the consent of the property owners. Such words reveal, therefore, that consent was exclusive to titleholders, and did not come from all those affected, specifically, leaseholders. When it came to the latter, in the words of Mayor of
Beyoğlu, “they can rent somewhere else.” This view assumes that individuals confronted with potential gains and losses will make the most rational choice: that is, if the gains of having decent housing with a low-rate long-term mortgage in the outskirts of the city are higher than the losses of being uprooted from an inner-city slum area, then individuals will choose the former. For mayors interviewed, then the urban transformation projects they undertook were win-win situations for the city and for the urbanites. As the appeal of cities increases with the introduction of posh residential and office spaces, state of the art shopping centers, and well-maintained squares and gentrified neighborhoods, slum dwellers are presented with the opportunity to live in modern high rises of newly developed metropolitan peripheries.
Indeed, in all the cases studied here, zoning decisions behind urban transformation projects reflect a common trend of segregating the income groups of the
315 Interview with Aziz Kocaoğlu by the author in 2012.
254 greater metropolitan area. Irrespective of political party or ideology, the officials I interviewed normalized and accepted this segregation. Zoning decisions, in this way, draw the maps of urban belonging. Therefore, the politics of urban transformation is not only an act of spatial engineering to create an attractive and competitive world city, but also one of demographic engineering. Accordingly, zoning decisions reflect the choices of power holders, that is, public and private actors of governance: the central state agencies (TOKİ and the Ministry of Environment and Urbanization), the municipalities, the construction companies, the real-estate brokers, and investment companies. The political alliances among these determine where urban rent will be created and how it will be allocated.
Despite their commonality with respect to how the market and competition orient municipal practices, as described above, municipalities use the social services they provide to politically distinguish themselves from the others. It was interesting to note the elaborate ideological names chosen by the municipalities for municipal practice
(belediyecilik anlayışı). In İstanbul, we hear “synergic municipalism” and “360 degrees municipalism”; in İzmir, “social democratic municipalism”; and in Diyarbakır, multilingual or “democratic, ecologic and gender equitable” local governments. While the array of services provided is put into law, room is left for innovation depending on the availability of resources and political agendas of municipalities. Thus, social services reflected nationally competing political agendas realized at the urban level: social services could thus reflect Republican sensibilities in İzmir and pro-Kurdish sensibilities in Diyarbakır.
255 All in all, there is a strong consensus across the political spectrum on the competitive and growth-oriented nature of urban governance that the AKP advances—its premises as well as its practices. From left of the political center to the right of it, the premises of competitive urbanization remained unchallenged; the practices remained mostly unquestioned. In 21st-century Turkey, the act of governing cities is becoming more and more of a professionalized undertaking. And yet, the fact that urban entrepreneurialism seems to have become the only game in town does not, in any way, mean that urban governance is void of politics or that cities’ entrepreneurialism is just about cities themselves. That is why entrepreneurial municipalism is a useful concept for tracing the political and institutional embeddedness of urban entrepreneurial governance and putting cities back into their national contexts before situating them within the larger universe of inter-urban competition.
However, there is still significant amount of terrain that this research did not cover and therefore a lot of work remaining to be done. One of the limitations of my research was that it exclusively focused on municipal leaders. Although municipalities are pivotal to shaping entrepreneurial practices in cities, other crucial actors include (as I emphasize in my argument), but not limited to, central state officials from the Ministry of the Interior, the Ministry of Environment and Urbanization, and the Housing
Development Agency as well as central state representatives at the local levels such as governors and district governors. Moreover, local actors besides municipalities should also be included: these are individuals from institutions such as professional associations, chambers of commerce, civil society organizations and businesses that actively partner with municipalities in various municipal practices and policies. Extending the research
256 base as outlined here will be of crucial import in not only deepening our understanding of how intergovernmental relations work as well as capturing a better picture of the role of local dynamics.
Furthermore, the main argument of this study could be tested against a different research design. The cities in this research could be described as “most-different” cases.
What does actually happen across “most-similar” cases? If one controls—as best as one can—city size, geography, population, and political affiliation on a subnational level, what kind of a picture would one draw? What would one attribute to differences, if any, in findings regarding the entrepreneurial practices and performance of cities: intergovernmental relations or local dynamics? These are some of the questions that might direct future research in this field.
A final point is in order regarding the dramatic changes in the political context of
Turkey since the June 2015 general elections, but more so since the July 2016 coup attempt. Since then, the country has been under the OHAL (state of emergency) rule.
Furthermore, the central government significantly curtailed the autonomy of select
(mostly of pro-Kurdish but not exclusively) municipalities by replacing their mayors with kayyıms (state appointees) who are central state bureaucrats (in most cases former governors and district governors). This resulted in significant regression and even elimination of many pro-Kurdish agenda-oriented municipal practices. Moreover, in
September 2017 İstanbul Metropolitan Mayor Kadir Topbaş shockingly resigned after serving 13 years in office. Although Mr Topbaş did not provide an explanation and stressed that he was still a member of his party, the allegations regarding his son-in-law’s ties with the Gülen movement (that was behind the July 2016 coup attempt) were
257 speculated to be the reason behind his resignation. The findings in this research, however, do not cover these developments as the field research ended in 2012. But these developments are a testament to how the autonomy of local governments are among the first casualties in these periods of “state of emergencies.” A spatiotemporal comparative research as to how cities and their entrepreneurial practices are affected before and after such episodes could shed more light onto the national/local dynamics of neoliberal urbanizations.
Part 3: Implications of This Study
Through a subnational comparative study of three metropolitan cities in Turkey, this research sheds light on (1) how entrepreneurialism is understood and implemented by mayors and municipal authorities; (2) how urban entrepreneurialism is—to a considerable extent—conditioned by intergovernmental relations imbued with party politics; and (3) how through entrepreneurial practices city becomes a scale at which national level political ideologies, agendas, and worldviews compete. As such, this research calls for a need to realign the focus of the literature on urban entrepreneurialism by situating cities back into their national contexts while evaluating the effects of political economy of neoliberal urbanizations and inter-urban competition so as to reveal the political and institutional embeddedness of urban entrepreneurialism. The implications of such an approach for future research on urban entrepreneurialism are broadly as follows:
(1) This approach calls for taking into account the roles played by the central state and the interplay between the national and local levels (intergovernmental relations) in conditioning the entrepreneurial action of cities. It means recognizing that cities do not exist in a vacuum and that their entrepreneurialism is as much a function of their
258 existence in relation to their country contexts (politically, economically, institutionally) as it is of their own skill, ability, and prowess in entrepreneurial action and strategies.
Entrepreneurial prospects could thus be facilitated, isolated, or obstructed depending on the positionality of cities vis-à-vis other state scalar levels.
(2) This approach calls for a rethinking of city (in other words unpacking the black box of city) as a site where various interests, agendas, and strategies compete and clash not solely for economic reasons, but also for political reasons. It means cities are sites/scales where broader political contentions and rivalries are sought via glocalized urban practices that might seem overwhelmingly similar at face value. It recognizes that such prima facie similar entrepreneurial actions do have meanings and functions beyond being wagers in inter-urban competition.
Such a fine-tuning has potential policy implications as well. International institutions that advise on city competitiveness and urban success more often than not reify cities and talk about best practices316 in a way that individualizes city success. As a result, policy prescriptions often omit the political context within which such successes occur. Instead, we must recognize that what are called best practices are far from being formulaic or atomistic processes, but are in fact products of political and institutional processes. These processes embody how past contradictions and crises of governance are addressed and resolved in present alignments and alliances for political and economic domination, dynamics that will eventually generate their own crises and contradictions in the future of those cities.
316 A recent example is World Bank (2015) report entitled Competitive Cities for Jobs and Growth.
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Bianet Cumhuriyet Hürriyet Hürriyet Daily News Hürriyet Ege Milliyet NTV Radikal Sabah Vatan Yarın (EGİAD) Yeni Asır
270 Yüksekova Haber
Municipal Sources
Bağlar District Municipality website Balçova District Municipality print bulletin Beyoğlu District Municipality website Bornova District Municipality print newspaper Diyarbakır Metropolitan Municipality print bulletin Diyarbakır Metropolitan Municipality Strategic Plans dated 2006, 2010, 2014 Diyarbakır Metropolitan Municipality website Fatih District Municipality website İstanbul Metropolitan Municipality print magazine İstanbul Metropolitan Municipality Strategic Plans dated 2006, 2010, 2014 İstanbul Metropolitan Municipality İzmir Fuarı (IZFAS) website İzmir Metropolitan Municipality print newspaper İzmir Metropolitan Municipality Strategic Plans dated 2006, 2010, 2014 İzmir Metropolitan Municipality website Kayapınar District Municipality progress report dated 2011 Konak District Municipality print newspaper Küçükçekmece District Municipality website Sur District Municipality website Yenişehir District Municipality progress report dated 2011
Constitutions, Laws, Documents, Ministries, Websites
1961 constitution 1982 constitution Bank of Provinces website: http://www.ilbank.gov.tr/index.php Election results http://secim.haberler.com/ Framework Law on Public Administration General Directorate of Local Administration website: www.migm.gov.tr/ Housing Development Agency (TOKİ) website: www.TOKİ.gov.tr/mevzuat İzmir Chamber of Commerce’s promotional video on İzmir İzmir Development Agency’s promotional videos on İzmir İzmir Development Agency’s Regional Plan for 2014-2023 İzmir icin Elele website: www.İzmirelele.com Kanal İstanbul Promotional Video Kültür Kenti Vakfı website: http://www.kulturkentivakfi.org/ Law on Founding Fourteen New Metropolitan Municipalities (#5216) Law on Metropolitan Municipalities (#5216) Law on Municipal shares (#5779) Law on Municipalities (#5393) Law on Provincial Administrations (#5302) Law on Public Finance Management and Control (#5018)
271 Law on Restoration and Renewal of Historical and Cultural Monuments (#5366) Law on State of Emergency (#2935) Law on Transformation of Areas Under Threat of Natural Disasters (#6306) Laws and Legislations www.mevzuat.gov.tr Metropolis website: http://www.metropolis.org/members/Diyarbakır#awards Ministry of Environment and Urbanization website: www.cbs.gov.tr Ministry of Finance website: http://kontrol.bumko.gov.tr/ Ministry of Foreign Affairs website: www.mfa.gov.tr Ministry of Internal Affairs website: www.icisleri.gov.tr Ministry of Justice website: http://www.mevzuat.adalet.gov.tr/html/652.html OECD website: www.oecd.org/ctp/fiscalfederalismnetwork/40925444.ppt. Reservations and declarations to the European Charter of Local Self-Government (downloaded from https://wcd.coe.int/ViewDoc.jsp?id=1842077&Site=COE) The AKP website http://www.akparti.org.tr/ The AKP’s Target 2023 list: http://www.akparti.org.tr/site/hedefler The BDP website: http://www.bdp.org.tr https://bdpblog.wordpress.com/ The CHP website: https://www.chp.org.tr/ The European Charter of Local Self Government (reached at http://www.coe.int/en/web/conventions/full-list/-/conventions/treaty/122) The Program of the 59th Government of Turkish Republic (reached at www.tbmm.gov.tr) The United Cities and Local Governments website: www.uclg.org http://www.heathrow.com http://laguardiaairport.com www.worldatlas.com www.turkey-visit.com
272 Appendix A
Metropolitan Population Year became 2004 Local 2009 Local 2014 Local Municipality as of 2016 metropolitan Elections Elections Elections Adana 2 201 670 1986 AKP MHP MHP Ankara 5 346 518 1984 AKP AKP AKP Antalya 2 328 555 1993 AKP CHP AKP Aydın 1 068 260 2012 AKP CHP CHP Balıkesir 1 196 176 2012 AKP MHP AKP Bursa 2 901 396 1987 AKP AKP AKP Denizli 1 005 687 2012 AKP AKP AKP Diyarbakır 1 673 119 1993 SHP* DTP* BDP Erzurum 762 021 1993 AKP AKP AKP Eskişehir 844 842 1993 DSP DSP CHP Gaziantep 1 974 244 1987 AKP AKP AKP Hatay 1 555 165 2012 AKP AKP CHP İstanbul 14 804 116 1984 AKP AKP AKP İzmir 4 223 545 1984 CHP CHP CHP Kahramanmaraş 1 112 634 2012 AKP AKP AKP Kayseri 1 358 980 1987 AKP AKP AKP Kocaeli 1 830 772 1993 AKP AKP AKP Konya 2 161 303 1987 AKP AKP AKP Malatya 781 305 2012 AKP AKP AKP Manisa 1 396 945 2012 AKP MHP MHP Mardin 796 237 2012 SHP* AKP AKP Mersin 1 773 852 1993 CHP CHP MHP Muğla 923 773 2012 CHP CHP CHP Ordu 750 588 2012 AKP DSP AKP Sakarya 976 948 2000 AKP AKP AKP Samsun 1 295 927 1993 AKP AKP AKP Şanlıurfa 1 940 627 2012 AKP Independent AKP Tekirdağ 972 875 2012 AKP CHP CHP Trabzon 779 379 2012 AKP AKP AKP Van 1 100 190 2012 AKP DTP BDP
*SHP and DTP are the predecessors of BDP.
Sources: Supreme Electoral Council of Turkey website www.ysk.gov.tr Turkish Statistical Institute website www.tuik.gov.tr
273 Appendix B
Kayapınar District Municipality Building, Diyarbakır Banner reads “Do not touch my will!” under a photograph of a line of arrested mayors and municipal councilors in the aftermath of 2009 elections.
274
Sur District Municipality Building, Diyarbakır Black flag and a black and white banner reading “Do not touch my will”
275 A statue made by Sur District Municipality in 2005 in honor of a Kurdish teenage boy named Uğur Kaymaz who was killed by police forces. The holes in the statue represent the 13 bullets that were found in his body.
276
Bilingual Municipal Signage, Diyarbakır
277