Urban Neoliberalism with Islamic Characteristics

Introduction

Since 1994, Istanbul—like the majority of cities across Turkey—has been governed by mayors coming from the strongest and the most prominent political Islamic movement in Turkey. Initially the Islamic party’s (then named the Welfare Party) cadres pursued populist and redistributive urban policies with a slight touch of anti-capitalist rhetoric, invoking the communitarian ideal of a just, pious and morally responsible society that took care of its poor, disabled and ailing members. The Islamic party was repeatedly shut down by the Constitutional Court on the grounds of undermining secularism, each time managing to reappear under a different banner. One of its latest reincarnations, the Justice and Development Party (AKP), proved to be a successful hegemonic project consistently increasing its share of the popular vote in every nation-wide election since it first assumed political power in 2002. From the outset, the AKP’s policies have been markedly different from those of its progenitor, adopting a resolute pro-business stance and propagating an ethics of market rule amongst the populace. In shifting from a welfarist-populist stance towards a neoliberal mode of governance, the AKP has not abandoned its communitarian and Islamist discourse. On the contrary, it has been able to significantly advance its Islamist agenda alongside its neoliberal programme. Thus, the AKP appears to have successfully merged elements of both Islamism and neoliberalism, presenting a model which—according to many popular commentaries since the Arab Spring—is now considered a viable model to be emulated by pro-democracy forces in the Arab world.

This paper will attempt to trace the emergence and workings of this co-articulation in the domain of urban governance. It will ask why and how, even in the face of imminent eviction threats from the AKP’s urban policies, the residents of poor neighbourhoods on the outskirts of the city could still decisively deliver for the AKP in local and national elections. I argue that the neoliberal state, and the circuits of capital accumulation that it seeks to facilitate, are inherently unstable and are interwoven with other logics such as political Islam, which the ruling AKP has skillfully utilised to gain a faithful constituency in poor neighbourhoods and among business elites alike.

The structure of the paper is as follows. The first section lays out the conceptual framework for understanding neoliberalism’s symbiotic coupling with Islamism in Turkey. The second section details the new legal framework redefining the parameters of urban governance under the AKP rule. The last section discusses state-administered charitable gift giving as a technique of governance in a peripheral low-income neighbourhood in Istanbul called Başıbüyük. Başıbüyük—considered a major stronghold of the Islamic party—has consistently delivered for the AKP at percentages above the national and Istanbul-wide rates, despite being adversely affected by its urban renewal policies. Findings of this study are based on fieldwork I conducted over a period of 11 months (June–August 2007, March–August 2008, January–March 2009) in Istanbul. To understand the recent shifts in the legal and institutional framework of urban policy-making, I conducted in-depth expert interviews with municipal officials, and collected and conducted textual analysis of reports, surveys and mission statements issued by local and central government agencies. I focused particularly on legislation, international agreements and policy documents pertaining to reforms in urban governance over the past decade under the AKP administration. Understanding the perceptions of the residents of Başıbüyük and local political dynamics required me to develop a deep engagement with the community. To this end, I deployed ethnographic methods including in-depth interviews, participant observation and life histories. I engaged with the residents in their everyday settings, including coffee shops, streets, front porches and inside their homes. During this time, I was associated with a very influential civic movement called the Popular Urbanism Movement (IMECE), which has ties with a number of neighbourhoods under threat of urban renewal at the grassroots level. This affiliation significantly facilitated my fieldwork in Başıbüyük.

The Coupling of Two Political Rationalities

A vast literature on neoliberalism has accumulated over the past decade. In most general terms, neoliberalism is understood as a signifier for a multitude of forms and pathways of market-led regulatory restructuring, aiming at the dismantling of policies and institutions of welfare states through privatisation of social services, deregulation of the economy and deep cuts to social spending (Brenner et al., 2009; Harvey, 2005; McCarthy, 2004; Brenner and Theodore, 2002; Jessop, 2002; Peck and Tickell, 2002). While there is a tendency to treat neoliberalism as a policy recipe or ‘shock therapy’ (Klein, 2008), various scholars adopting neo-Foucauldian perspectives also emphasise micro technologies of governance and control (Hoffman, 2010; Sharma, 2008; Li, 2007; Larner, 2000; Dean, 1999; Burchell, 1996; Rose 1996).

As Brown argues, neoliberalism is

a mode of governance encompassing but not limited to state, and one which produces subjects, forms of citizenship and behavior, and a new organisation of the social (Brown, 2003).

Neoliberalism is therefore more than a bundle of economic policies and should also be understood as a political rationality—namely, “a specific form of normative political reason organizing the political sphere, governance practices, and citizenship” (Brown, 2006, p. 693). Neoliberalism, then, entails a “normative” stance. As Treanor argues

the ultimate (unreachable) goal of neoliberalism is a universe where every action of every being is a market transaction, conducted in competition with every other being and influencing every other transaction (Treanor, 2005).

Neoliberalism as a ‘market-political rationality’ (Brown, 2006) is almost always found in combination with other political rationalities. Dikeç (2006) examines the co-articulation of neoliberalism and republicanism in the context of the emergence of French urban policy in the 1980s. Brown (2006) examines the mutual reinforcement between neoliberalism and neo-conservatism in the contemporary US. Similarly, under the rubric of the ‘capitalist-evangelical assemblage’ Connolly (2005) explains the alliance between ‘cowboy capitalism’ and evangelical Christianity in the US. Similar couplings of neoliberalism with moral-political rationalities can be observed in a variety of contexts. Neoliberalism’s alliance with Hindutva in India (Gopalakrishnan, 2009) is one case in point. A significant body of literature has also been produced examining the conjoining of Islamic values and modalities of neoliberal development in Cairo (Atia, 2012) and Beirut (Harb and Deeb, 2011; Harb, 2008, 2010). In the case of Turkey, Doğan (2007) provides a detailed history of ‘Islamic municipalism’ in Kayseri.

In a parallel vein, this paper seeks to explain how Islamism and neoliberalism as two distinct political rationalities came to resonate together, in the organisational body of the AKP, with a focus on its manifestations in urban policy. As with my approach to neoliberalism, I do not take Islamism to be a coherent, fully formed, self-reproducing model. Rather, I take it as a moral-political rationality that seeks to shape all aspects of social life (economic, legal, political, private) along Sunni Islamic principles. And, for the purposes of this paper I am concerned with particular forms it took under the leadership of the mainstream ‘National Outlook’ movement in Turkey. ¹

Since the institutionalisation of secularism in the 1920s, a multitude of Islamic currents have been actively present in Turkey (Yavuz, 2003; Bugra, 2002). Up until the early 1990s, these currents remained largely under the radar and were easily dismissed by the secular establishment as reactionary vestiges from a bygone era. March 1994 marked a dramatic turning point. In the municipal elections that month, the Welfare Party (RP) won mayorships of six (out of a total of 15) metropolitan municipalities across Turkey including those of Istanbul and Ankara. This unprecedented rise sent shock waves across the secular segments of the population, who perceived this as a significant threat to the seven decades old secular republican model.

During the 1994 elections, the RP’s Istanbul candidate Recep Tayyip Erdogan (currently the Turkish PM) ran on a platform of anti-corruption, poverty alleviation and redistribution. The campaign was particularly well organised in poor squatter neighbourhoods in the urban periphery. RP’s campaign volunteers—mostly modestly clad women—knocked on doors one by one, and reached out to the apparent ‘losers’ of globalisation (Bora, 1999, p. 52). Compared with previous municipal administrations, the RP—(and later its offshoot the AKP)—controlled municipalities across Turkey, have directed significantly more resources to the urban poor in the form of food, clothes and coal and have been able to attain an efficient and corruption-free image in the eyes of the public (White, 2002, pp.178–211; Akinci, 1999). They have pursued policies that brought Islamic practices, holidays and customs into visible public space. These include: organising circumcision festivals for children of low-income families; setting up tents for soup kitchens (especially during Ramadan), as well as temporary stations to distribute cheap or second-hand school supplies and clothing; reorganising public green spaces and municipality-owned facilities to make them ‘family friendly’ (i.e. separating sections where single men are allowed from areas reserved only for families, and banning alcohol); creating women-only parks; and organising various festivals and commemorative events during Ramadan, the birth week of Mohammed and the anniversary of the Ottoman conquest of Istanbul (Doğan, 2007; White 2002; Akinci 1999). These policies have a visible spatial reappropriation dimension and are made possible by public transport provided by the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality (IBB) at reduced prices, and often free of charge.

All these efforts have solidified the Islamist Party’s paternalistic image as a pious and trustworthy Muslim party of and for the people. In the 1995 national elections, the RP came out as the leading party and formed a coalition with the centre-right True Path Party. Turkey’s first experimentation with an openly Islamist PM came to an abrupt end in what later came to be dubbed as the ‘post-modern military coup’ of 1997. ² Subsequently, the RP was banned by the Constitutional Court with the charge of undermining the secularist foundations of the Republic. After this major setback, a new political initiative slowly emerged out of the Islamic party. Led by the party’s young cadres, this faction was markedly pro-business, pro-US and pro-EU. They founded the AKP in 2001 under the leadership of the former Istanbul Mayor Erdogan. The AKP leadership repeatedly assured the mainstream media that their party would not follow the Islamist political agenda of the National Outlook tradition; instead, the AKP advertised itself as ‘conservative democrat’ (Erdogan, 2009a) and comparable with Christian Democrat parties in Europe.

The rise of such a political initiative should be understood within the context of the emergence of an entrepreneurial work ethic amongst religious conservative business owners in hitherto peripheral Anatolian provinces of Turkey, today colloquially referred to as the ‘Anatolian tigers’ in reference to the impressive growth rates they have maintained since the 1980s (ESI, 2005). This was largely a consequence of the economic shift from state-led development to an export-oriented growth strategy, which undermined the hegemony of Istanbul-based big companies and encouraged the development of local entrepreneurial capacities (Adas, 2009, p. 627). These pious businessmen and their networks would provide the main financial underpinning for the Islamist movement and their charitable organisations (White, 2002, p. 115).

The AKP’s blend of Islamism and neoliberalism proved to be a very timely political project, as it sealed a resounding victory in the November 2002 national elections. Upon assuming office, the AKP strictly adhered to the IMF-supervised crisis management programme that had begun in April 2001, which was initiated by the previous administration, in the wake of one of the most severe economic crises in Turkey’s history. The IMF-crafted anti-inflationary, debt-management programme mandated checks on spending for public services and social reforms. The compliant AKP quickly implemented policies cutting public spending, controlling wages, significantly rolling back agricultural subsidies and privatising state-owned enterprises, as well as natural resources (Patton, 2006).

Redefining Parameters of Urban Governance

The AKP also showed unprecedented confidence in implementing various elements of neoliberal governance under the mandates of the IMF and the EU Accession Partnership document signed in 2000 (Atasoy, 2009). The AKP-crafted ‘Public Administration Reform’ (PAR) bill justifies the need for a radical market-oriented reform of public administration. It states that the goal of opening up to the global economy through a strategy that relied on competitiveness and free market principles was successfully implemented up until the 1990s (Kamu, 2003, p. 21). Apparently however, the country was unable to keep up with shifting global dynamics during the 1990s and failed to carry forth the success of the ‘first-wave’ structural adjustment policies, which were intended to “remove impediments” for free markets to flourish (Kamu, 2003, p. 23). The report cites various statistics for the period following the first wave. It notes that Turkey’s share of global FDI slumped from 1.8 per cent in the early 1990s to 0.3 per cent in 1999 (Kamu, 2003, pp. 23–25). Between 1994 and 2001, the economy receded three times at rates unmatched in the whole history of the Republic. During the same time-period, unemployment rose from 7.8 per cent to 10.6 per cent. In 1991, the budget deficit was at 5.3 per cent (as a percentage of the GDP), by 2002 it had risen to 14.6 per cent. Between 1991 and the 2003, GDP per capita dropped from US$2681 to US$2607 (–0.3 per cent), while during the same period the OECD average rose from US$11 141 to US$22 100.

Unwittingly, the document provides strong evidence that the roll-back structural adjustment policies of the 1990s actually took a dramatic toll on the nation’s economic performance and stability. Yet through an act of faith and an ideological commitment to neoliberalism, this bleak situation is seen as a result of insufficient liberalisation rather than its direct consequence (Guler, 2003). It laments that the first wave of ‘liberalisation’ was not followed by a more challenging yet imperative second wave of ‘restructuring’ of public administration. The document argues that “Turkey was opened to the risks of globalization without being able to reap its benefits” (Kamu, 2003, p. 23). The new approach proposed in the legislation “respects the market, and uses market tools whenever possible,” focuses on priority areas consistent with a “strategic management” approach and relies on “performance and quality” (Kamu, 2003, p. 23).

Many tenets of PAR have been enacted through a series of new legislations and amendments to existing laws regarding local administrations. ³ These new laws encourage the municipalities to behave like semi-autonomous market actors, granting them the right to privatise public assets, to implement urban renewal projects, to participate in public–private partnerships, to form private firms or real estate partnerships with private firms and to take up loans from national and international financial institutions.

A major arena of municipal entrepreneurialism has been the redevelopment of residential urban areas. Today an estimated 60–70 per cent of Istanbul’s citizens live in buildings constructed outside the purview of state regulation and any planning guidelines. These areas had emerged within the context of a populist regime of governance prevalent in the period from the 1950s up until the early 1990s. Rural to urban migrants—whose labour power was indispensible to the state-led industrialisation of the urban economy—constructed makeshift barracks (gecekondus) on state-owned peripheral lands. For decades, the authorities conveniently turned a blind eye to these rapidly proliferating gecekondu neighbourhoods. Consequently, these areas expanded and the makeshift shacks were rapidly replaced by multistorey apartment buildings. As gecekondu colonies consolidated into dense urban neighbourhoods, they also received municipal services and infrastructural upgrades on a regular basis.

In the context of long term-plans to shift Istanbul’s economic base from traditional smokestack industries to finance and services (Keyder, 2005), and the emergence of real estate as part-and-parcel of government strategies for economic growth at the global scale (Smith, 2002), these irregular housing areas have come under intense pressure for redevelopment. A wholesale residential renewal is estimated to have two major consequences. First, by replacing the sub-standard and unplanned housing stock in centrally located areas, a significant rent gap would be released (see Smith, 1996). A comprehensive renewal scheme in Istanbul is expected to increase real estate values threefold (Şenol, 2007). Secondly, urban renewal would incorporate these informal and only partially visible spaces into the formal circuits of capital accumulation, thereby completing the transition from a populist to a neoliberal mode of governance of property markets (Lovering and Türkmen, 2011; Kuyucu and Unsal, 2010; Candan and Kolluoglu, 2008).

As the AKP administration asserted urban transformation as the new overarching agenda in urban policy, district municipalities across Istanbul initiated numerous urban renewal projects within their jurisdictions. A network of legal and administrative frameworks provides the legal foundation for these projects. Whereas the Law on Metropolitan Municipalities (2004) and the Law on Municipalities (2004) are usually invoked in the implementation of all renewal projects, Law no. 5366 on the ‘Preservation by Renovation and Utilisation by Revitalisation of Deteriorated Immovable Historical and Cultural Properties’ (2005) specifically targets historical neighbourhoods that are governed by conservation laws. However, in just a few years, it has become clear that these projects were not proceeding at desired speeds. Often, lawsuits launched by the local neighbourhood associations against the renewal projects have been enough to halt the projects. In response to this challenge and the patchy legal framework, the AKP administration took even bolder steps to centralise transformative decision-making and undermine property rights in areas scheduled for urban renewal. In 2011, the ‘Ministry of Urbanism and Environment’ was founded; later, in May 2012, the AKP government passed a very controversial law (no. 6306) called the “Law Regarding the Transformation of Areas under Risk of Disaster” which grants wide-ranging expropriation powers to the newly founded ministry, effectively foreclosing the possibility of any legal recourse or appeal on part of the residents on the basis of right to private property.

The main actor in the implementation of urban renewal projects is the Turkish Housing Development Administration (TOKI), a governmental institution responsible for production of affordable mass housing. The TOKI—a hitherto peripheral state institution—has been reinvented by the AKP, turning into the main producer of market-rate housing in Turkey and raising its share of the housing market from a mere 1.1 per cent in 2003 to 18.6 per cent in 2007 (Toruneri, 2008) Consequently, it has become a profitable privilege to become a ‘TOKI contractor’. Of these registered contractors, only a tiny fraction have been repeatedly awarded the majority of these lucrative awards (IMO, 2009); most of these firms were founded during the AKP administration and have been proven to have links with the AKP and/or are members of Islamic business associations (Gürek, 2008).

An overall evaluation of the AKP administration’s nation-wide performance reveals that, even though it was quite successful in keeping inflation under control, real wages kept dwindling and unemployment kept rising (Yeldan, 2009). Under normal circumstances, this situation would be likely to spur widespread public discontent and uproar, as was the case during previous rounds of structural adjustment. In fact, one of the most violent episodes of public upheaval against an IMF-imposed plan took place in April 2001, just a few months before the AKP’s electoral victory (Atasoy, 2009, p. 109; Esnaf, 2001). This massive popular protest against impoverishment was led by small artisans and shop owners who are generally known to be the most conservative and religious segments of the population and later proved to be the main electoral base of the AKP (Tugal, 2009, pp. 71–77). How was the AKP able to maintain a very high approval level, considerably increasing its vote in the 2007 and 2011 national elections, and emerging victorious in 2004 and 2009 local elections, even though it followed the exact same IMF prescriptions that the previous administration had initiated?

In various existing historical analyses of the conjoining of Islam and neoliberal capitalism, researchers have emphasised the role of ‘trust’ and the efficiency with which Islam has been used as a political and economic network resource (Harb and Deeb, 2011; Tugal, 2009; Adas, 2009; Atasoy, 2009; Bugra, 2002). It was the sound foundation of this trust that made it possible for the erstwhile anti-Western and anti-EU Islamic political leadership to “naturalize modernized Islam among the masses” (Tugal, 2009, p. 3) In understanding this process of ‘absorption’ of the radical Islamic challenge, Tugal uses the Gramscian concept of ‘passive revolution’, which is different from a classic revolution (for example, French, Russian) in that, rather than the complete elimination of the old dominant classes by an emergent dominant class and their institutions through mass mobilisation, it entails a process whereby popular sectors are mobilised with revolutionary discourses, yet end up reinforcing existing patterns of domination. For Tugal

Moderate Islam is the culmination of a long process of passive revolution as a result of which erstwhile radicals and their followers are brought into the fold of neoliberalism, secularism, and western domination (Tugal, 2009, p. 4).

Despite its explanatory power, Tugal’s passive revolution thesis suffers from a major shortcoming. It presumes an initial dichotomy between Islamism and neoliberalism, and comes to the conclusion that this dichotomy is later resolved as the former is absorbed by the latter. His primary evidence is the fact that the majority of Islamists abandoned their political ideal of an Islamic state based on shariah and instead assumed a non-confrontational attitude, whereby former ‘radical Islamists’ turned into ‘conservative Muslims’. Yet when Islamism is understood as a political rationality that seeks to propagate Islamic values and norms in all aspects of social life with variegated and incomplete effects, it is difficult to claim that Islamism has been dissolved or absorbed by neoliberalism.

Today, Sunni Islam has become an undeniably prominent force in Turkey; Islamic values, habits, customs and rituals have become more visible and widely adopted. Some examples include the emergence of an Islamic fashion industry (Gökarıksel and Secor, 2010), government limitations on alcohol consumption, and the increasing practice of sex segregation in daily life, such as the proliferation of women-only hotels, swimming pools and public parks. ⁴ In short the Turkish society is increasingly a “religiously interpellated society” to borrow Brown’s (2006, p. 700) words in another context. The Islamisation of everyday lives, concomitant with the deradicalisation of political Islam, is treated only tangentially in Tugal’s analysis.

I argue that conceptualising the relation between neoliberalism and Islamism in terms of an antagonism that is eventually resolved through a process of absorption (synthesis), leaves little room for discussing the symbiosis between the two. Instead, I argue that neoliberalism and Islamism are in a relation of ‘mutual reinforcement’. Of course, the suturing together of two rationalities is tenuous and far from complete. The neoliberal rationality of “strict means–ends calculations and satisfaction of individual needs” (Brown, 2006, p. 699) clashes with the Islamist project of producing a pious subject and a moral order. It is particularly at such points of apparent incongruity that the suturing work needs to be performed. Here, the AKP cadres put emphasis on the religio-moral obligation to provide and care for one other. In 2002, in the eve of the formation of the first AKP cabinet, the prospective prime minister Abdullah Gül addressed the AKP cadres as the ‘WASPs of Turkey,’ with regards to their ethnic Turkish origins, their adherence to orthodox Sunni Islam and a hardworking, pro-business, entrepreneurial spirit that is comparable with the Protestant work ethic (Milliyet, 2002). In another instance, Gül described their communitarian liberal synthesis as a model in which the

‘thin’ instrumental rationality of the free market is supplemented and guided by the ‘dense’ moral context of ‘moderate and democratic Muslim society’ (quoted in Onis and Keyman, 2003, p. 101).

In what follows, I use an illustration to show how the AKP local state machinery mobilises this “moral” component to ensure the smooth implementation of urban renewal policies in Istanbul’s poor neighbourhoods.

Governing the Urban Poor

Başıbüyük is a partially consolidated gecekondu neighbourhood located in the district of Maltepe on the Asian side of Istanbul. The neighbourhood has received an increasing influx of rural migrants since the 1970s and is today home to 14 000 people. It is one of the several neighbourhoods scheduled for urban renewal as part of the new entrepreneurial municipalism agenda (explained earlier). The local municipality’s (Maltepe Municipality) renewal project entails the construction of six high-rise apartment towers by the TOKI on the empty plot of land in the middle of the neighbourhood. The short-term goal is to relocate the households in the immediate vicinity into the new project, in order to make space for a second round of redevelopment. Yet this is not a straightforward resettlement programme. The residents are required to pay the cost of their prospective homes. To facilitate this payment, the TOKI offers mortgages with long maturities (15–20 years); in this particular case, this would amount to paying 220 TRY a month for 15 years to attain the ownership of their new homes. This is a significant financial burden for the majority of the residents who, for decades, were able to partly offset the disadvantage of not having regular employment by saving on the cost of accommodation, and in some cases resorting to informal means of tapping into the city’s electricity and water networks. Living in the new development would eliminate all these flexibilities and impose a rigid and regular payment regiment to pay back the TOKI mortgage and to cover monthly maintenance dues. In short, the renewal programme in Başıbüyük involves the coercive marketisation (see Brenner and Theodore, 2002, p. 352) of not only informal spaces through their incorporation into formal real estate markets, but also the very temporal horizon of the residents themselves (Karaman, 2013).

Initially, the renewal scheme was met with steadfast resistance from the community, which significantly delayed the project. However, after a series of negotiations between the neighbourhood association and the municipality, construction finally began in mid-2008, and was already complete by early 2009. By 2012 all the units were occupied, a fraction of which were allocated to police officers as state provided housing.

Over the past 20 years, Başıbüyük –like many other gecekondu neighbourhoods in Istanbul and across Turkey—has emerged as a faithful constituency for the Islamic party. Strikingly, even in the face of imminent eviction threats from the AKP’s urban policies, the residents of Başıbüyük delivered a 56 per cent and 60 per cent majority for the AKP in the 2007 and 2011 general elections respectively. ⁵ How to explain this puzzle? As I have discussed earlier, the still widespread perception of the AKP as the party of the marginalised and the oppressed, its corrupt-free image and the popular reactions to the extra-democratic means with which the Islamic party was repeatedly shut down, have a lot to do with this. In the immediate aftermath of the first police assault in the neighbourhood, I asked Said—an unemployed construction worker in his late 30s—why the AKP was able to enjoy such widespread support in the neighbourhood in spite of what its policies have done to them. Said has been actively involved in the clashes with the police since the construction company’s first attempt to establish a base in the neighbourhood. Numerous times, he braced the icy cold water and pepper gas sprayed by the riot police. He answered without hesitation, “Well, if they [the Military and the Constitutional Court] constantly attempt to overrule our popular will, this is what happens”. ⁶ Here, he was specifically referring to the Military’s and the Constitutional Court’s efforts to block the AKP member Abdullah Gül from assuming the presidential office, even though he was elected by the Parliament in May 2007. Many residents echoed similar ideas about how they felt that the AKP had to be defended against attempts to liquidate it via extra-democratic means. Thus although the Islamic party has embraced and dramatically furthered the same structural adjustment policies that impoverished masses since the early 1980s, the poor and conservative masses still maintained an image of the Islamic party as the party of the oppressed majority and the ‘popular will’.

The AKP leader PM Erdogan’s personal charisma is another factor that needs to be taken into consideration. ⁷ In my regular interactions with the members of the grassroots resistance, their admiration for Erdogan would pop up at unexpected times. Erman is also a construction worker, who works as a sub-contractor for interior remodelling commissions. He is a member of the Nationalist Action Party, represented by a small minority in the neighbourhood, and for a brief period he was one of the co-presidents of the neighbourhood association. He is adamantly opposed to AKP’s policies and the renewal project in the neighbourhood specifically, but when I mentioned in an informal conversation that his oratory style was so similar to Erdogan’s, he was visibly flattered. With a grinning face, he confirmed that he had heard this before. He continued “Actually I really like the guy himself, he knows how to relate to people” (fieldnotes, 2 March 2009).

One other major interrelated factor is the AKP’s continuing policy of charitable gift-giving, which is the topic of the rest of the paper. The AKP administrations across Turkey oversee a very intricate and adaptive system of in-kind aid to poor people. In 2006, in addition to the in-kind aid, the IBB and many local municipalities began distributing shopping coupons as well. In 2008 only 984 000 shopping coupons were distributed by the IBB (IBB, 2009, p. 202). This figure excludes in-cash aid, gifts and shopping coupons given by the local municipalities and the central government.

The AKP is undoubtedly not the first political party to utilise populist policies in poor urban districts; but as Doğan (2008) explains, it is distinguished by its careful calculation of the consequent political benefits. Rather than aiming at the consolidation of a place-specific patron–client relationship in which certain local politicians are empowered and popularised, these aids are organised in such a way to empower the Islamic communities and the AKP as a whole. This is made possible by the fact that the AKP’s grassroots political organisation and the organisation of the aid itself derive their logic from the same ‘religio-moral populism’ (Tugal, 2002). In her study of Hezbollah’s efficient social networks in Beirut’s poor suburbs, Harb (2008, p. 216) explains how service provision produces “its own social and cultural environment, which conveys faith-based meanings and values to its beneficiaries”. It is part-and-parcel of the making of the ‘Islamic milieu’ in Lebanon (Harb and Deeb, 2011). Similarly, in the case of AKP, the aid appears as a natural extension of a certain counter-hegemonic, communitarian attitude that cannot be thought separate from the Islamic moral philosophy of the AKP itself. When accused by his opponents of bribing poor voters and making them dependent on alms (sadaka), ⁸ PM Erdogan (2009b) responded: “I don’t understand these criticisms. Sadaka is part of our culture. There is nothing wrong with that”.

Such careful organisation of aid distribution requires an extensive social network (Doğan, 2008) and a high level of “embeddedness” (Harb, 2008, p. 221) with the ability to penetrate into the nooks and crannies of the political society, and effectively to mobilise a sense of “neighborliness, fictional kinship, mutual assistance, and volunteerism” (White, 2002, p. 269) which the AKP inherited from its progenitor (the Welfare Party). These trust-based networks proved to be very crucial in micro-managing the renewal project, keeping a pulse on the neighbourhood and effectively containing ‘insurgent forms of citizenship’ which is eclipsed by a ‘calculus of compensation’ (Roy, 2009). As a general rule, the AKP administrations do not conduct meetings with the community as a whole. ⁹ None of my informants recalled any attempt by the local administration to organise meetings in the neighbourhood to discuss or inform them about the renewal project. Instead, the AKP’s local contacts carry out confidential one-to-one negotiations with the residents. There is a widespread perception that residents with close connections to the AKP and to the AKP-controlled local municipalities receive various concessions and favours, and influence others in the neighbourhood by coaxing them to sign an agreement with the municipality.

State-administered social assistance delivered in the appearance of alms creates a relationship of indebtedness (Bugra, 2009). Just prior to the municipal elections of March 2009, I was in the Maltepe Municipality for an interview that I had scheduled with an official. As I was waiting for my appointment, a woman in her early 40s, wearing a long dark blue trench coat and a yellow headscarf entered the room. She approached a clerk and, with a very soft voice, asked if she could receive some assistance in cash. The clerk responded with a calm yet firm manner that they were not allowed to distribute any aid at this point because the Supreme Electoral Council banned all municipal aid two weeks prior to the elections (even though I was able to get a hold of a shopping coupon handed to a resident by the Maltepe Municipality just a week prior to the elections). The woman responded with an indistinct voice. When she was rejected a second time, she yelled in full resentment “OK, then I will not vote for the AKP this time!” and stormed out of the office (field notes, 17 February 2009).

Many residents I interviewed in Başıbüyük were bitter towards those who accepted aid from the municipality. Hatice is a housewife in her late 30s, and has been among the most active female members of the resistance against the renewal project. She is concerned about how this perceived indebtedness undermines the struggle itself

Recently Mustafa Zengin [mayoral candidate from the major opposition party] came to our neighbourhood, a woman found her way, and asked him “Are you going to give coal?”. Now, as long as we have this mentality, we cannot win anything. We have a major issue here, we are about to lose our homes, but these people are still negotiating about bread and coal! Today Fikri Kose [then the mayor in office] brags on every occasion, saying “I am feeding Başıbüyük”. Now, only a minority receives these aids in kind, but the whole neighbourhood is included in the narrative. We all become indebted (field notes, 1 March 2009).

Macit, a 54-year-old male resident with strong anti-AKP sentiments echoes similar ideas in frustration

[The municipality] gives three courses of meal to 1340 people. It distributes fresh bread every day. In the winter, it gives away 1–1.5 tons of coal to lots of families. Every now and then it distributes cheques of 200 TL. Around 1000 people received a green card. ¹⁰ This is the people of Başıbüyük! Whoever gives them bread, they will go and vote for them. … When they accept these gifts, they do not ask themselves “who pays for these? Whose money is it?” They don’t say, “well instead of these gifts, why don’t you give me a job so that I can work and earn my own living?” (field notes, 7 May 2008).

Macit’s—rather workfarist—interpretation marks aid recipients as immoral subjects who are readily manipulated by the municipality. This has to be contextualised within the corporatist welfare system in Turkey, eligibility for which has been historically based on one’s employment status. Comprehensive, systematic and right-based welfare policies such as guaranteed minimum income schemes have been absent not only in practice, but also in political debates (Bugra and Keyder, 2006). The alms approach to poverty, then, solves multiple problems at once for the AKP. First, since it is not a right-based approach, it creates a relation of gift exchange and thus consolidates the AKP’s political credibility as a communitarian party. ¹¹ Secondly, it avoids the ‘danger’ of welfare-dependent subjects, as the aid is neither distributed on a regular basis nor as an undisputed social right ¹² irrespective of the administration in office. Therefore, even though it is masterminded, administered and overseen by state actors, it is actually not a state policy in the conventional sense of the term, but is conveniently left in an ambivalent intermediate zone. It is precisely this ambivalence that qualifies it as a highly efficient supplement to neoliberalism.

Donations from firms and contractors that have close business ties with the municipality provide the large bulk of the funding source for municipal aid. Many of these firms are themselves part of Islamic business networks and it could be safely assumed that these corporate donations to municipal governments create another circuit of indebtedness on the part of the municipality itself, exceeding municipal governments’ self-appointed role as “brokers in charity” (Bugra and Keyder, 2006, p. 224) and bordering on bribery and corruption (Akinci, 1999, pp. 88–89). Furthermore, in the case of in-kind aid, the municipalities contract certain local firms for the purchase of food, clothing, household appliances and furniture, further extending the value chain of aid provision. Hence, the ‘political economy of sadaka’ (Bugra, 2009).

There are no clear rules regulating either the selection of aid recipients or the frequency and consistency with which the aid is provided. As one municipal official explained

Every six months, we provide clothing and food in bulk. We try to provide monetary assistance as well, as much as we can. Normally, we don’t provide coal, that’s up to the local headman [muhtar], but if someone is in dire need we help the family in one way or another (field notes, 17 February 2009).

The municipality requires that the applicant obtain a ‘certification of poverty’ from the local headman’s office, then municipal authorities go and check the situation on the ground and interrogate the applicant’s neighbours to confirm her destitute situation. However, the whole process is administered in a completely informal manner and there are no publicly available records for either the amount of donations received from contractors or the amount distributed to aid recipients. ¹³ The common perception among the aid recipients is that one needs to have close ties to the AKP and/or follow Islamic codes of daily conduct, the most visible sign of which for women is donning the hijab. These unstated rules are widely internalised among the residents. As Hatice, who does not wear the hijab, explains

Two years ago [before the renewal project], we weren’t doing well. My husband had been unemployed for seven months, my son was away doing his [mandatory] military service and it was extremely difficult to make ends meet. Briefly, I entertained the idea of going to the municipality. Because my husband wouldn’t go. But I gave up quickly. If you don’t wear the headscarf, you don’t have a chance (field notes, 1 March 2009).

Another resident explained to me that a neighbourhood located right across the highway does not receive any aid simply because the residents are predominantly Alevi—followers of a heterodox Islamic sect in Turkey—and would not vote for the AKP. Similarly, in my explorations in another urban renewal area (Ayazma) predominantly inhabited by Kurdish migrants, the residents receiving aid from the local municipality told me that the moment it would become clear that they were not AKP supporters, their aid would be discontinued without any explanation. In short, aid distribution itself figures as one channel—among many—through which subjects are interpellated in a peculiarly religious way the framing of which is defined in quite precise terms along the ethico-political agenda of the AKP.

Conclusion

While the literature on urban neoliberalism has diversified considerably over the past few years, the centre of gravity in terms of theoretical and empirical work still lies within North America and Europe. Most of our foundational knowledge on neoliberal policies is derived from the experiences of the core countries of the West. I maintain that a useful approach for enriching our understanding of the workings of neoliberalism is to approach it as something more than a bundle of policy tools—namely, as a political rationality (Brown, 2006; Dikeç, 2006).

With this theoretical premise, this article examined the new urban policy framework in Turkey within the context of the coupling of neoliberalism and political Islam and their mutual reinforcement. In this, rather than political projects with clear ultimate ends, I took both neoliberalism and Islamism as distinct political rationalities aiming to reconfigure all aspects of social life. Therefore, with mutual reinforcement in this particular context, I refer to two processes. First, neoliberalism has become more entrenched in AKP’s hands. Its agenda was considerably furthered thanks to the Islamist Party’s widespread acceptance by and extensive networks within the urban poor and the public at large; the role of shared religion in establishing these networks of trust has been enormous. Secondly Islamism has gradually become a legitimate mainstream political stance mostly due to its commitment to an EU-mandated neoliberal restructuring agenda that granted it the approval that it needed both internationally (from the US, the IMF and the EU) and locally (from small and medium-size business owners and centre-right and liberal intelligentsia, as well as moderate-right voters). Islamist practices, morals, values and codes of conduct became more mainstream within Turkish society as the Islamist Party was able to claim a centre-right position within the political spectrum.

The co-articulation of neoliberalism and political Islam has had particularly visible consequences in the reframing of urban governance in the post-2002 context. The AKP has successfully established networks of economic and political interdependence (or tapped into existing networks) by appeasing both the emergent Islamic capitalist class—through lucrative contracts and business-friendly reforms—and the urban poor—through gracious gestures ingrained in traditional Islamic community values and morality. As illustrated in the case of an urban renewal project in a peripheral neighbourhood in Istanbul, policies of enforced marketisation have been supplemented by redistributive policies uniquely formatted to further consolidate AKP’s appeal in poor districts and, at the same time, enable it effectively to micro-manage potential political discontent.