Politics of “waiting for transformation” in protracted urban renewal projects in Turkey

Abstract

This paper explores the politics of ‘waiting’ as a mode of governance in large-scale urban redevelopment projects. In designated renewal areas, residents/landowners are often subject to several episodes of waiting: waiting for the public authority for information on redevelopment visions; waiting for the plans and projects to become public; waiting for the court ruling if they appeal the plans; waiting for demolition upon plan approvals; and, finally, waiting for the constructions to be completed. Given the complexity of actors and institutions involved in the waiting, it becomes a conflictual political process. This prolonged waiting leads to an ongoing temporariness and precarious spaces of urban renewal. The course of waiting affects the reorganization of the city space “now” and in the future. We analyze two protracted urban renewal projects from Turkey, Fikirtepe in Istanbul and Karabaglar in Izmir, to explore how residents’ decade-long waiting for urban change are shaped and how these diverse waiting experiences lead to different outcomes for the progression of the state-imposed urban renewal agendas. While Karabaglar residents have unified around active bottom-up resistance from the beginning to challenge the project-based plans the central government imposed, Fikirtepe residents pursued individual-level negotiations with developers to maximize private returns following the zoning incentives the public authority gave. Despite the socio-spatial similarities between these designated urban renewal project sites, variances in residents’ collective waiting strategies have led to different urban politics around project-based urban change.

Keywords

Waiting urban renewal temporal politics large-scale redevelopment Turkey

Introduction

Urban redevelopment in already built-up areas is a planning challenge shaped by complex institutional regimes of property, land use planning, housing policy, and the real estate market. Governments pursue urban redevelopment agendas and projects in partnership with market actors with varying business models and alliance configurations on various grounds. Large-scale urban redevelopment implementations also serve a range of economic, social, and ecological objectives. Numerous urban redevelopment projects occur under the name of densification to spur efficient land uses and fight against urban sprawl (Debrunner et al., 2020). Large-scale redevelopment projects to revitalize under-utilized city parts to induce economic development and attract affluent residents constitute an established line of research (Orueta and Fainstein, 2008; Swyngedouw et al., 2002). Moreover, large-scale urban redevelopment is also a common urban phenomenon pursued under the name of rehabilitation/renewal that focuses on upgrading substandard housing stocks to improve the physical quality of residences to mitigate disaster risk with controversial social outcomes (Doshi, 2013; James, 2010; Karaman, 2013; Saracoglu and Demirtas-Milz, 2014).

Given the complexity of the institutions and actors involved, large-scale urban redevelopment projects inevitably take time. Therefore, there is a temporality of planning, which triggers a temporal urban politics of time and waiting (Lombard, 2013; Raco et al., 2018; Sakizoglu, 2014; Zhang, 2022). While the actors “wait” during different planning and implementation stages, how they wait and what they collectively make out of the time it takes the urban change to happen is endogenous to the outcome. While there are advantages of slowing down the planning process for potentially creating room for more democratic and participatory practices (Raco et al., 2018; Weber, 2015), the context of slowing down matters in determining the agency and constructing power asymmetries embedded in the process (Sanyal, 2018; Stasik et al., 2020). In other words, actors that are subjects of waiting at different phases of large-scale redevelopment do not often live through a passive mode of inaction. Each planning phase of a redevelopment project entails a different objective and goal for involved parties, which determines “what” the actors are waiting for. The politics of waiting often unfolds as a process that politicizes the actors through accumulating knowledge, experience, and collectivization of the waiting experience (Jeffrey, 2010; Oldfield and Greyling, 2015). Therefore, understanding the temporality of planning requires exploring the relationship between the lived experiences of collective waiting and waiting as an embedded policy outcome.

This paper focuses on the temporality of planning by exploring the drivers that shape collective waiting strategies of small-landowner residents and their impact on large-scale urban redevelopment attempts. To bring together the theoretical underpinnings of waiting as a subaltern Southern experience and politics of time that is elaborated mostly in “advanced capitalist” realities of the North, we delve into the paradigmatic case of Turkey’s urbanism in-between South/North binaries (Flyvbjerg, 2006; Haug, 2021). We build on the analytical approaches of critical geography and policy to waiting as an empirical subject to explore: 1) How “waiting for transformation” in the urban context politicizes the residents in designated redevelopment sites; 2) How the residents’ strategies of waiting interact with their expectations from redevelopment together with their capacity and means to negotiate their present. To answer these questions, we analyze two cases of large-scale urban renewal projects from two metropolitan areas in Turkey, Fikirtepe from Istanbul and Karabaglar from Izmir. We use qualitative case study data on the collective waiting strategies, outlooks, and processes of small landowner residents of each designated renewal area.

Our empirical analysis demonstrates a link between residents’ politicization while waiting for state-led urban renewal and the embeddedness of waiting in the institutional context of project-based redevelopment attempts. Our findings suggest that the dynamic process of waiting, as a collective urban experience, continuously interacts with the institutions of planning and property rights. When the residents, despite varied land tenures, manage to determine priorities for collective action and develop strategies to negotiate the future of their neighborhoods beyond their individual plots, waiting has the potential to become an empowering political experience for the affected communities that the public policy undermines.

Theoretical framework

Waiting is an essential component of spaces of ordinary life, such as traffic, public offices, cashier lines, and hospitals (Corbridge, 2004; Jeffrey, 2008; Lefebvre, 2002). However, like any socio-spatial relationship, waiting has an uneven geography (Olson, 2015; Pakleppa, 2019; Straughan et al., 2020). Questioning who waits, for what, and under what circumstances is essential to understand the uneven geographies of waiting. These dimensions together constitute the spaces of waiting, where waiting becomes a spatial and temporal relationship between involved actors, and how this relationship unfolds generates the politics of waiting. Uneven geographies of waiting also cut across different inequalities, including income, gender, class, and race. Critical geography research on the politics of waiting explores chronic waiting predominantly as a subaltern experience associated with refugees, unemployed youth, squatters, urban poor, and irregular migrants. (Appadurai, 2002; Carswell et al., 2019; Conlon, 2011; Jeffrey, 2008; Mujere, 2020). Waiting for years, even lifetimes corners individuals with weakened agency to take any future-oriented action (Brun, 2015; Stasik et al., 2020; Straughan et al., 2020), limiting mobility and economic opportunities (Sanyal, 2018). Studies documenting waiting as a subaltern experience predominantly focus on cases from the global South, with some exceptions highlighting waiting’s power geometry based on gendered mobility in the global North (Straughan et al., 2020).

Waiting as a relational experience

Relational interpretation of waiting enriches the research on waiting as a subaltern experience. Focusing on the citizen-state interaction, Carswell et al. (2019) and Auyero (2011) frame circulatory encounters of waiting as a defining factor for citizenship that state bureaucracy dictates, and demonstrate that waiting as a spatial experience produces and maintains power and inequality configurations. Pakleppa (2019) focuses on the everyday waiting for public services in post-apartheid Cape Town to illustrate people’s interaction with the state and use “who is waiting” as an indicator of institutional and political design for entitlement. Zharkevich’s (2021) research on irregular migrants in Nepal illustrates that making people wait is a governmentality that exploits hopes to exercise power. Moreover, cases from Chile (Koppelman, 2018) and South Africa (Oldfield and Greyling, 2015) contribute to the theorization of waiting’s relationality between individuals and the state by showing public policy’s role in constructing the poor living in informal settlements as waiting subjects for low-cost public housing.

The state reinforces the politics of waiting by adopting the strategy to postpone, delay, and prevent meeting the socio-spatial demands of citizens together with its limiting socio-political consequences for communities (Joronen, 2017; Yiftachel 2009). Joronen (2017) studies the spaces of waiting in the context of the Israeli government's systematic use of postponing and delaying the building and construction permits for Palestinian municipalities under joint governance of Israeli and Palestinian authorities. Postponing and delaying permits for improvements in buildings, roads, and well constructions leave the Palestinians in a state of precarity and oppression, which also masks the colonial settler-occupation (ibid:8). Similarly, the racialized micropolitics of waiting for state-provided formal housing in post-apartheid South Africa shows how the state deals with citizenship and rights to the city (Oldfield and Greyling 2015: 1100). These prolonged precarity of living conditions in Palestinian and South African contexts highlight a paradoxical element intrinsic to the politics of waiting: while the “citizens consider themselves as the responsibility of the state,” they accept subversion, as their agency is simultaneously contentious and legitimate (Oldfield and Greyling, 2015: 1109; Yiftachel, 2009).

Relational interpretation reveals that waiting, as a subaltern experience does not emerge in a vacuum. Formal institutions and policies construct the conditions for waiting that shape the experience (Auyero, 2011; Carswell et al., 2019; Secor 2007). Waiting can be productive and does not necessarily have to unfold as a passive static experience for the subjects (Jeffrey, 2008; Stasik et al., 2020). Despite the inevitable power asymmetry between the state and citizens stuck in chronic waiting, there is also evidence for empowering means to challenge delays and inaction (Koppelman, 2018). Under the collective experiences of waiting, communities at times develop strategies that strengthen social relationships, which can lead to a power reconfiguration that challenges and resists authority (Lombard, 2013; Pakleppa, 2019). Katz (2004) suggests that communities adopt resistance, reworking, and resilience practices to navigate and respond to urban challenges, which also have a temporality. Therefore, waiting is not necessarily an accumulation of static subaltern experiences, but it can involve processes through which the subjects of waiting renegotiate and redefine their power to act on and influence the institutions that keep them waiting. The reconfiguration of power via the experience of waiting contributes to the production of agency to imagine an alternative future and to negotiate the present better (Auyero, 2011; Oldfield and Greyling, 2015).

Waiting and large-scale redevelopment project “failure”

Waiting as a relational experience also characterizes the urban politics around large-scale redevelopment and regeneration projects, which often take years to realize and unfold as several episodes of waiting for residents, landowners, developers, and the public authority. Despite the extensive research on disconnect between projected and resulting outcomes of large-scale urban renewal projects (Moulaert et al., 2003; Orueta and Fainstein, 2008; Swyngedouw et al., 2002), there is still limited understanding of the mechanisms behind projects that are stuck at an early phase of implementation or at planning phase (Kuyucu, 2022). This has raised questions about the need to explore and explain “failed” urban renewal projects that are not “successfully” completed and do not deliver the projected outcomes (Darrah-Okike, 2019; Kuyucu, 2022; Watt, 2013, 2023). Kuyucu (2022) mainly uses the term “failure” as a descriptive category for incomplete, unfinished, and protracted projects to focus on institutional inconsistencies as the explanatory factor behind policy failure. Based on four large-scale urban regeneration projects from Istanbul, Turkey, Kuyucu (2022: 3) concludes that the “successful” realization of projects requires a comprehensive legal-institutional framework that resolves institutional frictions, conflicts, and high transaction costs.

Studies on the temporal politics of urban planning question this descriptive categorization of success and failure in urban development projects (Raco et al., 2018; Temenos and Lauermann, 2020; Zhang, 2022). Moore-Cherry and Bonnin (2020: 1200) argue that success and failure in urban redevelopment depend on the “temporal framings that are privileged.” The subjective framing of success/failure in urban redevelopment planning helps us to understand the politics of waiting as a mode of governance. On the one hand, research on chronic waiting focusing on the subaltern experiences from the global South often associates waiting with physical and economic immobility combined with the subjects' lack of capacity to negotiate the present and the future. On the other hand, the perspective of temporal politics challenges this sweeping conceptualization. Raco et al. (2018) draw attention to the politics of time that counters the efficiency and growth imperatives of urban development by focusing on the meaning and implications of “slowing down” the urban planning process to reduce the profit appetite for real estate capital. Similarly, Jessop (2015) associates “fast-track implementation” with a lack of deliberation and participation, while Weber (2015) proposes “slower planning” as an opportunity for democratic deliberation and inclusion of citizen concerns that pushes for “qualitative improvement” for urban development (Raco et al., 2018: 1880).

These two lines of research, politics of waiting mainly looking from the South, and politics of time mainly based on the Northern urban experiences provide parallel readings of temporal urban politics. While challenging the a priori assumptions on the power/powerlessness of waiting subjects, we propose that the dynamic process of waiting as a collective urban experience continuously interacts with the institutions of planning as a public policy and property regimes in place. Studying this interaction helps us to avoid overstating the role of agency in altering the planning outcomes (Zhang, 2022), while exploring how this process contributes to the production of agency to imagine an alternative future and to negotiate the present as a form of “power to delay” (Hodkinson, 2012: 515). Delays create new costs through risks and uncertainties for the capital interests, but they also create opportunities for communities to defend their living spaces by keeping the use values of homes, social infrastructure, and solidarity networks intact. However, these opportunities do not completely rule out the risk of material costs of deterioration and underinvestment in urban amenities and infrastructure (Watt, 2023).

This study contributes to growing scholarly interest in the temporality of planning for redevelopment by focusing on the collective waiting experience of small-landowner residents of designated urban renewal areas: How do the landowner residents wait for project-based urban change? How does waiting politicize communities targeted by state-led urban redevelopment? At a more theoretical level, this paper brings together the ethnographic research on waiting based on Southern realities and policy research on the politics of time that theorizes mainly based on the global North. Our empirical basis supports this objective with the “paradigmatic case” of Turkey as a national context in-between the North/South binary (Flyvbjerg, 2006; Haug, 2021). The remainder of the paper explores the diverging politics of waiting in two urban redevelopment sites from two metropolitan areas in Turkey. The central government has designated both areas as large-scale redevelopment sites, which rely on market-driven real estate capital interests according to Turkey’s national urban renewal agenda. The following sections present our methodology and case descriptions with a brief background on urban renewal project planning in Turkey. Later, we present three main findings on how the context and implications of the politics of waiting differ as a mode of governance in two large-scale urban redevelopment projects. Finally, we discuss our findings before concluding with future research directions.

Methodology

To answer our research questions on how the affected communities’ strategies of waiting impact the urban politics accompanying urban redevelopment, we select two large-scale urban renewal projects for a comparative case study design. Our case selection strategy prioritizes similarities regarding the socio-spatial development processes, socioeconomic profiles of the targeted communities, and the scale of proposed redevelopment regarding the physical size of project areas and the vested real estate interests in redevelopment. Our case selection strategy leads us to two large-scale urban renewal projects that aim to transform primarily residential areas of several neighborhoods into mixed-use neighborhoods combining residential use with office and commercial spaces from two major metropolitan areas in Turkey; Fikirtepe from Istanbul and Karabaglar from Izmir. Both cities are coastal cities with major international ports, with inescapable physical boundaries to urban sprawl and high earthquake risk that legitimizes large-scale urban renewal projects. Moreover, both Istanbul and Izmir have witnessed rapid urban growth in the last decades with significant shares of unplanned development of informal housing stock that the public authorities tolerated legally and politically through several zoning amnesties (Demirli et al., 2015; Karaman, 2008; Saracoglu and Demirtas-Milz, 2014).

The empirical basis of each case study consists of qualitative data collected via multiple site visits for participant observation; interviews with residents and neighborhood association leaders; documentary evidence including planning documents, court cases, news articles from local and national media, and secondary data from published research. In Fikirtepe, we conducted six semi-structured in-depth interviews with landowner-residents and members of the neighborhood association through two field visits in July 2021 and September 2022. In Karabaglar, seven semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted with current residents and members of neighborhood associations during two field visits in August 2014 and July 2021. The majority of the interviews could not be audio recorded due to privacy concerns of the interviewees and recorded as handwritten notes taken during the interviews complemented with reflections in the aftermath. The direct quotes are from the recorded interviews, and we use direct quotes only if they also represent the experiences of other interviewees.

Decade(s)-long urban renewal planning in Turkey

Urban renewal projects have been a running agenda especially in larger cities in Turkey since the early 2000s (Kuyucu and Unsal, 2010) and gained momentum with the enactment of a new urban renewal legislation, Act No. 6306: Transformation of Areas under Disaster Risk in 2012. This new legislation centralizes planning authority to deliver urban renewal projects (Bayırbağ et al., 2023; Ergüven, 2020; Kuyucu, 2022), which was previously a municipal responsibility to ensure safe and sanitary residential standards for city dwellers (Penpecioğlu, 2016). Under the administrative and political dominance of the central government, urban renewal projects have become a state-led initiative legitimized by the state’s responsibility to protect the lives and property of citizens from the risk of natural hazards (Act No. 6306, 2012; Ay, 2019). In line with the national urban renewal legislation’s risk-mitigation objective, urban settlements that originally developed as squatter settlements - predominantly on public land- starting from the 1960s and 1970s became the main target of large-scale urban renewal projects (Bugra, 1998; Öncü, 1988; Türkün, 2011). Lack of building standards and zoning enforcement over decades constitutes the basis of the “risk mitigation” argument behind the state-led urban renewal projects, which predominantly targeted low-income neighborhoods. These informally developed neighborhoods as homes to urban poor gradually merged with the planned city parts. Central governments issued several zoning amnesties that sold public land to squatter settlement dwellers and recognized informally developed residential and commercial units that lacked construction and residential permits as “justified noncompliance” (Calor and Alterman, 2017). Moreover, these low-income neighborhoods are often located on economically valuable urban land with the expansion of the city over decades, which enhances the real estate appetite for redevelopment.

The real estate market and the construction business complement the central government’s legislative power to orchestrate urban renewal in project implementation (Yeşilbağ, 2022; Gülhan, 2021). The central government tenders construction projects to private developers that deliver housing and commercial units at the market rate. Small landowners in designated urban renewal sites often cannot pay the difference between the value of their plots (often divided between several individuals through inheritance) and the skyrocketing housing prices in their neighborhoods upon the construction of luxurious new housing complexes. At a project level, state-led urban renewal agenda triggers a massive property transfer from lower-middle-income landowners of informal settlements to higher-income groups facilitated by for-profit private developers (Karaman, 2013; Balaban, 2012). Both of our cases, Fikirtepe and Karabaglar, have a similar socioeconomic context regarding their development initially as squatter settlements, then formalized via zoning amnesties that enabled the squatters to purchase the land and become small landowners (Tarakci and Turk, 2022; Turk et al., 2020).

The derailed “New model” for urban renewal in Fikirtepe, Istanbul

We had a house my father built in 1973-74. It was a single-story. Then two floors were added in '92. We had a three-story house. (...) When we look at the culture and people of Fikirtepe, we see people who migrated from the East, Southeast, and Central Anatolia... They came back in days; and built houses with one or two floors, but then they added floors on top of them. Their children lived in them, and they rented some out and earned rental income. Most residents of Fikirtepe were seniors of retirement age but had no social security. Many of them do not have pensions. They settled in Fikirtepe, worked as porters, and carried loads in Kadıköy¹. They built their houses rented them out and tried to live on them.

Small landowner and former resident of Fikirtepe, July 2021

Fikirtepe is a characteristic example of former squatter settlements informally developed by working-class urban poor in the late 1960s and 1970s, gradually formalized and merged with planned built environment as the passage from an interview summarizes. Fikirtepe is located at the center of the ever-growing megacity of Istanbul located within the district of Kadikoy on the Asian side of the Bosporus strait, directly connecting to the major inner city and inter-city highways. Urban renewal in Fikirtepe dates back to 2005. When the urban renewal process began for Fikirtepe, the population in the affected area was approximately 50,000 people, and about 30% of the land was publicly owned (Özdemir and Aydin, 2016). The total size of the area designated for urban redevelopment in Fikirtepe is 134 hectares, divided into three phases designated for redevelopment gradually over the years (T24, 2021). It is also a powerful case to observe how the urban renewal policy in Turkey evolved by capturing the period before the centralization of the planning authority for urban redevelopment. In 2005, Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality approved a Master Development Plan that designated the whole area as a “Special Project Zone,” which implied increasing the permitted density and building heights; therefore, the redevelopment of the housing stock in Fikirtepe together with a major investment in transport infrastructure around the settlement (Tepe, 2016; Turk et al., 2020). It took the District Municipality 6 years to come up with an implementation-zoning plan to realize the Metropolitan Municipality’s master plan. In contrast to the inaction of the district municipality, Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality designated the residential part of the Special Project Zone as “urban renewal site” based on its legal responsibility to ensure the availability of safe and sanitary housing according to the Municipal Law.

In 2012, Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality announced a “New Model” for delivering the urban renewal project in Fikirtepe (Soytemel, 2017). This “new model” implied a major rollback of the public authority from the project implementation process and left it to the landowners to negotiate with the private developers to agree on how to share the new housing and commercial units to be built among landowners and the developers. The municipality incentivized the small landowners to merge their plots to get greater building rights, no limits to building heights, and allowed construction density twice more than zoning permits outside the designated urban renewal site (Arkitera, 2011; Milliyet, 2010). This would enable the construction of taller and bigger luxurious housing complexes with several amenities, including indoor swimming pools, underground parking, shopping malls, etc. At the end of the land readjustment process, the designated urban renewal site was divided into 61 plots with thousands of rightful owners in each plot. The negotiations between the landowners and developers took place in the absence of any mechanism to monitor the technical eligibility of developers to deliver ambitious construction projects. Negotiations between developers and landowners triggered a chaotic process of speculation, coercion, and conflict among residents and developers (Hurriyet, 2014; Hurriyet Daily, 2019).

A year after the Metropolitan Municipality announced the “new model,” the central government designated the whole Fikirtepe project site as a “risky area” based on Act No. 6306, which sets a lower legal requirement (2/3 of the rightful owners) for consent to demolition and reconstruction (CSB, 2013). Easing the criteria for landowner approval, the urban renewal in the area gained momentum along with forced evictions and demolitions. Although some landowners raised concerns about their tenure and undervaluation of their plots, it remained as marginal individual attempts and did not turn into a popular resistance that could halt the process completely. However, between 2012 and 2020, some unfit developers went bankrupt, leaving the construction unfinished in four plots and empty upon demolition. At the end of 2020, the Ministry of Environment and Urbanization announced that the government is stepping in to complete the unfinished projects in the area declared as the “first phase” of the redevelopment in the whole “risky area” that includes two other phases. The Ministry contracted with big developers to complete construction in 18 plots located in the first stage (Emlak Konut, 2022). Depending on which private developers the landowners contracted in the first place, landowners in Fikirtepe were stuck at a different phase of project implementation. Some landowners organized around neighborhood associations to advocate for their interests collectively, while many others sold their shares and moved on with their lives in other parts of the city or went back to their hometowns (Interview 1). In 2022, after 15 years of waiting for transformation, Fikirtepe is a major construction site surrounded by half-empty luxury condominiums standing on completed phases of the massive urban renewal project in Fikirtepe.

The looming urban renewal in Karabaglar, Izmir

On the 19^th day of the 11^th month of 1978, we came to the Limontepe neighborhood. We built a room and lived in it with a gas lamp for 3 years. There was no electricity, no running water; we continued our lives by drawing water from wells. (…) The municipality was sending a tanker truck. (…) We continued to live as neighbors supporting each other. Then Özal² came and gave the good news. He said “we are giving the deeds.” We got our deeds and years later we started to build houses for ourselves. Everyone tried to build according to their power. We all built a gecekondu³.

N.M. Karabaglar Resident, Blogpost at Karabaglar Neighborhood Association (2021)

Settlement in the designated urban renewal area in Karabaglar dates back to the 1970s, developed initially as squatter settlements and self-built homes for the urban poor (see Bektas Ata, 2021). Karabaglar urban renewal site includes 15 neighborhoods and it is one of the largest “risky areas” in the country, with 540 hectares. The treasury owns the vacant southeastern edge of the area, constituting about 30% of the area. The area is located to the south of the Izmir city centre, right to the north of a major intercity highway that connects the city to popular touristic districts on the Aegean coast. There are approximately 10,600 units in the designated renewal area with an approximate population of 53,500 residents (Ay, 2016: 153; CSB, 2012). The initial urban renewal agenda in Karabaglar started in 2007 when Izmir Metropolitan Municipality marked the area as a “renewal and rehabilitation zone” in its master development plan to fulfil its municipal responsibility to deliver safe and sanitary housing. While the Metropolitan Municipality expected approval from the Ministry of Environment and Urbanization to initiate the planning process for the urban renewal area in stages, the Ministry designated the area as a “risky area” based on Act No. 6306 and centralized the planning authority for conducting urban renewal projects in the area in 2012 (Ay, 2016; Ilbank, 2017).

A defining characteristic of the redevelopment area in Karabaglar is the tenure insecurity for more than 4000 residents in the area without formal title deeds. Therefore, demanding legal recognition for their de facto⁴ land titles constituted the starting point for neighborhood mobilization upon designation of the area as redevelopment site (Evrensel, 2022). Initially, the Ministry contracted with a private planning company to collect legal consent from at least 2/3 of the rightful owners in the project area, while the Ministry worked on project development (Duvar, 2018; Yeni Asir, 2014). In parallel, a group of residents representing landowner residents and those living in informally developed housing started organizing neighborhood associations. Starting with a neighborhood called Limontepe, several neighborhoods within the designated urban renewal area established neighborhood associations to defend and protect the residents' often partially defined legal entitlements to their land and homes they have occupied for decades while lacking construction permits (Interview 7). Since 2012, the neighborhood associations succeeded in resisting the Ministry’s push for redevelopment mainly by using legal means to challenge Ministry’s plans at the local administrative court (Evrensel, 2019; Yenicag, 2022). The neighborhood associations received voluntary legal support from the Chamber of Urban Planners. Since the first lawsuit filed in 2014, the administrative court have revoked the Ministry’s redevelopment plans 10 times already based on technical grounds such as incompatibility of redevelopment plans with other city plans at higher scales (Ege’de Sonsöz, 2022).

During the decade-long history of the urban renewal agenda the central government imposed on Karabaglar, the residents have focused on using legal strategies through the invited spaces of planning to block the project (Miraftab and Wills, 2005). There have not been any demolitions or evictions in the area, meaning that the urban renewal planning has been stuck in the planning phase due to the residents’ legal resistance. Although the Ministry has not given up on Karabaglar redevelopment project, the decade-old legal resistance of the neighborhood associations has established a strong knowledge base and solidarity network together with technical expertise (Interviews 12 and 13). Karabaglar residents have been essentially waiting for the Ministry to announce the redevelopment plans, studying the plan’s implications on their homes, land, and livelihoods with the support of voluntary experts, and taking the plans to court based on claims regarding incompatibility with higher-level plans. This recurring process has put them in a loop of a legal battle with the Ministry. While Karabaglar residents have been waiting for the courts to revoke the Ministry’s plans, they have gained political credibility because of their resistance to displacement and claims to tenure security. The most tangible outcome of their active waiting for transformation has been keeping their neighborhood and living spaces intact despite the constant pressure from the Ministry for redevelopment.

Findings

In both Fikirtepe and Karabaglar, residents’ waiting as a chronic subaltern experience is in line with the critical geography research on uneven geographies of waiting. Residents, mostly landowners of their small plots in designated urban renewal areas, are certainly not affluent privileged urbanites from upper-middle income groups. Typically, the residents in designated urban renewal areas are first or second-generation residents of substandard informally developed housing settlements. The residents often constructed their homes themselves together with family members when they migrated to Istanbul and Izmir chasing the opportunities for employment in industrial and service jobs. They are the urban poor, systematically excluded from society as a surplus population.

As a spatial-temporal experience, Fikirtepe and Karabaglar residents’ chronic waiting for urban redevelopment demonstrates the uneven geographies of waiting. State-led urban renewal in the form of large-scale redevelopment creates spaces of chronic waiting by determining the borders of “risky areas” cutting across neighborhoods, living spaces, and livelihoods. As they are “waiting for transformation,” the residents in both cases are fundamentally waiting for transparency in the planning process. As they are systematically excluded from decision-making processes, they did not receive vital information regarding the various aspects of urban renewal projects. Thus, residents in the renewal sites start to perceive redevelopment as a threat to their single source of wealth in the form of small landownership, means to access affordable housing, and solidarity networks that sustain these communities (Interviews 3, 7, and 12). In other words, waiting for urban redevelopment corresponds to establishing means to require reliable information. Depending on the planning phase, what the residents wait for ranges from technical details about the proposed development that what living environment the redevelopment proposes to existing residents to their chances of staying in their neighborhoods upon redevelopment given their limited financial capacity to pay for the renewal.

An interesting finding regarding the differences between the two cases concerns residents’ politicization through the spatial-temporal experience of waiting. Despite the similarities between Fikirtepe and Karabaglar, the protracted project planning triggered diverse politics of waiting among the residents. We identify three underlying dynamics that explain the difference in strategies and priorities that the residents have acquired as they have been waiting for the information, proposals, and delivery of the project through different stages of planning: 1) Contribution vs. Resistance to Un-homing; 2) Negotiating vs. Demanding Accountability; 3) Common private interests vs. Common collective interests. Below we discuss each point separately.

Contribution versus resistance to un-homing

A major difference between how Fikirtepe and Karabaglar residents “wait” for transformation stems from the immediate outlook, which characterizes the collective opinion among residents at the earlier stages of waiting. Fikirtepe residents emphasize a common sentiment at earlier stages of the renewal project that focused on future returns to their land:

From the very beginning, I knew that I wouldn't live there. My plan was to sell the new units and buy apartments elsewhere. That’s why I preferred one-bedroom apartments as people said those are the easiest to sell and to make the most money.” (Interview 1)

Like many other landowners from Fikirtepe, our interviewee’s priority was not to advocate for a redevelopment that delivers an outcome where all existing residents could continue living together and keep their social ties intact. Some residents stated that they planned to rent the new units to have stable rental income instead of selling (Interview 4 and 5). Although the investment plans differed among residents, many accepted that the new development would not provide a new home, but a source of income and wealth for people of Fikirtepe. Therefore, the people of Fikirtepe did not question the municipality’s “new model” that lifted the basic zoning regulations to maximize returns to the landowners. They anticipated that the market-driven business model for redevelopment inevitably triggers a process of un-homing (see Elliot-Cooper et al., 2020), cutting off their ties with their communities and living space. Their willing acceptance of un-homing in Fikirtepe stems from their interpretation of the redevelopment as a financial opportunity, like winning the lottery, they could not afford to miss. Therefore, the idea of maximizing returns to their plots dominated especially the earlier stages of Fikirtepe residents’ waiting and hindered politicization around the redevelopment.

In Karabaglar, the residents politicized directly against the pressure of un-homing from the very beginning. This position is a direct consequence of the tenure structure in the designated renewal area. Unlike Fikirtepe, there are about one-third of residents without legally binding land titles for the plots where their buildings stand. Therefore, there is greater tenure insecurity on legal grounds in Karabaglar than in Fikirtepe. Although Karabaglar residents were never fundamentally against the redevelopment of the housing stock and the urban infrastructure in their neighborhoods, they are strictly against the risk of displacement:

“We are not against redevelopment. We get together to defend and protect our rights. We are against the firms that are seeking a share from (economic) rent. We want the people to be included in the process of decision-making.” (Interview 12)

Our interview data collected in Karabaglar in 2014, confirms that the position of Karabaglar residents with respect to the redevelopment has not changed in the past 8 years. At the beginning of the process of “waiting for transformation”, they stated their position as being critical of the top-down imposition of the state-led redevelopment agendas (Interviews 7, 8, 10, 11). They have built their strategy to challenge the Ministry’s redevelopment plans based on their rejection of exclusion from the planning process, and they interpreted exclusion as an imminent threat of displacement and dispossession. Tenure insecurity for over 4000 residents in Karabaglar resulted in demanding legal recognition of de facto land titles as a starting point for neighborhood mobilization (Evrensel, 2022). The residents politicized around this tangible claim and problem of the “present” has become a prerequisite for the state’s redevelopment project to move forward concerning their future.

Negotiating versus demanding accountability

The second major difference between the designated renewal area residents’ experiences of waiting and its consequences for the politics of waiting for transformation concerns the residents’ strategy, which is about the process of waiting.

In the case of Fikirtepe, the urban renewal project started with intensive negotiations between the developers and the landowners. As a direct consequence of the Municipal strategy to step out of the process and leave it fully to the market forces led by the private interests on returns to real estate, landowners in Fikirtepe politicized more like real estate brokers rather than established residents of the targeted area. Landowners in Fikirtepe focus on the number and location of units they are offered based on their market value or the liquidity as assets in the real estate market. This strategy did not change its course after the Ministry stepped in to finish the incomplete constructions in the area either. In the course of a decade-long waiting for transformation, Fikirtepe residents’ strategy has evolved from maximizing their returns to minimizing their losses:

I am sure of one thing: We will continue to become victims even further. But my goal is to minimize my losses. That’s why I remain at the table with the State officials.” (Interview 3)

In the case of Karabaglar, the determining factor in residents’ strategy of waiting has been built on demanding accountability and transparency in the planning process. Representatives from the neighborhood association made continuous efforts to establish and maintain contacts with public officials in the district office of the Ministry by requesting an appointment each time a new officer was appointed (Interview 12). This effort to build personal relations with the officials was a part of their strategy to go beyond the planning bureaucracy and create an alternative communication channel for a better flow of information. Their demands to receive accurate information and to be “taken seriously” as both rightful owners and people who have invested in their time and labor in their neighborhoods in a systematically underinvested city part sets the tone of their political agenda (Interview Notes, 2014). In the course of years, with success in blocking the state’s urban renewal plans by using legal mechanisms with the support of voluntary lawyers, residents of Karabaglar have also accumulated confidence in their political power:

“There is no way that the urban renewal project can proceed without engaging us. They are also aware of that.” (Interview 12)

Common private interests versus common collective interests

Our final finding on two different processes of politicization around waiting concerns the connection between the outlook and the strategies of waiting. In Fikirtepe, the residents’ future-oriented outlook prioritized the future market returns to their land, and the negotiation strategy atomized the landowners to stand out for their private interests. During a decade-long active waiting for redevelopment, different resident groups have organized by founding four different neighborhood associations.⁵ Therefore, private interests did not completely work against the collectivization of waiting. However, the common denominator of these neighborhood associations has been primarily their private returns rather than a common claim regarding liveability, affordability, sustainability, etc. In one of the audio-recorded interviews, a Fikirtepe resident expressed his frustration speaking of his family after the Ministry stepped in to complete the unfinished urban redevelopment attempt:

“Damn it! We’re done- whoever is going to do it, [we] let them do it. At least we should get a roof over our head, so we will be saved from paying rent. People have been gradually selling their land. Many people are swamped in debt.” (Interview 1)

This quote illustrates the residents' direct costs as they wait for transformation. After a decade-long wait, the completion of the construction has become the residents’ top priority. They want the construction phase to be over as soon as possible to see what the Ministry will distribute to the landowners in Fikirtepe. Their current strategy of active waiting is to collect “data” and information on the wrongdoings in the implementation to use as legal evidence if/when they sue the Ministry about underpaying their shares from the redevelopment (Interviews 2, 4, and 5). However, they refrain from taking the wrongdoings they observe in the implementation to the court, such as the Ministry signing contracts with the developers before the date of the tender process, at this point, as they do not want to halt the ongoing construction (Interviews 3 and 4). Stating that they have lost their trust in the whole redevelopment process, residents prepare for a legal battle once the Ministry assigns the replacement units, which they expect to be below their legal entitlement.

Residents’ bottom-up mobilization in Karabaglar pursued a common goal to protect the “common interests”. Fragmented land tenure also contributed to the development of a common collective interest against redevelopment. A neighborhood association leader elaborated on the role of collectivization of knowledge and experience within their communities over the years:

“At the beginning, some people saw the potential for economic rent and getting rich through urban renewal, but after all these years people have understood that it won't be the case (…) We are not going to be humble about this. We can represent our demands very clearly with top-level officials. They also know this, but still, they are not coming to us to include us in the process.” (Interview 12)

This quote demonstrates the confidence Karabaglar residents accumulated during their active waiting. However, it also illustrates how they have politicized as they have waited to be included in the planning for redevelopment. Interviews with Fikirtepe residents also demonstrate similar confidence as they state that the whole process trained them in law, planning, construction, and real estate (Interviews 12 and 13).

Discussion

Our comparative study of different political strategies towards waiting among residents and small landowners in large-scale urban redevelopment projects provides important contributions to the research on the politics of waiting as a spatial experience. As both cases confirm, collectivized waiting is far from being a static and unproductive experience for the subjects. Both communities in targeted redevelopment areas have invested their time in developing and strengthening coalitions among themselves and with groups outside their neighborhoods. In Fikirtepe and Karabaglar, the residents have organized, mobilized, and developed strategies during waiting. However, how they relate to the planning authority in power, which is the central government, differs in both cases.

Based on the differences in their priorities, i.e., maximizing returns to their land versus securing their tenure, communities pursue different strategies to negotiate with the state in both cases. This leads to different outlooks on what residents demand from the public authority in charge of planning. In Karabaglar, the residents organized around a claim that can be tangibly resolved “now” by recognition of the de facto property rights for those who lack title deeds. By putting a tangible claim forward as a redevelopment prerequisite, Karabaglar residents could assess the state’s accountability. Whereas in the case of Fikirtepe, the collectivization of waiting emerged only after the promises from the private developers and the public authority were invalidated. This difference suggests that the residents of Fikirtepe and Karabaglar pushed back against different systems of power and domination: Fikirtepe resistance builds on the legitimacy of private property, and Karabaglar resistance builds on the claims to securing tenure (Katz, 2004). In either case, both communities have turned the waiting experiences in their favor. They have used the time to establish a political platform and construct their agency as active subjects of waiting rather than subaltern “surplus populations.”

Regarding the role of the State in the politics of waiting, our findings depart from a common pattern in previous findings that suggest the state’s deliberate, systematic efforts to postpone and delay the improvements in the built environment (Joronen, 2017; Oldfield and Greyling, 2015; Yiftachel, 2009). In the context of large-scale urban redevelopment in Turkey, our findings demonstrate the public authority’s efforts to speed up the projects by pursuing two strategies. First, in Fikirtepe, the metropolitan municipality and then the Ministry have been supporting big developers and investors by building right incentives or contractual agreements through public-private partnerships to speed up the process. Second, in Karabaglar, the Ministry has utilized tactics to circumvent the residents’ strategy to challenge the Ministry’s plans at the administrative court. Karabaglar residents interpret the Ministry’s strategy of proposing more or less the same redevelopment plans repeatedly (10 times since 2014) as a tactic to intimidate the residents and exhaust the neighborhood associations’ political resources, such as time and legal assistance for representation. Therefore, the State is not postponing or delaying as a deliberate strategy to keep the communities waiting in our cases. Quite the contrary, the State has been using a discourse of “urgency” by legitimizing large-scale urban redevelopment under the name of “disaster risk mitigation.” However, through the process of waiting, the Karabaglar residents have identified different priorities regarding urgency, such as avoiding displacement and dispossession in the first place.

This brings us to the discussion on the “failure” or “success” of urban redevelopment projects, looking at the temporality of planning (Kuyucu, 2022). If we use failure as a descriptive category for projects that fail to be completed, then both cases exemplify failures from a project-based planning standpoint. The physical and economic scales of both cases, combined with institutional complexity due to inconsistent public policy and property regimes, lead to bottlenecks in project delivery. However, from a politics of time perspective, which does not privilege the temporal framings of the state or the market, it becomes harder to jump to conclusions regarding the success or the failure of both urban redevelopment projects. In both cases, the residents have accumulated significant knowledge and expertise in institutions, i.e., the formal and informal “rules of the game,” governing the urban redevelopment process through laws, regulations, plans, and the organizations/actors strategizing within these institutional boundaries. In the face of economic hardships, processes, or the risk of dispossession and displacement, the accumulation of knowledge and politicization of this collective capacity demonstrates the resilience of residents to the exclusionary politics of space (Katz, 2004).

Conclusion

This paper explores the politics of waiting in the context of large-scale urban redevelopment projects by focusing on how the small landowner residents “wait for transformation.” Building on the concepts of uneven geographies of waiting and temporality of planning, we identify the relationships between the strategies that the residents acquire when their neighborhoods become the target of market-oriented redevelopment that entails the tangible risk of dispossession and displacement for established communities.

The accumulation of knowledge as a collective entity in the form of neighborhood associations enhances the communities’ political power and confidence in representing their interests as active citizens rather than submissive victims of redevelopment. Despite differences in their strategies, priorities, and timing of collectivizing their waiting experiences, small landowner residents in both cases have “succeeded” in establishing a local agency and organizing future-oriented action. However, it is important not to overstate the “role of agency” (Zhang, 2022). Small landowners’ political power to alter the planning outcomes remains a question for these protracted redevelopment projects. Yet, the active engagement of the residents in reworking their socio-political landscape to meet their needs and aspirations demonstrates the dynamic process of waiting (Katz, 2004). Therefore, we refrain from using the subjective framings of success and failure for project-based planning simply by looking at the status of the projects on the ground. Analyzing how and what the residents “wait for” demonstrates the significance of the temporal politics of urban redevelopment. The temporality of residents’ resistance, resilience, and reworking concerning imposed urban change is prone to democratic deliberation through residents’ empowerment and the state’s accountability (Jessop, 2015; Katz, 2004; Raco et al., 2018; Weber, 2015).

Turkey's national urban redevelopment context is in-between the liberal market democracies of the global North and the post-colonialist democratic struggles of the global South. Therefore, this paradigmatic national context demonstrates different layers of waiting as a mode of governance where the uneven geographies of waiting are intertwined with the potential for democratic deliberation through an accumulation of collective resistance experience and politicization. In other words, the politics of waiting in the context of urban redevelopment in Fikirtepe and Karabaglar help us to demonstrate two principal and, at times, conflicting dynamics of chronic waiting. First, power asymmetries characterize the subject of waiting as a subaltern experience. Second, there is potential for democratic control by creating room for the “surplus population” to politicize and accumulate political resources of knowledge and expertise to defend their living spaces and the single source of wealth. Our findings raise further critical questions to deal with in future research on the potential of waiting as a means of democratic and qualitative improvement in planning to move beyond the process and impact of the politics of waiting as an end in itself.

Interviews

Interview 1, Fikirtepe resident/neighborhood association leader, July 2021.

Interview 2, Fikirtepe resident/neighborhood association member, September 2022.

Interview 3, Fikirtepe resident/neighborhood association leader, September 2022.

Interview 4, Fikirtepe resident, September 2022.

Interview 5, Fikirtepe resident, September 2022.

Interview 6, Fikirtepe resident, September 2022.

Interview 7, Karabaglar resident/neighborhood association leader, August 2014.

Interview 8, Karabaglar resident, August 2014.

Interview 9, Karabaglar resident, August 2014

Interview 10, Karabaglar resident, August 2014.

Interview 11, Karabaglar resident, August 2014.

Interview 12, Karabaglar resident/neighborhood association leader, July 2021.

Interview 13, Karabaglar resident/neighborhood association member, July 2021.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Deniz Ay

Notes

Dr Deniz Ay is an urban scholar at the Institute of Geography's Political Urbanism and Sustainable Spatial Development Unit at the University of Bern (Switzerland). Her research interests sit at the intersection of urban redevelopment, land policy, and social reproduction, using case study and public policy analysis methodologies. She has taught Bachelor’s and master’s courses on land use policy, urban governance, international development, and sustainability at the University of Bern (2020-present) and The Ohio State University (2015–2017). Dr. Ay received her Ph.D. at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign's Department of Urban and Regional Planning. From 2019 to 2020 she was a research fellow at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel's Brussels Centre for Urban Studies/ Cosmopolis Centre for Urban Research.

Dr Mehmet Penpecioglu is an Associate Professor at the Izmir Institute of Technology, Department of City and Regional Planning. His current research concentrates on comparative urbanism and urban socio-geographical change, urban socio-spatial injustices, politics of urban social movements, and the future of urban commons. He received his PhD in Urban Policy and Planning from the Middle East Technical University, and he conducted postdoctoral research at TU Delft.

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