Paper short abstract:

The paper analyzes the relationship between urbanisation and de-industrialisation in the Global South, concentrating on the case of Turkey. It focuses on how the urbanisation strategy of the 2000s facilitated deindustrialisation, as part of a contradictory and implosive development policy.

Paper long abstract:

This paper analyzes the relationship between urbanisation and de-industrialisation in the Global South, concentrating on the case of Turkey. The paper will first argue that a neoliberal development policy based on an agressive urbanisation strategy prepared the spatio-political (and scalar) infrastructure of premature de-industrialisation in Turkey during the 2000s. This development strategy has been contradictory and implosive. Inward-oriented policies of successive JDP (Justice and Development Party) governments sought to meet the dual targets of wealth creation & redistribution, and it has established a particular "urban citizenship regime". The second part of the paper examines how this urban citizenship regime served as a socio-political mechanism that facilitated premature deindustrialisation. Four dimensions of this regime will be discussed with a special emphasis on "politics of (re)distribution", which stands for struggles among different social classes/groups revolving around (re)distribution, and institutionalisation of access to (or exclusion from):

A) Resources exploited to produce material wealth (land, labour and capital) - politics of possession/dispossession;

B) Value/surplus value produced through exploitation of these resources - politics of exploitation;

C) Publicly owned, controlled, and distributed resources/benefits - politics of commons;

D) Sites/centres of decision-making that shape and determine the functioning of the above spheres of (re)distribution and political struggle - politics of representation.

The paper concludes by questioning the limits to this urban citizenship regime, and highlighting the future of Turkish urbanization in the context of premature deindustrialization unfolding in certain cities.