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Paper short abstract

This paper shows how poverty in Turkey is reproduced through neoliberal urban and health policies. Housing-led urban transformation and marketised healthcare expand inclusion while shifting risk to households, managing poverty instead of enabling structural change.

Paper long abstract

This paper asks whether development remains possible under contemporary global capitalism by examining how poverty is reproduced through neoliberal urban and health policies. Using Turkey as a critical case, it argues that post-2001 reforms did not reduce state involvement but reoriented state capacity toward market-making, risk-shifting, and crisis management, limiting prospects for structural transformation. The paper analyses two policy arenas where poverty reproduction becomes visible. First, housing-led urban transformation, particularly through state-led agencies, expanded access to formal housing while restructuring urban space, displacing subsistence practices, deepening spatial inequality, and embedding households in debt-mediated dependency. Urban policy thus functioned simultaneously as inclusionary social policy and a mechanism of accumulation and control. Second, welfare and health reforms expanded formal coverage but conditionalised access through means-testing, insurance premiums, and rising out-of-pocket expenditures. These arrangements shifted social risk from the state to households, producing chronic financial strain and new forms of vulnerability despite moments of crisis responsiveness. Health access became formally universal but substantively unequal. These cases show that poverty in Turkey is not the result of individual failure or policy absence but a structural and relational process reproduced through institutional design, spatial governance, and marketised social policy. Inclusionary reforms coexist with deepening inequality when state power is deployed to stabilise markets and secure legitimacy rather than enable redistribution and productive transformation. It concludes that under neoliberal globalisation, development increasingly operates as a technology for managing poverty rather than transforming its structural causes.