Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses urban governance mechanisms in Eskişehir which utilized earthquake and disaster risk discourse in order to achieve an urban renewal project. It shows how policy-making process has entangled with an emergency declaration and multiple forms of uncertainties and insecurities.

Paper long abstract:

Leaving its heydays behind, Eskişehir experienced the fate of many other disempowered cities around the world, responding to pressures of neoliberalism by seeking to regain their power (Çağlar and Glick Schiller 2018). With the assertion of turning Eskişehir’s village-like urban character into a European one, the metropolitan municipality started its urban rescaling program that heavily depended on urban restructuring. Waterfronts of the Porsuk River have become spaces of opportunity for a series of URPs for accumulation, economic growth, and socio-cultural transformations. The paper illuminates how the central government’s new law, “The Law on the transformation of lands under risk of disaster”, designed to renew areas deemed to be under disaster risk brought along an opportunity for Eskişehir’s municipality. In 2013, the Metropolitan Municipality of Eskişehir declared an urban renewal project on 56-hectare land with a 15.000 population. Although the municipality utilized emergency and techno-moral claims to restructure the city-spaces to prevent asserted future disasters, perception and definition of risk, as well as the future of the neighborhood and housing security, have remained uncertain. The paper discusses the entanglement of emergency claims within uncertainties of risk, ambiguities of policy-making through technomoral governance mechanisms, as well as responses from the populations who experienced various forms of vulnerabilities emerging from uncertainties and waiting.