Political Science and Public Administration

This article aims to develop a comparative framework of analysis to study urban crises, arguing that there is a need to establish the analytical links between ‘everyday life and systemic trends and struggles’, and thus to tie together the insights produced by ‘particularistic accounts’. It examines urban crises as political phenomena and brings the Marxist notion of ‘alienation’ to the centre of attention. We argue that ‘alienation’ – as a universal mechanism facilitating capital accumulation process via dispossession, and as negative mental/emotional implications of dispossession, is useful to establish those analytical links. We identify two domains, urban economic structure and urban political system, where alienation is contained. Public authorities deploy various containment strategies in these domains to govern alienation, and urban crises occur when these strategies fail. The post-2008 wave of urban upheavals could be explained by the failure of roll-out neoliberal strategies, which constitute the basis of our comparative framework.

The meaning of ‘urban crisis’, and its applications in concrete struggles to govern and contest austerity urbanism, remains under-specified analytically and poorly understood empirically. This paper addresses the lacuna by opening up the concept of urban crisis to critical scrutiny. It begins by exploring how urban ‘crisis talk’ tends to over-extend the concept in ways that can render it shallow or meaningless. The paper looks secondly at different applications of the terminology
of ‘crisis’, disclosing key framings and problematics. In the spirit of critical urban studies, it focuses, thirdly, on practices of crisis-resistance and crisis-making. The paper concludes by summarizing the six urban crisis framings linked to six urban problematics, in order to inform future studies of austerity urbanism and assist in developing more reflexive approaches to the concept.

Issız bir adaya düştünüz. Karşınıza yalnız yaşayan ve daha önce hiçbir insanla karşılaşmamış bir kişi çıktı. Kendine de Robinson adını vermiş. Robinson’a geldiğiniz dünyayı anlatmaya giriştiniz ve sonunda, kendinizi tanıtırken, kamu yönetimiyle de ilgilendiğinizden bahsettiniz. Robinson, muhtemelen, size şu iki soruyu hemen soracaktır: 1) Kamu nedir? 2) Yönetim nedir? Bu sorulara nasıl bir yanıt verilebilirdi acaba?

This article investigates the nature, causes, and consequences of child poverty and youth unemployment
in Turkey, which is a transition country between the East and the West. It is argued that this
in-betweenness leads to a gap between the intended goals and outcomes of relevant policies. The article
places a special emphasis on how the post-1980 neoliberal turn has shaped the policy orientation of
successive governments, and transformed the nature of child poverty and youth unemployment in
Turkey, making the socioeconomic inequalities worse while concentrating these problems into major
urban centers. It is observed that Turkey still does not have a long-term policy outlook regarding the
future of child poverty and youth unemployment, such that those two issues could be treated as parts of
the same problem. The same observation is also made about the related policy implementation structure.
It is concluded that there is a need for a comprehensive approach, taking into account the needs and
problems of the individual at different stages of life as a whole; paying attention to the interdependencies
across the outcomes of state intervention in different policy areas; and ensuring policy coordination
within and across currently fragmented policy implementation structures in different fields.

The meaning of ‘urban crisis’, and its applications in concrete struggles to govern and contest austerity urbanism, remains under-specified analytically and poorly understood empirically. This paper addresses the lacuna by opening up the concept of urban crisis to critical scrutiny. It begins by exploring how urban ‘crisis-talk’ tends to over-extend the concept in ways that can render it shallow or meaningless. The paper looks, second, at different applications of the terminology of ‘crisis’, disclosing key framings and problematics. In the spirit of critical urban studies, it focuses, third, on practices of crisis-resistance and crisis-making. The paper concludes by summarising the six urban crisis framings linked to six urban problematics, in order to inform future studies of austerity urbanism and assist in developing more reflexive approaches to the concept.

Contemporary urbanization is characterized by the incorporation of historically isolated places into vast urbanized networks that are planetary in scope. We underscore the political processes and actors that instantiate urban transformation. Drawing on Lefebvre's writings on urban revolutionsin pluralwe show that he considered comprehensive urban transformation the result of multiple place-based revolutions that are typically driven by a state. We then present Turkey as an example in which the Justice and Development Party embraced an agenda of absolute national development whose primary mechanism was a nationwide urban revolution. We focus on Ankara, which served as a laboratory for urban policy experimentation from 1994 onwards, and we present original research to show how its urban governance mechanisms informed urban planning legislation at the national scale after 2002 when the Justice and Development Party embarked on a program of national renewal. This regime was based on the distribution of short-term gains but its longterm costs became apparent after 2010 and it faced increasingly fierce contestation. This case not only exposes the limits of urban revolution in Turkey, but it also shows that urban revolutions are negotiated political processes and inherently contingent, uneven and incomplete.

This paper examines the role of violence in Turkey’s state-coordinated pursuit of rapid urban transformation. We argue that the Justice and Development Party (AKP) implemented an urban development regime that relied on structural violence to control and distribute urban rent, housing and land. Despite framing this mode of urban transformation as a way to include marginalised urban populations in economy and society, it ultimately proved to be politically and economically unsustainable. In response to resistance, the AKP shifted its strategy to one of coercion in order to maintain control of the pace and scope of urbanisation. We present original research from Ankara and show how this strategic shift unfolded through an analysis of urban policy and planning practice. By highlighting the negotiated nature of Turkey’s urban transformation and the limits of structural violence, this paper offers insights into the complexities of contemporary urban politics.

The article concentrates on the reasons behind, and consequences of, the post-2008 urban crises experienced in the southern geographies of capitalism. It does so through a comparative analysis of three cases, namely India, Egypt, and Türkiye. The methodological approach in the article attempts to expand the scope of urban politics research to bring divergent cases into conversation. We argue that loosely defined, similar and different causes and/or repeated outcomes of urban crises across diverse cases could form an appropriate base for research in urban politics. The article brings the politics of redistribution in three cases/countries under the spotlight, focusing on four dimensions of the politics of redistribution: (dis)possession; exploitation; commons; and representation. While the last two dimensions dominated the scene in Egypt, in the case of Türkiye, it was about the politics of representation and exploitation. In India, the politics of (dis)possession and commons seem to constitute the center of urban politics. Furthermore, as the comparative analysis of the countries reveals, the role of the state and its historical and spatial configurations have played a strategic role in the formation of the politics of distribution. The comparative analysis also indicates that the variegated neoliberal urban policies have become successful or have failed in containing urban crises. The reasons for the success/failure in urban policies depend on three major factors: (1) the spatio-institutional design of the urban policy-making mechanisms; (2) the historical pattern of urbanization; (3) the role of the nation-state, especially the central government, in the politics of redistribution.