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

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.