Spotlight on Istanbul: Building and Rebuilding the Periphery

The workshop specifically was designed to address the political economies of large scale housing projects in the peripheries of the world’s cities. The event/project is about the various ways in which peripheral urban housing projects are being built and re-vitalized.

The location of Istanbul where the workshop took place was deliberately chosen. The significance of the city’s development from providing housing through gecekondu-style squatting and regularization to massive state-led building of mostly peri-urban housing estates (through organizations such as TOKI) is widely recognized as exemplary and subject to much inter-referencing in global debates on housing in post-suburbia.

Istanbul is also a geographical bridge between West Asia, North Africa and Europe, both historically and currently. We therefore would consider Istanbul to be at several intersections of theory, history and geography.

The workshop brought together leading Turkish and global researchers and activists on peripheral housing and settlement as well as social activism around housing, displacement and re-settlement with members of the MCRI research team to discuss how inter-referenced forms of urbanism are used to a) build peripheral large scale housing estates and b) manage those estates over time, in times of re-vitalization, shrinkage, population change, environmental challenges and economic crisis.

The event opened with a tour of Istanbul’s periphery and a keynote by Mustafa Dikeç (Ecole d’Urbanisme de Paris) on The Political Challenge of the Urban Periphery. This was followed by two days of presentations by international and local experts. 

The event was supported financially by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) through the MCRI Global Suburbanisms, by the York Research Chair in Global Suburban Studies and by local host institutions GPoT Center of stanbul Kültür University and Mimar Sinan University.