Building the New Turkey: State-space, Infrastructure, and Citizenship

This dissertation explores the contentious and contradictory ways the development of authoritarian infrastructure shapes state-citizenship relations, using the urban as an entry point through which such relations are (re)ordered and (re)produced. To do so, it analyzes the recent housing and mega transit projects in Istanbul as a common thread that weaves through state-space, citizenship, and urbanization. In this context, the research has three interrelated core arguments. First, it argues that within the last 20 years, the Turkish government created a new citizenship contract that presented the provision of infrastructure (housing and transit projects) as its primary mechanism to overcome existing inequalities and to offer full-fledged citizenship to its subjects. Second, it argues that what makes such a citizenship contract possible is the state-led process of commodification and production of parceled land (arsa in Turkish) through urban infrastructure, built on the Neo-Ottoman fantasies of unity, communal belonging, and collective prosperity. Finally, the research argues that such a citizenship model has its own contradictions and instead of overcoming existing inequalities, it creates new forms of socio-spatial and economic unevenness. The states failure to deliver its infrastructural promises reflect the gaps in the social contract, opening new spaces for citizens to reclaim and redefine their rights and responsibilities.