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State Stigmatisation in Urban Turkey: Managing the “Insurgent” Squatter Dwellers in Dikmen Valley
Author(s) -
Yardımcı Öznur
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
antipode
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.177
H-Index - 98
eISSN - 1467-8330
pISSN - 0066-4812
DOI - 10.1111/anti.12651
Subject(s) - state (computer science) , authoritarianism , mainstream , politics , stigma (botany) , political economy , capital (architecture) , power (physics) , political science , sociology , gentrification , newspaper , capital city , development economics , gender studies , economic growth , geography , economic geography , democracy , law , economics , psychology , physics , archaeology , algorithm , psychiatry , quantum mechanics , computer science
This paper contributes to the accounts of territorial stigmatisation by examining the state role in it in the case of Turkey, a country that suffers from growing state power. The existing debates are mainly restricted to its function as an economic strategy paving the way for capital accumulation through devaluing working‐class people and places. Drawing on textual analysis of political speeches, local newsletters and mainstream national newspapers and fieldwork material that include interviews and observations in Dikmen Valley where some squatter communities mobilised against the state‐imposed urban transformation project, I demonstrate that state conceptualisation of “problem people” targets the “insurgent” rather than the “unprofitable” groups. Stigma in urban settings functions in inciting the desire to meet the patterns deemed appropriate by the state, rather than the market. Moving from that, I argue that stigma is used as a state‐led political strategy, which is integral to the growing authoritarianism in Turkey.