State-led gentrification and time in Okmeydanı, Istanbul: Resisting uncertainties through everyday solidarities

<p>Gentrification studies have traditionally favoured <em>space </em>over <em>time</em>. The original contribution of this thesis lays in placing <em>time </em>at the centre of state-led gentrification analysis, which allows me to demonstrate how approaching contested urban spaces at risk of gentrification through the lens of spatiotemporal struggle <em>in, for </em>and <em>through </em>place makes them open-ended, multiple and inclusive. I do this through an ethnography of a deeply contested urban space, the area of Okmeydanı in Istanbul, threatened with a state-led gentrification project and historically subjected to stigmatization and multi-faceted violence. This proposal hinges in the interstices of long-entrenched dichotomies: urban/rural, formal/informal, Global North/South, researched/researcher, everydayness/event, pushing them beyond rigid binaries. I thus propose new vocabularies of engagement inspired by postcolonial and poststructuralist perspectives that allow for an onto-epistemological dislocation.</p> <p>In the face of (past, present and future) dispossessions, I identify three different analytical perspectives: the assembling of <em>limbos</em>, the synchronizing of waiting and moving on, and resistances as collective negotiation of <em>being available</em>. I operationalize these propositions through a situated reflexive and relational research exercise that holds me to account as much as it exposes the ways dwellers in Okmeydanı do <em>more than just surviving</em>. Thus, I have also reclaimed vulnerability, my own and others intertwined, as a key underlying subject invoked throughout the thesis.</p> <p>This thesis shows how through the reworking trajectories of <em>waiting </em>different sets of power relations are unveiled. They construct openness out of foretold stories of anticipated endings. I demonstrate how emergent temporalities bring dwellers to cope with institutional and state-produced limbos through their simultaneous position in collective action and everyday solidarities.</p>