11 - “Either they want it or not”: Turkey’s Chamber of City Planners as a catalyst for insurgency in planning

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Turkey's urbanization processes bring forth new discussions with regard to the global perspective towards the “communicative turn” in planning (Healey 1996), as a result of the country's recent history and struggles with democratization. These struggles are caused by authoritarian policies, which, in response, give rise to opposition, public petitions, judicial processes and public protests about controversial urban projects. Therefore, being insurgent or triggering an insurgent process has become a regular, and even normalized, reaction for some institutions, NGOs and urban planners in contemporary Turkey. In this context, this chapter discusses current urban politics and the participatory planning approaches in the Turkish planning system, with reference to the case of the Chamber of City Planners (Şehir Plancıları Odası: ŞPO) as an insurgent institution. Although insurgency is mainly defined and developed around the agency of citizens in the existing literature (Butcher & Frediani 2014; Earle 2012; Holston 1995, 1999; Pieterse 2010; Pine 2010; Samaddar 2012), we argue that urban planners may also bring insurgent actions into their professional roles. Especially in contexts in which top-down planning practices exclude not only citizens but also planners, they are opposed politically and/or ideologically to planning decisions and regulations. As such, we attempt to unfold the different modes and meanings of insurgency in Turkey by posing the question: how should we define the insurgent role of planners in a hostile institutional planning context?

We base our analysis on the personal experiences of two key figures of ŞPO, who in their daily work as planners have challenged top-down planning. It considers their institutional capacities and collective mobilization to events such as the Gezi Park protests and the opposition to the Canal Istanbul project, to reconsider the meanings of insurgency and the limits and potentials of participation in the case of urban planning in Turkey. These topics include the dilemma between being a lone insurgent and being in a collective movement; between being a proactive urban planner within an institution while understanding the specific constraints of participation; and its scale, actors and the fragile position between planning law and urban politics.

CURRENT URBAN POLITICS IN TURKEY

In 2018 the Turkish government enacted a built environment amnesty, allowing illegal buildings (approximately 60 per cent of the built-up area in Turkey) to acquire a permit and therefore become “legalized”.