1. Cultures of assemblage, resituating urban theory: A response to the papers on ‘Assembling Istanbul’
- Author
-
Amy Mills
- Subjects
media_common.quotation_subject ,Geography, Planning and Development ,Neoliberalism ,Urban studies ,Environmental ethics ,Urban theory ,Urban Studies ,Thick description ,Politics ,Urban anthropology ,Urban planning ,Ethnography ,Sociology ,Social science ,media_common - Abstract
The articles in this special issue extend research on urban space and politics in Istanbul with approaches that explorate the relationships between urban form, urban change, and political processes as assemblages of things, beliefs, institutions, and landscapes. They share a commitment to extended ethnography and thick description in urban studies, and contribute to research that destabilizes universalizing urban theory produced in Europe and America. The dramatic state-led project of neoliberal urban transformation in Istanbul has generated an important body of work that focuses on the consequences of creative destruction, urban displacement, and urban social and political exclusion. These papers contribute to that research with additional questions that incorporate understudied material and cultural elements of the urban political economy. What role do material elements (concrete, plexiglass, signs, maps) play in the practices that propel urban dynamics: that justify, for example, the rebuilding of some...
- Published
- 2014