Reconstruction As Enclosure: The Politics of Property in the Post-Conflict City of Di̇Yarbakir
Diyarbakır, as the heartland of Turkey’s Kurdish-populated southeastern region, has long witnessed violence, the most recent of which was months-long clashes between Turkish security forces and Kurdish armed militias. In the course of “urbicide”, the six neighborhoods that make up the eastern side of Suriçi witnessed total destruction, displacement and dispossession. Within a period of six years, under the aegis of overtly-centralized state bureaucracy, the ruined historic center has been planned, re-zoned and reconstructed in a way that has reinforced the state’s capacity to master territory on the basis of proprietary logic. This has meant to dissipate centrifugal forces of local inhabitants who had cultivated place-based commons, which range from material resources such as land and housing to immaterial attributes like experience, knowledge and skills.
To address material and imaginative aspects of this contestation over the city, I bridge scholarship on (post-)conflict cities, mostly of the Global South, with critical property studies. Accordingly, I conceptualize enclosure not merely as the extinction of material resources, but also as a generative governmental apparatus pivotal in territorializing the state in cities subject to ruination and devastation.
Building on this approach and drawing on my long-standing research on the changing forms of spatial politics in Diyarbakır since the early 2010s, this paper ultimately argues that the property-centered logics and imaginaries mobilized throughout the reconstruction of Suriçi have un-made Suriçi as a place by dissolving Suriçi dwellers’ commons and collective urban experience produced over generations.