Contesting Time and Space in Istanbul: Differential Civic Activism in Urban Development

The paper explores the re-appropriation of urban space as a practice of collective contestation against established frames of time and space in urban policy making.  Crisis and uncertainty in the governing of urban form have showed the spillovers of a rational model of spatial organization, based on long term future prediction of city growth and supply-oriented urban policy making. Civic society and urban users have been generally regarded as customers or users of urban space, while participatory examples sometimes become choreographic practices of cooptation. We argue that contemporary urban policy making are too much framing urban agency as a ‘governmentally designed object’, through preconstituted notions of space and time despite few attempts to enable self-organization. These linear models of space and time are evident in consolidated policies of urban development, that compartmentalize collective action into rigid boundaries of intervention and programming timelines. The paper explores the features civic political activism as a practice of opposition against these space-time frames in urban policy making. It defines urban activism as the creation of ‘differential space-time frames’, driven by the objective to manipulate ‘time-space boundaries’ of urban intervention. These borders constitute the major coordinates of contested urban agendas. The paper discusses how practices of creative resistance are targeted at governmentally defined time-space borders and underline that emerging conflicts lead to specific problems, which we call of spatial disaggregation. Evidences will be provided from Istanbul city region. The recent wave of protest in Turkey have been linked to a restructuring of urban activism against authoritative governmental policies. Despite its broad social and economic implications, we will particularly focus on the practices of framing urban interventions in the city and on the conflict between the modern logics of governmental intervention and the emerging relational spaces of urban activisms.