Speaker
Description
Henri Lefebvre’s materialist-dialectical approach to capitalist production of space, taken together with his engagement with revolutionary praxis, offers a possibility of critical and radical intervention to planning theory and practice. While his vigorous analyses of the production of space find resonation in recent critical urban theory, the mainstream urbanism has been almost opaque to his contributions. For Lefebvre, the continuing renewal of capitalist relations hinges upon domination of space and production of space. Here, spatial planning undertakes a major role backed by the state-capital alliance. The locus of the radical praxis would be the dialectics between appropriation and domination of space, between use value and exchange value, between abstract space and social space. These are the dialectical contradictions to be resolved by attacking on capital.
In Turkey, the neoliberal state-capital alliance works in unbridled ways, against which the Gezi Park insurgence in May 2013 exemplifies a striking objection. As urban and non-urban spaces have been profoundly and unevenly reworked through neoliberal-entrepreneurial restructuring of the state and capital across the city, urban and non-urban spaces have been exposed to intensified and expanded expropriation and new enclosures. While capitalist relations penetrate into socio-spatial processes and exacerbate the deep-seated socio-spatial inequalities and crises across the globe, the mainstream planning practice resort to techno-scientism, pragmatism and ecological urbanism. Also, following the “communicative turn,” the whole terrain of planning theory is rewoven by post-positivism, post-modernism and post-structuralism. Of course, planning in Turkey poses no exception regarding the reign of these mainstream approaches. We offer an intervention to this by elaborating on Lefebvre’s three dimensional dialectics of the (social) production of space, focusing on how the Gezi Park (İstanbul) has been an historical issue of the socio-spatial contradictions of capital, state and society. We also examine and discuss the post-2013 transformatin in Gezi Park and the adjacent Taksim Square, and how everything could be different from what it is, again based on Lefebvre.
