Speaker
Description
Urban spatial interventions of central and local governments in Türkiye’s cities in the form of master plans, plan amendments and piecemeal profit-driven initiatives have increasingly become subject to lawsuits in the past few decades. The two institutional actors that are at the center of this process are the Chambers of City Planners and the Chambers of Architects, which are the leading professional bodies having officially recognized authority over controlling the practices in the fields of urban planning and architecture, respectively. The article focuses on the Chamber of City Planners that enacts this legal authority in two ways; firstly, through conducting a professional audit to control whether the urban plans and projects are in line with the principles of the profession and secondly, by filing lawsuits against the plans and projects which violate the basic principles of the profession, such as the protection of the public interest, plan unity and plan hierarchy. These lawsuits are highly influential in the practice of urban planning leading to its increasing exposure to judicial overview and decisions, excluding planners, elected officials and urban citizens. In this article, to define and explain this exposure, we use the term judicialization and judicialization of urban planning.
The concept of judicialization is originally used as judicialization of politics at the intersection of political science and legal studies. Accordingly, it is ‘the ever-accelerating reliance on courts and judicial means for addressing core moral predicaments, public policy questions, and political controversies’ (Hirschl, 2006). In this respect, judicialization refers to a process in which issues that cannot be resolved through the governmental and societal regulations become disputes and brought to the courts. It is also defined as legal and judicial mediations and arbitrations in urban social and political conflicts (Mehmood and Cousins, 2022). Judicialization is a relatively new concept in urban studies and planning and not received adequate research attention yet, despite its rising impact on the implementation of urban development policies and plans, particularly in the cities of the global South. Therefore, it needs further elaboration with national and local case studies and the article provides an analytical perspective in the case of Türkiye in that respect.
We argue in the article that, judicialization in policy areas related to urban development have dramatic consequences for today and the future of cities and urban democracy. We put forward original research evidence based on in-depth semi-structured interviews with the representatives of the Chamber of City Planners, Ankara Branch (hereafter the Chamber). In addition to that, we utilize Chamber’s activity reports where the lawsuits filed by the Chamber are presented. Building on the findings from interviews and reports, we first define the types of spatial interventions that have become subject to a lawsuit, the similarities and differences in between these types in terms of number, rationale, purpose and result. Secondly, building on a critical assessment of the research evidence, we focus on the consequences of the judicialization of urban politics and planning in Ankara. We argue that, judicialization of urban planning occurs owing to the democratic deficit in urban policy making, and that it results in a pseudo-democratization by containing urban conflicts into court rooms and thereby excluding actors and local communities outside of it. It also creates ambiguities in the production of urban space by causing long delays in the realization of plans having further social and spatial consequences. We conclude with a call for a future research agenda and a broader public discussion over the meaning and the consequences of judicialization of urban planning for planning itself, for urban space and urban democracy.
References
Hirscl, R (2006) The new constitution and the judicialization of pure politics worldwide. Fordham Law Review 75(2), pp. 721-753.
Mehmood, Asif and Cousins, Joshua J (2022) Judicialising urban political ecologies: post-politics and environmental governance in South Asia. Antipode 54(6), pp. 1944-1964.
| Keywords | judicialization of urban planning; pseudo-democracy; urban conflicts; exclusion |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | No |
