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Description
Introduction
This study positions everyday uncertainty not merely as an unintended byproduct of urban fragility or abstract risk, but as a deliberate management strategy produced and distributed through contemporary planning decisions. In cities like Istanbul, where urban land values are acutely high, spatial restructuring serves global economic integration and capital accumulation, exposing a fault line running through urban citizenship (Ünsal, 2014; Yalçıntan & Çavuşoğlu, 2013). While citizenship is conventionally defined as an abstract, universal set of rights granted to all members of a national community (Marshall, 1963), in daily practice, citizenship diverges from a static legal status and manifests as a lived, spatialized, and graduated sovereignty regime that unevenly distributes uncertainties, risks, and the capacity to act among different urban groups (Holston, 2008; Ong, 2000).
Urban planning decisions, underpinned by dominant political and market discourses, define specific spaces and residents as "legitimate" citizens, while systematically framing Romani communities in Istanbul as problematic, disorderly, or "out of place." Rather than approaching marginality solely through physical expulsion, this research investigates how multi-dimensional thresholds across physical, legal, and symbolic layers prioritize, defer, or erase particular needs and demands. In doing so, it exposes the everyday uncertainties and structural constraints imposed on residents' spatial agency.
Theoretical Framework
Marginalization is often framed as an outcome of individual choices, 'inappropriateness,' or personal failures. However, Foucault’s (1990) biopolitical power analysis and Bourdieu’s conceptualization of symbolic violence show that it is, in fact, a domain of domination. This domain is sustained through hegemonic classification practices that dictate who is recognized as 'normal,' 'legitimate,' and a 'citizen'. Even when possessing formal legal status, the denial of recognition as an "accepted citizen" to certain groups in urban life demonstrates that citizenship is a relational process differentiated through spatial relations rather than a singular legal right (Isin, 2008).
In the right to the city and citizenship literature, it is also discussed that existing inequalities can contribute to the emergence of new forms of marginalization in certain cases (Kosnick, 2015; Cohen & Margalit, 2015). This situation requires thinking of marginalization not as a fixed "center–periphery" dichotomy, but as a process continuously reshaped within the relationships different groups establish with one another and with power structures. In this relational process, borders become tools that determine who will be positioned inside/outside, normal/marginal, rather than mere spatial lines separating groups. States both utilize the existence of borders to produce citizens and marginals identified with these identities, and they convert borders into performative processes spreading across society through daily practices, discourse, and institutional arrangements (Balibar, 2002; Newman, 2006; Paasi, 2009).
Linguistic and discursive practices in social life affect how social inequalities are perceived and legitimized by coding Romani communities as "accepted," "inappropriate," or "risky". Bauman's (2007) account of how the search for order and security produces "strangers", together with Wacquant's (2007) concept of territorial stigma, shows that these boundaries are produced not only through social perception but through the stigmatization of specific places and the groups who inhabit them. These physical (ghetto, camp, city), legal (status, citizenship), and symbolic (‘legitimate citizen’ norms) thresholds are not independent of the economic and political restructuring of urban space. In neoliberal urbanism, which configures cities around capital accumulation (Harvey, 2012; Smith, 2002), Romani neighborhoods are devalued as incompatible with capital accumulation, making them primary targets of urban transformation. Planning practices, beyond serving as technical tools in this process, function as institutional power mechanisms that determine which usage forms and communities the city accepts as legitimate (Lees, 2008).
Within this framework, the research approaches physical, legal, and symbolic thresholds as relational mechanisms that mutually reinforce one another. Thus, the marginalization of Romani neighborhoods is evaluated alongside spatial stigmatization, urban rent dynamics, legal regulations, planning decisions, and "accepted citizen" norms. In this way, this approach shows how planning interventions unevenly distribute urban uncertainties among different groups.
Methods
To rigorously demonstrate how this uncertainty regime operates, this study employs Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) combined with historiographical readings, archival research, and qualitative field investigations centered on historically core and transforming Romani settlements in Istanbul (e.g., Sulukule, Kuştepe, Tarlabaşı, and Sarıgöl). Rather than evaluating neighborhoods as static spatial containers, the research analyzes how discourses and policy mechanisms construct Romani spaces as a collective legal, spatial, and symbolic category.
To build a robust empirical foundation, the study analyzed press and media archives spanning 1970 to 2025 alongside spatial legal regulations, municipal council decisions, and urban transformation project documents. These administrative, legal, and media sources were systematically triangulated with oral history narratives from residents, local representatives, and activists. CDA is applied to trace how discursive labels as "security threat," "blighted area," "inappropriate housing" in public policy and news texts align with municipal planning decisions to legitimize dispossession and spatial segregation over a 55-year timeline.
Results
Empirical findings demonstrate how urban marginalization and exclusion are constructed across legal, symbolic, and physical thresholds. At the legal threshold, although Romani residents hold formal citizenship, systemic mechanisms confine them to a status characterized by visible yet restricted rights, institutionalizing social and spatial exclusion. Over time, legal and administrative decisions construct an enduring network of disenfranchisement and dispossession.
At the symbolic threshold, Romani identity and settlements are criminalized through public safety rhetoric, official policy documents, and media representations that label communities as "threats," "disorderly," or "security risks”. This territorial stigma legitimizes spatial interventions by framing neighborhoods as blighted areas requiring "cleansing". At the physical threshold, even without visible physical walls, Romani neighborhoods are symbolically stigmatized and starved of public infrastructure, forming abandoned, isolated pockets within the urban landscape. Combined with unequal capital allocation in high-value urban areas, urban renewal policies repeatedly push Romani residents from central locations to urban peripheries.
The three distinct dimensions of thresholds examined in this research function in practice as a dialectical mechanism of domination that continuously reinforce, reproduce, and entrench one another in space. "Crime hub," "incompatibility," and "deprived area" discourses produced through media and institutional texts at the symbolic threshold combine with the legal framework to legitimize projects, dispossession, and displacement decisions executed under the rationale of "public order, security, and preservation of urban vision" in the eyes of the public. Transformation, displacement, and infrastructural neglect practices applied at the physical level condemn Romani neighborhoods to isolation and deprivation on the city peripheries, ensuring that the symbolic stigma created in language is fixed and reproduced as a concrete, physical reality in space. Thus, legal vulnerability facilitates symbolic criminalization, symbolic stigmatization legitimizes urban cleansing, and invisible boundaries in physical space freeze symbolic labels on the spatial plane.
These invisible spatial thresholds are produced and continuously reproduced through concrete planning tools such as planning decisions, rent-oriented mega projects like urban renewal projects, and resettlement applications shaped by urban policies. Indeed, the everyday experience of Romani residents is shaped within a fragile liminal status produced by these thresholds; this situation reveals that urban citizenship is not a fixed legal status, but a differentiated regime of legitimacy continuously reconfigured through spatial planning and power dynamics.
Discussion and Conclusion
The pattern followed by Romani neighborhoods demonstrates that urban citizenship cannot be defined solely through a legal status. Findings reveal that marginalization is produced not merely through the banishment of specific groups outside urban space, but also by differentiating the conditions of remaining in the city, moving, attaining visibility, and accessing rights. In addition, carry a broader implication for planning theory and practice: far from being a value-neutral tool for managing risk, urban planning functions as a mechanism of power that can itself produce inequality. Therefore, this everyday uncertainty is not an abstract risk in the context of Romani neighborhoods, but a concrete and ongoing living condition produced through the cumulative and mutually reinforcing impact of legal regulations, institutional/media discourse, and planning decisions. The cost of this uncertainty is not distributed equally; while the capacity of Romani communities to remain in the city, move, and seek their rights is systematically constrained, the decisions producing this constraint are mostly presented under legitimate and neutral-seeming rationales such as "public order" and "security," eroding residents' trust in planning institutions. In the face of ongoing urban uncertainties, the study argues that marginalization is not merely a process of exclusion and domination, but one where residents continuously stretch boundaries through everyday spatial interventions and commoning practices, generating new spaces of solidarity, resistance, and existence.
The study, which examines the relationship between urban citizenship and marginalization through the co-production of physical, legal, and symbolic thresholds, argues that inequality in planning processes should be evaluated through spatial consequences and the restriction of individuals' capacity for urban action and decision-making. This threshold-based approach, offers an analytical lens for understanding how marginalization is experienced in different forms and intensities across different communities. In this direction, it must be interrogated whose needs, knowledge, and demands planning decisions accept as legitimate, and whose experiences they exclude from decision-making processes through legitimized rationales. Consequently, the study argues that planning should be addressed not merely as a tool that reduces uncertainty, but as a domain of power capable of generating uncertainty, unequal costs, and restricted capacity to act for specific communities. Moving from the example of Romani neighborhoods, this framework paves the way for a broader critical discussion regarding how citizenship and marginalization are established through spatial thresholds in urban planning processes.
Keywords
Urban citizenship, urban thresholds, everyday uncertainty, Romani neighborhoods, marginalization
References
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