State-led Urban Regeneration in Istanbul: Power Struggles between Interest Groups and Poor Communities

From the early 2000s, urban policy-makers in Turkey have promoted ‘urban regeneration’ as the main tool to transform low-income housing areas, along with former industrial estates, disused port facilities and so on, into modern living, working, shopping and entertainment areas. The intention has been to boost land and property values by transforming both the physical appearance and the sociocultural and class composition of selected sites. But while the impact, the rationale and the outcomes of urban regeneration in Turkey are broadly similar to those reported in the substantial global literature on ‘urban regeneration’, a case-study approach shows that a number of crucial context-specific factors have shaped the assumption and responses of key players and collective actors. These in turn have determined how ‘regeneration policies’ are finally translated into practice. This article illustrates this point by describing a particular recent case study in Istanbul: the Tozkoparan Regeneration Project.