Community politics in urban regeneration under authoritarian entrepreneurial governance

This article explores the authoritarian entrepreneurial approach to urban governance and its transformative influence on community dynamics in Istanbul’s Fikirtepe Urban Regeneration Project. As a large-scale urban redevelopment initiative, Fikirtepe has become a contested ground of competing interests, where strict regulations coexist with flexible planning practices, forming a complex governance model that turns community actors into quasi-developers. We argue that a governance framework characterised by a fusion of authoritarian and entrepreneurial traits, through mechanisms like the Disaster Law No. 6306 and the 2/3 majority rule, embeds profit-seeking behaviours within regulatory practices and state–market alliances, sidelining local authorities, marginalising stakeholders and intensifying conflicts. Unlike typical capitalist frameworks, this model compels both developers and residents to adopt opportunistic, profit-driven strategies, a phenomenon termed ‘entrepreneurial citizenship’. This redefines the roles of urban actors and disrupts traditional planning processes. In connection with this convergence of governance extremes, negotiation-orientated approaches to planning emerge, where all stakeholders, from residents to property developers to policy networks, engage in competitive adaptation. By illustrating the distinctive challenges unique to Fikirtepe, we conclude by evidencing an imperative trend in urban governance, subject to both progressively authoritarian and entrepreneurial turns, and issue an urgent call to examine its broader implications for urban studies.