Pathways of entrepreneurial urban governance Spatial dynamics and community politics in Istanbul's regeneration

What happens when urban governance adopts state-driven entrepreneurialism? Istanbul—a city metamorphosed into a canvas with its towering megaprojects—tells a profound tale of power, policy failures, and post-populist adaptations. Through the lens of Istanbul's transformation, the dissertation focuses on socio-spatial dynamics and community politics of entrepreneurial urban governance. While this governance model promises economic growth and innovation, this study reveals a fundamental tension: even as it generates new forms of social capital and community engagement, it simultaneously intensifies socio-spatial inequalities and marginalizes resistance and contestation, especially through state-led interventions.
Highlighting Istanbul’s large-scale regeneration as a case to understand the broader phenomena of non-Western entrepreneurial governance, this dissertation contributes more diverse perspectives to urban governance scholarship. The outcomes demonstrate how state-driven entrepreneurial strategies are not fixed in one mode but fluctuate depending on scenarios shaped by resistance, negotiations, or multi-level interactions among urban actors. These governance mechanisms move back and forth between contrasting approaches—from top-down planning to self-organization and to post-populist politics.
This dissertation argues that authoritarian entrepreneurial governance paradoxically creates conditions for local innovation and resistance. Local actors leverage state-designed tools and frameworks to challenge the system itself, either by re-politicizing depoliticized governance frameworks or by shaping community politics through market-driven imperatives. Urban residents display varieties of ‘entrepreneurial citizenship’, institutionalizing self-organization or adopting post-populist responses that imitate entrepreneurial practices of the state and property developers. This demonstrates how entrepreneurial governance, even in authoritarian contexts, can emerge as a platform for negotiated urban governance.