MOVEMENT TO COASTAL TOWNS IN TURKEY: Urban Rescaling, Local Deregulation and New Prospects for the Predatory Construction Sector

In Turkey, as in many Mediterranean countries, the Covid‐19 pandemic enhanced the mobility of the country's affluent classes to coastal towns. Many decided to settle there permanently, either by making their second homes their main residences, or by purchasing or renting new property. This has...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published inInternational journal of urban and regional research Vol. 48; no. 2; pp. 323 - 340
Main Authors Demirtaş‐Milz, Neslihan, Memişoğlu‐Gökbinar, Dilek, Aktaş, Derya, Ebe‐Güzgü, Pinar
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Chichester, UK John Wiley & Sons, Ltd 01.03.2024
Blackwell Publishing Ltd
Subjects
authoritarian neoliberalism
coastal towns
Construction industry
COVID-19
Demographics
Deregulation
Economic development
Environmental degradation
Governance
Housing
Local government
Mobility
mobility problems
Neoliberalism
Pandemics
predatory construction sector
Prices
Prospects
Radicalism
Renting
Rescaling
Scaling
Second homes
Socioeconomic status
Spatial ability
Towns
Turkey
Urban development
Urban growth
Urban policy
urban rescaling
Urban sprawl
Turkey
Online AccessGet full text

Cover

More Information
Summary:In Turkey, as in many Mediterranean countries, the Covid‐19 pandemic enhanced the mobility of the country's affluent classes to coastal towns. Many decided to settle there permanently, either by making their second homes their main residences, or by purchasing or renting new property. This has created severe social, infrastructural and environmental problems in these towns because of transformed demographics, a largely unregulated construction boom, increased renovation activities and an unprecedented rise in real‐estate and consumer‐goods prices. In this article we contextualize these problems in relation to the Justice and Development Party's neoliberal policies of urban governance and rescaling in the past 15 years. The government, having given the construction sector the main role in Turkey's economic development, subsequently granted it new spatial opportunities through the authoritarian and centralized allocation of urban and rural land. Coastal towns have been the target of unregulated urban growth and predatory construction in this process and have thus provided new spatial development prospects. Local governmental reform in 2012, which introduced radical urban rescaling and weakened district municipalities’ planning and regulation capacities, further intensified the process. These factors have had a severe impact on coastal towns and their middle‐income residents, who face new mobility pressures.
Bibliography:We wish to thank the anonymous IJURR reviewers for their constructive comments, which helped us improve the overall quality of this manuscript. We would also like to thank our master's students who work in local government and introduced us to our interviewees in Datça and Seferihisar municipalities. We are also grateful to our colleagues Mehmet Penbecioğlu and Nisa Akın for generously sharing their social connections in Datça with us. The field research that provided the data for this article was funded by University Research Fund no. 2022‐GAP‐İİBF‐0038.
ISSN:0309-1317
1468-2427
DOI:10.1111/1468-2427.13229