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Abstract
Why do residents of some cities enjoy a wider range of legal recognized rights concerning urban space and governance than others? What conditions and processes explain change and continuity in what I call urban citizenship regimes? In search of answers to these questions, this dissertation asks: what explains the variation in the urban citizenship regimes of Istanbul and Buenos Aires with respect to the legal rights urban squatters have pertaining to land and housing? Why did an incipient institutional change towards a social urban citizenship regime occur in Buenos Aires in the last two decades, while the Turkish state was able to maintain a propertied citizenship regime in Istanbul in spite of waves of rural migrants that failed to access shelter and urban space through formal land and housing markets?
Grounded in a comparative-historical analysis, the overarching argument of this dissertation is that the diverging patterns in the governmental decision to enforce or make exceptions to property and planning laws in state strategy towards the informal settlers explain the diverging paths of urban citizenship regimes. Institutional enforcement and exceptions produce such varying outcomes by shaping the incentives of societal actors to carry out mobilizations for urban rights that are alternative to individual property rights. Hence, the Turkish state’s routine use of de facto and de jure exceptions, measures and practices that suspend the normal functioning of law as a strategy of governing urbanization paradoxically reproduced the long-term institutional stability of a propertied citizenship regime by incorporating the urban squatters into the ambit of individual property rights. When the state began to revoke the earlier measures in pursuit of a new neoliberal urban redevelopment agenda after 2002, new urban rights mobilizations have blossomed in Istanbul as examined across four neighborhoods in this study. Yet the absence of political opportunities and the introduction of new exceptional measures have undermined the capacity of these mobilizations to generate institutional change in the urban citizenship regime. In Buenos Aires, on the other hand, repeated efforts to enforce property rights through slum eradication programs instigated urban rights mobilizations, which under the favorable political context of decentralization and stronger left-liberal elites, enshrined new legal rights. By addressing these questions and showing these arguments, this project contributes to the studies of democratization and urban citizenship in developing world megacities, institutional change and enforcement, and the interactions between contentious collective action and legal mobilization.
