This paper contributes to the accounts of territorial stigmatisation by examining the state role in it in the case of Turkey, a country that suffers from growing state power. The existing debates are mainly restricted to its function as an economic strategy paving the way for capital accumulation through devaluing working-class people and places. Drawing on textual analysis of political speeches, local newsletters and mainstream national newspapers and fieldwork material that include interviews and observations in Dikmen Valley where some squatter communities mobilised against the state-imposed urban transformation project, I demonstrate that state conceptualisation of "problem people" targets the "insurgent" rather than the "unprofitable" groups. Stigma in urban settings functions in inciting the desire to meet the patterns deemed appropriate by the state, rather than the market. Moving from that, I argue that stigma is used as a state-led political strategy, which is integral to the growing authoritarianism in Turkey.

The Covid19 pandemic has unveiled the cruciality of cities for people, not for profit. Many urban scholars and activists have long addressed the social costs driven by profitable redevelopment of urban space in an increasingly top-down manner, the most significant of which was the mass displacement of low-income and socially marginalized people. Housing activism mobilized in areas targeted for redevelopment received broad attention as struggles against neoliberalism. Nevertheless, this focus on the market-led processes and attendant sufferings may overlook state attempts at drawing people into urban redevelopment and people’s negotiations with that, as well as their contestations over exclusion. Focusing on the evolution of Dikmen Valley’s right to shelter struggle within the increasingly authoritarian regime in Turkey, this update contributes to the rethinking of rights-based struggles over housing by reframing state-citizen relations, as well as challenging the priorities of the market.

This article explores the role of contemporary urban redevelopment in invoking a renegotiation of citizenship. There has been a wide acknowledgement that neoliberalism is a political project involving transformations in the state–market–citizen relations. However, the scholarly emphasis on market-led principles in remaking places and people falls short of acknowledging political aspirations and struggles that intrude in processes of inclusion and exclusion at the city scale. Focussing on the case of Turkey, where neoliberal urban policies and practices have been linked to the central government’s political ambitions, the article illustrates that urban redevelopment projects help the state actors realign citizenship with the authoritarian regime. A focus on the state-led urban interventions from the perspective of bordering the ‘good citizen’ suggests that neoliberal urban redevelopment projects are mobilised by the state to promote official citizenship agendas. Drawing on in-depth interviews, photos and observations from 9-month fieldwork in Dikmen Valley (Ankara), this article ethnographically documents how the ideals of the ‘good citizen’ in an authoritarian context differ from the market-led promotion of consumerist, aspirational and active citizens.

Cultural anthropologist Anton Blok has written a book on radical innovators in science and the arts that will be of interest to people in the field of historical comparative social science and the sociology of innovation and inequality. Readers will find a treatise and

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