Waste and Metropolitan Governance as Vehicles of Eviscerating Urbanism: A Case from Ankara

ABSTRACT

The scholarship on waste governance tends to consider it a standalone policy area. This article seeks to enrich this scholarship by attending to relationships between waste governance, the transformation of waste spaces, and capitalist urban planning and development practices. I draw on the notion of eviscerating urbanization to argue that metropolitan and waste governance act as mechanisms to capture value from waste and land simultaneously. I present original research from Ankara, Turkey, and I narrate the evolving relationship between the waste disposal system and urban transformation in the early 2000s. The findings reveal the strategic role and agency of metropolitan governance in the processes of value production.

KEYWORDS:

• Urban political ecology
• waste
• urban planning
• metropolitan governance
• eviscerating urbanism

Acknowledgements

This research was partly carried out during my doctoral studies on “The Metabolic Urbanization of Waste in Ankara: A Governance Perspective” (Tuçaltan 2017), with financial support from the German Research Foundation (DFG) under the training group “Topology of Technology” (GRK1343), at Darmstadt University of Technology, Germany, and from the Department of Human Geography and Planning at Utrecht University. I would like to thank Professors Jochen Monstadt and Roger Keil for their kind support and comments throughout the research.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

2 Gecekondu means “built over night.” It refers to housing quickly built by newcomers to the peripheries of Turkey’s urban settings and remaining in place due to the lack of public response to the housing need caused by rapid rural-to-urban migration.

3 Some of the interviewees wished to remain anonymous. These were central government officials and urban planners who are active in the public and private sectors. In line with their demands, I decided to keep all the interviewees’ identities anonymous to avoid any possible inter-actor conflicts that the findings of this research might cause.

4 İ. Melih Gökçek served as the mayor of Ankara from 1994 until 2018 by winning four consecutive elections. A determining figure in Ankara’s urban development patterns, his administration was ended by order of the national government in 2018.

5 The Sincan–Çadırtepe waste storage and disposal facility is located 55 km west of the city center and has been active since 2009.