Education policy in an era of neoliberal urbanisation: a case study of Istanbul’s school relocations

Abstract

This article examines an effort to spatially re-organise urban public schools in the largest city in Turkey. Recently, the Turkish government has made an effort to relocate inner-city public schools in Istanbul to less desirable parts of the city. Analysing how education policy in the country is tied to wider political mechanisms and considering the results of the studies carried out in various parts of the world, this article argues that the interaction between education and urban life in Turkey displays unique characteristics in terms of the populations implicated in the policy change and the spaces transformed as a result. Two salient characteristics are the involvement of the secular middle class and the perception by them that school relocations entail de-secularisation of the city and the education system. The article argues that these characteristics should be conceptualised in the context of particular conjunctures of forces driven by different contradictions.

Keywords:

• Urban education
• urban transformation
• neoliberalisation
• education policy
• secularism
• middle class

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Cetin Eren and Roger Dale for their valuable feedback on an earlier draft of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. According to National Education Basic Act No. 1739, public school buildings are planned and built by the MoNE. For this reason they are considered public good. This makes it harder for policy-makers to legitimise selling the schools, although it has been legalised recently.

2. The MHA is the governmental agency responsible for the provisioning of public housing. It was originally established in 1984 to provide affordable housing and manage rapid urbanisation (Kuyucu and Unsal 2010), but was granted vast powers by the Justice and Development Party (JDP) (2003–2014) government and became a powerful actor in transferring public land to private institutions. The MHA plays a central role in the implementation of urban transformation projects all over Turkey.

3. While discussing Turkish secularism, we draw on the literature which argues that although they can be used interchangeably in some limited senses, secularism and laicism as concepts have different etymologies, institutional backgrounds and theoretical implications (see Davison 2003; Parla and Davison 2008). The founders of the Turkish Republic named the relationship between the state and Islam as ‘laiklik’, borrowing the French term ‘laicisme’, which was a correct choice. Despite its policies towards delegitimising religion and promoting non-religious ways of living, the Turkish state instrumentalised religion, rather than removing it, in order to institutionalise a new Turkish nationalism. In this article, we use the term ‘laicisme’ and its derivatives while referring to the state, but we use the term ‘secular’ and its derivatives while referring to people since they were marked by their differences, rather than being monolithic, in terms of their ideas on religion and what its role in regulating worldly matters should be.

4. Imam means ‘prayer leader’ in Turkish, while hatip means ‘preacher’.