Urban transformation in Istanbul and Budapest: Neoliberalgovernmentality in the EU's semi-periphery and its limits
Emel Akçalı a, *, Umut Korkut b
a Central European University, Department of International Relations and European Studies, Hungaryb Glasgow Caledonian University, Glasgow School for Business and Society, UK
a r t i c l e i n f o
Article history:Available online
Keywords:Public spaceGentrificationNeoliberal governmentalityNeo-authoritarianismRight to the city
* Corresponding author. Central European Univertional Relations and European Studies, Nador Utca, 9Tel.: þ36 1 327 32 43.
By discussing the variety and variability of urban neoliberal governmentality and its limits in the semi-periphery of the advanced capitalist world, the article aims to explore the embeddedness of neoliber-alism at the dawn of the new millennium. Cities that are increasingly becoming parts of the globaleconomy, despite being on the periphery of advanced capitalism, host a myriad of diverse forms ofneoliberal governmentality in terms of spatial change. Although responding with enthusiasm to theincreasing mobility of capital and the internationalization of investments through gentrification plans,the current transformative efforts of Istanbul and Budapest under two conservative governments indi-cate, for instance, the re-invention of authoritarianism so that these cities serve the purposes of theirnational leaders. This development signals a hybrid form of governmentality that combines neoliber-alism with illiberal logics and manifests similar processes in different locations despite disparities inscale, local needs and characteristics. The article further argues that since such urban transformationstake place within the neo-conservative leaders' battles to acquire cultural and social capital, they createpotential to make both metropolises the new rebel cities of Europe, albeit with divergent levels ofresistance.
The current politics in Turkey and Hungary with popular con-servative leaders and their converging interpretations of socialpolitics increasingly portray these countries as neo-authoritarianstates in Europe's semi-periphery, where mediating activitieslinking core and peripheral areas take place while institutionalfeatures remain intermediate in form and oscillate between thosefound in adjacent core and peripheral areas (Chase-Dunn & Dall,1997: 78e9). Both Erdo�gan of Turkey and Orb�an of Hungaryvigorously support conservative social engineering as well as urbanplanning schemes that not only serve the political and socio-economic interests of their supporters, but also associate Istanbuland Budapest with more traditionalist and conservative themes.Istanbul and Budapest are being planned increasingly to mirror the
sity, Department of Interna-, H-1051 Budapest, Hungary.
‘glorious past’ e the monarchies that preceded the respective re-publics in both countries while Erdo�gan and Orb�an build their ur-ban politics on neoliberal socio-political tendencies particularlyregarding regeneration. Both metropolises hence, turn into arenasof ideological battles between secularism and religious conserva-tism, nationalism and cosmopolitanism, and welfare and neoliberalpolitics in highly polarized Turkish and Hungarian societies. AsTurkey's and Hungary's conservative leaders strive to impose theircredentials upon the cultural capital of city-dwellers, ideologicalconflicts over the reorganization of cities remain crucial.
The Turkish protests in June 2013 over the government's plansfor the destruction of Gezi Parkı e a public space with a park at theheart of Istanbul e under the pretext of redesigning TaksimMeydanı (Square) illustrated the scale of these conflicts. Theremoval of trees and certain monuments from an equally crucialpublic space for Budapest, i.e. Kossuth T�er (Square) e a monu-mental square in front of the Hungarian Parliament e was alsocontroversial and even required the involvement of theombudsman in setting the terms for the reorganization of thesquare (Szalai, 2012). Subsequently, the Hungarian government'sdecision to erect a monument in Szabads�ag T�er to commemorate
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Nazi Germany's ‘occupation’ of Hungary in 1944 also promptedhuge controversy and protests with its depiction of victim andaggressor, alleged attempts to rewrite history, and hasty designwithout public consultation (M�elyi, 2014). These public squares inIstanbul and Budapest have been important arenas for theexpression of political, social and sexual identities in Turkey andHungary. Throughout the years, these spaces have seen workers'demonstrations, popular uprisings against authoritarianism,clashes between the security forces and opponents of variousgovernments, gay prides, expressions of extremist ideas, and mostrecently occupations by activists in response to various unpopularpolicies of the incumbent governments. What unified them all isthat both Taksim and Kossuth Squares are central venues fordenouncing dominant governments and ideologies. However, mostrecently, the domineering governments of Turkey and Hungaryhave been using these symbolic urban spaces to express their ownideological orientations, such as celebrations of electoral victory inHungary and mass dinners during Ramadan in Turkey, excludingthose that deviate from their ideologies from public spaces.
Scholars have argued that neoliberal urban governance, formedby the experience of advanced capitalist countries, has beenespoused by cities at the periphery or semi-periphery of advancedcapitalism without taking account of local needs and conditions(B€or€ocz, 1992; Kok-Tasan, 2004: 23; also see Wei & Yang, 1998; onTaipei and Yucekus & Banerjee, 1998, on Beijing). Yet, cities that areincreasingly becoming parts of the global economy host a myriad ofdiverse forms of neoliberal governmentality in terms of spatialchange (Kok-Tasan, 2004). In the advanced capitalist Western so-cieties of today, it is rare to find urban transformation policies thatreflect the contemporary revisionist perspectives of the Imperialpast as we see in Turkey and Hungary. Certainly, no similar casescan be found in the literature on urban governmentality in the coreEU countries. In Italy, for example, it was Mussolini, not Berlusconior any other charismatic politician, who reshaped large urbanlandscapes with massive reference to the Roman Empire. Despiteshowing enthusiasm to respond to an increasing mobility of capitaland the internationalization of investments through gentrificationplans, the current transformative efforts of Istanbul and Budapestunder the two conservative governments indicate for instance there-invention of authoritarianism, i.e., neo-authoritarianism, whichusurps cities to glorify their national leaders. Meanwhile, theneoliberal aspect of this transformation makes urban spacescomfortable merely for those publics that identify with Erdo�gan'sand Orb�an's socio-economic politics and ideological tenets.
Our case selection presents us therefore with two contexts inwhich mature and maturing types of neoliberal governmentalityprioritize the governance of urban landscapes and adopt urbantransformation as a technique for consolidating neo-authoritarianism. We highlight that the AKP has been in govern-ment for 12 years and has aggressively embedded neoliberalism inneo-authoritarianism, whereas Orb�an's Fidesz started its secondterm in government only in 2014, renewing the two-thirds parlia-mentary majority that it initially gained in 2010. The current suigeneris economic system of Fidesz is defensive, given its aspirationsto bolster the national bourgeoisie as a reaction to allegedlyexploitative international capital, and more hybrid in characterwith its peculiar balance of �etatism and acute welfare cuts (Korkut,2012; Voszka, 2014). Similar to variations in neoliberal mechanismsand the level of maturation in governmentality, the reactions toTurkish and Hungarian variants of neo-authoritarianism thatemanate from the activists' right-to-the-city claims also diverge. Aswe depict below, the Turkish case presents an aggressive, moremilitant subculture that can organize itself swiftly to protest for amyriad of causes insomuch as they relate to rights and freedomsdefined by the opponents' respective claims to city. The Hungarian
case illustrates a more cautious reaction with an ad hoc character.Hence, while the reactionaries are alert and able to resist in bothcontexts, their reaction varies due to the diverging stance andmaturity of neoliberal governmentality in converging forms of neo-authoritarianism in Turkey and Hungary.
Through an in-depth analysis of these two cases in the EU'ssemi-periphery based on a systematic examination of printed andsocial media since the end of 2012, site visits, and drawing on socio-cultural expertise supported by diverse linguistic skills and anassessment of shadow comparisons with cities of similar socio-economic composition, this article offers a critical dissection ofsimilarities and differences between two semi-peripheral urbantransformation dynamics. By discussing the variety and variabilityof urban neoliberal governmentality and its limits taking place atthe semi-periphery of the advanced capitalist world, the articleaims to explore the embeddedness of neoliberalism at the dawn ofthe millennium and strives to create a more situated multi-levelcomparative study of what Neil Brenner and Nick Theodore called‘actually existing neoliberalism’ (Brenner & Theodore, 2002; seealso Brenner, Peck, & Theodore, 2010). Rather than adopting uni-form techniques of neoliberal governmentality, cities at the pe-riphery of advanced capitalism produce deviation in urbantransformation based on their local conditions and characteristics.Moreover, with political leaders pursuing authoritarian practices,urban transformations can manifest similar processes in twodistinct cities despite differences in their scale, local needs andcharacteristics. When transformations occur alongside the respec-tive neo-conservative leaders' relentless battles to acquire thecultural and social capital of cities, metropolises turn into rebelcities within Europe. Before depicting the details of this process, wefirst qualify the recent evolution of Hungarian and Turkishconservatism, as embodied by Erdo�gan and Orb�an.
Brothers in arms: AKP and Fidesz in the EU's semi-periphery
There is much in common between the Justice and Develop-ment Party (AKP) in Turkey and Fidesz (the Hungarian Civic Union)in Hungary, not only with respect to their positions on socio-political conservatism and the styles of their leaders, but also intheir continuous claims to define and occupy the central pillar ofstrength in Turkish and Hungarian politics. Despite emphasizingtwo different religious traditions, i.e. Christianity and Islam, Fideszand the AKP represent the engagement of religion with politics.Both Fidesz and the AKP are self-defined ‘conservative democrats’and have a striking historical trajectory that involves a substantialchange of attitude towards social politics. On the one hand, Fideszstarted as a liberal, pro-Europeanmovement and then turned into aChristian-nationalist party that is also EU-pragmatic (Korkut, 2012).On the other hand, the founding members of the AKP, once avidEurophobes, have managed to turn their movement into an EU-pragmatic one, and they have increasingly appended their conser-vative Islamist politics to the course of liberalization that theystrove for in Turkey to gain EU membership.
The 1995 founding manifesto of Fidesz provides clues with re-gard to the right-wing conservatism of the party and its leadership.This manifesto declared that its leaders were ‘establishing a Union[to] strengthen the weakening fabric of the nation by supportingfamilies, and respecting women, with the help of the Churches’.Furthermore, to conclude its transformation from a liberal to aconservative political party, Fidesz entered into an alliance with theChristian Democrat KDNP and became a member of the EuropeanPeople's Party (EPP) in November 2000, terminating its member-ship of the Liberal International. Its transformation to a conserva-tive political force was rewarded, as Orb�an won his first electoralvictory against the left-liberal coalition in 1998 and served as Prime
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Minister until 2002. Fidesz's subsequent electoral victories againstthe left-liberal bloc, starting with the local election in Autumn2006, assisted Orb�an to re-tailor himself into a leader ready toprotect the interests of his country vis-�a-vis European and globalcapital as well as those of his domestic collaborators, allegedly theleft-liberal elite. The global economic crisis in 2008, the followingpublic insecurity, and the failure of left-liberal governments toalleviate the effects of this crisis brought Fidesz to government in2010. Since 2010, the fight against national debt has underlinedOrb�an's unique unorthodox economic policies to the extent ofassociating it with a lack of moral standards and non-Hungarianlifestyles (Korkut, 2012). A conservative reconceptualization ofdemocracy and public policy accompanied this economic battle,turning the country into a ‘guided democracy’ (see S�ark€ozy, 2013,among others) with curtailed judicial and decreasing legislativecontrol of the executive and increasing control of Fidesz over publiclife. Following the 2014 parliamentary election in Hungary, whichgave another two-thirds parliamentary majority to the Fidesz-KDNP alliance, Viktor Orb�an described himself as the leader of‘the most unified nation’ in Europe. Orb�an subsequently promisedto institutionalize an illiberal state in Hungary so that the countrycould engineer a post-2008 crisis environment where ‘anythingbecame possible’, while alluding to the success of illiberal andperhaps non-democratic countries such as Singapore, China, India,Russia and Turkey as stars in terms of international economicperformance. For Hungary to prosper in the race for globalcompetitiveness, Orb�an believes that it must break away from thedogmas and ideologies of Western Europe such as liberalism.
In Turkey, at the outset, rather than taking religion as a referencepoint, the AKP's higher echelons preferred conservatism. Forexample, the AKP's leadership refused to be identified as a religiousparty. From its inception, this new formation was described as amanifestation of 'conservative democracy,' expressing dislike forlabels such as ‘Muslim democrats’. Even when controversial issuesarose, such as the headscarf ban in institutions of higher educationjust prior to the 2002 elections, Erdo�gan declared that the ‘head-scarf issue was not a priority’ for the AKP. In the course of Europeanintegration, the AKP continued with its conservative democraticideology emphasizing secularism, social peace, social justice, thepreservation of moral values and norms, pluralism, democracy, freemarket economy, civil society and good governance (Korkut &Yanik, 2009).
At its inception, the AKP launched an initiative to raise toleranceand respect for the freedom of religion and conscience, and for theprotection of religious rights such as the right to practice religion inpublic and private spaces. Whether the AKP's discourse on con-servative democracy and Islamic liberalism achieved a trans-formation to a more tolerant society with respect to the recognitionof religious freedom and rights is not certain. However, it is clearthat the AKP government made profound attempts to force thestate and society to recognize cultural and religious differences(Kaya & Harmanyeri, 2010: 15e16). Nevertheless, the current toneof political discourse in Turkey regarding abortion, populationstagnation, education reform and increasing the impact of religionin a polity that remains only nominally secular in character in-dicates that the AKP's previous attempts were pragmatic toolsconsolidating its rule without triggering dissent. The AKP continuesits hegemony in Turkish politics. It has been able to secure a single-party government while increasing its votes since 2002, and it re-mains fully committed to advancing its religiously conservativeagenda alongside a neoliberal program (Karaman, 2013a: 3412). Itis thus unlikely that the transforming urban landscape could haveeluded the attention of such hegemonic consolidation.
We can hence surmise that the AKP and Fidesz are successfulpolitical machineries that have thrived on the continuous appeal of
conservative values to Hungarian and Turkish populations vis-�a-visthe inevitably cosmopolitan aspects of transformation that thesestates have experienced since the end of the 20th century. It hasbeen argued that semi-peripheral polities are likely to (trans)formthe logics of social reproduction by implementing such organiza-tional and ideological practices to enable their own upwardmobility towards the core (Chase-Dunn, 2005). Yet, in both cases,Europeanization, European integration and globalization still bringforward cosmopolitanism, though to different degrees. How thendoes the urban landscape serve as the expression of conservativedemocrat ideologies vis-�a-vis cosmopolitanism in the sameenvironment?
Cities as the ‘privileged instruments’ of neoliberalgovernmentality
Neoliberalism is argued to be ‘a chaotic concept’ (Jessop, 2013:65) due to its polyvalent character. As it triggered resistance at aglobal level, ‘Third Way’ politics supplemented and diversifiedneoliberalism as a meta-project through policies, networks andpubliceprivate partnerships, extending neoliberalism to servicesfacilitating non-speculative capital flows and deriving market so-lutions to environmental and energy-related challenges (Bohle &Greskovits, 2012; Jessop, 2013: 72). Neoliberalism came to becharacterized therefore ‘as a hybrid form of governmentality or acontext-dependent regulatory practice’ (Brenner et al. 2010: 183).Brenner and Theodore (2002) have already emphasized ‘thecontextual embeddedness of neoliberal restructuring projects in-sofar as they have been produced within national, regional, andlocal contexts defined by the legacies of inherited institutionalframeworks, policy regimes, regulatory practices, and politicalstruggles’ (2002: 349), and the current global economic crises havefurther challenged the standpoints ‘around the nature of neolib-eralism, its internal contradictions and its putative collapse’(Brenner et al. 2010: 183).
Rather than defining the essence of neoliberalism as a coherentproject, Foucault's work on neoliberal governmentality focused ontracing technologies of government (Weidner, 2010: 18; Koch, 2013)that aim to subject the agency and mold cultural, political, andsocio-economic understandings. According to this logic, neoliber-alism plays out from the interaction of power relations, is of dy-namic character, and is a political technology that is constantly ableto mutate into different forms (Foucault, 2008: 101e265,267e289). It is also an outcome not only of various forms ofknowledge, technologies and practices but also of asymmetricalstruggles, often between divergent actors and social forces(Weidner, 2010: 20). Urban contexts are indeed excellent settingswhere such political technologies can easily be observed. This issimply because cities, similar to businesses, have come to be seen asentrepreneurial and in ‘competitionwith each other for securing ordefending their share of the global market’ (Begg, 1999; D'Arcy &Keogh, 1999; cited in Karaman, 2012: 3). In order to resolve ‘thepolitical imperative to build with the capitalist demand forliquidity’, states have thereby launched mechanisms to generatemore flexible urban contexts that are responsive to the investmentcriteria of real-estate capital (Weber, 2002: 520). The reproductionof neoliberalism has then become dependent upon urban strategiesof governments (Brenner & Theodore, 2002: 345) and local politics(Massey, 2005). In his study on the slum eradication in Moroccancities, Bogaert demonstrated for example that the Moroccan po-litical commitments to fight poverty and uneven development havebecome part of a neoliberal political project (2013: 42). Therefore,cities have become key institutional arenas in and through whichneoliberal governmentality is insinuating whilst urban
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transformations reduce ‘lived spaces to commodities to beconsumed’ (Monterescu, 2009: 409).
In Istanbul, the areas of Kasimpasa, Kurtulus, Tarlabasi,Piyalepasa, Bomonti, Dolapdere and Hacihüsrev were all known asthe impoverished parts of the city. Some time ago, however, theybecame the most highly rated property-investment areas, drawingthe attention of domestic and foreign investment groups. InBomonti, Kurtulus and Tarlabasi especially, construction firms arebuilding residences for the newly emerging middle classes inTurkey, in conformity with Neil Smith's suggestion that the globalurban strategy serves the central and inner-city real estate marketsas burgeoning sectors of productive capital investment (2002: 446)(see Fig. 1). In Budapest, the transition to democracy in the 1990ssimilarly submerged in a series of profound urban transformationssuch as economic restructuring, sudden massive suburbanizationand privatization in a variety of domains including public space,public municipal services, homeownership and housing construc-tion (Bodn�ar & Molnar, 2010: 794), making the Hungarian capitalcity ‘central to the reproduction, mutation, and continual recon-stitution of neoliberalism’ (Brenner & Theodore, 2002: 375).‘Rehabilitation projects’ and privatizations in the aftermath of thetransition to capitalism in effect dislocated the Roma, the poor andunemployed from their homes, as the political and technical elite(such as the mayors and the architects) acquired the roles of ‘majormodernizers’ in the process of transforming Budapest. This trans-formation meant ‘cleansing’ those inner districts of Pest occupiedby Roma and the poor by demolishing or restructuring neighbor-hoods (see Fig. 2). At times, this meant changing the historiccharacter of whole districts. In fact, some inner-Pest districts turnedinto slums, while others, where the profiteers of the regime-change
Fig. 1. Gentrification of Tarlabası quarter in Istanb
lived, provided urban life standards at prosperous levels (Lad�anyi,2008: 148e153).
These examples show that urban transformation as a techniqueof governmentality particularly applies to the capital or the mostsignificant national cities, which are designed landscapes whosepatterns of roads and open spaces, buildings and monumentsinvariably inscribe foundation ‘myths, public memory, constitu-tional structures and heroic individuals into an iconography ofnationhood’ (Cosgrove 2008; Diener & Hagen, 2013: 264). Thepower-holding national elite seeks to sediment its myth in andthrough the cityscape, which is utilized as a platform to projectvisions for the future and to inscribe interpretations of the past(Palonen, 2013: 549). This seems like a contradiction, sinceneoliberal governmentality is considered to be in immanentconnection with the production of a neoliberal subjectivity, thepotential of which is realized in the ‘entrepreneurial individual’guided by the principles of a competitive marketplace and who hasassumed the expansion of these principles into all spheres of sociallife (Kurki, 2011: 353). This implies that the (neo)liberal govern-mental rationalities do not fit into ‘illiberal’ nationalistic settings.
Yet, it has been convincingly argued that ‘nationalism andneoliberalism should not be considered as conflicting ideologiesbut [instead as] a productive association’ (Hoffman, 2006; Müller,2011). For instance, nationalist projects can easily be reframed inentrepreneurial terms, and their associationwith neoliberalism cancreate an ‘entrepreneurial nationalism bound up with marketcompetition and calculative self-development as key attributes ofthe neoliberal subject’, while simultaneously displaying loyalty tothe state, as has happened in Russia (Müller, 2011). Similarly, ahybrid form of governmentality has emerged in late-socialist China
ul, photo taken by Emel Akcalı in July 2013.
Fig. 2. Gentrification in Ferencvaros, the 9th district of Budapest, photo taken by Marton Czirfusz in September 2006.
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that encompasses both ‘neoliberal techniques of governing (e.g.,marketization of labor, calculative choice, and fostering a self-enterprising ethos) in place of state planning, [and] Maoist-eranorms and values’ such as serving the nation (Hoffman, 2006:552). Such hybrid forms of neoliberal governmentality thatcombine neoliberalism with illiberal ideologies such as authori-tarianism, nationalism and even non-democracy both in theory andpractice can indeed enable us to explain the existence of amyriad ofdiverse reactions to neoliberal globalization in terms of spatialchange, especially at the peripheries and semi-peripheries ofadvanced capitalism. In order to elucidate these views, we nowscrutinize the cases of Istanbul and Budapest and theways inwhichthese two historically imperial capitals have become the ‘privilegedinstruments’ (Lefebvre, 1978: 262) of various forms of neoliberalgovernmentalities.
Istanbul, the global city
In the formative years (1923e45) of the Turkish Republic,despite a severe scarcity of human and material resources, modernTurkey's founding fathers ‘undertook ambitious infrastructuralprojects, including the construction of roads, railroads, bridges,institutional buildings, and the implementation of uniform urbanplans that were meant to transform the appearance of the country’(Akçalı, 2010a; Kezer, 2009: 508). These projects, which symbolizedmodernity and the birth of a new independent republic, broughtinto being ‘webs of uniform and centralized services to the newcitizens of Turkey, and thus enabled the state to assume a moreactive role in shaping the daily life of its citizens’ (Kezer, 2009: 508).Besides these urban projects, the modernist Kemalist ideology ofthe young republic instituted an industrial economy with an appealto the notion of progress rooted in European techno-scientificuniversalism (Atasoy, 2009: 242).
During the transition to a multi-party system in 1946, however,the new republic faced a number of challenges such as growing
political contestation between the Republican modernists and theconservative-right Democrat Party (DP) over which economic ori-entations to adopt and the place of religionwithin the state (Sargin,2004: 671). The DP government, which came to power in 1950 afterTurkey's first democratic election, opted for economic liberalism asthe sole successor of all economic formulations. This move,together with the further industrialization of the country, initiatedthe transformation of the demographic maps of Turkey in the faceof a massive population influx from the poorer rural regions intometropolitan areas (Sargin, 2004ibid.). The DP governmentfurthermore re-promoted the spatialization of Islamic identity thatthe early Republican fathers had not considered compatible withtheir modernist imagination of ‘New Turkey’ (Sargin, 2004ibid.).Due to such ideological struggles between the Republican and theConservative elites, with the former enjoying the support of themilitary, Turkey inherited a history of several military coups, semi-military structures within the state system, and the military elite'sundeniable impact on political decision-making processes since1960. The final coup d’�etat in 1980 was especially significantinsomuch as it marked an irreversible state and societal trans-formation in Turkey by crushing the leftist socio-political forma-tions through executions and torture, introducing economicreforms that soon replaced the developmentalist state structureand making Islamic religious education compulsory in publicschools to counteract leftist ideologies.
In 1994, for the first time in the history of themodern republic ofTurkey, the Islamist Welfare Party entered in to a coalition gov-ernment with the center-right True Path Party. During the sameperiod, Islamist politicians gradually started to increase their votesin the local elections, thanks to the support of the urban poor andthe relatively uneducated sections of the growing metropolitancities and the conservative countryside (Mert, 1998). The Islamistelectoral popularitymanifested itself within the urban space via theorganization of commemorative ceremonies throughout the holymonth of Ramadan and communal services such as free meals and
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shelter for the poor via semi-closed public tents in squares andparks (Sargin, 2004: 675). ‘Given that collective identity involvesthe temporal projections of memory’ (Shapiro, 2010: 182), suchpublic services enabled a powerful ideological performance toendorse and fabricate conservative and traditionalist identitieswithin the urban sphere, and ‘to evoke the most-desired religiousmemories’ from the Ottoman Empire period (Sargin, 2004: 182).The counter-reaction to such social engineering was swift: theNational Security Council (NSC) of Turkey issued a warning to theIslamist government on 28 February 1997 and banned it from theformal political scene. However, this incident, often quoted as a‘postmodern’ coup, could not halt the rise of the Islamist appeal inTurkey.
In 2002, by securing a single-party government in the midst ofsevere economic crises, the conservative AKP provided a break-through for almost all the anti-establishment socio-political actorse such as the Islamists, the liberals, and a section of the left-wingand pro-Kurdish civil society forces e and their political demandsin Turkey (Akçalı, 2010b). The AKP's electoral success stemmedmainly from two important acts: incorporation of broad segmentsof society, especially thosewho had been affected by deep class andregional inequalities and who held culture-based grievancesagainst the Kemalist state (Atasoy, 2009: 108); and reframing anIslamic moral stance into a ‘Third Way’ socio-economic under-standing as promulgated by Tony Blair, Bill Clinton and GerhardShr€oeder (Atasoy, 2009ibid: 109). These two actions enabled theAKP to unite the neoliberal market economy with citizen-empowerment politics, thus facilitating the transformation of thestate along liberal-democratic lines and Turkey's harmonizationefforts in the EU (Atasoy, 2009ibid.).
During this period, Turkey also experienced a period of eco-nomic growth (7.5 per cent on average per annum during2002e2006) assisted by a highly favorable global liquidity envi-ronment and low inflation (€Onis, 2009), which naturally played asignificant role in establishing AKP's hegemony. Besides the con-servative AKP, other religiously conservative groups also becamesignificant actors in the institutionalization of neoliberalism inTurkey, such as the Naksibendi religious order, the Nurcu commu-nity (Nurcular) and the Gülenmovement (Fethullahçılar), benefitingfrom the principle of enlarging civic engagement in the economy(Atasoy, 2009: 108). Hence, according to Atasoy, if the famousreformist Tanzimat period of the Ottoman Empire facilitated theintegration of the Empire into the British-led political organizationof capitalism, the Islamist reconstitution of the Turkish state after2002 paved the way for the integration of the Kemalist state intothe material and discursive relations of globalized neoliberalism(Atasoy, 2009ibid: 245). Such significant transformation naturallyalso manifested itself at the urban scale. From the early 1950s to thelate 1980s, millions ofmigrants from inner and rural areas of Turkeyhad congregated in Istanbul and other Turkish metropolises insearch of employment in the bourgeoning manufacturing in-dustries. These migrants constructed modest informal dwellings,gecekondu, which were built overnight on publicly and privatelyowned lands located on what was then the urban periphery.However, as happened in other parts of the developing world suchas Cairo (see Ismail, 2006), the authorities did not immediatelytarget this informal housing, because its existence freed the statefrom the responsibility to provide affordable housing for the mil-lions of migrant workers whose presence was fundamental for thestate-led industrialization (Esen, 2008:184). Meanwhile, urbanlandscapes with informal migrant backgrounds became increas-ingly unappealing to urban white-collar classes (Esen, 2008Ibid).‘Up until the 1990s, state authorities [thus] ignored and in manyinstances actively accommodated gecekondu development’ in largecities in Turkey (Karaman, 2012: 5). Such tacit agreements between
state authorities and gecekondu dwellers rapidly dissolved in the1990s, however, when major business groups and state authoritiescame to visualize Istanbul as a ‘global city’ and a world center forfinance, tourism, culture and fashion (Karaman, 2012ibid.) (seeFig. 3). As a matter of fact, as Karaman notes, the manufacturingindustries had already gradually started moving from the citycenter to outlying and peripheral urban areas from the late 1980sonwards (Karaman, 2012ibid.). In their place, real estate and con-struction sector and urban renewal projects have become ‘the mainpillars of the AKP's economic’ orientation and ‘success’ throughoutTurkey, even if this ‘amounted to displacement, dispossession, andforced marketization for the precarious urban poor’ (Karaman,2013a). In Istanbul, in collaboration with TOKI (the State HousingAdministration) operating under the Prime Minister's office, themunicipality of Istanbul demolished neighborhoods to build high-ways and high-rise buildings, eventually pushing the working classto peripheral areas.
The urban renewal campaign led to Istanbul being presented atinternational real estate and finance fora as a ‘rising, shining star’(Karaman, 2013aibid.). As ‘mega-projects’ are the most visible andomnipresent neoliberal governmentality techniques par excellencethrough which globalization becomes urbanized (Moulaert,Rodriguez, & Swyngedouw, 2003: 2e3), the AKP has also comeup with its own version of them as a top priority. Coined as ‘Çılgın-Mad Projects’ (http://nextcity.org/daily/entry/infographic-turkey-is-spending-billions-on-construction.-where-is-all-the-m) by theAKP's leader and the Turkish Prime Minister Erdo�gan, these urbanimaginaries, which amount to nearly $100 billion according tofreelance journalist David Lapeska's investigation, include con-structing a canal in Istanbul, an artificial sea-level waterway con-necting the Black Sea with the Sea of Marmara, bisecting theEuropean side of Istanbul and bypassing the current Bosphorus tominimize the traffic in the Istanbul Strait, a third bridge connectingthe Asian and the European sides of Istanbul, a vast mosque inÇamlıca (a dominating hill along the Bosphorus), a vast mosque inthe symbolic Taksim square and various vast shopping malls allaround the city (Morvan, 2011). The construction of shopping malls‘turned out to be [particularly] timely for the Turkish urban citizensearching for modernity through new identity components inconsumption patterns’ (Erkip, 2003).
In addition to these highly ambitious ‘Mad Projects’, which theexperts argue will create substantial environmental degradation,the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality (IBB) e also controlled bythe AKP e has launched a redevelopment plan for Istanbul'sinformal settlements, allegedly for the purpose of ‘increasing itsearthquake resistance and promoting sanitary and planned ur-banization’ (Karaman, 2012: 1). The municipality's plan to this endhas thus far been twofold: ‘the redevelopment of squatter settle-ments on the outskirts of the city and the enforced gentrification ofits inner-city slums’ (Karaman, 2012ibid: 2) (see Fig. 4). Anotherapparent pattern of urban redevelopment has been the threatenedpublic spaces such as parks and forests and the privatization ofhistorical monuments due to the AKP's ‘increasing self-entitlementto privatize public assets’ (I�gsiz, 2013). The modernist AtatürkCultural Center and Opera House in Taksim Square in Istanbul,which dates back to the early Republican era, has been closed downfor renovation for the last few years, for instance, and the former-PM and the current president Erdo�gan has openly stated that hewants it completely re-built with a mosque adjacent to it. As part ofthe redevelopment plan for the entire Taksim area, Erdo�gan andIstanbul's mayor have also repeatedly informed the public abouttheir plans to construct a replica of the 19th century OttomanBarracks to replace Taksim Gezi Park, the only green space in thearea, and then to turn this replica into a shopping mall that wouldalso contain a parking garage, a museum and high-end housing.
Fig. 3. The Financial Centre in Istanbul in Levent seen from Ayazma cemetery, one of the few remaining green areas of Istanbul, photo taken by Ugurhan Betin in August 2012.
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Formulated altogether as 'New Istanbul', these mega-projects andthe redevelopment plans of Turkey's largest metropolis surpris-ingly receive appreciation even from critical scholars such as SaskiaSassen, according to testimonials on the New Istanbul website(http://www.newistanbul.org/testimonials.asp).
As detailed above, the AKP-led urban transformation not onlyentails grounding neoliberalism in the material environment, but it
also projects a neo-authoritarian vision about nationhood and na-tional history through envisioning buildings that serve culture forthe public. In this way, it challenges the modernist Kemalist visionof the early Republican fathers and fosters its own imagination.During the Republican era, almost all Ottoman buildings includingthe barracks were re-functioned as schools, museums or publicbuildings. However, the particular military barracks which used to
Fig. 4. Gentrification of the Sulukule Roma community District in Istanbul, photo taken by Nejla Ossairan in 2007.
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exist in today's Taksim square, the Halil Pasa Topçu Kıslası, whichthe AKP government aimed to replicate, suffered considerabledamage during an incident on 31 March 1909 e an Islamist, anti-nationalist and reactionary revolt against the restoration of theconstitution in 1908. The barracks later became the site of a mutinyagainst the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) nationalists,commonly known as the Young Turks, who had advocated theconstitution. The ‘Action Army’ that marched into the capitaldeparted from Thessaloniki in support of the CUP nationalists andcrushed the insurgency in these very barracks. The Action Armywas accompanied by Bulgarian çapulcus, irregular plunderers, thevery qualifier that Erdo�gan used in relation to the mainly secularistand left-leaning protestors that occupied Gezi Park in TaksimSquare in June 2013. Mustafa Kemal, the founder of the modernRepublic of Turkey, was among those officers who entered thecapital to crush the reactionary uprising in 1909.
Budapest, the city of ‘order and hope’
In Central and Eastern Europe, an extensive interaction betweenendogenous and exogenous neoliberal forces, as documented byBockman and Eyal (2002), facilitated neoliberalism and constructeda dialogue within transnational networks that had already startedunder communism. In Hungary, systemic change in the 1990s sawtwo monologues: ‘utopian monetarism, [aspiring] to persuade so-ciety to accept the idea of a ‘self-regulating market’ wrapped inpolitical liberalism’; and mythical nationalism, an attempt to pro-mote ‘the early 19th century conservative-gentry paradigm of ‘purenationhood’ as an ultimate value and elevate it to the level of asecular state religion’ (B€or€ocz, 1991: 112). Thereby, neoliberalismcame about amidst a deep conviction of economists and policy-makers without political divisions that a technocratically flawlessprogram was all that was needed for successful reforms
(Greskovits, 1998: 54). Thereafter, elite-led consensus withoutmuch public participation in the early 1990s underlined a pervasiveconceptualization of democracy and economic liberalization thatleads the conservative right today to qualify this process with thenarrative that 'there was no real regime change' in Hungary(W�eber, 2010).
The elitist neoliberal economic transformation naturally hadmajor implications for the urban landscape. Since the early 1990s,Budapest has undergone the Hungarian version of a globalizedurban strategy of gentrification, mainly in the form of ‘urbanrehabilitation’ projects. The former industrial and working-classdistricts of the city have particularly experienced the most perva-sive ‘urban rehabilitation’, resulting in a peculiar gentrification ledby the new democratic regime. Eventually, the transition inHungary to democracy and market economy forced the poor toleave their homes in Budapest and relocate to villages (Lad�anyi,2008), which according to Jelinek (2011) amounted to a fewthousand families over the last two decades. The lack of concern forpublic housing during this transformation was a reflection ofmonetarism, given its tight-fisted fiscal policy implications, cuts inwelfare spending, and consideration of government intervention asundesirable (Eyal, Szel�enyi, & Townsley, 2000: 89).
The urban transformation efforts acquired novel strategies inBudapest under the current Fidesz government, however. In 2010,the Fidesz mayor of Budapest, Istv�an Tarl�os, claimed in his electionmanifesto that ‘Budapest needs spirit change, order and hope’ andimplied that chaos and liberalism might bring anarchy to theHungarian capital. Tarl�os (2010) continued:
the majority of the city dwellers are yearning for security,accountability and order. [ … ] Under the liberal [authority] andits leading domination, disorder has become the norm; diversityand tolerance are wrongfully and damagingly mixed up withchaos. The fundamental aim is that Budapest becomes a livable
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European major city and the capital of national unity andcompetitiveness. We will place serious and efficient emphasison the solution of the problems of homelessness, begging inpublic squares, drinking, advertisingwithout permission, graffitiand rubbish.
This rhetoric resonated further within the discourse of the un-dersecretary at the Ministry of National Economy, Zolt�an Cs�efalvay(2014), as he indicated that Budapest would become the ‘start-up’capital of Eastern and Central Europe by the end of the decade. Yet,by 2014, what has transpired in Budapest, according to Anna Szalai(2014), is the expulsion of homeless people from underpasses andpublic squares and the renaming of streets in symbolic compen-sation for concrete improvements.
This urban transformation complemented the neo-authoritarian system of Fidesz that according to Lad�anyi andSzel�enyi (2014) limited the role of the judiciary and the freedomof the media alongside institutionalizing a majoritarian democracywhose legitimacy rested on traditional family values, religion,spirituality, and patriotism. According to B�ekesi (2014), this systemimplies ad hoc economic decisions at an unqualifiedly low level ofeconomic legislation, and careless, populist, voluntarist economicsteps that support a patriotic economic policy to foster nationalbourgeoisie, and thus it appeals to the hearts of the Hungariannation, national interests and sovereignty. It also leads to a ‘per-verse income distribution’ that divides the nation into two, withone increasingly crowding group of people in hopeless situationsliving in penury due to policy changes in the tax regime andwelfareassistance (Ballai, Horv�at, Tam�as, Tecz�ar, & Urfi, 2014: 16). Overall,the entrepreneurial spirit that Fidesz vies to bolster in Hungary as asolution to Hungary's economic quandary does not serve improvedliberties or welfare standards.
As underlined by Voszka (2014), this is indeed a hybrid system,neither neoliberal nor welfare oriented. More correctly, it is ultra-liberal when it comes to tax and social policy, but it remainspaternalistic on the issue of decreasing utility costs, i.e. energy andwater charges for families. It also aggressively aspires to spreadstate ownership over the economy. The reflection of these eco-nomic policies in urban governance has been a renewed emphasisby Fidesz on polg�ar or polg�ari, that is, civic and bourgeois, to qualifyits own version of a city-dweller in opposition to all those featuresthat defined the traditionally liberal cosmopolitan citizens of thecity. Historically, Budapest was seen as a 'sinful city' (Palonen, 2013:539), and cosmopolitanism has been reserved as a connotation ofJews in the Hungarian public discourse, due to their fast assimila-tion into the socio-economic life of the city (Gy�ani, 2012). Fidesz, asa reaction, aims to bolster the civic city-dweller, the bourgeoizifi-cation of Hungarian society, and enrich the middle class withtraditionally conservative moral and cultural codes (Egedy, 2009:47) and entrepreneurial values, while attacking the left-liberalfactions as sources of decadence.
The architectural as well as the socio-economic remnants of thesocialist regime have been similarly undermining Orb�an's visionsfor Budapest. In this respect, the city squares have become venuesfor Fidesz to express its aspirations of what a ‘national’ Hungaryshould look like. It is no coincidence that in recent years therenewal of cities' public spaces with the use of EU funds receivedincreased attention in Hungary (Kissfazekas, 2013: 191). A concretediscomfort with the socialist legacy in Budapest, for example, hasbeen various campaigns to change street and square names e anendemic aspect of Hungarian politics since the transition to de-mocracy (Palonen, 2006a; 2006b). The symbolic transformation ofthe cityscape culminated when Fidesz returned to power in 2010with another wave of street-naming in spring 2011 (Palonen, 2013),
mostly with revisionist, nationalist, and Christian undertones (seeFig. 5). Some examples include reverting the name of Moszkva(Moscow) Square to Sz�ell K�alm�an Square (a leading financier, andlater PrimeMinister, at the turn of the century), replacing RooseveltSquare with Sz�echenyi, and lastly naming the square in front of theHungarian Socialist Party headquarters as Pope Jean Paul II in placeof its previous name of K€oztarsas�ag (Republic) Square. Further-more, ‘according to a proposed amendment to the Municipal Actput forth by MPs of Fidesz and the KDNP, public streets and squaresor public buildings may not be named after people who wereinvolved in the founding and/or upholding of systems of politicaltyranny during the 20th century’ (Bír�o Nagy, Boros, & Vasali, 2013).
The renaming and the pending debate over Moszkva Square hasalso been significant in terms of how the remnants of socialistsocio-economic relations have been problematic for the urbanimaginings of Fidesz supporters. Moszkva square has never been amasterpiece of urban design e nor even a particularly pleasantplace. However, it was not the lack of physical attractiveness thatgenerated its disrepute, but rather its striking representation of the‘disorderly’ nature of the city. Nowhere in Budapest has the tensionbeen more visible and unsettling than between those who traversethe square daily to reach the almost splendid isolation of the Budasuburbs, who are predominantly Fidesz voters, and those who livethere, i.e. between the citizens who make a brief appearance inpublic and thosewho depend on the square for their living (Bodnar,1998: 489). The position of Moszkva Square right at the doorstep ofFidesz voters encapsulated the reality of Budapest as the antithesisof the clean and pure small-town nationalism where their supportbase mainly exists (Palonen, 2013: 539). After the renaming of thesquare, there are plans to regenerate and gentrify this space tomake it worthy of its name in the conservative imaginings of Fideszpoliticians.
To depict how neo-authoritarianism and nationalism relate toneoliberalism, the reconstruction of Kossuth T�er or the new nemzetf}otere (national main square) with the 2011 resolution of theHungarian Parliament represents a good example. Following theresolution, the Office of the Parliament prepared the ‘Steindl ImreProgram’, in effect the construction of a state-owned square thataccentuated its position for the national heritage. In a revivalistmanner, the program carries the name of the architect whowon theoriginal tender for building the Parliament in 1882 with its neo-gothic structure. The renewed square is to provide a new ‘de-mocracy square’ for free expression of political views and accen-tuate the beauty of the House of Parliament, its monumentality, andits representation of the nation frommultiple perspectives (SteindlImre Program, 2011). The cost of renovation has been almost 24billion HUF or 81 million Euros e the tenders for which werepresented to three Hungarian firms without following public pro-curement procedures (Szalai, 2012) (see Fig. 6).
Kossuth T�er bears the fundamental expressions of Hungarianstatehood. The millennial celebration of the arrival of the Hungar-ians in the Danube basin took place here in 1896. Although manymonuments recall the medieval heritage, the Parliament built onKossuth Square projected a new era and was modeled on West-minster (Palonen, 2013: 537). The Square witnessed all the dra-matic events in Hungary's tumultuous 20th century history,including the proclamation of the Republic of 1918, Mikl�os Horthy'svictorious march into Budapest in 1919, P�al Teleki's funeral in 1941,Imre Nagy's speech in 1956, George Bush's speech in 1989, the anti-communist demonstrations in 1989, and the right-wing demon-strations of 2009. Hungarians in general are impressed by thesquare's omnipresent symbolic presence. The square representsmore than a sum of historical events e its power comes from the‘cultural continuity’ it forged between past, present, and future. Inreviewing Ger}o’s (2010) book, Public Space in Budapest, Turda
Fig. 5. Changing of Street Names in Budapest, photo taken by Emel Akcalı in February 2011.
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(2012: 351e2) reached the conclusion that the square's symbolicand spiritual history would definitely continue. Nonetheless, thecurrent reorganization of the square implied the removal of earlierstatues and clearing 40 trees, which in the words of its policy
Fig. 6. Renovation of Kossuth Lajos Square in 2013e2014, photo taken
document represented ‘a careless botanical garden [that] obstruc-ted the view of the Parliament’. According to the same document,these trees were to be replaced with fauna more typical to Hungary(Steindl Imre Program, 2011).
by Tibor Illy�es for MMTV-Magyar Televizio (MTVA) in June 2013.
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The subsequent haste with which the K�arolyi memorial wasremoved from Kossuth Square in March 2012 and how the sur-rounding trees were cut downwas remarkable. Mih�aly K�arolyi wasthe left-wing, progressive and pacifist leader of the short-livedHungarian democracy between 1918 and 1919, and his memorialwas particularly unwelcome in the new square due to his role insigning the armistice with the allied forces at the end of WWI thatlater led to major territorial losses for Hungary. The removal of hismemorial was also one of the demands posed by the Jobbik 2010electoral platform (Bír�o Nagy et al. 2013). Nevertheless, the hastewith which the trees were cut led to a conflict between environ-mental groups and builders. In response, the ombudsmanremarked that the procedure of issuing a license to the buildingcompany to cut the trees undermined the legal certainty that ac-companies the state of law and the right to a healthy environment(Szalai, 2012). However, in the words of the Steindl Imre ProgramLeader, Tam�as Waschler, there was no need for external inspectionof the program, given the extraordinary stringent schedule of theproject and the accentuated and unique importance of KossuthSquare to the national heritage (Szalai, 2012). The new square is toreinstate the statues of Count Gyula Andr�assy on his horse andCount Istv�an Tisza (Steindl Imre Program, 2011), who are politiciansassociated with interwar Hungary. Furthermore, it will not host thestatue of the poet Attila J�ozsef, as it did not belong to the pre-communist composition of the square. That statue is to be placedon the Danube bank alongside a new boat, which the critics alludedto as the boat of Admiral Horthye the interwar right-wing leader ofHungary (Progresszivblog, 2012). Finally, it hosts a new 33-m-longflagpole (Steindl Imre Program, 2011), and Waschler has promisedthat ‘the construction of this square and the parallel renovation ofthe Parliament building, and the following full-scale floodlightingof [the square] will strengthen Hungarianness (magyars�ag), bringgood news to our home, and henceforth motivate foreign visits’(Steindl Imre Program, 2011). At the time of writing, the new squarewas almost complete. It is a vast sterile landscape that belittlespeople. As for the concept of democracy square, it at best provides acontrolled expression of non-ideological political opinions in asterile corner of a vast square safely outbid by the solid expressionsof national grandeur.
Limits of Neoliberal governmentality at urban scale
Orb�an's and Erdo�gan's mega-projects certainly provide acontext of moral and political calculation and a hybrid form ofneoliberal governmentality. However, ‘no one ever lives the sameproject’ as ‘ in any given social world, multiple moral and politicalcalculations proliferate’ (Povinelli, 2011: 6). When, for instance, theAKP's ideological transformation was coupled with several previ-ous decades of neoliberal urbanism in which the Turkish metrop-olis, Istanbul was restructured to satisfy the agenda of the globalcapital rather than Istanbul's actual inhabitants, the conservativeorganization of social life became highly contested by a variety ofTurkish citizens. The citizens' grievances against such social engi-neering delineated the limits of neoliberal governmentality, inother words the conduct of individual and social lives in conformitywith market logics and in such ‘benign’ ways that resistance isrendered futile. After years of struggles on their own against thenegative effects of authoritarian and conservative politics, gentri-fication and displacement, various civil society groups in Istanbulsought to claim and embrace their ‘right to the city’ (Harvey, 2008,2012; Lefebvre, 2003) e a concept initially developed in the late1960s by French philosopher Henry Lefebvre and more recentlyrediscovered by the Marxist geographer David Harvey.
The factors that led to a nationwide insurgency in MayeJune2013 in Turkey, known as the Gezi protests, were primarily based
on such claims and practices of stakeholders deriving from ‘right tothe city’. The first wave of the protests took off in support of ahandful of activists who were protecting the Gezi Park locatedadjacent to Taksim Square against the government's redevelop-ment plans and the immediate threat posed by Istanbul Munici-pality's bulldozers. As these bulldozers were unable to proceedwith their work in the face of the protests, they were accompaniedon the next day by an extensive police force that brutally attackedthe peaceful protestors through extreme use of tear gas and plasticbullets. Despite the asymmetrical response used by the policeforces to crush all the peaceful demonstrations against the AKPgovernment thus far, ‘something unprecedented happened’: witheach wave of police attack, which in the end cost the lives of fivepeople and left hundreds seriously injured, the crowd burgeonedand the protests spread all over Turkey, setting the stage for themost pervasive popular uprising against the AKP governmentduring its 11-year rule (Karaman, 2013b). The insurgency involvednight-long marches and the occupation of squares in the differentneighborhoods of Istanbul and cities all around Turkey.
The Turkish state terminated the June 2013 uprising by extremepolice forcefulness and a witch-hunt of activists and social-mediausers who had supported the resistance via online activities. Inview of this costly reaction, protestors initially came up with newandmore individualistic forms of action, such as the ‘standing man’and ‘standing woman’, in which individuals stood silently for hoursat a site where they were not otherwise authorized to demonstrate.Spontaneous popular assemblies called ‘park forums’ also began toemerge, organized by local people in different neighborhood parksacross Istanbul, in which a cross-section of Istanbulites gathered todiscuss their rights, freedoms, history, present and a course ofcollective action for the future. Interestingly, the organizers and theparticipants of these park forums started to use the same hand-signs as the indignados (the outraged) that had gathered at Puertadel Sol in Madrid in 2011, signifying that they adopted the methodsemployed during the real democracy protests in Spain (Roos, 2013).The emphasis on concrete socio-political alternatives based pri-marily on solidarity and the protection of the common, socialequality and radical democracy in these park forums appearedpromising, since it signaled a genuine counter-hegemonic actionagainst the neoliberal governmentality of the AKP government byvirtue of its focus on the civil commons to protect and further life.
In Hungary, ever since Fidesz won the unprecedented two-thirds parliamentary majority in April 2010 and launched itsfierce program of re-shaping the country, the liberals, independent-minded conservatives and left-wingers have been organizing andparticipating in soul-searching that sometimes led to protestsagainst the government's increasing centralization of power andabolition or takeover of formerly independent institutions (ALB,2011). For some time, it has been customary for Hungarian activ-ists to raise awareness of those living on the streets by spending anight out. In 2012, that very night fell on the day on whichnationwide legislation came into effect in Hungary criminalizinghomelessness especially in the touristic parts of Budapest. At 16locations (10 in Budapest, 4 in other cities, and 2 abroad), activistsspent the night under the sky in solidarity with the homeless.Furthermore, as a reaction to neo-authoritarianism, an indepen-dent civilian group on Facebook called Milla e ‘One million peoplefor freedom of press in Hungary’ e stimulated and organized hugeprotests in 2011 against the new media law of Fidesz. It gatheredtens of thousands in downtown Budapest, from the ElizabethBridge to the inner city, ostensibly to demand freedom of the pressbut actually criticizing the Fidesz government in general. Accordingto the organizers, this was the largest demonstration organizedsince 1989 (ibid.). Similarly, an ad hoc Student Network, HaHa,came together to demonstrate against university reform in 2012.
E. Akçalı, U. Korkut / Political Geography 46 (2015) 76e88 87
Further protests occurred in 2012 when Hungarian citizens pro-tested against, amongst other things, the removal of the statues ofpoet Attila J�ozsef (1905e1937) and Mih�aly K�arolyi (1875e1955)from Kossuth T�er. Also, newly-named public spaces, MoszkvaSquare among others, prompted a reaction from younger people, asthey could not relate to the historical figures that these streetssought to revive (Kert�esz, 2014). October 2014 saw a new wave ofprotests with tens of thousand of protestors against the govern-ment's plans to introduce an Internet tax.
With the exception of the protest against the Internet tax, theprotests in Hungary did not impart much impact on everydaypolitics or lead to a large-scale urban movement and/or uprising asin Turkey. Such failure is due to the fact that most of these dem-onstrations have been organized by middle-class liberals mainlybased in Budapest, while more militant activism seems to pertainmore to the far right in Hungary, which seems to be in perfectharmony with the current Fidesz government when it comes togentrification and urban transformation processes. Nevertheless,there are indications that as neoliberalism embedded in neo-authoritarianism matures in Hungary, with Fidesz consolidatingits strength, both urban transformation and protests can ripen andbecomemore contentious. The newly elected Fidesz government in2014 is prone to engage in further transformation to boost eco-nomic growth, to introduce tax and social policies that wouldbenefit the Hungarian civic middle-class who identify with Fidesz-led socio-economic policies, and to curb liberties of urban cosmo-politan Hungarian citizens. Budapest will continue to be at theheart of further transformation and reaction. Actions against theFidesz plans for the regeneration of the Museum Quarter inV�arosliget (City Park) to open it for construction, and the 2014standoff at Szabads�ag T�er between protestors and authorities overthe building of the German occupation monument that presentsHungary as a victim during the atrocities against Jews, demonstratethat contention is growing.
Conclusion
Via an in-depth analysis of urban transformation cases inIstanbul and Budapest, this article illustrated the diverse and hybridforms in which neoliberal governmentality takes place in the semi-periphery of EU advanced capitalism. Whereas the gentrificationprocess in Istanbul is realized both by the AKP government andmarket forces, with the government enforcing the process with itslegitimate power on a large scale and creating a top-down char-acteristic, the gentrification in Budapest remains less centralizedand moderate. Thereby, the struggle for the right to the city as-sumes different forms, meanings and contrasting designs. While inTurkey there is a more militant sub-political subject that mobilizesitself against urban transformation, in Hungary resistance againstsuch developments is constrained. What these two cases of urbantransformation clearly have in common, however, is the articula-tion of neo-authoritarianism, despite the distinctions in the localcontexts and scales, which brings forward a forceful ideological andspatial removal of whatever does not fit with these tenets, makingthe recent Hungarian and Turkish conservatism undemocratic.Furthermore, as we have depicted, the cases of redevelopmentprojects in Istanbul and Budapest serve to occupy the traditionalprotest venues of the cities and hence exclude the opponents fromso-called national belonging and assist in micro-managing soci-eties. Consequently, they create the potential for ongoing protestmovements and to make both Budapest and Istanbul the new rebelcities of Europe.
Harvey contends that the idea of the right to the city no longerarises primarily out of various intellectual fascinations, but, asLefebvre understood, it is of revolutionary character (Harvey, 2012:
12). At a time when there is an increasing disenchantment with theinstitutions of not only the emergent but also the advanced in-dustrial democracies, people are searching for innovative ways ofgaining involvement in the political and the socio-economic de-cisions that affect their lives. It is likely that Istanbul and Budapestwill continue to resist the neo-authoritarian and neoliberal ten-dencies to co-opt the urban cultural and social capital. This articletherefore illustrates a form of neoliberal governmentality, enactedtop-down by the state, and a right to claim the city, practiced pri-marily by citizens from a bottom-up perspective, as a way to depicta comparison of urban governmentalities with politico-historicaltones and their limits at the semi-periphery of advanced capital-ism. Such variety and variability of urban neoliberal gov-ernmentality and its limits in the EU's semi-periphery shed furtherlight on the embeddedness of neoliberalism, calling for a moresituated multi-level comparison and scrutiny of ‘actually existingneoliberalism’ in urban and geographical research.
Conflict of interest
There is no potential conflict of interest surrounding our paperincluding any financial, personal or other relationships with otherpeople or organizations within three years of beginning the sub-mitted work that could inappropriately influence, or be perceivedto influence our work.
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Giovanni Picker, Daniel Monterescu,Csaba Jelinek, Xymena Kurowska, Achim Kemmerling and the threeanonymous reviewers for their enlightening comments whichhelped tomake this piece stronger. We are also grateful to Istanbul-based photographers U�gurhan Betin and Nejla Osseiran andBudapest-based Maìrton Czirfusz and the Critical Urban StudiesResearch Group for their generosity in sharing their fascinatingphotographs of urban transformation with us.
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