Are there local limits to gentrification?: The context of Tophane

From the beginning of the 1980s, urban space became an important node of economic growth and commodification as a result of the "wide ranging, transformative impacts" (Brenner & Theodore, 2002, p. 363) and, apart from being one of the biggest manifestation, gentrification also has a pivotal role on urban knowledge production for understanding this process. One of the consequences of this is the emergence of a sizable literature is pointing out the destructive gentrification processes and effects of them from different perspectives, which are ranging from very well-known demand or supply side conventional explanations to complementary ones and more critical up to date context based researches. Yet the current terrain of gentrification research is neither adequate for comprehensive understanding from a pluralistic perspective both geographically and theoretically, nor to mitigate the negative outcomes of the phenomenon. This necessitates reflecting upon the research framework of gentrification, which is deficient in terms of contextuality and alternative forms of the phenomenon, in a more critical and nuanced way. In this thesis, this gap will be addressed by converting our lens to limited gentrification process of Tophane case by focusing on context causalities of 'unsuccessful' but 'resistant' gentrification stories. Tophane, which is encircled by already gentrified and gentrifying zones including new large-scale redevelopment project sites at the south and the economic and cultural hub – Beyoğlu at the north, is the latest and "inevitable" hotspot both for indirect and state-led gentrification. The process that captured neighborhood's transformation through the blooming of galleries, design shops, hostels and local retail stores was seemed very predictable in the beginning of 2000s. Approaching to the 2010s, neoliberal restructuring together with gentrification politics of the state started to be challenged, interestingly and unexpectedly, by the neighborhood's local causalities including relative embeddedness of local Tophane community and presence of political activism, discretional urban policy and negative media image and branding. Today, Tophane is a battlefield of extreme tension and power struggle between closed and radically conservative local community networks and the increasingly visible and morally alien opportunist new comers; thus, it is a major playground to question the local limits to gentrification with a particular focus on local causalities. Within this scope, the thesis addresses this urban conflict and limited gentrification process by adopting critical realist methodology. It critically reviews the causalities of "resistance-based limited" gentrification; and examines the local particularities of Tophane through an intensive empirical research built on causality analyses and semi-structured interviews. Derived from the reality that the theory of gentrification is diverse and subject to change, the thesis contributes to the existing literature with a critical manifestation of Tophane's contextual causalities, which creates "successful" resistance to state-led gentrification, while putting its inevitableness under question