The metropolitan institutional arrangements of Turkey in re-scaling the spatiality of the state

This thesis examines the connections between the changing place and spatiality of metropolitan areas within the political economy of the global capitalist state as strategic areas of policy making. It investigates transformations in metropolitan areas in Turkey on the political economy of urban restructuring. The research analyzes the spatial restructuring processes of the state in Turkey after 1980, building on Henri Lefebvre's theorization of the production of space and using Neil Brenner's conceptualization of state rescaling. The ways in which the state rescaling process contributes to the formation and functioning of metropolitan municipalities and how these institutions affect state rescaling are examined. It is argued that the increasing importance of metropolitan areas as pillars for global capital accumulation triggered the "rescaling" of the nation-state and the restructuring of the spatial scales on which state power is organized. The main purpose of capitalist states is to strategically position metropolitan areas within the supranational and global cycles of capital. On this basis, the activation of entrepreneurial urban management forms in the urban space in Turkey is analyzed as a basic political strategy in which global capitalist state institutions try to reactivate the productive capacities of strategic positions such as global cities in their regions. Understood in this way, the metropolitan area represents large institutional spaces where the spatiality of state power is redefined. With this thesis, the basic elements of the theoretical interpretation of metropolitan institutional arrangements focused on the rescaling of the state are presented. The thesis research is guided by four critical aspects of metropolitan institutional arrangements in Turkey: centralization/decentralization, planning, financial structure, and control mechanism. In the thesis, it is argued that metropolitan institutional arrangements are centralized, and that the planning, financial structure and control mechanisms are determined by capital accumulation. With the analysis of neoliberal urbanization policies in Turkey from the perspective of Critical Urban Theory, it is argued that the socio-spatial context should be at the forefront in urban government.