Denanding ''justice and freedom'' at the urban margin :|an ethnography of Küçükarmutlu in relation to transgressive politics of space

Abstract

This thesis aims to anthropologize the present of a squatter neighborhood, Küçükarmutlu through historically tracing the employment(s) of transgressive politics of space. As such, differing lines of spatial identifications and distributions of social capital with regard to fluid networks of neoliberal urbanity constitute together the conceptual frame of the research. Within this framework the study intends to problematize, discuss and interpret the complexities of drawing a coherent image of the “urban margin” as to how the emerging shifts in the restructuring of urban space define the realm of politics, economics, social and cultural. Having been based on an ethnographic research conducted in Küçükarmutlu, stanbul this study focuses on the transgressive politics of space enacted in Küçükarmutlu through a radical employment of the “right to city”. Küçükarmutlu is elaborated as a boundary itself, more of an amorphously shaped and temporalized frontier zone between urbanization of labor and urbanization of capital; thereby from within the anachronism of industrial and neoliberal temporalities as well as in the very contradiction of respective logics and politics of spatiality. The thesis basically asserts that reading the present of urban margin should go through multiple dimensions of material and corporeal as much as symbolical and ideological in their complex relationality with the spatial forms of surrounding urban environments and their respective temporalities.