Istanbul of networks: space, technology, and governance

Abstract

This dissertation explores the promises and politics of networking in the globalizing city Istanbul, Turkey. It focuses on organizations of governance and struggle in relation to technological practices involving information communication technologies (ICTs) as well as discourses of networking inspired by ICTs. The question this dissertation seeks to answer is: how do discourses and practices of networking generate new models and mechanisms for urban governance and participation in the global city, yet simultaneously animate searches for, and enactments of, alternative trajectories of urban transformation? In more abstract terms, this dissertation inquires into the possibilities and limitations of participation and citizenship in the global city. To answer my question, I focus on two governance projects that underscore Istanbul's transformation into a global city: the information society project and the creative city project. Both these projects rely on networked formations of governance in which non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and self-organizing communities play key roles. Involved NGOs stimulate communities to acquire and produce new sets of skills and knowledge in preparation for what these NGOs take to be the necessities of the immanent future. In doing so, these NGOs integrate these communities with globalizing forms of labor, consumption, and citizenship. However, in the process, undermining a fixed division between more established civil society and forms of resistance, discourses and practices of networking also produce communities as entities endowed with a degree of political authority and with capabilities to not just adjust to but also appropriate and repurpose the technologies, discourses, and logics of the so-called information society and creative city. Against accounts of a homogenizing process of globalization, I show that the modalities of power that order the spaces of the global city and its technological modernity do not come strictly from above or from elsewhere. Rather, they are produced within complex contextual relations; they work through specific logics and are mediated by particular forms.

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