This research explores the relationship between urban redevelopment, urban destruction, and counterinsurgency strategies via their manifestations on urban space through an ethnographic case study of Diyarbakir, Turkey. Following the urban warfare between the Turkish state and the PKK in 2015-16, the old town of Diyarbakir has undergone drastic transformations. Through military operations, urgent expropriations of all lands -under the natural disaster Law No. 6306- and the urban redevelopment project, the Turkish state has been (1) depopulating, flattening, and emptying the area; creating a void, (2) displacing and dispossessing the low-income Kurdish families and creating a constant threat of displacement; leaving them in limbo, and (3) replacing this population and former public spaces of insurgencies with a new face that is constituted by state-led touristic/commercial gentrification and securitization. I expose that in the process of expropriation and urban redevelopment, the informality of the built environment has been used as an excuse and as an advantage in demolishing everything, determining ridiculously low compensations for the displaced people, and making it impossible for the people to come back to the area.
The subjugation of low-income Kurdish families through urban redevelopment has been further expanded by extending the scope of Law No:6306 with an additional article stating that areas, where public order or security is disrupted, can be declared as “risky” by the President, legally allowing the state offices to expropriate land, demolish such areas and apply urban redevelopment. Recently, inner Baglar, the poorest and densest urban section of Diyarbakir, has become the target of urban redevelopment through such a declaration. By focusing on the “risky areas” of Diyarbakir, my research contributes to a better understanding of the relationship between urban redevelopment policies and ethnic subjugation and of the tools and strategies of the Turkish state in practicing such policies.
