Erdoğan’s now infamous Aksaray (white or clean) palace, costing an astonishing $350 million, has defied court orders, symbolically and physically inserting the AKPs ‘new’ Turkey of Ottoman-style commodity fetishism into a public space, controversially in this case, the Ataturk Forest Farm.
Gentrification has taken on an almost unique significance in Turkey. The AKP is not only attempting (largely successfully) to inscribe its myopic neo-liberal vision on society in the form of re-development or urban renewal. It is architecturally imposing a top-down restructuring of the social sphere, attempting to cleanse from Istanbul and other sites of power those whose socio-economic profile defies the hegemonic culture as designed by the state.
The hybrid of Islamic and capitalist values melded by the AKP makes for a particularly aggressive version of gentrification which not only aims at the homogenization of culture but also, at the stratification of class through the enclosure of public space and the dystopian proliferation of gated-communities. Riding upon the back of its economic success, the detrimental effects of the AKP’s redevelopment vision have only recently become the subject of widespread popular contestation as a result of Gezi Park and the attention this brought.
