Istanbul 2010 European Capital of Culture: Civil Society as a Variable of Neoliberalization

• In Event: 2323 - Student Forum Refereed Roundtable
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: 8. Policy in a Global Context

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to analyze Istanbul 2010 European Capital of Culture project as a neoliberal enterprise to highlight the ways in which neoliberalism can be understood differently in an authoritarian regime. Although Istanbul seems to be a city in line with features of a typical neoliberal urban regime, the expected local partnership between state, market, and civil society did not occur in the 2010 ECoC project. While the literature recognizes the multiplicity of neoliberalisms, this paper attempts to define the status of civil society as a variable without further emphasizing the complexity of the subject. The claim is that Istanbul 2010 ECoC project failed firstly because Turkey displayed an anomaly during its neoliberal transformation and built local coalitions without granting autonomy to local actors and secondly the civil society was disorganized to the extent that it could not successfully collaborate with other actors in those coalitions. The paper will inquire the correspondence of the objectives of ECoC Action and of Istanbul 2010 ECoC Agency, and then, question the effectivity and sustainability of the results of the 2010 projects by comparatively surveying the processes of organization and implementation in Istanbul, Essen, and Pécs.

Author

• Sehrazat Gulsum Mart, University of Notre Dame