(Re)Assembling Commons: Conflict, Care, and the Politics of Urban Becoming in Istanbul

This doctoral thesis undertakes a situated and critical inquiry into the emergence and evolving dynamics of urban commoning amid increasingly precarious and contested urban worlds. In recent decades, marked by polycrisis and the accelerating effects of climate change, the concept of the urban commons has reemerged as both a radical political promise and a transformative horizon for socio-ecological justice, collective action, and alternative forms of urban life. However, the burgeoning interdisciplinary field of common studies often remains constrained by enduring binaries—urban/rural, formal/informal, nature/culture. This study intervenes in these debates by engaging with the limitations and potentialities of key approaches and seeks to unsettle and reconfigure these binaries through engaging with techno-feminist, posthumanist, and postcolonial frameworks that foreground relational, situated, and more-than-human understandings of urban commons.

Empirically, this conceptual repositioning is grounded in the contested terrain of the Yedikule Bostans, the centuries-old agricultural landscape situated along Istanbul’s UNESCO-listed Theodosian Land Walls. Over the past decade, this historically layered and ecologically vital site has become a focal point of intensified conflict, shaped by the convergence of national and international heritage-preservation agendas, technocratic urban greening interventions, and speculative urban redevelopment pressures. These converging assemblages sometimes threaten long-standing subsistence practices, intergenerational agroecological knowledge, and the multispecies entanglements that sustain the Bostans’ lifeworlds. But simultaneously, they provide fertile ground for various capacities to emerge and for collective becomings born of struggle, resistance, solidarity, care, and affective entanglements that arise spontaneously amid conflict.

Drawing on ethnographically informed fieldwork, archival analysis, and controversy-mapping approaches from STS and feminist epistemologies, the thesis advances the concept of latent commons—commons enacted through situated capacities — that illuminate how fragile moments of encounter and maintenance offer critical openings for political becoming as a more-than-human endeavour.

The research contributes to debates in urban design and planning theory around ethics of care, feminist political ecologies, and more-than-human urbanism, reimagining urban research itself as a form of care in pursuit of socially and ecologically just multispecies cities.