Urban Destruction and Redevelopment as Counterinsurgency: The Void, The Limbo and New Face of Sur

Abstract

This commentary explores the relationship between counterinsurgency strategies, urban destruction, and redevelopment via their impacts and manifestations on urban space through an ethnographic case study in Sur, the old town of Diyarbakır. Sur has been home to working class, marginalized and low-income Kurdish families, thousands of which have been displaced during and after the urban warfare between the Turkish state and the PKK in 2015-16. I discuss how urban destruction and redevelopment are used as counterinsurgency strategies under the AKP regime to subjugate the Kurdish cities, which have been the center of collective resistance and grassroots opposition.

My grounded conceptualization follows the physical fractions in Sur: The void focuses on flattened and emptied areas of Sur. The tools for emptying involve curfews, deliberate destruction of the built environment, depopulation of the area, urgent expropriations, and the extension of horizontal and vertical visibility in the redevelopment process for security purposes. The limbo focuses on parts of Sur where all land and properties are urgently expropriated but not demolished yet and unveils the temporality of displacement as a constant threat for the residents. It also discusses the everyday life of the displaced people who still couldn’t be able to establish a stable life. Lastly, New Face focuses on the newly built environment in Sur and exposes the tools of state-led tourism/commercial gentrification; securitization; and depopulation during the neoliberal redevelopment process.