The very recent accelerating pace of urbanization worldwide – marked by the dissolution of conventional boundaries between the urban, rural, and suburban – resonates with Henri Lefebvre’s hypothesis of the “complete urbanization of society.” Specifically, over the past decade, this hypothesis has gained renewed attention through debates on planetary urbanization, particularly among various critical urban scholars. Nevertheless, this conceptual framework has been the subject of critique due to its perceived lack of engagement with and interest in the local socio-spatial contexts and its broad and general perspective. Seeking to bridge such a gap between theoretical abstraction and grounded empirical analysis, this study contributes to the discourse on planetary urbanization by empirically examining the urban periphery of Ankara. Focusing on two different case areas located in southwest of the city, the study investigates how market-driven, fragmented, and speculative urban development – promoted under two decades of Justice and Development Party (AKP) governance – has transformed the urban periphery. These areas, formerly agricultural zones or planned as low-density suburbs, have undergone a transformation into luxury high-rise gated-communities and consumption-oriented and car centric environment, often lacking in infrastructure and spatial coherence. The central objective of our research is to explore how these urban transformations impact the everyday life in the urban periphery. We adopt a methodological framework inspired by Lefebvre’s “regressive–progressive” approach. The regressive component of the study traces the historical trajectory of urbanization in two case study areas, focusing on territorial regulation dimension of urbanization. To this end, we examine the impact of legislative activities and regulations, spatial plans and plan amendments, and assembly resolutions of the Ankara Metropolitan Municipality Council from 2014 to 2023 that shaped the urbanization process of our case areas. The progressive component, on the other hand, explores the current state of everyday life in these areas – not to predict future trends, but to capture the lived experience of a space that is under spatial and temporal transition. This part of the research employs a mixed-method urban ethnographic approach that combines semi-structured interviews with autoethnography, allowing for a reflexive understanding of how planetary urbanization is embodied, negotiated, and contested at the level of the everyday. By critically engaging with the planetary urbanization discourse through the lens of everyday life in Ankara’s urban periphery, this study offers several contributions to critical urban studies. It underscores the significance of localized, ethnographic perspectives in examining generalized urbanization processes, challenges center-periphery binaries, and adopts a Lefebvrean approach for investigating the socio-spatial transformations built by emerging and transforming neoliberal urbanization processes. In doing so, it contributes to a deeper understanding of how the urban is produced, experienced, and potentially transformed on the peripheries of a rapidly expanding metropolis.
Ender Iplikci (Mon,) studied this question.