Entrepreneurial citizenship at the urban frontier: civic micropolitics under climate governance in Istanbul and Noord-Holland

The ‘civic turn’ in planning has largely been assessed by the density of participatory procedures. This article shifts the question from how participation is organized to when civic agency becomes instituting. We treat entrepreneurial citizenship as situated civic agency, micropolitical practices as its mechanism, and instituting civics as its outcome. Civic action becomes instituting when it can remain organized beyond a particular mobilization, access decision-making, and sustain its capacity to act over time. We apply this framework to two urban frontiers under large-scale development and climate pressure: Istanbul’s northern periphery and rural Noord-Holland. The comparison moves beyond a distinction between weak and strong planning institutions to show instituting capacity accruing to professionalized civic actors; consequential decisions being constrained by grid capacity in Noord-Holland and legal-spatial reclassification in Istanbul; and civic gains remaining vulnerable to electoral instability. What differs is the micropolitical repertoire: institutional negotiation and co-production in Noord-Holland; coalition-building, litigation and counter-expertise in Istanbul. Civic agency, we argue, is instituted or contained by decisions taken upstream of participation.