Rethinking centrality

In this paper, I tackle the center-periphery dynamics under planetary urbanization by focusing on Gebze, the gigantic industrial city just outside of Istanbul’s administrative borders. Through an empirical study of peripheral urbanization processes in the Gebze-Istanbul axis, the paper engages with the planetary sub/urbanization debates and serves the triple purpose: (I) to emphasize the significance of peripheralization and the center-periphery dialectics to critique the predominant emphasis on centrality in urban and regional research which relegates the socio-spatial and political transformations of the peripheries to the background, (II) to offer an alternative approach to depictions of cities as sentient, anthropomorphic actors in a hierarchical and competitive Darwinian ecology, and (III) to contribute to planetary sub/urbanization debates by zooming in on some of the micro-spaces of peripheral Gebze during the extended urbanization process in greater Istanbul. Through a transdisciplinary methodology, the paper provides a local ontology by displaying how peripherality is constructed not merely from above and the center by the state or economic actors, but also by the people from below and the periphery, as it were, during their everyday rhythms, activities, negotiations, and coping. By resisting the merely expanded application of the term suburban, and instead taking seriously the complex web of governance, agency, defeat, organization, and exploitation within the lives of Gebze’s inhabitants, the article concludes that such phenomena make any universalizing claim about the urban or the suburban incomplete.