in: Flexibility, H.K. Özdinç,S. Güzelsarı, Editor, IJOPEC, London, pp.169-196, 2013
In the last decade, place-branding has gained importance within the national and
local policy circles in Turkey. It is observed that the “branding discourse” is to a
large extent utilized for the legitimization of the rapid and intensive transformation
process that the Turkish cities are currently going through. This study proposes that
neo-liberal urbanization requires the re-organization of the urban planning regime
and its main objective is to elaborate on the nature of this re-organization by focusing
on the recent tourism development in Bursa. By sheding light on the urban
planning process behind this development, this paper identifies the centralization
of urban planning rights, the effective insertion of public land into the neo-liberal
urbanization project and the strategic use of popular discourses, such as placebranding,
as the main pillars of the re-organization of the existing urban planning
regime. The study concludes that this re-organization indicates a criticial diversion
of urban planning from its ontological roots since the balance that urban planning
is supposed to find between public and private interests over land is shifting in favor
of the latter by the very intervention of the neo-liberal state.
Keywords: neo-liberal urbanization, urban entrepreneurialism, place-branding, urban
planning, tourism development