Talk:
“Public Lands and Dimensions of Citizenship: A Comparative Analysis of Mexico and Turkey”
by
Özge Yüksekkaya Political Science
Koç University, Turkey & University of Amsterdam, Netherlands
o.yuksekkaya@uva.nl
Date and Room Info
Wednesday, March 4, 2026, 12:30 p.m.
A-130
Abstract
Public lands have long been a vital resource for meeting one of the most basic needs of the urban poor: shelter, a precondition for accessing other social rights and a core component of social citizenship. In many low‑ and middle‑income countries, informal settlements constructed on public lands, such as gecekondus, colonias populares, and favelas, fulfilled a welfare function, albeit informally. They have been tolerated and even used as a de facto social policy tool by governments, helping prevent homelessness and secure political support. Mexico and Turkey were no exceptions to this rule: in Mexico City and Istanbul, the urban poor have historically relied on public lands for housing. Early work on neoliberalism expected the privatization and formalization of land to retrench material access to housing on public lands, accompanied by spatial exclusion of the urban poor from the city center, and by discourses that legitimized these adverse effects by promoting self-sufficiency and active participation in the market. Yet, public land regimes in both countries have remained surprisingly resilient, raising questions about the impacts of these policies.
My broader research focuses precisely on these questions and examines how neoliberal public land policies shape social citizenship along three dimensions: material, spatial, and discursive. It demonstrates the heterogeneous impacts of neoliberal public land policies in the material expansion of home ownership for the urban poor, their continued spatial access to the city center, and discourses promoting the state’s responsibility to ensure citizens’ welfare, with variation across Mexico and Turkey. In this talk, I focus on the material dimension by comparatively analyzing Mexico City and Istanbul using spatial and qualitative data. I show that, in addition to expectations of retrenchment, home ownership on public lands has expanded for low‑income citizens, but in highly conditional and selective ways—contingent on the urban poor’s political support or threat of protest and shaped by continuing informality in policy implementation. As a result, social citizenship remains (in)formally expanded yet substantively volatile for the urban poor.
Bio
Özge Yüksekkaya is a PhD researcher in the joint doctorate program in Political Science at Koç University and the University of Amsterdam. Her research focuses on social and public policy, comparative politics, political economy, citizenship studies, and urban studies. She is interested in mixed-methods research and combines qualitative approaches with novel spatial techniques. Her current work examines social citizenship and welfare through citizens’ access to public lands and housing in Mexico and Turkey. She has published on the politics of (re)centralization and central-local government relations in urban policy. Her research has been supported by major grants and fellowships from TUBITAK and the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research Foundation (IJURR).