ABSTRACT
Turf politics assumes the form of a politics conducted by coalitions of residential households, as in a neighborhood organisation; or by a local government representing those residential households. This chapter seeks to characterise the literature on turf politics and to understand it as a reflection of changes in the way the world appears. The chapter focuses on the literature dealing with turf politics that is characterised both in terms of its focus and its concepts. It outlines the historical specificity of the object of knowledge is validated, and that of the concepts through which one attempts to understand. The chapter demonstrates how both it and the concepts employed by orthodox social science to understand it are embedded in phenomenal forms, and how these phenomenal forms are produced, reproduced, and transformed by much more fundamental generative mechanisms, the nature of which is belied by the contemporary literature.
