ABSTRACT
Regeneration in Turkey is seen as an essential tool in the renewal of inner-city areas and especially the squatter housing areas, within the framework of neo-liberal policies so as to enhance the rent gap in the cities’ most appealing locations and creating high-income/status housing areas within a reorganized open market economy. Squatter housing areas are the primary project areas with their unhealthy living conditions and crime potential, factors that serve to legitimate the gentrification process. The projects are centred on the use of authoritarian state power through legal regulations and one powerful state agency, responsible directly to the Prime Minister – hence TOKİ (Mass Housing Development Administration) was reinvented in the 2000s as the single most important player in urban regeneration.
