ABSTRACT
The administrative elite in Turkey has been preoccupied with the production of place and people since the establishment of the Republic. Places and people considered to infringe the new national order were subject to removal, erasure and assimilation. This contribution will discuss this concern with negative place and subject identities ‘within’ the nation. This discussion will not focus on a particular case, but show through references to multiple instances how the articulation of negative identities to people (the poor and the Kurds) and places (the rural and the urban) contributed to a process of continuous reordering with, as a result, a continuous wasting of people. The chapter starts with examining urban renewal in inner-city neighbourhoods in Diyarbakir in the 2000s, followed by a discussion of negative identities in Turkey’s cityscapes from the 1920s until today and the definition of negative villages and rural places from the 1920s until the 1990s, before returning to Diyarbakir.
