Off the rails: the failure of Turkey’s twenty-year-long construction frenzy

Despite the Justice and Development Party’s (AKP) two-decade-long urban development campaign and its extensive control over urban governance and housing, the 2023 earthquake in Turkey resulted in over fifty thousand deaths and left hundreds of thousands homeless. What explains this paradox? This paper addresses this question by examining the AKP’s distinct pattern of urban neoliberalism. It reveals how the party’s urban development strategies fostered a self-perpetuating cycle between state-led developers, contractors, and subcontractors, where illicit activities flourished alongside rapid urbanization and housing developments. The paper argues that the AKP’s urban planning practices not only cultivated public-private alignments, typical of neoliberal urbanism globally, but also stimulated a new form of private construction sector with minimal oversight and regulation. This paper demonstrates how this uncontrolled construction boom, fuelled by authoritarian governance, transformed a natural disaster into a catastrophic human tragedy.