The political economy of fringe-belt alienation: iconic rebranding and morphological cost in a Mediterranean port city

Urban fringe belts, heterogeneous zones accumulating at successive urban growth edges, are structurally susceptible to entrepreneurial urbanism. However, no analytical instrument has existed to measure the morphological cost of their alienation at the plot level. This paper introduces the Fringe-Belt Critical Assessment (FB-CA) framework, synthesizing Conzenian urban morphology with critical political economy to make that cost empirically visible. The framework operationalizes rent gap theory, Harvey’s circuits of capital, and the spatial fix through three quantified domains of rupture: functional, physical, and historico-geographical. Applied to Mersin, Turkey, and in particular to the transformation of the Çukurova Cotton Factory into the Mertim Tower complex in Mersin, Turkey, and drawing on archival planning documents, cadastral records, and project drawings, the analysis reveals that alienation was institutionally engineered through four converging conditions: intra-group transfer between industrial and financial capital circuits within the same ownership group, state widening of the rent gap through legislation, absorption of opposition through procedural planning concessions, and architect-led iconic rebranding. The FB-CA framework reveals that the morphological cost of iconic rebranding under entrepreneurial urbanism is not merely theorizable but empirically measurable, structurally irreversible, and transferable as an analytical instrument wherever fringe-belt alienation is driven by equivalent conditions of capital convergence and state complicity.