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The politics of the environment: the transformation of green spaces through the example of Validebağ Grove in İstanbul

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Abstract

This article analyzes the transformation of urban green spaces in Türkiye through the case of Validebağ Grove in Istanbul, situating it within the country’s political and economic shifts since the 1970s. Once a historically and ecologically significant site, the grove has come under increasing pressure from urban development, particularly following neoliberal reforms that reframed green areas as economic assets. From the 2000s onward, under the New Türkiye vision, green spaces have also been mobilized as instruments of ideological and spatial governance, often targeted by redevelopment projects such as the Nation’s Gardens. Drawing on a political ecology perspective, the study conceptualizes this shift as part of authoritarian-neoliberal urbanism, where processes of dispossession and ideological legitimation operate together. The findings show that Validebağ provides a revealing case through which to understand how urban green spaces become politically charged sites of environmental governance, political power, and democratic resistance.

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Acknowledgements

The author would like to express sincere gratitude to Larry Oyeniyi from the Department of Foreign Languages at Yeditepe University for reading the manuscript and providing valuable comments. The author is also grateful to Prof. Jing Wang at ETH Zurich for providing a welcoming and intellectually stimulating research environment during the author’s time as a visiting scholar at ETH Zurich, where this study was developed and completed.

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This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

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  1. Yeditepe University, Kayısdagı Kampusu, Istanbul, Türkiye

    Sibel Akyıldız

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Sibel Akyıldız is the only author of this manuscript and remained responsible for conceptualization, methodology, data collection, analysis, writing and editing of the manuscript.

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Akyıldız, S. The politics of the environment: the transformation of green spaces through the example of Validebağ Grove in İstanbul. J Environ Stud Sci (2026). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13412-026-01128-6

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