Making the New Turkey Reconfigurations of state and citizenship in an Istanbul neighbourhood

What does it mean to build the New Turkey so often invoked by successive AKP governments? Based on ethnographic research in Kayaşehir, Istanbul, this dissertation explores how the AKP's vision of a post-secular modernity materializes through the ordinary spaces and practices of neighbourhood life. Rather than focusing solely on authoritarianism and exclusion, it examines the generative dimensions of this political project, asking how ideas of citizenship and the state are cultivated, experienced, and contested in everyday life. Using place-making as its central analytical lens, the study reveals how homes, streets, mosques, and neighbourhood networks become key sites where political ideals take material and social form. Bridging geography, sociology, and anthropology, this dissertation offers a new perspective on how political projects are enacted through everyday urban life.