Abstract:  This article examines struggles over urban governance in contemporary Turkey through the intertwined dynamics of authoritarian neoliberalism and democratic contestation. Drawing on Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory and recent debates on market‐driven urbanism and state‐led centralization, it situates Turkey within comparative scholarship on hybrid and electoral‐authoritarian regimes. It argues that such regimes mobilize cities as strategic arenas of hegemonic struggle, where executive centralization confronts counter‐hegemonic claims to participation, accountability, and urban citizenship. From this perspective, urban transformation projects and governance reforms are not merely policy interventions but sites where political choices are recoded as technical necessity and contestation is displaced into the language of expertise, inevitability, and development. Building on this framework, the article uses the Canal Istanbul mega‐project as a lens through which these dynamics become visible. Through a discourse‐theoretical analysis, it examines how governmental narratives of technocratic inevitability, moralized service, and performative visibility seek to naturalize centralized authority, while municipal and civic actors articulate alternative claims centered on public interest, participation, and social justice. The Canal Istanbul controversy thus reveals how urban politics under electoral authoritarianism is neither fully depoliticized nor fully emancipatory; rather, it unfolds as a structurally uneven terrain in which authoritarian consolidation and democratic rearticulation are continuously co‐produced.

Keywords:  authoritarian urbanism; Canal Istanbul; democratic contestation; local governance; neoliberal megaprojects; Turkey; urban future

Published:   3 June 2026

Issue:   Vol 11 (2026): Urban Futures in Times of Disruption (In Progress)