Stanford Humanities Center
Azat Gündoğan is an urban sociologist and political scientist who explores how people create and structure space and time, with a focus on cities in the Global South, particularly the broader Istanbul region. His research covers peripheral urbanization, anti-urban renewal activism, the Kurdish political movement in Turkey, and Turkish authoritarianisms. His work has been published in Urban Geography and City: Analysis of Urban Change, Theory, Action and has earned him various accolades, including the Sakıp Sabancı International Research Award (2016) and the Turkish Social Science Association’s Junior Social Scientists Award (2006).
SHC Project
The Backwater: Peripheral Urbanization and Urban Politics in Istanbul
Gündoğan will be working on his book titled The Backwater: Peripheral Urbanization and Urban Politics in Istanbul. He examines the transformation of Gebze from a small town into Istanbul’s gigantic industrial satellite, using a critical socio-spatial perspective. In visual terms, his analysis is processual (non-linear), bottom-up (ethnographic), and outside-in (from periphery to center). The Backwater considers the concepts of city/urban and center/periphery as dynamic and mutually-constitutive processes rather than fixed notions in time and space and challenges the metrocentric urge to put Istanbul (or any "global" city) at the center of scholarly inquiry and policymaking.
