When Housing Policy Erases Memory: Urban Renewal, Knowledge Loss, and Public Accountability

Author: Eda Bozkurt

University of Michigan Department of Architecture

ABSTRACT

This article examines state-led urban renewal as a problem of public accountability, arguing that prevailing policy frameworks systematically obscure the epistemic and temporal harms produced by prolonged displacement. Drawing on community-engaged research conducted in Ankara’s Mamak district in Turkey between 2023 and 2025, the article conceptualizes urban renewal not only as a housing and planning intervention but as a knowledge-governing regime. By privileging administratively legible metrics of progress, renewal policies restructure what counts as evidence while marginalizing resident-authored forms of spatial, social, and temporal knowledge. Across residents who remain in place, those displaced elsewhere, and those rehoused in newly constructed apartment blocks, the findings document spatial disorientation, fragmentation of informal care infrastructures, and the erosion of collective temporal expertise developed under prolonged uncertainty. These knowledge systems functioned as vital social infrastructure enabling coordination, reciprocity, and shared navigation of risk. Yet because they are relational and difficult to quantify, their erosion remains largely invisible within dominant accountability frameworks. Procedural participation does not compensate for epistemic exclusion. Reframing accountability as epistemic, temporal, and ongoing, the article advances a memory-conscious approach to housing policy, one that recognizes knowledge loss as a consequence of redevelopment and a legitimate object of institutional responsibility.

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