This chapter is the first in part 2 of the book and focuses on how heritage preservation is being deployed as a pro-poor redistributive practice in Istanbul. It focuses on an alliance that formed between urban activists and the heritage machinery of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization and the European Union that was aimed at safeguarding both affordable housing and heritage in Fener-Balat neighborhoods. It examines how mobilizing heritage as a modality for securing affordable housing relied on the depoliticization of heritage preservation and the identity and nationalist politics in which it was embroiled through its transformation from a monumental to an environmental practice that valorizes heritage landscapes as depoliticized totalities. The chapter is anchored around the practices through which a variety of stakeholders repoliticize the class-based and identity-based conflicts masked by the European Union's intervention and lay bare the contradictions of channeling redistribution through a seemingly depoliticized machinery of heritage preservation.
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