Le Ray 447Conclusion
The aim of this chapter was to highlight the conditions of emergence
of the public sphere in a restrictive political environment by consider-
ing its urban and spatial dimensions. I considered this as an invitation
to both scale down the analysis and to pay close attention to visual and
performative aspects in order to reveal the power dynamics in the consti-
tution of the public sphere. Political actors indeed continuously struggle
over the rules of coexistence and the meanings attached to the environ-
ment—that is, the constitutive elements of urban publicness—to secure or
challenge the existing sociospatial order. But this struggle is more often
than not fought on unequal bases. In highly conflictual contexts, collec-
tive actors who do not have access to institutionalized public (discursive)
arenas may go underground and resort to violence, which is as much an
acknowledgement of their inability to make themselves heard or seen as
an attempt to transform the existing public order. But urban publicness is
also continuously produced and renegotiated through daily coexistence
and ordinary interactions. In a restrictive political context, these ordinary
interactions become a privileged way to contest the political order and
transform the public grammar.
In Tunceli, the relative appeasement that followed the PKK declara-
tion of a cease-fire in 1999 led local state agents to redefine, or at least
diversify, their meaning-making operations in order to regain inhabit-
ants’ loyalty and adherence to the national order. But it also gave room
to inhabitants to renegotiate rules of coexistence as well as meanings
ascribed in their environment and, in this way, to challenge this same
national order. These challenging regimes of engagement in “postconflict”
urban space may be more or less organized or intentional: from returning
to the cem evi despite police harassment to a collective occupation of river
banks to contest dam construction. But they commonly contribute to the
transformation of categories of identification and interpretation, and pro-
mote new ways of inhabiting space and possibly new geographies of resis-
tance. Further, as we have seen, individuals “unintentionally” involved in
a contest over spatial devices or norms regulating the system of mutual
expectations may borrow arguments from a more institutionalized arena