Gender and civic engagement : the Bagcilar Municipality Women's Council in Istanbul

Turkey, a predominantly Muslim country, is a secular democracy with no official state religion. Secularism permeates the space and everyday life practices of people in Turkey in relation to, rather than as the opposite of, religion. This relationship, which involves both contestation and interaction between the secular and religious, plays out a role in place- making and spatial subjectivities. In this paper, I scrutinise women’s participation in urban life that is shaped through discursive and performative practices of the secular and religious in the district of Bagcilar in Istanbul. Bagcilar has been governed by Islamist oriented parties since it gained municipal status in 1992. The Bagcilar Municipality has not only produced projects and organised events for women, but also initiated the Bagcilar Municipality Women’s Council as part of the United Nations Development Programme on citizen participation and local democracy. Drawing on my fieldwork in Bagcilar in 2015, I argue that a new form of civic engagement in new spatial arrangements have emerged for women in a district shaped by Islamic political discourse, pious practices and gender segregation