Politics of urban development and wildfires in California and Turkey

Balaban U., Fu A. S.

ENVIRONMENT AND PLANNING A-ECONOMY AND SPACE, vol.46, no.4, pp.820-836, 2014 (SSCI) identifier identifier

  • Publication Type: Article / Article
  • Volume: 46 Issue: 4
  • Publication Date: 2014
  • Doi Number: 10.1068/a46163
  • Journal Name: ENVIRONMENT AND PLANNING A-ECONOMY AND SPACE
  • Journal Indexes: Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), Scopus
  • Page Numbers: pp.820-836
  • Keywords: commodification, disasters, fire prevention and suppression, forests, land-use policy, state, urban development, ground rent, absolute rent, differential rent, rent-seeking behavior, wildfires, wildland-urban interface, GROWTH MACHINE, FIRE, CONSERVATION, MANAGEMENT, ECONOMY, RISK, ADAPTATION, INTERFACE, DISASTER, ECOLOGY
  • Ankara University Affiliated: Yes

Abstract

While Turkey and California suffer similar wildfire risks, they have developed diametrically opposed fire-suppression strategies: the former adopted an increasingly centralized strategy, while the latter depends upon a highly decentralized system. This paper is a comparative analysis that relates the politics of land use in wildland-urban interfaces (WUIs) to this divergence in firefighting strategies. Our argument is that the evolution of the divergent fire-suppression strategies in California and Turkey are linked to two different types of rent-seeking behavior. Developers and landed interest seek absolute rent in Turkey and differential rent in California. The decentralized strategy in California allows property prices to be distinguished between areas of low and high protection, and commodifies safety as a form of investment regulating the market prices of land. In Turkey, the tendency toward centralization of firefighting is a part of the composite political strategy to open new land for development by completing the hitherto unfinished cadastral records of the WUIs. Thus, the centralized firefighting strategy leads indirectly to extensive commodification of the WUIs in Turkey and expands the national land market.