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Mehmet Baris Kuymulu is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the City University of New York, Graduate Center. His research interests include critical urban studies, social theory, urban political economy and the politics of nature. He has recently completed his dissertation "The Right to the City: Towards the Production of Space from Below."Between 2009 and 2011, Kuymulu was a Writing Across the Curriculum Fellow at New York City College of Technology, where he worked as a pedagogical guide for faculty from various disciplines to innovatively integrate writing into their teaching practices. His responsibilities also included organizing workshops on professional development for faculty, which covered issues ranging from the early stages of course and syllabus design to the later stages of student assessment.During 2008-2009 academic year, he was a fellow at The Center for Place, Culture and Politics.Mehmet Baris Kuymulu's project:Dialectics of Claiming the Right to the City: From Gezi Park to Organized ResistanceThe spark that drew Istanbul into a fire of protest and uprising was initially set off by a sit in, initiated by roughly 25 people against the destruction of a small public park, in order to make way for a shopping mall in Istanbul. Following serious police brutality on the protestors, who were openly discredited by the government for being a few looters and extremists, 80 out of 81 cities in Turkey saw a full-fledged uprising. This project would like to focus on a few issues to open them up for a collective discussion. The first aspect of discussion would be the relationship between the rapid expansion of the political geography of the uprising in June and the question of political agency and organizing. Which social groups and economic classes took active part in the protests? Was the June 2013 uprising a middle-class mobilization, as many liberal commentators argued? The second issue would like to question the growth-based political economy of Turkey in the last decade, which has been primarily based on urban development and the production of space. This specific developmentalism, it seems, gave way to a very diverse, albeit mostly localized resistance and dissident politics that eventually exploded at the urban centers of Turkey during the June 2013 uprising. Finally, The final focus point would be the novel forms of political activism—unprecedented both in terms of political form and the degree of popular participation—which sprang from Gezi Park and rapidly spread across the urban Turkey like the uprising itself, namely, the neighborhood assemblies or as the people call it: park forums.&#160;