The politics of gastro-driven gentrification and peri-urban transformation: Investigating the case of Urla, İzmir

This article theorizes gastro-driven gentrification as a strategic mechanism through which gastronomy operates as a driver of peri-urban transformation. Moving beyond descriptive overlaps between tourism gentrification, lifestyle migration, and second-home urbanism, the study conceptualizes gastro-driven gentrification as a mechanism synchronizing these processes through gastronomy as a territorially embedded amenity logic. Building on critical gentrification studies, the political economy of food, and research on extended urbanization, the article develops a tripartite framework: (i) gastrodevelopment as the driver, (ii) gentrification as the mediating process, and (iii) peri-urban transformation as the outcome. Empirically, the study examines Urla (İzmir, Türkiye) through a mixed-methods design combining statistical analysis, Geographical Information Systems and remote sensing, policy analysis, participant observation, and semi-structured interviews. The findings demonstrate that gastronomy in Urla operates as part of a multi-scalar urban food machine linking regional planning, municipal entrepreneurialism, supra-local symbolic economies, transnational tourism networks, and speculative land markets. The study further reveals that peri-urban transformation in Mediterranean and peripheral contexts operates less through classical inner-city rent-gap dynamics than through external demand, fragmented inheritance structures, declining agrarian viability, and amenity-oriented land speculation. Conceptually, the article contributes to debates on foodification and gastrofication by shifting the analytical focus from inner-city retail restructuring toward peri-urban operational landscapes embedded within broader circuits of extended urbanization.