THE HONORABLE EXCEPTION:
STATE AND THE SOCIAL PRODUCTION OF CONCRETE SPACE IN ISTANBUL
BY
SİNAN TANKUT GÜLHAN
BA, Middle East Technical University, 2003
MA, Binghamton University, 2005
DISSERTATION
Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for
the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology
in the Graduate School of
Binghamton University
State University of New York
2014
UMI Number: 3641987
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Accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for
the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology
in the Graduate School of
Binghamton University
State University of New York
2014
August 5, 2014
Çağlar Keyder, Chair
Department of Sociology, Binghamton University
William G. Martin, Member
Department of Sociology, Binghamton University
Denis O’Hearn, Member
Department of Sociology, Binghamton University
Kent F. Schull, Outside Examiner
Department of History, Binghamton University
iii
ABSTRACT
This dissertation examines Istanbul as a geographical and historical totality and
focuses on four different and integral parts of this totality: its Ottoman past, its dalliances
with modern planning attempts, the city’s death throes in the face of rabid
industrialization efforts, and its first true real estate boom. These divergent parts are
scrutinized through the relationship between the state and space. This work investigates
the different modes a city takes under different configurations of a state composed of, but
not limited to, cultural, ethnic, religious, class-based, formal, and spatial elements. By
studying Istanbul alone, it is possible to gauge divergent trajectories of the production of
space that the city takes.
The changes in Istanbul’s state-spaces are studied in five stages: the first involves
the urban theory that engendered my critical stance on Istanbul and the production of
space and how revolutionary urbanism can be harnessed to a re-evaluation of a semiperipheral metropolis. The second part is related to an attempt in unraveling the early
modern historical characteristics of the city and its overdetermining role in the formation
of state mechanisms. The third part unearths the rupture that modernity instigated in the
urban fabric and conjoining state institutions and mentalities that shaped the city. The
fourth part focuses on the industrialization and population boom of the second part of the
20th century and locates the consequence of social developments in the urban space: the
squatter settlements, the gecekondus. The fifth part grasps the cycles of boom and bust in
the real estate investments in Istanbul and is concerned in the concrete production of
space of the five decades since 1965.
To locate the configurations of state-space in Istanbul, four elementary
iv
components that create the state-space relationship are employed in this analysis:
territory, place, scale, and networks. Amidst the interplay of these elements, the emergent
middle class in Istanbul and its social and historical moorings in the urban built
environment are revealed to be rooted in the erstwhile squatters, in the gecekondu areas.
v
To my father and uncle,
For they taught me the “Builders’ Song”
vi
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This work is a product that came out of a travel through a long and winding road,
which I traversed mostly alone. I have a habit of keeping the work to myself until I
believe it is finished –but, not polished- form emerges, until the ideas come to life in their
final shape and acuity. So, any flaws in the following pages are entirely mine.
I have not used any institutional funding for the research and the writing process. I
made a decision in the beginning to protect my peculiar writing style and the way I
construct ideas and arguments. For that reason, it took longer than usual –five years, from
start to finish. I worked as a white-collar employee during my research process and as an
adjunct lecturer at both private and state colleges in Turkey during my writing. I am
especially indebted to my fellow white-collar workers and to my students and colleagues
throughout this long process.
One of my white-collar fellows from those days, Mustafa Akçınar, who later
became a colleague as well, merits special thanks. He provided the initial impetus and
persuaded me that I should sit down and write –instead of spending precious moments of
my life to make some bosses richer, and some other white-collar workers well-fed and
employed.
I was perhaps not one of the most enthusiastic students in Professor Çağlar
Keyder’s classes, but, I can easily claim that I have been one of his most avid readers. I
had the chance to have him as the chair of my committee. His writings provided the
sociological basis and questions unearthed in this work. I am indebted to him, for not
only his role as a helpful chair with lots of constructive criticisms, but also for his role in
Turkish social sciences since he laid out the fundamental questions many sociologists in
vii
Turkey are still seeking answers for.
Professor William G. Martin taught me the necessity of patience, meticulousness,
and ambition to seek out the invisible layers of historical problems. Professor Martin’s
classes instigated a new form of consciousness that social inequality can only be
overcome by dissecting the sociological underpinnings of the reasons. I, of course, thank
other members of my committee for their important contributions.
Professor Sencer Ayata deserves a special thanks, because in my quest as an
academic he was the first one to grab my then flimsy and ephemeral attention with his
urban sociology class when I was just an undergraduate student. Professor Ayata and I
had long discussions in those days and these discussions were foundations of my
understanding of social sciences and how one can carve a grasp of social phenomena out
of seemingly unrelated issues.
Kenneth Barr is another influential figure in this dissertation. I only have had the
chance to work with him during my undergraduate years. His ideas, his open vision of
academia, his helpfulness, honesty, and friendship were the main reasons why I went to
Binghamton. I now understand, how a small bar like Belmar can have immense effects in
the production of space.
In Binghamton, I have had many good friends. Though none of those friends have
known what I wrote in this dissertation, they contributed dearly to my project. Evrim
Engin not only pushed the envelope, which is my mind, she continuously pinned me
down to theoretical dead-ends and always lent me a hand to get out of these seemingly
endless conundrums. Çağdaş Üngör was a source of support during my bleak and dark
years in Istanbul. I would especially like to thank friends who shared my pain and my joy
viii
over writing –in addition to my constant enthusiasm for a good drink and great
conversation: Utku Balaban, Nazan Bedirhanoğlu, Kaya Akyıldız, Marcin Grodzki,
Güllistan Yarkın, Çağrı İdiman, Axel B. Çorluyan, Kristen Tran, Nikolay Karkov, Müge
Serin, and Hakan Atay.
I would also like to thank Şafak Erten, who read this dissertation, and moreover,
shared his ideas on practically whatever I have written so far. He is possibly the best
friend one can have and whenever he was around my often miserable life turned into an
odyssey to the moon. I do not recall a word I have had with him that did not constantly
turn into sparks in my mind.
I owe much to Professor Feridun Yılmaz in Bursa, Uludağ University. He has
inspired me with a new belief in academic oeuvre. Also, colleagues and friends in Bursa
were of much help during the process of writing this dissertation. Especially, during the
heady days of May-June 2013 and the summer of 2014, the friendship of Hüseyin Çellik
was invaluable. I would also like to thank Mustafa Demirtaş, Hasan Yeniçırak, Bahadır
Uzun, Hüseyin Damak, Müslüm Demir, and Berkay Altunay.
When I was twelve or thirteen, my father, Ihsan Gülhan, told me about Nazım
Hikmet. One of the first poems he recited from Nazım Hikmet was the “Builders’ Song.”
And he and I saw together how every one of the stanzas coming out of Nazım Hikmet’s
pen decades ago were true at the end of the 20th century. Later, my uncle, Ismail Yeter,
showed me how the builders worked, lived, thought, and persevered. My father imagined
this project, my uncle has seen it as a fata morgana. What befell on me was to pen their
dreams, to write their travails. They had the vision, I had the opportunity and ambition to
turn that vision into real, concrete, tangible words. I hope they can find a part of their
ix
Istanbul in this work, that their work is told as alive, as vivid, and as searing as the stories
they told me when I was growing up. My mother, Sevil Gülhan, was an indefatigable
source of resilience –a word frequently misplaced, but, I assure you, certainly apt in her
case- who helped me weather the innumerable storms of my life. If my father and uncle
had the vision, she had the wherewithal to bring the dreams into life. If only she was born
somewhere else at some other timeline. My brother, Ilhan Gülhan, has never quit being
there for me. Without my family, this work could not have come to fruition.
This work is a profound expression of joy. I was bereft of joy for a long time, and,
hence, my words were stale, my pen was dry, my drive was pointless. I owe much of
regaining what I have lost in terms of the joy of life to N. Pınar Özgüner. She taught me
how to enjoy a laugh again. I took her patience for granted –while I was buried in my
office, writing. Thanks to love we built bit by bit, that joy we found in each other’s
minds, this work is complete as befits Istanbul. In the end, I owe all of it, for better or
worse, to Istanbul.
x
Table of Contents
LIST OF TABLES ...........................................................................................................XV
LIST OF FIGURES ....................................................................................................... XVI
1 INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................... 1
1.1 Purpose of the Study ..................................................................................................... 7
1.2 Approaching the Object: Unit of analysis................................................................... 10
1.3 Towards an Understanding of the Modalities of State-Space: Contributions and
Possibilities .................................................................................................................. 12
1.4 Chapter Layout............................................................................................................ 33
2 THEORETICAL UNDERPINNINGS........................................................................... 39
2.1 The Site: Istanbul as an Aleph .................................................................................... 40
2.2 The Social Production of Concrete Space: Towards unearthing Space as Commodity
....................................................................................................................43
2.3 The Urban Revolution: Theoretical practice and the Question of the State ............... 51
2.4 An epistemology of State-space(s) ............................................................................. 57
2.5 The Spaces of Class: Divergent Representations of Space......................................... 59
2.6 The State-Space in Turkey: The State as an Episteme ............................................... 62
2.7 New State-Spaces and the Emergence of Unhindered Boosterism ............................ 65
2.8 Method
.................................................................................................................. 69
3 EMERGENCE OF AN OTTOMAN URBAN TOPOGRAPHY .................................. 74
3.1 Land tenure in Ottoman Istanbul ................................................................................ 78
3.2 Commerce and the Ensuing Incorporation to the World-economy ............................ 86
3.3 The Spatial Characteristics of Classical Ottoman Istanbul ......................................... 95
3.4 Qualities of Pre-modern Istanbul’s Urban Fabric ..................................................... 102
4 IMPOSSIBLE PLANS AND THE CENTRIFUGAL SPATIAL FORCES: URBAN
xi
PLANNING AND MUNICIPAL ORGANIZATIONS IN MODERN ISTANBUL ..... 119
4.1 Plagues and Cholera: Hüzün and Tristesse and The Breaking up of a Spatio-Physical
Order
................................................................................................................ 125
4.2 Rationing and Rationalizing Urban Space: Early Attempts in Planning in the Ottoman
Istanbul
................................................................................................................ 132
4.3 Cosmopolitan Istanbul: Population and Ethnic Distribution of Neighborhoods during
Fin-de-Siècle ................................................................................................................ 140
4.4 An Uneventful Series of Urban Plans: Tanzimat and Attempts in Reforming the
Urban Space in Istanbul .................................................................................................. 152
4.5 Try Again, Fail Again: A Fruitless Series of Planning Attempts, von Moltke, Bekir
Pasha, Arnodin, and Bouvard ......................................................................................... 158
4.6 The Demolition of Walls .......................................................................................... 165
4.7 The Expansion of the City: Railroads, Grand Boulevards, and Public Squares ....... 167
4.8 Modern’s Calling: The Urge to Urban Planning....................................................... 174
4.9 Henri Prost, Modernity without Modernism............................................................. 181
4.10 Prost in Turkey: The Mystery of the Lost Report and the Pains of an Urbanist..... 190
4.11 New Planning Commission and the Board of Professors: 1952-1956 .................... 197
4.12 Menderes and the Reproduction of Haussmannism in Istanbul.............................. 201
5 MEANDERING THE PATHWAYS TO THE PERIPHERY: THESES ON THE RISE
AND FALL OF THE GECEKONDUS........................................................................... 209
5.1 The Gecekondu as a (Theoretical) Problem.............................................................. 214
5.2 Gecekondus as the Denigrated Growth Machines in Istanbul: Towards a Politicaleconomy of the Quiet Encroachment.............................................................................. 223
5.3 A Concise History of Gecekondus............................................................................ 234
5.4 A Genealogical Look at the Origins of the Gecekondu ............................................ 243
5.5 Theses on the Rise and Fall of the Gecekondus ....................................................... 261
5.6 The Development of Land Tenure in Turkey ........................................................... 274
5.7 Municipal and Institutional Organization of Istanbul ............................................... 281
xii
5.8 Charles Hart and Zeytinburnu ................................................................................... 294
5.9 Squatters in the Time of Cholera: Impending Epidemics and the End of Turkey’s
Belle Époque ................................................................................................................ 305
5.10 The Rise and Fall of Gecekondus: The not-so-quiet Encroachment of the May Day
Neighborhood ................................................................................................................ 310
5.11 From the Objective to the Subjective: May Day Neighborhood and Residual
experiences of an urban sojourner .................................................................................. 328
5.12 The Distance that Brings Us Closer: Differences, Similarity, and Simultaneous
Histories
................................................................................................................ 349
5.13 Bridging the Theoretical Gap: From Rural Societies to the Urban Areas,
Transformation of the Petty Commodity Producers ....................................................... 362
6 BUILDING THE MIDDLE CLASS, BUILDINGS FOR THE MIDDLE CLASS: THE
STATE-CORPORATE ALLIANCE AND THE GREAT HOUSING RUSH OF THE
2000S
.................................................................................................................... 378
6.1 The Actors: Proponents of the Political-economy of Production of Space in Istanbul
..................................................................................................................390
6.2 Production of Housing in Istanbul: Agents, Actors, and Re-ordering of the Statespaces
..................................................................................................................395
6.3 Social and Economic Trends in the Making of Space: Istanbul and Turkey ............ 409
6.4 The Yapsatçı as a Bridgehead of Real Estate Development ..................................... 420
6.5 A Transitory Parenthesis: Co-operatives as Middle Class Building Initiatives ........ 438
6.6 The Little Apocalypse of 1999 and the Collapse of the Yapsatçıs ........................... 442
6.7 The Return of Austerity and the Beginnings of State instigated Private Developments
..................................................................................................................445
6.8 The Third Real Estate Boom in Istanbul and Corporate Take-over: JDP, TOKI, and
Enlarged Capitalist Accumulation .................................................................................. 448
6.9 The State-Corporate Alliance and the Fate of State Contractors: Meteoric Rises and
Stellar Falls ................................................................................................................ 462
6.10 The State-Space Conundrum .................................................................................. 477
6.11 The Instances: Representations of Space and the Manufacturing of Desire in Built
Environment ................................................................................................................ 484
xiii
7 CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................ 497
GLOSSARY ................................................................................................................... 510
BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................... 530
xiv
List of Tables
Table 4.1: Population of Istanbul between 15th and 20th centuries ................................. 142
Table 5.1: Istanbul Population and Annual Average Growth ......................................... 247
Table 5.2: Squatter Houses in Important Turkish Cities................................................. 250
Table 5.3: Turkish Urban and Rural Populations ........................................................... 261
Table 5.4: Istanbul's Population as a rate of Turkish Population.................................... 282
Table 5.5: Employment Structure according to the type of Economic Activity in Istanbul
......................................................................................................................................... 374
Table 6.1: TOKI housing development in Istanbul districts ........................................... 453
Table 6.2: Home ownership in Turkey and Istanbul, 2000-2011 ................................... 458
Table 6.3: Big 10 Real Estate Developers of Istanbul .................................................... 466
Table 6.4: Survivors of 2001 Economic Crisis ............................................................... 467
xv
List of Figures
Figure 3.1: Istanbul in 1500 AD ....................................................................................... 86
Figure 4.1: The Prost Plan .............................................................................................. 190
Figure 5.1: Construction permits for new housing units in Istanbul 1926-1950 ............ 246
Figure 5.2: Construction Permits for Housing Units in Istanbul, 1954-1965 ................. 246
Figure 5.3: Annual GNP Growth Rate of Turkey 1924-2005 ........................................ 264
Figure 5.4: Average Growth of Economic Sectors ......................................................... 264
Figure 5.5: Annual Average Growth of Istanbul Population .......................................... 265
Figure 5.6: Distribution of Istanbul’s Population according to the Paternal Registration
......................................................................................................................................... 266
Figure 5.7: Distribution of Istanbul Municipalities' Population (TURKSTAT data) ..... 289
Figure 5.8: Ataşehir Map ................................................................................................ 312
Figure 5.9: Share of overall employment according to the enterprise size in Turkey .... 372
Figure 6.1: Actors of new home building: Housing construction permits according to the
type of builders in Istanbul, 1992-2013 ......................................................................... 401
Figure 6.2: Housing Construction in Istanbul by Area ................................................... 409
Figure 6.3: Income Distribution in Istanbul, 2006-2013 ................................................ 415
Figure 6.4: Construction and Residential Permits in Turkey 1970-1991 ....................... 419
Figure 6.5: Construction and Residential Permits in Istanbul 1966-1991 ...................... 419
Figure 6.6: Construction and Residential Permits in Istanbul, 1992-2013 ..................... 420
Figure 6.7: Housing Construction Permits in Istanbul.................................................... 430
Figure 6.8: Annual Average Population Growth in Istanbul .......................................... 432
Figure 6.9: Construction by Building Cooperatives in Istanbul ..................................... 438
Figure 6.10: Housing Construction and Inflation Adjusted Unit Prices in Turkey ........ 448
Figure 6.11: Public Construction of Housing in Istanbul ............................................... 450
Figure 6.12: Public (TOKI) Housing Development Contractors in Istanbul .................. 456
Figure 6.13: Distribution of TOKI housing developments according to the type of
development .................................................................................................................... 457
Figure 6.14: Unit Heat Map of Corporate Housing Development.................................. 470
Figure 6.15: Price Heat Map of Corporate Housing Development ................................ 470
Figure 6.16: Average Size of New Homes Built in Istanbul: 2002-2013 ....................... 475
Figure 7.1: State-space Modality I .................................................................................. 505
Figure 7.2: State-space Modality II ................................................................................ 506
Figure 7.3: State-space Modality III ............................................................................... 508
xvi
Who built Thebes of the 7 gates?
In the books you will read the names of kings.
Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock?
And Babylon, many times demolished,
Who raised it up so many times?
…
Every 10 years a great man.
Who paid the bill?
So many reports.
So many questions.
Bertolt Brecht, Questions from a worker who reads1
1
Introduction
This dissertation examines Istanbul as a historical, geographical, and material
unity, as an urban space produced by the tensions between the processes of state-making
and formations of capitalist relations of production. The main thesis that shaped my
understanding of Istanbul is the need to treat the city as a whole. To be able to grasp the
long history of this great city, one has to bring forward an analysis engrained in the
longue dureé, since nothing in this city has emerged from the thin air, as nothing has
disappeared without leaving deep cuts in the urban fabric –traces that endured.
Today, Istanbul is at the forefront of international spotlight due to its role as the
site of one of the rarest social phenomena in Turkish history: the Gezi uprisings. As wide
scale urban rebellions that shook the city, as well as the country, from early June to midSeptember in 2013, Istanbul took the helm as one of the rebellious cities. My interest here
is oriented towards the culminating effects, the deep waves of social relations and
historical structures that gave birth to Istanbul we recognize today as an urban entity. The
1
Bertolt Brecht, Poems, 1913-1956 (New York: Routledge, 1998).
1
urban entity, and the reality that created that abstract entity are two different things,
which I will grapple with in the chapter on the theoretical underpinnings of this
dissertation.
This work is divided into five parts: the first involves the urban theory that
engendered my critical stance on Istanbul and the production of space and how that
revolutionary urbanism can be harnessed to a re-evaluation of a semi-peripheral
metropolis. The second part is related to an attempt in unraveling the early modern
historical characteristics of the city and its overdetermining role in the formation of state
mechanisms. The third part unearths the rupture that modernity instigated in the urban
fabric and conjoining state institutions and mentalities that shaped the city. The fourth
part focuses on the industrialization and population boom of the second part of the 20th
century and locates the consequence of these two interlocked developments in the urban
space-namely, in the form of the squatter settlements, the gecekondus. And finally, the
fifth part grasps the cycles of boom and bust in the real estate investments in Istanbul and
is concerned in the concrete production of space of the last five decades, since 1965.
When I began writing this thesis in 2009, the Turkish newspapers were rife with
news of urban development projects: Donald Trump-the behemoth of the American real
estate market- recently announced a joint project of condominium towers with a fullfledged shopping mall located in central Istanbul with a glitzy high society party attended
by a thousand prospective buyers; Zaha Hadid’s urban renewal project for Kartal-the
metropolitan gates opening to Anatolia- attracted attention not only due to its complete
tabula rasa treatment of one of the most congested, and almost crippled, districts of the
city but also with a five billion dollars bill attached to the construction; Zorlu Holding,
2
meanwhile, did not hesitate to sink more than a third of the returns (eight hundred million
dollars out of 2.3 billion dollars) they received from the sale of one of the top-ten
consumer banks in Turkey (Denizbank) to a European bank in a hitherto forgotten stretch
of land that belonged to the Department of Transportation right in the midst of the
projected new CBD growth zone-naturally, their initial sketches indicated an upscale
condominium tower or two adjoining another shopping mall with plenty of executive
office space; Dubai’s monarch Al-Maktum family emblazoned with the vigor of an alltime high sovereign fund thanks to skyrocketing oil prices joined the new gold (or land)
rush by successfully bidding seven hundred million dollars for an eleven acre land plot
that belonged to the Metropolitan Municipality- which served for decades as Istanbul’s
main bus depot, and the central nerve center of transportation for the city. However,
infatuation with towers-the development was presumably to be christened as Dubai
Towers- did immediately attract the ire of the public opinion.2 Meanwhile, TOKI (Toplu
Konut Idaresi, literally: Mass Housing Administration) and the Istanbul Metropolitan
Municipality (with its special quasi-private development company, KIPTAS) announced
new housing development projects while breaking ground at an unprecedented pace of
forty thousand residential units per year.3 Facing the immense power of financial
markets, the ubiquity of land speculation, the immense reconfiguration of Istanbul’s built
2
Ceren Karasu and Gokhan Kosetas, “Trump Towers’a Muhteşem Tanıtım Partisi,” Hurriyet, April 20,
2008; Fikri Turkel, “Ünlü Mimar Zaha Hadid’in Tasarladığı Kartal’ı Ilk Siz Görün,” Zaman, Cumaertesi
Eki, January 12, 2008; Yasin Kilic, “Kartal’a 5 Milyar Dolarlık Dönüşüm Projesi,” Zaman, February 21,
2008; “Karayolları Arazisi Resmen Zorlu’nun,” Hurriyet, May 20, 2007; “İETT Garajı 1.15 Milyar
YTL’ye Dubai Şeyhi’ne,” Hurriyet, March 21, 2007.
Ismail Altunsoy, "Biz Olmazsak Insaat Mafyasi Dogar," Zaman, 31st of October 2007, Ahmet Kivanc and
Yurdagul Simsek, "Carpik Yapilasmaya Dev Nester," Radikal, 20th of November 2006, Emre Boztepe,
"Istanbul'un Trafigini 15 Milyar Dolar Acar," Radikal, 2nd of January 2007, Saray Sut, "500bin Konut
Yapacagiz, Hedefimiz Alt Gelir Grubu," Zaman, 18th of June 2007.
3
3
environment, I thought that at no other time had the “city” undergone such deep cutting
and extensive restructuring; neither the Menderes governments of the 1950s, nor Turgut
Özal could have imagined the extent of transformation achieved by the modern prince of
capital disguised in twin shrouds of real estate (re)development and urban renewal.4 This
oldest, and for almost a millennium-albeit intermittently- the most populous metropolis of
Europe was undergoing its Haussmannesque moment rather belatedly, and under
completely different circumstances.5
Today, in early 2014, all of these real estate development projects unraveled
amidst a new rush for political power. The cultural and political coalition between two
different Islamist movements came to an end and this brought a hitherto unimaginable
web of quid pro quo relationships mostly embedded in trades of cash and influence.6 The
Trump Towers opened in fanfare, its partnership structure changed at least a couple of
times, one contractor had to resign, and Donald Trump’s name stuck only as a very
expensive tag on the buildings. In the half decade since, nothing has happened in Kartal.
Hadid’s blueprints turned into a promise of über-intensive real estate speculation and the
ground has not been broken. With the opening of the Istanbul Anatolian side’s subway
service and the imminent prospect of the Marmaray connection as the ultimate suburban
railway system between the eastern and western parts of Istanbul, Kartal once again came
4
Especially of note here are two essays by Cihan Tugal: Cihan Tugal, “Nato’s Islamists: Hegemony and
Americanization in Turkey,” New Left Review 44, no. March-April (2007): 5–34; Cihan Tugal, “The
Greening of Istanbul,” New Left Review 51, no. May-June (2008): 64–80.
On the demographic scale of Istanbul in early modern history, see, P. Bairoch, Cities and Economic
Development: From the Dawn of History to the Present (University Of Chicago Press, 1991).
5
“Ministers’ Sons, Businesspeople Detained in Major Graft Probe - Today’s Zaman, Your Gateway to
Turkish Daily News,” TODAY’S ZAMAN, accessed January 9, 2014, http://www.todayszaman.com/news334187-ministers-sons-businesspeople-detained-in-major-graft-probe.html.
6
4
to the forefront as the hotbed of rampant urban renewal. Yet, Hadid’s plans stopped at the
legal tracks; it was overturned five times by the administrative courts for the plans were
deemed detrimental to the public good.7 Even if Hadid’s plans found the chance for
application, there is scarcely any proof that it would not succumb to the intensive
concrete building frenzy prevalent elsewhere in the city. Istanbul’s never been fateful
when it comes to plans. Denizbank was bought by Dexia, a Belgian financial behemoth
who started to feel the shattering effects of the 2008 global recession and had to be bailed
out in a joint re-financing operation by the French and Belgian governments.8 To balance
its already fragile checkbook and save itself from the red, the bank sold its Turkish
operations for a sum of $3.6 billion to the Russian Sberbank.9 A more than fifty-percent
return in five years –discounting the exorbitant rate of profits collected meanwhile- is
even above the wildest success stories of the extraordinary hedge fund managers.
Meanwhile, the Zorlu Group used the cash not only for buying the land to build upon, but
also –apparently, as the most recent investigations revealed- to set the bureaucratic cogs
of the authorities in action to raise the zoning permits, to help inspectors overlook the
already dense construction. The glittering shopping mall adorned with four monstrous
concrete towers opened in December 2013 waiting for hungry customers and buyers from
oil rich gulf countries, since Turkish customers seem to no longer be in the mood for the
“Zaha Hadid ve MİA Planlarına Mahkemeden Ikinci Kez Red! | Kartal Gazetesi,” accessed January 9,
2014, http://www.kartalgazetesi.com/23317-zaha-hadid-ve-mia-planlarina-mahkemeden-ikinci-kez-red.
7
Reuters, “Europe Approves Dexia Bailout,” The New York Times, December 28, 2012, sec. Business Day
/ Global Business, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/29/business/global/eu-approves-dexia-bailout.html.
8
9
“Sberbank close to Buying Dexia’s DenizBank in Turkey - Today’s Zaman, Your Gateway to Turkish
Daily News,” Today's Zaman, accessed January 9, 2014, http://www.todayszaman.com/news-281448sberbank-close-to-buying-dexias-denizbank-in-turkey.html.
5
shopping craze. Al-Maktum royalty’s plans transpired to be short-lived; the
administrative courts did not turn a blind eye to them as they did to the Zorlu family.10
The actual zoning limits to construction on the lot made construction impractical, or,
rather not-profitable for the amount paid; they did not pay the full price of the title to the
Istanbul metropolitan municipality, hence, the land returned to its original owner.
Istanbul mayor, Kadir Topbaş, was sued at the council of state for this sale, punishable by
up to three years in prison. There are rumors that the December 17, 2013 investigations
are related to the IETT land as well.11There are still rumors of another bidding for
prospective buyers, and the Mayor is said to have put the price tag at least at $1.1 billion
for this prime stretch of land in the skyscraper center of Istanbul. Finally, TOKİ and
KİPTAŞ, fulfilled, and surpassed, their goals of producing 500,000 housing units in
Turkey and more than a fifth of those in Istanbul, even if, contrary to their initial
announcements, only a sliver of those were built as social housing. These two state
companies flooded Istanbul’s urban real estate market with over-priced, hyper-inflated,
glitz-laden homes aestheticizing a mix-up of Stalinist architecture of mass housing
complexes with a glimpse of post-modernist neo-baroque and Greek revivalist themes for
the wealthy and powerful, hand in hand with a plethora of developers- the nouveaux
riches of yet another imperial ascendancy of Istanbul. In the beginning, everything went
“İETT Land Payment Halted by Ongoing Trials - Today’s Zaman, Your Gateway to Turkish Daily
News,” Today's Zaman, accessed January 9, 2014, http://www.todayszaman.com/news-112607-iett-landpayment-halted-by-ongoing-trials.html.
10
“İstanbul Mayor to Stand Trial for Abuse of Authority - Today’s Zaman, Your Gateway to Turkish Daily
News,” Today's Zaman, accessed January 9, 2014, http://www.todayszaman.com/news-215137-istanbulmayor-to-stand-trial-for-abuse-of-authority.html; “Prosecutor Removed from New Graft Probe amid
Concerns of Cover-up - Today’s Zaman, Your Gateway to Turkish Daily News,” TODAY’S ZAMAN,
accessed January 9, 2014, http://www.todayszaman.com/news-335036-prosecutor-removed-from-newgraft-probe-amid-concerns-of-cover-up.html.
11
6
quite smoothly, booming real estate market, rising rent levels, a redistributive state policy
unmatched in scale and scope thanks to the breaking up of the floodgates of rampant
speculation.
Yet, as a student of this majestic city, I had to admit, the moment of such
speculation was neither unprecedented, nor unequalled. Istanbul definitely had a
mesmerizing power over the ones who controlled her. The more I write, read, experience,
touch, be touched, and ultimately transformed by Istanbul herself, the more I sense that,
this Aleph of the Alephs, was established as an imperial capital of power. Istanbul
corrupts, absolute spaces of Istanbul corrupt absolutely. Thus, this text is the story of
Istanbul in her various different lives, a tale of incorruptible decaying force of urban
reality.
1.1
Purpose of the Study
This dissertation examines the production of space that gave birth to several
Istanbuls with a particular emphasis on the state’s determining role. The “new” Istanbul,
in close inspection, is yet another novelty indebted to the profound contributions made by
the central, and centralizing, authority of the state. The unraveling of the state and space
conundrum at the level of spatial organization is the object of analysis in this dissertation.
Focusing upon the production of concrete space and its integral components, real estate
development, urban re/development and/or renewal, the construction industry, and the
urban process in general, I will primarily grapple with the historical processes of the
production of built environment. My objective in this dissertation is firstly, to pose
Istanbul as a theoretical question. What would that entail, how could a city be a
theoretical problem? Istanbul is first, and foremost, a construct, a second nature, a space
7
that is produced by means of human endeavor that traversed through variegated relations
of production, relations of consumption, relations of theoretical practice, ideology,
historiography, and as a historico-geographical entity made itself –or, reproduced itselfas a totality.
In doing so, I will deal with the structure and organization of the production of
space in Istanbul. Here, I develop an explanatory framework that is capable of portraying
the transformation of the production of space, its components in the state-making,
inasmuch as the metamorphosis of the socio-spatial conflict in Istanbul led to the
emergence of new modalities of state-spaces. The prevalent, and puzzling, question here
is the incipient effectiveness of the state in the last two decades, and the emergent
reconfiguration of the primary agents in the housing market.12 The contemporary state in
Turkey, unlike preceding periods of boom and bust cycles, has undertaken an active role
in promoting urban (re)development, either through opening up a swath of hitherto
pristine land that borders metropolitan regions (through redrawing laws on forest
reservations) to private development interests,13 or by privatizing public land by dint of
joint housing development projects.14 The institutional and social framework for the
See A. Öncü, "The Politics of the Urban Land Market in Turkey: 1950–1980," International Journal of
Urban and Regional Research 12, no. 1 (1988), Kemal H. Karpat, The Gecekondu : Rural Migration and
Urbanization (Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976).
12
One of the key points of contention between the AKP government and the secular elite in their first years
of government was the planned amnesty for the unlawful occupants of the degraded/converted forest lands.
According to the proposal of the Erdogan government -submitted to the parliament as a change in the
clause 2-B of the Forest Law therefore known by public as the 2B controversy- the degraded/converted
forest lands were to be sold to the current private occupants with prevailing market prices. Some estimates
pointed out that this would bring in 25 billion US Dollars as extra budget revenues. Gürhan Savgı, "2-B
Yeniden Geliyor Hedef 25 Milyar Dolar [Back to the 2-B(Reform): Target 25 Billion Dollars] " Zaman, 0410 2008.
13
A particular characteristic of urbanization in Turkey is the shape of land ownership. According to the
reports of the Ministry of Environment and Forestry, 69% of the land in the province of Istanbul is publicly
owned, and of this 49% is forest land. N. Musaoglu et al., "Istanbul Anadolu Yakasi 2b Alanlarinin Uydu
14
8
former was set up by the residual forms of housing development, namely the self-help
housing of the gecekondus, or through the small-scale production.15 The encroachment of
the urban land, the Turkish model of suburban sprawl or what Keyder and Öncü
described as the globalization of a Third World metropolis, has been costly in terms of
natural habitat and greatly contributed to a solidified feeling of urbicide in Istanbul.16
An important role in my research in this dissertation was given to home building
as a matter of analysis. Not only because housing today represents a tremendous
transformation both in regards the structural features of Turkish economy by dint of
rampant real estate speculation and consequently in terms of incisive reconfiguration of
the built environment, but also, house itself ensconces the kernel of all social relations in
its innocuous reality: its form, its production process, its circulation. All these
characteristics make up a multi-layered expression of totality. Three developments mark
this structural transformation: first, the unprecedented intervention of the state in urban
development; second, the withering away of small-scale self-employed contractors and
the shifting of hitherto dominant logic of production of space-and state spatiality, and
Görüntüleri Ile Analizi" (paper presented at the TMMOB Harita ve Kadastro Mühendisleri Odası 10.
Türkiye Harita Bilimsel ve Teknik Kurultayı, Ankara, 2005). It is crucial to note that private ownership of
land, agricultural or urban, is a relatively novel phenomenon in Turkey. Land had become a commodity in
1858; the private property rights on land was extended to foreigners in 1867. Çaglar Keyder, State and
Class in Turkey : A Study in Capitalist Development (London ; New York: Verso, 1987), 43. I Tekeli and S
Ilkin, Cumhuriyetin Harci, 3 vols., vol. 3 (Istanbul Bilgi Üniversitesi Yayinlari, 2004).The full
development of commodification of housing had to wait until 1965, when the “Flat Ownership Act” passed
in the parliament. See,.B. Batuman, "Turkish Urban Professionals and the Politics of Housing, 1960-1980
(1)," METU JFA (2006): 61. The dominant relations of private property ownership of land had long been
confined since the state appeared to be the unquestionable monopoly owner of especially urban land.
Ayse Bugra, "The Immoral Economy of Housing in Turkey," International Journal of Urban and
Regional Research 22, no. 2 (1998).
15
16
C. Keyder and A. Oncu, "Globalization of a Third-World Metropolis: Istanbul in the 1980's," REVIEW
17 (1994), Ç Keyder, "Transformations in Urban Structure and the Environment in Istanbul," in
Environmentalism in Turkey: Between Democracy and Development?, ed. F. Adaman and M. Arsel
(Ashgate Publishing, 2005).
9
finally the altered composition of the workforce-heavily indebted to the success of
subcontracting and various other forms of flexible production schemas- in a rapidly
transforming labor process. As the number of new homes built in the last two decades
attests to an overreaching and ambitious period of growth in the housing provision in
Istanbul, a unique transformation in Turkish society has taken place.17
1.2
Approaching the Object: Unit of analysis
In this dissertation, Istanbul is taken as a geographical and historical totality, and
in four different parts -in its Ottoman past, in its dalliances with modern planning
attempts, through its death throes in the face of rabid industrialization efforts, and in its
first true real estate boom. Although the shape, size, scale and the borders of the city
changed, I intend to take Istanbul as a totality.18 Of definite interest here -more than the
lofty deed of immersing one’s self in the inner workings of a locality, is the fecund
openings, possibilities, broken dreams and promises, and the strange but, continuouscentripetal tendency of the city. For centuries-or, millennia, perhaps- the city has risen
and fallen in the ebb and flow of fortunes of imperial forces and as the core of a historical
unity, has never let the incessant currents of centrifugal and centripetal waves of change
by-pass this beautiful city.19
According to the census reports, from 1984 to 2000 the number of buildings in Istanbul increased 72%,
while the number of housing units sprang 146%. It is safe to argue that in the last two and a half decades
Turkey has undergone a thorough urban revolution -perhaps, aptly put, the “apartment revolution.” The rest
of Turkey has also undergone such revolutionary transformation alongside a population boom.
17
See, for brilliant monographies on localities in Istanbul: Sema Erder, Istanbul’a bir kentkondu Ümraniye
(Iletişim, 2001); Şükrü Aslan, 1 Mayıs Mahallesi 1980 Öncesi Toplumsal Mücadeleler ve Kent (Istanbul:
Iletısım, 2004); Ayşe Derin Öncel, Apartman: Galata’da yeni bir konut tipi (Kitap, 2010).:
18
19
In itself, the city has been a part of a crucial dynamic of Mediterrenean world-economy and the rise and
fall of several World-Empires for at least a millenium and half. See, Stefanos Yerasimos, Ela Güntekin, and
Aysegül Sönmezay, İstanbul: İmparatorluklar başkenti (Türkiye Ekonomik ve Toplumsal Tarih Vakfı Yurt
10
It’s pertinent to point out that a world-historical approach which acknowledges
the Braudelian longue dureé, who spent an important amount of the second volume of his
Civilization and Capitalism on the elusive question of how the birth of a new worldeconomy skipped the Ottoman Empire centered economically, administratively, and
politically almost exclusively around its capital city, and the world-systemic approach
developed by Immanuel Wallerstein, who showed glimpses of an answer to how a
northern capitalism was already in the process of making, even at the apogee of an
ascendant Ottoman world-empire.20 These have been immensely valuable contributions
in envisioning the insuperable waves of building frenzies in Istanbul, how the city was
damned at the end of the first World War, and how it was exalted once more beginning
with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of Cold War, and how it became one of the
engines of growth in a disconnected nexus between surplus-value accumulation at a
grand level (the global circuits of capital) and a national economy, fully subordinated by
a triumphant neoliberal discourse, almost fully owing its existence to the economic power
of the city. Inasmuch as London owes its financial world city status, not to the British
economy or the inner workings of the British production, consumption, and technology,
but solely to its financial prowess and the newfangled white-collar aristocracy of the
business services sector, Istanbul is bent upon loosening its ties to the Turkish economy
in general.
An essential quality of this dissertation is its intent to keep its focus on the urban
Yayınları, 2000); Stefanos Yerasimos, İstanbul, 1914-1923: kaybolup giden bir dünyanın başkenti ya da
yaşlı imparatorlukların can çekişmesi (İletişim, 1997).
20
Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century: The Structure of Everyday Life
(University of California Press, 1992); Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System I: Capitalist
Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century, With a New
Prologue (University of California Press, 2011), 32.
11
built form. Unlike much of the undertakings in the field of urbanism and development of
urban areas in Turkey, my study will primarily focus upon the urban form-either as
gecekondus, or as the haphazardly built yapsatçı lots,21 or, as the gigantic TOKI
skyscrapers and apartment towers formed alongside the newfangled rings of highways
that strangled the historic urban core- and then question through what sort of historicgeographical relations did this urban totality come into being. I chose to embark upon a
chronological study of this Istanbul’s historical formation. Unavoidably, history lurked
beyond all spatial explanations in this one of the oldest and most important cities of the
world. Yet, this is definitely neither a study of urban form, nor an architectural history.22
The aim of this study is but to delve into how predominant forms transformed the
experiences of the city for ordinary human beings, and how the class positions of these
ordinary human beings came into play through urban representations.23
1.3
Towards an Understanding of the Modalities of State-Space:
Contributions and Possibilities
I began writing this dissertation with a simple exploratory question. From the first
Literally meaning, build-and-sell, yapsat was coined in the late 1970s and early 1980s to describe the
small-scale building activities in urban areas. The term applies to the one-man construction companies who
finance their own developments mainly through selling unfinished apartments in the market. Beginning in
the late 1960s, the yapsat type of small-scale housing development overwhelmingly dominated the urban
expansion of Turkish cities. Yapsatçı, with the Turkish suffix –çı, denotes a person who engages in this
kind of building activity
21
22
On the development of urban form in Istanbul, Uğur Tanyeli, İlhan Tekeli, and İhsan Bilgin have written
extensively on the issue; for the development of pre-modern architecture, see Doğan Kuban’s works.
Jean-François Pérouse, Istanbul’la Yüzleşme Denemeleri (İstanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 2011); İlhan
Tekeli, Development of the Istanbul Metropolitan Area: Urban Administration and Planning (IULA,
1994); Erol Tümertekin, İstanbul, insan ve mekân (Türkiye Ekonomik ve Toplumsal Tarih Vakfı, 1997). It
is crucial to note this project owes a great debt to the steadfast research conducted throughout years by
especially Tümertekin and Tekeli, under different contexts.
23
12
moment that I embarked upon constructing the treatise it was evident that Istanbul was to
be my object of analysis. However the usual questions scarcely let me off the hook. What
about Istanbul? What will your study focus on? What is the framework of your analysis?
The birds and bees of Istanbul? The Bosphorus? People? Which particular aspect of the
city will your analysis investigate? What kind of conceptual, historical, or relational piece
will you scrutinize? In the beginning, I had no clear-cut answer to these questions, and,
honestly, it did not make sense to come up with a categorical definition or a pigeonholed
description of social phenomena. Perhaps that’s why the Aleph is apt here as an allegory.
The Aleph is both an abstract and a concrete sign of how urban imagination can play a
fecund and creative thought experiment in my endeavor to conceptualize Istanbul as an
ordinary exception.
Is Istanbul an exception? Of course not. For a student of history, as Fernand
Braudel so aptly pointed out before, events are nothing but fleeting dust in the wind. Yet,
as soon as that wind dies down, the dust and flotsam and jetsam settles, we face the
seriousness of the unchanging power of geography. However I admired Braudel’s
exquisite explanation that treats event as dust, I must admit, I always had a thinly veiled
interest in the beauty, velocity, and viscosity of dust in the wind. Dust and rock-they are
of the same substance. And the thing that turns one into another, in the vicious cycle of
life, could only be time. I imagine that would be Spinoza’s response. Dust and rock,
immanent and ephemeral, time and space, change and permanence: although uncanny,
they seem to me one and the same. Actually, the term Aleph precisely refers to that fact.
Aleph is both unique and not. The Turkish people have a tendency to treat Istanbul as
unique, whereas the opposite is as true as it gets.
13
On top of that, one has to add into the equilibrium Istanbul’s extremely intricate
and articulate history as the capital of three world-empires. Not only was the city shaped
and reshaped many times, but also, each social and cultural context had carried on the
heritage of the previous –akin to the Russian dolls. I have written somewhere else that the
Aleph conjoins an essence of two different objects. First, the one with capital A, the
Aleph, is unique, one-of-a-kind, invaluable, preciously singular pointing to the
exceptionality of the concept. In that sense, Istanbul is exceptional. But, the second aleph,
the one with the small-case a, is just an aleph among others. The beauty of Borges’
allegory lies in his ability to wink at the reader when the main protagonist uttered the
words that there are speculations as to the existence of many other mythical alephs.24 So,
the object of analysis is not spectacularly singular. It is rather one of a series of
exceptionalisms that bring together different phenomena within the confines of its unique
totality.
It is true that Istanbul can be likened to Rio de Janeiro. With its gigantic slum
settlements that cordoned off the whole city –the favela is definitely counterpart to the
gecekondu. The same can be said about most other urban centers of the global South: Sao
Paolo, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Johannesburg, Bangkok, Manila, Mumbai, etc. All of
these cities share the burden of peripheralization, unequal distribution of income,
proletarianization of the hitherto peasant masses during the incorporation to worldeconomy. Overall, especially from the latter part of the 19th century on, these cities were
the solid examples of the growth of underdevelopment. This process was actively
supported by the core Western countries for harnessing the cheap labor of the East (and,
24
J. L. Borges, The Aleph and Other Stories, 1933-1969, trans. N. T. Di Giovanni (Pan Books [ua], 1973).
14
later, the global South) to the cogs and wheels of capital accumulation. Beginning in the
mid-20th century, the global South turned towards a model based on the lessons learnt
from Western modernization and import-substituting industrialization became the
dominant mode of organization of production and consumption. The nation-state was at
the helm during this phase and a series of etatist industrialization attempts led to an
unprecedented population growth in these cities.
By the mid-1970s, a global backlash –disguised under the Cold War realpolitikagainst the ISI mode of state organization culminated in many military coups. Brazil,
Argentina, Bolivia, Mexico, Turkey were among the few. But, only in the early 1980s,
with the center of the world-economy’s move towards neoliberal economic policies the
final blow that devastated the ISI national state-centric developmentalism came to a
decisive halt. In the 1980s, while Reagan and Thatcher deregulated, privatized and
butchered the trade unions, the global South underwent a re-orientation of state policies.
The state withdrew from productive activities. Economic policy was re-drawn on the
basis of Austrian economics: state-owned enterprises had to be returned to private capital,
the competitive qualities of each national economy was to be foregrounded, and
unnecessary investment in productive sectors had to be culled. In addition, price
subsidies on many basic goods –grain, gasoline, electricity, tele-communication, housing
prices, education, municipal services, in other words, almost everything the Marxists
deemed as collective consumption- was removed. This new system inaugurated a homo
homini lupus scene globally where each national economy was left to its own devices to
attract investment. The only way toward economic development was export oriented
growth and cheap production for global markets by employing cheap home-grown labor,
15
which became the newly enshrined principle of development across the global South.
All of a sudden, this made millions of people concentrated in the erstwhile rapidly
industrializing Southern urban metropolises redundant. The golden mantra of the postwar world-economy, the promise of full employment was suddenly nowhere to be found.
Under inflationary pressures both in the North and the South –though, in the South, this
was more often than not a hyper-inflationary descent towards chaos- the social contract
that writ the full employment as the state institutions’ primary responsibility was the first
casualty. Crime rates sky-rocketed. A public political frenzy of justice and order
permeated every city in the world.
Yet, each Southern city has had its own peculiar story in this common trajectory
of massive dispossession of the working classes. Unfortunately, Western urbanists have
had a long tendency to treat the phenomenon of slums under the umbrella term of
underdevelopment or Third World urbanization. A series of different cases, different
narratives, contrasting issues, and last, but not least, divergent ethnic, religious, and
racial issues are lumped into the same urban bandwagon. This is, in essence, reflective of
an earlier Marxian dictum: de te fabula narratur.
While the Western urbanists saw in the slums an unwavering source of agony and
victimization of the working classes, the unconscious symptom underlying this vision
was that one day, a class-based movement would overwhelm global capitalism. De te
fabula narratur implicitly indicates that each social formation follows a strict historical
progression –what you see in one sufficiently developed context will next be your story.
The problem, though, concerns whether that narrative of development ever followed a
straight line of progress, let alone historiographically problematic assumption that
16
development is linear under different contexts. As a matter of fact, maybe that story
would never be another’s story and my story would deviate from the previous examples.
An umbrella victimization of the dispossessed classes does not alleviate the conditions of
those classes, but rather carries the risk that the liberatory possibilities and contingent
potentials are overlooked. Contrary to mainstream representations of his work, Marx
himself did not employ such a simplistic theoretical framework. In Grundrisse, SurplusValue Theories, and the much later published Resultate section of Das Kapital, he argued
in plain sight that what makes labor is the sum of the possibilities.25 What constitutes the
hypothetical political power of the working class is the contingency to disrupt the
dialectics between labor and capital. Only after the 1960’s urban revolutions a
questioning regarding the possibilities entailed in the working class came to center stage.
The great urban rupture brought forward by the new classes –which were born and
nurtured during the unprecedented period of economic growth in the post-war worldhave helped me locate the gist of the problem not in the narratur framework, but in the
endless possibilities the urban question continuously posits.
This does not mean a wholesale objection to the interconnected nature of worldeconomy. That would be a gross misrepresentation. Especially after the Great Recession
of 2007-2009, the essential qualities of circuits of global accumulation of capital became
much more evident alongside their effects on urban structures. The collapse of the
mortgage market and subsequent crash of the inter-bank credit system have led to
historically low interest rates. For the deft central banks of the developing and emerging
25
Karl Marx, Grundrisse; Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (rough Draft) (London,: Allen
Lane, New Left Review, 1973); Karl Marx, Capital : A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes
(London ; New York, N.Y.: Penguin Books, 1981); Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus Value: Volumes OneThree (Prometheus Books, 2000).
17
markets –who learned a great lesson from the 1997 Asian financial crisis in keeping
exchange rates stable- global finance capital heralded cheap and abundant credit. While
speculative capital fled from the safety of below inflation rate treasury bonds in Western
markets, the global South reaped the benefits of their relatively liberalized and flexible
financial markets. However, apart from a few examples in East Asia, that flow of cheap
money did not materialize as an expansion of productive capacities in the South. Finance
capital flowed from the North to the South in huge numbers, but this barely put a dent in
the export-oriented productive sectors. Real estate provided the safest, easiest, and the
shortest path to sumptuous return on capital.
Cycles in real estate speculation and the ups and downs of land rent on a global
scale would be an excellent research agenda, a feat worthy of Kondratieff inspired
political economists.26 In the last seven years, as the financialization of land rent –via,
mortgage loans- collapsed in the North, finance capital flowed in droves to the South. In
places like China, where already depressed levels of wages still have room to contract
and where hundreds of millions of people are looking forward to gaining their welldeserved spots among the “middle class,” this might be sustainable. Here, the ethos of the
middle class, which mystifies and glorifies ownership of automobiles, homes, and
electronic goods has emerged as the panacea. Yet, in a country like Turkey, where the
whole system of production is geared towards exports of cheap second generation
industrial goods (textiles, garments, automobiles, steel, and processed food products), this
D. Harvey, “The Urban Process under Capitalism: A Framework for Analysis,” in Urbanization and
Urban Planning in Capitalist Society (London ; New York: Methues, 1981), 91–122; David Harvey, The
Limits to Capital (Oxford [Oxfordshire]: B. Blackwell, 1982); D. Harvey, “Land Rent and the Transition to
the Capitalist Mode of Production,” Antipode 14, no. 3 (1982): 17–25; D. Harvey, The Urbanization of
Capital (Blackwell, 1985); D. Harvey, “Flexible Accumulation through Urbanization: Reflections on ‘PostModernism’ in the American City,” Antipode 19, no. 3 (1987): 260–86; D. Harvey, Spaces of Capital:
Towards a Critical Geography (New York: Routledge, 2001).
26
18
does not bide well. With one of the lowest rates of education among the OECD countries
–on average, a typical Turkish individual receives 6 years of formal education- economic
growth in Turkey since 1983 has been limited to short bursts of growth financed by flows
of foreign capital immediately followed by dire crises.
In this global flow of finance capital between the North and the South, the real
source of attraction for today’s urbanists has been the centers of accumulation. These
urban nodes of global capitalism are unfettered from their own national circuits of capital
and have become centers of business services and other auxiliary and legal operations.
These unfettered nodes of global capital accumulation have also greatly contributed to the
urban concentration of social injustice. The global city has come to represent a nascent
complex named FIRE: Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate.
Unfortunately, urban analyses in the last two decades are squeezed into two polar
opposites: the South as a planet of slums, and the North as a network of global cities run
by FIRE executives, managers, ultra-rich CEOs, and inhabited by a nascent creative
middle class. The task I set myself here in this dissertation is to move beyond this well
traversed duality and go beyond these choices. Here, I employ urban anthropology in the
hope that anthropology is capable of re-seating the orientalistic urbanism it helped
engender – the most popular example of which was of course The Children of Sanchez, a
study conducted in 1950s Mexico City by American anthropologist Oscar Lewis, and its
namesake motion picture shot in the late 1970s.27 The slums are not the sites of
victimization; yesterday’s slum dwellers are today’s middle class-though they do not
utter that loudly.
Oscar Lewis, The Children of Sanchez: Autobiography of a Mexican Family (Knopf Doubleday
Publishing Group, 2011).
27
19
I use the term middle class in a heuristic fashion. The middle class itself only
appears in social relationships. It is not dependent on economic structures –like,
bourgeoisie and proletariat, nor can it be understood as a position of social status or
cultural capital. The middle class appears at the moment of ideology, where culture
becomes an all encompassing language of power relations, and under late capitalism the
middle class has become an integral element of reproduction of capitalist mode of
production. Hence, the middle class is approached in this work as an exploratory
apparatus and points to the ones who are neither industrial workers, nor owners of means
of production. This middle class is a vast collection of interests, a mediating class that
helped usher state-spaces in a new level of effectiveness.28
On the other hand, perhaps as an obverse image of erstwhile anthropological
orientalism oriented towards the slums, a novel resolute interest in the middle class
presents the gated community as a new urban object worthy of analysis. A tremendous
amount of interest shown in the gated communities owes its existence to the tacit
assumption that the middle class is a social facilitator that overcomes social and
economic injustice. This assumption is not only widely circulated in academic circles, but
also reproduced journalistically in a ubiquitous fashion. I call this the mission civilatrice
attested to the middle class: a neutral, successful, objective, productive and consumptive
class fraction that harbors democracy, an institutional basis of capitalist economic
relations, and technological advancement as ideological anchors. Of course, in close
scrutiny, nothing could be further from the truth. The middle class is based upon its
I owe this heuristic definition to Anton Pannekoek’s short treatise on the changing patterns of old middle
class in fin-de-siècle Europe. See, Anton Pannekoek, “The New Middle Class,” International Socialist
Review, 1909.
28
20
talents in suppressing a plethora of differences: ethnic, religious, racial, class-based.
Essentially, the middle class is the idealized embodiment of the state –in a sense, the
middle class is the state incarnate- and hence, state-spaces (or, the new state-spaces) have
become where the middle class lives, consumes, and produces. What befell a social
scientist is the task to locate this dual existence of the middle class on the cross-section of
layers that make up the state-space. At that point, the main objective of this dissertation
appears, to find the exception to the ordinary in Istanbul, as well as the ordinariness of
urban exceptionalism.
What makes this dissertation unique is its insistence on the exceptionalism of the
ordinary. A certain allure, I admit, exists in the paradigm of global cities: the attraction of
worldwide circuits of capital, mind-blowing mushrooming of the gated communities, the
triumphant pilgrim’s progress of the nascent middle class, and the mechanisms of
political power embedded in transnational networks. Yet, in the beginning, I set my eyes
on a more alluring empirical object: the historical and geographical totality of a city,
Istanbul.
I will make my understanding of totality clear in the next chapter when I discuss
Henri Lefebvre’s thought and his conceptualization of totality. In this dissertation, I
perceived Istanbul’s totality in two integral parts: the first is on the paradigm of historical
sociology and its possible resonation within urban sociology. The third and fourth
chapters are built on top of that paradigm. The second part continues the historical streak
but turns its focus towards an intersection of urban political economy, urban semiotics,
and culture. The fifth and sixth chapters are written on that premise and are an attempt in
bridging the gap between spatial form, everyday life, language, and politics at a local
21
level. The latter part is where the more audacious statements of this dissertation lies: the
rich heritage of the slum settlements, the transformation of the slum dwellers into the new
middle classes, and the changing shape of state-space nexus are the three underlying
themes.
The difference of the ordinary rises at this moment. Any precursory glance at
Istanbul’s built environment would suffice to augment the feeling that this city is
rudimentarily built. The city is surrounded by shoddily rising reinforced concrete
apartment buildings of bludgeoning boredom, colored by the dull, grey, and amorphous
forms, and is routinely butchered by highways and haphazard housing developments that
seemingly grow out of nowhere, brutally asphyxiated by the monolithic power of the
concrete. Hence, the concrete in the title serves a dual purpose: it symbolizes the building
material as well as the objective situation the city –and its residents- find themselves in.
This is a binding agreement between Istanbulites and the city: the ephemerality of the
dullness here becomes the determining essence of the urban fabric.
This agreement owes its existence –and origin- to a common denominator of all
urban citizens: the deference to the state. Before any religious teachings, before the first
signs of subjectivity, even before the first step is taken on earth, citizens of Turkey learn
how to internalize an omnipresent and omnipotent object: the state. On the one hand,
unavoidably, the state is Kafkaesque in the Turkish context; inasmuch as any other
nation-state, the state is there as the grand inquisitor. Everyone waits at the gates of the
state. Yet, in the Turkish case, the state not only makes you wait, but also waits for you as
well. Neither the citizenry, nor the state give up on waiting for each other. This state is an
extremely centralized and concentrated state with very few resources and fewer resources
22
than it can command at any point. The hollowness of the state is legible – the waiting is
long, the outer shell is hard as granite, but, inside that shell, few have managed to dwell
for long. The actual state is but a shadow of what it projects outwards.
In this dissertation, I examine a problematic which was abandoned by Marxists a
long time ago. Although it is uncanny to point out, I’d like to reiterate that I want to bring
the state back to the center of the discussion. It is true that the state as a determining
component of spatial and geographical relations has been studied in great detail.
However, a great deal of the research agenda was either oriented towards Ankara, where
the overwhelming presence of the central state is obscenely observed, or attuned to
coming up with solutions for underdevelopment, in which the state is treated as
rationally incapable of giving order to an unruly urban phenomenon.
Here, I investigate the different modes a city takes under different configurations
of a state –composed of, but not limited to, cultural, ethnic, religious, class-based, formal,
and spatial elements. By studying Istanbul alone, it was possible to gauge divergent
trajectories of the production of space that the city takes. The starting point of this idea is
the determining role played by the state on the formation of urban geography. However,
this does not imply that the state is a thinking, reified object. On the contrary, the state
acts upon the city through a mix of conscious, unconscious, and unintended actions. The
agglomerations of these conscious, unconscious, and unintended actions make up what I
understand as the state-space. It is also imperative to underline the fact that this whole
process is neither static, nor a one-way relationship.
To unearth the configurations of state-space in Istanbul, I paid predominant
attention to four elementary components that create the state-space relationship: territory,
23
place, scale, and networks. These four do not carry unchanging qualities that one can
freeze in time, but rather dynamic relations in constant flux, and, hence, they can only be
recognized historically.
The easiest to describe, but to hardest to pinpoint, among the four elements of
state-space relationship is territory. I define territory as an aspect of urban geography,
where borders, limits, boundaries, and uses of land are made by the intricate play
between the state and social forces. What is defined by the state as urban? Where is out of
bounds? How does a certain state institution enter the fray to define what is within the
territorial limits of the city? How is outside defined? What are the principles and
ideological and practical considerations of the state in delineating the borders? Who are
the citizens of the city? How is urban citizenship defined? What is the distribution of
population within the pre-determined territory? What are the boundaries of different
religious, ethnic, and racial groups, and in the Ottoman case, how are the relations
between different millets structured within the given territory? How does the city expand?
Are the planners, political decision-makers, or immigrants the predominant actors of
territorial expansion of a city? These questions are explicable through the study of
territory encapsulating the urban structure, both from within and outside.
Place, on the other hand, is the most theoretically seductive of all four. While
urbanists have a certain soft spot when it comes to discussing the role of place, the fertile
possibilities of social interaction harbored in locality, plenty of research has been
interested in actual geographical coordinates –basically, in territorial aspects. Treated as
such, place is nothing but a vector, it is not described, as it should be, as a set of
meanings, as representations of space. What I suggest in understanding place is deeply
24
related to how we grasp subjectivity. For instance, the notion of place and its relevant
patterns of subjectivity ensconced in the capital of a world-empire and in a rapidly
expanding industrial center of a peripheral underdeveloped nation are completely
different things. Inasmuch as imperial hubris starkly contrasts with the melancholia
grounded in the gradual feeling of collapse, a forceful centralizing gravity and a dazzling
speed of centrifugal withering of power are separate from each other. Local identities
built around incessant waves of cholera, plague, fires, and catastrophes born out of
constant warfare are not comparable to the interplay of fast commodified neighborhoods,
a burgeoning drive for consumption complete with shopping malls, high rises, and
suburban living. As an extension, the place of the Marxists is essentially not comparable
to the place of liberal mainstream geographers, and the difference is no less than the gap
between how urban planners conceive locality and how sociologists operationalize it as a
dependent variable. Similarly, the gated communities of the advertisement agencies –
although seemingly pointing to a similar phenomenon- are not the same thing as the
construct of these class indicators in the sociological imagination.
Place, in itself, is the site of nominal collective memory. It is where the irascible
remembrance etches itself in the collective conscience--where signs, symbols,
symbolisms, names, references, utterances, phonemes, and language that binds all of
these together meet. The dreams and creativity of people who reside there and the
ongoing insurmountable destruction of time intertwine at that place. The flow of
everyday life, routine imbued with politics, the pains of poverty and wealth, all come
together as an almost imperceptible nature.
Scale, the third layer of understanding state-space relations, has only begun to
25
gain its prominent position recently within urban social sciences. Yet, like other useful
concepts, the study of scale is laden with an incipient danger, turning it into a cure-all
explanatory device, a sort of deus ex machina. In my conceptualization of scale employed
in this dissertation, scale serves two main functions. First, it is a collection of capabilities,
inherent abilities of social actors on the whole of the urban structure. Among these actors,
the state has an exclusive monopoly via its power to define and impose scales on the
spatial framework. Therefore, a certain tendency to treat scale as mere state-making
activities is foregrounded, especially in the Turkish social science circles. As a corollary,
such perspectives that are primarily focused on the unhindered development of statemaking are limited in their assumption that the scale is nothing more that intra and interstate levels. Although it is true that scale is part and parcel of a series of relations that
makes intra and inter-state relations possible, it risks relegating scale as a mere interface
between the state and the city.
Thus, in my view, a second re-evaluation of scale is in order. This should be a
more comprehensive reformulation of scale that takes into consideration the relative
concentration of social, economic, political, and cultural relations. In other words,
economic capital has a certain predetermined scale of its own: holding companies, joint
stock corporations, stock options, bond markets, stock markets, derivatives, hedge funds,
sovereign funds, etc. are basically divergent elements of concentration of social
relationships, and hence, imply different scales. Similarly, social and to an extent,
cultural, capital have their own scale: differences in taste, assumptions of refined taste
and aesthetics –or, what makes taste socially distributed- country clubs, golf clubs,
alumni organizations, public radio memberships, library cards, reading groups, faith-
26
based institutions, etc. Scale is made up of the distances, of changing arrays of the
qualities of social, economic, and cultural qualities.
In the Turkish context, the state holds an undeniable sway on how individuals are
distinguished among divergent scales. The Friday Prayer communities at the mosques,
fraternal organizations of the Main Streets, parochial schools, political party affiliations,
college graduations, ethnicity and its inseparable markers in distinctive accents of speech,
physical traits, gender roles and their representations in music, cinema, in routine habits
and rituals, all point to the multiple spectral division of scalar relations. And, yes, under
scrutiny, class-based traits make more sense as scalar distributions of relationships.
What makes the state invincible when it comes to understanding the question of
scale is its ubiquitous role in all of these seemingly scattered realms. The state is the
allegorical black hole in Turkey: it breaks and bends, destroys and mutes, soothes and
extends whatever enters its domain. Remember, the veil was banned in college campuses
for a long time in Turkey. The critiques of the government and the military establishment
argued that the headscarf was a political symbol, and therefore, should not be permitted
in the campuses. As the squabble went on for more than two decades, the embodiment of
the Turkish state, Prime Minister Erdogan, uttered an innocuous question: What if the
veil is political? So what? The debate died down, the PM, on his own, single-handedly
redefined the whole question of scale: the gender question is out the window, politics
filled in.29 The state would know what is political, where politics begin and end. A more
proverbial example for the role of the state as a black hole of the scale can be better
29
Robert Ellis and Steve Trumble, “Turkey’s Religious Bent,” Los Angeles Times, accessed July 23, 2014,
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/la-oew-ellis28mar28-story.html.
27
revealed by an older example. One RPP mayor-governor, in the 1940s, was so furious
with the socialists –who went through absolutely horrific tortures during his time- is said
to have shouted out that, “If it’s deemed necessary [and beneficial] to bring communism
to Turkey, we [the state] would be the ones bringing it.” That’s why, as you will read in
the fourth chapter, a history of urban planning in Istanbul is never free from the incessant
nuisance of state intervention.
At that point, the networks promise a respite from the dead-weight of the state.
Unlike scale, networks are, more often than not, in need of formalized systems of
recognition. Yet, on the one hand, a network is a layer where the scale is crystallized. I
would like to describe how to conceptualize –and, visualize- a network, by borrowing a
vivid imagery from Henri Lefebvre’s brilliant work, The Urban Revolution, which
continues to be a constant source of inspiration for me.30 Lefebvre suggests having a look
down under during a night flight; the urban network presents itself in its entirety via the
lights. I think we have to hang onto that vision as a clear image of the networks. It is a
tangible expression of urban networks. And the scale of it is evident as well –a bird’s eye
view is one’s scalar position in the entangled web of different possible positions. The
networks lay themselves out in all their glory: where the territorial distribution and
separation of the city are, where the workers go to work, where they live, who the bosses
are, where the cars are, where the dark corners are located on the urban geography of the
world, which cities are connected to the network, which are not.
Of course, social phenomena do not reveal themselves as evidently and as clearly
Lefebvre wrote: “The urban is most forcefully evoked by the constellation of lights at night, especially
when flying over a city-the dazzling impression of brilliance, neon, street signs, streetlights, incitements of
various kinds, the simultaneous accumulation of wealth and signs.” Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 118.
30
28
as what one sees in a night flight. Some social relations are more powerful than others;
they are inescapably present. Some other connections are barely visible, but they contain
the power of weak links; they are made up of thinly threaded, but resolutely strong webs.
When I first started to write this dissertation, I sought to answer how one person whose
parents immigrated to Istanbul from a provincial village sixty or seventy years before still
keeps on calling herself a member of that provincial community and not an Istanbulite. I
believe the networks –especially the weaker kind- are the party to blame in this social
relationship. And, I believe, I found the answer to that question in Istanbul’s massively
successful redistribution of public land to those immigrant provincials.
The answer is embedded in the redistribution of social resources. A great many
socialist revolutions tried to claim the throttles of power and establish themselves as the
true guardians –vanguards- of the dispossessed multitudes. While the socialist revolutions
–mainly, peasant revolutions, perhaps with the glaring exception of the Paris Commune
and the Bolshevik October Revolution- predominantly depended upon a thorough
redistribution of land –and even the decades’ long reign of the Mexican PRI (Party of
Institutional Revolution) owed its existence to an extensive land reform, Turkish
republicanism largely refrained from meddling with the affairs of large landowners. And,
actually, the state itself was the largest landowner for a long time especially in the
western half of the country.31 What made the republican state enduring –apart from the
The amount of land held by the state was first made public in the late 1990s, during the relative
liberalization of the state institutions. The head of National Estates Administration, Doğan Cansızlar, told
the newspapers that the state owned 54% of land in Turkey and these properties were registered to the
treasury –thence, the Turkish name of public lands: hazine arazisi, means treasury’s land. “Türkiye’nin
Yarısı Internette Satılacak,” Hürriyet, January 17, 2000. Later, Turkish professional urban planners’
organization referred to this well publicized figure. ŞPO, “Plansız Hazine Arazilerinin Satışının
Durdurulmasına Ilişkin Genelge Hakkında Rapor” (Şehir Plancıları Odası, September 13, 2006),
http://www.spo.org.tr/genel/bizden_detay.php?kod=186&tipi=4&sube=0#.U9pqMvmSx1c. According to
the web site of the National Estates Administration, 240.000 sq. kilometers of land –around one third of
31
29
apparent use of coercive methods- was its successful redistribution of urban public land
which lasted decades and helped working class masses integrate into the industrializing
urban centers. Yet, what really made the republic feasible and long-lasting was the
Democrat Party’s post-1950 redistribution of public resources. This statement is contrary
to what the mainstream Turkish scholarship argued: the academic dogma prescribed that
although the Kemalists were scarcely interested in land reform, the peasants’ popular
support for the regime owed its existence to the military achievements of the founding
elites during the War of Liberation. Gecekondus –the Turkish squatter settlements- were
the greatest and most egalitarian contribution of the DP and its right-wing successors in
Turkey. If one of the unique contributions of this dissertation to the urban studies in
Turkey is the transformation of the state-space nexus in Turkey, the other one would be
the greater transformation of rural immigrants into the nascent middle class of the last
two decades.
Istanbul, in her subjection to this unpredictable and spontaneous project of
egalitarian redistribution of public resources, is a young city. It is not the only city that
was subject to this humongous wave of squatting, not even the biggest in terms of size.
What makes Istanbul exceptional is not the size of squatter settlements. It’s not even the
exceptional scale and active networks that partook in the gigantic schemes of expansion.
Istanbul is a moveable feast, a city that always changes shape, but nevertheless stays
intact. This is a city with a peculiar character, a soul of its own, and an unstained
melancholia of times past. Istanbul has an exceptional talent to withstand the corruption
Turkey’s landmass, is registered as owned by the treasury, including 160.000 sq. kilometers of forest land,
20.000 sq. kilometers of arable land, and 60.000 sq. kilometers of land with not distinction. But the web
site does not clearly state the amount of unregistered land –mostly in the areas where cadastral work is not
completed. See, http://www.milliemlak.gov.tr/187
30
of time.
The famed British historian William Gibbon wrote in the 18th century that the
oldest known precursor of Istanbul, Byzantion, was an honorable exception. At a time
when spoils of war, benefits of imperial majesty, extravagance in betrayal and in violence
exceedingly permeated the Roman Empire, Byzantion was the only city that resisted the
siege laid by the armies of Septimus Severus for more than three years. In Gibbon’s
words, at a time when no other city in the whole Mediterranean basin showed the
slightest example of struggle, Byzantion risked its existence in a show of defiance. In the
end, the whole city –whoever remained after a long and torturous period of starvationwas decimated, the walls were said to be demolished by the Severan forces. Yet, the city
was an honorable exception in a sea of backstabbing drudgery of intricacies.32 This
peculiar spirit of resistance is what makes Istanbul an honorable exception.
Although, in 2013, this spirit was gloriously on display during the Gezi Uprisings,
I chose the title way before the beginning of the demonstrations. I thought that the
resilient spirit is not merely about the social movements that brought life to a joyous halt
for the first two weeks of June, 2013. It is also evident in how the city transformed the
millions that flooded the streets, the greenery, the walls of the old city, the rivers, and the
shores of Istanbul in the last century. The city stood against the exorbitant forces of
industrialization, urban sprawl, commodification of land, commercialization of history,
and the touristic assault on its character. People came to Istanbul, not for the sake of
Istanbul, but for the sake of a new, prosperous life they lacked at home. Istanbul gave
herself, and, in return, gained millions of Istanbulites. Different each time, each wave of
Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (W. Strahan and T. Cadell,
1776), 123.
32
31
immigrants ended up contributing to the city in a spectacular fashion. The urban
characteristics remained firm. It has been a long, troubled, arduous, painful, and
destructive process. Yet, the city is intact-however beleaguered, fraught, and broken. In
the beginning of the 21st century, Istanbul gave birth to another state, a strange brew of a
novel state-space.
This happened after a long hiatus between the mid-19th century and the late 20th
century, when the political forces, centralizing agencies first in the modern world-system,
and second, in the Turkish national context stymied the city, Istanbul reinvented itself as
the primary site of capital accumulation and as the promised land of a triumphant class.
This new class, actually a class fraction, is the subject matter of the second part of this
dissertation. The middle class came to be reckoned as the new face of the city. The
problem is related to its emergence and the structures that prepared its appearance. The
third major contribution of this dissertation is the claim that today’s ascendant middle
class owes its existence, its geographical and metaphorical place, and its abilities in
determining the scale of social and economic relations in the city to the erstwhile
gecekondus. The emergence of the middle class in Istanbul is a consequence of the
appropriation of public resources in an earlier era by the gecekondu dwellers. Today, that
particular class fraction has become recognizable in a novel form thanks to extensive
commodification of land, financialization of housing markets, and rampant real estate
speculation.
In other words, an endeavor to understand the characteristic attributes of the
middle class in Istanbul does not only entail research in Nişantaşı, Suadiye, or
Kemerburgaz –some of the most affluent neighborhoods of the city, but it also means
32
incursive research that comprises the erstwhile gecekondu neighborhoods, places like
Zeytinburnu and the May Day neighborhood. I suggest that beyond the typical
expressions of the middle class culture that held automobiles, gated communities, and
higher education in high esteem, a vibrant, particularly Turkish middle class life exists in
the old gecekondu neighborhoods, an urban culture embedded in small-scale producers’
language, life-style, and everyday habits. These old gecekondu districts now play the role
of trend-setters in a wider circle –a reach unimaginable by the old Istanbulite middle
class. And they partly owe their existence to the small-scale entrepreneurial developers
and contractors’ infinitesimal efforts in profit-mongering through the transformation of
the built environment in the last two decades. In this dissertation, I at least hope to shed
some light on how the gecekondus transformed into the new growth machines of an
ascendant middle class.
On the other hand, the question of the middle class and its ideological and
discursive existence is a problem that goes far beyond the confines of this dissertation.
My primary concern here is not the theoretical construct of a new class, but the selfprofessed being of a nascent social phenomenon. My task is to locate the emergence of
the middle class in the matrix made up of territory, place, scale, and networks and to
bridge the gap between the knowledge on state and the practices of space in Istanbul’s
peculiar context.
1.4
Chapter Layout
In the next chapter, I will discuss the theoretical framework underlying the
arguments laid bare herein. I will examine the theoretical issues surrounding the study of
33
Istanbul as an object of analysis and the ensuing questions regarding the empirical study
of the city and space, the spatial configurations of the state and how the spatial form of
housing in Istanbul has come to represent the newfangled urban revolution-in the second,
implicit, meaning of the term according to Henri Lefebvre- in Turkey. The urban
revolution, as hinted by Lefebvre incessantly, replaced the industrial revolution –and as
such, starkly provided a much more explanatory framework than the post-industrial
revolution. In Lefebvre’s view, as the societies increasingly urbanized and rendered any
dialectics of urban and rural obsolete, urbanization replaced industrialization as the main
growth machine of capitalist accumulation. He named this new social and economic
structure as the state mode of production.33 Here, under this new mode of production, the
ubiquitous mechanisms of state-making skilfully disguised its personality through its dual
modes of stealth –neo-liberalism and neo-dirigisme- produced a social space that wed
consumptive production to productive consumption. The last three decades in Istanbul
had bared the stealth, made the invisible glaringly naked to discerning investigators, but,
still, the state mode of production was not simply formed by the capitalistic mode of
production.
The second chapter retains the indelible question of a world-empire’s capital and
investigates the Ottoman characteristics of the city that have irretrievably shaped
contemporary spatial relations. In this chapter, I answer the fundamental Braudelian
question: how does a center of a complex world-empire amidst the intricate and
interwoven structure of cultures, civilizations, economies, and certainly temporalities
33
Henri Lefebvre, Neil Brenner, and Stuart Elden, State, Space, World: Selected Essays (U of Minnesota
Press, 2009); Neil Brenner, “State Theory in the Political Conjuncture: Henri Lefebvre’s ‘Comments on a
New State Form’.,” Antipode 33, no. 5 (November 2001): 783, doi:Article.
34
comes into being? And, more to the point, how does one center of political power evolve,
throughout time and through immense vicissitudes, in its relative weight and how is this
change reflected through divergent and centrifugal geographical qualities of the city? Of
special import here is the peculiar land tenure prevalent in Istanbul, and how the role
played by non-Muslims helped secure an incipient urban social class –a protobourgeoisie of sorts- that played a crucial role in the tumultuous years of incorporation to
the modern world-system in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
In the third chapter, modernity is the protagonist of Istanbul’s emerging life. As
modernity ascended in Istanbul’s tragic history of endless transformations, what I dubbed
as the succession of Istanbul’s various divergent lives is brought under scrutiny. In this
chapter, I situate the spatial responses from a particularly Ottoman class fraction, the
askerî class, the military-bureaucratic class that was made by the state, and in return,
perhaps as an irony of dialectics, they held the state as their hostage, as their ransom for
keeping a hollow social formation alive way after its expiration date. This intervention in
the spatiality of Istanbul from above –from the state elites, professionals, architects,
planners, Westerners, Europeans, sultans, novelists, modernizers and the modernized as
the complete cast- produced a city that is both peculiarly Ottoman, and surprisingly,
though adamantly, unfinished.
Here, the elites -including the power-elites as perfectly pictured by C.W. Mills,
and my tongue-in-cheek neologism regarding the Turkish intelligentsia, the powerless
elites, the professionals, the bureaucrats of the state, intervened time and again with the
requirements of a crumbling empire, from the early 19th century onwards, with the
Tanzimat reforms. Tanzimat (which means reform in old Ottoman Turkish) found its
35
immediate spatial form and the endless possibilities in its engagement with modernity in
İstanbul; i.e., the very encapsulation that gave rise to the set of beliefs ensconced in the
zeitgeist. The disorderly city came to be disciplined incessantly by waves of reformers.
The reformers earned nothing in return but heaps of hüzün, an acerbic, yet enduring
nostalgia, a class-based trait, that defined the early 20th century Istanbul, as well as its
depictions in art.
The fifth chapter focuses upon a truly Turkish phenomenon, the squatter
settlements called gecekondu. Here, I discuss the questions of their beginnings, the
reflections that they elicited from the power-elite, how the squatter houses proliferated in
İstanbul, how that became a consistent phenomenon in Turkish politics from the 1950s
until the late 1990s, and how they fared in terms of the political economy of Turkish
industrialization in the 20th century, and finally, how they began their long and protracted
dissolution in the rampant real estate speculation of the early 21st century. In the first part
of this chapter, I dissect the intellectual, academic, and bureaucratic responses to the
social phenomenon of squatters from the 1940s on. In the second part, based upon a
thorough comparison of my field research, and previous research in two historically
opposing ends of the processes of building gecekondu settlements, in Zeytinburnu and
May Day neighborhoods, I underline their function as the true growth machines in urban
politics, economy, and culture in both Istanbul and Turkey.
The sixth chapter focuses attention toward the actors of an unprecedented wave of
real estate speculation, how thousands of acres were commodified into precious and overinflated housing units with the extravagant encouragement of the state, and how these
new state-spaces became important factors in determining the urban shape and
36
architectural form of Istanbul. Here, as a permanent undercurrent of urban phenomena, I
describe an ascendant Turkish middle class identity in Istanbul. How this new middle
class created their own spatial perceptions as an implicit extension of new state-spaces
while increasingly articulating its connections to the global circuits of capital is one of the
main themes of this chapter. As a consequence, the so-called “new” middle-classes have
not only carved a living space in the core of the metropolis, but they have also claimed
Istanbul of a different kind. Here, a dual play is at stake, the discursive truth tells a story
of Istanbul that fastened itself to the world-economy and gradually partook an
irreplaceable role in the worldwide circuits of capital; i.e., a global city of flows. The flip
side of the coin, however, indicates a massive annihilation of productive capital, a
merciless dispossession of the working classes, and an unyielding belief in the creative
potential of the capital sunk in urban land.
Money does not grow on trees, nor can the seeds of productive expansion of
capitalist accumulation be sown there. What is reaped is intra-class warfare, as the last
months of 2013 showed in its full indecency. In this chapter, I consolidate these loose
ends –the space produced by the whim of middle class, the silent encroachment of the
gecekondus and the ensuing silent flight of the impoverished masses from the urban core,
and discuss how these two anti-thetical processes took place in the space expropriated by
the accoutrements of a neoliberal state apparatus. As the state flexed its muscles through
appallingly populist –and at times, glaringly totalitarian- tendencies and policies, this
gave rise to subsequent new state spaces, and a whole array of newfangled capitalists
from the periphery of Turkish capital accumulation nestled themselves in the seemingly
safe net provided by the all-encompassing state mechanisms of power brokerage and
37
patronage.
38
2
Theoretical Underpinnings
In this chapter, I build a scaffolding which will connect a historico-geographical
theoretical understanding with the concrete reality of the making of Istanbul. Here, I will
tap into several foundational ideas on urban reality, how it is formed, how divergent
trajectories of transformations were made possible, and how sociologists have dealt with
the fleeting phenomena of the urban question.
First, I investigate what Istanbul as an object of analysis might indicate at the
moment one embarks on a research program that aims to make sense of the city as an
expressive totality.1 Then, I portray how the relations between the state and urban space
can be studied from a critical perspective. There, I draw heavily upon a defining moment
in the formation of urbanism in the 20th century. By studying what I call the
epistemological products of the urban revolution of the 1960s, I intend to open a passage
toward the state-spaces.
I interpret state-spaces as both tangible and invisible embodiments and
mechanisms of state actions on the urban built environment. Hence, the state-space is an
indelibly ingrained essence of the city from the outset. But, what befell a social scientist
is to unearth the modulations prevalent in different historical contexts, under changing
historico-geographic conditions. In the final part of this chapter, I briefly summarize my
field research and how I concretely approached my unit of analysis.
For a comprehensive explanation of different modes of totality, see, Martin Jay, Marxism and Totality:
The Adventures of a Concept from Lukács to Habermas (University of California Press, 1986).
1
39
2.1
The Site: Istanbul as an Aleph
In Istanbul, one shall not primarily see a geographical landscape, nor an ocean of
historically differentiated layers of architecture, nor the heart of a particular social
formation which is getting rapidly linked to the other nodes, layers, and scales of global
accumulation, nor the plight of a Third World city confined to the procrustean bed of
slums that continuously produce deviance, sustainable poverty and/or surplus humanity,
nor a revanchist discourse of neoliberalism shrouded in the new clothes of the world-city,
nor an irrepressible memoire involontaire implicitly underlying in all forms of historicism
which seeks an inversion where the modern, in its recurring images of beaux arts or
garden cities, came to gloss over a past that was never there.2 First, an important caveat
should be underlined here regarding my approach to Istanbul. Each one of these
concerns, in itself, valid, relevant, and worthy openings, yet they are, under the current
circumstances of theoretical practice, indicative of a deeper, historically determined
phenomenon where the division of (intellectual) labor reiterates the already existing
compartmentalization; i.e., the urban ideology.3
What I discern in Istanbul is an aleph-not the Aleph, with a capital A, nor a
singular entity, nor an unprecedented attribute of urban phenomena, nor a World-City,
2
Saskia Sassen, The Global City : New York, London, Tokyo, vol. 2nd (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 2001); Zeynep Çelik, The Remaking of Istanbul: Portrait of an Ottoman City in the
Nineteenth Century (University of California Press, 1993); O. Isik and M. M. Pinarcioglu, Nobetlese
Yoksulluk: Gecekondulasma ve Kent Yoksullari: Sultanbeyli Ornegi, 2001; Christine M. Boyer, The City of
Collective Memory: Its Historical Imagery and Architectural Entertainments (Cambridge, Massachusetts:
The MIT Press, 1994); Teresa Pires Do Rio Caldeira, City of Walls: Crime, Segregation, and Citizenship in
São Paulo (University of California Press, 2000); Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (London ; New York:
Verso, 2006).
3
For a discussion of urban ideology, see Peter Saunders, Social Theory and the Urban Question (London:
Hutchinson, 1981), 152–82. For a recent revival of the discussion see K. Goonewardena, “The Urban
Sensorium: Space, Ideology and the Aestheticization of Politics,” Antipode Antipode 37, no. 1 (2005): 46–
71.
40
nor an Ordinary City.4 Instead Istanbul as a subject of scrutiny accommodates a multilinear set of matrices grounded in the social relations of production. Such definition
necessitates an assured footing in the already overwhelmingly beleaguered terrain of
urban theory. What is the cornerstone-perhaps, the essential element- of this complex
matrix? How are we to approach a city unlike any other? Or, how are we to conceive a
city just like another one that can hardly be unique? What makes the urban phenomena
both so speculatively similar under different contexts, and at the same time strangely
unfamiliar? In other words, is it possible to grasp “the city” through a parallax view, that
is as both an in-itself, unique entity and as a mere moment in the universal and total
production of space.5
Unique, in the sense that it entails a name; nominally each city, each spatial
formation is different from another. Istanbul is historically determined; the phases of its
development could not have been more distinguishable, more accentuated than,
Johannesburg, Milano, or Paris. However, each city reproduces similar traits-incumbent
upon a shared matrix of distribution, production, consumption, similar dislocationscriminalization, law and order discourse, the carceral city- similar encroachments-social
classes, urban politics, social movements- based upon a crosscutting and totalizing social
relationships under a capitalist mode of production. It is rather the similarities, instead of
Peter J. Taylor, World City Network: A Global Urban Analysis (Psychology Press, 2004); Jennifer
Robinson, Ordinary Cities: Between Modernity and Development (Routledge, 2013).
4
The city as the Aleph has been a persistent theme in LA School’s study of Los Angeles. See, Edward W.
Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London ; New York:
Verso, 1989); M. J. Dear and Steven Flusty, “Postmodern Urbanism,” Annals of the Association of
American Geographers 88, no. 1 (1998): 50–72; D. M. J. Dear, The Postmodern Urban Condition
(Blackwell Publishing, 2000); M. J. Dear, “The Los Angeles School of Urbanism. An Intellectual History,”
in Urban Geography in America, 1950-2000 : Paradigms and Personalities (New York: Routledge, 2005).
5
41
subjective uniqueness, that rendered an analysis of urban phenomena possible-and
arguably, constituted the kernel of the former. This has been a consistently reproduced
problem of urban sociology since Max Weber raised a similar question in his
groundbreaking work The City, and revived by Louis Wirth’s triadic formula of size,
density, and heterogeneity.6 In my view, Istanbul presents the researcher with an
invaluable opportunity: as an urban structure portraying a rare heterotopia it is the site
where a possibility to bridge the analytical gap between the structured totality and
expressive totality is incipient.7
Finally, it is apt to emphasize that Istanbul represents a fecund universe of urban
study with a population exceeding 13 million people housed in close to 5 million
dwellings, producing almost half the GDP of Turkey, driving the neoliberal exportoriented growth machine as being the main export port to the rest of the world. As the
beacon of post-1980 export oriented industrial growth, Istanbul has also reclaimed its
position as the seat of the political power.8 The genuine Gotham of the Turkish context
has not only become the site of affluence, accelerated capital accumulation, rampant real
estate speculation, but also turned into a junkyard of dreams with a stark contrast of
Max Weber, The City (Glencoe, Ill.,: Free Press, 1958); L. Wirth, “Urbanism as a Way of Life,” American
Journal of Sociology 44, no. 1 (1938): 1; RE Park and EW Burgess, The City (University Of Chicago Press,
1984).
6
7
Lefebvre argued that historically the heterotopic character of the urban structure emerged during early
modernity alongside, and in reaction to, the political character of the city. He further pointed out that
heterotopy is pure difference, hence “[t]his difference can extend from a highly marked contrast all the way
to conflict, to the extent that the occupants of a place are taken into consideration.” Lefebvre, The Urban
Revolution, 38.
Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan’s political career had been catapulted to stardom during his tenure as the
mayor of Istanbul from 1994 to 1998, before abruptly coming to an end during the postmodern coup of 28th
February, 1997, during which period he had to spend 3 months in prison for inciting hatred by reading a
poem thought to be written by Mehmet Akif Ersoy-early 20th century Turkish Islamist poet, who also wrote
the lyrics to the Turkish national anthem.
8
42
income, with novel forms of ghettoization that harbor a peculiar form of a home-brewed
racialization where the Kemalist motto of Turkishness as the “classless, non-privileged,
molten body of people” had faltered both in the eyes of the subject populations and the
power elite, and replaced by a dystopian urban landscape of homo homini lupus. Dotted
by pockets of wealth-symbolized by the newly sprung gated communities, humongous
SUVs, and rabid habits of conspicuous consumption- the city has now come to reckon
with a future where fear and calls for social control, prosperity and misery, exclusion and
protests for a better future are intertwined.
2.2
The Social Production of Concrete Space: Towards unearthing
Space as Commodity
A thoroughly methodical study of urban space would entail first and foremost an
inquiry into the discursive constellation of urban episteme. Arguably this could pose a
curious, but not necessarily productive, task, which would be a discursive analysis of
divergent noumenal qualities of these concepts. Harvey, for instance, refers to the urban
process, instead of urbanization, to emphasize the processual and relational qualities of
space.9 Urban political economy and Marxist approaches, on the other hand, seem at
home with the categorical definitions of real estate development, the question of rent, the
categories of rent (differential rent, type I and type II, absolute rent, monopoly rent), and
definitely the labyrinthine problem of rent vs. surplus value as the prime explanatory
9
See, Harvey, “The Urban Process under Capitalism: A Framework for Analysis.” Also see the relevant
discussion in Neil Brenner, New State Spaces : Urban Governance and the Rescaling of Statehood (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2004).
43
conceptual framework.10 Furthermore, the building industry appears to be of scant
interest for both the sociologist and geographers, and is barely of note in scholarly
journals, apart from the literature on industrial sociology.11 Urban development,
meanwhile, implies a much more problematic phenomenon, and hence serves the
function of mystification regarding the discussion on “creative destruction.”12
The concept of built environment emerged as the unchallenged common ground
without disciplinary reservations and/or epistemological ruptures. However, in my view it
lacks the theoretical refinement necessary for a concept that can be productive for both
the explanandum and explanans, and is rather inclined toward a static treatment of spaceakin to the methodological pillars of urban ecology of the Chicago School.13 Henri
Lefebvre, meanwhile, genuinely contributed to the urban question by historically
juxtaposing the urban revolution with the industrial revolution. Once industrial
production dominated and carried forward the urban development, created boomtowns,
made industrial beacons like Manchester, Chicago, and Los Angeles out of thin air,
dictated the geographical patterns of growth through extensive exploitation of natural
M. Ball, “Differential Rent and the Role of Landed Property,” International Journal of Urban and
Regional Research 1, no. 3 (1977): 380–403; D. Harvey, Social Justice and The City (Baltimore: The Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1973).
10
See, Susan S. Fainstein, The City Builders : Property Development in New York and London, 1980-2000,
vol. 2nd, Studies in Government and Public Policy (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001).For a
historical account of the development of construction as a capitalist enterprise see an excellent work: L.
Clarke, Building Capitalism: Historical Change and the Labour Process in the Production of the Built
Environment (Routledge, 1992).
11
See, Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air : The Experience of Modernity (New York, N.Y.,
U.S.A.: Viking Penguin, 1988); David Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity (New York: Routledge, 2003);
Sharon Zukin, Landscapes of Power : From Detroit to Disney World (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1991).
12
Gottdiener voiced a similar concern in his critique of the Chicago School and put his emphasis on the
production of space approach. See, M. Gottdiener, The Social Production of Urban Space, vol. Second
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985); Manuel Castells, “Theory and Ideology in Urban Sociology,” in
Urban Sociology: Critical Essays (London: Tavistock, 1976).
13
44
resources –the urban agglomeration of the Ruhr Valley, centered around coal, or the
northeastern springboard in the US, and determined the production of space. This was the
structure-in-dominance up until the late 1950s, until the successful consolidation of the
capitalist world economy. Since then it has been the urban structure which determines
and molds the shape of industrial development, as well as the economic structure.14
Hence, my choice of a paradigmatic approach, the production of space –albeit its
shortcomings- provides an ample grounding in both theory and practice.15
Therefore, the main problematic does not merely aim at the discursive structure of
the epistemic scaffolding. In my view, the predominant mode of urban analysis has the
tendency to interpret space as the “product”; the point, however, is to unearth how it is
concretely produced. Hence, the concrete processes of the production of built
environment are the underlying assumption of this dissertation. It is my task to both
scrutinize and overcome the problematic inherent in the social production of social space.
The question is to go beyond the “social” element in parentheses and to pose the nexus
between the abstract and the concrete qua social. The connecting thread lies in the ability
to primarily locate urban space as a commodity. In other words, the building, firstly in its
life as the housing, can only be grasped as an “objectivity,” and second, it is resurrected
“as a congealed mass of human labour,” as the built commodity, for the built commodity
Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford, OX, UK ; Cambridge, Mass., USA: Blackwell, 1991);
Henri Lefebvre, Writings on Cities (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996). For a concise elucidation of Lefebvre’s
understanding of the “urban revolution” see, Andy Merrifield, Henri Lefebvre : A Critical Introduction
(New York: Routledge, 2006).
14
Castells was the first to point out the empirical deficiency of Lefebvre’s paradigmatic approach. He
claimed that Lefebvre’s treatment of space was not only beleaguered by a certain form of utopianism, but
also severely limited in terms of its determinism. For Castells, if the Chicago School was theoretically inapt
due to its ecological determinism, Lefebvre was irrelevant because of spatial determinism. The debates of
the last decade have proven otherwise. Manuel Castells, The Urban Question : A Marxist Approach,
(London: Edward Arnold, 1977).
15
45
exists as a thing that is simultaneously different from the tangible reality of the “building”
and also common to all other commodities.16
Yet, a major question still lingers: Why should city be studied as a first and
foremost an aggregate concrete product? Urban space has been the object of a myriad of
different responses, a good amount of which can be traced back to the epistemological
rupture of the late 1960s.17 Prior to that rupture it was a matter of a war of positions: the
Chicago School elaborately projected onto the space theses ingrained in the logic of
classical economy, thence arose a certain ecology of an overdrawn type of
Robinsonnade.18 On the other hand, the actually existing socialism, after a brief, but
innovative, spell of constructivism, turned oblivious to urban theory as counterrevolutionary, denigrated all attempts in devising a novel spatiality in the name of early
Marx-who saw the development of capitalism best reflected in the urban-rural dialectics,
thereby effectively barred any cogent approach toward a socialist appropriation of
space.19 Then comes the rupture whereupon the study of spatiality as a representation of
urban ideology and/or the grounded locality where divergent interests and layers of
theoretical practice was undertaken in a numerous and prolific fashion. Hence, space is
studied as both a secondary consequence and an ultimate container of capital
16
Marx, Capital : A Critique of Political Economy.
Aleksandra Sasha Milicevic, “Radical Intellectuals: What Happened to the New Urban Sociology?,”
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 25, no. 4 (2001): 759–83; Sharon Zukin, “A
Decade of the New Urban Sociology,” Theory and Society 9, no. 4 (1980): 575–601; M. Gottdiener and Joe
Feagin, “The Paradigm Shift in Urban Sociology,” Urban Affairs Quarterly 24, no. 2 (1988): 163–87.
17
18
Wirth, “Urbanism as a Way of Life”; Park and Burgess, The City.
19
Anatole Kopp, Town and Revolution: Soviet Architecture and City Planning, 1917-1935 (G. Braziller,
1970); Karel Teige, The Minimum Dwelling: L’Habitation Minimum = Die Kleinstwohnung : The Housing
Crisis, Housing Reform, trans. Eric Dluhosch (MIT Press, 2002).
46
accumulation, as the site of class formation -or of the misery of working classes and of
the ghastly setting of Dickensian exegeses- wherein the proletariat ought to grab itself by
the hair and to rise above the confines of an sich consciousness.20 Urban space is studied:
as both a consequence and container of capital accumulation, as the site of class
formation, or as a subcategory where rent, as the reified mediator of social relations, is
summoned to existence through its different lives: absolute rent, monopoly rent and
differential rent. Perhaps as the space gets hollowed out by the temporality imposed by
the requirements of capital in circulation, some attempted to reverse the urban fortunes by
questioning how “the urban settlement “gets built,” instead of the way place figures in the
production apparatus or in the misery of the working class. And yet, the definitive
answer, to an extent teleologically, set the space as a growth machine-akin to a
ceaselessly spiraling thread wheel- left to the capricious and inwardly particularistic
whim of local political coalitions.21
The city is a factory, albeit in a metaphorical and extended sense. It produces
circulation; circulation of commodities, circulation of abstract labor, circulation of
capital-albeit in a fictitious form, circulation of places, circulation of signs, circulation of
power. Risking echoing Henri Lefebvre too closely, I have to recall his words that the
This latter trope can be dated back to Engels’ Conditions of the Working Class in England in 1844, and
Raymond Williams did not hesitate to trace this dystopian, Dickensian vein as far back as the thirteenth
century. See, Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (Chicago: Academy
Publisher, 1984); Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York,: Oxford University Press,
1973).
20
Harvey Molotch, “Growth Machine Links: Up, Down, and Across,” in The Urban Growth Machine:
Critical Perspectives Two Decades Later, ed. Andrew E. G Jonas and David Wilson (Albany, N.Y.: State
University of New York Press, 1999), 247–66; John R. Logan and Harvey Luskin Molotch, Urban
Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place (University of California Press, 2007); Andrew E. G Jonas et al.,
eds., The Urban Growth Machine: Critical Perspectives Two Decades Later (Albany, N.Y.: State
University of New York Press, 1999).
21
47
urban space produces concentration, and furthermore, concentration of concentration.22
The built environment is the constant production and planned destruction of constant
capital, of the consumption fund, and it is of a prolific kind that recuperates and
reanimates both the dead labor and the faux frais of production in itself.23 No commodity
is more complicated, no study of the circulation of capital is more beleaguered, no
analysis of rent is more dubious, no grasp of the labor process is more concealed than
what is already conspicuously absent in an understanding of the built environment. Built
form is of the protean nature, yet, like Menelaus –the mythical but often overlooked hero
of the Odyssey, the forgotten protagonist, the second Ulysses- who shaped his own
destiny due to his powerful grasp of the mythical sage of the sea, Proteus, social scientists
today must try to capture the elusive behemoth in one of its guises.24
Hence, in the second part of this dissertation, from the fifth chapter on, I start
from the singular, from the building, from the city, from the individual dwelling called
gecekondu, as an object of state-making, as the concrete form of state-spaces. In this
state-space exists a pervasive reality, the city as commodity, the built environment as
facilitator of capital accumulation, the perpetrator of a growth machine whose eternal fate
is connected to the centralizing state. Thence arises the object, from the crystallized form
22
Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution.
To recall some of the fertile discussion of the 1970s those of which essentially posed the urban
problematic, see Edmond Preteceille, “Collective Consumption, the State, and the Crisis of Capitalist
Society,” in City, Class, and Capital : New Developments in the Political Economy of Cities and Regions
(New York: Holmes&Meier, 1982); Castells, “Theory and Ideology in Urban Sociology”; Manuel Castells,
“Is There an Urban Sociology?,” in Urban Sociology: Critical Essays (London: Tavistock Publications,
1976); D. Harvey, “On the History and Present Condition of Geography: An Historical Materialist
Manifesto,” The Professional Geographer 36, no. 1 (1984): 1–11; C. G. Pickvance, “Marxist Approaches
to the Study of Urban Politics: Divergences Among Some Recent French Studies,” International Journal of
Urban and Regional Research 2, no. 1 (1978): 219–55.
23
24
Paul Plass, “Menelaus and Proteus,” Classical Journal, 1969, 104–8.
48
that is the object of accumulation, the all too innocuous and innocent aliquot part of the
city: the residential building, or its crystalline form of housing as commodity. More so
than the building in its multiple modalities, the curious moment of production of space as
reflected in the concrete building presents my intention. It is the moment of resurrection,
when the dead weight of generations is revived and is “infuse[d]...with life so that they
become factors of the labour process” and ushered into a new life to form new products.25
It is the built form that is at once a commodity and dead labor, embodies in itself the
dialectics of rent and profit, and is located at both levels of circulation and reproduction.
Hence, the urban space is the reified mode of production. It is production per se; it
is the production personified in the totality of relationships that perpetually restructures
the spatial practice. It is true that “[t]he built environment’ is…a gross simplification, a
concept which requires disaggregation as soon as we probe deeply into the processes of
its production and use.”26 Yet, this disaggregation shall not merely suffice with the
statement of the abstract-“the aggregative processes of production, exchange and
consumption”- but rather undertake the concrete production of space as its object of
inquiry. In such a maneuver that aims at an understanding of the concrete practice,
concrete labor, and commodity in its barest existence, we can delve into the annihilative
space, the instrumental space, space that “[removes] every obstacle in the way of the total
elimination of what is different.”27
It is commonplace to claim that the changes in economy in general, and the
25
Marx, Capital : A Critique of Political Economy, 308.
26
Harvey, “The Urban Process under Capitalism: A Framework for Analysis,” 105.
27
Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 371. Naturally, a crucial problem is the distinction between abstract
space and concrete space, or our ability to juxtapose the movement from the abstract labor to the concrete
labor as ensconced in its mirror image in the movement from the abstract space to the concrete space.
49
corresponding technological oscillations- the industrial, and/or postindustrial productiondetermine our lives and the built environment that envelops those lives. However, the
vicissitudes and vagaries of the production of space, the way it reflects on and reacts to
our everyday experiences, the significant sway it holds over both abstract and concrete
layers of material relations has been deliberately dissected from the purview of political
economy. In other words, those words are not unbeknownst to the minds vetted in the
colloquial debates on social theory in the latter part of the twentieth century that
culminated in the catch-all phrase of economic determinism;28 political economy of
spatial formations resides at the first floor of the idiomatic house, while the semiotic,
symbolic, cultural, the panoply of lived and conceived experiences has been confined to
the upper levels-if permitted at all. On the contrary, to the extent that economy is not
grasped through a sterile theoretical imagination and not merely attributed to the
temporalities of production, circulation, and distribution, the possible opening towards a
cogent interpretation of the spatio-temporal reproduction of society and capital-labor
dialectic is self-evident. Hence, economy as a certain technology of (re)production of
human subsistence would further implicate that the state, inasmuch as politics, law,
philosophy, religion, literature, and art, is an economic factor.29
See a crucial debate that more or less sealed a series of similar theoretical questions: D. Harvey, “Three
Myths in Search of a Reality in Urban Studies,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 3, no. 2
(1987); Neil Smith, “Rascal Concepts, Minimalizing Discourse, and the Politics of Geography,”
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 3, no. 2 (1987).
28
As Engels put in a letter to Starkenburg late in his life, in order to clarify some of the misconceptions
surrounding his and Marx’s study of societies: “It is not the case that the economic basis is cause, is solely
active and everything else is only a passive effect. Rather, there is an interaction which takes place upon the
basis of the economic necessity which ultimately asserts itself.” Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Karl
Marx and Frederick Engels: Selected Correspondence, 1846-1895: With Explanatory Notes (International
publishers, 1942), 516.
29
50
2.3
The Urban Revolution: Theoretical practice and the Question of the
State
In the 1960s, a fissure, an opening towards a spatio-temporally conscious
approach appeared in urbanism. It was first the new urban sociology that had taken an
issue with the space-state nexus. Leaving aside the already polemical discussions
instigated by the Poulantzas-Miliband debate, and its repercussions in the PoulantzasLojkine debate on the essential nature of state under capitalist mode of production,30 one
can attest to the central role played by the state both in Castells’ “collective consumption”
thesis and in David Harvey’s three cuts of crisis theory. The state did not only occupy the
new urban sociology at the abstract level, but also, in my view, its sudden political and
economic alteration at the end of 1970s prepared the imminent collapse of the new urban
sociology. The urban critique fueled by the 1968 world revolution withered in the face of
the neoliberal backlash in the early 1980s.
Arguably, the new urban sociology was a product of advanced capitalism or as
Lash and Urry argued, of organized capitalism.31 I will not go into the detailed aspects of
the organized capitalism, or the discussions surrounding the academic explanations of
postwar Western societies. Monopoly, state monopoly, organized, advanced industrial, or
welfare, these different conceptual frameworks shared similar features; most common of
Pickvance, “Marxist Approaches to the Study of Urban Politics: Divergences Among Some Recent
French Studies.”
30
Scott Lash and John Urry, The End of Organized Capitalism (Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1987).
31
51
all was of course the ongoing existence of capital-labor dialectics. Similarly though,
every theoretical account of the postwar capitalist expansion in the West attaches a
significant role to the transformed characteristics of this dialectical relationship. Most
recognizably, it is the state intervention, either in the form of containing labor militancy
in the face of rising working class insurgency created by the existence of not one but
several workers’ socialist states, or through buying out the obedience of the working class
for facilitating an increasing relative surplus value creation (and real subsumption of
labor) that marked the three decades following the end of the Second World War. Two
distinct but complementary visions of the urban structure has dominated the discussion
here. On the one hand, Castells determinedly relates the urban phenomena to the question
of collective consumption –which has state as its central instigator- and on the other hand
Harvey situates the built environment in the circuits of capital.
Manuel Castells reiterated the crucial role played by collective consumption in
terms of understanding the urban question. In The Urban Question he definitively states
that “the essential problems regarded as urban are in fact bound up with the processes of
‘collective consumption’, or what Marxists call the organization of the collective means
of production of labour power.”32 Collective consumption is the ground for everyday life,
where housing, education, health, culture, commerce, and transport are located.33 It is a
consequence of the increasing socialization of consumption under advanced capitalism.
The everydayness of the phenomenon turns it into a matter of political conflict and
ultimately into an element of class struggle. The state not only acts upon the built
32
Castells, The Urban Question : A Marxist Approach:440.
33
Manuel Castells, City, Class, and Power, Sociology, Politics, and Cities (London: Macmillan, 1978), 3.
52
environment as the last resort of credit, since a disproportionate amount of collective
consumption goods are left to the state by the capitalists, but also as the final arbiter of
the class conflict. Hence,
[T]he state increasingly intervenes in the city; but, as an expression of a class
society, the state in practice acts according to the relations of force between
classes and social groups, generally in favour of the hegemonic fraction of the
dominant classes. It is in this way that specified problems become globalised, the
urban question increasingly relates the state to daily life, and provokes political
crisis.34
Yet, resonating Lefebvre’s argument that neoliberalism exists in an uneasy
tension with neo-dirigisme, Preteceille emphasized that the pressure to reduce collective,
public-funded consumption is even greater than that to reduce individual commodity
consumption because, even if the former is in many ways oriented towards and
subordinated to the logic of profit, it nevertheless also limits the field of direct capitalist
production and circulation.”35
In his theoretically incisive analysis of state spaces, Lefebvre described three
universal movements. First, he saw that state power proliferates unobstructed throughout
the globe, “it weighs down on society in full force…crushes time by reducing
differences,” and “promotes and imposes itself as the stable center” and hence,
“neutralizes whatever resists it by castration or crushing.” Second, within the same space
the state’s violence is countered by negation in the form of the violence of the subversive
movements, either through revolutions and triumphant victories of these movements, or
by way of defeats and ceaseless continuation of wars. For Lefebvre normality dictated by
34
Ibid.
35
Preteceille, “Collective Consumption, the State, and the Crisis of Capitalist Society,” 10.
53
the state can neither establish, nor normalize, the disappearance of difference. Thus, in
the third instance, the working class enters the picture as the lone beholder of the
sufficient power to induce revolutionary change.36 Further along the lines of his
discussion regarding the nexus between the state and space, Lefebvre claimed that there
is “[n]o institution without a space.”37 The implication of this argument is not that the
state is the sole claimant to the organization of space. Although the state is granted
extraordinary executive powers to render places extra-territorial (the consular offices, the
United Nations, certain international border zones) or altogether instigate absolute spaces
(the military zones, states of exception, special zones of customs and commerce, and
definitely war zones), more often than not this power is mediated through institutions.38
The gist of the matter, as ensconced in Brenner’s elaboration, and deciphering, of
Lefebvre’s highly abstract notions garbled in the highfalutin meta-theoretical debates of
1960s French intellectualism, is that the state is an intrinsically spatial structure that is
reflexively proactive on the very self-same space that begets itself.
A recent decisive attempt at solving the Gordian’s Knot, the state-space
conundrum, called for a research program where space is juxtaposed to a multi-scalar
governmentality poised to grapple with the hegemonic linearity of the state. Neil Brenner
argued that the debates on scale and state spaces is positioned to fill the conceptual void
left behind by the waning theories of collective consumption.39 The state-space, as
36
Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution.
37
Neil Brenner et al., State/Space: A Reader (John Wiley & Sons, 2008), 84.
For an interesting note on the extra-territorial spaces see, Keller Easterling, Enduring Innocence : Global
Architecture and Its Political Masquerades (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005).
38
He argued that the scale problematic was intrinsic to the critical geographical political economy since
1960s: “A case in point is Manuel Castells’… The Urban Question, which defined the urban scale in terms
39
54
conceived by Neil Brenner qua a Lefebvrian state mode of production, is not meant to
transcend the problematic of the state, nor regard the space as a passive instrument of the
state machinery, but aims at a multidimensional relationality that mutually transforms the
statehood in its different forms and spatial practices.40
Brenner, borrowing the scaffolding of his argument from Jessop’s strategicrelational framework on state theory and from Lefebvre’s conceptualization of the state
mode of production and the production of space, defined the state space primarily as a
process “rather than as a static thing, container, or platform.”41 Echoing Lefebvre, the
underlying principle of his study also critically delineated space-as-process. In other
words, space is constantly in flux, is mutually constitutive vis-à-vis the circuits of capital,
the juridico-political realm of state, and the life-world of capitalism.42 Hence, the state
of its role in the reproduction of labor-power and, more generally, in what he termed ‘collective
consumption’. As a number of researchers subsequently argued, this crystallization of collective
consumption functions at the urban scale during the postwar period and was closely intertwined with the
historically specific scalar divisions of regulation that emerged under the Keynesian welfare national state,
which relied heavily upon local and municipal state apparatuses as instruments of public service provision
and infrastructural investment within a broader, nationally configured administrative geography.” N.
Brenner, “The Limits to Scale? Methodological Reflections on Scalar Structuration,” Progress in Human
Geography 25, no. 4 (2001): 595. For a better idea on the scale debate see N. Brenner, “Global,
Fragmented, Hierarchical: Henri Lefebvre’s Geographies of Globalization,” Public Culture 10, no. 1
(1997): 135–67; N. Brenner, “Globalisation as Reterritorialisation: The Re-Scaling of Urban Governance in
the European Union,” Urban Studies 36, no. 3 (1999): 431–51; S. A. Marston, “The Social Construction of
Scale,” Progress in Human Geography 24, no. 2 (2000): 219–42; S. Marston and N. Smith, “States, Scales
and Households: Limits to Scale Thinking? A Response to Brenner,” Progress in Human Geography 25,
no. 4 (2001): 615–19.
Brenner, “Global, Fragmented, Hierarchical”; Brenner, “Globalisation as Reterritorialisation: The ReScaling of Urban Governance in the European Union”; N. Brenner, “Beyond State Centrism? Space,
Territoriality, and Geographical Scale in Globalization Studies,” Theory and Society 28, no. 1 (1999): 39–
78; Neil Brenner, “State Theory in the Political Conjuncture: Henri Lefebvre’s Comments on a New State
Form,” Antipode 33, no. 5 (2001): 783.
40
41
Brenner, New State Spaces : Urban Governance and the Rescaling of Statehood, 82.
Bob Jessop gave hints of the relationship between space and capital when he defined the ecological
dominance: “ecological dominance refers to the structural and/or strategic capacity of a given system in a
self-organizing ecology of systems to imprint its developmental logic on other systems’ operations far more
than these systems are able to impose their respective logics on that system” Bob Jessop, The Future of the
Capitalist State (Wiley, 2002), 25. One who is keen on intellectual genealogy can hearken to the resonance
42
55
space can only be grasped through an analysis that is open to and knowledgeable about
the processual, polymorphic, and multiscalar attributes of the relationship. 43 Contrary to
the territorial and nation-centric modes of knowledge production -which can be likened to
a fetishism prevalent in geographical and sociological studies, Brenner argued that the
state space is more than a mere territorial concentration of political power and its activity
in the form of centralized authority. The geography of state spatiality “must be viewed as
a presupposition, an arena, and an outcome of continually evolving political strategies. It
is not a thing, container, or platform, but a socially produced, conflictual, and
dynamically changing matrix of sociospatial interaction.”44
The questions he has raised as the paradigmatic pillars of his approach to the
unfolding matrices of state-space relationships are also of crucial import: “First, why
does statehood under capitalism assume a specific spatial, territorial, and scalar form?
Second, how and why has the spatial, territorial, and scalar configuration of statehood
evolved during the history of capitalist development?”45 From these premises, I argue
that state intervention in the production of space is not a consequence of readily made
decisions, but indeed a continuation of the process. There exists no state without a
particular spatiality, and as Brenner argued, “[t]he state is the site/generator/product of
between Althusserian structure-in-dominance and the ecological dominance. For a further understanding of
affinities and disagreements between Jessop and Althusser qua Poulantzas, see Bob Jessop, Nicos
Poulantzas: Marxist Theory and Political Strategy (Macmillan, 1985); Bob Jessop, “On the Originality,
Legacy, and Actuality of Nicos Poulantzas,” Studies in Political Economy 34 (1991) .
43
Brenner, New State Spaces : Urban Governance and the Rescaling of Statehood, 74.
44
Ibid., 76.
45
Ibid., 82.
56
strategies.”46
2.4
An epistemology of State-space(s)
If the primary purpose of this dissertation is to unearth the social production of
concrete space at the economic instance, of equal importance is the deciphering of a
mode inherent to this spatial formation: the state-space. Grappling with the state-space
requires a study engrained in both concrete and abstract formulations of state, as well as
an analysis that is reflexive of the spatio-temporal spectrum. The initial layer of such
questioning entails rehashing well-worn discussions such as the nature of the state, the
social, cultural, and ideological transmutations of the state, and its processual formulation
under a higher level of abstraction-the statehood. Furthermore, a relatively new mode of
inquiry grounded in spatial analysis and critical urbanism invoked-and laid bare the need
for- a critical examination towards reinvigorating space as an element of sociological
study, providing an ability to better grasp the socio-spatial dialectic. Third, a novel
conceptualization of the relationality between the state and space, what Brenner defined
as state spatiality, provides an elaborate social, geographical, and historical imaginationin addition to conceptual tools of explanation- while raising deeper, cross-cutting, and at
times, paradoxical questions.
My aim is to question the possibilities for an interpretation of the state as an active
agent in the formation of the built environment. This necessarily implies a state spatiality
Ibid., 87. Here comes into the picture an old Althusserian formulation borrowed qua Jessop-inasmuch as
it is impossible to talk of knowledge in itself, it is redundant to formulate the state as an insulated, isolated
objectivity. Hence, just like the theoretical practice being realized in material shape through knowledge
effects, the state is realized “through the mobilization and consolidation of state projects- which attempt to
integrate state activities around a set of common, coherently articulated agendas- that the image of the state
as a unified organizational entity (‘state effects’) can be projected into civil society.” Ibid., 85.
46
57
that is continuously reproduced via the flux of global capital accumulation. Hitherto the
state and space, the two proposed axes of processual investigation, has been studied
either as objective parallels with clear-cut relationships of causality, or two nonintersecting reified entities.47 On the one hand, the state, as a form of reification that is
primarily subject to the whims of economic, and/or juridico-political logic; i.e. the forms
and modes of different economic regulations would causally transpire divergent
institutional, ideological, and organizational arrangements of statehood. In other words,
Fordism as an accumulation regime is conjoined to the Keynesian Welfare State as the
mode of regulation that begets, for instance, spatial configuration best exemplified by the
suburban sprawl and functional architecture, while similarly, post-Fordism found its
paradigmatic Schumpeterian Competitive State form that permeates architectures of fear,
confusion, and/or bedazzlement. Under the premises of such spatial imagination, one can
deem this as another form of hegemonic discursive transposition that treats space as
object, space becomes the empty container. Much like historicism of an earlier era-in
which history was perceived to be nothing but a series of disconnected events- space is
treated as mute, docile, and at best, spectral.48
While the former treated the spatiality of the life-world as a tabula rasa, yet, the
latter tendency was inclined towards constructing reified objectivities-space as pure
Neil Brenner has brilliantly summarized the arguments regarding the state-space nexus.He suggests that
three assumptions are the underlying factors in the conceptual separation of the state and space. These are:
spatial fetishism, methodological territorialism, and methodological nationalism. These three in effect mold
the hitherto prevalent state-centric epistemology in social sciences. Brenner, New State Spaces : Urban
Governance and the Rescaling of Statehood, 37–47.
47
The gist of the argument presented here is indebted to the great work of Edward Soja, see, E. W. Soja,
“Between Geographical Materialism and Spatial Fetishism: Some Observations on the Development of
Marxist Spatial Analysis,” Antipode 1, no. 1 (1979): 3–1; E. Soja, “The Socio-Spatial Dialectic,” Annals of
the Association of American Geographers 70, no. 2 (1980): 207–25; Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The
Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory.
48
58
geography, as mere nature that is devoid of any social qualities, unchanged, untouched, a
static entity. State therefore, was deemed to be an externality. In the eyes of the 20th
century western Marxists the state was ontologically instrumental-an extension of class
domination that represented nothing other than a baton that regulates social relationships
of production in order to continuously produce consent. For others, the state was an
apparatus of redistribution, a wedge to extend the functional operations of different social
strata, a neutral arbiter, and the end result of the pluralistic political process. Yet, such
perceptions of the state and space had for a long time heavily underestimated the
multitudinous depths of their relationality, overlooked the possibilities of the state to
materially, and mentally, mold new spatial forms that reflect the state’s immanent
conflicting qualities, its incipient, and at times, fettered developmental tendencies, and
its vicissitudinous role in the capital circuits.
2.5
The Spaces of Class: Divergent Representations of Space
The question is still relevant then: the question of how to relate space and the
state. One of the figments of articulation regarding the nexus between the state and space
suggests space as a passive container-the state, either via its form as the ultimate agent of
redistribution, or by dint of its exercise in terms of mere and scantily clad brutal force
(law, is also a brute force, just like urban planning in its various guises) could act upon
space. It is the state of authoritarian envisioning of the power, Speer's architectural
behemoth in the service of Nazism, the fascist Roman revivalism, the Stalinist
hallucinations of grandiosity ensconced in the abysmal reordering of space and citizenry;
it is the ultimate mode of control bequeathed to a notion of totality –i.e. a Schmittian,
radically concentric, one-way structuration of the whole determined by the body-politic59
and undoubtedly, the wet dreams of countless dictators, to mold space, according to his
vision.49 Yet, Churchill recognized the obvious fact that “first we shape our buildings and
afterwards our buildings shape us.”50
Therefore, an effort towards locating a new space state should not directly begin
from the state with the capital S, or the state proper. Through my studies in Istanbul, I
came to recognize two main lines of possibilities concerning the state: state with a capital
S, or, the reified, representational noumenon, that dwells in the minds, habits,
interactions, and cultures of people.51
Yet, there exists another layer to the study of the state, a state that exists in the
minutiae of everyday life, that perspires, that bleeds, and hungers for more power
embedded in the real, tangible, day-to-day relays of divergent interests –imagined or
concrete- that simultaneously make and break the continuous processes of building a city.
An allusion to the power elite is apparent here and I will examine it further throughout
the discussions on the state and private capital’s visions concerning Istanbul.
Yet, in this dissertation, I intend to demystify a fallacious assumption that has
prevailed in the Turkish imagination regarding the long and pernicious assault on
Istanbul. The argument that is almost unconsciously held onto can be summarized as
such: that Istanbul had been a beauty, the crown jewel, the “payitaht,” the “dersaadet”
(the city of joy), the promised land and the state has turned a blind eye to the bile and
See, Kim Dovey, Framing Places: Mediating Power in Built Form (Routledge, 1999); Carl Schmitt, The
Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, trans. G.L. Ulmen (NY:
Telos, 2006).
49
50
Winston Churchill, We Shape Our Buildings, 1943.
Without a doubt, such reification smacks of a highly structuralist view of social phenomena as
exemplified by Althusserian thought, see, Louis Althusser, Essays on Ideology (London: Verso, 1984).
51
60
putrid overtaking of the masses, and effectively succumbed to the “barbarian invasion” of
the Anatolian immigrants. Hence, with minor modifications the story goes like this: that
Istanbul is the place where the selfless, disinterested planners’ miraculous solutions and
development programs had been betrayed relentlessly by parasitic elements, by
“clientelistic” politicians, by reckless and incompetent municipal authorities and due to
the overwhelming power held by the sheer numbers of the newcomers the state
succumbed to their continuous digressions and pressures. While space is the prerogative-and de facto extension- of the state in terms of Turkish Ideology, democracy has
somehow greatly contributed to the defiling of the crown jewel. This acute sense of decay
and insuperable decadence, the near-delusional elegy for Istanbul can be as innocent as
nostalgia voiced in newspaper columns and municipal publications (recall the periodical
yearnings for an Istanbul long gone, the reinvention of useless transport routes in the
form of Beyoğlu and Kadıköy tram lines as mere tourist attractions), or be as crudely
violent as everyday racisms against new immigrants and attempted pogroms against
Kurdish people.
It is crucial to note that both ends of this phenomenon represent a transformation
of the same kind of beast: beginning with the ultimate privileges bestowed upon the
urban specialists, architects, planners, and bureaucrats one steps through subtle
gradations, by dint of representations of space (recall the empty containers of space, the
signless signifiers, glitzy advertisement images, where a certain hue of whiteness –
resonant with the now ubiquitous term of White Turks- came to dominate the Sunday
papers, the billboards, the streets without souls, the image of brutal, but non-lethal,
power.)
61
In a sense, this dissertation dwells upon this notion of a fallen Istanbul. It begins
with a conflict that is lost-without the slightest whimper of a fight put into it. As my field
research taught me in different ways, my words here will attempt to raise an awareness,
that Istanbul is not the one and only thing all of us see at the same time. There is the
squalid Istanbul, living in the slums, there, next to the still smoking chimneys and the
asphyxiating smell of coke burning stoves of gecekondus, lies the soon to be rich
erstwhile squatters, and there lies the Bosphorus, a scion of paradise on earth, the reason
for most humble souls to withstand the endless hours of rush hour traffic, torments of
kilometers of lines to travel across the continents (Asian peninsula and the bridges
connecting Asia and Europe were designed to create new residential territories, and in
effect created the biggest bedroom community of Europe), and the endless concrete
boxes heaped upon each other along the highways circumambulating the gargantuan
mega-city’s arteries.
2.6
The State-Space in Turkey: The State as an Episteme
In the 1960s and 1970s, Turkey witnessed a novel, unabashed, conscious,
internationally comparative interest in fertile discussions on the foundational
characteristics of the Turkish state. The relationship between the state and society,
between different classes and their roles in the state strategies has found receptive
audiences within academic circles. The delayed modernization, the maladroit national
developmentalist strategies that are subject to the vagaries of the ebb and flow of cold
war politics, the stunted development of underdevelopment, the late incorporation to the
world-economy, the tension between the centripetal and centrifugal forces that played out
in the political and ideological antagonism of the center and periphery, and the unraveling
62
of this tension at the realm of politics played a prominent role in efforts to grasp the
uniqueness of the state and society relations in Turkey.52
The latter has gained an articulate emphasis especially in the last two decades
with the increased significance of the “urban question” –albeit belatedly compared to its
Western counterparts. More strikingly, the changing governmental landscape and its
emergent discursive means under the disguise of neoliberalism, have contributed greatly
to a marked interest in urban studies. Thence emerged a revival of interest in the spatial
forms of the early Republican period, in the divergent architectural representations of
Kemalism, in the failed modernity of urban development in Turkey, in the variegated
perceptions of gecekondu as indicative of the grand malaise of underdevelopment, and
finally the ubiquitous state projects of urban renewal and gecekondu rehabilitation
instigated a galvanization of interest in urban studies.53
Traditionally the Turkish state had functioned in a national developmentalist
mentality with a curious twist. Quite unlike the Fordist-Keynesian response to the
housing problem in the West, that either promulgated state as the chief financial regulator
Şerif Mardin, “Center-Periphery Relations: A Key to Turkish Politics?,” Daedalus 102, no. 1 (1973):
169–90; Şerif Mardin, “Ideology and Religion in the Turkish Revolution,” International Journal of Middle
East Studies 2, no. 3 (1971): 197–211; Şerif Mardin, Türk Modernleşmesi, 4. Baskı (İletişim, 1995); Çağlar
Keyder, “Small Peasant Ownership in Turkey: Historical Formation and Present Structure,” Review
(Fernand Braudel Center) 7, no. 1 (1983): 53–107; Çağlar Keyder, Emperyalizm Azgelişmişlik ve Türkiye
(Istanbul: Birikim Yayınları, 1976); Korkut Boratav, Çağlar Keyder, and Şevket Pamuk, Kriz, Gelir
Dağılımı ve Türkiye’nin Alternatif Sorunu (İstanbul: Kaynak Yayınları, 1984); Korkut Boratav, Tarımsal
yapılar ve kapitalizm (Ankara Üniversitesi Basımevi, 1981).
52
Gülsüm Baydar Nalbantoğlu, “Silent Interruptions: Urban Encounters with Rural Turkey,” in Rethinking
Modernity and National Identity in Turkey, ed. Reşat Kasaba and Sibel Bozdoğan (Seattle: University of
Washington Press, 1997), 192–210; Sibel Bozdoğan, Modernism and Nation Building: Turkish
Architectural Culture in the Early Republic (University of Washington Press, 2001); Güven Arif Sargın,
ed., Ankara’nın kamusal yüzleri: başkent üzerine mekân-politik tezler (İletişim, 2002); Güven Arif Sargin,
“Displaced Memories, or the Architecture of Forgetting and Remembrance,” Environment and Planning D
22, no. 5 (2004): 659–80; Ayşe Öncü, “The Myth of the ‘Ideal Home’Travels Across Cultural Borders to
Istanbul,” in Space, Culture and Power: New Identities in Globalizing Cities, 1997, 56–72; Ayşe Öncü and
Petra Weyland, Space, Culture and Power: New Identities in Globalizing Cities (Zed Books, 1997).
53
63
of the housing market by means of mortgages or through actively pursuing building
housing for the socially disadvantaged, the Turkish state’s response to the housing
question was much more passive.54 Especially as a consequence of the 1960s
policymaking decisions, a non-interventionist planning perspective was approached, and
in the 1960-1980 period 70% of housing investment was in private hands.55 The state did
not hesitate in undertaking grandiose schemes of infrastructural projects, irrigation
canals, hydroelectric power plants, and highways while marginally involved with the
housing market.56 The miniscule state contribution in urban development was mainly
oriented towards provision of heavily subsidized residence construction for the swelling
ranks of apparatchiki- teachers, officers, university professors, doctors, cross-cutting the
social landscape under the mantle of unquestioned allegiance to state bureaucracy.57
The western response to the urban question moved between two different polar opposites in terms of
planning: the American case where the private investment is the ultimate organizer in the post-war
suburban boom, and the French case, in which the state was the paramount regulator of urban land use and
housing construction. See, M. Ball, “The Development of Capitalism in Housing Provision,” International
Journal of Urban and Regional Research 5, no. 2 (1981): 145; Barry Checkoway, “Large Builders, Federal
Housing Programmes, and Postwar Suburbanization,” International Journal of Urban and Regional
Research 4, no. 1 (1980): 21–45; M. Dagnaud, “A History of Planning in the Paris Region,” International
Journal of Urban and Regional Research 7 (1983): 219–36; J. M. Goursolas and M. Atlas, “New Towns in
the Paris Metropolitan Area: An Analytic Survey of the Experience, 1965-79,” International Journal of
Urban and Regional Research 4, no. 3 (1980): 405–21.
54
B. Batuman, “Turkish Urban Professionals and The Politics of Housing, 1960-1980,” METU JFA, 2006;
Ruşen Keleş, Kentlesme Politikasi (Urbanization Policy), 11. Baskı (Ankara: İmge Kitabevi, 2010).
55
56
Suleyman Demirel can be seen as the ultimate embodiment of state spatial logic in this period. He served
as prime minister seven times between 1965 and 1993, had to relinquish power twice-in 1971 and 1980due to military interventions. With an education in engineering, and a brief spell in the USA his career
started at DSI (Devlet Su Isleri, State Waterworks and Irrigation Administration)was a handpicked poster
boy of the Menderes government in the 1950s.. His economic perspective reached a climatic culmination
with a grand irrigation project in the Kurdish areas of southeast Turkey-GAP (Guneydogu Anadolu ProjesiSoutheastern Anatolian Project) modeled after the New Deal projects like the Tennessee Valley Authority.
A borrowed word from French, the “lojman” –logement- has long created an interesting residential
segregation, an archetypal gated community, and in Kurdish areas definitely resembled a colonial
compound. Unfortunately, this peculiar aspect of urbanism in Turkey has been ignored for so long-perhaps,
due to implications of political interference in academic research. The golden era of the lojmans came to an
end with the neoliberal policies imposed upon the governments of the last decade by IMF programs. Aside
from the housing for the military, intelligence, and security personnel in the Kurdish cities of southeastern
57
64
While these apartment complexes served as the beacons of an urban way of life in
Turkey, the loyalty of the apparatchik residents was not only solidified through housing
subsidies, but also their self-reflexive consciousness of vanguardist Kemalism had
contributed dearly to what some described as the core-periphery conflict in Turkish
politics.58
2.7
New State-Spaces and the Emergence of Unhindered Boosterism
The decisive end to the passive government stance towards housing and urban
planning came with the passage of Housing and Urban Development Act of 1984. This
act established a Housing and Urban Development Fund (TOKI, in Turkish). The Fund
was -similar to military funds- exempt from effective parliamentary control. The Fund
(controlled partly by the Housing and Urban Development Administration) was allocated
a certain percentage from the sales of tobacco and alcoholic products, in addition to a
notorious cut from every employee’s payroll, and a levy on every citizen for their foreign
travels.59 However, the TOKI administration was inefficient and lethargic throughout the
1980s and 1990s; its housing projects were merely oriented towards upper middle
classes-to ones who could afford up to 80% down payments in an already overpriced
housing market. From its establishment to early 2003 -until the current neo-Islamist
government of Erdoğan came to power- the administration constructed around 30,000
Turkey, thousands of lojmans were either privatized, or began to be competitively priced.
Çağlar Keyder, State and Class in Turkey : A Study in Capitalist Development (London ; New York:
Verso, 1987), 47–8.
58
59
This cut was euphemistically called Konut Edindirme Yardimi-Housing Provision Aid, even though the
ones who aided the government to eventually get home ownership got nothing in return. The Fund was
later dissolved in the late 1990s under the directives of the IMF and the European Union.
65
housing units, and marginally contributed to the financing of the housing industry.60
The Erdoğan government was ambitious from the start. A widely publicized
episode between the chairman of the TOKI administration, Erdoğan Bayraktar, and Prime
Minister Erdogan illustrates the extent of his ambition very well. As told by Bayraktar on
national TV, PM Erdogan asked the newly appointed chair for a briefing on the current
conditions of TOKI. In this briefing, Erdogan inquired on the projections of housing
construction. Bayraktar promptly replied that it was in the range of 30,000 housing units,
either in the process of construction or waiting for the government’s green light. Erdogan
was taken aback, and had further questioned if the number he was briefed on was per
annum. Learning that it was indeed the projections for the next five years, he ordered
Bayraktar to immediately start planning for 100,000 housing units per annum, and the
rest would be assured by his government. The rest of course was more complicated than
it was suggested by Bayraktar-he was in tears, conspicuously under the impression of
Erdogan’s dedication and visionary leadership, when he recounted the story on TV- and
included certain legislative arrangements that grants TOKI with power to borrow from
international financial markets without Treasury backing or interference, the authority of
eminent domain for urban renewal projects in gecekondu areas, and definitely, the
government’s full backing regarding the appropriation of public land. Since 2003, TOKI
has embarked upon an unprecedented construction plan, in the last six years 300,000
units have already been built, or are in the process of construction, and the plan is to
finish 500,000 units by 2013-approximately 100,000 of which are slated to be built in
Istanbul. Bayraktar was later paid handsomely in return for his tears; he was appointed as
60
See TOKI (HUD Administration) website: www.toki.gov.tr
66
the minister of Environment and Urban Development after the 2011 elections: a post
specifically created for him.
In appropriating a free-market logic-contrary to earlier state-led construction
projects in Turkey in which the state directly undertook the role of the project
management and building process- TOKI developed, and is in the process of developing
all its housing projects through tenders to the private contractors and developers. The
process can be more or less summarized as follows: TOKI announces a development
project on public land and seeks private parties as development partners. Contractors
enter into an agreement with TOKI. In return for public land, they would build for
TOKI’s social housing-effectively allocating a certain percentage of the housing units for
a subsidized market. Thereafter, TOKI would provide generous long-term low-interest
loans to the middle and lower classes, while the private developer markets the adjacent
apartment at prevailing market prices mostly through mortgages secured by private
banks. It is interesting to note that the state-led urban development strategy closely
follows the precedent set by the yapsatçı whereas the state assumes the role of erstwhile
gecekondu owners, and the private developers expand the scale to unprecedented levels.61
The juxtaposition of the state-spaces with the everyday experiences of the
building process necessitates a methodological framework grounded in four spatial
dimensions of social relations: territory, place, scale, and networks.62 The Turkish state,
as any other state, functions through modal arrangements among these four dimensions.
A moderately scaled TOKI housing project would involve building of 1,400 units. In contrast, a typical
yapsat contract is limited to 20 to 40 apartments. The yapsatci is constrained by planning regulations, the
lack of capital, and certainly by the scarcity of urban land suitable for development.
61
Bob Jessop, Neil Brenner, and Martin Jones, “Theorizing Sociospatial Relations,” Environment and
Planning. D, Society and Space 26, no. 3 (2008): 389.
62
67
And I can aptly state that these four dimensions roughly equal to, at the territorial level,
the mutations of Turkishness from an ethnically based identity that claims suzerainty over
an ambiguous contingence that mythically extends from Asia to the Adriatic, and the
indivisible unity of the state and the people at home to one that portends a deeper
understanding of constitutional citizenship, civil rights, and the multifarious ethnic,
cultural, religious identities. The place, in this context, can be best grasped through a notso-subtle metonymy that has long prevailed in Istanbul, the governmentality that invokes
ruling by naming-naming and renaming streets, buildings, squares, even whole
neighborhoods- in addition to the state-sanctioned hidden racisms, open discrimination,
and fuelling of ethnically motivated division of labor. The scale, or the constant rescaling
of the Turkish state in the last two decades refers mainly to the tension between a
centralist (unitarian is the code-word in the language of the Turkish power elite), top-tobottom organized state apparatus and the incipient requests of an internationally
integrated (to the global capital circuits and decision-making bodies) and horizontally
structured form of statehood that is a member of the European Union. And finally, the
networks represent the means of resilience and transformative potentials of an economic
formation that carries the utmost crisis tendencies for the transformation from a smallscale employer dominated system to one that faintly resembles monopoly capitalism in
new clothes.63
63
Ibid., 393.Ibid.: 393.
68
2.8
Method
The method employed in this dissertation will carefully balance quantitative and
qualitative data. I spent more than two years between December 2009 and January 2012
doing field research in Istanbul. Of that time period, I spent 3 months as a participant
observant in Zeytinburnu and May Day neighborhoods, as more of a flâneur in
Zeytinburnu –since I have much deeper connections and rooted experiences in that part
of the city- and as a concerned sociologist in the May Day neighborhood. Between
December 2009 and May 2010, I had the opportunity to conduct participant observations
among the upper echelons of the development industry: working at a marketing research
firm provided me with ample time and chance to meet and talk with the decision-makers
on the supply side of the issue. In addition, for a year, between August 2009 and
September 2010, I visited several construction sites, albeit intermittently, to conduct
interviews with the engineers and architects.
The evidence in itself plays a major role to elucidate and bridge the gap between
what I have described as the two deficiencies in urban sociology: the abstraction of the
built form and the state fetishism. Hence, to overcome the apparent risks of reproducing
the state-centric spatial territorialism-bound by the academic reports, the governmental
statistics, and international non-governmental and governmental agencies’ studies are
supplemented by a qualitative approach. The implicit task is to foreground the production
process of housing in Istanbul. Therefore, the data for this research are drawn from my
participant observation in the gecekondu districts, informal conversations with the
engineers, architects, developers, advertisers, marketers. Some of those are conducted
journalistically, and some were semi-structured according to a set of issues sought after,
69
some were mere fleeting conservations, observations, or comments.
Not only the general division of labor within the construction industry is
scrutinized but also, perhaps of equal import, a wide array of other “consumers” of space
were also kept in perspective. The housewives of the affluent classes, the increasingly
atomized white-collar toilers of the metropolis and the aspiring “new” middle classes, the
fata morgana that circumvents the heart and soul of every new buyer of a “gated
community” condo, also played an important role for locating variegated contours and
layers of an insipidly dynamic society. I had the chance to talk to many prospective
buyers (25, to be precise), spent some time and socialized with the residents of upscale
gated communities.
In addition, I had the chance to conduct seven in-depth interviews with the toplevel executives of Istanbul real estate developers, the CEO’s, or Chairmen of gigantic
developers, the so-called captains of a non-existent industry, and mesmerized by their
bottomless optimism regarding the bull market in housing –as evinced by their insatiable
appetite for more- producing around 20 to 30 thousand housing units in İstanbul alone
(most are priced in the vicinity of 200 thousand US dollars, which makes them in total,
one of the biggest enterprises in Turkey, by revenue). The desires of the “new” middle
class, and the appetites of the capitalist have met in this bull market, where new house
prices have been on the rise continually for the last two decades-at least, since the
devastating crises of the mid 1990s and early 2000s.
On the other hand, the concrete production process of urban space is of crucial
concern here due to two important aspects. First, the manual workers, from the
unqualified sixteen year old worker to the experienced ironworker, plumber, concrete
70
mason, electrical technician are expected to carry significant variations according to the
different ethnic, class, and professional divisions of labor at the work site, which is, due
to limitations in gaining access to the work site (being a frail, 30 year old, 5’5’’ academic
does not get me very far in the business of construction) their experiences are not voiced
to the extent I hoped for in the beginning of this project. Yet, I had ample opportunity to
mingle with the workers and their supervisors, and especially, get into the depths of the
hierarchy prevailing in construction. And a glaring, scarcely mentioned second aspect
made itself felt: the engineers, architects, the controlling middle class at the workplace –
who are overwhelmingly in the left-wing, socialistic, Kemalist mold in terms of personal
politics- put an immense barrier between themselves, and the myriad of workers. There
happens to exist a heartfelt gap between the worker –the unskilled, menial, labor- and his
controller –the skilled, intellectual, supervising labor.64 This gap was nevertheless lost in
an intricately organized, a skillfully choreographed web of sub-contracting; which was
merely disguised under purely economic precepts.
So, I tried to employ what I call a guerilla ethnography to delve into the corrals of
the actual production of space in Istanbul. In order to get a glimpse of a comparative
perspective in terms of inter-operation of the different actors described above, I used
journalistic sources, newly established industry blogs, web sites, and most importantly,
Of course, a myriad of studies have been done to explain the ideological positions of these middle class
roles; while exploited by the capitalists, they hold a curiously contradictory role in the workplace and have
a dominating role in every part and parcel of the production process. These class contradictory locations
have found excellent explanations from Nikos Poulantzas’ highly abstract and theoretical oeuvre to Pierre
Bourdieu’s empirically conscious studies to Erik Olin Wright’s lengthy but definitively comprehensive
studies: See, Erik Olin Wright, The Debate on Classes, ed. Erik Olin Wright (New York: Verso, 1989);
Erik Olin Wright, “Framework for the Analysis of Class Structure,” in The Debate on Classes, ed. Erik
Olin Wright (New York: Verso, 1989); Nikos Poulantzas, Classes in Contemporary Capitalism (London:
New Left Books, 1975); Nikos Poulantzas, “On Classes,” New Left Review 78 (1973): 27–54; Pierre
Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (Harvard University Press, 1984).
64
71
gossip that permeated in the underbelly of the developers’ tightly protected realm of
action. Insofar as conditions permitted, an ethnographically oriented study of the different
segments of housing production is used here to corroborate the everyday experiences
relayed through in-depth interviews.
When I began this research, very few studies took the trouble of bringing together
a variety of statistical sources on urban development, a few had compiled construction
data, but except for one invaluable study, nobody seemed to pay any attention to the
quantitative development of the urban space in Istanbul –or, any other city in Turkey.
Ilhan Tekeli’s meticulous attention to detail, his stubborn interest in bringing out the
infinitesimal qualities and aspects of urbanization in Istanbul have been an extra-ordinary
source of influence for this study.65
Finally, I have drawn on newspaper archives, websites, developers’ own
publications, and my observations in the city to bring together a database of private sector
real estate development in the last 25 years in Istanbul. I collected 98 development
corporations’ more than 270 separate developments that consisted of more than 250
thousand housing units in a database, and entered GPS coordinates for each of them to
get an accurate view of the development industry in Istanbul. It proved to be a fertile
source, and promises to be of great use in the future. That database was of immense use
in the sixth chapter.66
In the next chapter, I will remove the cloak of Istanbul’s multi-variegated, rich,
and complex history to gain an insight on contemporary developments. Rem Koolhaas
65
Tekeli, Development of the Istanbul Metropolitan Area.
66
You can access the database online: http://bit.ly/1iWjFek
72
argued that understanding New York actually requires understanding the earliest
European settlement there; in other words, it means making sense of the gridiron shape of
urban planning laid out in the 17th century.67 In Istanbul’s case, things get much more
complicated. It is not merely a Turkish city, not even a city that belongs to the previous
millennium. It is one of the oldest centers of human history that has housed a series of the
most important world-empires. First, I delve into the ways the Ottomans appropriated
Istanbul as the nadir of their political power, and how the fate of the empire merged with
its capital city.
67
Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan (Monacelli Press, 1994).
73
3
Emergence of an Ottoman Urban Topography
The urgency of repopulating the city owed its existence to the crucial role of the
commercial and politico-administrative qualities of Istanbul. Moreover, these same
important qualities contributed to a limited –and highly relative-egalitarian streak that
permitted a modicum of understanding between different communities and helped nonMuslim groups succeed in commercial functions. The first developments in the city, after
the sacred Eyüp mosque complex, was the Grand Bazaar (Kapalıçarşı/Bedesten) built in
the midst of Constantine Forum (today’s Çemberlitaş) and Tauri Forum (Beyazıt).1 The
political apparatus was not far away from the commercial apparatus. Adjacent to the
Grand Bazaar, on the remainder of the Tauri Forum, Mehmet II’s palace was built, and
the palace remained as the main administrative center until the latter part of the 17th
century, when Süleyman I moved his household and offices to the Topkapı Palace. 2 This
new palace, which initially served as the residential palace for the sultan’s harem, was
most possibly in the ruins of Augusteion and Byzantium’s old Acropolis.3
Mehmet II’s symbolic gestures towards the city’s Roman heritage was not merely
limited to its imperial significance, he also ordered a mosque to be built in his honor,
named after himself, the Fatih Mosque, which also contained his planned burial site-that
Halil İnalcık and Donald Quataert, An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire Vol. I: 13001600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 18.
1
Inalcık wrote that sultans’ slaves were employed for the construction of this palace for wages comparable
to what Janissaries received then, and this was paid in order to ease these slaves’ payments for their
freedom, see, Halil Inalcik, “The Policy of Mehmed II toward the Greek Population of Istanbul and the
Byzantine Buildings of the City,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 1969, 236.
2
D. Kuban, İstanbul, Bir Kent Tarihi: Bizantion, Konstantinopolis, İstanbul, trans. Z. Rona (Türkiye
Ekonomik ve Toplumsal Tarih Vakfı, 2000), 206.
3
74
would later become a shrine in his honor- on top of the already half-demolished Holy
Apostles Church. The Holy Apostles Church was the burial site of Constantine and until
the 6th century restoration of the Hagia Sophia was the official cathedral of the Eastern
Roman state where emperors were crowned. After the mosque was built, a new
neighborhood, complete with bazaars was erected around the külliye.4 Hence, the first
stage in the Ottomanization of the city was completed. The old backbone of
Constantinople, the Mese, gradually lost its central character and was replaced by the
Grand Bazaar’s crucial access to the Golden Horn docks, and the erstwhile spatial
topography that axially moved through the forums and symbolically carried on by the
balance between the Holy Apostles Church and Hagia Sophia Cathedral was
reinvigorated by the visually powerful play between the Fatih Mosque and the newly
Islamicized Ayasofya Mosque.
There were three main suburbs outside the city walls: Galata, Eyüp, and Üsküdar.
Üsküdar was the first Islamicized suburb; the area saw Muslim communities flourish
before Mehmet II’s takeover of the city. After the conquest, newly built imarets further
solidified the Islamic character of the neighborhood-which quietly, but resiliently
continued for centuries. With Eyüp and Fatih, Üsküdar had played the role of TurkoIslamic anchor of Istanbul’s cultural self-description. Although Eyüp remarkably lost its
significance in the latter part of the 20th century, from the conquest onwards, for almost
five centuries, acted as the spiritual and spatial representation of the Ottoman reign over
the domain. The Eyüp Mosque and its külliye rapidly became a hub of Islamic
resettlement from the 15th century on. The 18th century and early 19th century Western
4
Ibid., 199–202.
75
travelers wrote that the neighborhood was still overwhelmingly Muslim, and indeed, the
vicinity of the shrine and the tomb of Eyüp and his namesake mosque was then off-limits
for foreigners and non-Muslims.5
Galata, or Pera according to the non-Muslims, was able to keep its privileges as a
commercial colony, and presented a stark contrast to the other areas across the Golden
Horn and other main suburbs with its predominant non-Muslim population. Even though
Mehmet permitted the autonomous self-rule of the Galata colony, let the Genoese and
other Italian and European merchants self-administer themselves –churches, lay people,
as well as commercial exchanges- through his hand-picked podesta, he and his followers
still kept a tight lid on the suburb by converting a –possibly- cistern to the Bodrum
Mosque near the eastern gate of the suburb, building cannon foundries by the northern
walls, later known as Tophane (literally, cannon house, in Turkish), armory and shipyards
by the southern gates (in today’s Kasımpaşa), and establishing schools for the enslaved
Janissary soldiers in the midst of the suburb. The privileges were later abrogated in 1682,
right before the great wars with the Habsburg Empire began.6 The suburb of Galata was
not free from the homogenizing influence of the gradually centralizing Ottoman state
apparatus. Yet, Galata has always played the role of an alter-ego, a sublimated envy, a
thinly veiled desire against the mainstream Sunni Islam’s strict control over bodily joys.7
For a quiet interesting and an almost apolitical orientalist heist, see, Charles MacFarlane, Constantinople
in 1828: A Residence of Sixteen Months in the Turkish Capital and Provinces: With an Account of the
Present State of the Naval and Military Power, and of the Resources of the Ottoman Empire (Saunders and
Otley, 1829), 300–308; Edhem Eldem, “Istanbul: From Imperial to Peripheralized Capital,” in The Ottoman
City between East and West: Aleppo, Izmir and Istanbul, ed. Edhem Eldem, Daniel Goffman, and Bruce
Masters (Cambridge University Press, 1999), 152; Halil Inalcik, “Istanbul: An Islamic City,” Journal of
Islamic Studies 1, no. 1 (January 1, 1990): 1–23.
5
6
See, Eldem, “Istanbul: From Imperial to Peripheralized Capital,” 151.
7
Ibid., 150.
76
Aside from these three suburbs, the early Ottoman Istanbul was a natural example
of any pre-modern city, albeit in overblown proportions. On the one hand, the Old and
New Palaces, the military installations, barracks, armories, foundries, and shipyards
adorned the urban fabric in its peculiar militaristic political vein, on the other hand, the
old Constantinople delineated by the Theodosian Walls still functioned by many gates
and docks that dotted the walls as umbilical cords that fed the city.8 One of these docks
was more important than the others. Unkapanı, the main grain dock of the city, and
vicinity became the focal point of growth with the increasing population. The ancient
peninsula was crowned by the military-administrative elites, between the axis of the Old
and New Palaces, while the civilian population was segregated according to faith.
Muslim quarters were located in the heart of the peninsula; Jews, Greeks, and Armenians
lived on the periphery- the well-to-do were closer to the main docks and ports, the less
fortunate were left in the cramped quarters by the walls. Greek quarters were on the
shores of the Golden Horn and the Marmara; Armenians lived on the strip from Yenikapı
to Samatya, and on the western part of the peninsula by the Topkapı gate (not the same
place as the palace, actually, Topkapı palace was not called as such until the late 18th
century) and Jews lived along the Golden Horn shores, across two neighborhoods on each
side of the Horn: Balat and Hasköy.9 The areas immediately adjacent to the Theodosian
Walls were the only empty spaces in this almost continuously crowded city, and these
places remained empty until the mid-20th century-in some cases, even until very recently.
Today, although nominally Unkapanı (meaning flour depot in old Turkish) stays intact among the once
countless points of entry for the city’s sustenance, there were other well-known places, like Yemiş İskelesi
(the port of the fruits, which stood until the late 1950s and served as a main port for passenger transport
across the Golden Horn ), Odun Kapısı (the gate of timber), etc. See, Ibid., 162.
8
9
Ibid., 152.
77
These vacant lots served a function similar to that which they did during the Byzantine
times, as the fruits and vegetable gardens of the city –partly, also as orchards- provided
fresh produce to the city.10
3.1
Land tenure in Ottoman Istanbul
The significance of Ottoman urban topography, however, owed its long-lasting
existence and enduring vitality to a particular aspect of the Empire’s political economy.
The unique features of land ownership had determined the growth of the urban structure
in the Ottoman Empire. As Halil Inalcık explained in detail, private ownership of
property emerged quite late in the history of the empire. Similar to some of its
contemporary world-empires, especially the Chinese Empire, the land almost exclusively
belonged to the state, and as the personification of the state, its control laid in the hands
of the ruling dynasty. As Eric Wolf reiterated Max Weber’s definition in his discussion of
this domain type over land as a prebendal domain, private landholding was to a large
extent limited, and the land could not be transferred from one generation to the other, as
in what he called patrimonial, or feudal, domain, but rather belonged to a centralized
state.11 Inalcık, and other prominent social historians and sociologists argued that the
Ottomans inherited, or followed closely, this land tenure system from the RomanByzantine imperial regimes, and in this continuity, the domain over land became
integrated with Islamic legal jurisdiction and formed an indubitable part of the traditional
J. Koder, “Fresh Vegetables for the Capital,” in Constantinople and Its Hinterland: Papers from the
Twenty-Seventh Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, Oxford, April 1993, ed. C. A Mango, G. Dagron,
and G. Greatrex (Aldershot, Cambridge: Variorum Publishing, 1995).
10
11
Eric R Wolf, Peasants (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1966), 51–3.
78
land ownership patterns.12 Thus, until the Tanzimat reforms of 1839, the right to own
land in the Ottoman Empire only belonged to the state and the sultan and to whom he
may see fit.13
As a consequence of the rulers’ absolute claim on the domain of land, the land
was strictly preserved as a non-commodity; not bought and sold on the market, the
transfer of land in any pecuniary form was precluded from the outset. On the other hand,
feudalistic tendencies and the centrifugal forces of the empire were kept on a tight leash,
the localization of any contention against the throne was brutally punished, the sole
challengers remained limited to the intricacies of palace politics, more often than not with
dire results for the sultan himself, but palace politics never extended to an open risk
against the dynasty, nor the Sunni-Islamic hegemony. This was the subject of a lengthy
discussion –an acrimonious polemic, indeed- whether this land tenure is an example of
Asiatic Mode of Production, or a different form of feudalism, wherein the prebends were
already commodified, albeit in a proto-capitalistic vein.14 In any case, the Ottoman
İnalcık and Quataert brilliantly summarized the landholding regime prevalent –though gradually
changing- under the Ottoman Empire: “The state (miri) lands, about 90 percent of all the arable lands
were…run accourding to a sultanic law code drawn up by the civil bureaucracy. It was this law code,
actually a combination of Islamic and local practices related to the Roman-Byzantine legacy, which
administered the relationships in Ottoman landholding and taxation. In fact, the system was closely
analogous to that of previous Islamic and Byzantine states, and there was no reason for the Ottomans to
revolutionize tested methods as long as the state received its revenues.” See, İnalcık and Quataert, An
Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire Vol. I: 1300-1600, 105–142.
12
Or, as İnalcık and Quataert described it, “[T]he Ottomans…regarded the family labor farm system as the
foundation of agricultural production and rural society…Maintenance of these two institutions [the other
being craft guild system] formed, so to speak, the constitutional underpinnings of the traditional imperial
system until the nineteenth century, when the Tanzimat reformers discarded them in favor of Westerninspired liberal policies.” Ibid. 145.
13
Erdost wrote lengthy, at times acerbic, even combative critiques against the former camp, whose
proponents were well-established academics like Korkut Boratav and Çağlar Keyder. Unfortunately,
Erdost, an agronomist by training, an old guard socialist, had limited sources at hand, and his findings were
mostly historical data’s pigeonholing to some theoretical doxa, and his influence was immense, almost
ruinous for a generation of scholars and socialists. See, Muzaffer Ilhan Erdost, Asya üretim tarzi ve
Osmanlı Imparatorluğunda mülkiyet ilişkileri (Onur Yayınları, 2005).
14
79
Empire’s predominant land tenure significantly differed from that of Western Europe,
and this difference shaped remarkably distinctive relations of production.15
Here, though, the land tenure in Istanbul begets particular attention in comparison
to the rest of the empire. Inalcık underlined the fact that 90% of all land available in the
empire was subject to the miri domain regime; i.e. owned by the state, and as the
personification of the state, belonged to the sultan. Yet, a considerable portion of urban
land in İstanbul, houses and shops, an important stock of residential and commercial
buildings that remained from the Byzantine era were granted the mülk status –i.e. could
be bought and sold, rented and inherited as waqf property- in order to rapidly repopulate
the city. There were of course some glitches, and a few steps were taken back to protect
the central state’s control, Mehmet II gradually diminished his mülk grants, and
furthermore, sanctioned new regulations to collect rent from the bequeathed mülk
property. Even then, a backlash against his whimsical interpretation of land tenure was
born, so in its stead, he expropriated some of these mülk properties, including properties
that were already turned into waqf, thanks to his administrators’ loose application of
sharia laws concerning property regulations. He was blamed for subsuming sharia law
under his ‘urfi law practices.16
This issue portends a quite interesting and much debated phenomenon inherent in the Ottoman social
structure and its impermeable resistance to a capitalist mode of production, echoing Marx’s arguments of
an Asiatic Mode of Production. Yet, İnalcık and Quataert prefer to accentuate the çift-hane system, and the
peculiarity of the Ottoman case. See, İnalcık and Quataert, An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman
Empire Vol. I: 1300-1600, 107–108. In the late 1970s, a contested polemic surrounding the characteristics
of Ottoman social and economic structure and its legacy to contemporary Turkey created much sound and
fury, yet, it is of scant interest here, and will be discussed with those questions at the end of the next
chapter.
15
16
Inalcik, “The Policy of Mehmed II toward the Greek Population of Istanbul and the Byzantine Buildings
of the City,” 239–245.
80
This conflicting character of private property and its inherent link to the whim of
political authority, inasmuch as its accentuated prevalence in Istanbul, compared to the
rest of the country, raised a profound question regarding the proto-capitalistic
characteristics of ownership in the Ottoman capital. Inalcık pointed out that urban land
rent –even if exerted by the state- would be thought to be synonymous with a Marxian
framework –wherein, land rent played a parasitic role on merchant and industrial
capitalists- and this might indeed portray some parallels with the sharia teachings on rent
–wherein, interest was sinful and forbidden for the Muslims and profits from merchants’
exchange relations and rent were mere means of accumulation, or hoarding17 It is made
sufficiently apparent by historians, that muqata’a –a form of tax farming- was a protocapitalistic form of rent, which side-stepped Islamic sharia regulations on interest by
turning the interest payable on capital borrowing –on land, state structures, merchandise,
etc.- as some form of service.18 So, urban land rent, in a very similar way to
financialization of mortgage credits, carried a potent but latent possibility for triggering
capitalist accumulation. Yet, all the might of the Ottoman state was not enough to turn
urban land rent collection as an established institution. It could barely be recognized in
gradual attempts to formulate a robust fiscal and financial system, though it was
withdrawn in each attempt in the face of popular and elite resistance, and, in most
likelihood, served as one of the elements of the palace elite’s sticks or carrots game
İnalcık and Quataert, An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire Vol. I: 1300-1600, 107,
145–53.
17
18
As Inalcık argued: “In Ottoman state finances the term muqata'a means in general the leasing or farming
out to an individual-after agreement on the sum which the individual will pay-of a source of state revenue.
In the context under consideration the term is to be understood as "rent." Inalcik, “The Policy of Mehmed II
toward the Greek Population of Istanbul and the Byzantine Buildings of the City,” 241.
81
repertoire.
Due to this ambiguous situation vis-a-vis the state’s role and willingness to
encourage an urban private property regime (at least, as the kernel of exchange relations),
from the 15th century on, the predominant mode of ownership and domain on land in
Istanbul became the wakf-imaret system. For instance, one of Mehmet II’s first economic
decisions of the city after the conquest was building the Grand Bazaar as the wakf of the
Ayasofya Mosque.19 Not only were the monumental urban structures of the city subject to
this wakf-imaret system, but the wakfs primarily established by the sultan’s family, and
secondarily by higher officials and pashas built imarets –charitable soup kitchens which
turned into urban institutions complete with mosques, hospices, schools, and
caravanserais. Whole neighborhoods were built around these wakf-imarets, and many of
the city districts were named after these central institutions of the urban growth.20 The
predominant features of Istanbul’s urban dispersal and residential topography were
defined not by the residents themselves, but by the imarets in the eye of these
settlements.21 In other words, the city was made by the powerful military and religious
elite and “those who provisioned the city were also its builders.”22 İnalcık definitively
stated that
high-ranking members of the ‘askerî class [palace officials, army officers, ulemâ
and “bureaucrats”] were…far richer than merchants and craftsmen, and were
Inalcik, “Istanbul,” January 1, 1990, 12. For instance, the waqf of Ayasofya Mosque received rents from
2,350 shops, 4 caravansaries, two baths, and 987 houses. See, Inalcik, “The Policy of Mehmed II toward
the Greek Population of Istanbul and the Byzantine Buildings of the City,” 243.
19
Nur Altinyildiz, “The Architectural Heritage of İstanbul and the Ideology of Preservation,” Muqarnas 24
(2007): 282.
21
Ibid.
20
Çiğdem Kafescioğlu, “The Ottoman Capital in the Making: The Reconstruction of Constantinople in the
Fifteenth Century” (Harvard University, 1996), 321.
22
82
more inclined to found wakfs, partly perhaps for reasons of social and political
prestige, but also as a means of retaining within the family’s control capital
derived originally as income from the Public Treasury.23
From the 16th century onwards, these classical urban institutions, the waqf
complexes, shaped the toponymy of the city, although, until late 15th century, Byzantine
era monuments and buildings were still definitive of the urban layout. The wakf-imaret
system was the truly Ottoman contribution to the city.
Inalcık further argued that mahalles, built around imarets, were themselves selfascribed auto-cephalous, almost autonomously controlled, self-administered units with
their own unique cultural significance. However, this argument seems to tacitly address
Max Weber’s discussion -and, eventually, his normative definition- of urban structures.
Max Weber’s conceptualization of the city and its intrinsic relations to the capitalist
development in the West have deeply influenced studies in urban history and sociology,
in addition to a plethora of other fields, but was especially determining of the main
parameters in modernization theory and area studies-at least until the late 1960s. Weber
thought the sole genuine urban experience that led to the emergence of capitalism and
modern civilization could be found in the Western city. And the Western city had five
basic properties that made it historically peculiar and helped it play the springboard for
further progress: a certain degree of protection and city walls, a marketplace, relatively
free and autonomous laws and courts, a specific form of association, or urban notion of
citizenship, and finally, a relative auto-cephaly or ability in self-administration.24
23
Halil Inalcik, “Istanbul,” The Encyclopaedia of Islam 4 (1973): 235.
“An urban “community,” in the full meaning of the word, appears as a general phenomenon only in the
Occident….To constitute a full urban community a settlement must display a relative predominance of
trade-commercial relations with the settlement as a whole displaying the following features: 1. a
24
83
Weber’s normative definition, perhaps his overly idealized typification, would
have presented an almost insurmountable hurdle for scholars in Ottoman history and
Islamic urbanism. A city court, or civil laws specifically writ for autonomous courts was
highly irregular for Islamic jurisprudence, and in essence, contradictory to the spirit of
sharia. However, Inalcık, appears to find a leeway for the Islamic city to claim a
comparable role as the hansestadt of late feudalism. In his arguments, it was not the city
in toto that carried Weber’s qualifications, but the mahalle. Mahalles elected their own
kethüdas (somewhere in between sheriffs and wardens) who were responsible for the
well-being of the community, the wakfs by means of their boards and imams of their
mosques were mediating institutions between the state and the community, and public
order was protected by the active participation of the residents. At least two guards kept
the streets safe, while at least two garbage men were tasked with the duty to clean up the
streets whose pay came out of the mahalle’s communal funds and imams (or, GreekOrthodox, Armenian-Orthodox priests, or Jewish rabbis) led their communities in this
urban quasi-grassroots local administration. Until 1826, imams and other religious
figures, were the de jure leaders of the urban communities, when a new elected position –
muhtar- was established for such role.25
What needs to be emphasized, however, is that the idealized Ottoman multiculturalism, as the underlying quasi-decentralized autonomy of the mahalle shows, was
rather a mere temporal cross-section of a highly dynamic social, political, and economic
fortification; 2. a market; 3. a court of its own and at least partially autonomous law; 4. a related form of
association; and 5. at least partial autonomy and auto-cephaly.” Weber, The City, 80–81.
25
Inalcik, “Istanbul,” 1973, 238–242.
84
system. The presumed self-control of the mahalle was almost always crushed in the face
of state intervention, and as the guilds’ and religious orders’ powers faded, the
bureaucratic-askerî apparatus did not hesitate to exert its force towards a centralized
uniformity.26 In that sense, it is possible to interpret the wakf-imaret system as the
precursor and facilitator of a bureaucratic-askerî hoarding of urban land. Hence,
economic monopolization of urban land and concentration of political power and
influence, were easily kept under lasting control by this comparatively small class
fraction. This system, and its main activities in the making of Istanbul’s state-space was
in itself inimical to the capitalist mode of production, especially the modern worldsystem’s unfettered and circuitous interplay between commodity-capital and moneycapital, but was rather at home with land rent and money hoarding. Although this
question found few interested parties, the wakf-imaret system’s lasting effects on
Turkish political-economy and ideological habits is a subject of profound interest,
especially given the fact that the current ruling party’s shadowy deals on land –and public
contracts- were almost exclusively conducted through wakfs. I will return to the
repercussions of this system in the sixth chapter.
Ebru Boyar and Kate Fleet, however, describe a different duality between the mahalle and waqfs. In their
research, contrary to the mahalle’s asphyxiating social control and pressure on the everyday life –of
especially women, wakfs present a breath of air with their intrinsic liveliness and heterodoxy that prevailed
in market relations. Boyar and Fleet gave a determining role to the wakf as a fundamental building brick of
the economic and social structure of Ottoman Istanbul. Defined as such, the role that wakfs play represent
the most important features that produced social space in Istanbul. See, Ebru Boyar and Kate Fleet, A
Social History of Ottoman Istanbul (Cambridge University Press, 2010), 125–8.
26
85
Figure 3.1: Istanbul in 1500 AD27
3.2
Commerce and the Ensuing Incorporation to the World-economy
Istanbul, the most populous metropolis of the world until the 18th century, had
kept on with its Roman inheritance: the city required a vast hinterland to be fed, kept
warm in cold winters, to build sheds for its burgeoning population, to produce and sell a
huge array of goods to the rest of the Mediterranean, to protect the state machinery, and
27
Inalcik, “Istanbul,” 1973.
86
to reproduce this very machinery’s constant drive for survival. 28 This long list meant that
the more the concentration of power in a city, the more the need for subsumption of
territory. Hence, this territory hungry empire’s extraordinary capital needed Egypt –the
grains depot of the Mediterranean since pre-historic ages- the Balkans and Western
Anatolia to be fed, and the Crimean peninsula and most of the northern Black Sea to
build sheds (until 19th century houses built in İstanbul were exclusively wooden).29
Imagining that the supply of such variety of resources from such an expansive
geographical reach was provided purely by force, by expropriation, or by sustaining an
idyllic semi-feudal countryside –again, mainly by the might of the sword- was neither
possible, nor reproducible in the long run.30
As Edhem Eldem succinctly described, “Istanbul was…a trading place of an
exceptional nature, in all ways distinct from other Ottoman ports and cities.”31 Istanbul in
the 16th and 17th centuries was the epicenter of Ottoman imperial institutions, complete
with the artisanal manufacturing prowess of the guilds and thanks to its gigantic scale
monetization of exchange relations, attracted eastern Mediterranean trade. The
availability of money payment, and indeed, the widespread use of money, the powerful
P. Bairoch, Cities and Economic Development: From the Dawn of History to the Present (University Of
Chicago Press, 1991); Zafer Toprak, “Istanbul’da Mekan ve Sayısal İlişkiler,” in Aptullah Kuran Için
Yazılar-Essays in Honour of Aptullah Kuran (Istanbul: Yapi Kredi Yayinlari, 1999); Zafer Toprak,
“Tarihsel Nüfusbilim Açısından Istanbul’un Nüfusu ve Toplumsal Topografyası,” Dünü ve Bugünüyle
Toplum ve Ekonomi, no. 3 (April 1992): 109–20.
28
29
Eldem, “Istanbul: From Imperial to Peripheralized Capital,” 162–163.
In dire times, the Roman and Byzantine emperors employed either one of these three methods, or all,
mostly in vain. See, P. Magdalino, “The Grain Supply of Constantinople, Ninth-Twelfth Centuries,” in
Constantinople and Its Hinterland: Papers from the Twenty-Seventh Spring Symposium of Byzantine
Studies, Oxford, April 1993, ed. C. A Mango, G. Dagron, and G. Greatrex (Aldershot, Cambridge:
Variorum Publishing, 1995).
30
31
Eldem, “Istanbul: From Imperial to Peripheralized Capital,” 161–3.
87
imperial elite’s ostentatiously excessive luxury consumption, the perpetual cycles of
military expenditure, the controlled environment of merchant transactions and the relative
transparency and competitiveness of trade relations made the city a beacon for
contemporary traders. With the high levels of monetization, Westerners’ attention was
also continuously directed towards the markets in Istanbul, and for Europeans, the city
became the single most influential magnet for merchants.32 The city, in pre-modern
terms, was a vast hub for a great variety of commodities and functioned as a central depot
for an array of consumption goods. A cornucopia of consumption goods (tanned leather,
cotton and silk yarns and all sorts of woven fabrics, rugs and carpets, ropes, soap, etc.),
building materials (bricks, logs, wooden material of different kinds), fresh produce,
processed food (dried fruits, olives and olive oil, spices, nuts, sesame, all kinds of cheese,
and definitely yoghurt), salt, and finally grain, flowed into the city to keep it well-fed and
content.33
What really set Istanbul apart from other capital cities of the contemporary worldempires, and other competing Eastern Mediterranean ports, was the extent of its dynamic
system of economic exchange.34 Although an urban geographical segregation and
discrimination was gradually incipient, and on top of that, a static and starkly limited
guild system defined the contours of artisanal production and exchange, the city’s
markets were dynamically located in a seldom witnessed coming together of different
32
Ibid., 178–179.
İnalcık and Quataert, An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire Vol. I: 1300-1600, 180–
183; Eldem, “Istanbul: From Imperial to Peripheralized Capital,” 178–179.
33
Eldem, “Istanbul: From Imperial to Peripheralized Capital,” 158–160. Eldem details a heavily
stereotypical account written by a Westerner, and calls it a form of “commercial anthropology.” The
stereotypical, and almost racist accounts provided by these visitors were rather the product of the state’s
compartmentalization of trades and its over-reliance on the guild system.
34
88
faiths and ethnicities. In other words, according to İnalcık, in İstanbul there had always
been Jewish, Greek, and Armenian mahalles, but never a Chinatown, nor a ghetto. The
residential segregation came to be irrelevant in the marketplace. Of course, this is
Inalcık’s rather rosy interpretation of Istanbul’s inter-ethnic guild based commercial
structure; on the other hand, Eldem’s account of an Armenian sarraf (goldsmith, and not
so infrequently, money-lender) in the mid-18th century is definitely not so optimistic.35
In my opinion, an important debate from the 1990s sheds light on the protocapitalistic characteristics of İstanbul. Jan Luiten Van Zanden, in a well-received book
and two further essays, argued that the capitalist mode of production emerged through the
merchant capital’s concentration in trading cities of Amsterdam-as it did before in the
Italian city states of the Mediterranean, Genoa, Venice, and Florence, and would later
happen in London. The debate echoes Henri Pirenne and Max Weber’s early twentieth
century arguments –that the urban structure owed its existence to the adventurous traders
and their able sense in hoarding large sums of gold-money. In this vein, merchants’
capital precedes the capitalist mode of accumulation, and van Zanden described the
situation of Amsterdam and other protestant cities in 16th century Europe as an
archipelago of capitalistic accumulation in a sea of feudalism. Immanuel Wallerstein
penned a harsh critique of this argument, and to an extent, rightly so, and blamed van
Zanden for putting the cart before the horse and misinterpreting the cause-effect
relationship between merchant-capital and the capitalist mode of production. In a candid
vigor, van Zanden’s argument would imply that capitalist mode of production existed
In its stead, the sarraf, Yakoub Hovenessian, was tortured after the downfall of his protector in the Porte,
“his dead body was decapitated and flung aside ath the entrance of the palace with his severed head
positioned between his legs.” See, Ibid., 164–174.
35
89
during the Roman Empire’s centralized system of trade in the Mediterranean, or, for the
same purpose in the classical Ottoman Empire, and the Chinese Empire, as well as
Mughal India. As Marx and Weber argued at several places in their study of modern
capitalism, pure profit mongering does not mean capitalist accumulation and the
conditions of gold-money’s transformation into capital is much more complicated than
the simple drive for hoarding. In any case, İstanbul can be seen as a failure in that regard,
compared to lesser cities of the 16th century, and the paradigmatic features of this failure
would be of much interest.36 While Amsterdam and other Dutch cities brought together
an accumulated merchant capital (or hoarding of gold) even before the provenance of the
capitalist mode of production, Istanbul could not translate this pre-capitalistic
accumulation of money into a fully-fledged modern world-system and a world-economy
built around itself.
One thing is certain, the extent and power of İstanbul’s trade relations in the 16th
century Mediterranean was, at least at the same level, if not more, compared to the
Habsburg Spanish Empire –so skilfully explicated by Fernand Braudel. What Ottomans
lacked in the Potosi silver mines and the slave labor of the New World, they recuperated
with the slave labor of Africa –even before the Europeans, though not mainly oriented
towards production- and resources of the constant expansion into the Balkans and
Northern Africa. Although discerning and useful in such comparison, the world-systems
analysis paid scant attention to the role played by cities in the shaping up of the processes
Jan Luiten van Zanden, “Synopsis of the Book: The Rise and Decline of Holland’s Economy: Merchant
Capitalism and the Labour Market,” Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 20, no. 2 (April 1, 1997): 189–92;
Jan Luiten van Zanden, “Do We Need a Theory of Merchant Capitalism?,” Review (Fernand Braudel
Center) 20, no. 2 (April 1, 1997): 255–67; Immanuel Wallerstein, “Merchant, Dutch, or Historical
Capitalism?,” Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 20, no. 2 (April 1, 1997): 243–54.
36
90
of uneven development that begot the modern world-system and the world-economy. The
city remained as a synecdoche, as an allusion to bigger economic and political
developments that took place in the longue dureé. 37
What is generally overlooked in this analysis was that the longue dureé, as Henri
Lefebvre so aptly put it in his rhythm-analyses of the urban structures, was not
impervious to the temporal and spatial aspect of the city, but rather encapsulated and
flourished within miniscule movements of everyday life as a representational space in
time. Treating the longue dureé as spatial –and, endowed with a plethora of multi-layered
wealth of geographical and cultural differences- temporality, would, I believe, firstly,
permit Fernand Braudel’s theoretically rich historiography. Second, it would open the
way for understanding the divergent fates of different cases of incorporation into the
world-economy, and especially, help engender an understanding of the discursive gap,
chasm to be more precise, between East and the West. Why is the question of
Orientalism, and its Siamese twin Occidentalism, or auto-Orientalism so pervasive in the
periphery? Why did the late Ottoman experience, as the empire collapsed, try to come up
with a top-down approach in centralized reformation, that came to be known as the
Tanzimat era, that left indelible marks on the psyche of the Turkish and Kurdish peoples,
and subsequently annihilated the non-Muslim minorities’ physical existence on this land?
And how can the effects of peripheralization be long lasting that not only shaped the late
Ottoman governmentality but lived on almost verbatim, in the Kemalist republican
entity? The questions can be numerous and will be a prominent, if implicit, theme of the
next chapters. However, the third contribution of reformulating the longue dureé at a
For a similar critique, see, Jan Nederveen Pieterse, “A Critique of World System Theory,” International
Sociology 3, no. 3 (1988): 251–66.
37
91
spatial scale further enables foregrounding cities as meaningful entities that have
determining power in the world-economy and the inter-state system of the modern worldsystem and assigning to these cities a proportionate role as an element of my object of
analysis.
Thus, it is pertinent to pay special attention to the geographical rhythm of
incorporation into the world-system. The incorporation that began with the Balkans in the
early 19th century continued in the Eastern Mediterranean with the gradual devolution of
Egypt, and finally, current Turkey’s Western borders entered a long phase of
peripheralization in the 1830s.38 The process of incorporation gave birth to a novel
capitalist class rooted in İstanbul with links to the worldwide capital circuits while a
whole pre-modern set of relations of production was uprooted and gradually obliterated
along with the ethnic, religious, and cultural connotations of such a system. As Europe
entered 19th century with a series of wars, the hangover effect of the French Revolution,
in a manner of speaking, the askerî class in the Ottoman Empire, lost the last vestiges of
its power and had to shoulder the burdensome and much belated reforms, and, eventually,
the turmoil of the Tanzimat era.
Stefanos Yerasimos wrote in the 1970s that the empire’s relations of production
up until the 19th century were almost exclusively built upon an ethnic division of labor
that centered on the redistributive hub of İstanbul. Yet, the 18th century brought a change
in this ethnic division of labor, possibly due to the abolition of the devshirme system the
non-Muslim population in Anatolia increased both in absolute and relative terms. By the
end of the 18th century, the share of non-Muslims in the Anatolian population increased
38
Huri İslamoğlu and Çağlar Keyder, “Agenda for Ottoman History,” Review 1, no. 1 (1977): 53.
92
from 8% to 20%. In addition to this relevant rise in population share, the traditional roles
played by separate ethnic and religious groups changed significantly in the early part of
the 19th century. The Phanariote aristocracy of Greeks (they were granted specific
privileges by Mehmet II, served as the foreign emissaries of the Sublime Porte, and for
eight decades in the 18th century ruled Wallachia and Moldova principalities as their own
fiefdom) lost their strategic and administrative influence after the Greek Independence in
1829 and then slowly turned into financiers next to the Armenian goldsmiths. Add to that
the most ancient merchants of the Orient, the Levantines, the incipient characteristics of
the merchant and finance capitalists of the empire were apparent: they were
overwhelmingly non-Muslim, from several Christian beliefs and with extensive
knowledge of and contacts in the ascendant Western world. They would be the kernel of
a truly Ottoman bourgeoisie. Moreover, the loss of Wallachia and Moldova to Russia at
around the same time, the withering of Porte’s tributary rule over Egypt, and most
crucially, the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 that paved the transformation of Western
Anatolia to one of the significant sources of grains imports to Britain had greatly affected
the predominant pattern of peripheralization of the empire. Already scarce labor power
was devalued further with the establishment of çiftliks-the large-scale manufactories of
agricultural products. Finally, the unfettered access of European textiles to the Ottoman
markets was the last blow that broke the back of the camel and shredded to pieces what
remained of the barter economy and non-commodified agricultural relations of
exchange.39
A key issue made itself felt in all its seriousness at this conjuncture. Çağlar
Stefanos Yerasimos, Azgelişmişlik Sürecinde Türkiye 2. Tanzimattan 1. Dünya Savaşına (İstanbul:
Gözlem Yayınları, 1975), 607–624.
39
93
Keyder brought attention to this question in his seminal book, State and Classes in
Turkey, wherein he pointed out that the sole class fraction of hypothetically imputed
power to act upon and reorder this social system prone to implosion at any moment was
the non-Muslim merchant capitalists. In a rapidly changing atmosphere with the
overwhelming power of the Western world and the perpetual threat posed by a
newfangled entrant on the stage, the Russian Empire, it was evident that the askerî class
had already forfeited its hard-earned right in ruling this vast empire. Though they still had
the de jure authority, their knowledge of this new system and the material basis of their
power in this system rapidly eroded. The newly emerging bourgeoisie gained the de facto
authority by means of capital accumulation, yet lacked the muscle power to establish a
new system. The nominal abilities of the bourgeoisie could not find the grounds for its
own realization.40 They were indeed the ruling classes on paper. Perhaps this could have
been the reason for Ottoman incorporation to the modern world-system as a peripheral
economy, unlike Russia, which had entered the fray as a semi-peripheral economy.41 This
will be of determining importance when I discuss the surreptitious conscience collective
that permeated with increasing might in İstanbulites’ spatial perceptions. A state
apparatus that is highly inept, uncoordinated, corrupt, and delusional about its capabilities
entered into a war of positions against a presumably ruling class of a new capitalist order,
a bourgeoisie that is mostly made up of Christians, and İstanbul played out as the urban
setting of this unjust war against the minorities. Before that, though, I will define the
architectural and urban qualities of classical Ottoman İstanbul.
40
Keyder, State and Class in Turkey : A Study in Capitalist Development.
Immanuel Wallerstein, “The Ottoman Empire and the Capitalist World-Economy: Some Questions for
Research,” Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 2, no. 3 (January 1, 1979): 389–98.
41
94
3.3
The Spatial Characteristics of Classical Ottoman Istanbul
A question asked of any layperson about the architecturally defining qualities of
classical İstanbul, what could best represent İstanbul symbolically, the answer would
indubitably be the mosques, their minarets, and a handful of Byzantine monuments. All
these soul defining imperial monuments have carried a single person’s artistic imprint
since the 16th century: Great Architect Sinan (1490-1588). In İstanbul alone, Sinan
designed and built 120 structures, and with more than 300 buildings attributed to him
throughout the empire, he shaped the fundamental style and form of classical Ottoman
architecture.42 The main spatial solutions Sinan employed in his structures were an
answer to the limits of pre-modern building techniques and an attempt in overcoming
technological limits: relations between monumentality and scale, domes, arches, and
vaults necessitated solving the underlying engineering problems in craftsmen’s
practically confined abilities, and further required a systematical, mathematical
reassessment of Hagia Sophia and baroque churches. All of his efforts in solving these
structural problems with both innovative and traditionally receptive methods made Sinan
comparable to Leonardo da Vinci.43 Not only had Sinan always preferred, “structural
clarity… to spatial chaos”44 in his design approach, but also undertook the dome as the
principle element of design as “the unit that defined the limits of the scale, and [the
element that treated] supporting foundations in a continuous volume.”45
42
Çelik, The Remaking of Istanbul, 26–27.
43
Kuban, İstanbul, Bir Kent Tarihi, 234–235.
44
Ibid., 235.
As cited by, Çelik, The Remaking of Istanbul, 26–27. Çelik pointed out that according to “Doğan Kuban,
Sinan’s central design principle was to use “the dome as the measure-giving unit and the supporting base as
45
95
However, it is still a matter of debate whether Sinan represented an architectural
genius, a matchless talent of centuries, or his métier was rather a fusion between
Byzantine Empire’s building techniques and repertoire of spatial forms and OttomanIslamic embellishments and a highly detailed set of motifs. Moreover, the latter
explanation –that sought the mending of two different architectural cultures in his workforegrounded the collective institutional aspect of the Ottoman architect’s craft. The
prevalent argument today is that his countless mosques, bridges, caravanserais, fountains,
etc. were instead of being the product of a single man’s genius, a collective making of
palace.46 The one-man-genius argument’s discursive value is evident. The story of a nonMuslim craftsman –who, possibly was not literate until his adoption by the palacebeginning as an enslaved soldier, converting to Islam, slowly rising in the ranks of the
askerî class, becoming the master architect of the empire with the formidable education
he gained in palace schools and bridging the gap between the predominant Ottoman
Turko-Islamic building techniques and Roman-Byzantine architecture to single-handedly
reformulate a novel, long lasting, and influential architectural language is definitely
appealing. Sinan was thus the embodiment of all things good about the Ottoman culture.
The opening words on Sinan’s wakf contract ossifies this story: “Ayn-ı âyân-ı
mühendisîn, zeyn-i erkân-ı müessisîn, üstad-ı esâtizetü’z-zaman reis-i cehabizetü’ddevran, oklidisi’l-asrî ve’l-evân, mimar’ı sultani ve muallim-i hakani.”47
In recent years, however, this narrative opened up for further debate. The veracity
a mass continuum.”
46
Uğur Tanyeli, Rüya, İnşa, İtiraz (İstanbul: Boyut, 2011).
47
As cited by Kuban, İstanbul, Bir Kent Tarihi, 233. The translation is: “The apex of all advanced
engineers, the ornament of the leauge of great builders, the master of masters of the age, the leader of the
learned men of the times, the Euclid of the times, the architect of the Sultan and the tutor of the khan.”
96
of the one-man-genius narrative is questioned given the extent of knowledge on the
architectural history of the period, and critiques raised their doubts if, instead of Sinan’s
particular ingenuity in coming up with new techniques, the Janissary Corps’ hierarchical
organization, their advanced level of technical knowledge, the Corps’ elaborate and
highly skilled workforce , and the transmission of Byzantine architectonic experiences
and building technologies were the underlying reasons for most of Sinan’s work. Thus,
Sinan, as the head of the Janissary Corps’ builders, might have been unjustly recognized
as the single culprit of their collective and anonymous labors. And, indeed, it is really of
much further interest, since the most mundane details of Sinan’s biography is not based
upon facts, but on pure conjecture.48 Tanyeli is right when he suggested that employing
one-man’s genius as the predominant theory for explaining architectural progress in
Turkey is rather tantamount to an autarchic, parochial mentality that imagined an
alternative idealized history without inter-relations of subjective and objective
phenomena.
Of course, it is possible to explain the great man narrative from another
perspective, though this explanation is dabbled in the crassest of Orientalisms. The
Western travelers in the late 18th and early 19th centuries tried to delve into the hitherto
incognito land of the East and through their detailed travelogues one can encounter
thorough descriptions of the built environment. Although Ottoman architects, neither
Sinan, nor the ensuing masters, piqued their interest, the travelogues provided a sound
Tanyeli, Rüya, İnşa, İtiraz, 49–53; Yasemin Bay, “Tanyeli: Mimar Sinan Muhayyel Biri,” Milliyet,
August 1, 2007; Yasemin Bay, “Sinan Hayali Değil Ama Abartı Var Tabii,” Milliyet, August 2, 2007, sec.
Kültür-Sanat. For further discussion of Sinan’s tradition as an architectural and ideological invention, see,
Gülru Necı̇ poğlu, “Creation of a National Genius: Sı̇ nan and the Historiography of ‘Classical’ Ottoman
Architecture,” Muqarnas 24 (January 1, 2007): 141–83.
48
97
picture of the pre-Tanzimat era Ottoman urban landscapes. A common assumption of
these Western travelers was that Turkish architecture was not really worthy of merit, but
owed its principal characteristics to the Greek architects, particularly to the spatial design
of Hagia Sophia: “[t]o Greek architects the Turks are indebted for the erection of their
mosques, which have evidently Hagia Sophia for their model, with slight variations in the
ground-plan.” 49 The seminal argument that brought forward a daunting dent in the
cultural formation –and undeniably, the confidence- of hegemonic Ottoman ideology was
voiced by Charles Texier, in the 1840s:
For a long time it has been said that the Ottomans (Osmanlis) do not have an
architecture particular to their nation (nation); being tribes with tents, they
remained strangers to the art of construction, and their public edifices are the
works of foreigners, Arab and Persian architects initially, and Greek architects
afterwards. No other type of edifice provides better proof of this fact than their
religious monuments.50
Another traveler reiterated this well-worn argument in 1827: “[t]he other
mosques, which are chiefly of Turkish origin, and modeled after St. Sophia, bear the
names of their founders.”51 For Brewer, the American missionary, the decisive essential
feature of the Turkish mosque architecture that set it apart from Hagia Sophia was the
introversive use of the public square that surrounded the main building and the use of
49
James Dallaway, Constantinople Ancient and Modern: With Excursions to the Shores and Islands of the
Archipelago and to the Troad (Cadell & Davies, 1797), 59.
As cited in, Necı̇ poğlu, “Creation of a National Genius,” 143; Charles Texier, “Notes Géographiques
D’un Voyage En Asie Mineure,” Comptes-Rendus Des Séances de l’Académie Des Inscriptions et BellesLettres 5, no. 1 (1861): 125. In Texier’s original wording, this issue is raised during his visit to Bursa,
apparently, he –rightly- saw that Bursa, unlike Istanbul, was house to a more authentic architectural
tradition of the Turks, he wrote: “Il y a longtemps qu’on l’a dit; les Osmanlis n’ont pas d’architecture
particuliere a leur nation; tribus de la met, ils sont restés étrangers a l’art de bâtir.”
50
51
Josiah Brewer, A Residence at Constantinople in the Year 1827: With Notes to the Present Time ...
(Durrie & Peck, 1830), 83.
98
fountains: “You will find most of them surrounded with a large open court, in which are
shade trees, fountains and cloisters, for the purposes of ablution.”52 Brewer was shaken
by the unhygienic conditions prevalent in the city and terrified by the prospect of plague,
rabies, and a myriad of other epidemics in the city and locked himself in the only
cloistered space, the Prince Islands for protection from the diseases, fleas, stray dogs, and
rats. Appalled by the general lack of maintenance and hygiene in Istanbul, his sole
commendatory mention was about the easy access to water: “The fountains are very
numerous, both in the city and by the way-side, and are an example worthy of imitation
in Christian countries…The public baths are likewise an object worthy of notice.”53
Ten years later, Charles Texier commented on the distinctive properties of
Ottoman architecture (unlike other travelers, he used the term, Ottoman, not Turkish).
Texier’s evaluations were extraordinary in terms of his travels in the three continents of
the empire; he found plenty of possibilities to compare different examples of Islamic,
Greek, and Byzantine architecture, he saw and wrote about the mosques of Istanbul,
Cairo, Bursa, Adana, Tarsus, and as far as Algeria in elaborate descriptions. He
recognized in Bursa’s Grand Mosque the traces of Seljukid architecture and gave a list of
features found in other Seljukid structures. What Texier found intriguing and worthy of
further speculation was the fact that the Seljukid influence in building forms, once
predominant in the two earlier capital cities of the empire, Bursa and Edirne, was
completely missing in Istanbul. He wrote that “[c]hose curieuse, la ville de
52
Ibid., 83.
53
Ibid., 85.
99
Constantinople ne contient pas un seul modéle de ce genre [Seljoukides].”54 And he
repeated the other travelers’ opinion almost in verbatim: “Dés ce jour toutes les mosques
qui furent construites dans l’empire Ottoman furent imitées de l’eglise de SainteSophie.”55 In Texier’s view, classical Ottoman architecture was nothing but a
reproduction of Justinian era Greek churches. The sole novelty in Ottomans’
interpretation of Justinian built forms was the use of domes supported by vaults, the
brighter interiors due to the light permitting pendantive windows, and the ubiquity of
fountains.56 This cornerstone of Ottoman civilization, the classical era mosques, owed its
existence to the Byzantine culture.
Yet, it was critically emphasized time and again that even in this indebtedness, the
free borrowing from Byzantines could not help the Ottomans in surpassing the size and
scale of the Hagia Sophia and its dome.57 Contemporary architectural historians pointed
out through a lengthy analysis of Sinan’s work beginning from the Şehzade Mosque, to
the Süleymaniye Mosque, and coming to perfection in one of his last works, the
Selimiye Mosque in Edirne, and decided that Sinan’s shortcomings in size, scale, and
grandiosity –compared to the Byzantine monuments- were more than surpassed by his
mastery of excellence in motifs, simplicity and harmony of functional elements, and his
C. Texier, Asie mineure: description géographique, historique et archéologique des provinces et des
villes de la Chersonnèse d’Asie (Didot frères, 1862), 126.
54
55
Ibid.
Ibid. “une salle quadrangulaire decoree ou non de colonnes a l'intérieur, mais toujours couverte par une
voute ou pendentif eclairee par de nombreuses fenetres. Le harem precede la mosquée, et les nombreuses
fontaines coulent aux alentours de l'edifice pour l'usage des croyants.”
56
57
Dallaway, Constantinople Ancient and Modern, 59.
100
holistic approach to spatial configurations.58
Whatever the case is, whether as a product of an artisanal engineers’ corps, or
making of a genius, whether pure novelty, or a reinterpretation of spatial solutions of the
Byzantine architects, Sinan’s külliyes are the definitive seal of Ottoman and Islamic
Istanbul. These külliyes, the plethora of wakf-imaret complexes, contributed greatly to the
urban topography of the city and added new axial dimensions that still stand today. As
Zeynep Çelik argued, these külliyes “are integral units organized around a central
structure and have no major arteries connecting them to the surrounding environment.”59
The well-described introversive characteristic of Ottoman urbanism is broken at the point
of külliyes’ geometrical patterns, and albeit grandiose in scale, they succeeded in
permeating the whole city, and indeed, once again, inherently meshed monumentality
with the urban layout.60 Istanbul had always been a monumental city, and the külliyes
remarkably reintroduced such monumentality in a new architectural and functional
language; the Roman forum was replaced by the Islamic mosque complex. However, I
will not simplify this transformation nor hesitate to criticize the ahistorical treatment of
the Islamic city as built around the mosques.61 As Istanbul was repetitively built and
rebuilt in the imagination of the sovereign, she kept some of her traits intact –the interest
showed in sheer size and monumentality, for instance- and shed some –the role played by
Kuban, İstanbul, Bir Kent Tarihi, 231–249; Aptullah Kuran, Mimar Sinan (Hürriyet Vakfı Yayınları,
1986). For a critical re-evaluation and revision of Sinan’s work and architecture, see, Gülru Necipoğlu, The
Age of Sinan: Architectural Culture in the Ottoman Empire (Reaktion Books, 2005).
58
59
Çelik, The Remaking of Istanbul, 26–27.
60
Ibid.
Ira M. Lapidus, Middle Eastern Cities: A Symposium [at Berkeley, Calif., October 27-29, 1966] on
Ancient, Islamic, and Contemporary Middle Eastern Urbanism, 1969.
61
101
the mese. Certainly, Western cities had gone through such evolutions, but, what made
Istanbul outstanding was the gigantic scale, in early modern notions, she was a beast, a
monstrosity.
3.4
Qualities of Pre-modern Istanbul’s Urban Fabric
Even at the time of its lowest population concentration, the city –the intra muros
core of Istanbul- was home to more than 400,000 souls. All of these people lived in a
tightly packed area within the walls, confined to the narrowest of the streets frequently
made up of dark, airless alleys and dead ends that shaped the chaotic urban
morphology.62 It was not merely the chaotic hustle and jostling of people from different
backgrounds, genders, ethnicities that made the early modernist literati uncomfortable
and discontent. Modernity’s great interlocutors had a profound problem, from the 18th
century onward, with the lack of order: the tight and seemingly spontaneously erected
buildings, the haphazardly developed streets, the amorphous and porous relations
between the houses and the streets were a source of constant disturbance. The relations
between hitherto organically defined dualities –streets and buildings, houses and gardens,
houses and other houses, homes and rooms, and mahalles and külliyes- had to be
reordered, since their mere existence as they are indicated a ruined system rooted in the
past, a dark age that needed to be erased, a mind that needed to be taught and trained, and
a present that had to be unfettered from the shackles of the Ancien regime.63
Çelik, The Remaking of Istanbul, 4. For a very similar evaluation, see also, Ebru Boyar and Kate Fleet, A
Social History of Ottoman Istanbul (Cambridge University Press, 2010), 271.
62
Such allusions were commonly made around the same 19th century frame regarding the prisons. The
modern gaze saw that the prisons are ghastly, buildings are either public houses, or extensions of pubs run
by the same patrons and are shacks in the midst of community with quiet permeable relationships with this
community, and haphazard collections of rooms merely to confine, inmates are nothing but a rowdy bunch
63
102
James Dallaway, a member of the late 18th century British ambassador’s retinue,
wrote in his very well received book, Costantinople, Ancient and Modern –published in
1797 to great acclaim and translated into German four years later- that Istanbul’s streets
were altogether an entanglement of a whimsically connected, haphazardly placed, and
chaotically related collection of passages: “The great founder left the streets to the
arrangement of chance, and it is probable, that they were scarcely more regular than at
present.”64 Besides the disorderly chaos of the urban setting, frequent fires routinely
devastated the city in a rapid fervor due to the overwhelming proportion of wooden
houses and Dallaway noted with allusion to the Byzantine historians that little had
changed in the city in the last millennium.
Brewer, on other hand, found it quite amusing that under the invasively constant
of irrepressible career crooks and/or are frequently made with regard to earlier methods of punishment and
imprisonment from late 18th century onwards. A legion of examples can be found in a plethora of writings
ranging from John Howard’s accounts of European, Russian, Ottoman, and British prisons to later prison
reformers of the 19th century, and best summarized by M. Foucault’s seminal work, of course, and
underlined by many distinguished historians of crime and punishment. See, Michel Foucault, Discipline
and Punish : The Birth of the Prison, vol. 2nd Vintage Books (New York: Vintage Books, 1995); Norval
Morris, The Oxford History of the Prison: The Practice of Punishment in Western Society (Oxford
University Press, 1998); David J. Rothmann, The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in
the New Republic (Transaction Publishers, 1971); Pieter Cornelis Spierenburg, The Prison Experience:
Disciplinary Institutions and Their Inmates in Early Modern Europe (Amsterdam University Press,
2007).Yet, it was Thomas Markus who aptly pointed out the spatial modulations prevalent in modernizing
mentality. He argued that an architecture of power was built around the subjectivities of the sad (mental
asylums), the bad (prisons), and the mad (mental asylums and hospitals again). Perhaps the East should be
added to this concomitant movement of spatial disciplining, since, the Orientalist gaze delved into the
fabric of the Oriental city, beginning with Istanbul, in its quest to bring orderliness and hygiene (in terms of
class relations, in as much as defining racial lines of segregation). See, Thomas A. Markus, Buildings and
Power: Freedom and Control in the Origin of Modern Building Types (Routledge, 2013); T. A. Markus and
H. Mulholland, Order in Space and Society: Architectural Form and Its Context in the Scottish
Enlightenment (Mainstream, 1982); T. A. Markus, “Buildings for the Sad, the Bad and The Mad in Urban
Scotland: 1780-1830,” in Order in Space and Society: Architectural Form and Its Context in the Scottish
Enlightenment (Mainstream, 1982), 25–114.
Dallaway, Constantinople Ancient and Modern, 70. Alas, his last dalliance with publishing fame was this
book; his other ventures into penning successive volumes for Gibbon’s Roman history failed due to his loss
of notes for the book. John H. Farrant, “Dallaway, James (1763-1834),” ed. Brian Harrison, H.C.G.
Matthew, and Lawrence Goldman, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: OUP, 2011),
http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/7040.
64
103
threat of endless fires, old houses fetched higher prices in the market than the newer ones,
since it implied that the older a house gets, the less fire ravaged that district was. To
prove his point he cited figures from unnamed sources, in 1782 seven or eight thousand
houses were burnt down, in 1784 almost twelve thousand was razed, in 1788, the whole
city was at the verge of complete demolition, and in 1826 –two years before his writinga devastating fire captured the city from “one see to another.” With an uncanny nonchalance he described what he witnessed in the ruined mosques, caravanserais, bazaars,
houses, and countless fountains: “It was estimated that an eighth part of the city was
destroyed, and on an average, the whole city is burned down and rebuilt, once in twenty
years.”65 With an interesting gaiety, he summed up his miles of wandering in Istanbul
streets, and in a strangely brilliant way recognized the cycles of pre-modern creative
destruction. Fire had been an inherent part of Istanbul’s identity since the beginning. And
although there was a limited attempt in the latter part of the 17th century to keep fire
under control, until the 20th century successive waves of great fires were an integral part
of the city’s urban lore and as long as the use of wood in construction lingered as the
predominant material, this situation did not change.66 It was part and parcel of the
gradually emerging Istanbul blues, a specific blues that was colored by flames and
unavoidable destruction.
Dallaway, three decades before Brewer’s writing, began seeing this blues, this
melancholy, and with unprecedented Orientalist condescension argued that even if all the
wealth and technical accoutrements of Europe were channeled to this once almighty
65
Brewer, A Residence at Constantinople in the Year 1827, 111.
66
Kuban, İstanbul, Bir Kent Tarihi, 272–274.
104
capital city, “Constantinople, under its Ottoman masters, has fewer conveniences than the
worst of them; and all it can claim is a sort of gloomy magnificence in the vicinity of the
great mosques, or as approached through the widely extended cemeteries.” He was
brusque, crass, unforgiving, and definitely racist, when he argued that this city of the
seven hills, although her population was proud of the mythical essence of these hills, was
scattered with an endless array of labyrinthine streets, dangerous and aggressive stray
dogs –which he claimed descending from wolves- filth, vermin, and an interminable
sense of poverty.67
After two centuries, it is rather interesting to note that these benevolent actors of
the Enlightenment, of rampant modernization, who claimed to be the champions of
progress and advancement for mankind, for all things humane, were in great moral panic
when it came to the stray dogs and cats wandering in great numbers on the streets of
Istanbul. Certainly, rabies and plague played a great role for long in decimating urban
populations, and dogs, rats, and all sorts of vermin were rightly seen as culprits-though,
the exact mechanisms of infection were not understood until much later.68 A specific
anthropocentrism pervasively determined their descriptions; the almost seamless
relationship between people and the stray animals, their access to urban communities, the
warm welcome they received from everyday folk, and their unquestioned role as living
organisms of the streets rang bells of alarm in all its force. The Eastern tolerance to stray
dogs and cats was irrational according to these common assumptions of the Orientalists.
What the Easterner saw in animals was unbeknownst to them, an alien concept, yet the
67
Dallaway, Constantinople Ancient and Modern, 70–1.
Ebru Boyar and Kate Fleet also point out to the same observation shared by many 19th century travellers.
See, Boyar and Fleet, A Social History of Ottoman Istanbul, 272–4.
68
105
Western man saw bestial disregard for hygiene; where transparency between all kinds
existed until early 20th century in Istanbul, the Westerner called for an immediate end to
this hazardous health conditions. In my view, although latently implied but never
discussed openly, the Westerner equated the animal with the Eastern human being-they
were one and the same: dangerous, unpredictable, unruly, infected, sentimental, and
irrational.
The Orientalists’ accounts of stray animals would procure much further insight
into the foundational pillar of Enlightenment thought: anthropocentrism. MacFarlane, for
instance, an officer, had kept his whip close at hand during his long walks. Brewer,
however, was not so lucky. Once the stick he was carrying proved useless against the
well-seasoned dogs of the city, he began paying passing locals to protect him against the
dogs.69 Brewer’s anxiety reached epic proportions, in almost Woody Allenesque hyperchondria, he left Istanbul proper after three months of agony full of constant fear of
diseases and epidemics, and moved to the Prince Islands. The rest of his tenure in
Istanbul, 9 months –contrary to what his books’ title suggested- was spent in complete
quarantine in the biggest one of the Prince Islands. During that time, as consolation –
though he was away from most of the stray dogs and rats, he kept on complaining that his
room was full of bugs and vermin- he tried to proselytize the Orthodox Greeks of the
Island, to no avail. The most important fruit of his time on the island, perhaps, not for
himself, but definitely for social scientists, was his impeccable description of life in these
islands and how the Hagia Georgios Monastery in the 19th century functioned as a mental
asylum, where “the sad and the mad,” those affected by psychological problems were
69
MacFarlane, Constantinople in 1828; Brewer, A Residence at Constantinople in the Year 1827.
106
confined in the monastery. He vividly detailed the cruel conditions then existing in this
early mental asylum and how the priests mercilessly treated their patients.70 It becomes
more interesting once I realized that without its Greek congregation, the monastery –on
top of the highest hill of the Prince Islands- became a sort of tourist location in the last
two decades, and how ordinary Istanbulites –Muslims and non-Muslims alike- today
come to pray in the small remaining church and leave rags on the tree branches along the
narrow and steep path up the hill for their wishes on the day of St. George.
Dallaway went beyond what Brewer did, and had ample occasions, a wide range
of connections to the higher up echelons of the Ottoman elites, and plenty of money to
delve into the daily lives of Istanbul’s Muslims at the end of the 18th century. His
depiction illustrated a society centered on domestic life; i.e., homes –the ultimate places
of privacy- played the pinnacle that organized flow of people, culture, and goods on the
streets of Istanbul. Once the evening prayer of the day –also signifying the sunset- was
heard from the minarets, thousands rushed to their homes, leaving behind a dark void on
the streets from sunset to the sunrise, the city “becomes an unoccupied space, like a
desert. One hour after sun-set every gate of the city is shut, and entrance strictly
prohibited.”71 As a proto-anthropologist, who failed terribly at gaining access from the
gatekeepers of the community, and as an Orientalist deeply compromised by his
unswerving allegiance to mission civilatrice, he tried to make sense of the empty streets.
He was lucky; he had few friends in the palace –remember, he was one of the British
ambassador’s men- and had first-hand experience of the venerated Ottoman houses.
70
Brewer, A Residence at Constantinople in the Year 1827.
71
Dallaway, Constantinople Ancient and Modern, 72.
107
For Dallaway, the insides of these houses were no different than their outsides: the
interiors were, in stark contrast to the surrounding streets, tidy, neat, clean, and well taken
care of. This contrast would later present one of the most repeated arguments of Turkish
mainstream –and, academic- discourse on space: the meticulously ordered homes against
the unruly, filth-ridden streetscapes. The decisive element, in the Westerner’s behold,
was the harem. Harem was located in the most opportune, accessible, relevant part of the
house. The harem was usually adjacent to an internal open-air court, which was more
often than not adorned with an embellished fountain. The ornate embellishments,
intricate handicraft woodwork furnishings were a frequent theme in the late 18th century
homes, according to Dallaway, and the inherently ostentatious displays of wealth were
presented at all costs to the homeowners. This was, in a sense, representations of what
later would be called conspicuous consumption.
Yet, in Dallaway’s view, these houses were “comfortless wooden boxes” in
general, cool during the summer months, though frigidly cold during the winter, and
poorly equipped to handle the rainy season. They lacked fireplaces and were heated by
earthen stoves that produced more smoke than heat. Worse, said Dallaway, the ground
floors were barely an extension of the public street, even then, the entries were
inadequately lit, the second floor stairs were mostly shoddily built out of wood, and they
were narrow, dark, and dirty.72
Without the apparent condescension and ill will, the homes portrayed by
Dallaway were more or less the staple of 20th century Turkish architectural discourse
72
Ibid.
108
surrounding the issue of tradition.73 Thus, residential buildings were perceived as merely
transitory, fleeting in a sea of change, and ultimately ephemeral to the deeper and wider
social transformations. To the extent that the Ottoman house provided amply for its
function as a shelter, its symbolic importance, how it was related to the class distinctions
prevalent at the time, was not of real interest: “the symbolic social value of housing is
very low…[and] [w]hat lacks in Turkish [classical] houses was not grandiosity, but the
notion of permanence.” Furthermore, “it is possible to argue that all Turks built their
homes like tents.”74
It is of course a matter of lengthy debate, if and when the Western pre-modern
housing fits Kuban’s –and multiple other architectural historians’- criteria. The
predominant mode of production, feudalism, or Asiatic mode of production, and the
determining social and economic relationship with nature bound by the capricious tides
of weather, crop cycles, droughts, and the limited state of forces of production, the
primitive notions of physical and material tools of building houses had all set insuperable
barriers in constructing permanent structures. Under any pre-modern circumstances,
comparing housing with the magnanimous structures –Egyptian pyramids, Gothic
cathedrals, Grand Umayyad mosques, Justinian churches, etc.- is not doing justice to the
limited civilizational capabilities that existed at the time. Even the long lost palace
architecture –where the Byzantine Magnum Palatium presented the paramount examplehad to wait for the 16th century’s sweep of centralized state abilities and the concentration
of coercive facilities in the hands of the kings and aristocracy; Versailles was not built in
73
Kuban, İstanbul, Bir Kent Tarihi, 274–277.
I preferred to stick with the literal translation-also widely in circulation in colloquial speech, but what
these tents referred to was akin to yurts-the Central Asian-Turkic notion of nomadic shelters. Ibid., 276.
74
109
a day, and its heyday came with the Sun King in the 17th century.
On the other hand, Turgut Cansever would voice a well-founded argument against
treating Ottoman houses as mere transitory tent-like structures and tried to focus upon the
complex relationship between the houses and the street. He admitted that the Ottoman
understanding of home necessarily implied an intentional distance between the street
level public life and the hidden expanse of private life. However, this entails rather an
organic integration of houses as imaginations of universe. Cansever’s notion of the
Ottoman spatial relations was not based upon the modernist notion of private individuals
coming together in the civic relations established at a public space. First, public and
private could not be delineated by means of drawing a property line between the street
and the built edifice; home itself contained a certain degree of public characteristics. The
more public the insides of homes become, the less functional and necessary were the
streets-one can still recognize such tendency in contemporary Istanbul. In a sense, home
itself was a re-enactment of the universe in general, when Cansever pointed out that the
Ottoman city was a representation of Islamic cosmogony –where the city acted as the
metaphoric replacement for Heaven on earth, and the state and the sultan reigned
supreme above the disorderliness of the urban communities- home emerges as another
layer to that urban imagery.
In this vein, Ottoman urbanism, perfectly depicted in Istanbul, could be seen as
Russian dolls: the land belongs to the sultan, rule by him alone; the city is a smaller
replica of the land, again ruled by the sultan, but in cases other than Istanbul –being the
capital city- the sultan’s rule can be relegated, the mahalle, subsumed under the city, is
again subject to a similar hierarchical organization, and finally, the home, as the singular
110
representation of patriarchy. Women of the house lived in the harem, only visible in front
of other women-the same principle applied to other layers from bottom up. The sultan
was the ultimate sovereign, ruled by fiat, and after the 16th century, became the leader of
the faith with his title Caliphate; the father of the house, similarly, ruled without any
objections, or any intrusions from outside.
Second, as a corollary to the latter point, a single mechanism of power, perhaps
Foucault would see a figment of pastoral power relations in it, controlled multiple layers
and reproduced its logic in an omnipotent manner. Yet, Cansever’s definition that such
patterns instigated an inherent organicism was widely off the mark-his imputed
organicism in Istanbul was not comparable to the Western modernism’s organicism.
Cansever’s organic urbanism was organic not by dint of increasing division of labor and
specialization of integral parts of the system, the city was deemed as organic, because he
saw a pristine proximity to nature, wherein nature implied unadulterated, untouched,
traditionally preserved beauty bestowed on earth by the creator of all things. Thence the
paradise allegory: the more organically related the mahalles become, the lesser the
intervention of engineers, architects, and the modernizing rationality. In his rejection of
classical modernist urban planning hierarchies –the grid plan, the city-square-boulevardstreet-house pattern of top-to-bottom organization- Cansever attempted a nativist
repudiation of corruption brought forward by capitalist accumulation in general. 75
Following a similar logic, it would be in vain to seek the public-private separation, to
look for the sources of the communitas, to focus upon the civitate, since these had
compartmentalized, subjected the intricately disguised –and, heavenly- hierarchy that
Turgut Cansever, Osmanlı şehri: şiir’den şehir’e (Timaş Yayınları, 2010); Turgut Cansever, İslâm’da
şehir ve mimarı (Timaş Yayınları, 2010); Turgut Cansever, İstanbul’u anlamak (Timaş Yayınları, 2008).
75
111
prevailed in Istanbul. In such reification, the Ottoman home would wither away, once the
social conditions that begot such spatial arrangements are put in motion -with the
peripheralization of the Ottoman economy- the whole artifice that was built upon a series
of tiny minutiae would implode onto itself.
Of course, similar to the Ottoman houses, which did not function as references to
social, political, and economic relationships, “the Ottoman room’s essential characteristic
is its aversion to playing a role in the inside circulation of the house…[r]oom in the
Ottoman house served not as an accessory to circulation, but as the ultimate
destination.”76 Tanyeli outlined that architectural practices until the mid-19th century
were oriented towards controlling access: each room was not reached by more than one
single doorway as entry points and these doorways were located asymmetrically in the
general layout to limit the gaze of the stranger, of the visitor, of anyone not belonging to
the mahrem. 77 Movement in the home was strictly controlled. Not only within the house,
but also at every instance, at every spatial layer, it was a closed system. Each moment in
this system was bound within its confines, not conversant, not relatable, but valued in its
endurance in keeping the totality of the artifice intact. This closed system of sub-systems
can be further applied at different scales, as much as rooms served a stop-gap function
within the whole house, külliyes served a similar function in limiting movement within
the mahalle. Külliyes worked not as passageways, as the gist of public interaction within
the community, but as communal private spaces; common in many pre-modern methods
Uğur Tanyeli, İstanbul 1900-2000: Konutu ve Modernleşmeyi Metropolden Okumak (Akın Nalça, 2004),
138.
76
77
Ibid., 138. A key concept appears here: mahrem. It has been studied extensively in the last two decades,
but the term itself is still of immense interest for locating a great deal of issues within Islamic past and
present, see: Nilüfer Gole, “The” Forbidden Modern: Civilization and Veiling (University of Michigan
Press, 1996), 27–63.
112
of social control, participation in a community of believers entailed a strict observance of
rules and orders and was synonymous with private control of the individuals.
Kuban, the architectural historian, saw in these structural urban patterns of the city
something akin to a “molecular” organization. He argued that “the Ottoman city was a
functionally molecular structure” and each unit in this city was resonant of Leibniz’s
monads, they were neither designed, nor geographically distributed, nor built according
to a connecting common principle, hence, they reflected a nature of serial randomness.78
In this serial random patternization, there is not a diachronic interpretation of urban
space. For a deeper scrutiny would only provide the synchronic nature of the built form in
Istanbul. Even an awareness of this synchronic historicity of the built form is limited use
for a discerning, critical look, since old and new were not functionally separated from
each other then. Historical preservation and cultural appurtenances of such sensitivity in
historic continuity were products of the late 19th century and mostly of the 20th century.
The serial randomness in building translated itself into a tolerant nonchalance, for the
classical Ottoman urban built form was primarily indebted to the continuation of the
millet system and the system’s immanent hierarchy and closed characteristics-which,
without any doubt, would contribute immensely to the impending implosion of the city
with the onset of forces of modernity.79 But, in the short run, only the subversives were
met with the brutal coercion of the state, while the multi-layered segments of the
Ottoman society were generally left to their own devices within strictly defined limits. As
long as one stuck within her ascribed sandbox, the imperial governmentality, and its
78
Kuban, İstanbul, Bir Kent Tarihi, 340.
79
Kuban, İstanbul, Bir Kent Tarihi.
113
apparatuses in the urban order, was fine with it, and would not bother with extra efforts in
social control.
Secondarily of import was the merciless functionalism of the urban state-space
nexus. The pre-modern city was simple, gritty, crude, and crucially oriented towards
function, contrary to the mainstream glorification of the Gothic past in Europe –thanks
largely to Viollet-le Duc’s Second Imperial style –almost photo-shopped- radical
restoration of Medieval era monuments, and the Turko-Islamic past in Turkey –here, it
was the making of the notoriously unreliable and nationalistically doctrinaire Turkish
education system that inculcated the invaluable, irretrievable magnificence of the past, of
times of purity where the Turk was the master, and others followed him as blind subjects.
Therefore, one era’s monument would be torn down without any second thoughts and its
remainders, its stones, would be employed as the foundation stones for the next imperial
monument-Magnum Palatium was left in disarray earlier; the late Byzantine imperial
palaces depended on the fortunes of the emperor, and even Constantine’s great Tetrarchs
statue was taken to Venice during the Great Sacking of the city. It is no great wonder that
the Holy Apostles Cathedral laid the foundation for the Fatih Mosque, nor would be a
surprising find that the Ibrahim Pasha Palace was built using the remainders of the
Magnum Palatium-the palace was right across the Hippodrome from the Old Palace, and
the second most expansive palace complex of the Ottoman reign. In that sense, the
Ottomans continued the urban logic immanent in Istanbul. That’s possibly the reason for
the very limited change observed in the city’s urban features during the first three and a
half centuries of Ottoman rule. The city kept its basic wedge shape, the Golden Horn
played its decisive role as the main commercial port of the city, the mese slowly became
114
the Divanyolu, and though most of the forums were torn down, their functions were
carried into the külliyes and bazaars, and the geographical elevation, the hills and winding
narrow paths were intact, the citizens still walked these streets, and pedestrian traffic was
the main mode of transportation, the porters -not the beasts of burden, due to the vast
population- were the preferred carriers of goods, and the minimal planning intervention
in the city’s urban fabric permitted the continuation of the Byzantine Constantinople as
Ottoman Istanbul with few minor changes.80 Later on, while the contesting spatial
imaginations of modern Turkish architecture’s foundational figures sought for an
examination of the repercussions of Ottoman-Islamic tradition’s everlasting traces, the
contemporary Turkish nationalist discourse, on the contrary, saw rupture as the
constituting element of a new state-space relationship.
In Edhem Eldem’s view, the most important change of the late 18th century was
the explosion of the city’s traditional borders. As a consequence, the seeds of a multinuclei city of the 19th century were sown.81 In the same time, for the first time since the
city’s founding, the ruling classes –dynastic family’s, pashas, and other militarybureaucratic elite’s residence crept to the seafront, which meant a long lasting
expropriation of the shores by the rich and powerful. Furthermore, a modern military
complex began to be installed. An elaborate and vast complex of army barracks –built out
of stone to replace a wooden barracks presumably designed by Sinan- was built on the
Anatolian shore, nearby Üsküdar, named after the sultan who ordered construction: the
Selimiye Barracks. Possibly to keep the non-Muslim and European subjects of the empire
80
Ibid., 340–345.
81
Eldem, “Istanbul: From Imperial to Peripheralized Capital,” 195.
115
in check an artillery barracks was built outside the Galata Walls, partly on Armenian
cemetery, named Topçu Kışlası, and a little more than a century later, in 1909, this place
would be the site of a counter-revolt against the parliamentarian-constitutionalist
revolution of CUP (Committee of Union and Progress) that finally helped CUP to depose
Abdulhamid II and install a puppet sultan.82
Along the Anatolian shores, north of Üsküdar, the cavalry barracks were builtthough, with scarcely any drilling area, since the steep slopes of the vicinity still forbids
highway construction. The new developments of the late 18th century were forever
enshrined in a Western traveler’s engravings –who would later be employed as one of the
court architects: Antoine Ignace Melling.83 Orhan Pamuk later described Melling as a
beholder of an Istanbulite vision, as someone who sees Istanbul as Istanbulites do, but
who depicts Istanbul with the ascertaining descriptive faculties of a Westerner-to whom
the city owes its architectural heritage rooted in eclectic forays between the Eastern and
Western styles.84 The building of Nur-u Osmaniye Mosque (ordered by the Ottoman
court, its name means, the sacred light of the Ottomans) at around the same time signified
the introduction of such eclecticism.85 Meanwhile, Mahmud II’s abolition of the
Janissaries and establishment of a new army modeled after the West made apparent the
Another century on, in 2013, the site was the focal point of the largest and longest lasting popular
uprising in Turkish history, where massive protests against the ruling government’s decision to raze a
public park, Gezi Park, –which was built after the demolition of the fire damaged (because of the 1909
uprising) barracks in the 1940s- and re-build the barracks, this time as a shopping mall. The Gezi Park
protests ended in 7 deaths, thousands of injuries, and at least 35 persons’ loss of eyesight due to
indiscriminate use of plastic bullets and tear gas canisters as projectiles.
82
83
Eldem, “Istanbul: From Imperial to Peripheralized Capital,” 195.
84
Ibid.; Orhan Pamuk and Maureen Freely, Istanbul: Memories and the City (Vintage International, 2006).
85
Kuban, İstanbul, Bir Kent Tarihi, 322–324.
116
two pressing needs for re-ordering Istanbul’s state-space. The leading forces of
Westernization were prominently in a dualistic relationship: military and architecture.
And their movement greatly contributed to the changing shape of Istanbul.86
In this chapter, I foregrounded the continuities prevalent in Istanbul’s history. The
decisive breaking point, however, arose in the late 18th century. From that point on, as
Europe was geared towards at least five decades of intermittent revolutionary fervor,
Istanbul withstood a phenomenal shift of power relations. And in this case, change in
Istanbul was not exclusively triggered by the masses, but by the military-bureaucratic
elites, the so-called askerî class. With the declaration of the Gülhane Edict in 1839,
which heralded the beginning of a long –but, tumultuous- era of reform, known as the
Tanzimat period, Istanbul entered a protracted process of re-making itself under the deadweight of modernity.
Here, I presented several lives of Istanbul that converged upon one uninterrupted
flow of cyclical ups and downs, insuperable movements of rise and demise. As
concluding remarks, three main emphases are in order. First regarding Istanbul’s
historical continuity, the urban topography of the city did not significantly change under
whatever name and form it was ruled, and to the extent that it kept its original role as the
capital city of a pre-modern world-empire, state-spaces barely budged in their purported
aims; i.e., to produce awe and subordination in the minds of the willing subjects.
Therefore, in a millennium and half, the city, albeit with devastating results, continuously
hung on to its imperial past. Second, the determining spatial logic of the city, before the
introduction of modernity and the capitalist mode of production, was ingrained in the
86
Ibid., 323; Eldem, “Istanbul: From Imperial to Peripheralized Capital.”
117
central consciousness of a world-empire and that was geographically shown in the city
through the symbolic power invested in the palaces, mosques, and külliyes built through
waqfs of respective sultans’, family members of the dynasty palaces, pashas, and mainly
the members of the askerî class-the military-bureaucratic elite. Third, the city kept its
defining features as the capital city until the collapse of the empire, and being the heart of
an empire carried on its central positions as the concentration of ethnic, religious,
political, and cultural aspects that made the empire a unique petri dish of failed multicultural modernity–barring the exceptionally short durations of invasions, famines,
plagues, droughts, wars, and fires. Only after the foundation of Ankara as the new statespace tailor-made for a nation-state was Istanbul deprived of her symbolic throne. The
next chapter focuses on the urban implications of the processes of incorporation to the
world-economy, how Istanbul coped with the juggernaut called modernity, and what
kinds of transformations took place in the state-space nexus during this period, and how a
gradually inflating drive to order space re-configured the city from within.
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4
Impossible Plans and the Centrifugal Spatial Forces:
Urban Planning and Municipal Organizations in Modern
Istanbul
Corruptio optimi pessima1
In the midst of the 19th century, as the ineradicable movement of modernity and
its accompanying plethora of efforts in political, social, and economic reconstruction, a
deep-cutting and vast project of reordering society in its own monolithic perception of
nature, industrial towns emerged as the places where all came together. This superlative
concentration of power in newfangled urban industrial settings had also meant the
triumphant reproduction of nature in a completely different disguise –as the environment
donned its utilitarian accoutrements - and while industrial production broke hitherto
untouched boundaries of material production, an unsurpassable optimism heralded hither
and thither a kind of plentiful future that no one before had witnessed, nor imagined –and
this discourse pervasively insinuated in the capillaries of everyday life. The most mature
and artistically excelled expression of such pervasive will to better one’s self as much as
the subjectification of the world to this unfettered optimism found its expression in the
bargain Dr. Faust made with Mephistopheles. Dr. Faust ambitiously partook in this great
trade off of one’s soul against powers to act upon the then innocently passive nature. Yet,
as soon as it became apparent that human beings were altogether willful, but unknowing,
1
Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope (Blackwell, 1986), 20. In Bloch’s piercing words “fraudulent hope is
one of the greatest malefactors, even enervators, of the human race, concretely genuine hope its most
dedicated benefactor. Thus, knowing-concrete hope subjectively breaks most powerfully into fear,
objectively leads most efficiently towards the radical termination of the contents of fear. Together with
informed discontent which belongs to hope, because they both arise out of the No to deprivation.”
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extensions of that nature, Dr. Faust appallingly came to a recognition of his fruitlessly
arduous toils. The better the intentions, the more horrendous the results, the more his
knowledge to fix things up in impeccable smoothness of scientific efficiency, the more
painful and unforgiving were his effects on his beloved ones. Although Faust was
definitely not an allegory of the urban vicissitudes, it carried the kernel of modernity’s
irresolvable dilemma: how to build things, produce the long prophesied world of plenty,
overcome scarcity, make reason –though, in its peculiarly Western, white-man centric
garbs- the uncontestable authority on Earth, and build an unshakable trust in the forward
march of “mankind” while things fall apart in the slightest intervention of this
benevolent, omniscient White-man’s incursion, rationality single-handedly destroyed its
castles made out of sand in its temper tantrums of large scale annihilative gestures.
Slavery in Africa, Late Victorian era Holocausts in the Indian sub-continent, massive
direct exploitation of non-white peoples of the world, ruthless colonization of the hitherto
free world, and, if might was not enough to prove its right, then, flooding of the preindustrial markets with cheaply produced industrial goods that wrought havoc in the daily
struggles of millions of craftsmen; these were the dark side of modernity in the
peripheries of the newly established world-economy.
In the core of the system, coercion and exploitation did not take its blunt shape –
neither colonization, nor slavery of several different forms- nevertheless, the mass
dispossession of the peasants –by varying means, enclosures, expropriation of the
commons, criminalization of the propertyless class, and indeed, the invention of modern
criminality and punishment, the foundation of a police force, novel institutions of social
control- served the same purpose: to let capitalist accumulation surround the world as
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swiftly and deeply as possible, and to turn every item of human conduct, every aspect of
mundane human existence as mere commodities bought and sold in the marketplace. If
for the former, the colonial others, the predominant site of state and space encounter was
archetypally the plantation, for the former it was the gigantic metropolis. The emergent
poetic modernism approached the latter with a tragedy peppered with a pinch of salt,
while the former developments for long remained a matter of in-yer-face condescension,
which showed its ugly face with the ubiquity of racist farce later in the early part of the
20th century. Tragedy met comedy in the city. Here it was farcical, once Mephistopheles
got into the mind of Dr. Faust, and there, as Goethe so succinctly showed, poetical
modernism is the moment of laughter turning into tears.
Once modernity, or its twin demi-gods -the all-powerful actors of the capitalist
mode of production- described by Marx as Madame La Terre and Monsieur Le Capital
circumambulated Europe, they were at first welcomed by thinly disguised envy and
childish hesitation; though in the land of the Ottomans, especially in its epicenter
Istanbul, their circumlocution meant ruinous prospects for the already fragile empire.
Modernity’s travails in Istanbul, at least in its adventurous first century and a half, were
synonymous with a perpetual struggle for existence in this spitefully competitive worldeconomy –for which the empire and its ruling classes were barely prepared- and opened
up a spiraling dizziness of self-questioning, if beyond the ruinous present laid the
promised land of sunshine and military might –where the empire would once again stand
on its own feet- whether the promise of the future meant the obliteration of the forsaken
past, and, whither the valued remnants –for few, privileges- of the ancient order for an
unknown set of values deeply ingrained in reason and technological certainty of progress.
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For those who had a fleeting glimpse of the 20th century, Istanbul was the place where
hope and despair, new and old, reason and faith, angst and will to power, presence and
lack, furtive meditation and disheveled action, ruin and magnificence came together; it
was an Aleph for its own sake. Today, Istanbul might be synonymous with an unending
festival, a sleepless metropolis, a dynamic motor of seemingly unstoppable national
growth, a modern Babylon with denizens that come together in this cramped, traffic-jam
laden, with stark scenes of glittering wealth and gut-wrenching poverty, with all its chaos,
and irreversible concentration of capital, culture, and revolutionary spirit. Yet, when
modernity entered this side of the earth and set foot on Istanbul, it was not met with
enviable curiosity of hungry consumers of a post-industrial era –as what transpired in the
last three decades- but instead was met with a gloom perhaps unprecedented. The
prevalent mood of the mid-19th century –which lingered until the end of the 20th- was
definitely a dark, sinister, Janus-like, but almost palpable feeling. It is called hüzün.
In this chapter, I first identify the cultural and spatial traces of this common
feeling and explain this incipient sense of lack through the dim silhouette of Istanbul’s
urban reordering since modernity’s arrival. Then, I focus on the successive spatial
undertakings of the Ottoman Empire as it tried in vain to join the modern world-system
as a core country, as one of the main powers, just to see itself deprived of few comforts
granted by its long protected isolation from the world-economy. The sick man of Europe
emerged as the rampant peripheralization continued in the 19th century and meanwhile,
Istanbul underwent a rapid geographical expansion and reconfiguration of its urban
functions. It would serve not merely as the imperial hub of a tributary system of military
control, but rather turned into the beachhead of capitalist accumulation and mechanisms
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of incorporation to the world-system. Partly to compensate for the dizzying pace of
growth, and partly to appease the imperial elites’ unswerving belief in themselves, a
series of attempts in modern planning were made. I describe this series of unfortunate
attempts, attempts so sterile that none even came to the point of actual implementation. A
puzzling multiplicity of urban spaces prevailed at this time, and at around fin-de-siècle
several ethnic, faith-based, and cultural layers of the city came to represent what was best
about this seemingly ethereal empire. Not more than two decades after the fin-de-siècle,
as Istanbul’s political, cultural, and economic structures collapsed onto itself under its
own unbearable weight and as the empire that Istanbul made vanished into thin air, all
that rendered this city special –people, languages, beliefs, byzantine politics, foreign
emissaries, endless waves of immigrants, buildings, and power structures- were gone.
Subsumed under the single-party rule of the new Kemalist republican ideology of
monolithism, the city had but a distant resemblance to its former self. However, this was
not just the making of Kemalist flag-bearer RPP (Republican People’s Party), their linear
and uniform approach was shared by the right-wing parties (from the Democratic Party to
the Justice Party, from the Motherland Party to the True Path Party, from the National
Salvation Party to the current government of the Justice and Development party) from the
first fair multi-party elections in 1950 onwards. Yet, under this crushing demand for
uniformity, obedience to the Ankara-centric policy-making, and gradually strengthening
obscurity of Istanbul –and concomitant with it the diminishing wealth and impact of the
old bourgeoisie- a lasting inertia did set on the city’s fortunes. Istanbul’s role in the
nation was once again reinvigorated in the latter half of the 1950s; Kemalist inertia and
hostile indifference to the city was replaced by the first wave of Haussmannesque
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reconstruction efforts instigated by Adnan Menderes. I will discuss the planning
decisions and their spatial imagination of this transformation from passive indifference to
active interventionism of this period.
Istanbul has for long been the embodiment of the best things, a vessel of
collective representation that brightly showed the excellence unmatched, of the
unsurpassed beauty ensconced in this country; the city herself serving the country as the
source of symbolic inspiration, has aspired people to be better, more powerful, richer, and
wealthier. This was all relative; of course, one can barely categorize what is the best
among all things, what can surpass the inimitable beauty-for the same purpose, what is
the gauge for the aesthetic qualities of an urban setting? And it is more problematic given
the fact that there had been only one other city –Rome, before the collapse of the empirefound worthy of comparison to Istanbul. Partly, what made Istanbul as we know her
today, is this injured self-knowledge, a broken notion of herself that is stunted, corrupted
and surrounded with a self-pity that frequently bordered unremitting self-flagellation.
This city hates herself. If she had a mind of herself, she would have told us that
her life would better end in painlessly protracted exhaustion. The city is irregular, its
shape incomplete, borders and frontiers uncharted, vertically and horizontally unmapped,
amorphous, but not devoid of any form, protean but indecisive, centrifugal but
subservient to the will of overbearing political center, anxious but confident, delinquently
innocent, servile in its rebellion, rebel in its gratitude; what makes Istanbul is this excited
modernism. To the extent that Turkey, as an amalgam of peoples, but never a fullyfledged nation –perhaps, two, or three, maybe more nations- has weathered a deeply
troubled relationship with modernity, Istanbul felt those troubles in her guts. Istanbul was
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–and, to a certain extent, still is- a perfect unfinished oeuvre, an excellently ruined lack.
Her excursus in modernity has been subject to endless autocratic interventions, though
each met with resolute resilience. As the mirror image of Turkey’s injured and injuring
experiences in modernity, what really attracted my attention was the multifarious
phenomena of spatial relations, the richness of concrete processes of production of space
and how these diffused spatial representations came together in a seemingly combustive
mixture of practical realities.
4.1
Plagues and Cholera: Hüzün and Tristesse and The Breaking up of
a Spatio-Physical Order
Orhan Pamuk, in his autobiographical book Istanbul: Memories and the City,
employed a viscerally evocative pair of notions to relate his existential experiences in
Istanbul: hüzün and tristesse. Tristesse should be a familiar term for social scientists;
Claude Lévi-Strauss, in his autobiographically oriented masterwork Tristes Tropiques,
wrote his first-hand observations of the destruction of South American native peoples’
cultural practices between the two Great Wars. He described and detailed the shared
anxiety of the people he encountered which was borne out of the inexorable and
relentless attacks instigated by modernity. Many communities, hitherto untouched,
unblemished by the advances of capitalist civilization were suddenly subject to the
pounding march of industrial exploitation, and peoples’ lives were changed forever
without recourse. In Lévi-Strauss’ account, Pamuk saw a parallel to his own experiences
growing up in Istanbul: “[t]ristesse is not a pain that affects a solitary individual; hüzün
and tristesse both suggest a communal feeling, an atmosphere and a culture shared by
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millions.”2 In drawing this parallel, he admitted that poverty could take similar forms in
different cities’ back streets of the world. Yet, the parallel between two concepts ends
here. Istanbul’s problem lies in its much glorified history. Istanbul streets carried a heavy
burden laden with a wealth of history; whatever similarities existed between the common
anxieties of tropical cities of America and Istanbul, whatever spiritual kinship permeated
these two geographically distant contexts, they vanish under this heavy burden, and
hüzün becomes a nostalgic yearning.3 While the monumental structures, fountains, and
arches surrounded the streets in a serpentine fashion and agonistically fell under the
gloomy shadow of the blunt reinforced concrete monstrosities, the Westerner is greeted
with an insurmountable shared conviction, and once more, hüzün and tristesse jointly
encapsulates one in a mystical air brilliantly described by Lévi-Strauss.4
To harness the explanatory power of these dual terms, hüzün and tristesse, might
not seem aptly drawn amid a plethora of allegorical description connected to Istanbul,
especially in light of 2013’s June Gezi Park uprisings.5 However, hüzün has such
resonance with Pamuk’s oeuvre and permeated both his writing and the actual
2
Pamuk and Freely, Istanbul, 101. Hüzün literally means sorrow, but in this case, this sadness borders
melancholy, an unrelenting feeling of loss, a protracted sense of grief. Perhaps it can be thought as the
grief, as the mourning for the beloved lost-though, hüzün, unlike mourning, does not recede, and it is not
connected to remembrance. It is rather a generalized form of loss without recuperation.
3
Ibid. Perhaps,spatially, the Tropics as described by Levi-Strauss is not that far from Istanbul: “the change
of hemisphere, continent, and climate has made it unnecessary for the Brazilians to erect the thin glass roof
which, in Europe, creates artificially something of the same sort. It is as if Rio had taken the Gallerias in
Milan, the Amsterdam Galerij, or the Passage des Panoramas or the hall of the Gare St Lazare in Paris, and
reconstituted them in the open air.” Claude Levi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, trans. John Russel (NY:
Criterion Books, 1961), 89. It is often remarked by Westerners how life is open out on the streets, and
needless to say the Grand Bazaar is a web of streets in themselves that dwarfed its Western counterparts.
Pamuk and Freely, Istanbul, 101.
4
Now, the shared feeling within a certain class fraction is not hüzün, but resistance at all costs. It is also
interesting to note that, during the Gezi Uprisings, a Western journalist in Istanbul wrote that the gloom so
saturated in the daily lives of Istanbulites miraculously disappeared in a day. Participants in the rallies
throughout the three weeks all around Turkey would attest to this public exaltation.
5
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dissemination of artistic representations of Istanbul’s spatiality, from his humble
beginnings in his early realist novels The Silent House and Cevdet Bey and His Sons, the
former set in a holiday suburb of Istanbul in Gebze, and the latter in Nişantaşı and
Cihangir, to The New Life –where Istanbul played a springboard for a noir that takes
place in the gritty backdrop of provincial Anatolia- to The White Castle and My Name is
Red –first, his earliest dabbling in magical realism, and the second, perhaps an attempt in
suspense, which were both set in pre-modern, classical Ottoman Istanbul as a metatheoretical investigation of the relations between East and the West- and finally his
masterpiece, The Black Book, and most recent work, Museum of Innocence, were both
illustrations of twentieth century Istanbul where the city herself gained a life, a tangible,
powerful agency that lived in the miniscule details of the city, from the stairwells of the
apartment buildings to the rooms as simulacra of the middle class’ existential furnishings,
to the endless labyrinthine streets that secreted life and death, to the Bosphorus that hung
on to the bodies of those deaths, one thing is certainly common: hüzün.6 In the last
decade, hüzün seemingly left Istanbul’s psyche, to be replaced by a certain form of
ambition, which will be examined in the next two chapters. Hüzün and tristesse, though,
were remarkable inscriptions of a city that was rapidly pushed out of its central role from
the late 18th century up until the early 21st century; as peripheralization ravaged the
empire, the city was hollowed out in its own imagination by the endless perspirations of
machinations, some its own making, some not. As Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence
embarked upon a dissection of this city’s relationship to objects that made herself, this
6
Orhan Pamuk, The Black Book (Faber & Faber, 2011); Orhan Pamuk, The White Castle (Faber & Faber,
2012); Orhan Pamuk, The New Life (Faber & Faber, 2011); Orhan Pamuk, My Name Is Red (Faber &
Faber, 2011); Orhan Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence (Faber & Faber, 2011).
127
predominant psyche, hüzün, was gradually replaced by a new form of resilience, perhaps
akin to an obsessive will to reminisce the times past through objects of everyday life.
But, before that, in another time and under completely different conditions,
Western travelers were full of certitude in their analyses of Istanbul. What they observed
was without any doubt, a depiction of hüzün, of melancholia. One, for instance, talked of
the stately and regal embodiment of such feeling, Mahmud, who rose to the throne after
the downfall of poor Selim, referring to another travelogue’s memories said “I had read
in some traveler, that his complexion was deadly pale, and that the expression of his
countenance partook of the doomed melancholy.”7 In another memoir, penned at the end
of 1829, a different traveler thought, for a moment, that he saw prince regent
Abdulmecid, who looked prosperous and well-clad. However good looking this man was,
his future as the regent was far from being as stately as his looks: “[a] crumbling, or at
least, a disputed scepter, one would think no very enviable inheritance in prospect.”8
In the Western traveler’s eyes, melancholia did not merely emanate from the
worldly persons of power, but even the cornerstone of Ottoman existence in Istanbul, the
Eyüp Mosque and its surrounding namesake neighborhood, its boulevards dotted with
ancient plane trees that glowed with white painted houses all around, effervesced with
unassailable melancholia. MacFarlane wrote that an unnatural, other-worldly
transparency and luminance stemmed from this melancholic narrow opacity of these
streets “like a glimpse of Paradise, caught through “the valley of the shadow of death.”9
7
MacFarlane, Constantinople in 1828, 500–508.
8
Brewer, A Residence at Constantinople in the Year 1827, 196.
9
MacFarlane, Constantinople in 1828, 500–508.
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Brewer, the unfortunately hypochondriac missionary that voluntarily quarantined
himself in the Prince Islands for protection against stray dogs and rats, rightfully pointed
out that the disorderly city was not essentially the making of the Ottomans, but, perhaps
always there from the beginning: “I have alluded to the filth of the city, and I might have
spoken of it under the head of antiquities, for I presume it dates as far back as the time of
Constantine.”10 As a good Protestant missionary, he did not refrain from coming up with
his heartfelt generosity of advice, “[y]et even these Augean streets might be cleansed at a
small expense. For a mere pittance, thousands of the poor could be constantly employed
as scavengers.” 11 And still, vermin and pests would be the visitor’s least concerns, it
seems. Brewer had conducted a thorough research before coming to Istanbul, and
explained in detail the real source of fears for his well-being, something that the 19th
century West forgot –gradually, at least, since the end of the 17th century- plague was
wreaking havoc on Istanbul. Although, little research exist on this particularly gruesome
period in the history of Istanbul, Brewer’s account described a city in the throes of an
intermittent epidemic of plague that cost many lives and rendered the authorities
powerless in the huge number of deaths. Brewer related that the frequent attacks of
plague struck the city and turned it into an open air mortuary with thousands of bodies
left untouched, without anyone to bury them. These ghastly scenes of mass deaths and the
grim inefficiency of urban sanitation should have been a reason for the onset of
melancholia in Istanbul.12
10
Brewer, A Residence at Constantinople in the Year 1827, 108.
11
Ibid., 93, 108.
On historical accounts of plague in the Ottoman Empire and its 19th century effects on the city, see
Nalan Turna, “İstanbul’un Vebayla İmtihanı: 1811-1812 Veba Salgını Bağlamında Toplum ve Ekonomi,”
Studies of the Ottoman Domain 1, no. 1 (2011): 39–74.
12
129
As a matter of fact, in the 19th century, two epidemics, each with its own waves of
attacks and differing intensities, plague and cholera, became an ordinary, albeit
gruesome, phenomena in urban life of Istanbul. The city’s trials with plague was dated to
the far past. The Justinian plague of the 6th century was argued to cost the loss of half the
population of Constantinople and that irretrievably caused the collapse of the Roman
Empire’s last vestiges of recapturing its hegemony in the Mediterranean.13 Even though
the Ottoman Empire was not subject to a severe epidemic witnessed by Europe in the
form of the Black Plague, from the 15th century to the 18th century, especially large cities
like Istanbul, Thessaloniki, and Bursa were struck by the disease. As early as the 15th
century, strict regulations for quarantine were put in place to prevent the spreading of the
epidemic.14 The most notable and fatal of these epidemics took place in 1811-12, with
100,000 fatalities. Plague caused the loss of a fifth of the city’s population, thought to be
500,000 before the epidemic. Most likely, this was what Brewer read before he embarked
on a journey to Istanbul, and when he arrived in 1827, he wrote that the disease was still
causing widespread fatalities almost daily. In another bout of epidemic, in 1836-1837,
25,000 died.15 Plague was the primary originator of the Tanzimat era’s modern sanitary
and hygienic regulations in Istanbul. Although the plague subsided with less intensity and
less frequency throughout the 19th century in Istanbul, it was replaced by another fatal
To some accounts, the great plague of AD 541-543 was the end of antiquity and the beginning of the
medieval era, see: William Rosen, Justinian’s Flea: The First Great Plague and the End of the Roman
Empire, Reprint (Penguin Books, 2008).
13
Turna, “İstanbul’un Vebayla İmtihanı: 1811-1812 Veba Salgını Bağlamında Toplum ve Ekonomi,” 31–
36.
14
Daniel Panzac, Osmanlı İmparatorluğu’nda Veba:1700-1850 (İstanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayınları,
1997); Turna, “İstanbul’un Vebayla İmtihanı: 1811-1812 Veba Salgını Bağlamında Toplum ve Ekonomi.”
15
130
epidemic in the second half of the century: cholera.16
Cholera had far reaching influences on the urban patterns of Istanbul, from the
names and characteristics of neighborhoods –the poorest and worst built districts, more
often than not, areas where Roma people lived, were called Cholera mahalles. This label
became a staple of modern literature in otherwise troubled novelist Metin Kaçan’s
works17 to the mainstream perception of these inner city neighborhoods as dens of
iniquity, and hence, punishable by god for their transgressions; from being the instigator
of modern sanitation methods to being the progenitor of the varoş and dangerous classes
myth amidst the nascent middle classes from the 1950s on. From the Tanzimat period on,
the Ottoman statesmen paid special attention to cholera, and it shaped their understanding
of urban spaces. One of the most well-known public hospitals in Istanbul, Cerrahpaşa
Hospital (literally, the Surgeon Pasha) owes its founding to the 1893 cholera epidemic.
The Mayor’s office bought a mansion in the intra muros neighborhood of Kasap İlyas and
opened a treatment facility for cholera. The wooden mansion (konak in Turkish) was later
demolished but laid the grounds for the vast medical complex of present Cerrahpaşa
Hospital.18 The zeitgeist of Istanbul in the 19th century was definitely formed by the
injury and futility in the face of relentless pounding of epidemic diseases, and thence was
born the indelible mark of hüzün and tristesse: any attempt in urban planning and sanitary
re-ordering of the city, whatever its scale, had succumbed to this uncanny common
Turna, “İstanbul’un Vebayla İmtihanı: 1811-1812 Veba Salgını Bağlamında Toplum ve Ekonomi,” 37.
For further information, see: Mesut Ayar, Osmanlı Devleti’nde Kolera Salgını: İstanbul Örneği (18921895) (İstanbul: Kitabevi, 2007).
16
17
Metin Kaçan, Agir Roman (Everest Yayinlari, 2012).
Cem Behar, A Neighborhood in Ottoman Istanbul: Fruit Vendors and Civil Servants in the Kasap İlyas
Mahalle (SUNY Press, 2003), 173.
18
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feeling of irreversible decay.
4.2
Rationing and Rationalizing Urban Space: Early Attempts in
Planning in the Ottoman Istanbul
The extent of plague, cholera, and epidemics and their fateful corollary, putrid
urban poverty determined a great deal of discussions in a wide variety of circles in the
mid-19th century. On the one hand, the newly formed socialist groups, in partnership with
the workers’ trade unionist, or syndicalist movements, in a diverse array of examples,
from the defenders of Lasallian workers’ industrial armies, to Engels’ The Condition of
the Working Class in England in 1844 and his collaborations with Marx and their
revolutionary call for overthrow of the capitalist state, and to Ebenezeer Howard’s
moderately formulated Garden Cities of Tomorrow, and, on the other hand, the
developments in positive sciences, that found their practical application in penicillin and
other vaccines, the discovery of the germs and importance of hygiene, and as a parallel,
the import of Darwinism to establishment thinkers’ social theorizations, the popularity of
Herbert Spencer’s “survival of the fittest” vulgarism in Britain and racially impinged
conservatism of LePlay’s ideas that found widespread interest in Second Empire France,
heralded novel, and bio-politically molded, state-spaces.19 Inasmuch as the worldsystem’s peripheral and colonial populations were subjected to the unforgiving and
grossly fatal epidemic of cholera, in the core areas where industrial armies continuously
devoured the newly formed working classes into the factories with celebrated
19
Harold L. Platt, “Exploding Cities: Housing the Masses in Paris, Chicago, and Mexico City, 1850-2000,”
Journal of Urban History 36, no. 5 (2010): 577–580; Harold L. Platt, “From Hygeia to the Garden City:
Bodies, Houses, and the Rediscovery of the Slum in Manchester” 33 (2007): 756–72.
132
smokestacks, the cities were beleaguered by a new epidemic: tuberculosis.20
As cited in David Barnes’ comprehensive social history of tuberculosis, David
Armstrong, in his search for a “political anatomy of the body” pointed to the “dispensary
gaze”, a strategy of controlling space within the city by mapping the movement of
pathology within it.”21 Furthermore, Armstrong came up with a key notion and its
relationship with urban space. When in 1866, it was written by one of the first crucial
names in public health, Southwood Smith, and declared that the centuries old notion of
quarantine was ought to be replaced by sanitary measures, a rupture in the social and
spatial organization of diseases was imminent. As put aptly, Armstrong sees in this a
development of reorientation, that“[i]nstead of a cordon sanitaire between potentially
coalescing geographical spaces the new regime of hygiene monitored a line of separation
between the space of the body and that of its environment.”22 The distinguishing aspect
of this reorientation laid in how the spatial characteristics and subjectivities are treated;
while, “[q]uarantine marked out a geographical space while sanitary science defined the
space of the body.”23 So, the remarkable boundaries that helped set up the geographically
conscious subjectivity as alive in the body distinct from its surroundings –and,
simultaneously, reproduced to be separated from space encapsulating itself- is broken
20
The situation was so dire that in the midst of the19th century, it was reported that in Paris, there was not a
single soul uninfected by TB. See, David S. Barnes, The Making of a Social Disease: Tuberculosis in
Nineteenth Century France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). Thomas Mann, depicted
wondrously in his masterpiece, the Magic Mountain, how TB did not know any class differences, and how
the illness cut through all strata of society and how it befell on the general angst prevailing during the interwar years. Of course, the rich had their luxurious asylums and retreats –later to be the model for holiday
resorts- for their sick, while the poor perished on the streets.
21
Ibid., 13.
22
David E. Armstrong, A New History of Identity: A Sociology of Medical Knowledge (New York:
Palgrave, 2002), 7.
23
Ibid., 14.
133
from the 19th century onwards, while sanitary measures are ubiquitously applied
throughout the capital cities of Europe, subjectivity as ensconced in physicality of the
body has become an extension of physical space. That’s why one of the two underlining
characteristics of Baron Haussmann’s planning principles depended upon sanitation.
As I sit at the table across my laptop and carefully listen to the rallying cries
soaring from the streets –the protesters are loud and clear even at a distance when they
shout “Her Yer Taksim! Her Yer Direniş” (Taksim is everywhere! Resistance is
Everywhere) among other calls for immediate ceasing of the brutal police oppression that
led to the Gezi uprisings, in this northernmost neighborhood of the city –Büyükderewhere a small Armenian Bosphorus fishing village was stripped from all its historical
features and turned into an upper middle-class suburb, I pondered that 160 years to the
day of these sentences written, on the 29th of June, 1853, Emperor Napoleon II appointed
Baron Georges Haussmann as the head of Seine prefect in Paris. From 1853 to 1870,
Haussmann (1809-1891) controlled one of the greatest and far reaching redevelopment
efforts as the Mayor of Seine prefecture. Haussmann’s downfall was instigated by his
shady financial dealings, and his consequent loss of favor in the eyes of the emperor,
before the Paris commune, few, if any, had succeeded in raising an effective dissent
against his reconstruction of Paris. Yet, his plans, and the underlying ideas that delineated
a specific type of space-state nexus were never absent from public discussions, or in the
Turkish case, urban grassroots social movements’ struggles against large scale
expropriation of urban land since his demise. Haussmann’s demise was never confined to
French urbanism, neither to the 19th century, but his ploys in making power legible in
urban structures proved to be a recurring theme of ensuing grand plans in redevelopment
134
and renewal attempts. Two main concerns shaped Haussmannesque urbanism and its
spatial realizations in practical applications: regularity (order, uniformity, ease of social
and physical control) and sanitation.24
Haussmann’s basic idea in urban spatial order was employing and carefully
installing vacuums, voids once stylistic elements of Baroque architecture, and were
harnessed in overblown proportions as instruments of grandiose social control. His tacit
purpose in doing this was partly a construction of cordon sanitaire, a bio-political reflex
ingrained in contemporary sensitivities vis-à-vis hygiene, but also partly a building of an
imperial monumentality that aspired to instill awe and produce subordination from the
subjects-which the 20th century dictatorships later excelled in their construction of
gigantic spatial apparatuses of fear and terror.25 What Haussmann manifestly did was,
however, rather different; his primary attempt was in manufacturing a perception of
planning embroidered with large swaths of emptiness, that amounted “through systematic
recourse to a kind of surgery which has since been considered vandalism.”26 The
symbolic import of a vacuum here was merely the negation of spatial existence;
rendering a place empty meant a resilience against social processes and relationships, a
vindictiveness that culminated in the powerful –but, irrational- mantra of emptiness for
the sake of emptiness and venerated the political will that kept it devoid of any social
meanings. It was deeply related to sanitation, but was not a hygienic response to germs,
24
Françoise Choay, The Modern City: Planning in the 19th Century (NY: George Braziller, 1970), 10–18.
Albert Speer, was the foremost influential architectural figure, who undertook an unfruitful attempt in
designing a new Berlin, almost on dopes in terms of size, to dwarf the buildings of the old Reich, and
adumbrate the immense and ineradicable power of Nazism’s state apparatus, see, Dovey, Framing Places.
25
26
Choay, The Modern City: Planning in the 19th Century, 18.
135
rather a sweeping hygienic impulse against social phenomena.27
In David Harvey’s view, regularization of urban space –and uniformly
generalized social control over that space- was tantamount to an extraordinarily novel
social transformation. Harvey quoted Haussmann’s own words and explained that instead
of “collections of partial plans of public thoroughfares considered without ties or
connections,” his main concern was a “general plan which was nevertheless detailed
enough to properly coordinate diverse local circumstances.”28 Haussmann started from
the totality, treated the city as a whole, and the difference underlying his schemes from
the preceding ambitious development programs was this peculiar view that saw an
organic complexity in the materiality of the urban structure, in a society exceedingly
shaped by continuous movement of commodities, capital, and labor the city were
supposed to be organized around the same principles of circulation. Furthermore,
Haussmann divided Paris into 20 arrondissements, and although each of these districts
had their own councils, naturally Haussmann himself was installed on top as the ultimate
decision maker.29
David Harvey, in parallel to Marshall Berman, argued that modernity as a
historical development and the cultural, intellectual, and behavioral patterns ushered in
modernity themselves represented a rupture and this rupture involved an invention of the
past as stasis, as a concentration of disorder, and modernity is the urge to shape, to
reproduce the forward motion, to trigger the chain of reactions that helped all that is solid
27
Ibid.
28
Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity, 106.
29
Ibid., 107.
136
melt into air.30 The worthiness of the modern novelty is in its ability to regulate the
unruly, to discipline and reorder the mess of differences; hence, the modern urge aimed to
differentiate itself from the inherent differences. A “pure and schematic order” will be
established from the disorder, chaos, amorphous crowdedness, and ambiguous realities of
the past to help the future unshackle itself from the fetters of tradition, the dangers of
unhygienic classes, and the unknowns of different peoples.31 Modernity is the unfettered
movement towards the future, and in order to do that, Haussmann opened up two main
axial roads, called grande croisée de Paris, the east-to-west and north-to-south roads
intersected in the center of the city. For his aim was to construct an uninterrupted flow
that made Paris a true totality where each point had access to another32 Apart from
bringing the city together in the center, to inculcate in what Lefebvre called concentration
of concentration, Haussmann had three other aims:
1. Extensive redevelopment…to make the centre both accessible and functional
2. To create a ring of boulevards around the central zone
3. [To establish] [d]iagonal streets through the central zone33
These aims of reshaping the city center had been surreptitiously applied
throughout Europe with almost surgical precision. Minus the precision, Istanbul’s fate,
through ambiguous detours as consequences of political failures and nation-state making
processes, followed this example quite closely.
30
Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air : The Experience of Modernity.
31
Choay, The Modern City: Planning in the 19th Century, 17. She defined regularization as: “that form of
critical planning whose explicit purpose is to regularize the disordered city, to disclose its new order by
means of a pure, schematic layout.”
32
Ibid., 18.
Thomas Hall, Planning Europe’s Capital Cities: Aspects of Nineteenth-Century Urban Development
(London: Routledge, 1997), 79–81.
33
137
In this indelibly modernist spatial logic, Françoise Choay recognized a
compression of meanings, perhaps akin to Harvey’s later conceptualization of space-time
compression, wherein lies possible further connotations: the one-dimensionalization of
multifarious urban semantics, the overwhelming domination of a new language produced
by the powerful, and the determining force of the inherent logic of an incipient political
economy-with all its appurtenances in colonization and proletarianization. Although
Choay did not explicitly touch upon these issues, she pointed out that the semantic
multiplicity prevalent on the pre-modern city –in which different sources of power
contested each other- was replaced by a mono-semantics of industrial urbanization. Here,
in this singularistic series of meanings, the urban mono-semantics dictated three things:
1. the virulence of the economic drive
2. the irruption of extraneous immigrants form the country, alien to the
significance and functioning of the city’s institutions
3. the development of increasingly abstract means of
communication…[i.e.]Railway, daily press and telegraph34
It would be naïve to claim that these three invincible and crucially determining
spatial formulations had not touched 19th century Istanbul. Yet, unlike its peers in
Western Europe, the historical heritage of the city, its inveterate formal articulations,
fragile economic and political relationships and ill-defined ethnic and faith-based intercommunal relationships precluded a fully-formed rational dissecting scalpel from
perfectly determining the urban geography. Furthermore, the Ottoman Empire’s
governmentality as projected onto imagined state-space relationships and its relevant
configurations in power structures were not indifferent to the cities. Stefanos Yerasimos
wrote that the Ottoman apparatuses of power paid special attention to the rules,
34
Choay, The Modern City: Planning in the 19th Century, 8–9.
138
regulations, stipulations, and ratifications that ordered urban concatenations, and even
before the Tanzimat period, intermittent interventions in the cities were a habitual
mechanism of governing.35 Halil İnalcık, similarly, pointed out that contrary to the
conventional view –which stubbornly diagnosed the Ottoman rule as uninterested, or,
worse, ignorant of the urban administrative needs- the imperial administration’s active
participation and particular attention in urban governance was evident, especially in
Istanbul.36 Although these habits of active intervention and particular attention were
stalwartly appropriated by the CUP and later Kemalist elites, a permanent drive for
control over urban areas did not emerge and relevant formulations in legal regulations
and administrative statutes were not established until the beginning of the Tanzimat
reform period. After 1839, the modern urge for reform did not only shape the core of the
power distribution in the imperial center, but also it was immediately reflected in
Istanbul’s spatial structure. 37
One of the most influential figures of the Tanzimat era, Mustafa Reşit Paşa, in his
quest for reformulating the existential basis of the Ottoman Empire defined four main
pillars of the state power: first, Islam and caliphate; second, the Ottoman dynasty; third,
Istanbul as the seat of power, as being the payitaht; and finally, government authority and
its relevant institutions’ exclusive lasting control by ethnic Turks. Though he also
promised a new understanding of equal citizenship for all ethnicities and faiths that had
shaken the strictly imposed hierarchy between different millets, his ideas behind the four
35
Öncel, Apartman, 91.
36
Inalcik, “Istanbul,” 1973; Inalcik, “Istanbul,” January 1, 1990.
37
Öncel, Apartman, 91.
139
main pillars had much more enduring effects in politics. Another powerful statesman of
the Tanzimat era, who served as adviser to three different sultans, Ahmet Cevdet Pasha
argued that a failure in a single pillar would entail the collapse of all four and mean the
collapse of the system.38 The troubled introduction of modernity to the Ottoman lands
would transpire in the state-space configurations of Istanbul as well and play a pivotal
role in ensuing transformations.
4.3
Cosmopolitan Istanbul: Population and Ethnic Distribution of
Neighborhoods during Fin-de-Siècle
As explained in the previous chapter, one of the crucial characteristics of Istanbul
that sets its urban structure apart from other urban experiences was the oft-quoted fact
that its metropolitan qualities do not owe their existence to the industrial revolution.
Indeed, from its foundation, the city served as an imperial hub to one or another worldempire, and rendered innumerable services to the inherent bureaucracies of successive
state structures as the host of their life-worlds, ideologies, and power distribution
arrangements. Furthermore, this was a host quiet unlike other capitals, where multiethnicity and coexistence of different faith groups was rule, rather than the exceptionthough, this does not entail a de jure tolerance, but a well-defined set of hierarchy in
communities. Yet, contrary to attestations of the burgeoning numbers of inhabitants,
which followed an approximate historical cycle for both the Roman/Byzantine and
Kemal H. Karpat, Ottoman Past and Today’s Turkey (BRILL, 2000), 21. Karpat added that “Ahmet
Cevdet Paşa (d. 1895), the foremost adviser to the three Sultans, stated in a memorandum that Mustafa
Reşit Paşa, the architect of the Tanzimat, believed that the Ottoman state stood on four foundations.
Besides Islam and the Caliphate, the dynasty, and the capital of Istanbul, one of those principles was that
the hükümet (executive) always be Turkish, and the loss of any one of the four would entail the
disintegration of the state. The principles of Mustafa Reşit Paşa’s theory were listed, though in a different
order, in various communications of Fuat Paşa and Sultan Abdulhamid himself.” Ibid.
38
140
Ottoman Empires of two centuries (for the Roman/Byzantine Empire, from the 5th
century up until the 7th century, for the Ottoman Empire, from the 16th century to the 18th
century) –which were cut abruptly by plagues, foreign incursions, and/or internal strifefrom the 19th century onwards modernity and subsequent incorporation to the modern
world-economy made itself felt demographically. The population of Istanbul, parallel to
other metropolitan capitals of European powers, showed a significant increase up until
the early 20th century and before the onset of the disastrous decade of wars from 1911
until 1922.
According to Halil İnalcık, Istanbul was subject to an immense state-led effort of
repopulation, by dint of resettlement, coerced migration, and subsidies for skilled
craftsmen. So, the figures in the following table –collected by İnalcık- suggests a
different picture of population composition than what Fernand Braudel, Robert Mantran,
and Halil İnalcık –in his earlier writings- and Paul Bairoch suggested.39
Year
1477
1489
1535
1690
1690
1826
1829
1833
1856
1918
1927
Unit
khâne
khâne
khâne
khâne
poll-tax
payers
males
individuals
males
khâne
individuals
individuals
individuals
Muslims
9,517
46,635
Christians
5,162
5,462
25,295
14,231
45,112
45,000
5,000
73,496
29,383
73,093
102,649
447,851
234,060
Jews
1,647
2,491
8,070
9,642
8,236
11,413
19,015
62,383
Total
16,326
80,000
359,890
700,000
690,911
Braudel wrote that: “we can justifiably say that Istanbul in the sixteenth century, with at least 400,000
inhabitants (and probably 700,000), was an urban monster, comparable in proportion to the largest
agglomerations today.” Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century, 52.
39
141
Table 4.1: Population of Istanbul between 15th and 20th centuries40
The figures collected by Kemal Karpat point to a much more accurate estimate
regarding the historical population figures. As I have underlined, by means of Fernand
Braudel’s–and, Robert Mantran’s since, Braudel cited the figures from Mantran’s
Istanbul dans la seconde moitié du XVIIe siécle- indications that İstanbul was a vast
capital city with at least a population approaching half a million souls as early as the 16th
century, which was termed as a monstrous urban concatenation by Braudel, seems to be
quite off the mark. Similar to Karpat, Zafer Toprak follows the method used by Cyril
Mango for Byzantine Constantinople41, and by using the figures of grain imported into
the city (91.250 metric tons annually) comes up with a more moderate estimate of
300.000 for the 17th century.42 Also, the population concentration which reaches 15.00018.000 per km square in the old İstanbul, where a vertical architecture is not yet evident,
suggests a different figure. Although, downplaying the destructive effects of the plague
epidemic that had been a constant source of man-made disaster acting as a natural
population control, Toprak’s estimate is that the city was home to 200.000 in the 16th
century, reaching 250.000 in the 17th century seems more logical, though, far from
explaining the great decimation of plague years in the early 19th century, which I have
referred to above.43
The Tanzimat years saw a huge increase, from 1844’s 356,653 to 873,575 in
40
Inalcik, “Istanbul,” 1973.
Cyril Mango, Le Développement Urbain de Constantinople (IVe–VIIe Siè Cles) (Paris: De Boccard,
1985).
41
42
Toprak, “Tarihsel Nüfusbilim Açısından Istanbul’un Nüfusu ve Toplumsal Topografyası,” 117–20.
43
Ibid., 119–120.
142
1885. The 1897 census counted approximately 1.1 million inhabitants, largely reflecting
the flow of Muslim immigrants from the territories lost during the Russo-Turkish War of
1877-1878- and the 1914 census, 909,978, though, the foreign population –which is
estimated to be around tens of thousands, because of trade privileges provided to the
subjects of European powers and the newly founded Balkan nations- are not included in
these censuses. Kemal Karpat gave a higher estimate of around 1.6 million for 19141916. In censuses taken during the armistice, the figure is around 1,203,000. After the
war, a huge drop in population was widely accepted. For instance, in 1922, the census
taken from police jurisdictional areas, the population was given as 710,286, and in 1924,
the decrease in population finally reached a trough with half a million inhabitants. The
census of 1927 indicated some signs of increase up to 690,857 inhabitants. The
population showed further signs of recovery only in 1935, with 741,148.44
Tekeli, Development of the Istanbul Metropolitan Area, 50; Toprak, “Tarihsel Nüfusbilim Açısından
Istanbul’un Nüfusu ve Toplumsal Topografyası,” 120.
44
143
Istanbul Population: 1829‐1935
1800000
1600000
1400000
Population
1200000
1000000
800000
600000
400000
200000
0
1829 1844 1885 1897 1914 1916 1918 1922 1924 1927 1935
Year
Figure 4.3: Istanbul Population 1829-193545
A comparison of these censuses reflect that the population of the city after the
First World War first increased considerably, due to the war refugees from the Balkans
and Anatolia, and later, the armistice and the foundation of Republican Turkey reckoned
a city with half of its pre-war population, almost nearing population levels comparable to
five decades earlier. Without a doubt, this decrease, on the one hand, owed a great deal to
the Armenian depopulation instigated by the CUP (Committee of Union and Progress)
which began on 24 April, 1915, with the deportation of Armenian community leaders
and intellectuals (first thought to be around 250, but later in the year reaching thousands)
from Istanbul under Talat Paşa’s orders.46 On the other hand, the long lasting war and the
Tekeli, Development of the Istanbul Metropolitan Area, 50; Toprak, “Tarihsel Nüfusbilim Açısından
Istanbul’un Nüfusu ve Toplumsal Topografyası”; Inalcik, “Istanbul,” 1973; Kemal H. Karpat, Osmanlı
nüfusu: 1830-1914, trans. Bahar Tırnakçı (Timaş Yayınları, 2010).
45
46
See, Taner Akcam, A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish
Responsibility (Picador, 2007).
144
inept governments not only decimated Armenian population, but also contributed heavily
to the emigration of Greek people-the second most populous ethnic group of the citythough, the Greek population was exempt from the population exchange agreement
signed between Greek and Turkish governments at the end of the war.
As Stefanos Yerasimos correctly pointed out, the population growth of Ottoman
Turkey in the two centuries between the 17th century and 19th century, shows a curious
and out of proportion increase of non-Muslims which significantly exceeded Muslim
growth of population.47 In 1885, for instance, 44% of city’s population was composed of
Muslims, while non-Muslims made up of 41% and a further15% were of foreign origin.48
According to Kemal Karpat's calculations, in 1897, Istanbul's population was 1.059.000,
and of this population, 597.000, roughly 60 per cent, were ethnically Turkish-even
though, Karpat, also gave the figures for Albanians and Kurds (two Muslim minorities).
Since, the distinction between Turkish and Muslim did not actually exist for a long time
in Turkish academic writing or for the purposes of collecting census data, it is better to
treat the figure as solely the Muslim population. Otherwise, Muslim immigrants from
Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia, Albania and other parts of the Balkans, as well as Caucasian
Muslim immigrants –Lazi, Georgians, Circassians, etc. - would all be delineated as
Turks. The Greeks were the second most numerous community numbering 236.000, and
Yerasimos, used Omer Lutfi Barkan’s population figures for the year 1530, and out of a total Anatolian
population of 6,5 million, non-Muslims made up of 8% of the total. Yet, considering Ubicini’s 1844
calculations, of the total population of 16 million corresponding to the contemporary territories of Turkey,
20% was composed of non-Muslims. Yerasimos explained this phenomenon –with some reserves- on the
basis of a transformation from a Gazâ based military apparatus to the conscription army that is bound to a
defensive –and non-extractive force- that befell on the Turkish-Muslim population. See, Yerasimos,
Azgelişmişlik Sürecinde Türkiye 2. Tanzimattan 1. Dünya Savaşına, 607–9.
47
48
Tekeli, Development of the Istanbul Metropolitan Area, 51.
145
made up almost a quarter of the city's population. By size, third is the Armenian
community, with 162.000 people. Following these two ethno-religious communities
(although, there were slightly smaller communities of Greek and Armenian Catholics, as
well as protestants, they were nevertheless counted as Greek and Armenian), the third
most populous community, was the Jewish community, with 47.000 inhabitants in the
city.49
With the integration into the world-economy the hitherto inward looking
geographical dispersal of various communities, which was more or less limited to their
respective ghettoes inside the city walls, a geographical expansion of residential areas
emerged. To the west, the growth of Makriköy (later to be known as Bakırköy) and
Yeşilköy along the newly installed railway created two new suburbs, mostly populated by
non-Muslims. Meanwhile, to the north, the almost ineradicable growth of Galata and
Pera, instigated by investments by Levantines, foreign employees of foreign-held
companies, and partly non-Muslims saw the first real estate boom away from the
traditional core of Istanbul. This wave of real estate development and the first western
style urbanization and commercialization was parallel to the northward movement of
state functionaries and officials, spearheaded by the Sultan’s move- from Topkapı palace
towards Tophane to the Ortaköy axis along the coast, defined by the Dolmabahçe and
Yıldız Palaces-both of which served as the seat of the Sublime Porte throughout the 19th
century at different times. Later, in the early 20th century, the first boom of real estate
development, and would extend its reach from Pera to Şişli, through the TeşvikiyeNişantaşı axis. On the Anatolian coast, the opening of the Anatolian railroads and its final
49
Kemal H. Karpat, Osmanlı nüfusu: 1830-1914, trans. Bahar Tırnakçı (Timaş Yayınları, 2010), 220.
146
terminus at the Haydarpaşa train station helped transform the then idyllic resort areas east
of Kadıköy into the first suburban settlements on the Anatolian side of the Bosphorus.
Yeldeğirmeni was the first to join, with western style multi-level apartment buildings,
and then followed by other suburban districts like Kızıltoprak, Göztepe, Erenköy, and
Bostancı.50
This first and most defining geographical expansion of the city during fin-desiécle was unmistakably an outcome of the progressively increasing welfare of nonMuslim populations, who seemed to be on the verge of bringing together the first genuine
middle-class of Ottoman Turkey.51 The Greeks continued their traditional existence in
Fener where their residence had been recognized by Mehmed II since the conquest, and
as an aristocratic extension of the Ottoman state apparatus. Fener Greeks represented a
privileged class of Greek subjects of the emperor.52 Ayakapı, Cibali, Samatya, and
Kumkapı were the other main non-Muslim intra-muros neighborhoods. They also
established new neighborhoods in Makriköy (Bakırköy) and Yeşilköy. The Karaman
Greeks lived between Narlıkapı and Yedikule in the intra-muros Istanbul. They also lived
in Galata, Pera, Pangaltı, and in small fishing villages along the Bosphorus: Tarabya,
Yeniköy, Arnavutköy-Kuruçeşme, Beşiktaş, Ortaköy, Rumelihisarı, Büyükdere, and
Sarıyer. On the Anatolian side of the city, Kadıköy and the Princes’ Islands were
overwhelmingly populated by Greeks, and they made up significant portions of
neighborhoods in Çengelköy, Üsküdar, Beykoz, Kuzguncuk, and Selimiye, on the eastern
50
Tekeli, Development of the Istanbul Metropolitan Area, 42–3.
51
Keyder, State and Class in Turkey : A Study in Capitalist Development.
52
Yerasimos, Azgelişmişlik Sürecinde Türkiye 2. Tanzimattan 1. Dünya Savaşına, 610; Inalcik, “The Policy
of Mehmed II toward the Greek Population of Istanbul and the Byzantine Buildings of the City.”
147
shores of the Bosphorus as well.53
The Armenian community was traditionally centered along the axis between
Samatya, Kumkapı, and Yenikapı, intra-muros Istanbul, on the western coast of the
Bosphorus, where the Patriarchate of Armenian Orthodox Church was, and still is,
located. Topkapı, Narlıkapı, Yedikule, Balat, Makriköy, Yeşilköy; Hasköy, Galata,
Beyoğlu, Surpagop, Pangaltı, Şişli, Beşiktaş, Ortaköy, and Kuruçeşme were also other
neighborhoods with significant Armenian populations. On the Anatolian side,
Kuzguncuk, Bağlarbaşı-Yenimahalle, Selâmsız, and İcadiye were neighborhoods where
sizable Armenian communities lived alongside Muslims.54
Jewish communities existed in intra-muros Istanbul in the neighborhoods of Balat,
Cibali, Ayvansaray, and Tekfursaray; yet, Hasköy was an important foci of Jewish
settlement, on the north of the Golden Horn. As was the same case with other nonMuslims, Galata, Pera, Kasımpaşa, and Tophane along the aforementioned late
nineteenth century real estate development axis, as well as the newly developed
Bosphorus coasts of Beşiktaş, Ortaköy, Arnavutköy, and Büyükçeşme and Kuruçeşme
had sizable Jewish communities. On the Anatolian coastline, Kuzguncuk –nearby
Üsküdar- was an important Jewish population center, whereas they also existed in
Çengelköy, and Üsküdar-mainly Muslim neighborhoods- and Kadıköy-mainly a Greek
neighborhood.55
Levantines and citizens of foreign countries began to turn some then insignificant
53
Tekeli, Development of the Istanbul Metropolitan Area, 44.
54
Ibid.
55
Ibid., 44–5.
148
neighborhoods like Cihangir –adjacent to Pera- into new urban residential areas with art
noveau apartment buildings that followed the latest trends in European architectural
circles, while the British and French nationals built exquisite seaside palaces in Modaadjacent to Kadıköy on the Anatolian side-, Bebek, Kandilli, and Büyükdere –erstwhile
northern villages on the western side of the Bosphorus. Close by, in Tarabya –a bay
between Büyükdere and Bebek, called Therapia in Greek- French, British, German, and
Italian Embassies’ summer residences were built, soon to be joined by the Russians in
Büyükdere; indicating a permanent rush to the Bosphorus, somewhat following the
Ottoman aristocracy’s earlier rush in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.56 It is
important to note that, this earlier urban sprawl, triggered by Westernized bourgeoisie,
was mostly pioneered by the privileged sectors of society protected under the foreign
powers’ bilateral agreements with the empire. In 1882, more than a decade after the
passage of the Ottoman Citizenship Law of 1869, close to half of the residents in Pera
(110,000 out of a population of 237,000) still carried foreign passports.57
The classical Ottoman geographical governmentality, rooted in a neatly arranged
tile-like distribution of Muslim and non-Muslim population in intra-muros Istanbul,
somewhat continued well into the 19th century. Although, apparently cut off from the
relevant circuits of capital and international trade, Muslims still dominated the old
imperial core of Istanbul: Aksaray, Laleli, Şehzadebaşı, Zeyrek, Vefa, Süleymaniye,
Çarşamba, Fatih, and Atikali faintly resembling the intercession of Byzantine forums and
56
Ibid., 46.
Caglar Keyder, “Bureaucracy and Bourgeoisie: Reform and Revolution in the Age of Imperialism,”
Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 11, no. 2 (1988): 161.
57
149
more or less still served the same functions. The two oldest suburbs of Istanbul were still
overwhelmingly Muslim and contained the spirit and symbolism of the imperial past
interwoven with dilapidated streets, wooden houses, külliyes that are hardly reminiscent
of the past and the rather spatially and ideologically imposing hüzün that crept slowly
but surely to the still ruling elite’s weltanschauung-ruling, but inept, incapacitated to
interpret and change the cataclysmic turn of events that is already incipient by the end of
the 19th century. Sütlüce, Kasımpaşa, Fındıklı, and Tophane were the working-class
districts, wherein the laborers of the Haliç basin’s manufactories dwelt. Nearby the
working-class districts, in a secluded valley, lived the outcasts of both Ottoman and later
Turkish society, the Roma people, who earned their livelihood as musicians, street artists,
publicans, dancers, etc.58
The bureaucrats of the rapidly centralized state machinery chose to –or were made
to- live closer to the ultimate authority, either the Dolmabahçe Palace, or the Yıldız
Palace, dependent on the sultan’s choice, so Beşiktaş, Yıldız, and Nişantaşı were the
earliest Muslim upper-middle class neighborhoods, epitomized with some quaintly
embellished Baroque-inspired row houses purpose built for the palace functionaries on
Akaretler street. Muslims were a minority in both Kadıköy and the Prince Islands, but
curiously, from the Abdulhamid era on, as more and more partook in the burgeoning
riches –the nouveaux riches who were direct products of the growth of state machinerythe eastward shoreline of Marmara Sea -beginning from Moda and Fenerbahçe bays
passing through Kızıltoprak, Göztepe, Erenköy, and Bostancı- a low-density
Tekeli, Development of the Istanbul Metropolitan Area, 45; Reşat Ekrem Koçu, Eski İstanbul’da
Meyhaneler (İstanbul: Doğan Yayıncılık, 2002).
58
150
suburbanization took hold.59
What was really remarkable about the fin-de-siécle Muslim population of
Istanbul, from a demographical point of view, was their peculiarity regarding family
planning. According to Alan Duben and Cem Behar’s study, “The Muslim population of
Istanbul appears…to have been the first sizeable Muslim group to have a systematically
and extensively practiced family planning.”60 The average household population in
Istanbul at the turn of the 20th century was 4.2, and closely resembles the average
household population at the turn of the 21st century, 3.85. Furthermore, from the
beginning of the twentieth century, women in Istanbul began to hold back marriages. By
the 1930s, the average marriage age for women was 23, while it was close to 30 for mennumbers not matched for most of the twentieth century once the long forsaken flood gates
of rural immigration were opened with all their might. The long 19th century not only
helped Istanbul become one of the pioneering global cities as the imperial domain
integrated to the modern world-economy, but also contributed to a relative amelioration
of women’s status and position. Duben and Behar, pointed to factors like, “education,
entry into the work-force, the late Ottoman and early Republican [feminist/suffragette]
movements” in addition to a growing sense of repulsiveness of polygyny and
concubinage, the perceived increase in options and choice for marriage, and, perhaps,
most well documented in Turkish literature, the influence (some contemporary critiques
might say, disruptive and debased effects) of western ideas and notions regarding
Tekeli, Development of the Istanbul Metropolitan Area, 46; Adnan Giz, Bir zamanlar Kadıköy: (19001950) : güzel Kadıköy, köşklerin dramı, Kadıköy’ün insanları (İletişim Yayıncılık, 1988).
59
Alan Duben and Cem Behar, Istanbul Households: Marriage, Family and Fertility 1880-1940
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 242.
60
151
marriage and love.61
In the next section, we will grapple with this rapidly changing society’s
tremendously altered structures and their reflections on the built environment and how
state authority came to terms with this change that often borders pure turmoil for most of
the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, and how in its endless
quest for molding space, the state reorganized Istanbul in its broken and ruptured selfimage.
4.4
An Uneventful Series of Urban Plans: Tanzimat and Attempts in
Reforming the Urban Space in Istanbul
A key notion which all Ottoman historians from all creeds, left and right,
Kemalist, nationalist, or socialist, seem to agree upon without contention is that the
Tanzimat period was the beginning of the Ottoman Empire’s exploitation by Western
powers.62 After the signing of the Anglo-Ottoman Trade Accords in 1838, prime minister
Mustafa Reşit Paşa declared the Royal Edict on November 3, 1839 in Gülhane Parkhence, the name is still known as the Royal Edict of Gülhane. With the abolition of the
millet system and the strict hierarchy and segregation of different faith-based
communities under the Ottoman throne and the de jure primacy of the Muslims stipulated
under the system, not only all subjects of the empire became equals, at least on paper, but
61
Ibid. See also Mardin, Türk Modernleşmesi., for a brilliant analysis of Turkish novelists’ inimical,
outright hostile, responses to the corruption of Turkish/Islamic virtues of family life by the invasiveness of
western values, which emasculated the male dominance in the household and let feminine sexuality loose in
a rapidly changing materialistic society.
62
On this, Yerasimos’ otherwise commendable work, with a socialist unequal development framework,
puts much of the blame on the Tanzimat era opening up of Ottoman economy: Yerasimos, Azgelişmişlik
Sürecinde Türkiye 2. Tanzimattan 1. Dünya Savaşına.
152
also, a whole series of economic, political, social, and cultural changes began. The
military-bureaucratic elite of the Ottoman Empire undertook a thorough reformation of
the system, comparable to the Meiji in Japan, but ended up in a completely different
trajectory. It is extensively researched and written that the effects of the Anglo-Ottoman
trade deals were devastating, caused a rapid disorganization in the then predominant
relations of production and shattered the enviously protected privileges of the guilds and
demolished the guild-centered craftsmanship. The flooding of Ottoman markets with
cheap British goods, especially woven yarns, had rendered the small-scale crafts
organization of Ottoman manufacture non-competitive and irrelevant. On the other hand,
the incessant demand for Ottoman agricultural produce, especially grains, for the British
markets, instigated a proliferation of plantation-like enterprises, called malikanes, and
further led to the proletarianization of landless peasants. Meanwhile, those who mediated
these trade relations, non-Muslims of Istanbul and Smyrna, began accumulating capital
and rose to an unrivaled position in the empire as the lenders of last resort. However, it is
also suggested that the actual picture did not fit into the posited account and that small
scale production and craftsmanship did not collapse until World War I, especially in areas
where merchant capital could not reach, like Central Anatolia. Furthermore, similar
claims were raised to the effect that the Anglo-Ottoman Trade Agreement was rather a
restatement of the already existing agreements with other European powers, and its real
objective was to fend off the threat posed by the ruler of Egypt, Kavalalı Mehmet Ali
Paşa, and further served as a stop-gap for the gradually splintering off of Balkan nations
triggered by the 1833 Hünkar İskelesi Treaty signed with Russia, which recognized
153
Czar’s protectorate over the Christian subjects of the Ottoman Empire.63
Whatever one’s evaluation of the Tanzimat era reforms, we cannot deny the
plausibility of powerful, far reaching changes in Ottoman society. For the first time,
bureaucracy was raised from its subservient status as the tabaa and began its long and
arduous path in Turkish history as a proto-class.64 The differentiation within the labor
force and relations of production became articulate –at least, the ethnic division of labor
that prevailed in the Janissary army and amongst the servants of the Porte was gradually
set free from the fetters of the sultan’s control, and in return, they had lost their influence
in the intricate palace politics. A whole new array of social, political, cultural, and
economic transformations kept the society in its grips, and ushered in a new mode of
relations with the modern world-system, completely imposed by an unprecedented set of
economic and governmental institutions. This was translated into concrete developments
in Ottoman political economy. The first bank notes were printed, a private and public
banking system emerged, a complex and highly centralized financial system started to
gain ground in Istanbul, and a new fiscal structure and public and private accounting
system modelled after European examples was for the first time employed by both the
state and private enterprises. Private property on land and real estate was recognized by
the Porte and a system of land registry and titles was established, a stock market was
founded, first public bonds were issued, and as a consequence, Ottoman economic and
Furthermore, this interpretation comes from quite different academic and political vantage points: Zafer
Toprak, “Modernization and Commercialization in the Tanzimat Period: 1838-1876,” New Perspectives on
Turkey 7, no. Spring (1992): 57–70; İlber Ortaylı, “Tanzimat,” Tanzimat’tan Cumhuriyete Türkiye
Ansiklopedisi (Istanbul, 1985).
63
64
Mardin, “Center-Periphery Relations.”
154
social scaffolding was firmly moored to the modern world-system’s circuits of capital.65
The Tanzimat period spearheaded a thorough reorientation of Ottoman social fabric, and
Istanbul was the primary setting of this economically instigated transition.
To a large extent, the melancholia and hüzün attributed by Westerners in the early
19th century was due to the intense reaction to a pre-modern layout of the city. In the
beginning of the 19th century, the width of Divanyolu –the Ottoman version of the
Byzantine Mese, the most important avenue that connected the Grand Bazaar, the state
institutions, and the külliyes of Beyazıt, Fatih, and Sultanahmet (the Blue Mosque) - did
not exceed 6 meters, 65 feet, and the average width of the city streets were between 2
meters to 2.5 meters, 6.6 feet to 8.2 feet.66 Apparently, the physical characteristics of
Istanbul’s urban patterns was no longer sufficient for a highly mobile system of labor and
commodities exchange. Furthermore, the administrative structure of the classical
Ottoman period was no longer capable of answering a wide variety of needs instigated by
these transformations. The extension of central authority in urban areas, which was made
up of mahalles, the kadıs, the proto-private form of ownership in waqfs, and strictly
controlled artisanal guilds of architects and masons, and the wardens appointed by the
sultans and a whole array of limitations on labor’s circulation, price controls, and
inefficient legal framework; in sum, the accoutrements of the Ancien Regime were
Toprak, “Modernization and Commercialization in the Tanzimat Period: 1838-1876,” 62.: “Compared to
the pre-Tanzimat period, the economic history of the Tanzimat is characterized by the rise of modern
economic and financial institutions, both public and private. The first paper money, the transition to a
unitary monetary structure, state and private banking institutions, European-style budgets, the stock
exchange, foreign debts, foreign chambers of commerce, in short a host of new economic and financial
devices unknown to the previous era proliferated from 1838 onwards.”
65
66
Inalcik, “Istanbul,” 1973, 240.
155
overwhelmingly inept in fulfilling the requirements begotten by capitalist accumulation.67
One by one, each was subject to the modernist drive to reform. The rule of the day was,
reform or perish-and we know that, the former was not exactly accomplished.
The real difficulty in a reform of Istanbul’s urban structure laid not in the deficit
of political will, or the lack of resources, but rather, in the orientation of that will. A short
history of the Ottoman Empire and Republic of Turkey could be told in five seconds as a
never-ending conflict between centralizing and centrifugal forces. Similarly, although the
first municipal authority in the empire was established in Istanbul in 1855, named
Şehremaneti,68 it was not functional. The first true municipal administration was founded
in 1857, in the Pera District, named the Sixth Municipal District (the other five districts
were supposed to be established gradually in other parts of the city). For a long time, the
Sixth District remained as the sole municipal local authority in the empire.69
The Sixth District was an experiment in local administration, the first dabbling of
the Porte in granting some authority to the people’s elected officials. However, this
experiment also contained a double movement on the part of the Ottoman central
authority: the non-Muslim population of Pera saw this as yet another attempt at extra
taxation of their businesses, while the Porte partly aimed at establishing the Sixth District
as both a way of diminishing the Christians’ –and European powers’- complaints of
arbitrariness in administration. Furthermore, the Sixth District was useful in getting rid of
67
İlhan Tekeli, Modernizm, modernite ve Türkiye’nin kent planlama tarihi (Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayınları,
2009), 109.
The name was of course symbollicaly laden, literally meant, the trustee of the city; which was an
admission that the city belonged to the sultan, and his appointed mayor would run the city as his trusted
person-the mayor’s name was also, Şehremini.
68
69
Tekeli, Modernizm, modernite ve Türkiye’nin kent planlama tarihi, 109.
156
the non-Muslim members of the Şehremaneti council. Once they had their own municipal
council, the eerily familiar political strategy thought, they would refrain from dealing in
the overall administration of the city. One thing which was not really understood by the
Porte, was that the urban growth of the city in the midst of the century was almost
exclusively the making of the non-Muslims. Aside from the Sultan’s move to the new
palace of Dolmabahçe in 1856, which was naturally followed by his retinue and the high
level government officials who moved into a complex of Baroque apartment buildings
nearby, Pera was the sole epicenter of building activity in the period. This also brought
Beşiktaş’ integration to the city –once a relatively unimportant port, and mooring place of
sail ships, its adjacent forests were the hunting grounds of the dynasty. In the 1860s, the
Sixth District administration started the demolition of the Genoese Walls surrounding
Pera in order to pave the way for further real estate development, and by the 1870s a
rapid wave of expansion helped the city’s center move towards this area for the first time
in history.70
The Sixth District municipality’s already limited authority ebbed and flowed with
the whim of the Porte as the only municipal administration in the empire until the early
20th century. In 1877, the first constitutionalists attempted to extrapolate this experiment
to the rest of country, though this attempt in devolution of Porte’s powers was cut short
by Abdulhamid II’s regime of restoration.71 Even if the municipal administrative reforms
came to fruition, it was highly unlikely that a military-bureaucratic class vanguard
70
Murat Gul, The Emergence of Modern Istanbul (I. B. Tauris, 2009), 46–7.
71
Tekeli, Modernizm, modernite ve Türkiye’nin kent planlama tarihi, 109.
157
affected, or tolerated, a lasting change in the distribution of power. Since the Sixth
District was relatively affluent and well connected to the international financial circuits,
Pera went through a rare period of growth. For the rest of the empire, the
peripheralization processes in the world-economy meant very limited possibilities for
similar urban development.72
4.5
Try Again, Fail Again: A Fruitless Series of Planning Attempts, von
Moltke, Bekir Pasha, Arnodin, and Bouvard
It is peculiar that the German modernization attempts so closely followed the
Ottoman modernization –albeit quite belated- and that one of the pioneering figures of
German unification –by means of militaristic expansionism and Prussian dominationHelmut von Moltke was also the first urban planner of Istanbul. According to art
historians and historians alike, the Von Moltke plans, the sketches of the famed Prussian
general Helmut von Moltke (the Elder) who would not only pave the stones of the road
that led to the Prussian expansionism, but also to the CUP/Kemalist consolidation –since,
his writings were a source of endless inspiration for generals of the Ottoman army, not
the least amongst them was Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turk- and are
widely seen as the first plans that attempt to re-draw Istanbul on a western footing.
Although there exist some rumors regarding von Moltke's plans and the authenticity of
his authorship of these plans, there is a widespread consensus among historians regarding
his favored status with the Sultan's court, and that his were the first such attempts in
72
Tekeli, Development of the Istanbul Metropolitan Area, 41.
158
bringing order to the pre-modern Istanbul. 73 On the other hand, according to Murat Gül’s
recent research on the subject, there remains doubt regarding the authenticity of von
Moltke’s plans. Possibly, the ambiguity concerning the authenticity and authorship of
these plans owes its existence to the mistranslation of von Moltke’s notes on the
subject.74 Yet, a prominent historian, Ilhan Tekeli argued that without any doubt, the
plans drawn in 1836-47 by von Moltke are definitively the first attempts in urban
planning in Istanbul.75
More important than the originator of the plans, von Moltke or someone else,
what really matters is the underlying features of those plans. The plan laid down a grid
organization that geometrically ordered the old, intra-muros city, sought to widen the
already existing streets, and open up new arteries of circulation in the city on five new
boulevards –each, at least 15 meters wide. On top of that, the plan stipulated that wood be
replaced by stone, or brick as the primary building material. Also, monumental structures,
particularly mosques, were to be foregrounded by cleaning up their surroundings to
enable an unsullied view of Istanbul’s grandiosity.76 Von Moltke plans were not brought
into actual implementation.
Yet, in Von Moltke plan, the four modernist design principles; the application of a
gridiron plan, the opening up of wide avenues, replacing wood with sturdier and fire
resistant materials like stone and brick, and the imputed importance of monumental
73
Çelik, The Remaking of Istanbul, 50.
74
Gul, The Emergence of Modern Istanbul, 33.
75
Tekeli, Modernizm, modernite ve Türkiye’nin kent planlama tarihi, 109.
76
Çelik, The Remaking of Istanbul, 105–6.
159
structures with an urgent need for cleaning up of their vicinities, played a central role in
the ensuing 150 years of an endless series of planning proposals. Istanbul remained
without a master urban plan, though with several layers of fruitless plans, some
implemented, some turned into statutes but never seriously applied, a mismatch of urban
rationalism pervasively surrounded the city from the beginning of the Tanzimat era. İlhan
Tekeli succinctly suggested this era, the period between mid-19th century and the
declaration of the republic, was the time of shy or timid modernity. The state was wary in
its approach to space, and almost without exception had undertaken small, reversing
steps, which were bogged down from the outset with a series of paperwork and red tape,
or, financially and technologically impossible to implement.77
However, the failure in the application of Von Moltke plans did not translate into
the government’s permanent disinterest in the built environment. In 1839, a more modest
attempt in following up the plan’s instigated ordering of the streets was undertaken, and
the first urban planning regulations of the empire were declared. Later, in 1848, a
Building Code (Ebniye Nizamnamesi) was announced to control the building activities in
Istanbul. In 1864, similar regulations were extended to the whole country with the
Building and Roads Code (Ebniye ve Turuk Nizamnamesi); in 1882 the Building Statutes
were signed into law.78 The first grid-type street organization was built in 1856, and the
first streets widened in 1866.79 Yet, a mere twenty years after von Moltke’s failed plans,
another attempt at bringing the auspices of modern planning principles were undertaken
77
Tekeli, Modernizm, modernite ve Türkiye’nin kent planlama tarihi, 106–137.
78
Ibid., 109.
79
Gul, The Emergence of Modern Istanbul, 33.
160
by an Ottoman pasha. Bekir Pasha, a member of the "askerî" class, the scion of
modernism in the post-Tanzimat Ottoman era, was sent to London by Sultan Abdülmecit
and upon his return, appointed as the Director of Engineering School (Mühendishane-i
Berri Hümayun Nazırlığı).
According to Tekeli, Bekir Pasha prepared plans for Istanbul around the 1860s,
though the plans were lost and the information regarding its date is far from being certain.
Tekeli gave a detailed description of the plan as outlined by a relative of Bekir Pasha,
Mehmet Eşref Bey. As precursor to the Beaux-Arts school of urban planning, his plans
were said to foreground the monumental architecture of Istanbul, and place the Selatin
mosques80 and the Hagia Sophia in the center of large parks connected by wide avenues.
However, unlike the ensuing plans, which appropriated a large swath of the Topkapı
Palace complex that had fallen into disuse by the time of Abdulhamid II’s reign (who is
rumored to have said "for the railways to enter the city, I can sacrifice my whole palace"),
Bekir Pasha's plans located the main railway station in Kazlıçeşme. Thereby Bekir
Pasha’s plans prevented the railroad tracks entering the imperial city. The grand station
was purported to be built across Yedikule, around the Yıldızlı Gate (Gate of the Stars),
claimed to be the gate that saw the entrance of Mehmet II into the city he conquered.
Adorned with an “Arch De Triomph alla Turca” the trains from Europe would have their
terminus by the gate, and presumably, the visitors from the West would fall in awe of the
ornamental power of the Ottomans. The connection between the train station and the
These are the main mosques and külliye complexes of Istanbul, built under the orders of the sultans and
paid for by the coffers of the imperial treasury-which, of course, before the Tanzimat reforms, were the
sultan’s own property.
80
161
inner city was to be done by horse carts.81
During Abdulhamid II’s reign, Moltke and Bekir Pasha’s unfulfilled master plans
were followed by Arnodin’s fantastically ambitious plans –which suggested and proposed
finished drawings of two lavish stone bridges on the Bosphorus, one between Üsküdar
and Sarayburnu, the other between Kandilli and Rumelihisar (approximately, on the
location of today’s Bosphorus Bridge) and an outer ring road surrounding the city for
easy movement of troops and commercial goods, but none of his designs came any nearer
to application, and never went beyond beautifully drawn sketches with a resounding
similarity to Jules Verne novels.82 Still, the Hamidian rule saw further attempts in urban
planning, control of city’s growth and renewal of old districts, and Joseph Antoine
Bouvard, a member of Beaux-Arts school, was employed by the Porte. Bouvard’s plan,
was paid for by the French government, and although Bouvard had drawn these plans, he
did it from the comfort of his office in Paris, without a single visit to the city. Bouvard’s
plan attempted to reconstruct the Roman monumentality that was long buried underneath
centuries of rubble. The Hippodrome was to be excavated, or rebuilt, and would serve as
the main axial epicenter of the grid planned Istanbul. Naturally, to do that, Sultanahmet
Mosque and the Külliye complex had to be razed, at least partially, but Bouvard
apparently thought this could have been a small sacrifice for unearthing the beauty of the
past. As any government with scarcely any human decency or ordinary sanity would do,
the Porte flatly refused to tear down this most majestic example of classical Ottoman
81
Tekeli, Development of the Istanbul Metropolitan Area, 33.
82
Çelik, The Remaking of Istanbul, 107–110.
162
architecture. 83
Bouvard, on the other hand, seems to take his clue for design from Paris. In his
plan, Beyazıt Square would portray the might of the Ottoman state. An imperial library,
ministry of agriculture, ministry of war, and an Hôtel de Ville a lâ Parisienne would
adorn an overblown reconstruction of the Tauri Forum. Yet, once again, a tiny nuisance
stood in the way for the implementation of Bouvard’s plan: Beyâzıt Mosque and Külliye.
The asymmetrical positioning of the mosque and külliye vis-à-vis the square and
surrounding structures –especially, the monumental ministry of war, today, Istanbul
University campus- portended an irresolvable problem for not merely Bouvard, but a
series of architects and urban planners.84
Arnodin and Bouvard’s plans were perfectly representative of Abdulhamit’s rule,
grandiose in its attempts, ostentatious in all its details, ambitious in all extents, but always
incomplete, never fulfilled, and more often than not, left to rot in a forgotten place –either
the imperial shipyards, as had happened to the new naval flotilla, or as myriad urban
plans in the archives. The governmental apparatus was rapidly centralized in the person
of Abdulhamid II, his part enlightened, part Oriental despotism tried to heal the wounds
of the 1877-78 War’s catastrophic repercussions. Istanbul’s population increased
significantly with the hundreds of thousands fleeing from the severed Balkans and
Caucasus, and Abdulhamid had to make the decision to re-balance the center of gravity in
the empire: returning back to the Danubian basin in the Balkans was no longer a
possibility. He was the last sultan that reigned over a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural,
83
Ibid., 109–125.
84
Ibid., 115–6.
163
universal empire.85 His talents were typically Ottoman: instead of relegating power to a
bureaucratic elite, who deposed his uncle and predecessor Abdulaziz I and led to his
death in uncertain situations, he concentrated all decision-making in his own small circle,
and kept control of the unruly sections of society, especially the nascent professionalintellectual class, by means of constant surveillance provided by an expansive secret
police and continuous censure of the press.86 He never left Istanbul during his 33 years of
rule, not even for a day, and did not reside in his predecessors’ palace, but built for
himself a new palace on the hills of Beşiktaş –possibly to fend off the vulnerability of the
Dolmabahçe Palace. As the novelist Ihsan Oktay Anar so sarcastically dramatized in
Yedinci Gün (The Seventh Day) Abdulhamid II turned the whole country into a huge
panopticon, centered around himself, where even the sultan feared his own gaze.87 What
remained of his empire, his 33 long years of sheltering himself in the confines of Yıldız
Palace, and witnessed the gradual implosion, slowly metastasized collapse of Ottoman
society was a collection of photographs –hundreds, perhaps thousands of them- taken
from all around the empire, showing new railroad terminals, school pupils, clock towers,
his subjects in different poses, his officials in brand new suits, his army –all of which
waited for the day he’d give up the reins of power.88
İlber Ortaylı, “Son Universal İmparatorluk ve II. Abdülhamid,” in Osmanlı, vol. 12 (Ankara: Yeni
Türkiye Yayınları, 1999), 889–98.
85
86
For a much more lenient treatment of Abdulhamid’s reign and ineradicable tendencies to centralize
power, see, Ali Akyıldız, “Sultan II. Abdülhamid’in Çalışma Sistemi, Yönetim Anlayışı ve Bâbıâli’yle
İlişkileri,” in Osmanlı, vol. II (Yeni Türkiye Yayınları, 1999), 286–97. One can say that Abdulhamid
excelled in the social control techniques that emerged with the onset of the Tanzimat see: Cengiz Kırlı,
“Kahvehaneler ve Hafiyeler: 19. Yüzyıl Ortalarında Osmanlı’da Sosyal Kontrol,” Toplum ve Bilim 83
(2000): 58–79.
87
İhsan Oktay Anar, Yedinci Gün (Iletisim Yayinlari, 2012).
88
For Abdulhamid II’s extensive collection of photographs taken throughout the empire, see,
164
4.6
The Demolition of Walls
Although the plans of Bekir Pasha never actually came to fruition, nor Arnodin or
Bouvard’s ideas for the same purpose, the gist of their designs would provide the
cornerstone to the development of Istanbul in the next century and a half. The great walls
of Istanbul would not only pose a physical barrier in the late 19th century. Once, the
Roman walls made the "polis," the one and only city in world history that housed three
empires (each from a different religious and cultural creed) and nurtured and isolated
these world-empires to the point of their consumption. Yet, the very walls that made the
city have also bequeathed the modern Istanbul with almost insurmountable problems.
Leaving the walls intact would be to approve and to acknowledge the historical
continuity of the idea of "polis" embedded in the geographical form of Istanbul. If New
York City would be meaningless without the gridiron shaped frame laid out in the form
of Manhattan, then Istanbul is but a void minus the historic core delimited by the ancient
walls.89
Yet, the fate of the walls elsewhere in Europe was what befell on the lesser city.
The demolition of the Galata walls took place in 1864 according to the plans drawn by
http://www.loc.gov/pictures/search/?st=grid&co=ahii
Of course the walls themselves are no longer ancient, they were demolished and rebuilt several times
throughout history, the most recent being Mayor Bedrettin Dalan's revival of the walls as both a reference
to the "glorious" Turkish-Islamic past and a boon to the then fledgling tourist attractions. As a matter of
fact, the walls are still the farthest from being a tourist attraction, since, arguably, they are made by mostly
factory-made bricks and mortars, in bright red color, and vociferously "new" in appearance. Yet, the
vicinity around the walls have served as an ideological herding point, as a moment to be gathered around
every 29th of May-the day of the conquest- during the mock-up ceremonies held at the Yedikule gates, or
for a small fee, you can help engender feelings of nationalism in younglings by the nearby diorama gallery,
called in a grandiose way as the "Panorama 1453 Istanbul Museum." See, A. Çinar, “National History as a
Contested Site: The Conquest of Istanbul and Islamist Negotiations of the Nation,” Comparative Studies in
Society and History 43, no. 02 (2001): 364–91.
89
165
Islah-ı Turuk (Roads' Reform) Commission, enforced by the Sixth District.90 The
synchronous wave of the demolition of walls in Europe and Istanbul was the surest
expression of the march of modernity and its accoutrements in the form of railroads, train
stations and modern army barracks. The artillery and mass war machinery and techniques
triggered by first, the Napoleonic Wars and then the Crimean War, meant that the
fortification was not merely useless, but also an impediment on the necessary mobility
required by the modern war making doctrines. As time and again proven by the failures
of the Ottoman forces throughout the 19th century, the walls were of no military use, let
alone protecting the city from foreign invasions, it severely limited the military
maneuvering. Hence, almost all functions of the Ottoman army, navy, and armaments
industry were built outside of the historic core. The Artillery Barracks were built in
today's Taksim in the 1780s, while the Artillery Arsenal was for a long time located on
the Tophane shore, the newly reformed Army (Nizam-ı Cedid, or the New Order Army)
barracks were first built across the Bosphorus, to protect them from being taken over by
the Janissaries in 1800, burnt down in 1806, and rebuilt in its current form between 1825
and 1828, and most importantly, the functions of the imperial headquarters were already
removed from Topkapı Palace by early 19th century; while in the former part of the
century, the Sultan's preferred Bosphorus palaces, the Dolmabahçe Palace (built in 1856)
in Beşiktaş become the main seat of power and Yıldız Palace (built in 1880 and used
solely during Abdulhamid II's reign) reiterated the move away from the historic
peninsula.91
90
Tekeli, Development of the Istanbul Metropolitan Area, 35.
91
Ibid.
166
4.7
The Expansion of the City: Railroads, Grand Boulevards, and
Public Squares
Leaving aside the conservative strongmen Adolph Thiers' absurdity of a wall
surrounding Paris (built between 1841 and 1844), Vienna and Istanbul were the last great
cities in Europe that were still fortified, but for completely different reasons. While
Vienna held onto the last vestiges of its scare regarding the beast from the east, Istanbul
kept the fortifications partly due to its symbolic importance (as the last remaining sign of
the glorious victories of the ancestors), in part because of its container effect on the
populations kept inside, and mainly because its fortunes no longer laid with the imperial
system that made its unique expansionary world-empire ascendant. The city's fortunes
were clearly defined by the future represented by Pera, by the newly built Dolmabahçe
Palace that took its visual cues from another absolutist monarchy from a different era (the
Versailles Palace), and the bureaucratic elite to be employed by either one of these
centers of powers-former financial, and the latter political.92 Just as the fortifications
were being replaced by the wide avenues in European capitals93-to control and to quell
the possible resistance movements that were without an exception all born in the city
following the French Revolution's model- Istanbul was also in dire need of expanding its
road networks. The new roads like Yenikapı Avenue, Şişhane Street, Büyük Hendek
Street, Boğazkesen Avenue and Yorgancılar Avenue between Karaköy and Azapkapı,
92
By 1844, Vienna, was still enmeshed in the mold of tightly woven fortification, and as Schorske put:
"Well after other European capitals had razed their fortifications, Vienna had maintained them. The
massive defense works and the broad glacis which had protected the imperial capital against the marauding
Turk had long since ceased to define city limits." p. 17
C. E Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (Cambridge Univ Pr, 1981), 18–19; Harvey,
Paris, Capital of Modernity.
93
167
Galata Avenue connecting Karaköy and Azapkapı were built either from scratch or the
already existing streets were widened by the demolition of walls.94
Furthermore, outside the Yedikule and Kazlıçeşme leather manufactures
developed in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.95 A whole new array of
manufacturing enterprises began to settle around the Golden Horn for two reasons: the
ease of access to raw materials and markets, and the proximity of the workers. Decades
after western industrialization ravaged waterways, the Golden Horn met the same fate
firstly with Cibali and Feshane as the first industrial establishments, and rapidly Balat and
Hasköy turned into slums, while Eyüp became a Muslim working class neighborhood
providing the hands for the dockyards and industries.96
The European railways system and its most ostentatious –and without any doubt
mystically Orientalized- arm, the Orient Express reached Istanbul in 1871. Contrary to
Bekir Pasha’s plans, the railroads followed the western model of articulating and
reformulating urban agglomerations by means of opening up the entrails of long closed
districts and entered the heart of intra-muros Istanbul, akin to an open-heart surgery,
replaced the Sublime Porte’s long tight grip of the city with a novel and heartless
intrusion. The railroad tracks followed the course of the millennia old Theodosian –and
later Ottoman- Walls along the Marmara Sea coast, leading to the demolition of most
fortifications between Ahırkapı and Sirkeci, in addition to royal palaces. Not only did the
rail tracks redefine the southern borders of the old city, but they also cut through the
94
Tekeli, Development of the Istanbul Metropolitan Area, 36.
95
Toprak, “Modernization and Commercialization in the Tanzimat Period: 1838-1876,” 60.
96
Tekeli, Development of the Istanbul Metropolitan Area, 47.
168
gardens and yalı and palace complex of the old throne of the imperial power –Topkapı
Palace. Sultan Abdulaziz, contrary to his cabinet’s insistence on keeping the old city and
imperial palaces complex intact, permitted the intrusion of railroads to the deepest and
most secluded corner of state power in Istanbul. When the railroad tracks were
completed, with the main terminal station right at the mouth of the Golden Horn, the
city’s imminent integration into the world-economy was completed.97
The main terminal station, Sirkeci Garı, was built apropos the Orient Express
imagination, rich in allusions to a mystical image of the east, an over-accentuated
emphasis was put on the play between the rich ornaments and the distinctive identity of
oriental forms. Designed by the German architect August Jachmund, with his newly hired
apprentice Mimar Kemaleddin, and built between 1888 and 1890, this exaggerated
eclecticism deeply marked Ottoman architectural character for the coming decades. The
station was extended by the Sirkeci Port in 1900 and across the Golden Horn, the Galata
Port was already built by 1895.
On the other side of the Bosphorus, with the newly forged alliance between the
German and Ottoman governments, the terminus of the Baghdad-Istanbul railroad,
Haydarpaşa Station, designed by two German architects, Helmut Cuno and Otto Ritter,
was opened in 1909, as an addition to the Haydarpaşa Port and Dockyards built between
1899 and 1903.98 Haydarpaşa Station did not only outmatch the grandeur and eclecticism
of the Sirkeci Station in its design, but also portrayed the ambition of the Hamidian
project to shift the Ottoman center of gravity eastwards; though, again, it was too little,
97
Kuban, İstanbul, Bir Kent Tarihi, 359.
98
Ibid., 360–1.
169
too late. Abdulhamid had lost his tight grip of power in the 1908 Revolution to the Young
Turks, the Istanbul-Baghdad railroad never fulfilled its purported role, and in a decade,
was a mere ghost of the old imperial will. However, as soon as the station was completed,
it served as another booster for suburban expansion and filled the empty space between
Kadıköy and Üsküdar. Now, with a regular tramway service, the two opposite ends of the
Anatolian Istanbul met at the station and the gargantuan barracks of Selimiye and the
neighboring mahalle.99
Meanwhile the city kept on expanding, once distant suburbs like Üsküdar, and
later Kadıköy, were tightly being integrated to the periphery. Yet, unlike its European
counterparts, Istanbul soon become a capital with a vast land mass, an urban organization
that stretched two continents, a few islets, with scarce connection between each other,
except rudimentary sailboats-or, rowboats, between the two shores of the Golden Horn.100
Toprak compared Istanbul to Paris, Vienna, Berlin and the Pest side of Budapest. At the
turn of the century the surface area of these metropolitan areas were, 108 sq. km in Paris,
155 sq. km in Vienna, 107 sq. km in Berlin, and 227 sq. km in Pest, while in Istanbul the
same area was 204 sq. km.101 The problem though, lies not in the physical vastness of the
city, but in the axial distances.102 The north-south axis between Kavaklar and Köprü was,
and still is, 24.35 km and the east-west axis, between Pendik and Küçükçekmece was 47
km (this expanded much in the last five decades), four times the length in Paris, Vienna,
99
Ibid., 360–361.
See, Toprak, “Tarihsel Nüfusbilim Açısından Istanbul’un Nüfusu ve Toplumsal Topografyası,” 111;
Toprak, “Istanbul’da Mekan ve Sayısal İlişkiler,” 454.
100
101
Toprak, “Istanbul’da Mekan ve Sayısal İlişkiler,” 454.
102
See, Toprak, “Tarihsel Nüfusbilim Açısından Istanbul’un Nüfusu ve Toplumsal Topografyası,” 111.
170
or Berlin.
Bringing together this loosely connected whole, this vast dispersal of humongous
city was possible first, due to the 19th century concentration between Pera and Sirkeci –
the two sides of the Golden Horn. Second, hitherto unpassable forests, hills, and valleys
were opened up by new roads and made accessible by filling up the Bosphorus shores.
And third, the steam-powered boats made swift, predictable, and affordable
transportation possible between suburbs and the new city center –at least, for the
newfangled middle class. The first Bosphorus crossing steamboats began service between
Eminönü and Üsküdar in 1845. Later, Şirket-i Hayriye (Auspicious Company) was
established as a joint stock company with Russian and English capital and Ottoman
pashas’ influential partnership in 1851, and began service in 1854. In 1858, the first car
ferries began running between Kabataş and Üsküdar.103
The introduction of steamboat service that connected the most populous and
predominantly Muslim suburb of Üsküdar to the city center was followed by the opening
up of horse-drawn tramways between Eminönü and Aksaray in 1869, and in the intramuros Istanbul, and in 1871, between Karaköy and Ortaköy, the former, new business
hub of the city, and the latter, the place where the Ottoman upper classes and aristocratic
families lived. Karaköy –the financial and commercial hub of Istanbul then- was
connected to Pera with the construction of a second underground railway (Tünel) –after
the London underground- between 1871 and 1874. Tünel (Tunnel), was built with private
money for the transportation needs of the Pera residents, who were overwhelmingly
Christians and employed in Karaköy or Eminönü, and belonging to middle or upper
103
Kuban, İstanbul, Bir Kent Tarihi, 359.
171
middle classes.104
The 1880s saw the first row houses in Beşiktaş. The first modern, Western style
residential buildings in Pera, Beyoğlu were erected after the 1850s - followed by
Cihangir, Nişantaşı, and Teşvikiye.105 Tekeli stated that the oldest apartment buildings
from that period in contemporary Istanbul can be dated to 1882.106 The first modern,
Western style apartment buildings on the Anatolian side were built in 1907 in
Yeldeğirmeni.107
During the fin-de-siécle, Pera, Büyükdere, Prince Islands and parts of Moda in
Kadıköy were said to be spatially organized according to Western cities. The life style
prevalent in these areas presented a stark contrast with how the Muslims lived in
Üsküdar, or in the intra-muros mahalles of Fatih, Aksaray, and Süleymaniye.108 These
Muslim populated mahalles, with heavily concentrated populations, scarcely any water
sources nearby, and narrow streets and cul-de-sacs were frequently subject to fires that
devastated whole neighborhoods, and sometimes, the neighborhoods were a mere
collection of wooden sheds built in between devastating fires.109 So, when Doğan Kuban
argued that the city was torn down and rebuilt at least three times between the reign of
104
Ibid., 359.
105
Öncel, Apartman.
106
Tekeli, Development of the Istanbul Metropolitan Area, 40.
107
Ibid.
108
Kuban, İstanbul, Bir Kent Tarihi, 366.
Tekeli points to a study by Osman Nuri Ergin which showed that in little more than half century
between 1854 and 1908, in 229 fires, 23404 buildings burnt down, in addition to Cibali and Hocapaşa
which were devastated by 8 eight different fires in the same period, see, Tekeli, Development of the
Istanbul Metropolitan Area, 11–2.
109
172
Mahmud II and 1914, he points to a perfectly natural cycle of creative destruction
embedded in the second nature of Istanbul.110
This self-reproducing cycle of doom and rebirth, this almost whiggish insistence
on the unalterable fate of Istanbul as the center of the known universe and the neverending waves of expansion in real estate –yet to be studied by urban historians- had
turned upside down the death of the city, as well as the living residents. The travelogues,
in the early eighteenth century, remarkably, and perhaps, grimly put that half of the city
of Pera was made up of cemeteries; seemingly endless hillsides, down from the Cadde-i
Kebir (the Grand Rue de Pera), filled with deceased of all faiths and beliefs.111 By the
midst of the nineteenth century, the cemeteries were surrounded by one of the most
rambunctious expansions of built environment hitherto experienced in Istanbul. Though,
apparently the new residents were always on the verge of an uneasy coexistence with
their ancient neighbors-and, alas, possibly, both the demolition of the Galata walls and
the wide availability of cemetery-neighboring land made this unique modern real estate
expansion possible. Taksim Square had first come into use, when yet another epidemic of
the plague in 1865 finally led to the ban on inner city cemeteries. Thereby, the Armenian
cemetery in Pera –present day Taksim Square- was moved to Şişli and the Catholic
cemetery was transferred to Feriköy, in their place, a park designed according to the
Beaux-Arts principles was built, and as a first of its kind, became a new form of
attraction in the newfangled urban core of Pera.112
110
Kuban, İstanbul, Bir Kent Tarihi, 366.
111
MacFarlane, Constantinople in 1828.
112
Tekeli, Development of the Istanbul Metropolitan Area, 36.
173
4.8
Modern’s Calling: The Urge to Urban Planning
In 1908, the authoritarian one-man rule of Abdulhamid II was overthrown by a
popular movement spearheaded by officers of the Ottoman army, who congregated
around an underground organization called Committee of Union and Progress.
Abdulhamid stayed as the sultan for another year, but, when his supporters, especially led
by the rank-and-file Muslim soldiers of the Artillery Barracks in Pera attempted to
reinstall him to power again with a rebellion against their officers on April 13, 1909
(known as the 31st of March Rebellion, due to the calendar of the time), he was deposed
and sent to exile in Thessaloniki -then, the most important city in the remaining Ottoman
Balkans. From then on, the CUP gradually increased its control of the revolutionary
parliament and government. Following defeat and loss of Macedonia, Albania, and
western Thrace –the last remaining lands of the empire in the west- in the First Balkan
War (1912), the leading CUP members forced their way into the government, and
overthrew the then elected government through a coup in 1913. This junta, led by three
pashas, Enver, Talat, and Cemal, established a single party rule, and very soon, the
Empire entered the World War on the German side. This heralded the doom of the
Ottoman Empire, as we know it, and by 1918, along with the Austro-Hungarian Empire,
this last imperial entity dissolved.
The leaders of the CUP junta were court martialed and sentenced to death in
absentia. Talat was shot and killed in 1921 in Berlin by an Armenian activist for ordering
the massacre of more than a million Ottoman Armenians. Cemal also fled to the newly
revolutionary Soviet Union, to recuperate and to bring together an army to join the
struggle against the Allied occupation; though he was assassinated in Tblisi by the
174
Armenian activists, for the same reason as Talat. Enver died while fighting against the
Soviet forces to establish an Islamic Pan-Turkic state in the Central Asian steppes.
Although, the leading figures of the CUP were slain a few years after the end of the war,
the political and military machinery set up by these three figures was still intact, and a
relatively unknown and younger pasha, Mustafa Kemal, led this organization from 1919
onwards. By 1922, the invading armies of Greece lost the war and withdrew from the
occupied lands of western Anatolia, the Ottoman Empire and the dynasty were abolished.
In 1923, a new parliamentary republic was declared, with Mustafa Kemal at the helm as
president, Ankara became the capital of the new parliamentary republic, and a whole new
set of modernizing reforms –many initiated by CUP- took a stern and relentless turn to
modernize the whole country.113 Yet, even though the names of the protagonists changed,
the old way of doing things in the country, the insuperable power of the bureaucratic
class, the holy centrality of the body of sovereign, the sovereign central power’s
omnipotent and omnipresent entity pervasive of infinitesimal minutiae of everyday life
stayed the same. This line of reasoning, to which I agree with reservations, permeated the
most enriching and analytically able research on social history of Turkey. From Mardin’s
center-periphery antagonism to Keyder’s bureaucratic class, the sociological insights
provided by such reading have left an indelible and lasting modicum of grasping social
relationships which still endures in Turkish academia.114
113
It is Erik-Jan Zürcher’s suggestion that Kemalist Turkey inherited a great deal of its ideological and
organizational qualities from the CUP. See, Erik J. Zürcher, The Young Turk Legacy and Nation Building:
From the Ottoman Empire to Atatürk’s Turkey (I. B. Tauris, 2010). For extensive and brilliant analyses of
the CUP ideological formation before they took over power, see Şerif Mardin, Jön Türklerin Siyasi
Fikirleri, 1895-1908, vol. 1 (İletişim Yayınları, 1983); M. Sükrü Hanioglu, Preparation for a Revolution:
The Young Turks, 1902-1908 (Oxford University Press Oxford and New York, 2001),
http://www.lavoisier.fr/livre/notice.asp?ouvrage=1146790.
114
Keyder, State and Class in Turkey : A Study in Capitalist Development; Mardin, “Center-Periphery
175
A key caveat after the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and the foundation of
the Republic of Turkey concerned Istanbul: no longer an imperial capital the city wasafter sixteen centuries as the site of one or another centralized state mechanism- finally a
respite to be left to its own devices.115 The early republican elites had deeply entrenched
qualms about the extent to which the city could be subjected to their reform agenda. After
the suppression of widespread dissent in the Kurdish areas and the deposition of the
opposition parties in the parliament in the early years of the republic, a window of
opportunity was created in the late 1920s. Yet, the 1929 Great Depression made itself felt
in this small agricultural republic, which was becoming more and more introvert in its
quest for Turkifying the nation. Without any doubt, the cosmopolitanism embedded in the
brick and mortar of Istanbul, its deep-rooted commercial connections to the world circuits
of capital accumulation and the non-Muslim character of the ones who represented the
connected citizens of the city, was if not anathema, certainly, repulsive for the republican
elite groomed in the Committee of Union and Progress’ umbrella ideology Turkishness.
Istanbul had to wait for the late 1930s for the draft of a master plan, and another
decade and a half for even the partial adaptation of that plan. Meanwhile, the city lost its
primacy in political, economic, and cultural landscape –which was almost second nature
to Istanbul’s existence for almost sixteen hundred years. The almost mystical role played
by the city was now replaced by a sinister sublimation: if Ankara was all things novel,
modern, good, pure, clean, neat, Turkish, homogeneous, and patriotic –a perfect
semblance to a desire towards spatial tabula rasa- Istanbul was undoubtedly ancient,
Relations”; Mardin, Türk Modernleşmesi.
115
Cansever, İstanbul’u anlamak, 92; Gul, The Emergence of Modern Istanbul.
176
rugged, chaotic, old, dirty, ruinous, Western, Christian, heterogeneous, dark, and
ominously representative of the great and costly past failures. Ankara was the new
prodigy, a showcase for the great leap forward undertaken by the Kemalist republic,
ambitious, hesitant to prove its worth, resourceful in its provincial loneliness, delicately
resentful to her older –much older- elder sister, Istanbul. Ankara was power spatialized,
there, it was no longer possible to speak of the nexus between state and space, since the
single-party rule and personality cult around Mustafa Kemal meant that party was the
state, and geography was not merely subject to the state- urban and rural alike, all
geography was state’s ultimate embodiment. All the mediations of state and space
relationships withered. Economy was no longer a restriction, the state simply
expropriated –especially, land the belonged to the Armenian, Greek, or Jewish émigrésneither, politics, nor culture. The state became the space.
Yet, in doing this, a frivolous envy bordering schizophrenia emerged: German
Reich’s blown out proportions were appropriated, architectural scale was boldly pushed
further, ordinary Turkish peasants turned into muscular men and women of the new
Republic –like, any other revolutionary regime, they also sought, at least in part, to forge
a “new man”- stone masonry was employed by brutally capacious projects, and a certain
sense of sterilization was laid down by dint of a new urban planning. On the other hand,
Kemalists, a clique within the ruling elites, sought the salvation of the masses through a
close reading of the Soviet Union’s unprecedented optimism and self-confidence in remolding the imperial cities inherited by its imperial past. So, Kemalists developed a
profound angst, an indecisive oscillation between a pure and untamed show of industrial
and military force represented by the Reich, and planned rationalism harnessed for the
177
exaltation of the working classes as the Soviets.116 Under these circumstances, once
Ankara tapped onto already limited capital reserves of the newly founded country, there
were not enough resources for the reconstruction of Istanbul. And, in the beginning,
Kemalists had scarcely any interest in this complex multi-layered city, which was simply
resistant to the imposition of uniformity.
The situation changed in the 1930s, once the contestants to power was forcefully
eliminated and Kurdish uprisings were brutally suppressed and the Takrir-i Sükûn laws
crushed the freedom of speech. The Kemalists and the single-party regime of the
Republican People’s Party felt confident enough to deal with Istanbul. A competition for
Istanbul’s urban planning was announced and three European planners were invited for
participation.117 These three invitees were most well-known planners of the time: Alfred
Agache, H. Lambert, and Hermann Elgoetz. Agache was a fervent supporter of Frédéric
LePlay’s sociological ideas –rooted in social Darwinism and elitist conservatism- and
previously he had prepared the urban plan of Rio de Janeiro. Lambert partook in urban
planning efforts in Paris, New York, and Chicago, while Elgoetz was responsible for
Essen’s planning. Elgoetz won the competition. The gist of Elgoetz’s planning was a
well-worn suggestion to foreground the monumental structures of the city. Though, his
planning proposals differed in his treatment of the main traffic arteries, unlike previous
proposals, he argued for the removal of circulation from the vicinity of the monuments of
the inner city. Similarly, and insightfully, he proposed the removal of the industrial
Between the two extremes, Ankara was also the setting for a highly experimental vanguardist
architecture briefly in the 1930s, instigated by the German emigrés who fled the Nazi regime. This brief
period was known as Ankara Cubism in architectural history. See, Bozdoğan, Modernism and Nation
Building; Sargın, Ankara’nın kamusal yüzleri.
116
117
Gul, The Emergence of Modern Istanbul, 90–95.
178
establishment from the Golden Horn and zoned the area as non-industrial. In this
proposal, he also suggested the transfer of the docks from the Golden Horn to a new port
facility to be built in Haydarpaşa. Elgoetz’s plan was never implemented, rather it waited
in the archives as proposals for Istanbul’s development.118
In the course of these developments, Istanbul gradually recovered from the decay
of the post-war years, between 1927 and 1940, and the population increased from
690,857 to 793,749. The first slum areas appeared during this time period. The new
immigrants, overwhelmingly coming from Anatolia, had paid scant attention to the fast
deteriorating inner city. Coupled with state initiated industrialization efforts, a workforce
was needed, and neither the hüzün of ruins meant anything for this dynamic laboring
classes, nor could the city harbor this burgeoning wave of newcomers. It was evident that
Istanbul, if intent on playing its role as the industrial epicenter of this predominantly
agricultural country, needed a plan to be drawn and implemented immediately. In 1935,
another international competition was opened. Two of the names who responded to this
call for competition are very important: Le Corbusier and Henri Prost. Prost, at the time,
was Le Corbusier’s arch-enemy, and their urban imaginations reflected a head on
collision. Prost, a proud progeny of the French Beaux-Arts tradition, was the head of
Paris urban planning administration and designed the archetypal spatial representations of
French colonialism in North Africa. Le Corbusier was, on the other hand, the scion of
CIAM, the harbinger of International architecture, high modernism, a product of
unhindered geometricism, a leading vanguard of purist architectonics, and a prominent
Kuban, İstanbul, Bir Kent Tarihi, 384–385; Stéphane Yérasimos, “La Planification de L’espace En
Turquie,” Revue de l’Occident Musulman et de La Méditerranée 50, no. 1 (1988): 114,
doi:10.3406/remmm.1988.2257.
118
179
enemy of all things traditional.
His proposal for Istanbul, which he summarized in a brief letter to Mustafa
Kemal, befitted his fame. He offered to leave the ruinous past untouched and rebuild a
new city from scratch immediately to the west of the ancient walls. There, he argued, it
was possible to build an enormous industrial city, unfettered from history’s asphyxiating
weight, the true and revolutionary potential of the Turkish revolution could have been put
on pedestal. The ultra-modernist Le Corbusier was at play, he later would formulate his
notion of housing as machinery for living, streets as circulatory mechanisms in a complex
organicism of the industrial city and for nature to remain untouched, suggested going
upwards, and designed skyscrapers with dense residential populations, surrounded by an
idyllic countryside. His letter went unresponded, and he lamented his peculiar judgment
on ancient Istanbul –and possibly, on the dearth of the Ottoman past- and especially
regretted the particular comment when he had heard that Henri Prost won the
competition. 119
Henri Prost’s proposal was much more moderate, and in essence, followed the
main outlines of von Moltke and Bouvard’s plans. He arrived in Istanbul on May15, 1936
and remained the head of Istanbul Municipality’s planning unit, the master planner, the
urbanist of Istanbul, until the first months of the Democrat Party rule in 1950.Yet, his fate
was no different than the preceding planners’ grand designs. Only a minority of his
proposals –the opening up of public parks in Maçka and Taksim, and clearing of
Eminönü square- came to the point of actual implementation. On the one hand,
bureaucratic inefficiencies hurt already tight budgets and scarcely any money was
119
Gul, The Emergence of Modern Istanbul, 96.
180
available for extensive appropriations of land, and on the other hand, the onset of World
War II had shelved any near term possibility of its actualization. Nevertheless, Prost’s
plan was the culmination of a century long experiment in modernist urbanism, and
remarkably signified modernism as a technical talent capable of reorganizing space
according to the state’s desired configurations. Prost’s designs, akin to Schroedinger’s
cat120 may have been realized or not: the question is, whether his proposals transpired to
become concrete realities and meanwhile withered as abstract notions, or vice versa. We
might never know the answer.
4.9
Henri Prost, Modernity without Modernism
A curious gap, however, exists in Turkish architectural and urban planning
history. Henri Prost, who perhaps was the single most influential actor in modern
planning in Turkey, undertook a complete and unprecedented overhaul of urban
topography, and coincidentally architecture, in Istanbul. Prost as an urban planner has
scarcely attracted any interest apart from his ideas. His blueprints for Istanbul’s
development portending the ultimate rationalization of a city feeling the cumbersome
throngs of industrial and modernist explosion of growth has been eagerly studied. It is
true that, household figures in Turkish architectural and planning history attempted to
locate his role in a diachronic fashion- how from Von Moltke to Henri Prost, via
Hermann Jannsen, they contributed deeply to a teleological coming of rational and
modernist planning in Istanbul-and, thanks to Jannsen, in Ankara. The diachronic
120
Schroedinger’s cat is a famous thought experiment employed by physicist Erwin Schroedinger to
illustrate the applications of quantum physics in everyday life wherein, a cat is both dead and alive at the
same time.
181
attempts are no doubt laudable, in their great efforts to locate the Turkish discourse on
space, urbanization, and industrial growth. Yet, the synchronicity of Prost’s efforts, and
the context of his Weltanschauung barely received any attention. Albeit a symptom of
Turkish manifest destiny-that, unlike the Americans, this trope retells a story of how
Turkey is unique in its underdevelopment, how in all its isolation, it had come up with
weirdly syncretic forms and modes of thought, and will ultimately succeed in becoming
our “lonely, but beautiful country,” that even in its glory, as well as in its mirth, our
country is fatally flawed in its intractable plethora of problems; the lack of attention to
Prost’s time and ideas is nevertheless interesting. Meanwhile, Prost’s undertakings in
planning in Europe and its colonial expansion in the Maghreb, and his own spatial
underpinnings and perceptions which owes its existence to the brief spell he spent in
Istanbul in the fin-de-siécle attracted scant attention.
Paul Rabinow, in his brilliantly written book, French Modern: Norms and Forms
of the Social Environment articulated how a certain product of a zeitgeist came to shape
the cities of the Mediterranean basin, inasmuch as it shaped the minds of the peoples of
what is colloquially called as modern. Henri Prost’s plans almost reverberated perfectly
with the prevalent notion of temporal-spatial connection in Turkey: space was to be
annihilated, the cities had to be created anew, but not like the Soviets doing-with
merciless acts of erasure as it happened with the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, nor akin
to the Germans or Italian fascists’ unquestioned belief in technological excellence
embarked in the purification of race would have sufficed or calmed down the Turkish
ruling elites’ already unmoored anxiety towards their identity. Rabinow suggested that,
182
“if, following Jurgen Habermas, we define modern neo-conservatism as an uncritical
embracing of economic and technological change combined with a longing for social
stability and a legitimated social hierarchy” –it’s eerily similar to the Turkish republican
governmentality- then, such neo-conservatism comes alive in Prost’s plans.121 So, Le
Corbusier, would have never made it in any case, since, Prost’s basic reduction of
modern planning as a tool, an instrument of conservation, and an act of reintroducing and
reinventing the past, is in itself, the definition of Kemalism –in various guises- in a
nutshell.
Henri Prost’s prolific and brilliant career began when he was awarded a multiyear scholarship at Villa Medici, Rome in 1902. The other scholarships went to talented
architects and urban planners who would play crucial roles in Europe’s urbanization in
the first half of the twentieth century. Tony Garnier earned the scholarship in 1899, Paul
Bigot’s tenure, whose work concerned Rome, began a year before Prost, in 1901 Leon
Jaussely –who dwelled upon the concept of a truly democratic city while preparing for a
competition on Barcelona- moved into Villa Medici in 1903, and soon Ernest Hebrard
joined these formidable figures. Prost, at the time, was working on his sketches and
drawings he made during his time in Istanbul. 122
All these names earned their professional degrees in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts
technique. This exceptionally influential style, which deeply changed the cities of its
time, put the onus of aesthetic beauty on the singular characteristics of monumental
Paul Rabinow, French Modern : Norms and Forms of the Social Environment (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1995), 224.
121
122
Ibid., 222–224.
183
buildings and purported to bring these buildings to the forefront and attributed them a
crucial role for building an axially symmetrical harmony in urban space. The Villa
Medici scholars were obviously inspired by the Ecole des Beaux-Art professors Julien
Gaudet and Auguste Choisy, but their sources of influence also extended to Camillo Sitte,
the late 19th century planner of Vienna, and Ebenezer Howard, the seminal urban
utopian.123
In Rabinow’s opinion, amongst the names, although Garnier attracted the most
attention, Prost deserved particular interest and is at least as influential as Garnier, if not
more, given the scope and impact of his work.124 Prost (1874-1959), after winning Prix
de Rome and awarded with the scholarship that permitted his stay in Villa Medici, won
the urban planning competition for Anvers’ with his renovation and development
proposals, ran the urban planning department of Morocco under Lyautey’s management,
made Cote d’Azur’s regional development planning, produced the first regional plans for
Paris, and shaped Istanbul’s urban planning from 1937 to 1950. Rabinow aptly pointed
out that, even though figures like Lyautey, with his own urban manifesto and an
impressive personality, were subject to much research, it is lamentable that someone like
Prost with a crucial role in bringing together a wide variety of experience in urbanism is
so easily overlooked.125
Prost was different than the others from the outset. Like all other Villa Medici
scholars, he studied classical Roman architecture –Prost conducted his research in
123
Ibid., 212.
124
Ibid., 232.
125
Ibid.
184
Pompeii-, and he also went to nearby Greece with his colleagues for his architectural
survey of classical Greek architecture and drew architectural reliefs of the monuments.
Yet, unlike others, his next stop after Greece was Istanbul, and he made detailed sketches
of the Hagia Sophia, produced drawings of the reliefs and Islamic decorations. He had a
special interest in Byzantine architecture and the condition of the Hagia Sophia was a
source of worry for him. He wrote to Paris, complaining about the decrepit, rundown
condition of this once most magnificent architectural monument of the Roman Empire.
His behavior was highly unusual for his time, as he dared to step outside the confines of
contemporary architectural teachings, which delineated that ancient Greek and Roman
styles were the main subjects of form.
Prost’s other noticeable feat was, of course, his ability to gain access to the
mosque. It was forbidden for any Christian to enter mosques at the time, and this being
one of the most important mosques of the time, made it doubly interesting, given the fact
that in an actively used mosque with thousands praying each day, a European man
drawing sketches for hours would definitely be a source of inquiry for those faithful
Muslims. Prost mentioned a certain pasha in his letters. This pasha once served as an
ambassador of Porte to Rome, and during Prost’s visit he was the minister of Ewqaf.126
Thanks to his close relations with this apparently Europeanized pasha, he found the
chance to extensively document the Hagia Sophia, shielded both from police harassment
126
Evqaf is the plural of waqf; the ministry of waqfs was –and still, is- responsible for the accounts and
legal works of the waqfs. With limitless resources and almost absolute authority, the waqfs functioned as a
bank, securities commission, and registry of quasi-private property. During the republican era, the ministry
of Vaqfs turned into one of the biggest landlords of the country, established a state bank, and unlawfully
expropriated Armenian, Greek, and to a lesser extent, Jewish emigrés urban properties. Only in the last
decade, with the European Union accession talks, the ministry of vaqfs decided to return non-Muslim vaqf
properties to their rightful owners, albeit in an excruciatingly slow procession.
185
and faithful Muslims’ intrusions. According to Rabinow’s conjecture, an architect like
Prost, without any political affiliations or indeed, with well documented aversion to
politics, isolated himself professionally. Due to his outward neutrality and his
connections to people in higher places, he comfortably traversed the intricacies of
Turkish and Moroccan societies at different times in his career.127 It is no wonder that
successive generations of Islamists and conservatives in Turkey have a guttural hatred for
Henri Prost and his plans, seen as a senseless, alien, imperialist extension of the Kemalist
government. He is also widely held to be the culprit for the conversion of the Hagia
Sophia (Ayasofya) from a mosque to a museum, but given the dates, this assumption is
apparently held wrongly –or, as a mere extension of blatant Occidentalism which blames
everything corrupt on the ineradicable influence of Westerners. Whatever the case, it is
rather an interesting fact that without Prost’s drawings we would have barely had any
visual clues to the early twentieth century Hagia Sophia (Ayasofya) as a mosque.
Prost’s close proximity to the powerful entails a well-disguised motive for
shaping the urban built environment under the watchful eye of the political authorities.
We can find the echoes of his power-centric approach in his definition of urbanism.128 As
the self-claimed progenitor of urbanism, Prost argued that urbanism was "a visual art
which directs itself to our senses; a beautiful city which we love is one where the edifices
have a noble beauty, the promenades are agreeable, and where our everyday life is
surrounded by an agreeable decor producing in us a sentiment of profound harmony.”129
127
Rabinow, French Modern : Norms and Forms of the Social Environment, 232–4.
Even though, Cerda first used the term in the context of 19th century Barcelona, Prost argued his was
the first formulation of urbanism.
128
129
Rabinow, French Modern : Norms and Forms of the Social Environment, 234–6.
186
It would be unrealistic if this visual art merely concerned itself with the principles of
aesthetics. The task of the urbanist is to create a wide-scale adaptation to the given
context, and sociologists, architects, engineers would help him enable in his envisioned
reconstruction of nature that reorients the society towards better and more hygienic forms
of shelter, and provides for the circulation of human beings and goods, production at a
humane scale. For Prost, this is tantamount to a simple matter of administration, and
bluntly argued that: “the amenagement of cities has been for the last few years one of the
gravest governmental preoccupations; it has become one of the dominant objects of
contemporary civilization.”130 A city needs order, and order is provided by the political
authority; the urbanist, on the other hand, supplies the blueprints for the foundations of
such order.
In this, Rabinow saw something peculiar to Prost- that he was technically modern,
and his modernity is rather devoid of modernism in its essence. The remarkable
difference between Prost’s fin-de-siécle urbanism and the preceding Haussmannesque
neo-conservatism was the incipient understanding that urban structure and built
environment were not particular phenomena free from the social relationships that shaped
them. Prost, primarily figured out that especially productive facilities and the
transportation infrastructure were an extension of regional and national patterns. In
Anvers, his planning approach focused upon railway terminals and highways in tandem,
and treated infrastructure not as mere externality to the aesthetic anxiety, but as integral
elements of urban totality. Of course, when not possible to integrate some unsavory parts
–like, prisons, or hospitals, for different reasons- to the functionally central and
130
Ibid., 236.
187
aesthetically indispensable areas –like, working class housing- zoning became the
centerpiece of his urban strategy. The teachings of Beaux-Arts school was not availed
with completely, public monuments, statuesque flair of the core areas, intensive and the
critical use of emptiness, and an articulate emphasis on public squares still made
themselves felt.131
Prost was no Le Corbusier, he was a product of modernity, inspired by
modernism, but not a heartfelt modernist. His approach was a mélange between neoconservatist principles, neo-Baroque sensitivities to scale, and modernist optimism
regarding the role of rationalist principles of ordering space. Rabinow aptly put that his
unique style was rooted in his distance to modernism, and called Prost’s approach as
techno-cosmopolitanism: his allegiance was to the technological advancement of
modernity, not to the rampant dualism.132 That is eerily similar to the Turkish experience:
modernity was exalted, venerated, enviously sought for at all costs, because it was
technically superior, technologically mesmerizing, desirable, and hence, Turkish ruling
classes were infatuated with it. But its baggage was not what they wanted, just as how
Prost thought zoning would single-handedly render undesirable elements of society, or
the gross injustice colonialism wrought in Morocco, the Turkish power elite thought, a
technically competent modernity would serve them best, without the corrosion of their
stranglehold on social relations. What they missed terribly in their assessment was fairly
simple, - the broken soul of Faust. Faust’s insurmountable loss was being cheated in his
bargain with Mephistopheles- the irrecoverable feeling of deception did not foreshadow
131
Ibid.
132
Ibid., 211–212.
188
his ultimate understanding of the dialectics of modernism, that all that is solid melts into
air, that everything that exists deserves to perish, and wretchedly so. It is the story of the
Turkish power elite and its intellectual appurtenances as well, be it the ‘anxious moderns’
–a contemporary euphemism for liberal-secular intelligentsia-, the Grand Chief and his
tightly knit cadre of advisors –as the current Prime Minister came to be recognized- or
the Kemalist vanguards, the common ground was the timid modernism –grand in
technical illusions, calculating and haphazard in appropriating the reality.
189
Figure 4.1: The Prost Plan133
4.10 Prost in Turkey: The Mystery of the Lost Report and the Pains of an
Urbanist
In 1936, when Henri Prost arrived in Turkey, as any other astute planner would
do, he attended a lavish ceremony held by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, was received warmly
and tasked with turning around the fate of a rapidly decaying imperial capital. He drafted
a master development plan for Istanbul in two years, and in 1939 his plan came to force.
133
Çelik, The Remaking of Istanbul, 162.
190
His plan laid out the contours of Istanbul that we have come to recognize. The most
immediate application of his plan was the reordering of ancient peninsula. Lütfü Kırdar,
the appointed mayor of Istanbul municipality, and the governor of Istanbul province, was
primarily responsible for the realization of Prost’s plan between 1938 and 1950.
The vicinities of Beyazıt Mosque in Beyazıt and Yeni Mosque in Eminönü were
cleared of small-scale shops and residential buildings by large-scale appropriation
initiatives and turned into public squares. The most striking element of the plan was the
central role played by the newly made Beyazıt Square (parts of which were the ancient
Tauri Forum), which was designed as the core of circulation in Istanbul, and was the
beginning point of an urban axis that extended to Şehzade Mosque. The Roman
Hippodrome –or the spatial vacuum to be filled by archaeological excavations- was to be
accentuated as the pinnacle of a grand archaeological park that contained Topkapı Palace
and Sultanahmet Square.134 Furthermore, the Unkapanı-Aksaray axis was transformed to
a secondary alternative route to the old Galata Bridge that connected two sides of the
Golden Horn -adorned with the renovated Valens Aqueduct-a picturesque touch still
visible. Though, the opening of this route brought extensive land appropriations,
demolitions, and serious damage was done to the Ottoman heritage. The end point of this
new route was Yenikapı via Aksaray Square –Yenikapı was purported to replace the
Golden Horn as the main port of the city. The new route was named as Ataturk
Boulevard. Nearby, a vast structure was erected for the Istanbul University’s Faculty of
Arts and Sciences. Immediately to the south of Süleymaniye Mosque’s külliye, the sheer
scale and ambitious allusions to Reich architecture attracted plenty of criticism, least of
134
Kuban, İstanbul, Bir Kent Tarihi, 385–7.
191
which was Prost’s lamenting that it harmed his planned vision of the old city. Sirkeci
Terminal was renovated with new extensions to fit the expansion –and clearing up- of
Eminönü Square. A new ferry service between Sirkeci and Haydarpaşa began.135 For all
these development and demolition efforts, it is reported that 1,148 structures were
appropriated by the state during Kırdar’s tenure.136
However, the real lasting impact of the plan was felt on the other northern side of
the Golden Horn, where the new republic was fervidly intent on bringing the area under
its own control, since Pera, renamed Beyoğlu, was where the minority population
concentrated, and actually made up the majority. First, on the eastern approach to Taksim
Square, Dolmabahçe Palace stables and servants’ quarters were razed and the first
modern sports facility of the city was constructed between 1939 and 1947: Dolmabahçe
Stadium, changed in 1973 to İnönü Stadium, after the president of the 1940s. The
Artillery Barracks (designed and built in 1806 by Krikor Ballian), where the 31st March
Uprising against the Constitution of 1908 was sparked by the NCO’s of the Imperial
Artillery Barracks. The barracks had been in disuse since the CUP (Committee of Union
and Progress) stalwarts shelled the huge stone complex, and the internal courtyard had
been used as the main soccer field for city’s competitions before the opening of
Dolmabahçe Stadium. In 1940, three remaining wings of the Artillery Barracks –the
northern wing had been demolished during the 1908 Revolution- were torn down and a
new park was built in its place. The park was one of the two main parks designed by
Prost in the neighborhood. The park, with a rectangular central square surrounded by
135
Ibid., 387.
136
Tekeli, Development of the Istanbul Metropolitan Area, 124.
192
landscaped trees, was named İnönü Promenade until 1950, and later, Taksim Promenade.
Promenade, was translated into Turkish as Gezi (leisurely walk, a literal translation),
hence, after the 1970s, it was known colloquially as the Gezi Park. A new Opera House
was built on the northern boundaries of the expanded Taksim Square. Another barracks
building, Taşkışla, five hundred meters to the west of the square was assigned to the
Istanbul Technical University after renovations. Since, 1909 it had also been in disrepair
because of skirmishes between the brigades guarding the sultan and the CUP forces.
Further west, towards Harbiye, a new exhibition hall and a radio house was built. The
street between Taksim and Harbiye was widened, the neighboring Armenian cemetery
was torn down –and, apparently not moved, but buried deeper into the ground- and a
series of apartment buildings erected on the former cemetery’s premises. The critiques
voiced that these were mere cheap replicas of Parisian apartment buildings. To the north,
across the valley between Taksim and Nişantaşı, Prost designed another park in his plan Maçka Park was built here, adjacent to several villas. The villas created a great deal of
debate at the time, and the opposition claimed that they were built for İnönü and his
family. Seven kilometers to the north of Taksim, and on the west of Beşiktaş, on the land
that Abdulhamid I granted to Admiral Hasan Pasha, called Levend (sailor, in Ottoman),
the first large scale modern housing complex construction began.137 Thereby, Harbiye
and Şişli joined in an urban sprawl, with an extension to Beşiktaş. During the
construction of İnönü Stadium, the Beşiktaş-Taksim road was opened by way of
Gümüşsuyu, so, a continuous path from Beşiktaş to Taksim, Harbiye, Şişli, Mecidiyeköy
and Levent was complete. Prost’s plan foresaw a bridge across Bosphorus connected to a
137
Kuban, İstanbul, Bir Kent Tarihi, 387.
193
grand boulevard in Beşiktaş, though nothing was accomplished to that effect during the
RPP rule.
A few critical voices against the Prost plan were raised by journalists and social
scientists at the time. In 1942, the sole voice of Turkish academics and intellectuals, a
magazine with a socialist bend –though, socialism was strictly banned and punishable by
law- Yurt ve Dünya (Country and World) published a critical account. The essay began
with a vignette of how Prost’s plan was sold to the public, and interestingly, still vivid in
delivering the point of how spin is used for building public consensus for urban
development projects. In 1939, at the exhibit halls of Galatasaray High School in
Beyoğlu, where the “Domestic Goods Fair” was held, one of the poster presentations was
titled “Istanbul of Tomorrow” (Yarınki Istanbul). In that presentation, the details of
Prost’s plan were laid out and it was shown how modern planning techniques would
change Istanbulites’ lives for the better. According to the critique, of course, this served
as nothing but a signal for speculators to buy cheap plots of land which were slated to be
development zones, for they were orchards and gardens that cost little at the time of the
presentation. And he argued that in the three years since the plans’ public announcement,
“the main role in the development of the city was played by the land speculators.”138
Later, architects, urban planners and architectural historians wrote extensively that
the complete and reckless transformation of the Golden Horn estuary into an industrial
development area and the intense concentration of apartment buildings in between
Harbiye and Şişli was the making of Prost, and his plan was greatly responsible for the
138
Hüseyin Avni Şanda, “Şehre Doğru,” Yurt ve Dünya 3, no. 18 (September 1942): 180–182.
194
initial corruption in the classical urban fabric of Istanbul.139 In intra-muros Istanbul, he
was criticized as being oblivious to the Ottoman and Islamic cultural heritage, while
bringing the Roman and Byzantine era structures to the fore. Another opinion was voiced
regarding his approach to three main areas of plan implementation: Beyoğlu, ÜsküdarKadıköy conurbation, and Galata. He was panned for treating each of these regions
separately and missing the integral unity of the city.140
Henri Prost’s contract was terminated by the Democrat Party after they came to
power in the first free and fair elections in 1950. The termination of his contract was
publicly announced, nevertheless he was called for one last hearing. He was accused of
dereliction of duty, for the report he drafted between 1939 and 1947 and submitted to
mayor and governor of Istanbul, Lütfü Kırdar, in 1948 was missing from the municipal
books and registries. His report went missing in the archives thanks to the haphazard
work of the municipal officials. Prost spoke bluntly in front of a committee established
by Istanbul Municipality officials. His statement required no further questioning, and the
bureaucrats not only succeeded in losing the planning report, but also implemented a
building code he did not authorize, and basically did everything in their power while he
was away:
I stayed here without any intermission from the end of September 1939 to 29
June, 1947. My contract stipulated 16 months of stay, while I worked for 97
months. During my leave from 29 June, 1947 to 4 December, 1947, the planning
office implemented the building and roads’ code without the slightest attention to
public health…All of the reports I have drafted were sent to the commission [and]
as a consequence, utterly failed as they stuck in the depths of [commission’s] file
cabinet. To see all [his] efforts to vanish into thin air is very painful for this
Kuban, İstanbul, Bir Kent Tarihi, 387; Cansever, İstanbul’u anlamak, 50; Tümertekin, İstanbul, insan ve
mekân; Tekeli, Development of the Istanbul Metropolitan Area.
139
140
Kuban, İstanbul, Bir Kent Tarihi, 385–387.
195
[humble] urbanist of yours.141
What really caused Prost’s pains was essentially the misappropriation of his plans.
He did not aim, neither supported, the development of low-density industrialization in the
Süleymaniye neighborhood, nor condoned the construction of high-density public
facilities. In the years 1942 and 1943, the RPP elites were overwhelmingly under the
influence of Nazi Germany, and impressed by the Nazi triumphs of French and Russiansto which the same cadres lost the empire a little more than two decades ago. The RPP
command ordered a grand university building and appointed two of the leading architects
–one from each architectural faculties then existent: Emin Onat from Istanbul Technical
University, and Sedad Hakkı Eldem from the Academy of Fine Arts. The final product of
their collaboration was unmatched in its height, its out-of-proportion scale, its simplistic
grandiosity, and its self-righteous disregard for the Beyazıt and Süleymaniye mosques
and külliyes. Prost did not mince words in his criticism of the new building: “as a
consequence of failing to implement our plans, it is observable that everywhere there
emerges buildings and structures competing with the lamentable faculty of biology
building that everyone wants to see demolished.”142
Aside from the university building, two other sore points remained for Prost:
141
The original of his statement in Turkish is: “Bilâ fasıla 1939 eylül nihayetinden 29 Haziran 1947’ye
kadar burada bulundum. Kontratım mucibince (16) ay kalmam lâzım gelirken tam 97 ay çalıştım. 29
Haziran’dan 4 Aralık 1947’ye kadar devam eden gaybubetim esnasında, İmar bürosu en basit bir hıfzısıhha
kaidesini bile nazarı itibara almadan yapı ve yollar talimatnamesini meriyete koydu…Bütün hazırlamış
olduğum raporlar komisyona havale edilmiş netice itibariyle çekmecenin derin gözlerinde mahfuz kalarak
tam bir akamete uğramıştır. Yapılan bütün gayretlerin nisyana karışmasını görmek şehirciniz için cidden
pek acıdır.” “Henri Prost’un Kaybolan Raporu: 12 Senelik Şehircilik Mesaisinin Bilânçosu,” Milliyet,
January 12, 1951.
142
In Turkish:“[n]etice itibariyle projelerimizin tatbik edilmemesi yüzünden, herkesin ortadan kalkmasını
temenni ettiği şayanı esef biyoloji fakültesine rekabet edebilecek inşaat ve yapılar her yerde göze
çarpmaktadır.” Ibid.
196
presumed plans for a parking lot next to the Yeni Mosque, and an attempt through
informal means to gain a building permit from the municipal planning bureau for a tall
building across from the university. The latter permit was issued not under Prost, but
under another planning board later in the 1950s.143 After hearing Prost’s testament, and
possibly, not coming up with a sensible explanation to the question of how a planning
report was lost, the mentioned board told him that they will no longer need his services
and the province’s council terminated his contract. Prost left Istanbul forlorn, before
seeing the fruit of his labors in the city, yet, what he laid down, was enthusiastically
implemented by the ones who terminated his contract, albeit in an overblown and
ambitious way.
4.11 New Planning Commission and the Board of Professors: 1952-1956
On May 14, 1950, in the first free and fair elections of Turkish history, the
Democrat Party was elected by a landslide, and its leaders took the helm of the country.
Celal Bayar was elected as president by the parliament, and Adnan Menderes had been
the unchallenged Prime Minister for ten years. The Democrat Party did not hesitate in
gradually abolishing RPP’s decisions and publicly unpopular policies, though, left intact
the highly centralistic institutional structure of the regime-which was actually designed
for a single-party rule. Henri Prost (and his planning) was one of the earlier victims of the
backlash. In the first three years of DP rule, a nationalistic language surrounded
discussions on urban planning and growth policies. As a consequence of this political –
143
Although Cansever vociferously criticized Prost’s plan as culpable of ruining classical Ottoman
Istanbul, he pointedly blamed the 1950’s planning commissions as responsible for opening up the Golden
Horn estuary to industrial development, which incidentally caused the massive demolition of wooden
Ottoman mansions on both sides of the estuary.Cansever, İstanbul’u anlamak, 50.
197
and, soon, cultural- backlash, Turkish professors, architects, and urban planners gained
important positions in decision-making bodies; however, although undocumented, a quid
pro quo agreement between these urban professionals and the politicians always held
sway.
A new Special Planning Commission was established after the termination of
Prost’s contract by the provincial council. The new commission began its duties in June,
1952. The commission members were: Ahmet Kemal Aru, professor of urban planning at
Istanbul Technical University, Cevat Erken, İmar Bank’s head of urban development
branch, Behçet Günsav, art historian and lecturer at Technical School and a member of
the high committee on the preservation of monuments. The commission was primarily
tasked with determining the location and extent of low-priced or free land to be
distributed to those in need. Moreover, another planning bureau was established to draft
new regulations for traffic circulation in the city –which was deemed as lacking in Prost’s
plan- and correcting and re-evaluating Prost’s 1:5000 scale plans, in addition to drawing
new 1:500 and 1:2000 scale plans. The new commission, headed by Professor Mukbil
Gökdoğan, was named “The Investigations and Documentation Bureau” and purported to
complete its tasks in three or four years.144 Between 1950 and 1956, before the direct
intervention by Prime Minister Menderes, influential figures that made Istanbul’s
planning and development decisions were a few select Turkish professors and educators:
Prof. Dr. Kemal Ahmet Aru, Prof. Dr. Mukbil Gökdoğan, Mithay Yenen, Cevat Erbel
and Mehmet Ali Handan. Turgut Cansever later lamented the work in this period as
144
“Belediyenin Halka Satacağı Ucuz Arsalar,” Milliyet, April 6, 1952.
198
chiefly culpable of turning the Golden Horn estuary into an industrial zone.145 Yet, as
mentioned above, their work mainly served the nativist lingo prevalent in public opinion
and fed the backlash against RPP era policies. The nativist discourse in urban
policymaking and architectural formation of the city helped a relatively new
amalgamation of Turkishness and Turkified urbanism emerge as an exclusively political
apparatus. In 1953, after the new commission came up with a new zoning and building
code, the chairperson of the municipal planning division proudly announced to the
newspapers that they no longer required the services of Prost, or any other foreign
specialist. The initial geographical interest of the commission was oriented towards three
areas: Beyoğlu master plan, the re-zoning of the Rami area as a site of industrial
development, and the re-drafting of Prost’s zoning plan with the expansion of a
previously limited Golden Horn industrial zone to the whole basin.146
From the 1950s to the 1990s, if gecekondus were the predominant aspect of urban
expansion in Istanbul, the largely overlooked but highly integral part of this expansion
was the transformation of inner city neighborhoods into slums and ghettos for the poor.
The former grabbed extensive attention, while the latter was subsumed under the rubric
of general distaste felt by the Istanbulite elites and their deep aversion to the immigrants.
Süleymaniye, Saraçhane, Şehzadebaşı, Beyazıt-Soğanağa neighborhoods were
transformed into transitory stages in the immigrants’ urban experience, they were the
slums that first harbored them, until they found a way to save enough money, or until
they built a reliable network of kinship and hometown affiliations to move through the
145
Cansever, İstanbul’u anlamak, 50.
146
Ibid., 145.
199
multi-layered labor market of the city that permitted them to relocate their families into
self-owned gecekondus in the periphery.147 The decaying of these once core areas of
ancient Istanbul was the making of the planners’ hastily drawn decision to expand the
industrial permits to the whole Golden Horn basin. Yet, it is rather interesting that the
Turkish intellectuals showed an immense reaction to the Golden Horn decision. The
estuaries, the easily accessible water basins, and the docks and ports were an integral part
of Western urbanization, and none of the early industrial centers had the luxury to skip
waterside development. Given the level of technological advancement in the 19th and
early 20th centuries, it was illogical to assume an industrial city could be built anywhere
but the waterside. Extensive studies and detailed research of these waterside
developments were elaborately written and published. So, it is rather an untenable
argument to insist on blaming the commission decisions, especially in view of European
urban planning policies prevalent in the first half of the 20th century.148 The
industrialization of the Golden Horn estuary contributed heavily to a re-drawing of
Istanbul’s class lines on urban geography, and although the industrial establishment is no
longer there, this ineradicable class difference still determines the mapping of political
affiliation, class characteristics, and employment opportunities in the area.
147
Ibid.
The wrenching stink of the Thames in London reached such levels that in 1858, the famous British
politician, and then the leader of the Commons, had to leave the parliament building and postpone the
parliamentary meetings until the summer odor subsided: see, Julia Werdigier, “Plan Aims to Fix Sewers,
but Its Cost to Residents Leaves a Bad Taste,” New York Times, October 21, 2013, sec. London Journal.
The Turkish academy has to begin anew its study of the Euro-American industrialization and urbanization
starting with Engels’ The Condition of the English Working Class in 1844 and Jacob Riis’ How the Other
Half Lives to be able to rid of themselves the mesmerizing attraction of Western superiority. See, Engels,
The Condition of the Working Class in England; Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives (Applewood Books,
2011).
148
200
4.12 Menderes and the Reproduction of Haussmannism in Istanbul
The influence of Turkish urban planners and architects –who were called
collectively as the Professors’ group- continued until 1957, when Adnan Menderes
personally decided to take over the helm in Istanbul’s urban development. The first thing
he did was to acquire a European urban planner as his advisor; possibly, he thought the
dual planning body –the commission and municipal bureau- and complicated red tape,
prevented swift and decisive action in re-ordering space. He was not alone in this, as the
strong-men of Turkish politics have always tried to by-pass what they saw as inefficient
and burdensome collective decision-making processes and in its stead took over as the
sole power at all levels. His hand-picked appointee in the implementation of new urban
development was a German planner, Hans Högg. And his ambitions in this new phase of
development were nothing less than the “second conquest of Istanbul.”149 Hans Högg,
was no less modest in replicating his new boss’ grandiose plans, and he told newspapers
that Menderes’ new development plan would shape the city in the way Baron
Haussmann’s undertakings molded Paris a century ago.150 Menderes took a personal
interest in the Istanbul development project. It is still related as an urban legend that
Menderes traveled from Ankara at his slightest convenience to follow the clearing up and
construction activities from the Eminönü port to the hundreds of buildings slated for
demolition alongside the new boulevards. His interest had reached such high levels that
as the Prime Minister he would even act as negotiator with the landlords for appropriation
149
Altinyildiz, “The Architectural Heritage of İstanbul and the Ideology of Preservation,” 295.
150
Ibid.
201
amounts, and if they were intransigent, used his powers to bring them to submission. He
was not only the chief planner, executioner, and negotiator for the development plans, but
as a steadfast engineer, he allegedly controlled the daily works of the construction
crew.151
Under the watchful eye of Menderes, Istanbul’s historical core underwent the
most extensive transformation. The opening of new arterial roads, which were feigned to
be built at least since von Moltke’s plan, found its pinnacle with the trio of new
boulevards Vatan-Millet-Ordu (Motherland-Nation-Army) named after the nationalistic
craze of the time. The Theodosian Walls on the Marmara shores were demolished in
Sarayburnu and paved the way for a new waterfront parkway. Karaköy square was
cleared and a new wider avenue was built to connect Karaköy, Azapkapı, and Tophane.
This avenue later reached Beşiktaş. A new boulevard was built in Beşiktaş that divided
the neighborhood into two and was designed as the main connecting artery to the
purported Bosphorus Bridge. The ground was broken for the first middle-class and upper
middle-class housing project in Ataköy and the Ataköy housing complexes became the
Menderes government’s trademark undertaking in providing modern housing for the
urban population. A new highway, named E-5, later to be the Trans-European
Motorway’s Turkish section, was built both on the European and Asian sides of the city.
On the European side, the highway passed parallel to the Western walls of the historic
city and reached Ataköy, on the Asian side, the new highway connected vast stretches of
Later, of course, these urban legends turned into a coherent attack on his alleged corrupt methods of
governing and became the sole sore point at his defense in the courts established after the May 27, 1960
coup. A great deal of the prosecution’s accusations were baseless –involving Menderes’ private life- and
merely aimed at invalidating Menderes character in the eyes of the public. Yet, the hastily made decisions
and rampant extortion of landowners during the Istanbul redevelopment project did stick in an otherwise
abominable court process. See,“İstimlâk Davası Bugün Başlıyor,” Milliyet, April 17, 1961.
151
202
land between Kadıköy and Üsküdar; both of which greatly contributed to fuel the frenzy
of real estate speculation and private housing development. On the Asian side, the
decision was made to open up further land and tilt the balance of population to hitherto
sparsely settled areas. Two new boulevards –Bağdat Avenue and Minibus Avenue- were
either opened up, or widened at places to extend the land available for settlement.152
Highways and wide boulevards, their intersections and the pedestrian underpasses with a
plethora of shops –which still exist with cheap peddlers of a cornucopia of Chinese made
toys, electronics, and bicycles- dotted the squares of Aksaray, Saraçhane, Karaköy, and
Topkapı and heavily contributed to the removal of pedestrian circulation from the public
streets.153
Even during the early phases of demolition and construction of the Menderes
development projects, a dissenting voice was heard in 1958. The haphazardly coordinated
demolitions, clumsily designed renovations and destructive clearing and widening of
streets attracted the scorn of the opposition parties. As a remedy to the nascent criticism,
an Italian professor of urban planning, Luigi Piccinato was contacted and appointed as
the coordinator of planning and development activities in Istanbul. In addition to the new
coordinator’s position, İller Bankası (Bank of Provinces, the state bank that allocated
municipal budgets) established another commission –parallel to Högg’s planning
commission- named the Directorate of Development and Planning for Istanbul.
Piccinato’s tenure in Istanbul helped confine the exorbitant wave of expansion
Oğuz Öngen, “Ataköy Sitesinin Temeli Atıldı,” Milliyet, September 16, 1957. Kuban, İstanbul, Bir Kent
Tarihi, 394; Tekeli, Development of the Istanbul Metropolitan Area, 121–124.
152
153
Kuban, İstanbul, Bir Kent Tarihi, 394.
203
and especially limited the northward development of the city. His plan proposals stated
that the E-5 highway would act as the final border for the northern expansion-and this
remained so until the early 1990’s when the second Bosphorus bridge and the connecting
highway was built. Piccinato’s second invaluable contribution to the city was the
delineation of the urban areas of Istanbul province. Placing the urban zoning permits on
the Küçükçekmece-Büyükçekmece-Haramidere-Black Sea line on the European side, and
between Şile and Tuzla on the Asian side, at least diminished further development for a
while.154 Unfortunately, his attempts to limit and gradually diminish the traffic circulation
in the historic peninsula were to no avail, and with the opening of Vatan and Millet
boulevards he had to accept and revise his plan accordingly. The leading figures of the
Democrat Party government persuaded Piccinato to account for a new north-south artery
in the plan, as a consequence of which a new road between Beyazıt and Eminönü was
built that connected to the Atatürk Boulevard to the west.155 Piccinato could not complete
his 1:10,000 scale master plan before the May 27, 1960 coup. Once he submitted his final
plan to the junta-run Planning and Development Ministry (Nafıâ/Bayındırlık Bakanlığı)
in late 1960, the ministry’s military appointed bureaucrats argued that the newly
instigated regional development plans and the soon-to-be-completed 1:5000 scale plans
would entail radical revisions in the plan and denied approval. His plan, the closest to a
fully legal implementation since von Moltke’s 1839 plan, faltered at the gates of
bureaucracy.156
154
Tekeli, Development of the Istanbul Metropolitan Area, 125.
155
Cansever, İstanbul’u anlamak, 324–5.
156
Tekeli, Development of the Istanbul Metropolitan Area, 130.
204
Piccinato’s interventions, however, could not undo Menderes’ Haussmannesque
dissection of the historic peninsula. The ancient urban core was already broken, and the
middle-classes began leaving the area in droves for the newly developing residential
neighborhoods in the Şişli-Levent axis, and Ataköy-Bakırköy area. The radical intrusion
of grand boulevards and automobile traffic irreversibly harmed the urban fabric and
rapidly led to the ghettoization of the Fatih district. His ambitious development projects
ended in the demolition of 7,289 buildings total -given the fact that there existed around
65,000 buildings in the whole of the city- that meant more than a tenth of the city was
razed to the ground. Of these, countless heritage sites from the Ottoman and Byzantine
eras were either torn down completely, or severely maimed. One can still see the
disfigured churches, broken down street patterns on the way to Tophane from Karaköy as
well as the old Divanyolu (Mese).157 The extent of the demolitions and disregard for
historical heritage reached such unseen heights that amongst the earliest victims of the
clearing for roads was the gate that Mehmed II used to enter the city.158 Even an
avowedly conservative-Islamist figure (since Adnan Menderes was held dear for this by
his political kindred) like Turgut Cansever did not hesitate to label Menderes’
undertakings as “ferocious” in its scope. Cansever explained how he waged a struggle
against the engineers of the highways administration. He waged a war against those
engineers since Menderes employed his own handpicked institution, the Turkish
Highways Administration, as the primary agent to implement the development plans in
Istanbul in order to by-pass a democratic overview of the parliament and public opinion.
157
Altinyildiz, “The Architectural Heritage of İstanbul and the Ideology of Preservation,” 295.
158
Ibid.
205
Leaving aside the crudeness of Menderes’ political machinations and the fact that
engineers without any interest in urbanism decided the development processes, Cansever
pointed to the fact that the corner stone of Ottoman and Islamic existence in Istanbul,
Eyüp mosque, was almost destroyed for the new highway bridge on the Golden Horn.
Cansever claimed that his interventions saved this invaluable historical site.159
Cansever was installed as the head of the Planning Bureau, established on January
1, 1961, after the coup. 160 He was not well received in the municipal administration and
was seen as a nuisance in Istanbul’s well-heeled echelons of power, and strongly disliked
by the RPP oriented municipal bureaucracy. Yet, after the May 27 junta sacked Högg,
turned down Piccinato’s plan, and closed down the İller Bankası Directorate, Cansever
became the sole authority responsible for planning and development in Istanbul. Even
though Cansever’s tenure did not last long –he resigned from his position in 1963- he
designed and implemented the Beyazıt Square renovations, supported Charles Hart’s first
gecekondu research in Zeytinburnu, and drafted the first regional plans, land use plans,
and zoning regulations.161 The renovation and reconstruction of Beyazıt Square had not
been completed at the time of his resignation, and only a fifth of the development was
done.162 Neither the regional plan, nor land use and zoning regulations came into actual
159
Cansever, İstanbul’u anlamak, 51.
160
Tekeli, Development of the Istanbul Metropolitan Area, 130.
For Cansever, Beyazıt Square was both a culmination of his professional life and a showcase of his
talents as an architect and urban planner, but also a representation of Menderes’ hastily made decisions.
See:Cansever, İstanbul’u anlamak, 283–328. For the discerning urbanist, his Beyazıt Square is still alive
and the problems he detailed are apparent.
161
162
Ibid., 302.
206
implementation.163
Adnan Menderes’ indictment and his swift sentencing were carried out by the
courts of the junta, and his presumed crimes included, but were not limited to, his
involvement in the Ataköy housing development and the appropriations in the historical
peninsula. He was executed by hanging in Yassıada in 1961. After Menderes, no other
political figure dabbled in urban development projects, until Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The
only urban plan approved and passed by the municipal council and parliament –and,
Ministry of Planning and Development in Ankara- since 1839 had been the 1:100,000
scaled Istanbul Environmental Development Plan announced to the public in 2009. That
plan has already been shelved with the Erdoğan government’s declaration of intent to
build a third airport –the public bidding process won by a group of wealthy state
contractors- and a channel to connect the Marmara Sea and Black Sea as a parallel
seaway to the Bosphorus (the so-called ‘crazy project’), and the construction of the third
Bosphorus Bridge and connecting highways.
In that regard, Istanbul is a marvel, an exception: a city so vast, so historically
crucial, so rich in its cultural heritage, but is nevertheless still lacking any urban planning,
any architectural principle of preservation, or any principled zoning regulation. Things
can change in the blink of an eye: already existing zoning regulations can be altered by
municipal councils –presumably, for a good sum-, and high-rise buildings can be erected
in the historical peninsula, even on top of the underground tunnels at the risk of
thousands of commuters, and the government can change the rules of architectural
preservation to raze the oldest buildings of Pera –as happened in Beyoğlu so pervasively163
Tekeli, Development of the Istanbul Metropolitan Area, 136.
207
or, it can change the rules of the game in the midst of the play, as what took place in Gezi
Park in late May, 2013. Before dissecting the prevalent state-space logic of late
capitalism in Turkey –which is the subject of the sixth chapter, I will present the effects
of industrialization in Istanbul, and how that process introduced an irreversible current of
plebeian appropriation of urban land as squatters flourished in the city.
208
5
Meandering the Pathways to the Periphery: Theses on the
Rise and Fall of the Gecekondus
On a sunny day in spring 2010, I walked towards the center of the May Day
neighborhood. In my hand, I strongly held onto Şükrü Aslan’s brilliant work that
heralded the breaking point in Turkish urbanism: 1 Mayıs Mahallesi: 1980 Öncesi
Toplumsal Mücadeleler ve Kent (May Day Neighborhood: The City and Social
Movements before 1980).1 Soon, I will meet the muhtars of the two mahalles and the
people who have been there since the beginning of the old May Day neighborhood. The
place has its own tangible aura, a sort of unspoken weight, since the neighborhood is still
home to a wide array of Turkish socialist movements, and not but a few of them owe their
genesis to this place. Not many districts in Istanbul have armed policemen and armored
personnel vehicles guarding the entrances to their neighborhoods - alert at all times. The
police station, though, is not anywhere near the district. Actually, there are two police
stations serving the district, or aptly put, keeping a leash on the district: one heavily
armed, the other one very well staffed. The former is located to the north of the district, in
a strategic point between the middle class settlement of Ataşehir and the TEM highway
onramps. The other one is within the borders of the May Day district’s southern neighbor,
Örnek (literally, exemplary) district, and this one has plenty of police officers. Nearby the
former police state, five hundred meters to the north of the May Day district lies one of
the bigger middle class gated communities built by Soyak –one of the most well-known
and successful developers of post-1980 Istanbul. The police station is not really
1
Aslan, 1 Mayıs Mahallesi 1980 Öncesi Toplumsal Mücadeleler ve Kent.
209
interested in that housing complex. Beyond the high walls, the gated community has its
own security services complete with CCDs, badges, and trained guards.
I entered the district from the northern approach, not, through the southern way, as
usual. The E-5 highway, built during Menderes’ gigantic development in the late 1950s,
serves as the main transportation artery for the Asian side of the city. With a series of
intersections, and a newly completed subway underneath, the E-5 highway travels the
borders between residential, industrial, and the gecekondu areas. The May Day
neighborhood is located to the west of the Göztepe intersection, a mile before the E-5
turns toward the Bosphorus Bridge connection. To the south lies Kadıköy, to the north
Üsküdar, and from where I walked into the neighborhood, a road climbs up the hills of
Çamlıca –where the nouveaux riches of the Islamist AKP rule rendered the hills invisible
with their gated communities. On this road, three miles to the west of the May Day
neighborhood, Dubai’s famed Emaar Holdings is developing a skyscraper complex,
complete with shopping malls and ultra-luxurious residences. The road zigzags along
Çamlıca and arrives at Altunizade, where in the 1980s, a middle class residential
apartment building boom literally invented a whole new neighborhood from scratch, and
since the early 1990s, the earliest shopping mall of Asian Istanbul (called, Capitol),
helped the only untouched area between Üsküdar and Kadıköy filled to the brim with
yapsat style apartment complexes.
So, the May Day neighborhood is suitably located at the convergence of two of
the main arteries: the first one, the east-west axis of the E-5 highway between Kadıköy
and Kartal, and its tributary parallels that extend as east as Dudullu, Sarıgazi, Samandıra,
and Sultanbeyli with connecting roads to an emergent alternative axis of the TEM (the
210
newly built Trans-European-Motorway), Bağdat and Minibus avenues to the south. And
the second one, the north-south artery that provides access from the E-5 highway to
northern areas of Ümraniye, Kısıklı, Bulgurlu, Üsküdar, and Dudullu. In the 1950s, none
of these areas existed –apart from Üsküdar and Kadıköy- and planning for development
took Kadıköy as its pivotal point for further expansion along the Marmara Sea. The area
between Kadıköy and Üsküdar was supposed to be preserved as a low-density residential
area with seaside mansions and with its immaculate Bosphorus views. No-one had
foreseen the mushrooming sprawl of gecekondus and their ensuing transformation to
multi-floor apartment buildings until the 1970s. Today, as I traversed these streets, one of
the last remaining undeveloped gecekondu areas laid before my eyes: the land strip
between the E-5 and TEM highways present bountiful, crucial, and dynamic
opportunities in real estate speculation.
My usual route during my wanderings in the area began from the border between
Kadıköy and Üsküdar, and the newly incorporated sub-province of Ataşehir. Istanbul’s
delicate historical urban political geography crystallizes here: the neighborhood was
named to commemorate the slain of the May Day 1977 massacre, where 37 died at a rally
on Taksim Square during a stampede triggered by gunshots from the surrounding
buildings. This is a mahalle named after a massacre, a neighborhood that took its fair
share of oppression, murder, and demolition. The May Day mahalle is predominantly
populated by Alevis or workers with a background in left-wing, socialist politics. Yet, the
Ottoman governmental logic that intervened in population distribution seems to be at
work here, and has been fully harnessed by the ruling parties since the 1970s. The
neighborhood is surrounded by three Sunni mahalles: to the immediate north lies
211
Esatpaşa, to the west Örnek, and, though without any physical borders, Fetih (Conquest)
lies to the northwest. Parts of Esatpaşa belonged to the earliest May Day neighborhood
squatter, most of the mahalle was made up of gecekondus built by Sunni immigrants in
the 1970s, simultaneously with the May Day squatters. Dilapidated blocks of social
housing are located in the center of the Esatpaşa district. They are rundown because they
have been slated for development since at least 2008, waiting for TOKİ and private sector
contractors to come to an agreement and pass the necessary planning revisions. The
Örnek mahalle is named as such (meaning exemplary in Turkish) for it was built in the
late 1970s as an exemplary gecekondu area, ironically, gecekondu districts are
overwhelmingly named as such in other Turkish cities as well, though, nothing is really
exemplary, or worth modelling. The eastern borders of the neighborhood are limited by
the highway and to the south lies a deep valley between the neighborhood and beyond
that valley begins the Ataşehir residential development area, the upper middle class
heaven.
One can understand her entrance to the May Day neighborhood by visual and
spatial clues alone: the minarets disappear, liquor stores emerge, women are unveiled,
and a few actually work in the stores. The other symbolic borders are actually drawn by
two mosques. The Mosques remind me of gates- gates that declared the land of the
heathen lies beyond. And, tragically, the Turkish state did not spare any costs to build
mosques in Alevi neighborhoods everywhere in Turkey. But, perhaps to diminish the
injury, they are named after two figures held dear to the Alevis: Ali and Hussein. These
two mosques, one on the street that passes through the Örnek district, and the other on the
212
northern approach from Esatpaşa, mark the northern and western limits of the settlement.2
In Anatolia, Alevis were subject to a similar fate as the Istanbulite non-Muslims,
though their suffering began much earlier and their treatment had been heavy-handed
from the beginning.3 In the 20th century, bolstered by the centralized state apparatus, the
pogroms became systematic and ruthless. The low level planned political encroachments
and gradual recruitment of secular Alevites to the Kemalist state machinery –and the
manufacturing of Alevite allegiance to the state represented by RPP- came to several
boiling points. In the late 1970s, pogroms were planned and systematically applied by the
so-called “deep state” machinations in Çorum, Maraş, and Sivas which led to the deaths
of hundreds of Alevis, and instigated a wave of immigration to the cities and especially,
to Germany as gastarbeiter. The last massacre took place in 1993 in Sivas and its
memory is still searingly fresh for my generation when live TV broadcasts showed
hundreds of Islamists surrounding the Madımak Hotel, chanting slogans asking for the
deaths of Alevi poets, writers, singers, and musicians who came to the city from all over
Turkey to commemorate Pir Sultan Abdal -the most revered 14th century saint-like figure
of their faith. The crowd set fire to the first floor curtains, and shortly the fire leapt to
other floors. Exits blocked by the hateful mob trapped many inside and 35 died of smoke
2
It seems rather a habit grown out of political practices amidst the ruling classes in Turkey. When PM
Erdogan finally delivered his much sought after democratic reforms in October 2013, it was not a promise
fulfilled, but just another round in the decades-long game of norming by naming: the only reform
ensconced in this package of basic statutory changes was the christening of Kırşehir University as Hacı
Bektaş Veli University, Hacı Bektaş-ı Veli (yet, other statutes stipulated that the proper spelling was still
forbidden, hence, the missing letter i), was one of the most prominent patron saints of Alevi belief. Two
weeks late, Erdogan heralded the coming of his grandson, whom he proudly announces his intention to
name Ali, after the fourth khalifa, without any doubt, as a good will gesture towards Alevis. The
interpellation, the great game of calling the names still ensues.
3
Karen Barkey wrote on the Bektashi-Shiite uprisings in Anatolia from the 16th century to the 18th century
and how bandits were integrated into the system. However, there is still a gap in the literature regarding the
Alevite collective memory of forced resettlement, persecutions, exiles, and atrocities. See, Karen Barkey,
Bandits and Bureaucrats: The Ottoman Route to State Centralization (Cornell University Press, 1996).
213
inhalation.
Not all gecekondu districts are the same, not even all Alevite neighborhoods are
the same.4 To the same extent that Irish workers lived and suffered in rotten
neighborhoods on both sides of the Atlantic in the 19th century, and Polish immigrants
hung onto their identities in the suburbs of Chicago in the early 20th century, while waves
of Jewish, African-American, and Puerto Ricans dominated the Harlem, Istanbul was
made up of a very delicately knit pattern of ethnic and racial communities.
The May Day neighborhood is not only important for its location, it is also one of
the only remaining socialist strongholds in Istanbul alongside Gülsuyu/Gülensu in
Maltepe, Okmeydanı in Şişli, and Gazi mahalles where the Alevites and working classes
are still actively organized. The May Day neighborhood presents a rich atmosphere of
Turkish socialism-but, not Kurdish socialism, in comparison to other centers of dissent.
In this chapter, I will juxtapose the transformation of the gecekondus as both a social
construct and an element of urban imagination with the concrete spatial reorganization
that has taken place in Istanbul since 1946.
5.1
The Gecekondu as a (Theoretical) Problem
Wherever the state-capital coalition proved to be insufficient in terms of meeting
the demand for housing, new formulations for production of space arose. Firstly through
self-help housing, the gecekondu was initiated by accelerated immigration to the three
urban centers-Istanbul, Ankara, and Izmir. It has been widely studied by scholars of
4
There is, thankfully, burgeoning literature on Alevi identity and transformations endured by Alevite
communities in diaspora, whether in Turkish metropolitan environments, or in Germany-since, a great
many people fled Turkey after the pogroms of the late 1970s.
214
urban studies.5 The enlightened consensus within the circles of academia and liberal
media has long sought for the purge of these profit-mongering mongrels, and invited the
state agencies to take over the decision-making authority in control, planning,
construction, and design of housing from the unruly predicates of freewheeling market
capitalism. On the other hand, an ambiguous stance prevailed within the left-leaning
intellectuals engaged in the discussions of urban planning and architectural design. The
appropriation of land by the immigrant working classes, through self-help housing,
gecekondus, had been heralded as a novel, genuinely democratic, and redistributive
movement, while in practice it propelled the hitherto dormant processes of accumulation
by means of land speculation to an unprecedented extent. 6 From a historical point of
view, it can be safely claimed that the process of capital accumulation primarily based
upon rent -that reached a climax in the last decade- is heavily indebted to the waves of
immigration, and to the conciliatory relationships between the state and
immigrant/working class populations since the 1950s.7
Until the last three decades, Istanbul’s urban geography more or less followed the
pattern described by geographer Erol Tümertekin in the 1960s: an archipelago of urban
Karpat, The Gecekondu : Rural Migration and Urbanization, Bugra, "The Immoral Economy of Housing
in Turkey."
5
Şükrü Aslan, 1 Mayıs Mahallesi 1980 Öncesi Toplumsal Mücadeleler Ve Kent (Istanbul: Iletısım, 2004),
B. Batuman, "Spaces of Counter-Hegemony: Turkish Architects and Planners as Political Agents in the
1970s" (Binghamton University, 2006). Deniz Baharoglu and Josef Leitmann, "Coping Strategies for
Infrastructure: How Turkey's Spontaneous Settlements Operate in the Absence of Formal Rules," Habitat
International 22, no. 2 (1998), Halil I. Tas and Dale R. Lightfoot, "Gecekondu Settlements in Turkey:
Rural and Urban Migration in the Developing European Periphery," Journal of Geography 104, no. 6
(2005), Charles W. M. Hart, Nephan Saran, and Odasi Istanbul Ticaret, Zeytinburnu Gecekondu Bã¶Lgesi
(Istanbul: Ticaret Odasi, 1969).
6
Hence, the 1960s, or the second republic, can be dated as the genesis of urban revolution in Turkey. The
legal superstructure of urban landscape and the state intervention in planning in Turkey was laid out during
this period by two laws: the 1965 “Flat Ownership Act” and in 1966, the “Gecekondu Act.”
7
215
concentrations with loose links to each other, geographically distant and with poorly
integrated function, administratively tangled up in a mess of residual rural statutes and
urban municipal codes dictated by Ankara’s centralized government.8 In the 1940s, Şişli
began to be colonized by apartment buildings that introduced middle class comforts to a
nascent, but limited, portion of Turkish society, and simultaneously was taken over as a
subject of fascination by Turkish novelists. While the gradually Turkified middle class
and bourgeoisie were slowly but surely eating away the urban weight of the non-Muslim
erstwhile bourgeoisie in Pera, in Bomonti, a mile north of Şişli, a new industrial district
was born. From the slopes of the valley that reached Bomonti to Mecidiyeköy, on an arc
that traversed Çağlayan, Okmeydanı, Kuştepe, a new working class neighborhood was
formed as an accessory to the newfangled industrial development. Interestingly enough,
although the residents of this arc lived and worked very close to the bourgeois and upper
middle class neighborhoods of Nişantaşı, Fulya, and Şişli the two classes never mixedtheir lives stayed separate until the early 2000s, once a great land rush made the erstwhile
gecekondu dwellers rich landlords. However, an invisible barrier still prevails. The lower
one goes down the valley towards the north, from Şişli to Dolapdere and Çağlayan, - the
easier to recognize the accoutrements of class differentiation: the street patterns, the small
shops, the coffee houses. With one exception though, Feriköy and Kurtuluş withstood the
pogrom of 1955, and as an Armenian neighborhood they barely budged, until the last
decade’s bohemian-bourgeois surge. Gentrification, a truly unknown phenomenon until
the new middle classes sought a spatial blank slate to define themselves amid the
tumultuous period of the country in the last decade and half, only made itself felt in a
8
Tümertekin, İstanbul, insan ve mekân.
216
limited area from Beyoglu/Pera, Cihangir, and Kurtuluş. The real underlying process that
defined Istanbul, more crucially than gentrification, was the transformation of
gecekondus to apartment buildings.
Hence, in several different lives of Istanbul that I tried to depict so far, the last
decisive actor was the working classes that once built themselves a house on public landor, on land, that had loosely defined ownership- and, although not deliberate, they shaped
the city in the second half of the 20th century. The story of the working class housing, the
gecekondus, had brought together a rich amalgamation of colors, beliefs, material
cultures, habits, and patterns of everyday life in the concrete reality of Istanbul’s urban
geography. The circuits of capitalist accumulation were fastened to the state’s capabilities
in the marketplace until the 1980s in Turkey and in this model of state-led importsubstituting developmentalism, the state was notoriously inept in providing housing. The
reasons for this is manifold, some related to the heavy-handed response the Menderes
government received from the 1960 junta, while some are deeply intertwined with the
treatment of land as the state’s domain-a sort of pastoral territorialism that is ingrained in
Turkish governmentality.
Whatever the causes of the state’s shortcomings in providing housing, the
working classes showed their mettle in their steadfast chipping away of urban land from
the tight guardianship of the state and ultimately led to the most extensive income
redistribution program in Turkey, albeit informal and in strides that spanned seven
decades. This redistribution of wealth has reached its crystalline form in the last decade,
under the neo-liberal economic policies of the AKP (Justice and Development Party) with
large-scale planning and zoning changes, TOKİ and KİPTAŞ’s active privatization of
217
public land, and crony capitalism that pervaded every level of public-private relations
regarding housing provision. The ascent of real estate led growth in capitalist
accumulation had shown its desired effects in redistributing income by real estate
speculation, but also, spelled the end of gecekondus as an exclusively Turkish urban
phenomena. Once the gecekondus began disappearing, their place was filled by an
endless assault of reinforced concrete apartment buildings, uniform in size, shape, and
color. The new concrete of urban renewal portrays the dystopic present. As yet another
life of Istanbul comes to an end, the social scientist cannot only attest to the withering
away of gecekondus, but can also witness the grand, all-encompassing, gargantuan scale
of such change. Or, as Lefebvre would have described it, this is exactly the moment to
come to grips with the state mode of production at work that concentrates concentration,
that centralizes everything just for the sake of centralization, that rips apart all that exists,
that an urban revolution is underway to mimetically reproduces new –but, eerily familiarrepresentations of space just for capitalist accumulation to continue its interminable
orrery of creative destruction.9
In this chapter and the next, I purport to convey the story of Istanbul’s modern
urbanization as a product of the gecekondu. It is the rise and demise of the gecekondu that
transpired in the current structure of the built environment. In doing so, answer a few
questions: Why did the gecekondus exist at that particular point in history? Are the
gecekondus of Turkey, and more specifically, Istanbul, a counter-part to the slums,
tenements, bidonvilles, favelas, projects, different forms of ghettos of the working classes
all over the world? How did the power elite respond to the gecekondus and their rapid
Brenner, “State Theory in the Political Conjuncture”; Lefebvre, The Production of Space; Lefebvre, The
Urban Revolution.
9
218
proliferation in Istanbul? How did a particular section of the power elite accommodate
and extend their influence by means of gecekondus? To what extent were these
gecekondus political? And amidst the tumult of plebeian transformation of the city, to
what extent did their agency play a decisive role in molding Istanbul’s built environment?
Concurrently, of course, it is of interest to lay down the contemporary social scientists’
notions and conceptualization of this rather peculiar phenomenon of gecekondus.
Thereby, I will point to an underlying theme of my work, via an ideological critique, it
appears that a certain shared sense of auto-orientalism pervasively prevailed in the
genesis of social sciences. There, I will draw from a rich literature in Turkish urban
sociology and urban planning, and to contrast, will refer to two seminal works from
different ends of the phenomenon: Charles Hart’s Zeytinburnu research in the 1960s, and
Şükrü Aslan’s May Day neighborhood study from the 1990s.
The most legible effect of the gecekondus in social and political structure was the
territorial distribution of newly established municipalities in Istanbul. I will also describe
how the state-spaces respond to the gecekondus, either by means of territorial
arrangements, by dint of legislative actions, or through actual interference to the
production of space. Istanbul’s rural areas were sucked into this humongous movement,
and the central state responded by a series of indecisive, ambivalent moves: gecekondus
were first recognized, but further squatting was denied –to no avail- the public land was
allocated for distribution to those in need –but the state hesitated in setting up the very
institutions for distribution, hence, people took the initiative and built further gecekondus
on that land- and finally, the state decided that it was the municipalities job to deal with
the squatters, and gradually devolved land and budgetary tools to the local
219
administrations, then, suddenly, withdrew all power, and concentrated decision-making
capabilities in Ankara-of course, the Turkish power elites’ endless bickering that led to
the “each decade a new junta rules” dictum had greatly helped in such ambivalent policymaking.
After a relative liberalization of Turkish politics and economy in the mid-1980s, a
legion of newly established municipalities sprang upon Istanbul. In the next two decades,
through blunt attempts in gerrymandering, an electoral map of local boundaries was
made by mostly right wing governments. After decades of dynamic border-drawing the
final shape to the municipal map was given in 2009, and even its current condition is
subject to change. Yet, the gecekondus defined the municipal structure of the city: as
early as in the late 1960s the inner city municipalities’ populations reached saturation and
additional growth in population took place almost exclusively in the peripheries. Inner
city municipalities like Beyoğlu, Kadıköy, Şişli, Üsküdar, Fatih, and Eminönü stopped
growing in the mid-1970s, while the rest of the city had seen a demographic explosion.
Istanbul’s new population distribution was defined by the highway routes: erstwhile
fishing villages or seaside resorts of middle classes like Büyükçekmece and Avcılar were
joined with an unprecedented sprawl in Beylikdüzü and extended to Bakırköy and
Zeytinburnu in an uninterrupted chain of high-density development. Similarly, on the
Asian side, Çekmeköy, Sancaktepe, Samandıra, and Sultanbeyli –villages, rural areas
nothing more than green pasture and idyllic views of forests a mere two decades agowere rapidly deforested and opened up for urban sprawl. In essence, understanding the
gecekondu phenomenon is delving into the urban development of Istanbul.
In this endeavor of understanding, I will discuss my observations in the May Day
220
neighborhood and Zeytinburnu during my field research in Istanbul between 2009 and
2011. These two gecekondu areas helped me develop a grasp in two historically,
ethnically, and politically different places, two different ends of the same spectrum, and
helped me locate the ensuing changes in the built environment, which will be a matter of
the next chapter. The variegated levels of transformations in these two neighborhoods,
their different levels of incorporation into neoliberal market economy relations, the
incipient middle class in the latter, and the lack thereof in the former, helped me situate a
key agent in the ongoing restructuring of Turkish society and Istanbul’s role as the
spearhead of that restructuring. The middle class was a phenomena oft-cited, but seldom
researched in Turkish urban studies. The difficulty lies in where to locate the middle
class. The predominant view, of course, saw gecekondus and the middle class as mutually
exclusive, immutably external categories. The middle class was located in the inner city,
in Kadıköy, Beşiktaş, some time ago in Beyoğlu, and in Şişli, etc. The frequently
overlooked issue here is that the gecekondus themselves became the real boosters in
upward social mobility in Istanbul, and the once denigrated, humiliated, rejected
gecekondu dwellers themselves became the new pillars of social stability: thence, the
mesmerizing electoral success of the AKP and its enduring power in making Turkish
political discourse perceivable by a vast swath of society. It does not fit the mold of other
populist, pragmatist parties –at least, it was significantly different until June 2013, before
its ruthless clampdown on the Gezi protests, but this is a completely different matterbecause, it is the product of an upwardly mobile new middle class, and unlike its
predecessors, it is neither rural, nor merely dependent upon disenfranchised and
powerless urban poor-although, indisputably, they have a solid support among that
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section of society- their driving force is the ability to harness middle class’ aspirations in
climbing up the social ladder.
In the final part of the sixth chapter, I will bridge a gap that existed between rural
studies and urban studies in Turkey to shed a light on the characteristics of the middle
class in Turkey and Istanbul. Without paying ample attention to the very well scrutinized
problem of center-periphery relations in Turkey and its underlying political economy
rooted in small commodity production, one can barely begin speaking about social
relations in this country. Furthermore, the real question emerges at the moment of urban
revolution Istanbul had gone through in the last five decades: what happened to the
peasants in the city? Well, they became workers at the factories. That’s true as well. But,
they also became teachers, engineers, poets, writers, bankers, realtors, mechanics, taxi
cab drivers, real estate developers, politicians–at least, their sons and daughters did.
Unfortunately, there are very few longitudinal studies on social stratification and mobility
in Turkey, and they are somewhat unreliable. Yet, the stories of the people I met and
talked to, their houses, their lives, tell the story of this grand transformation. The habits
and traits, the traditions and reflexive reactions of small scale commodity production
survived in the city, thanks to a successful urban redistribution of wealth, and it paved the
way of a nascent middle class. I will focus on that middle class’s experience in the built
environment in the next chapter, but, suffice it to say, the continuity of rural social
relations in the urban atmosphere –the fragmented, small-scale, individualistic, and
atomized characteristics of urban culture, is what makes Istanbul a most invaluable aleph
among other alephs.
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5.2
Gecekondus as the Denigrated Growth Machines in Istanbul:
Towards a Political-economy of the Quiet Encroachment
The frauds who have built Istanbul gecekondus sell them for something between
1000 to 1500 liras. If you touch one [gecekondu’s] roof, a couple of women rush
to the newspaper offices, wailing, shouting, as the Syrian grievers hired for pay.
Try to withstand it, if you have feelings. If these people are really in dire need of a
room or two, and have the wherewithal to spend somewhere in between 500 and
1500 liras, isn’t it reasonable [for them] to find a rooftop to squeeze into in any
district of Istanbul? A member of parliament, led the way by personally
demolishing a gecekondu he built on land that belonged to a cobbler which he had
rented to two women …An idea that said “let’s build a house on any land, the
state provides us with electricity, water, gas and roads, anyways” has become well
established. In no other time and era had the right to private property become so
easily abrogated. Once the sultan used to expropriate [property], now the same is
done by the[se] frauds.10
In the late 1940s, at the dusk of the RPP’s single-party rule, Falih Rıfkı Atay, a
leading member of parliament and a close confidante of the late Ataturk, wrote an
interesting piece, named “This is Bolshevism,” comparing squatters in Istanbul to the
Bolsheviks, describing them as frauds who abolished private property for their own
benefit. Unfortunately, we do not know if there existed a heated debate in the early
Kemalist era regarding private property, land use, housing, and zoning regulations as the
name of the publication, Emlak Sahiplerinin Mülkiyet Mecmuası (The Magazine for
Landowners’ Private Property [Rights]), indicated.11 We know that before 1965, housing
was developed prominently in lots, in a detached, or semi-detached form, so, the
discussion on land ownership was apparently an unclosed business amongst the power
Falih Rıfkı Atay, “İşte Bolşeviklik,” Emlak Sahiplerinin Mülkiyet Mecmuası 2, no. 8 (January 15, 1949).
Cited from, İlhan Tekeli, Türkiye’de yaşamda ve yazında konut sorununun gelişimi (Ankara: T.C.
Başbakanlık Toplu Konut İdaresi Başkanlığı, 1996), 61.
10
11
Ilhan Tekeli’s meticulous, brilliant works in the evolution of urbanism and urbanization in Turkey are
definitive works in the field, but, there is an overwhelming wealth of data from the period that still waits to
be investigated. Without Tekeli, I would not even like to speculate the situation of urbanism. Any Turkish
urbanist owes an immense debt to him.
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elite, maybe akin to the British “corn laws” which basically was a decades- long
parliamentary –and, partly social- debate within the two fractions of the ruling class.
Falih Rıfkı Atay provided the earliest example of a class warfare on the dispossessed, and
raises a culturally rooted lament which would later become commonplace in the Turkish
mainstream media and academia. In Atay’s view, bolshevism should not be investigated
in the notebooks of lofty college students, but in the assault on the right to private
property carried out by the gecekondu dwellers. The squatters who built on public land
that did not belong to them commit a crime more serious than the one communists
committed: they abolished the right to private property. In Atay’s evaluation, these
frauds, these tricksters, these crooks committed theft in the slightest meaning of the term,
they stole from the already scarce resources of the public. The way they did it varies, they
were either performed by women and children’s exaggerated displays of selfvictimization, or by their monetary power, or through cronyism with volunteer
cooperation of the politicians. In the face of this rabid invasion of the barbarians –this is
my interpretation, but definitely not far from the tone of his writings, Atay and other
fellow members of his class –since, he referred to the injured party as “us”- were deeply
disturbed. Yet, apparently, he was neither disturbed by the masked racism –the “Arabs” is
a shorthand for swearing that prevailed in spoken Turkish racism, applied in a wide range
from blacks to actual Arabs- nor by the homeless thousands, or tens of thousands who
had to live in houses without sewage, running water, power, let alone, gas.
When this essay was published it must have caused remarkable repercussions in
intellectual circles. Ekmel Zâdil, a professor at the Istanbul University, wrote a rebuttal.
Though not directly addressed to Atay, he argued that human need for shelter cannot be
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reduced to fraud, and instead of pointing fingers, it is rather the state’s responsibility to
provide housing for the increasing urban population. 12 Apparently, his warnings were not
heeded and the impervious RPP regime’s treatment of the urban gecekondu dwellers can
also be counted as one of the reasons which led to their downfall in the 1950 elections.
Atay’s writing is also indicative of the Kemalist tactic of reinventing history at a
discursive level: the similarity he built between the gecekondus and the communists –
during the time of Red Scare, when Turkey wholeheartedly embraced the US side and
NATO as its protector and instigated yet another rounding up of the alleged communistsis deplorable, but, the way he drew a parallel with the Ottoman sultans is undoubtedly
interesting.
The gecekondu was an economic relationship between the ruling classes –or the
fractional interests of those- and the nascent working classes and Atay seems to be one of
the earlier proponents of posing it as such. Although never manifestly stated in the
mainstream media by the Turkish academic intelligentsia, there was always an implicit
consensus to refer to gecekondus as a way of unlawfully obtaining material gain. The
extent of need was not the pressing issue here. In that vein, it definitely resonates with
one of the foundational features of capitalist class relations in Western Europe: the
distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor- a defining element of social
control that first emerged as an instrument of discipline –an inalienable part of what
Weber described as the Protestant Ethic. This distinction set barriers between different
strata of urban poor, attempted to inculcate work discipline and instill an obedience at the
workplace, and established the modern concept of punishment, built a set of social
Ekmel Zadil, “İstanbulda Mesken Mes’eleleri ve Gecekondular,” Sosyal Siyaset Konferansları Dergisi,
no. 2 (1949): 65–87.
12
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control mechanisms around the idea of welfare and safety net, while dehumanizing a
section of the poor as beyond reformation and turned them into a public enemy, as the
embodiment of dangerous classes.13 The language on gecekondus reproduced a similar
effect in Turkey, with the added benefit of a concept hitherto alien to Turkish public
discourse: the free rider. Gecekondus exploited one of the scarcest of public goods, urban
land, and not only expropriated and wrestled away the land that was supposed to belong
to the urban citizens, but also put an unnecessary drain on further common resources like
roads, water, electricity, sewage, transportation, education, health services, municipal
items of collective consumption. In such governmental terms of imagination, they also
threatened genuinely civilized urban cultures, provincialized high-culture, bastardized the
authentic urban community, adulterated the city’s communal values with their feudalistic,
backward, superstitious norms, corrupted morality, and brought ineradicable vice with
themselves. In the 1990s, with the varoş literature, this class-based condescension took
the form of outright hostility and criminalized the gecekondus. Yet, as the gecekondus
stood fast, they changed, but barely budged in the face of such discriminatory discourse.
Even in socialist circles, with a supportive stance towards the gecekondus, the
urban underclass, the squatters, were seen as less of social agents who could barely
follow their own individual benefits, let alone the common class interests. The socialists
at the time treated the gecekondu as a conjunctural phenomenon that arose at the moment
of state’s diminishing control over space or its faltering redistributive channels. We can
E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Vintage Books, 1968); E. P.
Thompson, “Eighteenth-Century English Society: Class Struggle Without Class,” Social History 3, no. 2
(1978): 133–65; Spierenburg, The Prison Experience; Foucault, Discipline and Punish : The Birth of the
Prison.
13
226
certainly claim that the gecekondu as a social phenomenon presented a reality
significantly different than what both the urban intellectuals and the power elite since the
Tanzimat used to deal with. The Ottoman peasant rebellions left no enduring trace
behind, and they were, unlike other peasant rebellions, coopted by the askeri class. The
last serious peasant rebellion had taken place in the 17th century, and even then it
presented no systemic threat. Although a few socialist intellectuals throughout the 20th
century sought for a revolution modeled after China or Cuba, the Turkish peasants
apparently did not share their view-though, the Kurdish peasants are a completely
different story.
Under these circumstances, where the state had an unchallenged monopoly over
peasantry, the processes of urbanization –not the barrel of a gun- brought the peasants to
a gradual parity with the urbanites. A recount of the most influential right-wing
politicians of the last century tells the story of this gradual encroachment of the peasants,
respectively by date: Celâl Bayar (the son of a Balkan émigré imam who settled in
Bursa), Adnan Menderes (a big landlord in the western Aegean region), Süleyman
Demirel (the college educated engineer son of a peasant family from Isparta in western
central Anatolia, who spent his childhood shepherding the village herd, hence the
nickname, “Çoban (Shepherd) Sülü (diminutive form of Süleyman), Turgut Özal (again,
a college educated son of a Kurdish mother and Turkish father, an official in a state bank,
from Malatya, southeastern Turkey), Necmettin Erbakan (a Ph.D. in engineering from
Germany, mother from Sinop –a small town in northern Turkey- father, a judge who was
appointed to this small town), and, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (a son of a coast guard mariner
from Rize in northeast Turkey, who was born in Kasımpaşa, one of the poorest- half
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gecekondu, half slum neighborhoods of inner city Istanbul, and who was raised in the
ranks of Erbakan’s Islamist urban political movement). The gradations in their
backgrounds reveal how Turkish urbanization, and political inclusion of immigrants from
rural areas, progressed. A defining feature of the early republican era was the importance
of higher education and its role as the sole catapult to upward social mobility; Demirel,
Özal, and Erbakan graduated from the same university –Istanbul Technical Universitymajored in extraordinarily similar fields, respectively, civil engineering, mechanical
engineering, electrical engineering; were one year apart from each other, 1949, 1948, and
1950; and all went abroad for either graduate studies, or professional training, to the
USA, USA, and Germany. It is more interesting that between themselves, they ruled the
country from 1965 to 1997. The only interruption –aside from their protégés short term
rule- was Bülent Ecevit’s four terms as prime minister (1974, 1977, 1978-9, 19992002).14
Not only did the immigrant masses enter the great melting pot of Istanbul, but
also, the political class –who, as the dominant argument in Turkish social sciences goes,
developed a clientelistic and one-way relation with their power bases- learnt from those
people, from the city, facilitated the capitalist accumulation circuits, organized around
newly established patterns of social capital, and deftly employed one of the more
probable ways for social mobility in this country- still starkly divided between urban
14
The so-called left-wing –represented by the previous autocratic single-party’s reorientation to center-left
in the mid-1960s- had only two elected prime minister. The first one was Ismet Inonu, a CUP affiliated
officer of the army, who was second in command during the War of Liberation after Mustafa Kemal, his
successor as the president and the leader of RPP, and the other was Bülent Ecevit, the only son of an
influential intellectual couple of the RPP era. Although Ecevit was known as the most erudite of his
contemporary peers and challengers, he did not go to college, but graduated from an old American
missionary school, Robert’s High School.
228
center that is highly educated and provincial periphery that is mostly subordinate. The
pervasive Tammany Hall style politics and its economic roots in the distribution of urban
land abruptly stemmed a possible path towards transparency in decision-making
processes and democratization. Unfortunately, the heavy-handedness of the militarybureaucratic elite, the coercive state apparatus, invasive and opaque Cold War and
international relations all contributed to the failure in building ideological norms around
such liberal notions of parliamentary democracy, meritocracy, welfare state, etc. in
Turkey and rather helped enshrine a winner takes all principle, that ended up in a tedium
of intra-class skirmishes, cycles of violent uprisings and more violent and bloody
suppressions of those who rebelled, street-level blood-letting, countless juntas, successful
and less successful coups, and an asinine routine of failed state-making. If the statemaking fails, there goes the space-making. The gecekondu as an urban phenomenon was
overwhelmingly equated to this failure, either as a reflection of failure, or a root cause of
that very failed state.
A new perspective is necessary to go beyond ascriptions of pariah status to the
gecekondus. The gecekondu was a product of a dual movement: a project of economic
redistribution and political integration. Only then, one can properly situate the concrete
social fact and look beyond the mere surface phenomenon. To be able to do that, two
previous studies laid an invaluable framework for each aspect of the duality: Asef
Bayat’s Street Politics: Poor People’s Movements in Iran foregrounded a fresh history
from below originating in Iran’s 20th century social movements history, and Harvey
Molotch’s brilliant essay, The City as a Growth Machine: Toward a Political Economy of
Place –first published in 1976 and later the centerpiece of Molotch’s book with John R.
229
Logan named Urban Fortunes, published in 1987- engendered an urban politicaleconomy built around the inveterate real estate speculation on land that laid the basic
building bricks of late capitalism.15
Bayat’s starting point in his analysis was the fact that the urban poor have tapped
into public resources without any monetary payments, either impervious to such
demands, or, outright rejecting to spend their already limited material resources on such
goods. As a result, their mere existence in the cities has turned into a massive public
appropriation. The most salient example he gave was the street peddlers who were in
constant struggle with the shopkeepers. These very peddlers –pesky, or resilient,
depending on whose side you are on- withstood the harassment of the local authorities
and the shopkeepers’ continuous objections and they were the most vocal supporters of
the 1979 Revolution, active agents of a social movement that led to the overthrow of
Shah Rıza Pahlavi and return of Khomeini which paved the way to a complete reversal of
the political system. Bayat argued that the massive appropriation of public resources by
the urban poor cannot be assumed synonymous to the corruptive influences of the
“lumpen-proletariat” or the “dangerous classes.” Simply put, the situation the urban poor
was in “represent[s] the natural and logical ways in which the disenfranchised survive
hardships and improve their lives.”16
In this, Bayat saw a distinction between the classical social movement theories’
formulations for class or normative and value-based interest group mobilizations and the
Asef Bayat, Street Politics: Poor People’s Movements in Iran (Columbia University Press, 1997); Logan
and Molotch, Urban Fortunes; H. Molotch, “The City as a Growth Machine: Toward a Political Economy
of Place,” American Journal of Sociology 82, no. 2 (1976): 309.
15
16
Bayat, Street Politics, 4.
230
urban poor’s silent, isolated, continuous episodically organized collective actions. There
exists neither an open leadership, an ideology that was defined in certain terms, nor a
structured organization. Not only these foundational aspects of modern social movements
lack, but also, the urban poor’s collective action does not have to be completely
antagonistic to the state interests. Bayat called this peculiar type of collective action “the
quiet encroachment of the ordinary” and recognized a silent, patient, widespread, and
long-haul resistance of the urban poor against the property owners and the powerful to
sustain and better their lives.17 While the poor people sought for furthering their interests
in the urban sphere individually, quietly, and gradually, their efforts in preserving their
gains has been collective and vociferous.18 The humiliated and insulted earned their place
in the urban society through overcoming numerous hardships, but once they had broken
the surface and had taken roots there, they would not be easily removed.
Second, what is crucial here is the economic relations the urban underclass
entered into through their massive appropriation of public goods, and here Harvey
Molotch pointed out invaluable aspects of the urbanization processes under capitalism.
Molotch’s criticism can be read as integral to the 1968’s rupture in urban ideology. His
critical approach directs its ire towards the leftist urban analysis which paid out-ofproportion attention to the relations of production and class, while overlooking the
17
Ibid., 7–8.
Ibid. “The types of struggles I describe here may best be characterized as the “quiet encroachment of the
ordinary” –a silent, patient, protracted, and pervasive advancement of ordinary people on the propertied and
powerful in order to survive hardships and better their lives. They are marked by quiet, atomized, and
prolonged mobilization with episodic collective action –an open and fleeting struggle without clear
leadership, ideology, or structured organization, one that produces significant gains for the actors,
eventually placing them in counterpoint to the state…[O]ne key attribute of these movements is that while
advances are made quietly, individually, and gradually, the defense of these gains is always collective and
audible.”
18
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definitive characteristics of the cities where these relations took place. Unfortunately,
said Molotch, “[t]o this day, the "urban" is often equated with troubles that happen to
occur in cities, rather than with the mechanisms that produce space and the settlements
where these ills are witnessed.”19
To enable a research agenda that focused on the mechanisms of production of
space, John R. Logan and Harvey Molotch suggested treating the city as a “growth
machine.” In offering such a paradigm they pointed out that “the pursuit of exchange
values so permeates the life of localities that cities become organized as enterprises
devoted to the increase of aggregate rent levels through the intensification of land use.”20
The city as a whole is turned into a capitalist enterprise; spatial diffusion, public goods,
collective consumption, housing of the classes and historico-geographical interaction of
these classes, the use of time, human being and existence, and every point of social
reproduction of the system, within the system, is defined, limited, and permitted by this
total growth machine. The growth machine called the city acts as an asymptote, it dictates
the terms of public engagement, imposes the tone and content of public discussion,
determines the issue at stake, delimits the cultural responses, and sets the newspaper
headlines.
A great deal of seemingly unrelated phenomena is actually knotted to the
underlying logic of this machine. The growth machine functions as a perfect ideological
Molotch, “Growth Machine Links: Up, Down, and Across,” 248. He added that the two exceptions to his
critique were Henri Lefebvre and David Harvey’s studies in spatial relationships. They gave due attention
to the autonomous movement of the city and urban space –like other social forms, economy, politics,
classes, etc. Only then, the perpetuity of inequality and the mechanisms of production of space can be
evidently studied.
19
20
Logan and Molotch, Urban Fortunes, 13.
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apparatus, nurtures and permeates an urban ethic based upon boosterism, insuperable
quantitative developmentalism and solidly represents the liberal democracies’ sacred
principle of freedom of choice, in essence that choice is the sole option –the absoluteunder given spatial conditions.21 For Logan and Molotch, the urban growth machine was
a consequence of historical processes, and they argued that the western expansion of the
US, and the underlying frontier mentality, this credo of constant, insuppressible
development is writ large into the American built environment.22
In Turkish social sciences one of the theoretical and empirical pitfalls of urban
studies is to separate gecekondus from the wider political-economic characteristics of the
late industrialization and peripheralization of Turkey and to treat it as a problem
exacerbated by the neoliberal economic policies of the post-1980 era. The implicit
assumption here is that the gecekondu is a transitory stage in Turkish modernization,
which was represented in informal, inappropriate, exceptional, and corrupt urbanization
practices that led to a city of peddlers, minibuses, disorderly mass of squatter houses, and
the unbecoming cultures of the newcomers that flourished –invaded- everywhere. In this
view, gecekondu was an anomaly born out of deficient, irresponsible practices of the
policy-makers in Ankara, and the eradication of the squatters were incumbent upon a
Molotch, “The City as a Growth Machine: Toward a Political Economy of Place”; Logan and Molotch,
Urban Fortunes.
21
Logan and Molotch, Urban Fortunes, 13. One can follow a similar theoretical approach in the boosterism
that prevailed in Los Angeles from its beginnings, see, a seminal work: Mike Davis, City of Quartz :
Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (London ; New York: Verso, 1990). David Harvey gave ample
evidence that solidified Molotch and Logan’s suggestions in plenty of writings during the heyday of
neoliberal backlash, see, David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of
Cultural Change (Oxford; Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1989); D. Harvey, “From Managerialism to
Entrepreneuralism: The Transformation in Urban Governance in Late Capitalism,” in Space of Capital:
Towards a Critical Geography (New York: Routledge, 2001); Harvey, “Flexible Accumulation through
Urbanization: Reflections on ‘Post-Modernism’ in the American City.”
22
233
cross-sectional, top-to-bottom organization of a new phase in modernization. I will argue
that, to the contrary, gecekondu was an integrally determining part of Turkish
modernization, and not a side-effect of that movement, but indeed was the primary party
in carrying modernization to masses by means of becoming the one and only growth
machine Istanbul –and, to an extent, other cities- came to recognize. With one caveat
though, unlike what Logan and Molotch suggested and Harvey reiterated several times
over, Istanbul did not turn into an enterprise in the course of capitalist urbanization. The
state appropriated Istanbul’s urban space to project itself onto the daily lives of the
Turkish peoples, and first, turned gecekondus into a formidable growth machine, roughly,
from the 1950s to the late 1970s at differing tempos in various parts of the city and then,
through a gargantuan effort in apartmentalization of housing, from the late 1970s up to
now, and reignited the social role of the gecekondu as the incubator of a new middle
class. To portray these processes, we first have to look at the origins of the gecekondus
and question the particular epistemology produced by Turkish social scientists.
5.3
A Concise History of Gecekondus
Although an academically established doxa is built around the suggestion that the
appearance of the gecekondu owed its existence to the 1950s economic liberalization, a
great many number of researchers conceded that the first gecekondus were built in the
second half of the 1940s. Yet, the questioning should be less about when the first
gecekondu was built, but more concerned with how the working classes of Istanbul lived
before that. The working classes did not appear with the gecekondus, thus, in
Zeytinburnu, Beşiktaş, Mecidiyeköy, and Kasımpaşa –the periphery of Istanbul in the
first three quarters of the 20th century- the rapid increase in population had already begun
234
in the 1930s. The only difference was that those workers of the new state (and a few
private) industrial enterprises followed the experiences of previous generations, and they
stayed in bachelor’s inns, pensions, and communal houses which were so widely
available in Ottoman Istanbul that those houses –which were concentrated in a tiny strip
between Karaköy to Tophane in the early 1900s- were seen as the culprits of great fires.
But, as the industrialization took hold, the workers stayed in Istanbul, did not engage in
shuttling themselves back and forth seasonally, brought their spouses, families, and the
first slum neighborhoods were born in Kazlıçeşme –an area adjacent to Zeytinburnu,
where the tanneries and leatherworks were concentrated until the 1980s- Kasımpaşa,
Fatih, Bomonti, and Beykoz. Their conditions were no different than the slums of Paris,
Manchester, or the tenements of New York in the 19th century. The ones who lived in the
multi-floor houses in Zeytinburnu, lacked water, toilets, electricity, cooking or heating
gas, paved streets, and had to endure the stench of the tanneries for decades.
In the last two decades, studies on immigration and working class formation in
Turkey showed remarkable progress, and an elaborate social history of the working
classes began to take shape, though a predominant portion of those studies scarcely paid
attention to the geographical distribution of the working classes and spatiality of their
new settlements. In any case, the underlying reason which triggered the emergence of the
gecekondu must be a radical realignment in the way the state-space is publicly perceived.
There had always been impoverished neighborhoods, ghettos, and “dens of iniquity” in
this city’s majestically long history, but never before had the state permitted a transfer of
ownership of land. Yes, the state granted land, and taketh it away at will, but it did not
permit such wide-scale appropriation of urban land. We should also be aware of the fact
235
that the Kemalist state was not particularly revolutionary in spirit-it was nowhere near the
CPSU, where an unprecedented land appropriation by the state and its redistribution
cemented an urban working-class and peasant coalition. The state mainly left the
relations of production and patterns of private property intact. A great deal of the
Kemalist regime’s reform efforts were state-centric, most were largely cosmetic –the
laws that made the wearing of the European hat compulsory is notorious, since at least
tens of people were executed for not wearing hats. Some of the reforms were cultural and
oriented towards breaking the power structure of a single class fraction, namely the
religious institutions: the switch to the Latin alphabet, the establishment of “Turkish”
historical and language institutions, school reform, the abolition of the khalifate, the
omission of Islam from the constitution as the state religion, etc. Before the Great
Depression, the worldwide rise in the price of agricultural goods helped the government
to stay aloof from relations of production, and once the global market for its only
exportable goods collapsed, it was too little, too late to hop on the bandwagon of state-led
industrialization.
However limited the industrialization of the 1930s, there was still a need for cheap
labor, and as emphasized before, and Istanbul’s rapidly aging population –which already
bore the brunt of the war years and the stasis that began with Ankara’s ascent- was no fix
for that need. On top of that, the closing of the centuries’ old trade routes, the earlier iron
curtain that fell on the border with the Soviet Union, made hundreds of thousands of
immigrant workers redundant, and worse, their survival, once the trade with the Russian
Empire was gone, was at risk. This must be one of the reasons which led to the
movement of northeastern peasants’ flocking to the cities, especially to Istanbul
236
beginning in the late 1930s.
Çağlar Keyder and Korkut Boratav’s research on the Turkish agriculture’s
economic and social structure showed that western and central Anatolia were
predominantly oriented towards small scale production, while the Kurdish regions of
eastern and southeastern Anatolia represented a mode of social stratification akin to
feudal large-scale landholding. 23 In the analyses brought to the fore in a Marxian mold, a
glaring absence of Black Sea villagers is noticeable. Although, a lack of feudal bondage,
and the relative equality of landholding in the northeast Anatolia can be comparable to
the non-Kurdish rural areas, a significant difference rendered the use of such comparison
ineffective. The rural land in the northeast was scarce due to the geographical features of
the area, and the lack of grain farming made even the wealthiest Black Sea villager
subordinate to the external markets and instigated an early proletarianization. The
cultivation of cash-crops like tea and nut did not begin in wide-scale before the 1950s,
and with the onset of a demographic boom, thanks to the Kemalist health reforms, the
increase in population made immigration the sole alternative to starvation.24
A discerning eye, and a mindful ear, can recognize a pattern in immigration
stories. The first wave of Anatolian immigrants came from the higher altitudes of the
Black Sea mountains where animal husbandry was the only source of livelihood. It is also
interesting to note that, the first Anatolian immigrants came to Istanbul not from the
Çağlar Keyder, “Türk Tarımında Küçük Meta Üretiminin Yerleşmesi,” 1988, 163–73; Boratav, Keyder,
and Pamuk, Kriz, Gelir Dağılımı ve Türkiye’nin Alternatif Sorunu; Boratav, Tarımsal yapılar ve kapitalizm.
23
For the emergence of tea as a cash crop and its effects on the eastern Black Sea region, see,Ildiko BellérHann and Chris Hann, İki Buçuk Yaprak Çay: Doğu Karadeniz’de Devlet, Piyasa, Kimlik (İstanbul: İletişim
Yayınları, 2003). For divergent histories of immigration of the Hemshin people from the eastern Black Sea
region -which is well documented unlike other ethnic-cultural groups- see, Uğur Biryol, Gurbet Pastası:
Hemşinliler, Göç ve Pastacılık (İstanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 2007); Hovann H. Simonian, The Hemshin:
History, Society and Identity in the Highlands of Northeast Turkey (Routledge, 2007).
24
237
nearby villages and towns from across the Marmara Sea, but from the farthest regions in
the country, from the mountainous northeast. First, the mountain villagers of Trabzon,
Artvin, Rize, Ordu, Giresun, Samsun, and Sinop left their villages, then the ones from the
seaside provinces joined in this vast exodus, and eventually, rural people from northern
parts of Gümüşhane and Erzurum joined them. Today, more people whose descendants
can be traced to these northern and northeastern areas live in Istanbul, than people in
those very provinces they originated -with, perhaps, the exception of Trabzon and
Samsun due to their urban development as the two main centers in the Black Sea region.
Another observation that I have to underline is that none of these provinces,
except Samsun and Erzurum’s provincial centers, had railroad access to the rest of the
country. While, even the deep Kurdish heartland was connected to Ankara by the early
1930s –Siirt, Kurtalan and Van’s Iranian border were the terminus on that route, beyond
Samsun, northeast Turkey was simply beyond the reach of government. A typical
immigrant’s story of travel to Istanbul from their village in the northeast involved a day’s
walk from the village to the shore –where all the roads pass- taking a horse-drawn car
ride to Trabzon, or, Pazar in Rize, or Rize provincial center –another day- and then
boarding a ship for a journey that would typically last five to seven days. The vessels
they boarded –ships that provided transportation at least until the 1960s- were converted
merchant ships, so hundreds had to fit into the steerage, and they would normally carry
their own bedding –straw or cotton beds- and food for the duration of the voyage. It is
understandable that the rough terrain of the Kaçkar Mountains precluded the railroad
network’s extension to the northeastern Turkey, yet, under further consideration, the
equally harsh terrain of the Kurdish provinces was no problem for construction activities.
238
A cursory look at the railroad network constructed during the Kemalist rule (1922-1950)
reveals a politically, and definitely, not economically, motivated development agenda.
The railroad network, much like the dams built in the last two decades, served the
purpose of social control.
The increase in Istanbul’s population in the 1940s made itself felt with an increase
in the number of shacks already built in 1940: there were 1669 shacks in Istanbul at the
time. After World War II the number of shacks almost doubled, reaching 3218 in March
1949.25 Today, it is widely accepted that the gecekondus were a product of the war years’
hardships.26 Research by Ruşen Keleş and Charles Hart gives a rough estimate of 10
persons per household in the gecekondus in the 1960s. It would not be an exaggeration if
I claim that during Istanbul’s population increase after the war, between 1945 and 1950,
eighty eight thousand people, at least one third, found a shelter in the first large-scale
gecekondu settlement of Zeytinburnu, which was estimated to house a population of
thirty thousand.27 The heavily controlled movement of rural population –who suffered
heavily during the economic depression of the war - began to move into Istanbul. And
this movement followed an urban upward mobility, the bachelor’s rooms were traded for
sloppily built shacks or slum houses in the peripheries or in the collapsing core of the
city, and transferred into a massive appropriation of urban land through waves of
squatting that began in 1946.
The surviving first and second generation immigrants’ life stories fulfill the
25
Tekeli, Türkiye’de yaşamda ve yazında konut sorununun gelişimi, 45.
26
Keleş, Kentlesme Politikasi (Urbanization Policy), 493.
Ruşen Keleş, Urbanization in Turkey, Working Papers of the International Urbanization Survey (New
York: Ford Foundation, 1971), 84; Charles W. M. Hart, Zeytinburnu Gecekondu Bölgesi, trans. Nephan
Saran (Istanbul: İstanbul Ticaret Odasi, 1969).
27
239
description; they –or their fathers, or uncles- stayed in bachelors’ rooms, but once they
brought their families to Istanbul, they moved into old houses, occupied by many other
immigrant families, in Kazlıçeşme, or Mecidiyeköy. And the common argument dates the
beginning of the squatter settlements to 1946. Interestingly, it did not begin as a result of
the gradual chipping away of land by immigrants, but as an unexpected and sudden rush
to enclose land. The earliest squatters had scarcely any money to begin building houses
immediately, so instead, they had enclosed their chosen land with visible borders made of
stones collected from the area. They began with shacks, bribed the municipal authorities
heavily, and had to endure unannounced visits, threats, and occasional skirmishes with
the authorities. The sudden start of the gecekondus in Zeytinburnu is explicable given the
time-frame. Yes, the war years’ pent-up need for housing found an expression by the
appropriation of public land, but, the first multi-party election held in 1946 must have
played a role in the this unexpectedly swift movement-old Zeytinburnu residents told me
that, in a matter of a few months, no land was left for further claimants.28 The first power
cables reached the neighborhood around the same time, but it took at least another five
years for electricity to reach gecekondus farther from the center of Zeytinburnu. A
remarkably quiet encroachment took place in an interestingly short span of time.
Similarly, on the other side of the Golden Horn, to the north of Şişli a new locus
of gecekondu settlement was born by the end of the 1940s. The ruling party RPP’s mayor
and governor of Istanbul, Lütfi Kırdar (1889-1961) who served from 1938 to 194929,
Yet, bear in mind that the 1946 elections were neither free, nor fair and heavily tainted by irregularities, it
was later known as the election in which voting was public, but counting of the votes was secret.
28
As a medical doctor specialized in opthalmology, he was the most important politician in Istanbul during
the RPP rule. However, he switched sides in 1957 and served as a minister of Health in Menderes cabinet
between 1957 and 1960. He was arrested after the May 27, 1960 coup, sent to Yassıada, and died of a heart
attack there.
29
240
pointed out to the growth in the area with his words:
A long time before the fashion of gecekondu began, a lot of that kind of shacks
were built in Mecidiyeköyü. While we were trying to deal with the squatters who
occupied public and private land for no good reason the gecekondus became a
phenomenon…With that in mind though, previously some of the occupied land in
Mecidiyeköy was cleared through legal means and by court orders. 30
In Lütfi Kırdar’s description in the late 1940s,other than Zeytinburnu and
Mecidiyeköyü, a squatter settlement in Yıldız had already been built –most likely on the
thin strip of land on a steep slope up the hill to the Yıldız Palace park and today’s
Serencebey street, which was comparable in size to Mecidiyeköyü, 200 to 250
gecekondus. In Şişli, there was another settlement by the Hürriyet-i Ebediye Hill (the Hill
of Eternal Liberty, adorned with the Statue of Liberty erected as a commemoration of the
March 31 counter-revolution’s suppression), composed of 100 houses-in the valley
between today’s Çağlayan and Bomonti. Other than these main loci of squatter
settlements, there were roughly fifty gecekondus in Kasımpaşa, Eyüp, Fatih-Çarşamba,
Karagümrük, and a further fifteen in Şehremini. On a much smaller scale and in a widely
scattered form, gecekondus could be observed on the Golden Horn shores, in
Ayvansaray, on the Marmara shores in Kumkapı, and on the Asian side in between
Çamlıca and Paşabahçe-Beykoz.31
The most important amongst these squatter settlements was of course
Zeytinburnu, and its residents were also the first to recognize the importance of being
organized. In 1948, in a first of its kind, the Kazlıçeşme-Zeytinburnu Gecekondu
30
Tekeli, Türkiye’de yaşamda ve yazında konut sorununun gelişimi, 45.
31
Ibid.
241
Neighborhood Association was established and, using their own resources, the residents
paved their own roads and opened up water wells.32 The newly appointed mayorgovernor of Istanbul, Fahrettin Kerim Gökay, made a visit to the mahalle in July 1950,
and broke the news to the residents that new plans were being drawn up for the area,
which had at the time 5000 gecekondus and a population of 35000 people. He also
promised that none of the gecekondus would be torn down –though, gave an implicit
ultimatum that no further squatting would be tolerated- and new power lines would be
added to bring electricity to the 56 unconnected gecekondus, and the owners of the
houses should pay for at least half of the cost of this extension.33 Rather than seeing it as
another hefty expenditure for living in the gecekondus, the people of the neighborhood
enthusiastically celebrated the news, since this was the first time they were seriously
received by any state authority –other than the usual intimidations and pesky business of
paying the municipal officers. Furthermore, the neighborhood was to be divided into
three different mahalles, which meant at least three positions opened up for the politically
talented as their district’s gatekeepers to political influence. Two bakeries and a local
farmer’s market were additionally promised to be built by the municipality. Gökay kept
his promise to the Zeytinburnu dwellers, and the residents began receiving their land
titles for the first time in 1951. For years to come, primarily Zeytinburnu, then,
Mecidiyeköy, Gültepe, Bomonti, Beykoz, the earliest and oldest gecekondu settlements
of Istanbul, proved to be steadfast supporters of Adnan Menderes and his successor rightwing parties.
32
Ibid.
33
“Zeytinburnu’ndaki Gecekonduların İmarı,” Milliyet, July 9, 1950.
242
5.4
A Genealogical Look at the Origins of the Gecekondu
References to gecekondu, which literally means “dropped-in-a-night,” can be
spotted in the newspapers as early as the 1940s, though, there exists scarcely any
consensus on the origin of the term. In the mid-1960s, the state finally conferred upon
gecekondus a legal status, recognized them as a social fact, and drafted the Gecekondu
Act. The law that passed in 1966 defined a gecekondu as a “structure built upon land that
belonged to someone other than the builder himself and built without the landowner’s
permission against the planning regulations and building code.” On the other hand,
Kentbilim Terimleri Sözlüğü, (Dictionary of Urban Sciences) defined a gecekondu in
even stricter terms than the law, its evasive of planning and building codes, but in
addition to that, any building activity on public land is referred to a gecekondu. Though,
the dictionary adds that, the state and municipal administrations’ inefficiencies led to the
impoverished sections of society to adopt such shelters.34
The Turkish state’s dealings with the gecekondu has a rich and tedious history,
once the Planning Law No. 6188 passed in parliament in 1953, it included some
marginal regulations concerning the newly emerging gecekondus. At the time of its
passing, the estimates suggested that there were 80,000 gecekondus in all of Turkey, and
at the end of the decade that figure reached 240,000 in 1960. It was 1,5 million in 1983,
1,75 million in 1990, and reached its apogee in 2002 with 2,2 million gecekondus all over
the country that housed more than 11 million people.35 The 1966 Gecekondu Law far
from solving already debilitating issues at stake, was drafted to solve the legally
34
Keleş, Kentlesme Politikasi (Urbanization Policy), 493.
35
Ibid.
243
ambiguous situation for the then existing buildings, and provided a legal foothold –a
formalized understanding that granted legal ownership rights to the gecekondus built up
to that point. Yet, it contained no stipulations regarding possible future squatter
settlements, and no foresight regarding the increasing population pressures growing upon
Istanbul. The city at that point, had a population of 2.3 million, and given other industrial
examples it was bound to grow and an already bloated real estate market or private
housing development was no cure for the millions without basic right to shelter. The
effort to legalize squatter settlements as ensconced in the Gecekondu Law was too little,
too late. Unlike what the conventional view almost religiously professed vis-à-vis the
liberalization of the 1950s, the greatest population explosion, both in real and
proportional terms, took place right after the passage of the Gecekondu Act, between
1965 and 1970. From then on, Istanbul’s population doubled every fifteen years and
reached a staggering 14.5 million today.
After 1965, the city’s population began growing more than 150,000 each year.
Meanwhile, the nation underwent through an experimental period, an unprecedented
social, economic, and political transformation that had wide repercussions for the peoples
of Turkey. Social scientists today define this era as the import-substituting
industrialization period, even though there remains some questions regarding the exact
time brackets it lasted. Some argued that it was the period between 1950 and 1980, and
other argued that it can be more precisely described as the period between 1953 and
1977.36
36
Roger Owen and Şevket Pamuk, A History of Middle East Economies in the Twentieth Century
(I.B.Tauris, 1998); Boratav, Keyder, and Pamuk, Kriz, Gelir Dağılımı ve Türkiye’nin Alternatif Sorunu;
Keyder, State and Class in Turkey : A Study in Capitalist Development, 141–165.
244
Under the circumstances of national developmentalism, an unfulfilled appetite
was born for more urban labor to feed into the newly established factories, especially in
the western parts of the country. For the first time in Turkish history industrial
manufacturing played the role of the driving force, and this culminated in never before
seen rates of economic growth. Concurrently, urban population has grown at least two
times, and sporadically three times more than the overall population growth. People
flocked to the city in droves, while the countryside was going through its last spell of
breath –which without any question contributed greatly to the push factor decisive in
people’s immigration- but the pull factor was almost irresistibly alluring. Electricity,
public schools, health services, job opportunities, monetary income, relative gender
equality, and the breaking free from the grips of the patriarchal system, were some, but
not all of the perks of living in a city.
However, the pace of housing production could not keep up with population
growth in all of Turkey, construction permits for houses and apartment buildings did not
exceed 60,000, even given the extended household sizes prevalent in classical Turkish
families –the average household size was five for a long time- it was a mere pittance.37
The annual production of housing units in all of Turkey would barely suffice for the need
in Istanbul. And, what is more striking is the fact that the shortages in housing provision
had been an acute problem since the earliest years of the new Turkish republic. In
Istanbul, from 1927 to 1948, annual housing units constructed did not exceed 2000, and
even in an optimal estimation, this was not enough to shelter the natural population
Source: TURKSTAT census data and Tekeli, Development of the Istanbul Metropolitan Area, 132-4. The
construction industry did not really show any interest in development until the passage of the
Condominium Ownership Act in 1965.
37
245
growth of the city, barring immigration from the calculation.38
Houses and Apartment Building
Construction Permits in Istanbul
1926‐1950
1200
1000
800
600
400
200
0
Houses
Apartment Buildings
Figure 5.1: Construction permits for new housing units in Istanbul 1926-195039
Construction Permits for
Housing Units in Istanbul 1954‐
1965
20000
15000
10000
5000
0
Houses
Apartment Buildings
Total Housing Units
Figure 5.2: Construction Permits for Housing Units in Istanbul, 1954-196540
38
Source: TURKSTAT census data and Tekeli, Development of the Istanbul Metropolitan Area, 132-4.
39
Source: Tekeli, Development of the Istanbul Metropolitan Area, 132.
40
Source: Ibid., 134.
246
Year Population
Annual Average
Growth
1927
1935
1940
1945
1950
1955
1960
1965
1970
1975
1980
1985
1990
2000
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
1,19%
2,44%
1,76%
1,63%
6,30%
4,54%
4,38%
6,32%
5,87%
4,29%
4,64%
5,02%
3,71%
3,64%
0,98%
1,72%
1,59%
3,84%
1,69%
-
806.863
883.599
991.237
1.078.399
1.166.477
1.533.822
1.882.092
2.293.823
3.019.032
3.904.588
4.741.890
5.842.985
7.309.190
10.018.735
12.573.836
12.697.164
12.915.158
13.120.596
13.624.240
13.854.740
Table 5.1: Istanbul Population and Annual Average Growth41
Thus, the filling of the gap in housing provision with gecekondus is neither
surprising, nor an abnormal situation. Human beings need shelter, if those shelters are not
built via market mechanisms, or through state intervention in the built environment, then
they would take matters at hand and embark upon self-housing. The emergence of the
gecekondu, the massive appropriation of public urban land by the impoverished sections
of the society, the quiet encroachment of the plebeian classes, however you’d choose to
call them, is not interesting, neither anomalous. Yes, it is an apparent and blunt response
41
Source: TURKSTAT census data.
247
to the evident governmental inefficiency, a response that was truly organized by the
grassroots in a silent, but resilient way to overcome the incompetency of the impotent
state apparatuses. But, why had the Kemalist republic, a state machinery deeply
enamored in its visionary imagined future for molding a new society, fail terribly in at
least bringing a partial solution to the housing problem?
Andy Merrifield wrote that first the Soviet Union, and later the Maoist PRC, had
an acute disregard, a thinly disguised animosity towards everything that is urban and
described how they explained their distance to urbanism through Marx and Engels’ –
highly vulgarized- earlier texts.42 Especially in the last decade the proximity between the
Nazi and Fascist regimes of the 1930s and ‘40s’ Germany and Italy and the RPP of the
era drew ample interest, and a plethora of different consents were manufactured via
newspaper columns, TV shows, etc. The overwhelming influence of European fascism
had undeniably piqued the Turkish power elites’ attention, they had definitely engaged in
racist and white-supremacist state-fetishisms, totalitarianism as a fantasy. Yet, the
realization of their urban programs, or the mental idealization of urbanization
significantly differed from those examples, as their urban imagination had nothing to do
with Hitler’s Germania, Mussolini’s grotesque grandiosity of ersatz neo-classicism, a
reinvention of Rome.43 Instead, the RPP elite, the decision-makers, the ideologists of the
revolution, had followed a credo Stalin widely employed in the Soviet Union: the
countrymen stay in the country, the urbanites stay in the city; no mixing is allowed, and
Andy Merrifield, Metromarxism ; a Marxist Tale of the City (New York: Routledge, 2002); A definite
read on the issue is, an early Marxist architects exposé of Stalinist treatment of urban space, see, Karel
Teige, The Minimum Dwelling: L’Habitation Minimum = Die Kleinstwohnung : The Housing Crisis,
Housing Reform, trans. Eric Dluhosch (MIT Press, 2002), 144–157.
42
43
Dovey, Framing Places.
248
the only way to overcome the urban-rural dialectic is to turn the city into nothing more
than a control center for the vanguards, for the party apparatchik, and to transform the
whole countryside into a huge industrial complex complete with industrialization of
agriculture and a manufacturing establishment built far away from the existing citiesfurther away from the corruptive influences of the old metropolitan areas. This was
certainly an anachronism, an attempt in turning back time, a misunderstanding of the
internal characteristics of the industrialization of capitalist accumulation, and worse, a
misrepresentation of Marx and Engels’ theories. Yet, the RPP elite seemed to
enthusiastically embrace the idea, as the Village Institutes (Teachers’ Schools that
attempted to educate the masses in the villages), Halkevleri (which replaced the Türk
Ocakları, as the local organizations for the party), and tried to replicate the CPSU model
of Pioneers, Komsomols, etc. The dissecting of the city from the countryside, given the
already existing distance between the center and periphery –which was an integral
element of classical Ottoman social stratification- contributed massively to the alienation
of the two sides from each other and fed unto the mutual distrust between the two
nations. It was an overblown idealism, an imagination that lacked solid foundations, not a
single example had there been in world history that industrialized without extensive
urbanization. The Sovietic response to urbanism –or, rather, the prevailing anti-urbanismfound easy appeal amidst the Kemalist intelligentsia, and until the late 1980s, the
idealized mental construct of the cities determined most of the intellectual perceptions
regarding the gecekondus. However, the parallels between the Soviet and Turkish
governmentalities were limited. While the Soviets sought for the abolition of the city for
the sake of an absolute ruralization of the whole country, the Turkish power elite was
249
much more ambivalent in its stratagem. They were never much in favor of the peasants,
and had a profound distaste regarding their cultural habits and instead of lengthy
applauds for the rural society they held onto a glorified Turkish man –which was a mere
aphorism- that was moralistic, militaristic, and unabashedly obedient. In a sense, they
succeeded in partly instilling these characteristics into the hegemonic discursive tool of
surviving Turkish nationalism. The gecekondus –and increasingly the Kurds after the
1980s, or the urban Kurds of the gecekondus in the last two decades- though, presented a
crucial hurdle along the way of building a homogeneous society.
City
% of Squatter Houses in
total Housing Stock
Ankara
Istanbul
Izmir
Adana
Bursa
65
40
25
59
22
Table 5.2: Squatter Houses in Important Turkish Cities44
% of Inhabitants of the
squatter houses in the total
urban population
65
45
35
45
25
However, as soon as the Gecekondu Law passed, it was nullified by the ebb and
flow of the incessant waves of population growth. Not only did it preclude the
newcomers from building their own houses on public land, but also the frequent passing
of building and planning amnesties in parliament helped them flourish without any real
threats. İlhan Tekeli, from the beginning of its implementation, saw the Gecekondu Law
as an experimental take by a novice tailor on the fabric of the city: “If we replace the
words housing with “clothing”, reformation with “patching”, demolition with
“nakedness”, prevention with “re-clothing” [in the writing of the law], we can arrive at a
44
Keleş, Urbanization in Turkey, 122.
250
“mutatis mutandis” reading of that legislation in a very interesting way.”45 He was right,
though with one crucial caveat, the tailor was the people of the gecekondu and, indeed,
the clothing was tried on the government.
The squat homes were demolished many times, and rebuilt again, without respite,
for decades. The first demolitions started in the 1940s, and in one way or another, the
haphazard attempts in razing the gecekondus extended to the late 1990s - by Municipal
officials, work crews, trucks, and bulldozers. The title holders tried to retain the use of
their land for decades in endless court procedures –and more often than not, they failed.
From the 1970s on, first the socialist political movements, and then, the nationalist
extreme right-wing attempted –and some succeeded to a certain extent- to establish their
own rule and control over these districts. In the 1980s, their control turned into
racketeering, and extortion, money was provided in return for keeping the homes safe,
land squatted, authorities away, and it particularly helped further land –especially,
forests- appropriated for settlement.
In 1966, the first socialist party to be represented in the Turkish parliament, the
Labor Party (of Turkey) proposed that not only public land, but also land that belonged to
private persons should be taken under the purview of the legislation. Behice Boran, the
legendary sociologist –who was kicked out of the academia during the 1942 purges- who
turned out to be one of the leaders of the party, stated that the losses of the private
persons should be paid for out of the state budget. It is a travesty of historical and
political fate that, both the Justice Party (Adalet Partisi, the successor to Menderes’
Democratic Party) and the RPP vehemently opposed her proposal as they were the
İlhan Tekeli, Konut sorununu konut sunum biçimleriyle düşünmek (Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayınları, 2010),
26.
45
251
primary beneficiaries and benefactors of gecekondu population’s enfranchisement as
urban citizens in the next three decades. Although they scarcely had any commonalities at
the time, they converged in wholeheartedly hanging onto the right of private property. A
deputy from the ruling party (JP) argued that, “justice is the foundation of [private]
property.”46 And, voiced his opinion that the state could in no way be an accessory to the
expropriation of private property.47
The Gecekondu Law remained as legislation in name only, as a de jure
arrangement, which held no real effect on the housing provision in Istanbul and other
growing cities. Once the state let the flood gates of urban land appropriation open to
development of any sorts in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the gecekondu neighborhoods
became the de facto resources of land that were subject to the boundless developmental
imaginations of the state and municipal enterprises –TOKİ and KİPTAŞ in Istanbul- and
private capitalists. Yet, the dual perception regarding the gecekondus continued, they
were legally absent, but empirically, socially, and economically there for the taking. The
situation could only be grasped by the ones who were well-versed in the ways of Turkish
state-space imagination: the ambiguity surrounding the social fact. A social fact can only
exist as far as the state permits it, to the extent that the state turns a blind eye, overlooks
the indelible existence of social reality, it can persist in a being that is dominated by
There is a wordplay here, though, not beknownst to every Turkish speaker, the dictum is “adalet mülkün
temelidir.” Mülk, here denotes the state-not property. A borrowed word from Arabic, mülk meant, primarily
the state, the territory, though this was valid before the coming of private property in the 19th century.
After that point, mülk conjointly meant land that was privately held. It is still writ large on every courtroom,
though, and no longer refers to the state in public mind, but to property.
46
It is quite interesting to note that, all three parties with deep contention against each other unified for the
protection of private property: İsmail Hakkı Boyacıoğlu, (AP-Burdur), Nihat Diler (YTP-Erzurum), and
Arif Ertunga (CHP-İzmir) all wholeheartedly criticized Boran. Millet Meclisi, “Birleşim 107” (TBMM,
July 8, 1966), 537–541.
47
252
nothingness - exists, but invisible. There, but away. Solid, but can willfully vanish the
next day.48
At the ruptures of this dual existence was born what I can describe as a peculiarly
Turkish socialism, a popular movement that was not indebted to the state –for the first
time in history- but also, not seen by the state, as well. In the late 1960s and throughout
the ‘70s the Turkish socialists skilfully maneuvered this ambiguous existence of
Istanbul’s urban identity. They excelled in being erudite Istanbulites –hence, the leading
intellectual cadres of the country, themselves coming from the most privileged familiesand being comfortable as the vanguard cadres of the working classes-though, their mental
labor had to find other vessels to galvanize a mass movement. This was largely done
through the novels of Yaşar Kemal, a poor writer coming from a rural background, who
wrote an immensely successful and brilliant series of Memed, My Hawk as a glorification
of armed rebellion against unjust feudal lords. On another level, this was done by Yılmaz
Güney’s formidable screen persona, the “ugly king” of the Turkish cinema -which was
going through a golden age, tens, at times close to two hundred movies a year, second
only to Hollywood, and better suited than Bollywood to be the next locus of exporting of
screen stories. Güney began with spaghetti westerns and genre noirs, where he played the
good guy who happened to beat the bad guys. He was seen as the hero of the ordinary
man, was not particularly handsome, and not really different from the other guy on the
street. He was a heavy drinker, chain-smoker, gun-loving, womanizer, and famous for
his machismo, and he had a strong affinity with the working classes. He was first sent to
prison for aiding and abetting the revolutionary leftist youth after the March 12, 1971
48
Tekeli, Konut sorununu konut sunum biçimleriyle düşünmek, 30.
253
coup and served two years. In 1974, in a bar fight, he shot and killed a state judge and
was sentenced to 19 years’ prison. While he was serving time, his cinematic language and
his intellectual interpretation changed considerably and his socialist realism began with
Arkadaş in 1974, continued with award winning films, Yol, Sürü, and Duvar. Although
he escaped from prison in 1981, he died of cancer as a fugitive in France. After Yaşar
Kemal, and perhaps more of an impact on the masses, Güney was the first person to
transfer socialist ideals to everyday perceptions and represented the political
consciousness of the working classes in the gecekondus.49
In music, a similar, but lesser attenuated interest in social inequality, found its
expression in a new form called arabesque. Amidst the constant threat of demolitions,
rampant discrimination, poverty, and exclusion Orhan Gencebay voiced the first
arabesque tunes. Born in the minibuses that served gecekondus –the city buses did not
begin service in the peripheries for some time, which gave rise to a new entrepreneurial
class that provided public transportation- it was not as stale as classical Turkish music or,
monotonously reminding of the rural past as the folk music was at the time, a truly
popular music was born. The lyrics were pessimistic, almost fatalistic, but contained a
grain of rebellion against the unjust system. Gencebay fortified his new-found fame with
It is pertinent to note that, until the 1960s, under the heavy and almost suffocating grip of the Cold War
international political scene, it was anathema to publicly espouse socialism in Turkey. The loosening of
censorship restrictions, and the relative toleration provided by a strengthened the judiciary thanks to the
1961 constitution’s emphasis on the separation of powers, led to an explosion of interest in socialist
literature, most prominently Nazım Hikmet’s poetry –which was banned until the 1960s, and unpublished
in Turkey.Until 1991, the mention of class warfare and the political struggle of working classes was
punishable by articles 141 and 142 of the Turkish penal code. These articles, stipulated that, any member of
a socialist or communist organization –i.e. an organization defending a particular class’ domination of other
classes- is punishable from 8 to 15 years in prison, and anyone disseminating socialist propaganda is
punishable from 5 to 10 years. The leadership of these organizations was punishable by death. Thousands
served time as political prisoners until these articles were replaced by a specialized law on terrorism, which
of course, exacerbated the situation that led to thousands more to be incarcerated. The counterpart to these
articles against socialist politics was article no. 163, that forbade Islamism as a political ideology.
49
254
a series of movies shot as backdrops to his songs and which found millions of viewers at
a time when television broadcast was a privilege of the upper middle-classes- Turkish
television broadcast did not begin until late 1971, and throughout the ‘70s and early ‘80s
it was not commonplace.50
Türkan Şoray, the undisputed queen of Turkish cinema, the Turkish Catherine
Deneuve, continued to hone her extraordinary talents in filmmaking, and directed two
movies, Dönüş (1972) and Azap (1973), the former telling of the agonies of a village
mother whose husband went to Germany as an immigrant worker-and returned with a
German mistress- and the latter detailing again, another mother’s heartbreaking travel
from her village to the big city to find a cure for her child. Her portrayal of a widow in a
gecekondu neighborhood in Sultan (1978) was emblematic of the time’s cultural
reorientation towards the gecekondus and was one of the first that showed a truer account
of the urban underclass life. Sultan’s story, produced by legendary filmmaker Ertem
Eğilmez and written by Yavuz Turgul, was built around the demolition of the gecekondus
for the construction of apartment buildings and brilliantly tapped into the social anxieties
of the ‘70s, when gecekondus were rapidly devoured by developers while the residents
themselves were becoming an integral part of social struggles thanks to the emergent
socialist movement. The defining cinematic representation of the gecekondus and the
endless anxieties surrounding real estate developers’ creeping entry into those mahalles
came in 1988, with Zeki Ökten’s film Düttürü Dünya.51 The film starred the comedic
Meral Özbek, Popüler Kültür ve Orhan Gencebay, 11. Baskı (İstanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 2013); Martin
Stokes, Türkiye’de Arabesk Olayı (İstanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 1998).
50
Zeki Ökten was once a close friend of Yılmaz Güney, and while Güney was in prison, shot his seminal
script, Sürü (1978), on his behalf. There still exists some questions regarding the true artistic ownership of
the film.
51
255
genius Kemal Sunal in a hitherto unseen dramatic turn, in which he played a poor
musician, scraping by on his measly earnings as a clarinet player in the seedy night clubs
of Ankara. His gecekondu is sold to a developer by his brother-in-law, who also
employed him as a street-peddler. The developer asked for him to immediately move, and
with his gecekondu soon to be torn down in the last ten minutes of the film, he plays his
clarinet on the streets, defiant against the unjust world.
During the convalescing of popular cultural representations around the social
reality of the gecekondus, public intellectuals and academia stood impervious to such an
amazing cornucopia of musical, visual, and artistic forms. The spontaneity in the building
of a new set of symbols, largely devoid of the Kemalist regime’s strictly defined tracks of
progress, was barely registered by the social scientists of the era. Instead of rationalizing,
investigating, leaving aside the simple task of the social scientist as defined by Weber- an
understanding, a crucial distance was taken to this unprecedented and unexpected
phenomena. The argumentum ad hominem –as the worst kind of logical fallacy- was
replaced by argumentum ad arabesqum, wherein the arabesque music was perceived as
the culprit and embodiment of everything corrupt, immature, and underdeveloped about
the gecekondus and the Turkish working classes. Contrary to what Karpat suggested,52
the gecekondu dweller was seen as not ripe enough for the adaption of urban values, and
they were instead presenting grave challenges to the pristine and refined urban culture,
imagined to be the caliban, the undeserving poor, the never-growing unruly kid. Nothing
could be further from the truth.
52
Kemal H. Karpat, The Gecekondu : Rural Migration and Urbanization (Cambridge ; New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1976); Kemal Haşim Karpat, Türkiyede Toplumsal Dönüsüm (Imge Kitabevi
Yayinlari, 2003), 332–3.
256
In the Dickensian tale of the two cities, the two classes had at least touched each
other at different points in their lives. Here, in Istanbul, a habitual ostracism, an
endogamy of the classes became the rule for the coordination of everyday lives. The
favorite of the Cannes Film Festival, Turkish filmmaker Zeki Demirkubuz’s first movie,
C-Block (1994) was a frontal assault on this idea of social segregation. A woman from a
middle-class apartment building complex. Shot in the then fancy gated blocks of Ataköy
that instills a dreary aesthetic of reinforced concrete, she sleeps with a poor, young boy –
the boyfriend of her housekeeper- and shatters this mold to pieces. Soon after, new terms
pervasively took over public discourse, and the middle-class Istanbulites wholeheartedly
accepted the term “White Turks” to delineate their cultural and social refinement
compared to other, ordinary, even “Black Turks.” During my two years of field research,
cross-cutting the class boundaries between Nişantaşı and the rest of Istanbul, the term
“White Turk” surfaced again and again. At first, I thought, the phrase was employed by
these college-educated, some even PhDs, socially liberal, secular persons as a tongue-incheek reference to the inanity of the term. Instead, apparently the Whiteness was some
exalted, idealized imagination of the embourgeoisement in the eyes of the upwardly
mobile class segment. They were nowhere near to be a genuine part of the bourgeoisie –
apparently, they were not aware of the fact- though, they equated themselves as the
chosen few, the blessed minority, the true Istanbulites with taste, culture, and style. For
the same people, the others, the Blacks were the ones who lived or came from the
gecekondus. They actually came up with a new adjective from the 1990s infamously
idiotic, disgustingly racist term: varoş.53 Varoş defined the style, the crude,
Varoş comes from the Hungarian term, varos-which literally meant, neighborhood in Hungarian, where
the central Budapest districts were known as belvaros. The linguistic root might be var, which means castle
53
257
underdeveloped, distasteful, ugly, extravagant, nouveau riche, uncultured, unrefined, and
almost without exception, being Kurdish.54 I will not claim that such an excessively
hostile perception is the making of Turkish intellectuals, but their adamant belief in
portraying Istanbul’s history as a fall from heavens contributed greatly to form a
racialized other who lived in the gecekondus. No need to reiterate, but the term varoş is
still predominantly employed and facilitated in scholarly publications by Turkish social
scientists. Given the social scientific indifference to the actual development of the
gecekondus, this is adding insult to injury.
Turgut Cansever, the preeminent Islamist architecture and urbanist, would voice
an objection. Interestingly, Cansever was an unabashed critique of the gecekondus and he
did not hesitate to lament their intrusion into the urban fabric: “once every family had a
house in 1925; by 1960, half of the city’s people were without a home. Gecekondus
surrounded the city as the most important urban issue and as a source of embarrassment
for the [entire] community.”55 He argued that these gecekondus were the products of real
estate speculation and the harm they caused led to the severing of the ties between the
city and culture and civilization.56 At another point, as a product of the same intellectual
mold with Falih Rıfkı Atay, Cansever raised the “frauds” claim: “We should cut the ‘my
in Hungarian, and apparently followed, Pirenne and Weber’s idea that the city emanated from the castlelike structure. Unfortunately, nobody appears to know how the term entered Turkish suddenly in the mid
1990s,- a mistake in translation, a newspaper editor’s previous touristic visit to Budapest, an opinion
columnists own invention, it is not known.
Nevertheless, it is striking that, “varoş” in Turkish, almost completely follows “ghetto” as a mental map
for the affluent classes; yet, while ghetto is appropriated as a defense mechanism by the underprivileged in
the American context, I observed no one using “varoş” in a similar manner.
54
55
Cansever, İstanbul’u anlamak, 170.
56
Ibid.
258
citizens, my society, poor human beings’ crap. Those who come to Istanbul not for
residency, but for looting the city should be stopped in their tracks.”57
Treating the gecekondus as less than a house, counting their dwellers as the actors
of looting, and going as far as claiming them to be an embarrassment, makes his
arguments actually troublesome, highly problematic, yet, once again, representative of
the prevailing state-space logic of the era. Interestingly enough, even Sedad Hakkı Eldem
tried to come up with a preliminary in-situ urban renewal project, and attempted to
develop architectural sketches applicable to the gecekondus.58 Yet, Cansever rooted for
gentrification from the outset, and barely paid any attention to the conditions that made
gecekondus. In a short tract, possibly written in the 1970s, he suggested a program of
urban renewal, a gentrification in the Prince Island which would eliminate the unsightly
shacks and buildings -he coined the term, efendileşme as a Turkish equivalent of
gentrification.59 He had an utter spite against one of the biggest gecekondu settlements on
the Asian side of the city, and in an interview he said that as a republican making of the
urban space, “Fikirtepe has nothing to do with fikir (thought).”60 Cansever’s urban
imagination is attuned to a city without the gecekondu, without any doubt, his idealized
Islamic city has no space for the poor, the unfortunate, and the rootless. It is rather a
57
Ibid., 126.
58
Uğur Tanyeli, Sedad Hakkı Eldem (İstanbul: Boyut, 2001).
Efendi means master in Turkish, however, this refers to its secondary meaning, used for someone with
venerable high morals. Possibly, he took his clue from the root of gentrification, the gentry and effendi can
correspond to each other. But, gentrification and efendileşme does not. Cansever, İstanbul’u anlamak, 87.
59
One of the earliest public distributions of land, instigated by the republican power elite, Fikirtepe soon
turned into a vast gecekondu settlement. Fikir means, thought or intellect in Turkish, and tepe means hill. I
could not find any information on why the area was called Thought-hill, but, sounds familiar to earlier
republican toponymy. Ibid., 337.
60
259
fetishized, a-historically frozen, anachronistically built fantasy that is doomed to hüzün
and tristesse altogether.
İlhan Tekeli, on the other hand, did not call the state to action for a surgical
removal of the squatter settlements by the hands of the state. In his view, the gecekondu
issue was rather the statement of the obvious. The housing problem rather extended into
an urban cultural struggle due to the deferred urbanization of the gecekondu residents.
His observations at the time led him to suggest that not even the second generation
immigrants had been adapting to urban culture. His definition of the notion of an “urban
culture” is definitely borrowed from Louis Wirth, a normative description of the urban
way of life. Tekeli was moderate in his treatment of the gecekondu problem. His was a
genuine surprise in the way that this population who heavily harnessed urban
opportunities to better themselves and found novel ways to express their interests in
urban politics had nevertheless, showed resistance to the adaption of urban culture. He
gave the clear example of the arabesque music for this resistance. Arabesque music gave
the in-between, neither urban, nor rural masses, a new form of expression as new
urbanites to fully articulate their ideology, as well as make use of the market economy.61
These new urbanites not only built a hugely successful economy around this in-between
identity, but they also set the tone of the national dialogue in the years of political
oppression. Today, the popular forms of arabesque music are as Turkish as the apple pie
is American, thanks to the gecekondus. The center of the Turkish social formation,
cultural patterns, and economic relationships was built by the gecekondus. In order to
understand the Turkish urban condition in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, one has to
61
Tekeli, Modernizm, modernite ve Türkiye’nin kent planlama tarihi, 122.
260
grasp their circumstances. Since, the gecekondus themselves harbor the most illustrious,
oft-sought, seldom found, social agency imputed to an imagined middle class, they
themselves are the ones who formed the middle ground in Turkey and Istanbul. Before
moving on, though, a few myths regarding the gecekondus need to be debunked.
Urban and Rural Population in Turkey
70000000
60000000
50000000
40000000
30000000
20000000
10000000
0
1965
1970
1975
1980
1985
Köy
1990
2000
2007
2011
Şehir
Table 5.3: Turkish Urban and Rural Populations62
5.5
Theses on the Rise and Fall of the Gecekondus
In this part, we will discuss how the gecekondu played the role of an urban growth
machine. To be able to do that, a couple of corrections to the commonplace
misunderstandings of Istanbul’s urbanization in the 20th century is in order. Otherwise,
the discussion would succumb to an already stale and economically determinist,
politically selective parameter of a failed state-making and liberalization of national
markets argument. A majority of explanations in that regard strongly echoes the
Census Data, TURKSTAT, “Genel Nüfus Sayımları,” Genel Nüfus Sayımları, accessed January 20,
2014, http://www.tuik.gov.tr/PreTablo.do?alt_id=1047.
62
261
governmental sentiment voiced by one RPP mayor-governor of the 1940s, that once the
populace rushed to the beaches, citizens had left no place to join the sea –the relations
between the newcomers and the already existing urban middle classes were not a zerosum game. There are two problems with such an explanation. First, it makes it impossible
for social scientists to distance themselves from the adopted dogma. Second, it relegates
political-economy as an afterthought to a deeper cultural struggle between Kemalist
seculars and the Islamist right-wingers. As I mentioned above, a thorough study of the
Turkish Ideology necessitates a much lengthier analysis, which I will not embark upon at
this moment. However, the exact numbers regarding the gecekondus tell us a great deal
about when and how they started and through what geographical patterns they
proliferated in Istanbul.
First, gecekondus are not the making of the relative liberalization of Turkish
economy that took place between 1950 and 1960. The claim that they were solely a
product of that period’s decisions overlooks the longer trend of Turkey’s
industrialization. The Gecekondu as a social phenomenon was the direct result of a
concentration of the working classes in the cities, whether that industrialization was done
under the premise of comprador-bourgeoisie or by means of monopoly state capitalism is
not really relevant to the question at stake here. What really matters is the fact that
Turkish urbanization was no different than the Western urbanization models triggered by
capital accumulation.
Yet, it was only in around 1983 that the urban population surpassed rural
population in Turkey. The gradual, fairly slow expansion of urban population was driven
by industrialization that began to pass the rates of agricultural and services sectors only in
262
1955. So, the verbatim formula that suggested massive urban growth happened in the
vicious decade of the Democrat Party rule is not only wrong, but also downplays the late
blossoming of industrial development in Turkey. Turkey became a majority urbanized
social formation only in the mid- 1980s, and its arduous travails in industrialization
showed its truer side only in the second half of the 1950s. Of course, it is a matter of
quarrelsome polemics whether industrial capital brought the workers into the cities, or the
reserve army of labor found easily in the cities helped grease the machines of capitalist
accumulation –though, my bet is on the former claim- but so far, I have tried to explain
that the peasants migrated en masse to find jobs at industrial enterprises. A cursory
glance at the tables below, would point out that the population growth in Istanbul and the
development of the industrial sector which was organized around Istanbul as its focus
strongly correlated.
In essence, gecekondu construction and squatting activities expanded significantly
during the longest period of prosperity the country had undergone until the 2000s. The
period between 1963 and 1977 was the golden age of import-substituting national
developmentalism in Turkey.63 Only with the abrupt break with that model triggered by a
creeping junta –modelled after Augusto Pinochet’s experiments in Austrian economics in
Chile- had the model changed. Only after Turgut Özal’s election as the Prime Minister in
1983 and his purported shock therapy and the ensuing rise of the robber barons had the
economic growth engine restarted anew.
Owen and Pamuk, A History of Middle East Economies in the Twentieth Century; Keyder, State and
Class in Turkey : A Study in Capitalist Development.
63
263
Annual GNP Growth Rate and
Average Growth Trend
40,0
30,0
20,0
10,0
‐10,0
1924
1927
1930
1933
1936
1939
1942
1945
1948
1951
1954
1957
1960
1963
1966
1969*
1972
1975
1978
1981
1984
1987
1990
1993
1996
1999
2002
2005
0,0
‐20,0
Annual GNP Growth Rate
SOURCE: DPT
5 per. Mov. Avg. (Annual GNP Growth Rate)
Figure 5.3: Annual GNP Growth Rate of Turkey 1924-200564
Growth of Economic Sectors
5‐year Averages
1929‐2005
20,0
15,0
10,0
5,0
2004
2001
1998
1995
1992
1989
1986
1983
1980
1977
1974
1971
1968
1965
1962
1959
1956
1953
1950
1947
1944
1941
1938
1935
1932
‐5,0
1929
0,0
‐10,0
Agriculture
Industry
Services
Figure 5.4: Average Growth of Economic Sectors
Figures 5.3 and 5.4 are compiled from www.kalkinma.gov.tr economic statistics. In figure 5.4 the second
line indicates the 5-year moving average.
64
264
Annual Average Growth
of
Istanbul Population
7,00%
6,00%
5,00%
4,00%
3,00%
2,00%
1,00%
0,00%
1935194019451950195519601965197019751980198519902000200720082009201020112012
Figure 5.5: Annual Average Growth of Istanbul Population65
Compiled from TURKSTAT census data. The spike in 2011 should be disregarded, since it was
probably a one-time correction of population figures due to the change in the census data collection.
From 2007 onwards, the Turkish population census model was changed, however, the newly established
residential-based population registration was not fully enforced until basic civic functions like voter
registration, motor vehicle registration, land and real estate title databases were connected to this
database
65
265
Istanbul Pop. Distribution 2013
Place of Registration
Gaziantep
2%
Kayseri
2%
Kırıkkale
2%
Others
10%
Istanbul
16%
Şanlıurfa
2%
Zonguldak
2%
Kocaeli
2%
Tekirdağ
2%
Trabzon
14%
Van
4%
Mardin
4%
Samsun
9%
Sivas
5%
Malatya
5%
Ağrı
5%
Erzurum
6%
Kastamonu
8%
Figure 5.6: Distribution of Istanbul’s Population according to the Paternal Registration66
The most important element in Turkey’s state-making capabilities in the
formation of the urban space is withdrawal. The state had almost retreated from the
building of urban spaces with the sole exception of the period between 1955 and 1960.
No other industrialized nation had attempted such a vapid withdrawal from the built
environment, no other case presented such disregard for the housing of the working
classes, and in no other example the supply of urban land was so willingly, in an
uncannily deliberate way, limited by the central government, while that government
66
Compiled from TURKSTAT census data. The regions refer to TURKSTAT’s definition of IBB2 levels.
266
controlled an overwhelming proportion of the available land. As recent as the 1980s, in
Western Europe and the USA, a crucial part of the housing supply was provided by the
state or municipally undertaken social housing projects. Michael Harloe discussed in
detail how the three different forms of housing define the post-war building of socialdemocratic and/or liberal welfare states in these two different regions. The three forms of
housing tenure were: socially rented housing, which were either rent controlled, or rented
by the state or municipal authorities outside of market relations, privately rented housing,
and owner-occupied housing. In the early 1980s, right before the great onslaught of
neoliberalism, social housing consisted one third of housing stock in Britain, forty per
cent in Holland, almost one fifth in Denmark and Germany, and a little more than ten
percent in France.67 Even a sliver of this analysis would tell someone working on
Turkey’s housing problem a glaring fact: the apparent lack of social housing. 68 Brazil
and Mexico –the closest examples to Turkey as similar models of underdevelopment and
late industrializing countries- had dabbled in social housing to quell the restive militancy
of urban populations. The Brazilian government built a gigantic capital city complete
with housing for the middle class officials of the state, and Mexico had controlled the
Michael Harloe, “The Changing Role of Social Rented Housing,” in Housing and Social Change in
Europe and the USA, ed. Michael Ball, Michael Harloe, and Maartje Martens (London; New York:
Routledge, 1988), 42–48.
67
The comparison between Turkey and the west is without any doubt quite interesting, and provides cues to
grasp the expansion of housing supply through private market mechanisms. Social housing, up until 1980s,
had been the primary means to provide shelter for the urban working classes, coupled with an uprecedented
rise in welfare levels. This meant, urban settlements were safely guarded against the whim of market
speculation. See, Michael Ball, Michael Harloe, and Maartje Martens, Housing and Social Change in
Europe and the USA (London; New York: Routledge, 1988); Harloe, “The Changing Role of Social Rented
Housing”; Ball, “The Development of Capitalism in Housing Provision”; John Burnett, A Social History of
Housing, 1815-1985, vol. 2nd (London ; New York: Methuen, 1986). Even an apparently market-oriented
housing regulator like the HUD in the USA, have provided plenty of housing –in comparison to the Turkish
state- for the impoverished inner city neighborhoods. See, Harloe, “The Changing Role of Social Rented
Housing,” 59.
68
267
land supply, while the Turkish state’s efforts seems to be trickle in the pond-housing for
state employees, mostly for the soldiers and police, a few for the teachers, and nothing
else. The gecekondu was a result, not a cause in the gross expansion of Istanbul, and this
fact was undervalued for long. The newly immigrated working class, appalled by the
despicable conditions of sheltering took initiative themselves and built their own
homes.69 And, meanwhile, their massive appropriation of urban land led to some
unintended consequences of a further redistribution in the Turkish economy, but they had
to wait at least a few decades to reap what they had sown.
Gecekondu building was a slick maneuver in terms of the working classes’ claim
to the right to the city. Eventually, that claim became more than a right to the city, but it
also turned into a right to a share of the windfall in capital accumulation instigated by the
investments in the built environment–an unplanned, uncontrolled, gradually, and then,
suddenly moving rhythm of economic redistribution. That provided a springboard for the
dispossessed masses to gain a foothold in the city –that’s also why so many stayed and
didn’t returned back to their ancestral homes, although they wanted to. It helped Istanbul
gain a stable population, unlike other metropolitan centers in the world- the ones who
moved in, stayed forever, never left, never to be replaced by another, cheaper reserve
army of labor –since, as workers, they had the minimal dwelling to pursue their interests
in the city. The permanence of settlement and the relative equality in the appropriation of
urban land helped make Istanbul a crucial amalgam of ethnicities, cultures, and beliefs
with a sizable middle class population. For instance, when Hart conducted his research in
69
Tanyeli draws attention to the fact that the gecekondu construction brought self-made housing back to
Istanbul after more than a five- decade hiatus, especially after the devastation of wooden houses in the intra
muros. See, Tanyeli, İstanbul 1900-2000, 130.
268
Zeytinburnu in the early 1960s, he reported that there were 3812 families in the area who
were the owners –mostly without legitimate titles- of their own homes. First, the 1970s
and ‘80s yapsat wave of developments and later, the state-induced TOKI and KIPTAŞ
urban renewal projects led to a tremendous real estate speculation in the area. This urban
transformation, the cooptation of the periphery, ended up in creating thousands of
landlords, rentiers, and, eventually its own middle class out of those 3812 households.
A moderate guess would suggest that each of those 3812 families had the fortune
to own 10 apartments each on average –and this indicates that each family had only one
parcel of land, and around 20 apartments were in each building, again, an estimate on the
lower side of the spectrum, and they signed their contracts with the developers on the
basis of half of the apartments, a perennially going rate in such developments. Then, this
would amount to 38120 apartments, which is in line with the overall population of the
sub-province of Zeytinburnu and the relevant household sizes there. The real estate
website of the leading daily Hürriyet, Hürriyet Emlak, gives an average value of 2,276
liras per square meter at the end of 2013, given the average footage of 100 square meters
in a typical Turkish apartment, and this makes 8 billion liras, somewhere around 4 billion
US dollars. Here, also, bear in mind that, as Hart’s studies suggested, and my
observations supported, this relatively small sub-province had almost a perfect egalitarian
distribution of land, as very few families owned more than one lot. This was one of the
most peaceful, less talked about, and fruitful redistributions of wealth in Turkish
history.70 The biggest Turkish industrial company by revenues was TÜPRAŞ, the only
Hart noted that, amongst the property owning families, only 15 to 20 had more than 4 houses or shops.
See, Hart, Zeytinburnu Gecekondu Bölgesi, 40.
70
269
oil-refinery of a country of 76 million, and it was privatized for more or less the same
amount.71 The extent of rent created and capital sunk into real estate, in essence, land,
even in this relatively small-scale area, is mesmerizing.
In the last half of the century, gecekondus were Istanbul’s main growth machine,
and not only for this most important city, but almost all cities of Turkey were driven by
their expansion in terms of population, political influence, and economic development.
The population growth in Istanbul municipalities tell us how each region has grown, and
how gecekondu development has moved geographically since 1965. The central
municipalities of Istanbul, Eminönü, Fatih, Beyoğlu, Beşiktaş, Şişli, Kadıköy, and
Üsküdar, have shown no real increase in population other than normal demographic
expansion in this time frame –and, in this Eminönü and Fatih waned as erstwhile centers
in the last three decades. While, the rest have grown according to the initiation of the
gecekondus’ proliferation. The six waves of growth in the Istanbul gecekondus were: 1st
Wave (1930-1950) Zeytinburnu, Mecidiyeköy, Bomonti, and Yıldız. 2nd Wave (19501965) Bayrampaşa-Sağmalcılar, Beykoz, Gaziosmanpaşa (Yıldız Tabya) 3rd Wave:
(1965-1970) Bahçelievler (Yenibosna), Esenler, Sarıyer, Eyüp (Alibeyköy), Güngören.
4th Wave (1970-1975), Maltepe, K. Çekmece (Mahmutbey, Sefaköy), Kartal. 5th Wave:
(1975-1980) Ümraniye, Bağcılar. 6th Wave (post-1980) Sultanbeyli, Sultangazi,
Arnavutköy, Esenyurt, Avcılar.
Ayşe Buğra correctly described this process as state redistribution, yet, unconscionably tagged it as an
example of “immoral economy” betraying the urban habitat and environment. In my view, her pun on
Thompson’s “moral economy” is once again, both inappropriate and politically incorrect. I cannot but
imagine anyone in their right mind prescribing “projects” as “ghettos,” or, squatters, favelas as “immoral”
–unless, of course, they are followers of the Austrian School. Her otherwise crucial analysis loses a great
deal of its intellectual rigor by dint of addressing environmental impact as solely carved by gecekondu
dwellers. See, Ayse Bugra, “The Immoral Economy of Housing in Turkey,” International Journal of
Urban and Regional Research 22, no. 2 (1998): 303–7.
71
270
The commodification of the gecekondus and the land those gecekondus were built
atop would follow a reverse order, except, some politically significant areas –which are
the foci of anti-authoritarian resistance to the successive right wing governments in
power- like Gaziosmanpaşa, the May Day neighborhood in Ümraniye –now, in Ataşehir,
and Gülsuyu/Gülensu in Maltepe.72
The transformation of the gecekondus commenced in late 1970s, not in the ‘90s.
The first private entrepreneurs that invested in the housing industry were not the largescale capitalists, but the small-scale contractors, known by the name yapsatçıs -pettybourgeois of the construction trade. As I will try to show in the next chapter, their efforts
reached a pinnacle in the latter part of the 1970s, only to be reproduced in the late 1980s,
this time with the helping hand of the state. The accelerated small-scale production of
housing came to two abrupt halts in 1994 and 2001 due to two massive economic crises,
only to be recovered after 2003, under a new accumulation regime directed by the AKP
government. In other words, the proliferation of an apartment life, and the cultural
depictions of the Lazi developer, the archetypal yapsat person, was quite accurate. Kemal
Sunal’s Kapıcılar Kralı (King of the Doormen) represented the profound transformation
in urban living, again, in another film by Zeki Ökten, made in 1977 which showed a
doorman’s struggles with the endless demands of the apartment dwellers in Cihangir,
Beyoglu. The small-scale schemes of enrichment instigated by the yapsatçıs which
involved a know-how of the ropes of municipal permits prevalent in the 1970s turned into
oligarchic backdoor deals involving grand sums of money –seven figures of US dollars-
For GOP’s resistance to urban redevelopment and insistent preservation of its peculiar urban fabric,
see:Pérouse, Istanbul’la Yüzleşme Denemeleri.
72
271
to break the ground for any typical undertaking in the gecekondu areas in the 2000s.
Today, it is no longer called yapsat, but rather euphemistically spun as “urban renewal
projects.”
The land stock for housing in Istanbul had already been consumed to the fullest
extent by the mid- 1980s, as Ayşe Öncü aptly suggested before.73 The limits in land
suitable for housing developments were put in by the Prost plan of the 1940s, and
Piccinato’s revisions in the 1950s, a city assumed to grow in an east-west axial directionwith one crucial exception in the 1980s, the second Bosphorus Bridge and its connecting
highways. The gecekondus broke those limits and provided land through turning
themselves into high-density neighborhoods. They brought their own demise as
communities, but engendered a hitherto unseen enrichment of the erstwhile working
classes.
In the 1980s, Turgut Özal (leader of the center-right ANAP, Motherland Party,
and Prime Minister from 1983 to 1989, and president from 1991 to 1994), initiated a
housing program akin to Menderes’ Ataköy. Named, Anatepe (later, renamed, Ataşehir)
and Bahçeşehir, these new massive housing complexes, with thousands of apartments in
high-rise blocks were directed towards the upper middle classes. In the 2000s, Erdoğan’s
government opened up Başakşehir, Kayabaşı, and Arnavutköy on the European side, and
73
Ayşe Öncü, “The Politics of the Urban Land Market in Turkey: 1950–1980,” International Journal of
Urban and Regional Research 12, no. 1 (1988): 38–63. Yirmibeşoğlu investigates the highly lucrative real
estate commissioner's geographical dispersal in Istanbul, the less land prone to development, the higher the
commissions especially for the urban core. F. Yirmibeşoğlu, “Emlak Komisyoncularının Mekânsal Dağılım
Süreci ve İstanbul’da Konut Piyasası,” İTÜ Dergisi A 7, no. 2 (2009). As a corollary, gecekondu
neighborhoods, to the extent that they were protected from development efforts, had no commissioners
operating within their borders. The renting and buying and selling of gecekondus depended on a different
network than the highly public and commercialized real estate sector.
272
Sancaktepe, Çekmeköy, and Samandıra to real estate developers. But, without these
exceptions an overwhelming part of the new housing development from the 1970s to
2000s was supplied by the demolition and rebuilding on gecekondu land.
A great deal of land stock for urban development was acquired through state-led
efforts. Though these state-led efforts were procedurally labyrinthine, gibberish to the
uninitiated, and more often than not, involved bribery and clientelism, they nevertheless
helped to expand the private housing market. The apartment buildings raised atop the
one-floor, low density gecekondus and this helped produce an immense new supply of
housing units in the urban market. The state cross-cut the division between its central
planning roles and the responsibilities of the municipal authorities. The state originally
envisioned municipalities as mere appendages to its already powerful organs in place.
Municipalities, however, not only fulfilled those original goals, but they also brilliantly
turned land into commodity, and fuelled the growth machine through waves of
gecekondu expansions in between the building and planning amnesties. In doing so, the
municipal structure presumably aimed at building a Sunni, Hanafi, and Turkish
majority’s hegemony in Istanbul by way of political alliances. Thusly, the scaffolding of
the so-called “silent majority” was erected to sustain and preserve this right-wing,
conservative pillar of the country –working classes were bought into this scheme by their
share in land and urban rents- and any swerving off the course set by the militarybureaucratic elites were met with the heavy-handed response of the same elites, 1960,
1971, 1980, 1997 the blatant and violent coups or disguised putsches attest to the
effectiveness of the response. Yet, coincidentally, the annihilation of the gecekondu by
the very growth machine that gave birth to it resulted in two unintended consequences.
273
First, the “silent majority” was irretrievably dispersed or became subservient to
similar land-grants, and since the neoliberal turn after 1980, the state could only
sporadically feed the thirst for land rents-1989, 1994, 2001, and 2009 were the years of
deep recessions. Second, the political alliances of the previous era and the cultural and
social patterns of coalition-making were no longer possible in the isolated, high-density,
cosmopolitan life instigated by the transformation to apartment dwelling. The effects of
the latter will be harder to discern, but without any doubt, will bring forward a radical
change to Istanbul and Turkey’s political landscape-of which, a few signs made
themselves felt during the mass uprising in the Spring of 2013. We can be assured that it
will be followed by further spontaneous and sporadic rebellions of the newly forged
urban classes.
So, what are the connecting dots that bring all of these together? The underlying
reason that triggered the emergence of the gecekondus was twofold: the scarcity of land
available in the market in Istanbul and the concentration of population and economic
activities in the city. The repercussions of the overwhelming control exercised by the
central state over the ownership of land, the peculiar landholding structure inherited from
the Ottoman Empire, and jealously guarded privileges of the state over urban space had
led to long-run success of redistribution of urban rent. We will discuss Turkish legislation
on urban land and property regime briefly. Then, we will move onto the question of the
state’s behavior in shaping the specifics of municipal and institutional organizations as
the facilitators of land appropriation in the last four decades.
5.6
The Development of Land Tenure in Turkey
A particular historically determined characteristic of domain over land played a
274
significant role in the urbanization of Turkey.74 The predominant model of land
ownership, as described above, was molded by Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman
experiences, all more or less followed a similar blueprint and built successively on top of
each world-empire a method for the centralized system of control over land. It is crucial
to note that private ownership of land, agricultural or urban, is a relatively novel
phenomenon in Turkey. On paper, land had become a full commodity only in 1858, and
the private property rights for land was to be extended to foreigners in 1867.75 The full
development of the commodification of housing had to wait until 1965, when the
“Condominium Ownership Act” was passed by the parliament.76 The “Condominium
Ownership Act” itself was in the making for quite a while, yet, several attempts remained
fruitless until 23 June, 1965. The dominant relations of private property ownership in
land had long been confined since the state appeared to be the unquestionable monopoly
owner of especially urban land.
The problems brought by the lack of a legal framework for ownership of separate
housing units in free from- the land itself had become an issue as early as the 1940s, and
it was already sought by Henri Prost in his suggestions to the ministry of Reconstruction
74
In Peasants, Eric R. Wolf pointed out that domain over land was distinctively different in Asian models,
and he gave the Ottoman Empire, the Persian Empire, and the Chinese Empire as examples. Wolf,
Peasants.Eric R. Wolf, Köylüler, trans. Abdulkerim Sönmez (İmge Kitabevi, 2000).
75
Çaglar Keyder, State and Class in Turkey : A Study in Capitalist Development (London ; New York:
Verso, 1987), 43. I Tekeli and S Ilkin, Cumhuriyetin Harci, 3 vols., vol. 3 (Istanbul Bilgi Üniversitesi
Yayinlari, 2004). The foreigners’ rights on land is still a matter of hot debate; only a few years ago, the
right of non-citizens to buy land was recognized, though this was stipulated on an abstract notion of
reciprocity-meaning that, the non-citizen’s home country should permit Turkish citizens’ to buy land.
76
B. Batuman, "Turkish Urban Professionals and the Politics of Housing, 1960-1980 (1)," METU JFA
(2006): 61.
275
in Ankara.77 It is interesting to note that the 19th century Ottoman Civil Code, Mecelle78
had statutes that permitted partial ownership of property and land, while the new civil
code of the republican regime lacked such regulations. Article 652 of the new civil code,
adopted in 1926 as almost a verbatim translation of the Swiss Civil Code, stipulated that
“separate floors of a house shall not entail ownership on land,” which effectively
prohibited housing units’ sales in the free market without any attachment to the land the
unit is built upon.79 Apparently, this brought a series of problems, limiting ownership of
flats to partial ownership of land, leading to the treatment of all housing units as
extensions of urban land, and severely limiting the formation of a real estate market.
Under the conditions of strict limits to free trade and the state ownership of industrial
enterprises, in addition to the extensive nationalization program of the republican regime,
this did not portray an urgent problem. However, after the end of World War II, with the
inescapable emergence of the gecekondus and relative economic growth, the question of
ownership in housing came to the fore, in 1948, and an amendment to the Notaries Law
was drafted. The amendment offered to provide notaries’ with the right to regulate real
estate sales contracts and designated notaries’ as the bookkeepers of transactions of real
estates. The amendment did not pass the parliament.80
The burgeoning price of urban land and population pressures on the main cities
“Henri Prost’un Kaybolan Raporu: 12 Senelik Şehircilik Mesaisinin Bilânçosu”; Tekeli, Türkiye’de
yaşamda ve yazında konut sorununun gelişimi, 84–87.
77
Mecelle was prepared by a commission headed by Cevdet Paşa between 1869 and 1876, came into effect
in 1877 before it was replaced by a new civil code –almost a verbatim translation from Swiss Civil Codein 1926.
78
79
Tekeli, Türkiye’de yaşamda ve yazında konut sorununun gelişimi, 34.
80
Ibid., 84; Tekeli, Development of the Istanbul Metropolitan Area.
276
after the 1950’s liberalization of economy once again led to a surge in interest for
reformulating a legal framework of ownership in housing units. On January 6, 1954,
another amendment, this time in the Law of Land Registry, was brought to the
parliament. The amendment included a new option that permitted the common ownership
on land, while private domain was recognized. It was designed to divorce flat ownership
–as a private easement, right to use, on the housing unit- from the ownership of the land
that the property was built on. Unlike the previous amendment offer in 1948, this new
amendment gave the regulatory power and responsibility in registration to the Office of
the Land Registrar-a much older institution than the Notaries. Yet, the contracts drawn in
front of the notaries still held their sway. The amendment lacked relevant stipulation
regarding the division of joint property of the flat. Again, the amendment did not pass the
vote. Finally, in 1959, the stately jurist Hıfzı Veldet Velidedoğlu headed a commission
and who would later head the commission to draft the 1961 constitution- to draft the Flat
Ownership Act. Due to the intervening coup of May 27, 1960, the act stalled for another
six years. Finally, with further amendments, it passed on June 23, 1965, and came into
effect on January 2, 1966. The law was distinctive, since in it, Velidedeoğlu tried to
establish each separate unit as subject to separate legal entity. So, for the first time, and
quite unlike the Anglo-Saxon examples prevalent back then, the housing unit had become
a private property to be sold and bought without any attachment to land.81 Contrary to the
moderate expectations, this immediately instigated an explosion in the construction of
apartment buildings. Once the apartment itself was severed from the land, it could gain a
high versatility as a commodity.
81
Tekeli, Türkiye’de yaşamda ve yazında konut sorununun gelişimi, 85–6.
277
One key unintended consequence of the law was its effect in shaping Turkish
cities. In less than two decades, the apartment buildings had become the predominant
architectural form, and the residential qualities, the social patterns, class relationships
then prevalent were irreversibly transformed. As I will try to show in the next chapter,
before the passing of the Flat Ownership Act in 1965, detached, or semi-detached homes
with single-ownership on land, formed a predominant part of buildings constructed.
Apartment buildings were few and lacked legal basis, sold as a partial ownership of the
land on which the building was raised. Gecekondus were a product of this belated
development of ownership on urban private property. If, as a conjecture, we would
hazard a guess, and say that this law had passed two decades earlier, the gecekondu as we
know it, probably would not have existed, and in its stead, the tenements would have
played a much larger role akin to the similar experience in industrialization in London,
Manchester, or New York.
İlhan Tekeli, pointed out that flat ownership regulations and its much awaited
legal framework is a product of the construction business known as yapsatçı.82 The
relationship of causality is not so clear-cut in my view: it is debatable whether the small
scale entrepreneurs predated the legal framework, or they blossomed in the rapid
industrialization centered in Istanbul under the watchful tutelage of a state apparatus bent
on expanding import-substitution policies. In all likelihood, an appurtenance of
construction companies sprang up as state investment in built environment was gradually
directed towards the cities. We know that Turkish engineers and architects were
82
Ibid.
278
forerunners of small scale apartment building construction in the 1950s.83 By late 1960s,
immigrants from Black Sea region, mostly erstwhile foreman employed with their work
gangs as the head of their kinship, and without any doubt, dwellers of the gecekondus,
gradually took over the small-scale construction business. The lowering of the political
barriers, thanks to the legal framework provided by the state, and the close proximity
between the social habitus of the Black Sea constructors to the land owners (since, the
first land to be built upon at this stage, from late 1960s, until late 1980s also belonged to
other gecekondu dwellers), their activities rapidly flourished and dominated housing
provision for the next two decades.
Yet, it is no wonder that the word apartment in Turkish, apartman, carries a dual
meaning; it denotes both the single unit, sold as a separate commodified entity, and the
building itself. Until late 1970s, apartman’s connotation was meant to be a life showered
in the luxurious riches of city life, with hot water, separate bathrooms, kitchens with good
ventilation, electricity and gas, central heating –though, until the late 1990s, construction
guidelines stipulated necessary air vents for stoves in new homes- possibly a doorkeeper
with daily services for groceries and newspapers. As a necessary appendage, these
apartmans were for people with either their own cars –a rarity up until late 1980s- or with
easy access to orderly public transportation. For the rest, the minibuses –that sprang upon
as a grassroots efforts to provide easy, cheap, and frequent urban public transportation
thanks to the deafness of the municipal authorities- with 35 people, standing up like a tin
can of sardines, was the sole choice of necessity to get to work. In the single most
successful musical play of the Istanbul Municipal Theatre, Lüküs Hayat (A Luxurious
Tanyeli relates how a single architect-builder, İlyas Çokay, transformed Fındıkzade in Fatih from 1950s
to 1960s. See,Tanyeli, İstanbul 1900-2000, 129.
83
279
Life), which has played intermittently for more than seven decades since 1933, two
working class hacks, before their latest heist, sing merrily the title song of the play,
Şişli’de bir apartıman,
yoksa eğer halin yaman
nikel-kübik mobilyalar
duvarda yağlı boyalar84
In these almost Brechtian lyrics, which possibly predate Brecht, likely written by
Nazım Hikmet during one of his tenures as a political prisoner, ensconces the immense
distance between working class life and the newfangled urban life symbolized by the
apartman.
On the other hand, the urban way of life and its highly corruptive and exploitative
burden on the working classes is skillfully contrasted in Yılmaz Güney’s Sürü (1978).
With the hardships endured by the masses who had to toil for much less than their
apartman dwelling counter-parts earn through their urban jobs, education, and crony
proximity to the power brokers, the pinnacle of the movie’s plot is extrapolated in an
apartment in Ankara still under construction. Here, the consciousness of the working
masses is to be raised by a young revolutionary. The young revolutionary’s father is a
guard of this soon to be finished apartment building; with views of the city, the apartman
is something novel for the main characters of the movie. The revolutionary youth
explains to the main protagonist, a Kurdish shepherd trying to sell his herd before the Eid
while his wife tags alongside him, speechless and in dire need of medical attention, that,
people like them had to work for nothing, so that bourgeois can live happily in these flats.
84
The song’s lyrics in full are “A flat in Şişli, If you cannot afford it, such a pity, Nickel-cubist furnitures,
Oil paintings hanged on walls, Two automobiles, One cabrio, one not, Chef, butler, and servants, Kitchen’s
full, pantry’s as well, Luxurious life, Luxurious life, Take it easy, and enjoy, Nothing’s like a luxurious
life”
280
He asks the shepherd - even if you sold all of your herds –which you grazed for the whole
year, brought to the city to be fed to the well-to-do- can you afford to buy one of these
apartmans? Of course not; it is not about this party, or that party –the Kurdish shepherd
sheepishly says that, we’re for the Adalet Party (Justice Party, successor to the
Democratic Party, the precursor to today’s Justice and Development Party). It is about
class.
5.7
Municipal and Institutional Organization of Istanbul
The breaking up of the delicate power balance between the provinces and the
center in Turkey did not really take place until the 1980s. As underlined above, the
floodgates of the provinces were set loose in the 1950s, yet, critical mass was not reached
until the 1980s. The proportion of Istanbul’s population- in general population- doubled
from 1950 to 1985, and from 1985 to today, it increased another sixty percent. Almost a
fifth of the population lives in Istanbul (See, Table 5.4). If you add the ubiquitous urban
sprawl alongside the Kocaeli Gulf, the extraordinary size and scale of this humongous
conurbation glaringly emerges: close to a quarter of Turkish population. Either a quick
glance in parliamentary representation –in which Istanbul and surrounding provinces are
highly underrepresented- or the extraordinary attention paid by the national media on
Istanbul mayor’s election would portend the importance the city has gained in the last
three decades.
281
Year
Population of Istanbul
“Greater” Istanbul*
Turkey
intra muros
Proportion of
Istanbul Pop. to
Turkey Pop.
1927
13,648,270
245,982
806,863
0,059
1940
17,820,950
266,272
991,237
0,056
0,316
1950
20,947,188
349,909
1,166,477
0,056
0,338
1960
27,754,820
433,629
1,882,092
0,067
0,296
1965
31,391,000
482,451
2,293,823
0,073
0,313
1970
35,605,176
554,659
3,019,032
0,085
0,184
1975
40,347,719
627,012
3,904,588
0,097
0,161
1980
44,736,957
567,902
4,741,890
0,106
0,120
1985
50,664,458
590,842
5,842,985
0,115
0,101
1990
56,473,035
545,908
7,309,190
0,129
0,075
2000
67,803,927
459,143
10,018,735
2007
70,586,253
455,498
12,573,836
0,178
0,036
2008
71,517,100
443.955
12,697,164
0,178
0,035
2009
72,561,312
433.796
12,915,158
0,178
0,034
2010
73,722,988
431.147
13,120,596
0,178
0,033
2011
74,724,269
429.351
13,624,240
0,182
0,032
2012
75,627,834
428.857
13,854,740
0,183
0,031
0,148
Proportion of
Istanbul intra muros
pop. To Greater
Istanbul pop.
0,354
0,046
Table 5.4: Istanbul's Population as a rate of Turkish Population85
The co-opting of these newcomers, the migrants, the oft-denigrated denizens, had
in essence become a matter of urgency for the extraordinarily centralized Turkish state to
reproduce itself and to incorporate the scattered provincial allegiances rooted in ethnic,
religious, or, even, tribal identities. The best way was by dint of a municipal expansion;
Note that, İnalcık also used a similar data in, Inalcik, “Istanbul,” 1973. The period between 1970 and
2012 are collected from TURKSTAT census data. However, for İnalcık, Greater Istanbul refers to intra
muros Istanbul including Beyoğlu, Beşiktaş, Şişli, Kadıköy and Eyüp. From 1970 on, I preferred to assume
Greater Istanbul as synonymous to the provincial borders, for the sake of overcoming the difficulties that
arise from a distinction between the sketchy definition of urban and rural according to government data.
From the mid-2000s onwards, the government accepted metropolitan Istanbul delineated by the provincial
borders.
85
282
the more municipal institutions that are built, the better for the migrants to politically,
culturally, and economically connect to the urban way of life. Yet, these municipal
structures, would not follow the Weberian trajectory-the city councils, the municipal
organizations, and a myriad of attached voluntary associations were not for the
disenfranchised masses to join in the autonomous urban way of life. The municipal
organizations had very limited discretionary powers bestowed on them by law, and their
elected officials, the mayors and the councilors were designed to be subordinate to the
central state apparatus’ appointed officials-the governors, sub-provincial governors, and
even the police officers.
Until the 1960s, the mayors were the Ankara appointed governors, which kept the
state at an inch away from being a one-party state at all times. The newly established
municipal authority was defined by law to be a goal-oriented structure; with few
resources, but a gauntlet of citywide responsibilities: from garbage disposal, to sewage
collection, from squatter prevention and reforming of the gecekondus, to providing roads,
pavements, public transport, energy, and building regulations supervision. This way, the
over-politicization of the masses, and the incipient threat from the hegemonic potentials
of the socialists were to be short-circuited. In a goal-oriented framework, the primary task
of a municipal organization is not to increase public participation in the decision-making
processes. Actually, the lesser the participation, the smoother and faster the roads and
buildings are built. Defined in this way, and unable to break through its fiscal procrustean
bed, the municipal authority can only show its performance by tapping into the land rent.
This crony capitalism served the municipal authorities successfully for decades
and illustriously constructed a public consensus for the expansion of urban land. The
283
municipal authority became the public bureau of redistribution, rubber-stamping changes
in zoning regulations, opening up vast swaths of land –previously belonging to the public
treasury and/or Waqfs, but more often than not, appropriated by the gecekondus- bringing
utilities and public services to these new areas of development and, in essence, making
the cogs of this huge growth machine work. The municipal identity is, thus, remarkably
boosterist and comfortably nested in real estate speculation. Yet, the left entered a selfdefeating cycle by entering the game with incompatible expectations and its gross
ineptitude in making the growth machine work without any glitches, i.e. for employing a
legalese while slowing down the vernacular mechanisms of redistribution.
After the 1960 coup, the junta first directed its attention to the gecekondu
neighborhoods, foremost among them, Zeytinburnu, as dissent was rising in these
impoverished settlements against the overthrow of Menderes and his ensuing hanging by
the military administration. To quell the hidden dissent –as Bayat described- not only did
the newly appointed governor recognize their rights of ownership on land, he also
promised the extension of public services. In a swift succession, the central government
attempted to co-opt the newcomers to Istanbul’s urban political framework by
establishing peripheral municipalities, each of which was loosely connected to the
metropolitan municipality.
The newly established municipalities were: Ümraniye(1963), Avcılar (1966),
Güngören (1966), Yakacık (1966), Kocasinan (1967), Sefaköy (Safraköy) (1967),
Alibeyköy (1967), Hadımköy (1969), Celaliye (1969), Soğanlık (1969), Esenler (1970),
Kemerburgaz (1971), Selimpaşa (1971), Yenibosna (1971), Dolayoba (1971), Yayalar
(1971), Halkalı (1976), Yeşilbağ (1976). The establishment of a myriad of new
284
municipalities, many of which lack serious infrastructure or official expertise in urban
development and planning (and nor did they have the means to hire such expertise), not
only transpired in a highly tangled hierarchy of inter-municipal relations vis-a-vis
metropolitan municipality, but also freed the hands of surrounding villages in luring
capital into land for either industrial development or residential purposes. Thereby, while
on the one hand, the "municipal incorporation" of these newly settled and populated areas
made it possible for a new form of urban politics and policy-making to emerge, on the
other hand, it accelerated the already incipient "urban sprawl" and the spiral of
immigration to unprecedented levels in Istanbul.86
However, the military junta of September 1980 did not hesitate to roll back the
emergent decentralization of municipal administrations-for better or for worse. One of the
very first things the junta undertook, right after sending innocent adolescents to be
hanged, and arresting hundreds of thousands for subversive activities against the state,
was of course to abolish all civil administrative duties in municipal authorities, ban all
municipal councils, depose all elected mayors and replace them with appointed figures.
Another self-appointed authority, the supreme executive power of the junta, the National
Security Council (which will play a special and almost permanent role in the post-1980
coup politics of Turkey) decreed on December 11, 1980 that all peripheral municipalities
around large cities were to be unified into one central municipality. And by the
declaration of Commander-in-chief of Istanbul martial law administration, on February 9,
1981, the peripheral municipalities were reorganized and rolled into a single, centralized,
For a discussion see, Tekeli, Development of the Istanbul Metropolitan Area, 169–170; but more
importantly Tümertekin, İstanbul, insan ve mekân.
86
285
and monolithic Istanbul municipality.87
Apparently, stymieing the municipal institutions was neither an effective means of
organization, nor tenable due to the already existing practical problems. The newly
elected ANAP (Motherland Party) government of Turgut Özal did not ignore the simple
ineffectiveness of the monolithic municipal structure and in January, 1984, re-districted
the municipal body into 14 different pieces mostly along the lines of pre-1980
municipalities. This, furthermore, created 14 mayoral positions up for grabs in the next
local elections (doubtless, to be taken by the then unopposed ruling party) and
meanwhile, dissecting the municipal governance of Istanbul into piecemeal parts created
administrative units that were largely irresponsive to each other's needs or overall
development of the city. On July 27, 1984, the law no. 3030 on the "Administration of
the Metropolitan Municipalities" was issued, and a novel system of two-tiered municipal
governance was established.88 A metropolitan municipal authority with its own citywide
municipal council and mayor would oversee the powers and practices of district
municipalities. The districts would also have their own mayors and municipal councils.
Yet, the municipal councils would not but serve as the mayor’s own rubber stamp,
due to the scarcely distinguished but highly tricky arrangements in municipal council
election system. The Turkish parliamentary elections have an incomparably high
threshold for representation, 10 percent (the closest nation-wise, is the Russian threshold,
with 7 percent), and the general assumption, as well as European Parliament’s enduring
The new peripheral municipalities were: Alibeyköy, Avcılar, Dolayoba, Esenler, Güngören, Halkalı,
Kağıthane, Kartal, Kemerburgaz, Kocasinan, Küçük Çekmece, Küçükköy, Küçükyalı, Maltepe, Pendik,
Sefaköy, Soğanlık, Tokat(Beykoz), Tuzla, Ümraniye, Yakacık, Yayalar, Yenibosna, and Yeşilbağ.
87
88
Tekeli, Development of the Istanbul Metropolitan Area, 178–180.
286
criticism, points out that this prevents proportional representation and hurts the principle
of pluralism in a democratic society-but, of course, to no avail. The 1980 junta installed
the threshold in order to promote a two-party system, though they largely failed in that.
On the other hand, the municipal elections law, law number 2972 passed on January 18,
1984, contains a similar threshold for representation in municipal council. The seats
allocated to each party list is defined by article 23 of the law; stipulating that, any party
receiving less than 10 percent of the vote will not be included in the distribution. The
parties with more than 10 percent of the votes will receive seats on the basis of their votes
minus the 10 percent. Hence, the bigger parties receive more seats, while, the party with
10 percent of the vote –hypothetically- gets only a seat. This system, barring smaller
parties from the city councils is just another travesty in the highly crooked Turkish
democratic institutions. The consequence is a council that is anything but a democratic
organization and fulfills its design by being a rubber stamp following the orders of the
mayor –and higher echelons of the party- and turning the councilor’s influence as a
bridge to the mayor into real estate speculation.
The metropolitan municipalities and their legal framework would present a
sometimes lively, often quarrelsome contestation between different political parties.
ANAP (Motherland Party) and the SHP (Social-democratic Populist Party) during the
late 1980s and early 1990s, the RP (Welfare Party) and the CHP (Republican People's
Party) during most of the 1990s and between the AKP and the RPP since 2003. The new
municipalities, especially after 1983, served as an adaptive tool for different political
organizations. The most well-known is of course, the AKP’s (the ruling Justice and
Development Party) and its predecessor political movements’ (the Welfare Party, the RP,
287
after the party was banned by a decree of the constitutional court, the Virtue Party, FP)
vetting its candidates to certain positions in power in Ankara. Not only that Prime
Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was raised amongst the 1994 tide of an Islamist takeover
of municipal governments, but also, a new interface between the provinces and the center
was built. It is no coincidence that Erdoğan’s cadre from the Istanbul mayoralty later
served important positions in his cabinets, further, officials appointed to Istanbul’s
several municipalities served as the seeder for provincial mayors. Istanbul returned the
favor to the provinces –whom it owed its current political and cultural structure- by
raising and building a network of power holders. And several large scale revisions of the
law would bring a more fine tuning of the hierarchy and budgetary distribution between
the district municipalities and the metropolitan municipalities. Yet, in the latest general
elections, the ruling party JDP, have held the promise of metropolitan municipality status
as a lure for some eastern and southeastern cities, especially in cities like Malatya and
Ordu.
288
Istanbul Municipal Population Distribution
1965‐2011
100%
Zeytinburnu
Üsküdar
Ümraniye
90%
Tuzla…
Şişli
Şile
Sultangazi (2008)
Sultanbeyli(k)(1992)
Silivri
Sarıyer
Sancaktepe
80%
Pendik
70%
Maltepe
Küçükçekmece
60%
Kartal
Kağıthane
Kadıköy
50%
Güngören(1992)
Gaziosmanpaşa (1963)
Fatih
Eyüp
40%
Esenyurt
Esenler (1993)
Çekmeköy
Eminönü
Büyükçekmece
30%
Çatalca
Beylikdüzü
Beykoz
Beyoğlu
Bayrampaşa (1990)
Başakşehir
Bakırköy
20%
Beşiktaş
Bahçelievler(1992)
10%
Bağcılar (1992)
Avcılar(1992)
Ataşehir
Arnavutköy
2011
2010
2009
Adalar
2008
2007
2000
1990
1985
1980
1975
Figure 5.7: Distribution of Istanbul Municipalities' Population (Source: TURKSTAT census data)
289
1970
0%
1965
In figure 5.7, the role played by the municipal reorganization of population and
the dominant expansion of the peripheral municipalities are evident. The expansion of
these peripheral areas owed their existence to the highways incrementally built in the last
five decades. The state-activated plebeian development of urbanization in Istanbul was
pursued by the municipal authorities. Until the 1980s, as Erol Tümertekin underlined, the
municipal authorities that were mostly tolerated by the central state mechanisms were the
peripheral ones, the ones who were not a part of the metropolitan Istanbul municipal area,
for instance, in Ümraniye.89 In the period following Menderes’ execution, the state’s
withdrawal in the housing market was more than recuperated by the gecekondu
appropriations in the peripheries of Istanbul. For long, a centralized and efficient
organization of Istanbul metropolitan administration was not possibly initiated by the
political leaders in Ankara, since a leaner and more interventionist metropolitan
organization would mean an extra hurdle along the way in Istanbul’s massive creation of
land rent. A relatively weak metropolitan authority was surrounded by the nameless
legion of local municipalities -many of which were out of the purview of Istanbul’s
mayor.
The junta of September 12, 1980, decided to abolish many municipalities,
appointed an officer as the mayor until the first local elections in 1984 and befitting a
soldier’s abilities, actually obsessive-compulsive infatuation, with central and
hierarchical organization condoned by the National Security Council, Bakırköy, Üsküdar,
and Şişli became giant municipal districts in terms of population and geographical
dispersal. One of the first things Turgut Özal did after he was elected in 1983 was to
89
Tümertekin, İstanbul, insan ve mekân.
290
reverse the junta’s decisions on municipal redistricting. Özal was the one who excelled in
the goal-oriented municipal urban politics as the neoliberal founding father of Turkey,
and he designed a system that strictly followed the power elite’s exclusion of any kind of
participatory decision-making processes at any level from local to national scales. Yet,
Özal’s party was a mere coalition of different and divergent class, ethnic, and faith-based
interests. As soon as Özal left his chair as the party head and landed in the most
prestigious position in Turkey, the presidency –he was elected in the parliament as the
first non-military president since 1923- his ragtag coalition dispersed rapidly, and for the
first time in modern Turkey’s history led to the bitter rivalry of two center right-wing
parties for power in the 1990s.
Out of this bitter war of positions, which saw an intensifying of the armed
struggle between the Turkish armed forces and the Kurdish rebels, and the dirty war on
the millions of Kurdish peasants, which intermittently led to the collapse of the Turkish
economy, an unspotted political party came along. Necmettin Erbakan’s Welfare Party,
once the underdogs, a perennial marginal party, which was only catapulted to power in
the 1970s (three times, as the minor coalition partner, in the first Ecevit cabinet in 1974,
and later, in two Nationalist Front cabinets of Demirel), had first claimed victory in the
local elections of 1994. The metropolitan municipalities of Ankara and Istanbul were
won by the Islamists, in addition to almost all sub-provincial municipalities in both cities,
and to a remarkable success in central Anatolia and the Black Sea –the classical power
base of Turkish nationalism and conservatism.
Erbakan and his Islamists were partly modeled after the most successful
underground organization of the 20th century, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.
291
Though, the genesis of the movement, named Milli Görüş (National View), did not begin
in the backwaters of Anatolia, but amongst the immigrant workers in Germany, who
found themselves in a condition where they were devoid of any social norms, any
traditional bonds, or community support. Erbakan, a Germany educated PhD in
engineering was extremely talented in channeling this feeling of anomie in forging his
own social and political movement, which sought a return to the traditional role of
religion in people’s lives through evidently modern means. The workers brought the idea
of the possibility of a political organization along the lines of a new golden age of
Islamism back to Turkey in the 1970s, and in addition to their monetary support in terms
of remittances in Deutsche marks that helped many Anatolian enterprises established,
expanded, and eventually, faltered, due to lack of oversight.
The goal-oriented structure of municipal administrations was tailor-made for
Erbakan’s movement. They could tap into their tight-knit, highly organized, hierarchical,
small group of supporters as their cannon fodder to do place at strategic levels in the
municipal organizations. It did not take very long for them to emerge as the benefactors
of their power base: the gecekondus. The mayors, as well as the cannon fodder was very
loyal to their leader and were very technical minded, like their leader, since, one of
Erbakan’s election promises in the 1970s was a leap forward in heavy industries. The gap
in talent was either solved through transfers from the center right, or by harnessing the
engineering and planning abilities of the European contractors. Erbakan’s Islamists made
no mistake about the fundamental characteristics of the municipal organizations; they
came to govern, not to build participatory politics or a democracy from below. They
tasked themselves with efficiency, quantity, and if the former two was not apparent
292
enough, with disseminating their achievements through a publicly funded public relations
campaign- then unprecedented in scale and reach. The spatial imagination of the Islamists
resonated deeply with the Turkish state-space hegemonic doxa, only at the micro level.
With the exception of the 1997 putsch, they did not wait for long to exercise their
imagination at the macro level.
The reproduction of fictitious capital and how urban land rent turned to play the
predominant means for the extension of new state-spaces in Istanbul is mainly a matter in
the next chapter. Here, the real emphasis should be rather put on the redistributive
qualities of the quiet encroachment, and how this seemingly passive, but fundamentally
resilient class played a triggering role in such a gigantic undertaking in the appropriation
of land. In order to be able to accomplish this, I will try to portray two different –yet,
convergent- trajectories of two different gecekondu neighborhoods. First, we will try to
understand how that disenfranchised class lived, beginning from Charles Hart’s
observations in Zeytinburnu-the first and foremost gecekondu settlement in Istanbul.
And, second, how that class who overcame further fault lines embedded in the racial,
ethnic, and religious structures of a power- employed political struggle in order to embed
itself in the May Day neighborhood during the tumultuous days of 1977, survived
decades of oppression. Here, however, the focus will rather be on the longitudinal
change, on the diachronic change these two neighborhoods underwent in an
asynchronous manner. While Zeytinburnu become the site of the most successful and
financially most egalitarian redistributive project, the May Day neighborhood is still
prone to obliteration under the watchful eye of the new state-spaces; in our case, the Mass
Housing Administration and its often shady deals with private real estate development
293
companies.
5.8
Charles Hart and Zeytinburnu
By 1964, around half or more than half of the urban population in Adana,
Erzincan, Zonguldak, and Ankara; close to one third of the population in İstanbul,
Samsun, Mersin, Bursa, Erzurum, İskenderun, and Antakya lived in gecekondus. The
gecekondu became an indelible part of Turkey’s built environment with the rapid
industrialization centered on urban areas.90 Interestingly enough, monographic studies
from that era are extremely limited, and this evident transformation of a predominantly
rural society into an industrializing urban society is documented in a severely limited
fashion.91 The two major works of the era, Daniel Lerner’s Passing of Traditional Society
–in which he studied Ankara, Balgat’s transformation from being a rural appendage of
Ankara and an agricultural community into a peripheral part of the capital and gradual
enrichment via industrial employment through the 1950s- and Paul Stirling's Turkish
Village are still waiting to be translated into Turkish.92 With the exception of Mübeccel
Belik Kıray’s, METU Sociology Department’s founder, pioneering works on two rapidly
90
Tekeli, Türkiye’de yaşamda ve yazında konut sorununun gelişimi, 125.
I will discuss the groundbreaking work of Çağlar Keyder and Korkut Boratav in the 1970s and 1980s,
which introduced Marxist political economy to the analysis of rural structures below, as a bridge to the
urban transformation. For a detailed, insightful, and perhaps critical, summary of mainstream rural
sociology in Turkey up to the mid-1970s, see, Ulrich Planck, “Türkiye’de Köy Sosyolojisi,” Erzurum
Atatürk Üniversitesi İşletme Dergisi 2, no. 4 (1977). Planck pointed out that even a simply essential
question regarding the discipline itself remained unanswered: whether to call the field of inquiry “rural
sociology”, or the “sociology of village.” In my view, while the former required a much more structuralist
and dynamic analysis, the latter befits the Turkish political stasis that treated villages as the homogeneous
source of the Turkic identity. In the centrally dictated curricula of most of the state universities’ sociology
departments, the Rural Sociology course is still taught under the name “Sociology of Village.”
91
Daniel Lerner, The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East (Free Press, 1958);
Arthur Paul Stirling, Turkish Village (Wiley, 1965).
92
294
industrializing cities conducted in the 1960s, urbanization was largely absent in Turkish
social sciences’ intellectual agenda.93 İlhan Tekeli pointed out that until the mid -1960s,
twenty years after the emergence of the phenomenon, only three pieces of research were
done on the gecekondus in Turkey.94 The first large-scale, longitudinal, and useful study
in Istanbul was conducted by Charles William Merton in Zeytinburnu, in the mid1960s.95
Hart was an unusually frank social scientist. His criticisms and comments should
have made a lasting impact amidst the theoretically abstract agenda of Turkish social
scientists. His frankness should also be seen as an element of goodwill with a salt of
extreme amazement to the jargon ridden and sterile inertia of the bureaucratic elites in
academia. In 1966, for instance, the parliament asked for his opinion on the gecekondus
as a specialist on the issue and as the chairperson of the department of Social
Anthropology. His reply, the thinly veiled sarcasm prevalent in the tone of his criticism,
Mübeccel Belik Kıray, Ereğli: Ağır Sanayiden Önce Bir Sahil Kasabası (Ankara: T.C. Başbakanlık
Devlet Plânlama Teşkilâtı, 1964); Mübeccel Belik Kıray, Örgütleşemeyen Kent: İzmir’de İş Hayatının
Yapısı ve Yerleşme Düzeni, Sosyal Bilimler Araştırma Serisi A-1 (Ankara: Türk Sosyal Bilimler Derneği,
1972).
93
For Tekeli, the most important among them was written by Granville H. Sewell as a dissertation thesis in
political science from MIT, named, “Türkiye’de Gecekondu Yerleşmeleri: Bir Sosyal Siyasal ve Ekonomik
Problem.” The other two are written by another PhD student, İbrahim Öğretmen, at Ankara University
Faculty of Political Sciences, and by a rural well-known rural sociologist, İbrahim Yasa, from the same
faculty. See, Tekeli, Türkiye’de yaşamda ve yazında konut sorununun gelişimi, 118–122.
94
Hart, Zeytinburnu Gecekondu Bölgesi. Charles W.M. Hart (1905-1976) was an Australian born social
anthropologist and sociologist, a naturalized citizen of the U.S. he died there in 1976. He studied with
Radcliffe-Brown between the years 1923-1929 at Sydney University, later continued his studied with
Malinowski and Seligman at LSE and University of London in from 1930 to 1932. Between 1928 and 1930
he conducted his field research for his dissertation amidst the Tiwi peoples of Australia. In 1932, he moved
to Canada as a founding member of faculty of department of Anthropology at Toronto University. Later, he
accepted a job offer from Istanbul University to establish a department of Anthropology and to serve as the
department chair-the second Anthropology department to be opened after the physical anthropology
department at Ankara University, which was established in the 1930s. He continued as the chair of
department until his wife’s health problems led to their return to the US in 1969. Ronald Cohen, “Charles
William Merton Hart, 1905-1976,” American Anthropologist 79, no. 1 (March 1, 1977): 111–12.
95
295
is still unrivalled given the relations between the state and academia in Turkey. He wrote
in his report to the parliament that “this problem, which can be discerned by anyone with
a mediocre IQ, has turned into an irresolvable issue due to the lawmakers’ confusion
regarding two different aspects of the problem.” 96
The problem Hart referred to was a fairly simple one: How can we differentiate
between the old gecekondu settlements where people have already settled for decades,
and the new squatters, or the ones which will be squatted very soon under the
circumstances of population explosion in Istanbul? He argued that, the lawmakers, the
drafters of the law, and the technocrats in Ankara had probably no idea what a gecekondu
district looked like or what the differences were between Zeytinburnu –with a history of
30 years’- and Çağlayan, a relatively new and rapidly prospering area, and, Yıldız Tabya,
where appropriation of land had just begun. By evaluating all the gecekondus under an
umbrella formula, the lawmakers not only hurt the established neighborhoods like
Zeytinburnu, but they also willingly voted for a law which had no practical use, or chance
of implementation in the face of actual reality of squatting and population growth. His
study shed an invaluable light with its empirical depth and meticulous collection of data
unmatched in its access to every possible level of gecekondu life in Zeytinburnu that
contributed greatly to a sociological understanding of the urban phenomenon. His team
conducted surveys with all 9800 households in Zeytinburnu, reaching out to the complete
population of 120,000 at the time.97
Hart, Zeytinburnu Gecekondu Bölgesi, 116. Unfortunately, I could not access his letter to the parliment,
yet, the letter is dated 7 July, 1966.
96
97
Kemal Karpat’s Gecekondu is also of immense importance, conducted as almost complementary to
Hart’s research as underlined above. Yet, Karpat was actually seeking a clue to the break up of the past
order, not signs of further developments, as his later research confirmed his interest. See, Karpat, The
Gecekondu : Rural Migration and Urbanization. Furthermore, thanks to his privileged position as the
296
Even from the outset, Hart faced a strange lack of data on urban settlements in
Turkey. Any state institution had more or less a pre-conceived idea about the gecekondus,
but they had no hard data on their convictions. Yet, an apparent interest in the housing
problem was ascendant among the progressive circles by early 1960s. On September 7,
1964, Hart attended a seminar on housing, organized by TEKSİF –one of the most
important unions organized under the biggest Turkish trade union confederation, TÜRKİŞ. Tarhan Erdem, a familiar name to the Turkish audience was the organizer of the
seminar on behalf of the union.98 At this conjuncture, once an important contingent of
Turkish intellectuals paid needed attention to the housing question, Hart voiced utter
criticism. The data the governmental institutions collected about the issue was either
deeply lacking, or not well kept. 99 He uttered his frank observation on the issue:
Although, nobody has concrete and reliable figures and knowledge about the
people who live in gecekondus in Istanbul, almost everybody has plenty of
estimates, notions, and pre-conceived conclusions on them.100
Here, Hart’s criticism of the Gecekondu Law is meaningful and implicates the
main characteristics of Turkish governmentality. Plans and legislation were drawn at the
table, not using empirical data, and in essence had nothing to do with reality. The
verifiable knowledge, the falsifiable truth, as the fundamental pillar of any legislation –
departmental chair, Hart commanded more resources to conduct research unprecedented in its reach and
longitude.
98
Erdem later served as the general secretary of RPP for a short interregnum after the party’s crushing
defeat in 1999. He runs a social research company and regularly writes a column for the liberal left-wing
newspaper, Radikal. In 1963, he was also a representative of TEKSİF at the 1. Housing Panel organized at
Istanbul Technical University.
99
Tekeli, Türkiye’de yaşamda ve yazında konut sorununun gelişimi, 114–123.
100
Ibid., 123.
297
or, any scientific and modern undertaking- was missing.101 For that reason, the
Kazlıçeşme plans made in 1957 had nothing to do with the actual reality on the ground.
The grid plans suggested by the planning professionals, blocks of developments which
had no grain of relevance in themselves to the actual development of the neighborhood,
were merely vicious approximations drawn somewhere in Ankara to be exercised in
Zeytinburnu. Hart was not sarcastic, but rather plain spoken when he argued that “what
the Turkish architects and planners made of urban planning was nothing more than
rectangles orderly drawn on a blank piece of paper.”102
A similar situation could be observed in the persons of Hart’s undergraduate and
graduate students. His students came from Istanbul’s well-to-do neighborhoods, and none
had set foot in a gecekondu before. Actually, some of his students declared that their time
at the places of particular ill-fame was not well-received by their families, when asked
about their research in the gecekondus.103 Social scientists had a certain distance between
their work, their habitus, daily lives, and the lived and practical spaces of the working
classes, just like the planners and architects. As soon as Hart’s research began, that actual
distance showed itself. In 1962, the wounds of Menderes’ execution were still fresh in the
gecekondu district –he was venerated by the residents as a great leader- so people showed
hostility and well deserved suspicion towards authorities on the research team. Hart
decided to rent a gecekondu and moved a part of his research team into that house for a
full-time stay. Henceforth, they succeeded in breaking the barrier between the researchers
101
Hart, Zeytinburnu Gecekondu Bölgesi, 50.
102
Ibid., 107–8.
103
Ibid., iii.
298
and the people of the area. 104
The research was conducted from July 1962 to February 1963, first funded by the
Istanbul Chamber of Commerce, and then, after their funding was cut, supported by the
Ministry of Planning and Building. They were also supported, at least nominally by the
planning department of the Istanbul metropolitan municipality, headed by Turgut
Cansever. From the outset they faced a methodological problem: what should be the
sample, and how would that sampling be selected? The already tense political atmosphere
contributed to their problems in the neighborhood, but the households fiercely protested,
and were deeply suspicious of the selection of their neighbors. Why didn’t the researchers
ask them questions? Were they not deemed as worthy as the next house? How could they
not stop by their place? Typical questions any self-respecting sociologist from Turkey
would hear were continuously directed at them. Hart decided that it was a helpless
situation, as there was no way to explain the mechanisms of sampling for a survey to the
whole sub-province. So he went with the ballistic option and decided to carry the
questionnaire to every household in Zeytinburnu. A highly impractical choice for a social
scientist, burdensome and tiring indeed, nevertheless he let us have a preciously precise
study of the early 1960s gecekondus.105
The most crucial finding of the research was a reiteration of an already known fact
-that the immigrants were not interested at all in returning back to their villages. The
question of if they would be interested in going back to their villages met with an
104
Ibid.
105
Ibid., 1–2.
299
overwhelmingly negative response.106 Against years of oppression, extortion, hardships,
in a dire situation where some of the houses were demolished 13 times and rebuilt 14
times, and contrary to the urban middle classes expectations for their return, they
unequivocally declared their intention to stay. They not only had no interest in going
back to their villages, but also they denied hypothetical choices for moving out of their
self-made homes -90 per cent declared that they were not willing to leave their
gecekondus.107 Five decades after Hart’s study, I can attest to the correctness of his
survey, as the Zeytinburnu population has perhaps quadrupled in the period, but the core
stayed the same. The earlier immigrants grew roots here, their sons and daughters
continued their lives in the neighborhood, and scarcely moved out of the area. They
reaped what their mother and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers had sown in bitter,
endless, worrisome struggle against the state and municipal institutions. They made
themselves a new home away from home in this part of Istanbul.
Furthermore, the situation of the gecekondus, at the time of the study was far from
being certain. In Gültepe, a relatively newer gecekondu settlement in Şişli, people had
already received their title deeds from the government, and although they were much
poorer than Zeytinburnu, the prevailing mood was much more optimistic and their
attachment to their land and to their district was manifestly full of confidence for the
future.108 Yet, the people of Zeytinburnu had a burning desire to better their
106
Ibid., 63.
107
Ibid., 44.
In Gültepe, on the other side of the Golden Horn, situated near the E-5 highway (then constructed as the
main road connecting Istanbul to the European highway system), was one of the earliest gecekondu
neighborhoods to fully receive land titles. Zeytinburnu had to wait another decade, until the 1970s to
completely receive titles to their land. Hart draws a stark distinction between Gültepe and Zeytinburnu,
while Gültepe was built recently, he argued, the prevailing mood in the district is much more optimistic
108
300
neighborhood, but they had to live in tin shacks due to their fear of demolition, and rarely
spent any money on their homes and gardens. Meanwhile, even though close to half of
the houses were already marked in the cadastral maps and granted temporary land titles,
the state still planned large-scale demolitions. Worse still, the planner and architects had
not paid attention to how those people lived, and had drawn their sketches far from
Zeytinburnu. One of the founders of this gigantic gecekondu town told Hart, “we found
this big city and we’re proud of it, but nobody thanked us for this.”109 I have talked to
people whose grandmothers and grandfathers lived in small shacks, afraid to build more,
and even if they had spare land to build another house for their kin, they rented it for fear
of demolition, or worse, expropriation. They told me the stories of how their
grandmothers slept on bare earth, just to hang onto their tiny piece of land, to save it from
being retaken by the authorities. Today, Zeytinburnu is still alive and one of the
burgeoning inner city areas of the city thanks to such pioneers. And the informal network
of social and economic relations built by them still continues to function.
Hart saw that Zeytinburnu was an integral part of Istanbul’s industrial growth,
something that the state sanctioned academia never found the heart to utter, and the
socialist intellectuals found themselves imprisoned for saying the obvious: “If
[tomorrow] you move the Zeytinburnu people out of this area and demolish the
gecekondus, factories in Kazlıçeşme, Zeytinburnu, Bakırköy, Osmaniye would find no
one to work.”110 The work was no pure exploitation by the factory owners though, in the
compared to Zeytinburnu, then, a gecekondu settlement of two decades.
109
Hart, Zeytinburnu Gecekondu Bölgesi, 28–9.
110
Ibid., 67.
301
first half of the 1960s, Hart showed that the real income of a gecekondu household
increased twofold.111 It is true that the Zeytinburnu folk had not welcomed May 27, 1960,
raised vocal objections to the overthrowing of a popularly elected government, and a few
years ago, attacked Ismet Inonu in Topkapı and beat up his retinue. Yet, in a few years,
due to the unprecedented economic growth and thanks to redistributive policies
developed by the junta and following the RPP governments, impoverished peripheral
neighborhoods unwillingly bought into the new governing power elite’s rule. A half-way
consensus was built,-they would not rise up against the new balance of power, and in
return their homes would not be demolished. Hence, a silent pact was signed into by the
working classes. The carrot in the form of property ownership has helped pacify the
working classes, bought them into the governing consensus, kept the otherwise
objectionable practices in the working place under a tight lid, solidified a right-wing
coalition that earned the underlying bureaucratic-military elite’s approval at all times.
Such coalition tactics worked until the breaking up of the pact by a deep turmoil in the
ruling elite fractions in 2010. The peasants moved into the city and carved themselves a
new home there, and along the way, determined the fate of the country.
Another important finding of Hart’s research concerned women’s entry into the
work force. Against all odds, 16 per cent of all married women (almost half of all women
over 18, and between a quarter and a half of all females in the 13-to-18 age range
depending on income levels) worked in Zeytinburnu. Similarly, the gender roles in the
labor force did not fit the facile descriptions –where, depending on the researcher’s
political standing, either men stayed at home and spent time at the local coffee house and
“Average monthly income in Zeytinburnu is three times the amount found in Denizli and Tarsus
villages, more than the amount in Polatlı villages, and exactly four times of Erzurum villages.” Ibid., 63.
111
302
women worked as servants, or women were stuck in the vicious cycle of unpaid domestic
labor while men earned money as blue collar workers. Unemployment in the
neighborhood was below 10 per cent, less than the nationwide unemployment levels, and
men actively sought work in the market place.
What Hart could not foresee was the political and cultural trajectory of the
gecekondus. Even though he did not suggest explicitly, the underlying arguments of his
research proposed a gradual liberalization of the gecekondu society and an invincible
formation of a liberal middle class out of those people he studied. He thought that in the
near future the gender division of labor and the barriers that kept women as secondary
citizens would be overcome:
A young woman who lives in Zeytinburnu today is an urbanite. She wears high
heels and short skirts, imitates Beyoğlu fashion, follows [the other] urbanites in
her behaviors and tastes. If she graduates from middle or high school she would
look for a job in a bank or at an office in the city; or else, she would work as a
salesperson in Aksaray or Beyoğlu retail store; if she cannot complete high
school, she would seek for a “good and regular job in a “good and regular
factory.” In both cases, even if she marries, when possible, she would keep on
working not for money, but for the satisfaction of work…From the perspective of
women this is an aspect of Turkey’s industrialization and modernization and in
our opinion this is a healthy and good aspect.112
Yes, a middle class was born out of the gecekondu settlements, but they were
nowhere near what Hart suggested, definitely not liberal, and they were not even socially
moderately conservative and economically left-wing. A crass chauvinism, a heartbreakingly unequal gender division of labor, a boringly dull nationalism pervasively took
over the gecekondu districts after the 1980 coup. Karpat, for instance, thought and
showed that a left-wing tendency was imminent in the gecekondu districts. His research
112
Ibid., 80.
303
in Sarıyer, Baltalimanı, and today’s Rumelihisarüstü showed that 15 per cent of the poor
squatters voted for the Labor Party of Turkey (the first socialist party to be represented in
the parliament), and his surveys indicated that the leader of the Labor Party, Mehmet Ali
Aybar, came in the fourth place, after Inönü, Demirel, and Sunay (the first, one of the
two founding fathers of the republic, the second the leader of the center right, and the
third, the then president), beyond, Ecevit, Menderes, Çetin Altan, and Alpaslan Türkeş.
Someone who had gone through such survey data in the 1970s would have suggested that
in ten years’ time the Labor Party be a formidable force of parliamentary opposition, if
not a minor partner in government.113 Political and street level violence, the 1971 coup,
bad and unwise choices made by the socialists themselves, and surreptitiously
reoccurring ruptures in the political system contributed to the disappearance of the
parliamentary socialism, while the extreme nationalist Türkeş and Islamist Erbakan laid
the foundations of Turkey for the next four decades. Hart recognized the urban
characteristics of Zeytinburnu in the 1960s, unfortunately the endless bickering,
theoretically ambivalent, empirically weak basis of Turkish social sciences still sought
the peasants, the villagers, the varoş in the city. Hart was right, but what he could not
foresee were an intricately related series of processes: the onslaught of premature
deindustrialization, merciless devaluation of labor under flexible accumulation, the
disorganization of the working classes’ unionization, the breaking up of the organized
political parties, a whole new array of neoliberal mechanisms of dispossession that was
sown on January 25, 1980, and the inescapable allure of urban land rent.
113
Karpat, Türkiyede Toplumsal Dönüsüm, 309–330.
304
5.9
Squatters in the Time of Cholera: Impending Epidemics and the
End of Turkey’s Belle Époque
Another crucial observation of Hart’s study concerns the potable water provision
and the wastewater disposal system in Zeytinburnu. According to his team’s survey, more
than a quarter of the toilets were used commonly between adjacent houses. The main
method for the building of the toilets and the control of the waste water was, for a couple
of adjacent lots to dig a common hole. In the 1960s, only a single district in Zeytinburnu
had a functioning sewage system. The rest used cesspits as their primary wastewater
collection methods. Even houses with built-in toilets had employed these simple –and
highly unsanitary- cesspits. The cesspits were mostly the responsibility of the gecekondu
dwellers. The accumulated wastewater was collected by municipality trucks equipped
with waste-water pumps. Three quarters of the households used these municipality
collecting trucks to empty their cesspits, but this was done for a fee. The rest of the
houses, close to a quarter of them, and mostly the poorest ones, either covered the cesspit
with soil and dug a new hole for a new cesspool, or removed the waste-water themselves,
or did nothing at all with the waste.114
Drinking water was primarily carried from the fountains, the adjacent
neighborhood, Kazlıçeşme, is named after an Ottoman-era public fountain-the fountain
had, and until recently, a stone relief of a goose. The most well-known amongst several
fountains was the Valide fountain, which was closed down in 1964 due to
contamination.115 The municipal authorities built several public fountains in the 1960s,
114
Hart, Zeytinburnu Gecekondu Bölgesi, 52.
115
Ibid., 53.
305
which provided potable water for up to 80 percent of the households in some districts of
Zeytinburnu.116 Yet, as my interviewees pointed out, a prominent trend from the late
1940s onwards, was gecekondu dwellers digging their own water-wells. Some, with easy
access to their wells had gone for selling their excess water for a small amount in tin
cans, while one enterprising family had even built a sizable water tower and distributed
water to other houses via pipes for a monthly fee of 10 liras.117
The risk was evident. In the absence of a sewage system, the smallest leak from
any one of the cesspools –considering the fact that these were used by more than a
family, each with around ten persons, approximating 30 to 40 users for each cesspoolwould have contaminated both the water from the public fountains and the private water
wells very easily. When Hart did his research in the mid-1960s, the condition of the
waterworks and sewage system was glaring. It took a few years for the real toll to make
itself felt in Istanbul. On October 15, 1970, after months of news about cholera epidemics
in neighboring countries, newspapers reported that an epidemic “illness” passed through
water, euphemistically named “gastro enterite” but not cholera, had killed three
persons.118
The epidemic did not begin exactly in Zeytinburnu, but very nearby, 5 miles north
of Zeytinburnu, in Sağmalcılar. Sağmalcılar was a gecekondu district built around its
namesake prison-which also happens to be the prison in the setting of Billy Hayes’ brutal
ordeal-named later which came to fame with the blockbuster movie The Midnight
116
Ibid., 54.
117
Ibid.
118
Vasfiye Özkoçak, “Hasta Sayısı 150’yi Aşıyor,” Milliyet, October 15, 1970.
306
Express. Sağmalcılar was a decade newer and in a much worse economic and material
shape than Zeytinburnu, and mostly comprised of immigrants from Yugoslavia. The next
day, the newspapers started to grasp the extent and severity of the epidemic, and while
the Minister of Health avowedly dismissed the possibility that it was cholera, the
headlines glaringly announced the outbreak of cholera.119 The reporters entered the
gecekondu district for the first time with the minister’s entourage, and they witnessed the
primary schools without adequate water sources, or a sewage system. The toilets of the
school were reeking, because the sewage was not connected to the main pipes laid in
front of the school building.120 Yet, two days later, on October 18, the first reports from
the Hospital for Tropical Diseases in Bakırköy showed the brutal impact of the disease.
The doctors and hospital staff were grossly inadequate for the task, and many perhaps,
hundreds were left to their own devices for survival. Infants, adolescents, young women,
and pregnant women were especially vulnerable.121 While the administration never
denied prescribing the disease as cholera for fear of international quarantine, rather came
up with another ingenious idea to label it with the particular strand of bacterium that
caused it, as the El Tor cholera, and the whole city was dreadfully shaken by this
insurmountable and invisible disease. The health ministry’s official explanation put the
death toll at 27, and announced 715 hospitalized due to the illness, but the Milliyet
reported 41 deaths, and thousands hospitalized on the third day of the epidemic according
to its own sources.122 The final official tally was 50 deaths and 1163 hospitalized due to
119
“Kolera Şüphesi Belirdi,” Milliyet, October 16, 1970.
120
Vasfiye Özkoçak, “Sağlık Bakanı’yla Beraber Sağmalcılar’ı Teftiş Ettik,” Milliyet, October 16, 1970.
121
Özdemir Gürsoy, “Tek Bir Ses Vardı: Ölüyoruz, Ölüyoruz!,” Milliyet, October 18, 1970.
122
“Bakan: Salgında Duraklama Var,” Milliyet, October 18, 1970.
307
illness. However, it is very likely that this figure was largely an understatement of the
real effect of the epidemic.
The disease continued unabated for at least another ten days after its initial
outbreak. On October 26, 1970, the legendary journalist and the editor-in-chief of the
Milliyet daily, published an interview with one lucky survivor. The survivor, Muharrem
Özden, a master glazier from Sağmalcılar, explained in the interview that seventeen
people –five siblings, three of them married, and their children- lived in their gecekondu
of seven rooms. Three of these siblings got sick by cholera and hospitalized. The glazier
detailed how they had drunk the water, knowing full well that probably it was not
potable, and how the municipality failed in installing sewage pipes for months at that
time which led to the overflowing of the cesspools-his account was confirmed by
previous newspaper reporting. A rather striking issue in the interview was İpekçi’s
insistent suggestion that perhaps Özden’s hometown, in Erzincan, a small village by the
Euphrates River, may have suited him and his family better. Özden single-handedly
refused such a suggestion, and he gave examples of how they could not get any medical
attention in their village even if they had money, that they lacked electricity and basic
retail facilities like butchers, groceries, and lastly, of course, mentioned how they made
more money in Istanbul and how he could afford meat any given day, while he could eat
only two or three times per year in his hometown. So, when İpekçi pointedly insinuated
the question that it might have been better to live in his village again, Özden halfheartedly said, “yes, perhaps I could have gone back to my village, provided that I earned
well.”123 The epidemics did not stop the run from the rural idyllic, neither swerved the
123
Abdi İpekçi, “Her Hafta Bir Sohbet: Kolera’yı Nasıl Atlattım,” Milliyet, October 26, 1970.
308
intelligentsia’s deeply held belief in their exact place –back at their villages- nor sent
back the already rooted millions.
The public reaction to the epidemic was swift, frenzied as usual in Turkey, and
overly cautious; drinking water was boiled for months and it later led to the first bottled
water distribution services to be established in the city. For the well-off, drinking and
cooking water was bought from suppliers in five-gallon glass jugs –the most famous
amongst these bottled water suppliers was from a village called Taşdelen next to
Alemdağ, then an idyllic rural outpost on the northeast of the city, now a primary urban
sprawl area, named Çekmeköy. The impending feeling of invisible death meant the
closure of the 1960s belle époque with unprecedented economic growth and an expansion
of the welfare provided by rapid urbanization and industrialization. The epidemic also
pronounced the first public blunder of Süleyman Demirel’s government, elected a second
time with %47 of the votes just a year before, Demirel was at the height of his power
when cholera struck. His role as the successor to Menderes and the leader of center-right
was brandished with his two-overwhelming majorities in 1965 and 1969 elections (his
1965 win with %53 is still unsurpassed, the Republican People’s Party, still headed by
Ismet İnönü was still a distinct second, with %28 and %26 of the vote tally respectively).
Five months later, on March 12, 1971, Demirel was overthrown by a right-wing army
junta led by the chief-of-staff of the Armed Forces. Presumably to fend off another junta
from taking over power-the Madanoğlu junta, led by General Cemal Madanoğlu, this one
was a coalition of left-wing, Kemalist intellectuals and younger officers of the army. His
cabinet was replaced by a cabinet of professionals hand-picked by generals, and this socalled technocratic cabinet ran the country under martial law until the general elections in
309
1973, arrested thousands of socialists, tortured writers, journalists, university professors,
and intellectuals in special interrogation cells, hanged three young revolutionaries, Deniz
Gezmiş, Hüseyin İnan, and Yusuf Aslan, whose most serious crime was bank robbery,
and summarily executed tens of young socialists in the Anatolian countryside. The 1970s
opened with an epidemic and its fever burnt the whole country for the next decade in
street fights and daily acts of political violence. Within this overall picture and as a
consequence of left-wing politics’ popular outreach, the cholera epidemic of the 1970
have helped gecekondu areas change their political allegiances from right wing parties to
newly active left-wing parties and organizations that were now beginning to engage with
a new and militant form of grassroots politics.
After the 1960s, the middle class left the historic peninsula en masse. Laleli,
Aksaray, Kocamustafapaşa, and Çapa were the hardest hit from the middle class flight.
The three boulevards opened up after the greatest devastation Istanbul reckoned were
soon ghost highways. They saw activity only during the daytime in the areas where
Istanbul University’s main campus, hospitals and the Istanbul police headquarters are
located, but at night, the humdrum of the crowds petered out.124
5.10 The Rise and Fall of Gecekondus: The not-so-quiet Encroachment
of the May Day Neighborhood
One of the most studied, symbolically important gecekondu settlements of the
1970s was built as a working class squat on the Asian side of Istanbul near the highway
For the migration of the middles classes from Laleli, see Çağlar Keyder, “A Tale of Two
Neighborhoods,” Istanbul Between the Global and the Local, 1999, 173–86.
124
310
that connected Istanbul to Ankara, in the location known as Kapanağılı.125 Kapanağılı
was partly an old pig farm –owned by non-Muslims, but apparently run by Muslims- and
the northern part of the area was dotted with stone quarries, again owned by Greeks. An
overwhelming amount of the land in Kapanağılı belonged to a Greek, named Gornik,
who resided in Karaköy, Bankalar Street. However, the anti-Greek policies of successive
governments, the September 6-7, 1955 pogrom in Istanbul, and Inönü government’s
large-scale deportation of Istanbul Greeks in the early 1960s –as a reaction to the
simmering Cyprus issue- on flimsy legal basis led to a depopulation of Istanbul’s Greek
population. The depopulation, forced immigration policies, and Turkification of the city
and perhaps deliberately ended up in a massive transfer of land and urban private
property. It is extensively written how Istanbul Greeks –and other minorities- had to sell
their lands and buildings for trinkets before they left the country. Similarly, lands and
farms in Kapanağılı were seamlessly transferred to the workers in those stone quarries
and farms, and especially the supervising foremen of the enterprises, the Turkish people,
benefitted from this forced migration.126
125
Aslan, 1 Mayıs Mahallesi 1980 Öncesi Toplumsal Mücadeleler ve Kent, 95.
126
Ibid., 95–6.
311
Figure 5.8: Ataşehir Map127
Similar to Kapanağılı, a large stretch of land from the E-5 highway to the
connecting arteries of the TEM motorway, thousands of acres of land, were known in the
vicinity as Karaman Farm until the early 1980s. This vast land was still used as grazing
area for the sheep flocks as late as 1980s, and the owners of the land, the Tahralı family –
a family claimed to come from Karaman in central Anatolia, hence the farm’s namewere running a dairy farm at that time. The Tahralı family began selling land piecemeal.
First the land was sold to building cooperatives, to the TESK (Cooperative of Craftsmen
and Artisans of Turkey) which built one of the earliest “modern” styled gated apartment
development –called, Bağ-Kur (an abbreviation of social security system for the selfemployed, the so-called, craftsmen and artisans) and a mile to the north, the Esin blocks
were their making. Later in the mid-1980s, a huge apartment complex of upwards to 2000
units- was erected by a pioneering private sector developer, Soyak, designed by the
famous architect Behruz Çinici, and this completed the thorough settlement of this area
127
Source: Istanbul Ataşehir Municipality, www.atasehir.bel.tr
312
by the nascent middle class. The farm area was extensive to today’s Ataşehir subprovince. There exists no reliable records, but, this vast land, Karaman Farm, might be
connected to the massive expropriation of Greeks during this period. Urbanization in
Istanbul, inasmuch as a story of redistribution instigated by the growth machine of
gecekondus, was similarly a product of the expropriation of non-Muslims’ private
property either in the form of taking control of urban land and key architectural buildings
from their lands by heavy taxation, or by mere coercion.
The Gecekondu Law of 1966 permitted a key intervention and opened up a new
entrepreneurial venue in urban development efforts: trade unions, chambers of
commerce, and basically any voluntary association were encouraged to organize around
building cooperatives and they were granted public land, low interest credits from the
state banks, and further, some exceptions on taxation. Additionally, land grants to
municipalities as gecekondu prevention areas and the Planning and Building Ministry’s
budgetary allocations helped a novel phenomenon appear in Istanbul, for the first time,
the state initiated social housing for the disadvantaged sections of society in the 1960s.
Building cooperatives played a crucial role for the development efforts and greatly helped
state employees and organized workers to own a house throughout the 1980s and ‘90s.
The foremen and contractors raised and earned a place in construction business and as the
building cooperatives later gave way to large-scale private developers in the 2000s, they
played a big role as the newfangled and ambitious businessmen of a new era.
Unfortunately, the building cooperatives, a brain child of Bülent Ecevit and his RPP,
could not even supply a significant portion of the housing necessary to stem the growth
of the gecekondus event during the sporadic rule of RPP in the 1970s and instead, helped
313
middle classes gain a foothold in the already chaotic urban land markets by sheer force of
numbers. In the absence of credit in urban development, the cooperatives served the
purpose of small-scale housing loans banks, though, more often than not, they took years
to complete, involved graft, and most of these cooperatives ended up bankrupt,
particularly during the crisis prone years of 1990s. The varied and highly experimental
state-space building endeavor makes itself visible in the 2- mile radius around the May
Day neighborhood in a multi-layered cross-section of class relations.
Soon after the passing of the Gecekondu Law, an expansive swath of public land
by the E-5 highway that extended to the south of present Ümraniye was allocated as the
Ümraniye area gecekondu prevention zone. Here in one part of the allocated land, the
Planning and Building Ministry commenced construction of social housing. Aside from a
few examples –in the 1930s the first housing complex of the republic, named Saracoğlu
Houses were built in Ankara as state and army employees accommodation, later in the
1950s, in Levent and Ataköy the Menderes government tried to provide housing, but that
only fed into the middle class aspirations for western style “modern” urban living, the
land grant and limited housing provided to the Balkan immigrants in the 1950s, and the
building of a grand complex of housing and leisure facilities for the military officers and
state officials (the logements as a direct borrow-word from French)- the state was mainly
impervious to the housing question. In essence, the state was interested in creating
housing supply and urban development for its subservient class fraction –the militarybureaucratic complex- and partly in the middle class housing, which already had
economic and material means to own their homes. 128
The sole example of social housing in a significant scale was the Saracoğlu district in Ankara, slated to
be a 3000 unit comple. The land appropriation began in 1928, but no construction activity took place until
128
314
In 1968, an area consisting of today’s Esatpaşa, Örnek, parts of Fetih, Aşık
Veysel, and Mustafa Kemal mahalles, 2100 decares of land were appropriated by the
state. 1200 decares of this land were transferred to the Istanbul metropolitan municipality,
while 900 decares were given to the then still rural municipality of Ümraniye. On this
land, a social housing complex with 200 units was built by the Planning and Building
Ministry in today’s Esatpaşa, and further land was granted to the cooperatives which built
680 apartments. By 1977, the state had completed 880 homes in almost a decade, but, in
the land surrounding the state-built social housing, on the gecekondu prevention site and
on the conjoining land of quarries and farms, already more than 4500 gecekondus were
built. What the state did was too little, too late, once again.129
The first gecekondus in Kapanağılı were built by the instigation of certain groups
who had connections among the immigrant community and who allegedly had influence
amidst the decision-makers of the time. In the 1970s, the earliest founders of the
gecekondu communities were adept traders in influence and established their own
protection rackets to sustain their power over land distribution. Organized crime had
been an integral part of the land grab from the beginning, and they were called the land
mafia by the early 1980s in the mainstream newspapers. The oldest residents of the
mahalle thought that this land mafia and these rentiers were the ones who first saw an
opportunity for gain here. Yet, organized crime could not easily parcel out land and
distribute it to buyers, because the neighborhood stood next to one of the main garbage
1944. The Paul Bonatz designed housing complex for the bureaucratic and military elite was completed in
1946, though on a much smaller scale, 424 units were finished by that time. See, Tekeli, Türkiye’de
yaşamda ve yazında konut sorununun gelişimi, 40.
129
Faik Akın and Abdullah Öğülmüş, “1 Mayıs Mahallesi: Nedir Ne Değildir? I,” Milliyet, May 1, 1978.
315
disposal areas in Istanbul’s Asian side. Compared to the other, adjacent areas –for
instance, Yeni Sahra a few miles east of the Kapanağılı- the garbage made the area
unsavory, at least, in the beginning.130
The growing power of organized crime and its pioneering role in commodifying
urban land in return for both protection rackets –they claimed they were protecting the
mahalle from demolition by bribing persons of power, or by threatening the individual
gecekondu owners to abide by their power- reached a certain pivotal moment in 1977 in
Kapanağılı. The area saw considerable movement in 1976, and was ripe for organized
crime’s intervention and its function as speculators on urban land. Farms with loosely
documented titles of ownership, stone quarries with unknown landlords, a wide area in
between designated as a gecekondu prevention zone by the state, and on top of all, a
municipal administration with plenty of land but few authority over that land –Ümraniye
was no more than a village entity at the time- further underlined the vast economic
possibilities that waited its speculators in the area. Moreover, the working class
population had already settled in nearby areas like Fikirtepe and their growing numbers
and relative proximity to the urban centers like Üsküdar and Kadıköy added to the
attraction. The area was open for the taking and whoever first claimed it would have to
preserve its claim by a carefully balanced mix of physical force, extortion, bribery, and
friends in the higher-up places.
Şükrü Aslan, who wrote a brilliant monograph on the establishment of the
gecekondu neighborhood here, related that he found a chance to meet a couple who
moved into the area in the 1960s. The couple told him that when they arrived the area
130
Aslan, 1 Mayıs Mahallesi 1980 Öncesi Toplumsal Mücadeleler ve Kent, 99–100.
316
was no different than the countryside, with few and far between country houses, and
plenty of grazing land for the sheep. By the 1970s the flood gates were wide open, but the
gecekondu dwellers knew that demolition was not far away and they had no means to
stand against the municipal authorities. A group of people offered the Kapanağılı
residents their help: they would obtain necessary permits for building and thwart attempts
of demolition, telling them that they had connections in higher places. But, those in
higher places were not easy to persuade, and the ones in the gendarmerie (the rural
police) and municipalities were rather greedy, so they asked payments from the residents.
They said that the money was for presents, for taking the people of influence out to
dinner at luxury restaurants, and, also, for bribery. One day, it was money to be collected
for buying dinner for gendarmerie officers, the next day it was for a present. After a
point, the residents began to ponder if the money collected from them, which they had no
idea of how it was being spent, was actually paid straight into a protection racket. Some
even claimed that they saw some members of this group enjoying their time in the night
clubs by themselves. They felt cheated. The people of the mahalle decided to elect their
own representatives by public vote. This new representative committee would decide the
further development of the mahalle, determine the new direction of their neighborhood’s
expansion, solve problems regarding the borders between gecekondus –a crucial task,
since no parcel was cadastrally drawn, it was a permanent source of conflict between
neighbors- decide communal squat of new public land, provide suitable land for
newcomers, rent empty lots to increase the community coffers, and prevent speculation
over their appropriated land. They established a true community organization that would
protect residents’ interest in the city. In the summer months of 1977, the committee was
317
founded as a consequence of a participatory meeting where all had a say. The committee
membership was mostly made up of young socialists from the neighborhood, but a few
people known to be representatives of the organized crime group were also elected. The
first real democratic local self-government experience came into existence in this way.
Alas, the brevity of the experience was no match for its wider social repercussions that
would resonate deeply in the next four decades.
The mass appropriation of mainly public land was spearheaded by a series of
Maoist socialist organizations: Halkın Yolu (People’s Path), Halkın Birliği (People’s
Unity), Halkın Kurtuluşu (People’s Salvation) –a family of socialist organization, they
were offshoots of internal divisions of an earlier organization, but they were in alliance
with each other, and collectively known as the Halkın Sülalesi (People’s Family)
colloquially among other socialists- and Partizan led the efforts. The Maoists of the time,
during my interviews also related how this mass appropriation and participatory
grassroots democracy experiment were a making of their own –they, kind of, jealously
wanted to guard their important contribution to urban socialist struggle. Though,
apparently, Maoism and urban appropriation were not theoretically compatible –their
organizing principle pivoted on a revolutionary movement that sprang from the
countryside and then moved into the urban areas.
However, Aslan underlined that this large-scale experiment in land appropriation
and distribution to those in need could only be facilitated through consensus building
politics.131 Similarly for instance, at around the same time, Fatsa people elected the
socialist tailor, Fikri Sönmez (the tailor Fikri) as an independent mayor. Tailor Fikri, built
131
Ibid., 120–5.
318
a popular committee, ended fierce violent struggles between right-wing and left-wing
citizens of Fatsa, instigated collective work for public roads, waterworks, and organized a
theatre, musical workshop in less than a year.132 Both experiences in power –for the first
time in Turkey’s history of socialism and only limited to local authorities- entailed
opening up conversation with hitherto hostile sections of society, a cold calculation of
opportunities, a rallying of different social strata, and albeit conducted perfunctorily, a
certain mode of public relations-which meant, reaching out to non-socialists of Istanbul
and Turkey. The people’s committee, as an instance of consensus building, discussed
whether they might name their neighborhood after one of the political leaders of the time
(Ecevit or Demirel names were on the table). Yet, the socialists set in motion their
popular influence amidst the general population, and against the moderate members of
the opposition’s vehement opposition, the decision was made in August, 1977 to name
the district May Day mahalle as a nod to the memory of 37 people died during the
shooting and stampede on May Day in 1977.133
Meanwhile, the active members of the people’s committee were acutely aware
that an intervening operation by the state forces and a wave of demolition was in the
making. One influential member, who also served as the chair of the committee, told
Aslan that their resolve for resistance was actually inspired by their northern neighbors in
the Esatpaşa mahalle who stood against the court-ordered demolition of their mosquewhich was built on private land.134 However, the May Day neighborhood’s growing fame
In comparison, Fatsa’s participatory democracy experience was led by Dev-Yol (Revolutionary Path),
which was neither Maoist, nor Stalinist/Sovietic and they were better equipped in the cities and among
younger educated sections of urban society.
132
133
Aslan, 1 Mayıs Mahallesi 1980 Öncesi Toplumsal Mücadeleler ve Kent, 120–5.
134
Ibid., 128.
319
among the socialist and left-wing circles and their demonization by the right-wing
attracted the ire of government, and the brutal force, blatant coercion employed during
the demolition was unrivalled. On the early morning of September 2, 1977, the operation
for demolition started with hundreds of gendarmes and policemen. Even though the
residents had been on the look-out for months and had a system of precautions in place,
the result was devastating: nine were shot to death, between 138 and 300 were arrested,
tens of gecekondus were torn down. The violent response meted out to the innocent
gecekondu residents made the headlines, where just four months before, 37 were killed
during the May Day demonstrations, and once again, the state institutions, unable to find
–or unearth- those responsible, had killed a further nine in a cold-blooded operation. The
Minister of Interior, Korkut Özal (elder brother of Turgut Özal) –responsible for the
police force- made statements in the newspapers to the effect that the operation was
nothing more than a routine public safety event.135 The neighborhood took a particularly
important role in the newspapers, the spiraling of street level political violence was on the
verge of becoming out of control, and the events in the May Day neighborhood fuelled
further animosity toward the right-wing governments of the time.
After the massacre of September 2, the May Day neighborhood gained symbolic
importance within the socialist and left-wing circles and saw an increasing support from
all around Turkey. This spatial experiment in self-government that was raised on socialist
principles of equality and fraternity was closely watched by other socialist movements
and treated as a test in socialist talents to actually govern and reproduce daily lives of the
Faik Akın and Abdullah Öğülmüş, “1 Mayıs Mahallesi: Nedir Ne Değildir? II,” Milliyet, May 2, 1978;
Faik Akın and Abdullah Öğülmüş, “1 Mayıs Mahallesi: Nedir Ne Değildir? III,” Milliyet, May 3, 1978.
135
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working class, while setting up mechanisms for redistribution. Young revolutionary
college students would stop by the neighborhood in the evenings, took part in urban
planning, built new gecekondus, drew cadastral maps for distribution of land, helped the
people’s committee functions to continue –since, many of its members were either still
under arrest, or in the run from the government forces- although, they were barred from
owning or staying in any of the gecekondus.136
The breaking point, however, was not the September massacre. In a short period
of time the neighborhood overcame the damage done by the massacre, and with help
from outside socialist organizations rebuilt the demolished houses and found a way to
sustain the working of the committee. In March 1978, another act of violence shook the
neighborhood deeply. On March 18, 1978, five bodies were found in the vacant stone
quarries. Four of the dead were factory workers at Otosan –then, three miles to the west
of the neighborhood on the E-5 highway- and the fifth was a construction worker. All of
them were from the same family, from Giresun’s sub-province, Görele. First, the
newspapers could not figure out the reasons of their death, and in the daily dead count of
the period their number just added up to the already hundreds of those who died during
the street level political violence. Soon, it was learned that all five lived in the gecekondu
district of nearby Yenisahra, and they also owned gecekondus in the May Day
neighborhood. Previously, they were seen coming to the May Day, and an altercation
took place between the five and the residents of May Day because they did not want to
give up their parcels to the people’s committee. All five were known as belonging to the
Faik Akın and Abdullah Öğülmüş, “1 Mayıs Mahallesi: Nedir Ne Değildir? IV,” Milliyet, May 4, 1978;
Aslan, 1 Mayıs Mahallesi 1980 Öncesi Toplumsal Mücadeleler ve Kent, 130–154.
136
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nationalist organization of “Ülkü Ocakları.”137 Hürriyet daily wrote that the five died
under heavy torture, and other right-wing newspapers joined the fray trumpeting that the
May Day mahalle was the locus of uncontrolled “anarchy,” where revolutionary courts
were set up to convict people with execution, and state institutions were vehemently
called to duty to end this “state within the state”- to get rid of this parallel state.138 Their
calls did not remain unheeded, and on March 21, 1978, 1000 policemen, 250 gendarmes,
75 police and gendarmerie cars, 11 armored vehicles entered the May Day neighborhood,
searched 3000 gecekondus, and arrested 80 persons. The leading members of the
committee fled and moved underground to continue their activities until the September
12, 1980 coup. The committee lost its steering role in the community.
In the ensuing period, although the revolutionary spirit and intent of the
committee tried to be kept alive, the murders and the pressures put on the community by
the state institutions led to lukewarm responses from the residents. The people’s
committee was replaced by a committee of the elders. The RPP, meanwhile turned its
attention to the mahalle, the metropolitan municipality (headed by a mayor from the
RPP), laid water pipes in the area and, for the first time, the RPP’s Kadıköy District chair
paid a visit to the May Day neighborhood.139 A gendarmerie post was established in the
spring months of 1978 in the center of the mahalle which ultimately sealed the
integration of the neighborhood to the wider system in the eyes of the central state
137
Hearth of the Ideals, a literal translation, was a youth organization with paramilitary tendencies
modelled after the Turkish Hearth and worked as a street-level extension of the Nationalist Action Party
(MHP). The organization still exists, though no longer harboring paramilitary aspirations. See, Tanıl Bora
and Kemal Can, Devlet, ocak, dergâh: 12 Eylül’den 1990’lara ülkücü hareket (İletişim Yayınları, 1991).
138
Aslan, 1 Mayıs Mahallesi 1980 Öncesi Toplumsal Mücadeleler ve Kent, 149–150.
139
Ibid., 159–161.
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authorities. Soon, this integration was completed by first the opening up of a mahalle
cooperative, then, the incorporation of primary schools, and finally, with the building of a
health center.140
After the 1980 coup, a gendarmerie major who commanded and governed the area
under martial law, decided to erase the name of May Day from history, and renamed the
place as Mustafa Kemal mahalle. 141 As a consequence, the neighborhood became a
legally recognized mahalle complete with a military appointed muhtar –normally, a
selected position similar to a county executive- and the incorporation to the state-space
mold was finalized. This incorporation reproduced a perennial dilemma that surrounded
socialist and left-wing politics in Turkey: to what extent does the person and symbolism
attached to his personality cult resonate with the left? The military did not hesitate in
assigning the name Mustafa Kemal to this neighborhood called May Day, and many
socialists of the 1970s, ‘80s, and ‘90s showed a similar lack of restraint when they joined
the ranks of socialists. Kemalism provided a safe harbor in the exceedingly complicated
relations between the state and working classes, sheltered the Alevi minority from the
Sunni majority, and pretended to be the main locus of progressive politics in Turkey. The
May Day neighborhood, was a representation of such state-space nexus, it stood no
chance as a socialist mahalle but it was at least permitted to be a part of the system-it can
be contained and tolerated. A similar fate awaited all non-Kurdish intellectuals in the 20th
140
Ibid., 162.
“Come here, old man” the Major said, “where do you hail from?” I replied, “May Day neighborhood.”
He said, “May Day’s dead. From now on, you live in the Mustafa Kemal district.” Ibid., 186. Later in 2009,
Mustafa Kemal district was divided into two mahalles, and the newly formed district was named Aşık
Veysel. Both Aşık Veysel and Mustafa Kemal are systemically tolerated and encouraged toponymy, names
found suitable by the dominantly Sunni and right-wing authorities. It is similar to naming schools in the
impoverished inner-city neighborhoods after Martin Luther King, Jr. in the USA.
141
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and 21st centuries in Turkey, as long as they had to survive in the state delineated and
sanctioned borders of permissible politics, they had to renounce internationalism of
socialism and hang onto a loosely defined Kemalist progressivism. The electoral history
of the May Day neighborhood in the last two decades starkly posits the situation, it is
either Kemalism, or nothing for the erstwhile socialists and genuine progressives.
Sema Erder, in a study she conducted in the late 1980s and early ‘90s, gave a
vivid example of how the May Day neighborhood (newly minted as Mustafa Kemal) was
integrated into the system. She found out that 90 percent of homes in the district were
owner-occupied and the remaining 10 per cent were rental households. A preliminary
land deed was distributed by the early 1990s, though, actual land titles were printed and
handed only in 2009-and that, for a hefty sum of money. At the time of Erder’s research,
the neighborhood’s population was 19 thousand, and only 2 per cent of this population
was employed where they lived. The occupations of the residents were counted as
unskilled laborer, street-peddler, and domestic servant. At that time, there was 1
secondary school, 1 high school, 1 post office, 2 mosques, 7 restaurants, 2 doctors, and 2
real estate agencies, and no banks. Erder’s information source was the muhtar, and he
told her that immigrants from Sivas made up the majority in the neighborhood.142
The most interesting part of Erder’s research was her extended interviews and
observations with the mayor and council members of Ümraniye. She did not disclose the
mayor’s name in her book, nor the other council members’ names, but we know that
Şinasi Öktem was the newly elected mayor of Ümraniye at the time. Öktem was a DevYol (Revolutionary Path) member before the 1980 coup and actively partook in the
142
Erder, Istanbul’a bir kentkondu Ümraniye, 42–129.
324
establishment of the May Day neighborhood. After the coup, he entered business life as a
real estate developer and contractor and was elected as mayor of Ümraniye in the
landslide local election victory of the Social Democratic Populist Party143 at the very
young age of 33 –for a gerontocratic society like Turkey, his age was exceptionally
young.144 As previously explained, the Turkish local administration imposed the
municipal council as a mere appendage to the mayor’s power, an executive board handpicked by the mayor himself. Erder’s conversations with Öktem’s council members and
advisors –who happened to be his friends from the days of the May Day neighborhoodconfirm that as well. Erder’s data on council members additionally provided a rare
glimpse into class characteristics in Ümraniye, 62.5 per cent of the council members (20
out of 39) were real estate developers or contractors.145 That undeniably pointed out the
overwhelming role played by real estate speculation and redistribution of urban land rent
in politics. Furthermore, her survey showed that a generation before, among the parents
of those council members, only one had been involved in construction, and almost a third
of them (ten members) had parents who were farmers.146 Apparently, the massive
appropriation of public land helped many figures enter local politics. But the May Day
neighborhood’s political influence was not merely limited to Ümraniye’s city council, as
the mayor and his friends had far more outreach than one would expect.
SHP, a successor to the RPP, since the latter was banned after the coup, was active until the reunification with RPP in 1995.
143
144
Erder, Istanbul’a bir kentkondu Ümraniye, 146–159.
In Turkish, the Arabic borrow-word müteahhit is used to denote both a real estate developer and a
building contractor. The root of the Arabic term, also a borrow-word in Turkish, is taahhüt, contract.
However, müteahhit does not only indicate those who build on contract, but also, and especially, selfemployed developers.
145
146
Erder, Istanbul’a bir kentkondu Ümraniye, 42–129.
325
Two years into his term, Şinasi Öktem decided to switch his party affiliation and
left the SHP with a clique led by Deniz Baykal –the perennial contender for the
leadership of the RPP. Deniz Baykal and his team resuscitated the moribund RPP, Öktem
was one of the first to join the reestablished party and his early devotion to Baykal was
not left unnoticed. Today, the May Day neighborhood residents still talk about the
alleged corruption of his tenure and how it led to the explosion in real estate speculation
in the mahalle with the mushrooming apartment buildings all around. Early in his tenure,
during a visit to a wedding, an armed assault was directed at him, and his bodyguard took
the bullet for the mayor.147 Even then, some questions were raised about his shady deals.
After he left the SHP he got into an open quarrel with the Istanbul metropolitan mayor,
Nurettin Sözen. Blamed Sözen openly through newspaper interviews for his lack of
leadership abilities –although, they were both elected from the same party and
represented similar political views. Later, allegations surfaced concerning an extremely
valuable land deal in Ümraniye. The land, which belonged to the metropolitan
municipality, was allegedly transferred by Öktem to a local cooperative through forged
signatures.148 The fatal blow to Öktem’s mayoral career came on April 28, 1993. Due to
an explosion caused by a buildup of methane gas underneath the Hekimbaşı landfill, 37
people died. The landfill belonged to the Istanbul metropolitan municipality but not
directly under Öktem’s purview, however, newspapers wrote that he was allegedly
responsible for parceling the adjacent empty lots to the landfill and selling it to poor
immigrants. The deaths were among the people who lived in those newly built
“Ümraniye Belediye Başkanı Ölümden Döndü: Üstüne Kapandı, Başkanı Kurtardı,” Milliyet, June 24,
1990.
147
148
Nilüfer Kas, “Öktem’in ‘Sözen Öfkesi,’” Milliyet, March 14, 1994.
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gecekondus.
He entered the 1994 elections from his new party, the newly re-established RPP
and got only 5 per cent of the votes-he had been elected with a staggering 39 per cent five
years previous. The other left-wing parties, the SHP received 20 per cent, and the DSP 10
per cent of the votes. The overall left-wing votes were more than what Welfare Party got
at 33 per cent-however, the Islamists won the mayoralty of not only Ümraniye, but most
of the metropolitan municipalities in Turkey. A new period began. The Islamists who
beat Öktem still rule municipalities, and although they did not only build a successful
local administration, they also went on to become the ruling party in Turkey, in 1997 –
briefly- and in 2002 which lasts up until today. Between 1994 and 2003 Öktem was one
of the right-hand men of Baykal, and his unswerving loyalty was awarded with the
appointment as the chair of the RPP’s Istanbul Provincial organization. He was elected as
a member of parliament from Istanbul in 2007, like his sister, Güldal Okuducu. During
their time, the single-party hegemony of the AKP was gradually bolstered in the lack of a
viable and vibrant opposition. The deficient democracy was further injured by Baykal’s
steadfast support for the military, and his skilfully crafted coup-mongering for the alleged
threats on secularism, while any meaningful democratic voice was suppressed in the RPP.
As Öktem and his family became an integral part of the RPP’s rightward shift, the May
Day neighborhood continued in overwhelmingly voting for the party. The hegemonic
hold the RPP constructed in the aftermath of the 1978 murders, and operations in the
May Day neighborhood went on unchallenged, and while different brands of socialist
grassroots organizations and Kurdish liberation movements flourished in the area, none
other than the RPP showed a significant electoral success.
327
5.11 From the Objective to the Subjective: May Day Neighborhood and
Residual experiences of an urban sojourner
In the spring of 2010, under beautiful sunshine, I walked towards the May Day
neighborhood while pondering silently about the immutable twin problems of the
impossibility of writing on Istanbul and the fleeting reality of urban space. I told myself,
the problem is not in bringing together the empirical reality,-reality as perceived fact is
ubiquitous and fertile, open to sociological imagination, conversant with a plethora of
discussions from all corners –and, unlike two decades earlier, urban issues slowly gained
traction, and so, the problem is not in finding people with comparable interests, and,
definitely not in finding receptive ears, the urban question is once again fashionable. The
problem is in juxtaposing the urban totality onto the ephemeral minutiae of everyday life,
of walking the tight rope between the particular and the universal, weaving the intricate
threads that connect empirical fact and theory, introducing the concrete reality to the
abstract fantasy. And, also, the problem is in paying the due respect to this ethereal aleph,
Istanbul.
The more I traversed Istanbul, the more my path bifurcated along the labyrinthine
streets and corners, faces and sounds of this once beautiful, now breath-takingly
indescribable city, the more I found myself in awe. On the other hand, I tried to keep my
chin up, guard my distance to my object of analysis, I am in the ken of the all-toocommon habit of treating one’s object of study as unprecedentedly unique, one-of-a-kind,
irreplaceably integrated to an orrery of sociological artifices. Somewhere amidst my grey
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brain cells, simple diagrams are heaped on top of each other. Levi-Strauss plays a huge
role there, I sat next to him, in the midst of an Amazonian village, we looked at the hutshow does the lineage play a function to give form to human mental image of the
surrounding space? How do we interact with the built environment? Why is this half of
the village different than the other half? Why is there an invisible border between where I
just laid my foot, and not there, a step before? The differences made the whole. The
undifferentiated does not make the whole, inasmuch as the function and delineations stay
the same, the totality is not a true totality, it is rather a lump, lifeless mass, devoid of
vitality, dormant but not dead, heralding a future awakening, an incipient antagonism.
This is a constellation of contradictions, I think, neither dormant, nor lethargic, the
sea that separates us is not livid, the inequality that meshed our lives into each other is not
morbid. The sun, the soil, the streets, the cars, the buses; they are not the same, yet, in
their difference they share a commonality in this strange city of alephs. This is what the
sociologist sought for, they investigated the particular in the multiplicity, and even if they
tried to do otherwise, if they tried to ascertain the multiplicity in the singularity, not much
would have changed. Here emerges Benjamin’s unmatched talent in discerning things
from other things, his adamant effort to unearth the beauty of repetition, the particularity
of likeness, the singularity of the multitude. It is neither advisable, nor facile to wander
the streets –however grotesque and rundown they are- for the simple reason of walking
the streets, the nomadic mind, the impervious consciousness, the spatial connoisseur, the
one who sought the truth in its endless turn of Janus-faces, and who, settled for the
multitude of those faces, is perhaps, if not adorable, but venerable. The unbreakable shell
of social and urban phenomena cannot be broken by dint of theoretical instruments, but,
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may give way to the somnambulant travails of a flâneur. Walking for the sake of walking,
not for a manifest reason, but for delivering the reasoning to the patient formulations of
space as it is.149
The streets of the May Day neighborhood are no different from an ordinary
provincial city’s well-to-do central business district. The same sideways, same signs,
same coffee houses, same barber shops, bus stops, different faces. The same cornucopia
of buildings, here a balcony full of freshly washed laundry waiting to get dry, and there,
the walls painted green, right next to the newly painted glow of white side-walls of a
well-kept gecekondu, the health center was unmistakably painted in what I call the state
pink, the standard color of all schools, state universities, courts, barracks, kindergartens,
basically anything that is public. It is the most unlucky of all colors in the color spectrum,
the red and yellow were taken by the socialists until very recently –and, hence, forbidden
by the state- green was the Islamists’ color of choice –ditto, banned- white and blue were
a no-go, since they meant the Greek flag, purple was hard to come by, orange was
childish, and so the state came up with an ingenuous solution, red –the color of the
Turkish flag- adulterated by white –the secondary color of the flag- which produced a
peculiar pink; not exactly pink, to flag it as queer, but pinkish enough to be politically
innocent.
Benjamin put it quiet succinctly, and left no room for further refinement, nor any ascertainment,
regarding the career of a flâneur: “It is the gaze of the flâneur, whose way of life conceals behind a
beneficent mirage the anxiety of the future inhabitants of our metropolises. The flâneur seeks refuge in the
crowd. The crowd is the veil through which the familiar city is transformed for the flâneur into
phantasmagoria. This phantasmagoria, in which the city now appears now as a landscape, now as a room,
seems later to have transpired the décor of department stores, which thus put flânerie to work for profit. In
any case, department stores are the last precincts of flânerie.” W. Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Belknap
Press, 1999), 21. Throughout my convocations for various lives of Istanbul, and perhaps, more often than
not, frustrated grappling with Istanbulite modernity, I had to invoke this hapless characteristic of the
flâneur.
149
330
Further down the road, steel lighting fixtures clutter already crowded sidewayswhich were unusually high above the pavement level and uncomfortably narrow to
permit a leisurely walk along the main thoroughfare adorned with shops: the local liquor
store, the ladies’ hairdresser, barbershop, grocery store, a small electronics dealer which
also sells pre-paid mobile cards, and the sin qua non of any mahalle, the furniture and
white goods store which sells on credit but to recuperate the costs at, at least, 10 per cent
more expensive than the competition, and apparently, this store is no match for the one
up the street in Örnek district, so it will not take long for the store to go out of business.
Fifty feet away, at the intersection of the main street and a smaller street that takes you up
to Esatpaşa, a small children’s park has been made, the grass already died away,
brownish, the children’s equipment is apparently newly installed, but the park is not more
than a thousand square feet, so there is hardly any place for the kids. The park benches
serve as a breathing spot for the elders who take their kids for an afternoon stroll, or for
those who are out grocery shopping in the Örnek district –the chain stores have not yet
arrived in the May Day neighborhood.
There are low-rise gecekondu houses, two, or three floors at most, hidden inside
gardens, and it is impossible to get a peak since the gardens are surrounded by high walls.
The gardens that the bourgeoisie would spend their easily earned millions on are often a
second thought here. Some do tend their gardens though, growing tomatoes, peppers,
cucumbers; a decade ago, it was still possible to be awakened by the cock’s crow, a
predominant way for the poor to obtain their daily protein for cheap, but it is no longer
possible to hear them anywhere in the city. Without any exception, all gardens have at
least a tree planted, perhaps a reminder of where they came from, a souvenir from a
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vacation in their village, or, a heralding sign of their first born, or, maybe as simple as to
have an apple tree.
While the main street is full of gargantuan, monolithic, unpainted, or simply
plastered reinforced concrete buildings, one building had something akin to a shopping
mall inside, called a pasaj in Turkish, the inspiration was from the French arcades of the
1950s on, but very few shops inside are occupied. On the upper floors of the main street
buildings, there are a few offices, but they are mostly residential. Remarkably, the
planning regulations had apparently not extended to this part of town, so some buildings
are three floors tall, others are five, a familiar cacophony of structures prevail here. The
buildings around, both the residential ones and shops, seem to me once well maintained
but left to a thinly disguised decay in the last few years, as if everybody’s waiting for the
developers to buy their land and raise an apartment building there –getting affluent in the
process.
The unlikely twin of the May Day neighborhood, its opposite soul, its
doppelganger, the Örnek neighborhood, has already undergone a similar phase of urban
transformation. The familiar gecekondu face of the Örnek mahalle is gradually being
replaced by the ubiquitous vernacular of the yapsatçıs. Homes, small brick buildings with
gardens, are rapidly being replaced by at least four stories- high, reinforced concrete
buildings. All look alike, fashionably painted in new pastel colors –colors impossible to
produce a decade ago, though still, interestingly, akin to the state pink I mentioned above,
though, somewhere between brown, dark yellow, and brownish red are the predominant
colors. A new balcony style is unexceptionally recognizable in all such buildings: floor
height windows ornate with aluminum balustrades, called French balcony-since, they
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looked like the Parisian vernacular houses. They are no real balconies. Turkish women’s
cure-all were the balconies, their sole desire in terms of architectural form, they for long
served as drying platforms for the laundry, storage units for the excess furniture,
refrigerator for storing rice, grains, pickles, etc., and more recently , a smoking pod for
men. Apparently, the French balcony provides plenty of light, but, on the other hand,
means a certain extra chore in cleaning, the windows are large, nonpermissive, and even
dangerous. Aside from the French balcony, they are adorned with neat inventions in
façade design. The introduction of ready-made plaster, which also provided insulation,
provided a panacea for design. Any form can be given to the building –as long as it does
not concern structural elements, or the already crumpled layout of the building- you
would like neo-classical touches on the building with Doric columns, no problem, they
can be installed without any headache, what about that baroque inspired arches we saw
yesterday at a friend’s place, again, you name it, they’d build it, as long as you pay. On
the streets of Örnek, the ragtag shops are gone, the Black Sea pita house has been
replaced by an eight-floor apartment building, the stationer who desperately waited for
the school kids to sell stuff for trinkets has been demolished and a grocery chain store is
now operating on the first floor of an apartment building, the cock no longer crows, the
hearths that burnt coal were replaced by new imported boilers, the coffee house on the
corner where people gathered together to catch the soccer games has been replaced with a
café and restaurant, and I assume, people now watch games at home. The middle class
has taken over the area.
The beauty and difficulty of the May Day neighborhood lies in the effort to get to
know the traces of what remained from Aslan’s, newspaper reports’, and old faces
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accounts. Few marks are legible, the streets are in order, the homes are nothing like what
social scientists lamentably told time and again in the extensive gecekondu literature.150
There are no broken windows, no houses without curtains. And actually, as any other
place in Turkey, curtains are elaborately embroidered to both protect the insiders from the
gaze of the wanderers on the streets and to prove that the homeowner is rich. While one is
relatively free to roam the main street and her movements are barely registered by the
flotsam and jetsam of everyday life, a walk in the back streets immediately attract undue
attention. If it is a weekday, small kids follow you around, tailing you as if you are a
disturbing nuisance, or a potential troublemaker, and old women direct their gazes on
you, from behind the garden walls. And if on a weekend you stroll in the streets, not only
the kids but all of the people living around will follow your steps with subtle, but
undisguised interest. It is a good idea to keep your strolls limited to the main street, or
wander in the weekdays. On the streets of Örnek, amidst the apartment buildings, there
are no eyes on the streets, and four or five-floor apartment buildings are no match for the
opportunities provided by the gecekondus for social surveillance.
Gecekondus on the other hand, have been completely integrated to the system,
their water is metered, the gas and power is metered as well, and they have broadband
internet connection. Since 2010, 3G mobile connections have become plentiful, and
people began switching to smartphones –the sole little comfort workers in Turkey could
afford for themselves. The streets are clean and although not grid-shaped, the layout
Tahire Erman wrote how in the last five decades, four different generations of social scientists followed
contrasting frameworks in their studies of the gecekondu phenomenon and how they conceptualized the
subjectivity of the migrants. See, Tahire Erman, “The Politics of Squatter (gecekondu) Studies in Turkey:
The Changing Representations of Rural Migrants in the Academic Discourse,” Urban Studies 38, no. 7
(2001): 983–1002.
150
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helps you navigate the steep hills the neighborhood was built atop. Here and there, very
few empty lots remain- kids used to turn these lots into impromptu soccer field a while
ago, but now, they cannot enter the empty lots-as they are enclosed by barbed wire. The
kids play on the streets, or, during the weekends, jump over the nearby high school’s
walls to use the asphalt basketball field there. Only recently, Ataşehir municipality built
an extensive park, though it is far away from the homes-down by the valley’s base, in the
dividing line between the much more affluent Ataşehir and the May Day neighborhood.
The park was opened with much fanfare. The RPP’s leader attended the ceremonies, and
the park was named after Deniz Gezmiş, the socialist who was executed as a traitor in
1972 by the junta. Gecekondus now do not look like anything as described by Hart or
successive generations of social scientists. They are transitory, waiting for the arrival of
developers with deep pockets and good connections in higher places.
I remember vividly the day I first visited a gecekondu neighborhood. I was a kid,
and as a son of a family whose ancestors were among the first to immigrate from their
Black Sea villages to Istanbul and Ankara, a sizable part of my relatives lived in the
gecekondus. My extended family was very clearly divided into two geographical,
political, and class camps. One camp, the earliest immigrants to Istanbul and Ankara, in
the 1930s and ‘40s, had the chance to be educated in the republican primary schools and
continued their education and graduated from high schools –the highest level of
education possible, given the limited places in a handful of colleges in Turkey. They were
the proper citizens of the Kemalist republic, where women did not veil their heads and
some worked as white collar professionals, and they lived in apartments, had telephones
–a rare luxury until the deregulation of telecommunications in the 1990s-, went to their
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summer houses, and especially stayed away from visiting their villages during holidays,
they overwhelmingly voted the RPP, believed that religion was a highly private matter,
something to be ashamed of rather than publicly displayed, they placed a particular
emphasis on education as the only path towards upwards social mobility, and they praised
the state as the almighty apparatus established and sustained by the RPP and the army,
and one’s civic responsibility is to keep your head down and obey orders
unquestioningly-especially, if these orders came from the state or the army.
At a certain moment of my sociological readings –or, meanderings- a rupture
made itself apparent in all its gravity. Turkish sociology was intent on keeping its vow of
silence regarding the question of state, but plenty of socialist novelists and poets wrote
about that rupture. Orhan Kemal, Yaşar Kemal, Kemal Tahir, and last, but definitely not
least, Nazım Hikmet extensively described this class division, for the “Great
Humanity,”151 things were not so great. The lives of the other part of our extended family,
the ones who either came later in the 1960s and ‘70s –since, our grandparents made a
vicious decision to leave some of their kids behind in the village as the guards of family
lands or who could not go further than primary school - were starkly different. They
worked as blue collars at the factories, or, waited tables at restaurants, they owned an
auto repair shop and even in the family enterprise those were the ones who worked as
delivery boys, not as the bosses. They lived in the gecekondus, the streets were unpaved,
the buses did not run to where they lived, and it took a whole day from the city center to
pay them an annual visit during the Eid. Their women were stay-at-home mothers –
whose hands were hardened and rough from all the cleaning they did themselves. They
Great Humanity, (Büyük İnsanlık) is Nazım Hikmet’s symbolism, his ironic euphemism for the working
class. See, Nazim Hikmet, Human Landscapes from My Country (Persea Books, Incorporated, 2008).
151
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wore veils, they prayed ostentatiously in the living room, or even if they were the visitors,
we had to show them a quiet bedroom for their prayers. They ate their dinners all together
in their gardens, and they voted for the right-wing. That’s why the two sides never got
along when it came to politics, and huge fights erupted- brothers and sisters swore and
cursed at each other.
After the 1980 coup, everyone chose to evade politics, the snitches could be
anywhere, and politics was a relic of a bygone era. I remember Zeytinburnu in the early
1980s, a vast stretch of gecekondus, and the coal that burnt in the stoves would hurt your
throat, but otherwise, it had wide green scenery, every home had an expansive garden, all
the fruit trees were heavy with the remainders of kids’ looting in late autumn. The sky
was accessible from everywhere, actually, it was so close, and one would not have
imagined a better place to live. Now, I can discern that the gecekondus had produced a
second nature for themselves much closer than the real thing-and they evidently
surpassed the stunted imaginations of republican planners or architects.
The May Day neighborhood reinvigorated those memories, but only as
amorphous traces, as a fata morgana where one can barely recognize the shapes, but not
the whole scene. Gecekondus and apartments were not the same kind, neither sourced,
nor shaped, not even related by the same everyday practices. Not only do the spatial
configuration of the housing units differ remarkably, but the overall relations between the
streets and the homes are even nowhere near comparable. The streets do not follow a
particular logic other than topographical and economic necessities. If you are not familiar
with the area, it is highly unlikely for one to find a home she just left. Yet, topographical
limits on building –albeit ended up in labyrinthine streets and frequent dead-ends, which
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is so often praised as new urbanism in the last two decades- do not limit one’s overall
navigation, since following the elevation would naturally lead one to the center of the
mahalle. That center, more often than not, is either built around a mosque, or a cemevi –
where the Alevi faith’s congregation takes place.
The May Day neighborhood’s street layout is no different than other gecekondu
districts. Perhaps, streets numbered 3042, 3043, and 3044 are parallels, but the 3047th
street cuts through those streets in addition to the 3046th street. Some streets are
numbered, a few are named. Some odd numbered streets are crossed by even numbered
streets and some even numbered streets intersect other even numbered streets. Practically,
street numbers are of no use in finding your way in the area. And no one from the May
Day neighborhood in her sane mind would use those numbers as addresses. The
addresses are descriptive, rather than numeral; the first left across the grocery store, pass
the old gendarmerie station, after the cemevi, behind the primary school, walk 100 meters
down to the health center, would be much more familiar and useful descriptions.
Furthermore, the streets of the May Day neighborhood were drawn by the help of
college students, and represent a moderately orderly separation. In any other gecekondu
neighborhood, where land is steeper, it would be much harder to find your way. The
mind-boggling question is, of course, why would the streets be numbered as such? It is
possibly the making of a municipal planner, who had not bothered to visit the area and
rather decided to haphazardly name the streets. Worse, every new cadastral activity,
every new squatter amnesty, every reorganization of the municipal borders would mean a
redrawing of the street maps, giving out new numbers, drawing new streets, and
altogether changing the door numbers of the gecekondus. Gecekondu neighborhoods are a
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moveable feast, befitting its name, the form and function, the labels and numbers,
constantly change; the faces remain the same.
Spatial configuration within the gecekondus could not be farther away from the
use of internal space prevalent in the Turkish middle class apartments. Turkish middle
class apartment living has been elaborately studied and much is written on the issue. 152
Turkish architectural and vernacular internal design and widely applied principles of
spatial circulation was heavily impressed by 19th century French architecture, and
attempted a clear-cut separation of functional areas within the home. The three-plus-one
became the shorthand of architectural design sought by the reputably upwardly mobile
middle classes. Three bedrooms, and a living room-a French-style salon, seldom used by
the ordinary members of the household, it is in essence a visitor admission hall with
framed portraits from the family history, crystalware, and impeccably protected furniture
- it has been appropriated as a delineation of everyday life in Turkish middle class
existence, complete with one and a half bathrooms, one, frequently the larger one, with
the European toilet seat, and a half bathroom with an a la Turca toilet –the residual
traditionalism, or a nicety to the elders and more traditionalistic guests. The hallway
played the centerpiece in this organization, with an ostentatious entrance hall, and a
luxurious wooden coat hanger and shoe-stand (remember, even middle class people do
not enter homes with their shoes on), an ideal home could be within the reach of
anyone.153 The internal spatial circulation of the gecekondu was profoundly different than
S. Ayata, “The New Middle Class and the Joys of Suburbia,” in Fragments of Culture: The Everyday of
Modern Turkey, 2002, 25–42; Sencer Ayata, “Kentsel Orta Sınıf Ailelerde Statü Yarı\csması ve Salon
Kullanımı,” Toplum ve Bilim 42 (1988); Öncü, “The Myth of the ‘Ideal Home’Travels Across Cultural
Borders to Istanbul.”
152
For an insightful analysis of space, function, form and their interplay with power, see, Markus,
Buildings and Power. Markus, uses Hillier and Hanson’s novel method to gauge the social significance of
153
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an apartment and closely followed what Eldem, Cansever, and Kuban described in their
detailed accounts of the “hayat” house. Depending on the weather and climate, all the
functional circulation within the home was concentrated around an enclosed garden, or
balcony. If the garden was enclosed, or the balcony was not within the reach of the
dwellers, a big table and an umbrella could serve the purpose during the summer and
spring seasons, for the rest, the room which was easiest to warm and closes to the kitchen
–the warmest part of the house- would suffice. Contrary to the dysfunctional and rarely
used spaces prevalent in the middle class apartments, every inch of a gecekondu was
functional. The living room of the gecekondu was where people really lived, not an
element of conspicuous consumption to show off to the others.
Yet, the centrality of the living room in gecekondu, helped build a tighter-knit
web of control between different elements of the family. Kids studied there, some slept in
the living room, females of the household did the chores there, prepared meals in the
living room, and the males came to steam off there as well. Before the coming of the
television sets as the ultimate commander of attention and instigator of social interaction,
the living room was the hub of social control and domestic surveillance. Before
televisions dominated the working class life, gecekondus produced a field filled with
daily experiences, everyday symbolisms, cultural representations, and a social
reproduction of spatial practices. 154
physical space, by dint of a relational matrix; a similar approach would be both imaginative and extremely
fruitful in the Turkish context, while providing key arguments for how the market mechanisms interact
with the state intervention in the production of space. See, Bill Hillier and Julienne Hanson, The Social
Logic of Space (Bell & Bain, 1993).
154
Here, it is evident that the referential frame points to French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu's distinction
between the habitus and field. I will not go into the details this distinction, nor its theoretical connotations,
However, the spatial underpinnings of Bourdieu’s thought had been scarcely investigated. Under the
overwhelming influence of Henri Lefebvre's thoughts on space, perhaps a more thoroughly sociological
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Some of this was the remainder of their peasant life, the superstitions, the
irreplaceable belief in magic, in saintly figures, in evil eyes, a loosely defined gender
division of labor, a patriarchal distribution of power, a vital belief in authoritarian
personality, and a proclivity to follow charismatic leaders. Yet, a great deal was made in
the city: morality as a highly flexible notion and harnessing this ambiguous notion as a
repression towards sexuality, an accentuated anti-intellectualism, pragmatism at all levels
of life, individualism, isolationism within the nuclear family, commodification of
everyday life, a deeply harbored dislike and distaste toward the rich, while the
conspicuous consumption itself has turned into a spectacle of, and for, consumption,
resilience in the face of increasing work hours and excruciating commute –which reached
more than two hours in contemporary Istanbul- and a steadfast belief in might makes
right. These, and many others, were all formed in the tiny confines of the gecekondus and
pervasively permeated the language of everyday life defined by the Turkish ideology.
The gecekondu homes, on the other hand, reintroduced the self-building methods,
and rendered everyone their own architects and designers. Istanbul had been familiar with
self-built housing until the early twentieth century, though after the collapse of the
empire, and before the appearance of the squatter houses it was missing as an element of
the built environment.155 Vernacular forms of the gecekondu were scantly studied, and it
is now on the verge of extinction. But the assemblage of different materials –bricks of all
forms and sizes, plexiglass roofs and separators, different sizes and patterns of wood, tin,
perception is often overlooked. See, Bourdieu, Distinction; Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of
Practice. (Esquisse D’une Théorie de La Pratique). Transl. by Richard Nice. (Repr.) (Cambridge
University Press, 1977).
155
Tanyeli, İstanbul 1900-2000, 130.
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iron, and glass; the enclosed patios, extensive balconies with obsessively guarded views,
hastily laid home-made concrete in the staircases and gardens, the walls had all been a
part of the gradual and slow construction, and the playful use of colors were defining
formal qualities of a grassroots building culture. Not a few of those very gecekondus
were made by the builders of many grand buildings in Istanbul. The middle class
apartment was mostly free from its dwellers interventions, mostly shaped by the early
yapsatçı contractors, and largely a reformulation of the same sketches –possibly, by a
newly graduated architect- they were soulless, monolithic, dull monolithic boxes of grey
reinforced concrete. The middle class figured out the importance underlying in the
designer’s contribution, and began paying hefty sums for a dwelling that had the
“signatures” of a very few architects in Turkey. Only now we can talk of an emerging
market for the architect’s design, though, unlike the self-built houses of the gecekondus,
as I will try to explain in the next chapter, the creative dialogue is not between the
architect and the client, nor between the architect and his object of creation, but between
the designer and the developer. The developers pick what sells –oblivious to the actual
desires of the nascent middle class- and their briefs are not design guidelines for the
architects, rather, perceived to be mere dictates of the customer. We will discuss that in
the next chapter.
Whatever were the merits and shortcomings of the gecekondus, they are on the
wane. As I sat across the room with the muhtars of two districts of the erstwhile May Day
neighborhood, joined by a handful of elders from the earliest days of the settlement –
themselves, blue collar workers- we talk about how to make the mahalles a better place.
In 2009, due to an increasing population, the May Day neighborhood was divided into
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two: Mustafa Kemal and Aşık Veysel. Soon, the districts were made part of a newly subprovince, a product of gerrymandering: Ataşehir. The eastern part of Ataşehir is made up
of erstwhile gecekondus, but of a more conservative nature. The center of Ataşehir is the
new Eldorado, the promised land for the upwardly mobile, high rises are sold with mind
blowing price tags –asking prices of new condos began around 5000 liras per square
meter (or, roughly per 10 square feet) in 2011 and the apartments were specifically
targeted to the white collars, since Ataşehir was announced to be the Wall Street of
Istanbul in 2008. The white collars were thought to be predominantly pro-RPP, proopposition, but the results of the 2009 local elections showed that the new middle classes
distributed their votes almost evenly between the governing party and the opposition. On
the western part, split from the soon-to-be Wall Street of Istanbul by a deep valley lays
the May Day neighborhood. The elders and muhtars are willing to bring some change to
their constituencies –since, for decades they were seen as a mere nuisance in their old
sub-province. Ümraniye, run by the Islamists in the last two decades, hardly paid any
attention to the area.
Yet, things have changed, and they are hopeful in getting the attention of the
municipal officials now, since, the RPP owed its success in the 2009 elections in Ataşehir
almost solely to the overwhelming support they received from the May Day
neighborhood. If the May Day neighborhood switched their allegiance, or, even the vote
distribution resembled central Ataşehir, then their plurality would be definitely at stake.
So, the prevalent perception in the room is that it’s been almost a year since the elections
and it is nice to finally be receiving the land titles; but the main street is in tatters, there
are no real parks around, and worse, the cemevi is in dire straits. They could always ask
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the youth of the neighborhood, but the problem is that they are overwhelmingly socialist,
and once they get into motion, and the demonstrations and protests would definitely
attract the attention of readily waiting authorities to suppress any social movements-and,
in the process, the local shopkeepers would pay the price with broken shop windows, lost
customers, harassment of police officers, etc. They have decided to ask for a relatively
simple, but symbolically laden gesture of goodwill from the mayor: to change the name
of the main street. The main street is called 3001st street, meaningless, hard to pronounce,
and an affront to common sense. They decided to petition for renaming the main street for
the memory of Deniz Gezmiş, the executed leader of People’s Liberation Army of
Turkey, the iconic youth leader of the 1960s.
We first went to the RPP’s Ataşehir offices. They previously tried to arrange a
meeting with the Ataşehir RPP organization’s chair, but somehow that plan failed to
materialize, either they did not pick up the line, or refrained from setting up an
appointment. Then they decided to pay a visit with the muhtars, the thinking, I assume,
was that they would eschew seeing the elders and notables of the neighborhood, but
muhtars were the foundation of their electoral base there, so, they stood a better chance to
petition their request. The party offices were unlike any other I’ve seen before –though,
my previous knowledge was mostly limited to small fringe socialist parties’ offices. To be
precise, the party office reminded me strongly of the real estate developers’ offices I have
visited frequently during the last six months, glamorously decorated, ostentatious
displays of wealth –perhaps, perceived to be synonymous with taste- were all around, a
life-size painting of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk stood in the center of chair’s office. Brass
light fixtures, stationary on his desk, the impeccably ironed black suit he wore melded
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into the rest of the room, another portrait was by his side –an enlarged photograph of the
party leader at the time, Deniz Baykal- and the leader resolutely fixated his gaze on us.
We introduced ourselves, the chairperson seemed anxious, as if he had a meeting
to catch, he was in his early 50s, receding hairline, bony cheeks, and dark, piercing eyes
which avoided any contact. After the usual niceties and the customary teas were served,
the group told him why they were paying him a visit. He was not especially fond of the
idea, but did not reject it outright, and told us to see the mayor. The group, naturally,
requested an appointment from the mayor –possibly, he played the role of the gatekeeper
to the municipality. He seemed eager to do that, called a few people –and received a one
too many calls about irrelevant business. The mayor was too busy, the council was giving
him a headache, all the things to be done, and he was unable to reach the mayor in
person. Well, we visited the party’s office, had our tea, time to take back our petition, and
go home. The situation was strange, and the chairperson basically did nothing, while he
seemed to convince us all that he had done a great favor for us. What was the favor?
Basically, he told the group to go and see the mayor themselves. They did exactly that.
The very few municipal offices I’ve been to were mere appendages to the already
inanely boring and slow moving bureaucratic offices of the state in Ankara. You would
barely see a soul in the halls to even ask for so-and-so’s office’s direction, let alone,
getting your work done. Stale, airless, dark, and before the ban, thick ether of ages of
smoking lungs pervaded the atmosphere in those buildings-I used to think. The Ataşehir
municipality was completely different, perhaps, the structure is a testament to the goaloriented local administration’s qualities. The great entrance hall is exactly a replica of a
modern institution, not the parliament, not the police station –thankfully-, not even the
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party office. This was a bank. If I went there blindfolded, and left in the middle of the
entrance hall, and told to open my eyes, I would be certainly convinced that this was just
another bank office. Here are the tellers, this is the queuing machine which printed out
numbers to let you know your place in the line, these, over here, are the customer
representatives, whom you have to talk to for anything more than depositing or
withdrawing your money, over there is the public washrooms –articulately hidden behind
the desks to preclude customers’ frequenting them- the raw white light, the dominant
yellow color, the cheap industrial furnishings, which were tried to be made cozier by the
pinewood patterned counters.
Our party stopped by the reception desk, but the receptionist had no idea where
the general manager –ahem, mayor- was. Maybe they should have made a better decision
to call his secretary’s office first to try to fix an appointment with his chief-of-staff. I
thought, I was naïve, of course, they are nothing more than a bank nowadays, they
facilitate the movement of capital into the grave, they are the ceremoniously venerated
undertakers of capital, and they help millions of people to bury their hard-earned cash in
an unprecedented rush for housing. They have to sink capital into the built environment,
and local governments are but the ones who dig the graves, who made the dead
presentable with an eloquent make-up. Palin’s supporters in the 2008 American elections
had that shrill slogan, “Drill, baby, drill!” The Turkish local governments do not utter that
so explicitly, but behind closed doors, as they pass through the tellers’ counters in every
bank-like hall of municipal offices, it is silently repeated, “Build, baby, build!”
Empty handed, bored, visibly shaken, but afraid of breaking the communal spirit
of a democratic quest for the citizens’ rights and hence, quiet, we returned back to the
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small office in the neighborhood. Possibly, the older muhtar –one of the earliest settlers,
he clung onto the pre-1980s language of referring the community as a revolutionary onewas aware of how things would have transpired. The younger female muhtar possibly did
not expect to be treated as such. They were not dealt the greatest hand at that moment,
and with the elections four years in the future, no mayor would pose as the great
benefactor of the mahalle and seek for a muhtar’s approval. The tables will turn in four
years-that was for sure. Yet, nobody was really interested in talking about the petition any
longer. Was it a pipe dream? We tried to come up with explanations, perhaps the subprovince municipal council had no authority on the renaming of the streets, and it fell
under the metropolitan council’s purview; though, later I found out that a street in
Esenyurt, on the European side of the city, was renamed in 2009 as Deniz Gezmiş streetapparently, near a Recep Tayyip Erdoğan Park -the ongoing geographical kulturkampf of
the nation was ironic.
I left the office to walk with the older muhtar, stopped by his small pre-cast office
next to the small park on the intersection. He told me about the history of the
neighborhood, in details that his mind permitted, and talked about his anxieties regarding
the youngsters. After an hour or so, I returned back to the small office, where the elders
had remained. The conversation was not about politics, but about the rising towers
nearby. They said the apartments there sold for hundreds of billions (they were still using
the old lira), and they tried to imagine how much money the people who bought those
apartments made. The most affluent among the four people in the room –not counting
myself- was a blue collar worker retiree who has his gecekondu nearby. The owner of the
office, an old Maoist, was once a successful and rich lawyer who had his office in
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Kadıköy, who had health problems, and issues with alcohol abuse. He lost everything he
had had, his wife abandoned him, and he moved back to the May Day neighborhood. He
had an old gecekondu in the neighboring Esatpaşa. Nobody in the room wanted to utter
the inescapable fact, but they waited for a contractor with deep pockets and reliable
business practices to sign their land development.
Of course, they would not settle for anything less than a fifty-fifty contract, half of
the newly-built apartments would belong to the contractor and the other half to the
landowner. I suggested if the skyrocketing prices of the tower apartments would induce
them to sign such a deal. They did not hesitate to speak the truth, yes, they would sign, as
long as the developer was someone trustworthy, they would not think for a moment. They
explained that they toiled their whole lives for the trinkets they received as pension. They
had to consider their future, as old age would not be so kind to them, and they wanted to
live in a well-heated apartment, collect rents, and grant one or two of the apartments to
their grown-up kids, to at least contribute their earnings.
They were right. The real talent underlying capitalist accumulation is its ability to
turn its sworn enemies into unwilling companions. In doing so, the trajectory is not one
of coercion, not even the sticks or carrots conundrum comes into play here. Remember,
in 1984, the protagonist succeeded in actually seeing the four fingers, after torturous
examinations. Capitalism does not torture, it produces desire as the ultimate machinery
that provided the continuous reproduction of the system. Desire is what makes the built
environment. It is human, all too human.
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5.12 The Distance that Brings Us Closer: Differences, Similarity, and
Simultaneous Histories
In this chapter, I covered the development of the gecekondus in Istanbul on the
basis of two cases: Zeytinburnu and the May Day neighborhood. The reason for my first
choice is quite apparent: because it was the first permanent gecekondu settlement in
Istanbul. It is true that before Zeytinburnu, some squatters settled on the slopes of the
valley from Şişli to Haliç and Mecidiyeköyü. But, none were as populated, as
residentially well-built, and as tightly-knit and organized a community as Zeytinburnu.
The previous squat settlements were made up of scattered shacks, a few there, a few here,
built as comparatively small, silent homes for the poor and the newly immigrated people.
These homes were prone to the whimsical decisions of the government; they were razed,
and their residents would settle somewhere else. In the late 1930s, and early 1940s, even
the area surrounding the old seat of power, Abdulhamid II’s Yıldız Palace, was subject to
such a low density squatter settlement. Zeytinburnu, on the other hand, was the first
enduring gecekondu community. Its residents were resilient, their homes were razed and
rebuilt several times. Furthermore, Zeytinburnu gecekondus were organized around
formal neighborhood associations as early as the 1950s. Zeytinburnu remained as the
most expansive, most populous, and organizationally active –but politically silentgecekondu areas of Istanbul until the 1980s.
The May Day neighborhood, however, began under completely different
conditions and developed as a gecekondu community in a harsh, extremely politically
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charged environment of insurmountable tensions. But it was not the last district settled by
the immigrants from Anatolia. For instance, the area once known by the name Yıldız
Tabya –unrelated to the Yıldız Palace- on the western part of European Istanbul came to
be recognized as a fully-fledged Alevi gecekondu settlement in the 1980s, though the
squatter settlements began decades before the formation of present Gazi mahalle. Yet,
when I began to write this dissertation, a brilliantly informative work on the Gazi mahalle
was published: a collection of Jean-François Perouse’s a decade’s long work on
Istanbul.156 Similarly, Çayan, Gülsuyu/Gülensu, Sarıgazi, or even Okmeydanı were
formed as gecekondu neighborhoods approximately a decade after the May Day
neighborhood. These neighborhoods were as politicized as the May Day neighborhood, if
not more, from the beginning. There were three reasons for my decision to focus on the
May Day neighborhood. First, it was sufficiently researched in the beginning, so that I
would be able to compare and contrast previous studies with my current findings. Like
many other gecekondu neighborhoods in Istanbul –but, unlike the Gazi, Çayan,
Gülsuyu/Gülensu neighborhoods- it was on the cusp of the private developers’ takeover.
So, this was possibly one of the last windows of opportunity for research here. The
second reason is related to geography. Zeytinburnu already provided plenty of hints about
European Istanbul’s geographical development. I needed some clues about Asian
Istanbul’s paths of growth. The third reason concerns the nature of field research. These
neighborhoods necessitated a deep understanding of socialist political movements in
Turkey, and with few exceptions, all of the alternative gecekondu areas were strongholds
of a certain socialist faction. Bringing into the discussion the long, painful, and almost
156
Pérouse, Istanbul’la Yüzleşme Denemeleri.
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apocryphal struggles of Turkish socialism would have been unjust to both the socialists
and the gecekondu dwellers. The ongoing struggle of Alevism and socialism in the
Turkish cities portends a fruitful agenda for my future studies.
After choosing these two areas as the emblematic sites of gecekondu growth in
Istanbul, it is important to underline the divergences and similarities between
Zeytinburnu and the May Day neighborhoods. There are four main headings where these
two neighborhoods significantly differed: ethnic and religious networks, the territorial
extension, scales of political involvement and politicization, and finally, the divergent
trajectories of place.
The most characteristic difference between the two gecekondu settlements is the
role played by religion. The distance between Alevism and Sunni Islam is not only
determining a legion of other behaviors, patterns of cultural exchange, and dispersal of
ethnicity –which can be claimed as the final form of exclusion, since both Alevis and
Sunnis are no longer differentiated on the basis of faith, but it has rather become a part of
their respective ethnic qualities, but also definitive of how urban space is made. My
discussion of the May Day district and how it is positioned amidst the sea of other Sunni
dominated neighborhoods points out this variegated relationship with the urban built
environment.
However, a certain pitfall overwhelmingly looms in a treatment of religious and
ethnic networks as the decisive elements of a community. This pitfall is the risk of
perceiving Sunnis and Alevites as inherently homogeneous communities. Nothing could
be farther from the truth. Both the Sunni and Alevi communities are internally
heterogeneous communities. Even though the two communities behave as if they are
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made up of ethnically different elements and build their own identities on a scaffolding
that is erected on a pre-supposed principle of exclusion, the stories within tell otherwise.
For instance, even if Zeytinburnu is predominantly Sunni, this Sunni identity is divided
between two irreconcilable identities: Kurds and Black Sea immigrants. The Kurds
moved into Zeytinburnu around three decades after the Black Sea and Balkan immigrants
established the gecekondu community in the late 1940s. The fault lines here do not lie in
the Sunni identity’s hypothetical antagonism against the secularist or Alevite political
orientations, but in uneasy relations with the Kurds. Furthermore, the Kurds do not
belong to the sect to which the majority of Sunni Turks belong, but they follow Shafiism.
In a similar vein, the Alevis of the May Day neighborhood have to learn ways to get
along with Sunni gecekondu dwellers who moved to the outskirts of their mahalle.
Immigrants from Tokat, Amasya, Sivas –provincial areas that lie in the intersection
between Anatolia proper and the Black Sea regions- have moved into the neighborhood
in significant numbers since the early 1980s. What is striking though is the fact that the
latecomers have adapted to the majority political tendency in these communities. The
Sunni settlers of the May Day district have coopted a predominantly secular world view,
while the Kurds of Zeytinburnu readily compromised with the right-wing, conservative
outlook of the earlier Black Sea Sunni settlers. In Zeytinburnu and the May Day
neighborhood, two different contexts have converged along a peculiarly similar
development.
The second difference between the two gecekondu settlements is related to the
territorial distribution. From the outset, Zeytinburnu had its apparent borders.
Zeytinburnu has always been a district bordered on the south by the city walls, on the
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west by the E-5 –or, previously, London highway (yes, interestingly enough, an older
generation knew that piece of road as Turkey’s connection to London), and on the
northern perimeter by the fledgling industrial establishments. On the other hand, the May
Day neighborhood was a territorial utopia. As a socialist undertaking it was already
limited by the mosques and the Sunni settlements to its west. Yet, it was intent on
expanding towards the north. Even today, some earlier founders of the May Day
neighborhood own some land in that area –now, of course, scattered by the building of
the highway connections.
Also, Zeytinburnu’s territory is today completely coopted to the gargantuan urban
sprawl. The highway’s role as Istanbul’s European hub of transport, its proximity to both
the industrial and commercial centers of the city and shopping malls, rendered
Zeytinburnu a thoroughly transformed, but integrally connected part of the city. Nobody
can talk of Zeytinburnu as a gecekondu district any longer. But, the May Day
neighborhood is still hanging onto its old gecekondu heritage. The predominant forms of
building, the street patterns, its relative distance from the city center by public
transportation –the district is only 5 miles away from Kadıköy, though, depending on the
time of travel, it takes a good part of an hour to get there- the disconnect between the
nearby commercial establishments and the area all attest to the territorial seclusion of the
May Day neighborhood. And it’s for the better. The urban development in Zeytinburnu
showed that as soon as the developers enter a gecekondu district a wholesale
transformation of a community’s urban culture is inevitable. In other words, Zeytinburnu
has succeeded in turning into a characterless void that replicates the main formula of the
Turkish developers: build higher, build bigger. The fate of the May Day neighborhood is
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now on one hand, totally contingent on the whims of the state actors of real estate
development, and on the other hand, depends on the wills of the residents, whether they
are interested in upward social mobility provided by property ownership.
The third difference -the divergent interplay between the scale and the attainment
of political goals- between Zeytinburnu and the May Day neighborhood is deeply
intertwined with the processes described by Asef Bayat as the political movements of
dispossessed and poor masses in the city. Zeytinburnu has achieved its prominent role in
Istanbul’s local politics due to its long lasting support for the governing right wing parties
since the 1950s. By the mid-1990s, Zeytinburnu’s support for the right wing local politics
turned it into a powerhouse of national politics. On the other hand, the May Day
neighborhood was active in both local and national politics from its inception. As the
momentum of the socialist politics turned into a grassroots organizing impetus for RPP’s
brand of leftism, the gecekondu neighborhood had a brief, but deep influence in the late
1980s, and succeeded in helping one of its earliest activists get elected as the mayor of
the much bigger Ümraniye sub-province. Yet, these home brewed politicians neither
returned to the May Day neighborhood, nor showed any interest in local politics therethey were shooting for the bigger scene. Still, in contemporary Turkey, although one of
the losses during the Gezi uprisings was from the May Day neighborhood, Mehmet
Ayvalıtaş, a relative of one RPP deputy, the district has limited reach and ability to affect
national scale changes in Turkish politics.
This indicates a paradoxical situation in the Turkish political system: demands,
rights, and freedoms rising out of a wide array of societal needs –from minibus fares to
the right to shelter, from unionization drives to minimum wage limits- are hardly ever
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fulfilled as long as they remain politicized. Politicization of demands are more often than
not, perceived as threats against the hegemonic state power and duly repressed. Yet,
social and economic demands that do not follow a politicized path, but rather channel
their energies toward achieving their goals through clientelistic and informal religious
and ethnic networks frequently become successful: gecekondu amnesties, unionization of
pro-state workers, job security, freedom of belief, and most prominently, women’s right
to attend college with their headscarves are a few examples of such goals successfully
attained by means of non-politicized struggles.
The fourth difference between two cases is actually a corollary of the second and
third –territorial and scale-wise- differences since Zeytinburnu is located in the midst of
Istanbul, but also successful in transforming its connection by tapping into its own
population. Largely, the transformation of Zeytinburnu from a gecekondu settlement to a
full-scale urban sprawl in the form of apartment buildings was undertaken by local
developers. Similar to many other gecekondu settlements’ transformation into high
density apartment- living neighborhoods, Zeytinburnu’s local characteristics have hardly
changed. The buildings were taller, the streets were crowded –but, still labyrinthine- the
greenery that surrounded the gecekondus were gone, but the coffee houses, the mosques,
the Friday Prayer communities stayed largely intact. However, it is questionable if a
similar wave of development in the May Day neighborhood would follow a similar
trajectory. Already a great deal of development activities done in the area is the
responsibility of outside yapsatçıs and its relatively low price levels and proximity to the
new subway lines recently completed have made the area highly attractive for a growing
white collar population. This might entail the end of the May Day neighborhood. And
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worse, if the plans of the large-scale private developers concerning the neighborhood
come to fruition any time soon, that would translate into a complete annihilation of the
place.
In other words, a certain locality is in an advantaged position as long as it
suppresses its localized aspirations –changes in the mahalle’s power structures, more
control to the residents, democratic grassroots organizations, and any kind of
autochthonous demands. If such suppression is successful and is sufficiently articulated
to the national level politics, and if it mirrors the tone, the gestures, the behaviors of the
grand-scale, a locality then would reap particular benefits granted by the benevolence of
the state. This is the condition of the state-space nexus in Turkey. Although neoliberal
overtures in the last three decades definitely changed the outward appearance of the statespaces –i.e. heavily monetizing the relationship, and later, financializing by sheer dint of
rush to the real estate market- the inner workings remained the same. To the extent that
one urban neighborhood refrains from accentuating the local demands, in return, it would
be heavily rewarded for its subservience. This is a paradoxical process, since the
development of local identities means the denial of such identities.
I argue that the exit from this impasse, from this paradoxical situation is possible
only through a change in the class-based dynamics. The right-wing politics in Turkey
have always depended on its immaculate talent in dissimulating the everyday behaviors,
traits, beliefs, and characteristics of the large swath of Sunni working classes. A few
insightful analysts of the situation in the early 1970s called this a reversal of the selfprofessed roles: the right is objectively oriented toward the left and the working classes,
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and the left is essentially right-wing in its class position.157
That was definitely an insightful, yet an inherently deficient statement laden with
gross overlook of comparative political contexts. It is true that the leftist politics was
concentrated around the colleges, higher education circles, cosmopolitan, and secular
urban centers in the 1960s. And without any exception the left-wing movements have had
deep troubles when they tried to tap into the vast reserves of working classes. The rightwing politicians have been mesmerizing in their peculiar narratives of the Horatio Alger
story for all. The leftists were severely criticized for their failure to speak the same
language with the working classes. The only section that left-wing politics found a
readily available interest was among the Alevis. Although muted for a long time, the
Alevi community in Turkey presented a sympathetic pool of supporters for left-wing
politics and especially after the 1970s, many leaders, organizers, and martyrs of the left
were also Alevis. The left in Turkey re-established itself after the 1960s re-orientation in
the RPP as a coalition of the secular, college educated, middle class urban citizens and
Alevis.
This created a long running problem in Turkish politics: an ethnicized dispersal
between the two voting blocs, one Sunni, one Alevi or secular held sway as the
determining feature of the peculiar Turkish case –the moderate middle was lacking, since
the former was roughly twice the size of the latter. In an ironic way, the right-wing
government of JDP instigated a crucial change in this balance of power. In the last
decade, more than 120 colleges –both public and private- were opened in every province
of the country, already established universities’ student quotas were at least doubled, and
157
İdris Küçükömer, Batılılaşma ve Düzenin Yabancılaşması (İstanbul: Profil, 2012).
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from around 9% of cohort in 1995, today, 36% of the age group enters the higher
education system.158 Each year, 500,000 students begin college education.
It’s been written and researched for a long time that higher education plays a great
role in an individual’s social mobility. Higher education is generally accepted as the great
equalizer in the post-war welfare regimes of the West. Yet, higher education and
meritocracy, as the inventor of the term pointed out, have worked to the detriment of the
disadvantaged minorities, and acted as an illusionary remedy in the last three decades.159
Whatever the critics claimed perhaps could be true in the Western case. But in Turkey,
higher education played a tremendous role in churning out secularized, republican,
modern, and affluent middle classes. The problem until very recently was its extremely
small-scale.
I can give three examples to solidify the import of higher education in the building
of a Western-style middle class. The first example directly concerns my own family. The
story begins in the late 1930s and early 1940s, when my grandmother immigrated to
Istanbul at the age of 7. Her father ran several businesses in that decade, first a bar in
Trabzon, complete with Russian émigré women as servers which went bankrupt, and later
a working class pub in Istanbul, and finally a restaurant where no alcohol was served.
Each went bankrupt one after another, with tidy sums of debts. In the early 1940s, during
TURKSTAT education statistics: TURKSTAT, “Eğitim İstatistikleri,” Eğitim İstatistikleri, accessed
April 20, 2014, http://www.tuik.gov.tr/PreTablo.do?alt_id=1018. See, especially figures on
http://www.tuik.gov.tr/PreIstatistikTablo.do?istab_id=135.
158
Since Michael Young invented the term “meritocracy” in the 1950s, it has been much abused and a
disproportionate onus was attached to the role of education in overcoming social inequality in the advanced
industrialized Western countries. The mainstream abuse of the term reached such heights –that even
considered educational attainment as synonymous to innate intelligence- that the original inventor had to
deny the intellectual baggage of the term. See, Michael Dunlop Young, The Rise of the Meritocracy
(Transaction Publishers, 1994); Asa Briggs, Michael Young: Social Entrepreneur (Palgrave, 2001).
159
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the Second World War years, he found a job as a translator to a German –more likely,
Polish-German- engineer at the IG Farben’s factory. My great grandfather was born and
raised in Imperial Russia and was fluent in Russian. His families owned and operated
several bakeries in Russia until the October Revolution nationalized their properties. My
grandmother, born and raised in a small Black Sea village, did not see her father until the
age of 7 when they moved to Istanbul to bring back the whole family together.
In the late 1930s, when she began school, my grandmother spoke with a heavy
Black Sea accent: a source of ridicule among her classmates. First, she fixed her accent
and adapted to Istanbul Turkish. Then, she showed such a remarkable talent in her
classroom that her teacher –one of the earliest female teachers, a true Kemalist- was
impressed by her intelligence. Yet, her being a girl, and her father being a not-so-devout
Muslim (since, selling alcohol is strictly forbidden in Islam), but still a patriarch, meant
that she would not continue her studies beyond the age of 11. My grandmother and her
teacher organized a way for her to enter central examinations for state schools. She won a
top place with full scholarship and boarding at a prestigious high school of the time. She
graduated from high school with success –and, against further pressure from her fatherwon a place at one of the four universities in Turkey and studied chemistry at Istanbul
University for a year. However, the situation was not to her liking. Unlike her high school
years, she had to live with her parents in Zeytinburnu, cook for them, prepare the table,
clean the dishes, wash the laundry, and walk all the unpaved roads of a gecekondu
neighborhood and get to the campus, where everyone seemed to come from another
planet. She failed one of her courses in her first year. Being an ambitious star student, she
would not accept failure, dropped out of college and found a job as a bank clerk. She left
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Zeytinburnu after she got married and never returned. She worked as a manager of a state
bank in Şişli for 23 years and retired in 1980. She is 84 today. Around once or twice each
year, she travels to Zeytinburnu from across the Asian side of Istanbul. The distress in her
face is clearly visible. She always hated Zeytinburnu. Her brother, five years older than
my grandmother, did not really go to school. He learned how to fix cars and stood by his
father, and after his father’s early passing, his mother. He owned and operated a
mechanic shop for decades. He never left Zeytinburnu and protected the family’s assets
there.
At the May Day neighborhood, the lawyer, whose office I visited a couple of
times to listen to people’s stories, seems nervous. He is waiting for his son to arrive. I
knew that he was not married at the moment. He told me before that he got divorced from
his wife long ago. Once I met his son, I understood that there is a tangible distance
between the two-not one of emotional distance, but perhaps a cultural one. The lawyer
exudes an air of provincialism, like the other college educated professionals of his
generation. His son is a white collar employee. He arrived with his personal car. Talking
to him, I see the generational separation I went through as well –being middle class,
being an urbanite. The conversation comes to the May Day neighborhood and how hard it
used to be when he was growing up to get to the neighborhood from Kadıköy. “The
Mustafa Kemal minibuses” he says, “were hard to find, and once you found one, it would
be a filled to the brim.” Nowadays, he only stops by to visit his father perhaps, not more
than once a month.
At another instance, I talk to a college student from the May Day neighborhood.
He was brought up in the May Day neighborhood as the son of working class parents. He
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told me he lost his father when he was an adolescent. His mother has taken care of his
upbringing. He is full of adorable respect for his mother and told how she raised five
kids. He is the youngest. The more he talks, the more I am impressed by his mother’s
accomplishments as a single mother. His parents found a gecekondu before he was born.
Incidentally, his mother’s story finds a striking parallel in my mind. The way he talks of
his mother reminds me of my grandmother’s mother, how they waited day and night
against the demolition crews sent by the municipality.
The way he describes his childhood in the May Day neighborhood sounds
familiar. It is familiar to anyone who was born before the insuperable urban sprawl and
the evisceration the Turkish cities went through after all the greenery was razed, all
empty lots were allocated to housing development, highway expansion, or building of the
shopping malls. He said that he was quite a naughty kid back then, getting bruises all
over, and spending most of his time outside. After primary school, his mother moved to
Kadıköy, Moda, and he continued his schooling at a high school in Kadıköy.
I asked him if he has visited the May Day neighborhood recently. He said that he
visited the neighborhood with his mother a few months ago. How was it, how do you feel
about it? I followed up with my previous questioning. He said that it felt strange, that her
mother still has many friends over there. What about your childhood friends? He said:
“They’re the same. Just as I left them.” Most of them did not continue their education.
They mostly spend time in the neighborhood, most of them unemployed, out-of-work, or
looking for a part-time job. He makes a joke that they still sit at the park, drink coke and
have sunflower seeds –the favorite and cheapest pastime snack in Turkey. I asked him
how he succeeded in getting into college. He told me that his mother decided to send him
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to a primary school in Göztepe, not the school in the May Day neighborhood. “Actually,”
he said, “it was a friend of my mother’s who first came up with the idea. She sent her kid
–a year my senior- to that school.” Back then, the address-based population registry was
not in effect. And, it took some bribing for parents to persuade a public school’s
headmaster to get their child enrolled there. Today, due to the restrictions on the addressbased population registry, unless registering to a private school, parents cannot enroll
their kids at schools other than where they are registered.
His mother was inspired by that friend, and, along with few other children in the
neighborhood, he was one of the first to go to a school in a more affluent area. The school
was miles away. I asked him how he got to the school. He said, “Either by bus, or by the
school service. But, once we missed the buses, we had to walk all the way to school and
home, on our own.” He was eight years old at the time. Apparently, it worked. Aside
from his friends with whom he made those trips to the school in Göztepe, he is the only
college student among his childhood friends. Without any doubt, that wise decision by
his mother will pay off handsomely as he graduates and enters Istanbul’s burgeoning
white-collar population.
5.13 Bridging the Theoretical Gap: From Rural Societies to the Urban
Areas, Transformation of the Petty Commodity Producers
As the 1960s and ‘70s heated discussions, valiant theoretical polemics, and
piercing debates on the structure of Turkey’s social classes were waged in Turkish
socialist circles –these were not only limited to the academia- the socialist and left-wing
movements’ actual political direction, revolutionary agenda, and particular grassroots
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capabilities were determined interminably. The burning question was whether the
Turkish context contained any particular diversions from the Western context, and if so,
how it would transpire in a political-economy rooted in Turkish social relations of
production. The pivotal problem was the diagnosis of the predominant mode of
production in Turkey as either feudal, or as Asiatic, or, still, a formation that oscillated
in-between these two polar opposites. If the predominant mode of production in Turkey
was feudal, then a bourgeois revolution was in the offing –to carry on the forward
movement of history, or, of course, Kemalism, might have been that bourgeois revolution
itself, and relatively progressive compared to the other options on the table.
The debates led to a rift in Turkish socialist circles, an incision that is still not
stitched, and instead has grown in time which gave birth to two inimitable camps. In one
camp, the reasoning of argument claimed that large landowning in Turkish history was
rooted in feudalism –or, at least, something akin to either proto-feudalism, or different
articulations of feudalism- and the keys to an understanding of the rural question in
Turkey laid in the internal transitions in class structure (i.e., how the feudal landlords
turned into parasitic merchant-capitalists, or as the Latin American Marxist concepts
found wider use, comprador bourgeoisie) , and external integration to the world-system
and imperialist domination. In the 1960s, this diagnosis was leased a new, but limited,
life through political consciousness raising activities in eastern and southeastern Turkey,
and brought to the fore, the “Eastern Question,” which could only be posed in its
appropriate name in the 1990s as the “Kurdish Question.”160 The Kurdish question was
Though, the main reason for banning the only legal socialist party in Turkey, the Labor Party, was its
organization of “Eastern Rallies” in the Kurdish majority regions, the constitutional court saw that as
sufficient reason for banning the party as a threat against the unity of the republic after the 1971 coup.
160
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kept under a tight lid by the central state, through carefully constructed coalitions with
the local landowners and constant repression of the Kurdish population until the 2000s.
Yet, the feudalism argument failed in explaining the centralized concentration of power
in Ankara, or the almost uninterrupted holding of power by a small, military-bureaucratic
elite since, at least, the onset of the Tanzimat reforms. How could a feudalistic social
formation rally around a limited, elect few who came to organize a tightly connected state
machinery in a brutal manner? And, how could this relatively small number of people
who organized as a power elite control the destiny of the bourgeoisie so effectively? And,
perhaps most importantly, an aristocracy, a landowning class which exercised its
economic monopoly over land by means of adept political persuasion and puppetry
behind the scenes, was completely missing from the picture. In its stead, the idea of state,
with an extensive list of apparatuses coercive and otherwise, seemingly mediated all
forms of social contradictions and was legitimately perceived by several class strata as
the great arbiter.
In the mid-1960s, Maurice Godelier undertook an extensive re-evaluation of
Marxian theories of the mode of production. His attempt was especially crucial for
making sense of the African liberation movements, as well as the new socialist regimes
established in Cuba and China. Godelier argued that the Asiatic Mode of Production, as
envisioned by Marx and Engels, contained deeply flawed assumptions regarding social
transformations towards capitalism and was problematic in its entirety due to its
treatment of eastern societies as fixed, unchanging formations. Thus, Godelier suggested
an alternative that went beyond a framework where the state’s ownership of property was
not the mere gauge of determining the characteristics of a particular mode of production
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and gave a due weight to military and bureaucratic classes’ subordination of social
totality. His claim was that the most striking examples of such a peculiar mode of
production did not primarily arise in Asia, but instead in Europe and Africa-he and his
colleagues later came up with the concept African mode of production.161
Based on his research in different historical and geographical contexts, Godelier
determined four overarching themes in his attempt to re-evaluate the Asiatic mode of
production. First, the Asiatic mode of production should be seen not as a completed,
mature, unchanging social stasis, but rather as a transitory stage between the movement
from a classless society to a class society. The Asiatic mode of production carries within
its own confines the kernel of an incipient class. Second, Marx’s argument of “oriental
despotism” should be revisited, and corrected, through the study of a ruling class that
appropriates the surplus product of peasants’ labor, who has absolute control over forces
of production and organization of labor and relations of production –either through
control over hydraulic resources, as Wittfogel almost obsessively put forth, or by other
means. Third, this particular mode of production should not be treated as a static, stable
social system, free from internal contradictions, and scrutinized with an eye for the
dynamic social forces prevalent within the system that might lead to a consciousness
regarding the evolution of internal contradictions. Fourth, as a consequence of the third
theme, the proponents of a hegemonic unilinear historical and social presumption that
accepted the path followed by the West as the one and only possibility should be shorn
aside and replaced with a new paradigmatic awareness that puts forward for further
161
Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, “Research on an African Mode of Production,” in Relations of
Production, ed. David Seddon (New York: Frank Cass & Co Ltd, 1978), 261–88.
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studies a recognition of social particularities of each society and investigates how these
particulars evolved under different historical, political, cultural, and social contexts.162
Godelier’s theoretical discussions found reception amid the Turkish intellectuals,
and especially Çağlar Keyder and Korkut Boratav’s research on the rural structures of
production in Anatolian villages reflected a certain problematization of the Asiatic mode
of production debates under a Turkish circumstance. On the other hand, a Turkish
novelist’s highly dilettantist conceptualization of the history of the Ottoman Empire and
transition to capitalist modernity was ascendant among the nationalist, right-wing circles.
Kemal Tahir, a pupil and erstwhile close friend of Nazım Hikmet, argued that the
Ottoman social system closely resonated the Asiatic mode of production. But unlike the
commonplace picture of brutal coercion and suppression of dissent painted by the term
“oriental despotism,” Kemal Tahir, and his followers, claimed that the empire was
benevolent towards the masses of peasants and showed excessive tolerance toward nonMuslim faiths. The state had already a quiet unshakable role as a foundation in the
Turkish intellectuals’ ideological upbringing, yet, Kemal Tahir added onto that
foundation another layer of apologism and nostalgia in a rosy account: a classless, nondiscriminating, free, and egalitarian society under the watchful eye of a father-like state.
Keyder, on the other hand, pointed out the dangers of excessive idealization of a
given social formation and the reductionist treatment of social relations as static,
unchanging entities. Even though the Ottoman conquest of Anatolia brought an abrupt
end to the feudal tendencies of local powers, landholding structure had always been
fragmented and this prevented a large-scale land-owning class to consistently emerge as a
M. Godelier, “The Concept of the’Asiatic Mode of Production’and Marxist Models of Social
Evolution,” Relations of Production: Marxist Approaches to Economic Anthropology, 1978, 209–57.
162
366
social force at least since the Roman time.163 On the residues of the empire left to Turkey,
especially in the Black Sea, central and in the western Anatolia regions, the only
remaining large landownership patterns were broken up by the peripheral incorporation
to the modern world-system.164
According to Keyder’s research in four villages in separate parts of Anatolia –one,
Kurdish, and three Turkish villages- in the 1970s and ‘80s, rural social relations of
production were predominantly based upon independent small peasantry and owed its
continuation to petty commodity production, with one crucial exception. In the Kurdish
village, literally all peasants were share-croppers and they owned no land, while in other
three villages, land ownership was, more or less, distributed evenly throughout the
community-neither large ownership, nor any landless peasants were observed.165 Boratav,
in his book Tarımsal Yapılar ve Kapitalizm (Rural Structures and Capitalism), agreed
with Keyder, and added that the independence of small peasants and their petty
commodity producing characteristics do not preclude them from being exploited.
Peasants are exploited not at the moment of production, but at the precise moment of
selling their produce on the markets, they are exploited by the market forces. To prove
his point, Boratav referred to five pieces of research done during the 1970s and provided
summaries of several contextual data from these -delineating rent, wages, interest, and
commercial profit in the total agricultural gross revenues. He compared different cases of
exploitation rates, according to the product: grain cultivation, fruits and vegetables, cash
163
Keyder, “Small Peasant Ownership in Turkey,” 57–8.
164
Ibid.
165
Ibid., 105–6.
367
crops. His finding was, that in grain cultivation, relatively oriented towards selfsufficiency, the rate of exploitation was lower than in market oriented crops, like fruits
and vegetables, and especially cash crops, like tobacco and cotton.166 Thirty years after
Keyder and Boratav’s studies, their findings still continue to be invaluable, and their
import is invariably confirmed during my research in Anatolian villages.
Their studies also shed light on the population movement from the rural areas to
the urban areas. We know that Turkish inclusion to the modern world-system did not
exactly follow the same path as Britain’s 19th century massive dispossession of peasants,
large scale enclosure of the commons, planned scarcity and famines that cyclically
instigated waves of immigration to the industrial centers and led to the constant
devaluation of labor, nor, is China’s last three decades comparable, where a heavily
regulated central state particularly kept agricultural prices and remunerations under heavy
pressure to provide cheap labor to the gargantuan urban manufacturing sector, and hence
created a dual society: millions of impoverished peasants who would take any job in the
city just to break free from the vicious cycle of poverty that prevailed in the countryside.
In Turkey, we know that a comparable dispossession did not take place, apart from the
Kurdish regions. This also explains the relatively low number of immigrants from more
affluent regions with agriculture geared toward market consumption, i.e., Western
Anatolia and northern Marmara –especially, the Marmara basin provinces, the ones
closest to Istanbul, like Bursa, Balıkesir, Çanakkale have a strikingly low proportion in
Istanbul’s population. Yet, the ones from farther away, the people who either were
landless due to geographical factors, mostly Blacks Sea immigrants, and its adjacent
166
Boratav, Tarımsal yapılar ve kapitalizm, 53–7.
368
mountainous areas and central Anatolian peasants with limited access to irrigation, or to
the ethnically motivated campaigns of forced migration and the mass burning of land
during the 1990s in the Kurdish areas. Here, the Kurdish and Turkish trajectories differed
significantly, and unfortunately, I could not dwell further on this difference. Around 37
million people have joined Turkey’s urban population since 1980, while the rural
population has scarcely changed in the last three decades. The urban population has
tripled in this duration.
For the Turkish peasants, the neo-liberal reforms in agriculture, the extensive –
even zealous- use of fertilizers and pesticides, agricultural production’s increasing
integration to industrial processing, and the easy access to tractors and agricultural
machinery rendered a great number of peasants surplus labor; thousands of village
schools were closed in the Western, northern and northeastern, and central area of
Anatolia. Hundreds of villages have turned into pensioners’ resorts. Other than the
Kurdish areas, no rural community in Turkey has shown any increase in population in the
last decade, and many provincial regions are rapidly losing population, or are noticeably
aging. The question that really concerns us here is the continuity of the petty commodity
production. The Turkish peasants have not vanished into thin air, they were not forcibly
integrated to the industrial growth of the urban centers, and they willingly partook in this
great transformation of the last five decades. They became urban citizens. If Keyder and
Boratav were right about the independent nature of small peasantry, and if petty
commodity production required a fragmented and relatively equal distribution of private
property, then, their essential characteristics would have continued in the cities.
The current statistical evidence on the structure of employment and enterprise
369
attest to the endurance of petty commodity production in the cities. 55 percent of
employment in Turkey is in enterprises with less than 20 employees, while only 31 per
cent of workers are employed in enterprises with more than 100 employees. The wellworn argument of Turkish mainstream economists implicates that the real problem
underlying the underdevelopment of Turkey’s economy is the lack of capital and the
ubiquitous existence of small and medium scale enterprises-the KOBİs.167 Scratching the
surface of those arguments reveals the fact that KOBI is just another name for the
pervasively flexible sub-contracting system, and that sub-contracting system flourished in
all spheres of urban relations of production. The construction industry has already gained
a notoriety due to its precariousness and brutal sub-contracting system; from the janitors
in the college campuses to secretarial functions of all state institutions, from the hospitals
non-medical staff to non-teaching (or, non-part-time teaching) employees of the public
and private schools, from the telecommunication providers to internet service providers,
from banking to accounting, from taxi cabs to grocery stores, from public transportation
to the simplest industrial manufacturing, sub-contracting is seldom documented but
mercilessly cancerous social phenomenon in contemporary Turkey. The essential
teaching of Turkish capital accumulation, especially from the bourgeois point of view, is
that “small is beautiful.”
Table 5.5 portrays the extent of the small scale enterprises in the context of
Istanbul’s employment structure. The table shows the abundance of small-scale
enterprises, their distribution according to economic sectors, how they led to a striking
KOBI is the abbreviation of small and medium sized firms, it is defined as enterprises with less than 250
employees, and they present the backbone of Turkish economy, the state has an extensive KOBI support
bureaucracy, and banks pay special attention to them and advertise their special credits constantly, yet, after
all this attention, they are not particularly productive, nor successful exporters of goods.
167
370
imbalance in wages’ levels, and how they contributed to an unjust distribution of income.
Under the ‘other services’ heading, all sorts of shopkeepers, barbers, hairdressers, dry
cleaners, etc. are continuing a precarious existence-or they found a reliable way to skirt
paying their taxes. The more the mom and pop shops there are around the corner, the less
they earn, and therefore, the less they are paid; it is no big secret that, even the
compulsory minimum wage laws are routinely evaded by the employers in these
enterprises, and employees are paid as per oral agreements. Retailers –the neighborhood
electronics and mobile shops, furniture stores, appliances stores- and public ground
transportation –minibuses, privately owned buses, smaller buses, and taxi cabs- are
serious sources of employment and in their isolation, atomized structures. One-man run
characteristics, they are particularly talented in protecting themselves from the taxmen, as
well as, the social security system. Furthermore, the wages to revenues ratio tell us in
which sectors a conjectural propensity exists for the middle classes: the accountants,
research and development activities, education (except, public personnel), health and
social services, computing and related activities are the chief among these. Unfortunately,
banks and public institutions are exempt from reporting their employment payrolls. In
sectors where labor-intensive activities are predominant, and a relatively unskilled
workforce is needed, the wages are low in terms of firm revenue, while, in capitalintensive sectors where high-skilled workers are required, wages are apparently higher.
371
Share of Overall Employment
according to Enterprise Size,
Turkey‐2008
4%
5%
1‐19
20‐49
7%
50‐99
6%
100‐249
9%
6%
250‐499
55%
500‐999
8%
1000‐4999
5000+
Figure 5.9: Share of overall employment according to the enterprise size in Turkey168
168
Source: TURKSTAT Annual Statistics on Employment in Industrial and Services Sectors.
372
2008
Turkey
Istanbul
Mining and quarrying*
Manufacturing
Electricity, gas and
water supply*
Construction
Sale, maintenance and
repair of motor
vehicles and
motorcycles; retail sale
of automotive fuel
Wholesale trade and
commission trade,
except of motor
vehicles and
motorcycles
Retail trade, except of
motor vehicles and
motorcycles; repair of
personal and household
goods
Hotels and restaurants
Land transport;
transport via pipelines
Water transport
Air transport
Supporting and
auxiliary transport
activities; activities of
travel agencies
Post and
telecommunications
Real estate activities
Renting of machinery
and equipment without
operator and of
personal and household
goods
Computer and related
activities
Research and
development
Other business
activities (accounting,
law offices,
architectural offices,
call centers,
advertising)
Education
Health and social work
Sewage and refuse
disposal, sanitation and
similar activities
Recreational, cultural
and sporting
activities(radio and
TV, motion picture,
news agencies,
sporting activities)
2 732 541
647 028
541
113 477
10 087 751
3 139 463
6 403
939 013
4
5
12
8
Average
Wages
per
employee
(TL)
100 282 441 020 9 941
38 907 709 824
12 393
77 110 152
12 043
12 303 835 267
13 103
91
27 947
15 598
195 576
171
7
541 924 996
1 841 509 654
34 743 9 949 086 593
9 416 31 595 923 014
5
6
35
47
27 497
107 609
4
1 026 369 572
9 538
3
64
93 425
401 888
4
5 619 817 933
13 984 258 336 418 683
2
141
164 522
41 680
439 148
174 630
3
4
3 278 896 068
1 400 553 186
7 466
8 020
5
16
166
148
66 382
1 555
53
156 613
17 702
15 554
2
11
293
1 250 367 840
522 537 152
870 562 956
7 984 16 562 859 555
29 519 6 628 860 352
55 970 9 180 186 499
8
8
9
40
43
165
11 185
70 587
6
1 025 349 549
14 526 12 715 553 702
8
165
2 124
6 562
25 908
19 684
12
3
822 668 536
199 930 113
31 753 12 506 893 971
10 157 1 556 482 676
7
13
79
49
661
3 772
6
50 769 956
13 460
8
12
2 441
29 480
12
722 045 842
24 493 2 872 567 889
25
405
16
178
11
5 918 228
33 248
37
312
38 804
3 001
13 100
309 440
57 783
69 299
8
19
5
4 195 072 322
1 217 364 385
1 115 068 989
13 557 29 209 083 146
21 068 3 147 786 477
16 091 4 429 925 385
14
39
25
458
191
89
172
19 497
113
236 556 146
12 133 1 063 816 298
22
481
10 090
29 272
3
405 459 642
13 851 3 977 612 847
10
77
Number of Number of
Number of
Wages and
persons
employees
local units
salaries (TL)
employed per unit
373
Wages as a
Wages as a
percentage
percentage
of
of
Revenues
investment
1 766 486 418 815 6
99
682 407 887 570
109
6
860 251 196
9
77
161 458 100 535
8
121
Revenues (TL)
34 647 550 255
69 568 140 794
8 707 834 261
661 004 431
15 840 913
Other service activities
(washing and drycleaning, hairdressing
and other beauty
treatment, physical
well-being)
21 701
36 525
2
95 982 490
2 628
598 210 755
Table 5.5: Employment Structure according to the type of Economic Activity in Istanbul169
16
107
We know that Istanbul is the richest city in Turkey and perennially posed as the
poster child of Turkish economic development. The city is also home to the all the
Turkish billionaires, but it owes its weight in the economic and political balances in
Turkey to being the backbone of the Turkish middle class. The question is then, where
does the middle class come from? Keyder, in his book State and Classes in Turkey, drew
a parallel between the criollo led Bolivarian revolution in Latin America and the CUP
takeover after 1908 in Turkey. And he asked whether what took place in the Turkish case
can be seen as a “middle class” revolution. For two reasons, his answer to the question
was negative: first, the Latin American “middle class” were large land owners who were
also preoccupied in industrial manufacturing. In contrast, the Young Turks’ power base
was neither in large land-owning class, nor in industrialists, but small scale producers of
the time - shopkeepers and small independent peasants who were not particularly fond of
capitalistic development. Second, the lone social force comparatively deserved to be
addressed as the “middle class” were the Christian urban dwellers of the Ottoman empire,
the only socially active class after the military-bureaucratic elite, and yet, they
persistently refrained from entering the political fray, rightfully avoided competing with
the state elites, and kept their attention on ethnic and religious fissures, which transpired
in the gradual erosion of an imminent “middle class” voice in politics. 170 In the end, “the
169
Source: TURKSTAT Annual Statistics on Employment in Industrial and Services Sectors.
170
Keyder, State and Class in Turkey : A Study in Capitalist Development, 77.
374
peculiar status of the bureaucracy as a ruling class, which implied the absence of a
landowning commercial oligarchy, prevented Ottoman social development from
embarking upon any of the more familiar trajectories.”171
Keyder’s argument precisely pinned down the class landscape that arose after the
CUP intervention and its post-CUP Kemalist repercussions, which in itself was a product
of the Ottoman Empire’s slow integration to the world-system and sudden disintegration
as a social formation. Before Keyder, Şerif Mardin laid out the impending precipice that
troubled the Ottoman Empire, as well as the Republican Turkey. In his seminal analysis
of center-periphery relations in Turkish society, Mardin pointed out the absence of
mediatory mechanisms in Ottoman society. Unlike the gradual evolution of Western
political institution –which developed as a result of a historical series of contradictions
between the landed and landless classes, between the church and the state, state-makers
and centrifugal forces of localities- Ottoman society was built on a single antagonism,
the power struggle between the center and the periphery. The center-periphery power
struggle has gone through several phases and in the absence of mediating forces has
turned into a simple stark reality: center’s direct control over the periphery, a naked
exertion of power by the bureaucratic elites over the peasant masses. A mere exit in this
coercive impasse is the rise of a new social actor: the middle class.172
Here however, a defining feature of analyses incumbent on center-periphery
duality emerges: projecting the middle class as a natural extension of bourgeoisie. In
truth, the middle class and bourgeoisie are different things, not only do they differ in
171
Ibid.
172
Mardin, “Center-Periphery Relations.”
375
nature, but their social interests also do not match, nor do their historical evolution follow
the same trajectory. Mardin, reduced the historical characteristics of the middle class to
that of bourgeoisie and tried to draw a parallel between the European bourgeoisie and the
incipient Turkish middle class. Nevertheless, he correctly pointed out that in the absence
of transitory structures between the center and the periphery, the task that befell on the
newfangled middle class was to mediate this relationship. The problem was that the only
social class fragment poised to take over this mediation role, the mere candidate for the
moderating position, was the bureaucrats, the Westernized elites, and the integral
component of the center. And even if we discount the fact that as part of the center, the
bureaucrats had barely any incentives, or moderating influence over the periphery, the
ebb and flow of their ascribed privileges, their state-sanctioned hierarchical role and
fluctuations in their total accumulated wealth prevented this unique class from emerging
as a mediatory social actor.173 The Turkish system of economic and political power
distribution fervently stood loyal to its mold in the Asiatic mode of production: the center
instituted a chokehold on the top of the pyramid, while the rest of the society equally
shared their disenfranchisement and became willing partners in the excruciatingly slow
redistribution of social resources. Gecekondus, in my view, were just another
representation of legitimacy built in such an unequal distribution of power.
Social scientists of Turkey waited eagerly for the much heralded arrival of a
middle class, a social actor who would balance the crooked political system, release the
clot in the veins of capital accumulation, and help raise the country’s peripheral standing
in the world-system. The middle class was either altogether erased from the face of the
Ibid. See also Mardin’s further discussions on Turkish modernization, Mardin, “Ideology and Religion
in the Turkish Revolution”; Mardin, Türk Modernleşmesi.
173
376
country, as happened in the first half of the 20th century, or the fixed income bureaucratic
class was sacrificed with the neoliberal political economic decisions of the post-1980
Turkey whence the state decided to resign from its role as a monopoly capitalist and a
guardian of the newfangled urban elites. Once again, with invisibly taken steps, through
quiet encroachment of the ordinary that took at least five decades, a new candidate
appeared for the role. The gecekondus, the peripheries amidst the center, the erstwhile
working classes, the educated masses, the small producers, emerged as the next middle
class. This “new” middle class did not make itself on the basis of its role in the relations
of production, but dwelled upon its appropriation of urban public resources, which
proved to be formidably rich investments in the burgeoning market of urban land rent. In
the next chapter, we examine how the urban space appropriated by the gecekondus turned
into a peculiar springboard for the rising middle classes, and how the different modalities
in the production of space approached their object. There, I will describe this new space
and explain how the buildings for the middle class built the middle class itself.
377
6
Building the Middle Class, Buildings for the Middle
Class: The State-Corporate Alliance and the Great Housing
Rush of the 2000s
On a late winter day in 2010, I entered a big, grey, concrete building, around
downtown Istanbul, up on the hill of Beşiktaş, by Darphane. It was a sunny day outside,
yet the breezing northern wind still touched one’s spine like the deft but blind
accordionist’s hands -as Istanbul’s winter cold is famous for its piercing vindictiveness,
especially in March. The entrance hallway befitted the respectability of the firm; marble,
speckless floors, high ceilings with modern, 1960s style chandeliers, geometrical design,
few, but aptly selected paintings that adorned the walls, if this was the 1980s –as most of
the design seemingly dated to- the company was shouting in capital letters that the firm –
or at least, the ones who owned the firm- had the style, social and cultural capital, and
high-taste. Unfortunately, for the 2000s, it was seriously out of fashion, and apparently
after two decades of inertia, the owners of the firm decided to begin renovating their
headquarters. In any case, it is remarkable that as one of the top ten players in Istanbul’s
real estate development game, they had the most stately headquarters, since, almost
overwhelmingly, the real estate developers invested all their flashy and ostentatious
designs in project sales offices, to impress the potential buyers, while their headquarters
are scarcely manned, and resembled contractors’ shabbily built containers. Yet, in the last
half decade, with the enormous growth in the development sector, that was bound to
change as well. And, they followed the footsteps of their flashiest and friendliest partners
in marketing housing as commodity, and pretended to look more like the advertising
agencies, than the builders they once were, but no longer.
In this scheme of things, I played the role of a bespectacled geek –who happened
378
to have taught in the US and was working for his PhD in Istanbul- and as a participant
observant, my prime responsibility was either nodding my head as a positive response to
whatever was being suggested, or, if things seem uncontrollably moving towards a deadend, coming up with erudite suggestions, which were improbably realistic, but
nevertheless petrified my so-called status as an intellectual authority. One of the perks of
occupying such a position of authority, albeit intellectuals’ perennial habitual denigration
in general in Turkish society, aside from the free meals, was a free pass to ask the
untouchable, unimaginable questions to the CEOs or other, similar top echelons of
corporate management.
With a few exceptions, the routine visit to a corporate headquarters requires
handing your state-issued ID at the reception desk. In return, you would receive either a
visitor’s badge, or more often than not, an RFID-chip loaded card that is presumed to
keep their secrets from the prying eyes of the visitors. Yet, on that winter day, once again,
the entry gates did not read my badge, the turnpikes were mum as the lights turned red, I
was more than pestered with the detailed security precautions, and knowing the extent of
the inner workings of a construction company, I blankly looked around the entry hall in
the hope that someone could help me pass through the gates of this mighty corporation.
In essence, basically nothing of interest can be found in any room in this building - this is
not a bank, not even an insurance agency, nor a municipal planning and zoning office,
and the slightly interesting and particularly illegal deals are never kept in the books, the
payments are recorded either very secretly, or completely ingrained in the minds of the
few trusted staff. The secret is not in security; I would later understand that not even a
penny is kept in the vaults, nor some blueprints for future development projects, but what
379
is kept inside so skillfully is the aura of invincibility, a Hollywood-produced image of
professionalism that is sold to the client, to the prospective buyer of houses, or
prospective seller of land, that they were in safe hands, that they were better protected
here than in the banks, the state institutions, or even in the army’s hands.
However, the electronic turnpikes at the gates had this pesky habit of breaking
down, or becoming blind to the RFID-chips, so, it was the security guard’s regular duty
to use his card to let us in. Once before, I had been to the third-floor of this building,
decorated with pinewood panels of a yellowish brown and unceremoniously completed
with 1980s dull office furniture, and a stale smell surrounded the meeting room due to
lack of air –air-conditioners are not one of the most favorite conveniences in today’s
Turkish business world and an involuntarily suffered nemesis of the white-collar- though,
with impeccable views of the neighborhood and possibly as far as the Bosphorus (since,
that view was not shared with ordinary visitors, but served as a precious piece of the
bosses’ domain). Contrary to my expectations, we headed down stairs to a small meeting
room with some views of the neighborhood which at least provided a well-deserved
leeway from the pretentious mannerisms of the corporate bigwigs and their pompous
advisors. This time, though, the meeting was important –I, somehow, missed the clues to
the gravity of the situation- and the main conference room in the basement –which was
newly decorated with college campus style seating, exquisite lighting and audio-visual
systems and hardwood-paneling, isolated from the humdrum of office business and
apparently attempted to serve as a paean to the academic and technical eloquence of the
corporation. The hallways were dark and the janitors had just left the conference room.
With scarcely any food on the tables, nor any tea served –other than the first ones for the
380
sheer sake of courtesy- we should have been better prepared for the coming onslaught.
Right before I entered the conference hall –I smoked a few cigarettes outside to
dumb down my nerves while waiting for the bigwigs to arrive - I was informed that the
second-in-command, one of the Chiefs, would attend the meeting, as well as my friendcum-boss’ real employer, a top-five advertising agency’s CEO, Creative Director,
Strategy executives, and essentially everyone from the top brass of both companies
would be present as well. Once again, I tried to keep my cool. First the advertising people
came in. We had got there before everyone, since, my boss tried to spin a few interviews
I had conducted with residents of a gated community development as a possible business
opportunity, and the advertisers pinned their hopes on the success of this plan to divert
attention from the slow sales of that project. There, I had learned rule number one for the
real estate market; if a developer keeps on funneling millions of liras for one single
project –and, especially with the tagline that “few apartments are left, so hurry up and
earn your place among the lucky few”- it means that the project is a flop, bombed in the
marketplace. The more successful a real estate development is, the less its visibility on
the newspaper pagers.
A short, stout woman in dark business suits entered the room followed by three to
five men- her retinue mostly made up of men, aged in their 30s, well-shaven, dark blue
suits, cheap looking ties, they were either engineers, salesmen, or accountants –though,
the last one was unlikely if they did not plan to pay on the spot. Later, I learned that they
were the engineering corps of the company who were granted the unholy titles of
“business development specialists or executives.” The lady had been educated at a
foreign university, a graduate of a top-level college in Turkey as well, and she was one of
381
the very few top-level executives in the real estate development and construction
business. She was markedly different than the women I had met before in the business –
the only career option for women in this sector was in public relations and marketing,
either as pretty and beautiful, physically attractive in general opinion as the “faces” of the
brands or as managers of connections, or simply as young and hopelessly stuck
saleswomen. In contrast, this woman exuded pride and almost a sensible disgust for the
motley crew that surrounded her, and the few times I had seen her, she had not once
smiled. The advertising people, on the other hand, were the exact opposite of her and her
team: the only suit- wearing person was their strategy manager. She was a veteran of the
advertising business, had built and sold at least a few research companies before, and
now worked at her leisure and as a token sign of trust in her boss. She started her career
as an employee in one of the most important state-economic-enterprises, and slowly, but
surely climbed the ladders of success; an exceptional talent, a rare breed in this world of
horizontal mobility, where moving upwards is almost always reserved for the “lucky
few.” The advertising boss himself was another example of such stellar ascent –his,
upward mobility was one of a kind, and that explained his seeking of continuous
attention, as he was once a prodigy, a wunderkind, a talented creative mind. His ads
helped governments collapse, new coalitions rebuild, and they stretched a wide acreage
of all brands of Turkish politics from the Islamist to intransigent Kemalists. He created
brands from scratch, scratched brands that hung onto the pinnacle of their markets, and
seemingly, they were on good terms with the admen, though, unaccustomed to the rituals
of business, I had a tendency to miss key behavioral signs of unease and well-disguised
disrespect.
382
Yet, in a matter of two hours –a lengthy meeting- the client –the real estate
development company- tore our proposal and presentation into shreds, as they broke the
advertising agency’s each and every intentional gesture to salvage its failed campaign
into pieces. As I will describe later throughout the chapter, the failure helped me delve
into the almost one-dimensional corporate mindset: quantity over quality. In other words,
building and selling more in less time and effectively diminishing the costs for the sake
of higher prices meant the desired results for the company. Urban space, the architecture,
the geographical practice of living, these were mere afterthoughts. I figured out that the
corporate developers, the builders sanctioned by the establishment, were not only
reproducing an utterly quantified capitalistic logic, but were also building an image of
themselves.
The buildings for the middle class, piecemeal built that very middle class. The
middle class was both the target audience and the setting for that ideal home, the class
itself, and its cultural and ideological appurtenances were rather a ruse for building an
abstract object of desire. The stern corporate bigwigs not only came up with the
commodified parcelization of urban space in the form of housing and shopping malls, but
in the course of their business, they produced the idea of the middle class. The middle
class, as foregrounded by those highly speculative developers, was an abstract notion;
nevertheless, it was as factual as the next social thing.
Right before my eyes, the stars had aligned, they revealed the unfathomable
secret of the production of space in the 21st century Istanbul. It was neither interesting,
nor secretive, nor particularly enjoyable, nor full of well-founded, eager practitioners of
the space. They tried to unearth a simple question; the advertisers, the market researchers,
383
and the developers grappled with the twin issues of whom to sell their products and
where and when to reach the potential buyers. This is indeed the seminal question of
capitalism, to connect the superficially separate worlds of production and consumption,
to close the gap, to complete the circuits of capital accumulation, sufficient information
must be uncovered to help the reproduction of capitalism. What went missing in that
meeting room was the state, the deus ex machina of the built environment, the Turkish
Goliath that shaped, formed, made and remade Istanbul in her different lives. The state –
in any one of its institutional representations- was glaringly absent in discussions on new
housing construction, marketing, sales, and design.
Any ordinary commodity is subject to the whimsical distribution of information
determined by the level of transparency prevalent in a given market, and guarded heavily
from any hypothetical interference by the state, or other public institutions, aside from
consumer concerns, –at least, prima facie, the predominant economic doxa (in both
Keynesian and Austrian variants) stipulated that as a desirable status quo and permitted
government intervention at the last instance. Yet, while circulation of money-commodity,
and money-as-commodity (i.e. finance capital) is devoid of state intervention, investment
in a built environment is bound to government interference.1 In commodification of urban
land, the state is the real invisible hand –though, more often than not, its role is ably
disguised- it controls the sunken-capital in the built environment, helps the
financialization of the fictitious commodity in its different forms –either as mortgage
backed securities, or as collateral for further debt.
David Harvey attempted to explain the crisis-prone characteristics of investment in the built environemnt
through his analysis of the uneven geographical development of capitalism and inter-imperialist rivalries,
see, Harvey, The Limits to Capital, 424–445.
1
384
I did not have to wait for long for the state’s incursion in the real estate business
in Istanbul, and, perhaps only lamented the conservative scale of my previous estimates
regarding the extent of inherent relations between the political party in power and a
myriad of figures famed to be the flagships of construction and development activities in
Istanbul. On December 17, 2013, the Turkish public was struck by yet another wave of
arrests and televised scenes from a series of police operations. In the last seven years,
with the incessant operations against the deep state and its alleged collaborators in the
army, navy, air forces, police, media, and academic establishment which later included
the allegedly coup-scheming generals, one could have hazarded that the public opinion
would become immune to such scenes.
Yet, this time the subject party of the alleged crimes were completely different,
the tables were turned, and the police and prosecutors ordered extensive operations
against the party in power. The sons of three cabinet ministers, the director of a state
bank, the mayor of Fatih province, a multi-billionaire Iranian businessman–who
happened to be the young and celebrated husband of a pop star- and two real estate
developers with well documented ties to the governing party, were arrested on charges of
bribery, corruption, gold smuggling, influencing zoning regulations, and structurally
risking the Marmaray tunnels. The Fatih mayor and the developers were claimed to be
plotting a handover of large public land in the old city center, and the developers were
said to be in collusion with the Urban Development and Environment Minister’s son –
and, ultimately the minister himself- to gain zoning and building permits for their
extravagant projects that included the building of residential skyscrapers, hotels, and
shopping malls. For the first time in its 12 years in power, the governing party faced such
385
an imminent threat against its chokehold on controlling hegemony.2
After a tense week, the ministers resigned from the cabinet –one, the minister of
Urban Development and Environment, Erdoğan Bayraktar –the close confidante of PM
Erdoğan since his days as Istanbul mayor in the mid-1990s who admitted he had cried for
his leader on live TV- refused to hand in his resignation, declared on national TV that if
he was guilty of any crimes, the same would hold true for PM Erdoğan, and he should
resign as well. Although he was sacked by the PM, he later retracted his statement, and
reiterated his unswerving loyalty to Erdoğan. In addition to the three ministers’
resignations, PM Erdoğan announced a cabinet reshuffle, replacing almost half of the
cabinet with his close circle of advisors and thereby making it known that the upcoming
local elections would turn into a matter of survival for him and his political creed.
Erdogan vociferously directed his attention to the so-called “parallel state” a neologism
targeted against a Sunni Muslim social organization headed by a preacher, Fethullah
Gülen, who continues to live in a secluded ranch in rural Pennsylvania.
By December 25, rumors heavily circulated behind closed doors –and, some of
which found their way to internet journalism –since, mainstream newspapers and TV
stations are heavily censored, or practice self-censoring- indicating that the next largescale operation against corruption would be instigated by the arrest of Bilal Erdoğan, the
PM’s son. That operation was abruptly ended even before the start- the files were taken
from the prosecutors and those prosecutors were then transferred to provincial positions.
In a few days, wiretap recordings from both cases’ files were made public via YouTube
2
Tim Arango and Sebnem Arsu, “Graft Inquiry Intensifies Turkish Political Rivalry,” The New York Times,
December 17, 2013, sec. World / Europe, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/18/world/europe/graft-inquiryintensifies-turkish-political-rivalry.html.
386
and Twitter, and millions watched online, and listened to the alleged wiretaps.
The accused were set free in less than three months. Meanwhile, thousands of
police were transferred from critical positions to either provinces, or to positions of
irrelevance –traffic, police schools, oversight duties, basically, to passive roles. A hastilydrafted law directly subordinated the justices and prosecutors, and made their transfers,
appointments, promotions and demotions, and workloads subject to the approval of
Minister of Justice. To prevent the leaks from the cases brought against the PM and the
three ministers’ sons from reaching a further audience through the internet, an
unprecedented law of internet censorship was passed rapidly through the parliament and
approved by the president. The law stipulated that access to any web page could be
limited by the arcane censorship and wiretapping institution – the Telekomünikasyon
İletişim Başkanlığı (Directorate of Telecommunications and Communications) - without
any court order and within four hours of the publishing on the website. After the
directorate effectively censored the web content, they would receive relevant court
orders, and only after that could the affected party apply for the removal of the ban on
their content. This draconian law has its counter-parts only in the authoritarian or
totalitarian regimes of North Korea, the People’s Republic of China, Cuba, and Saudi
Arabia. As of March 2014, the iron curtain on the internet did not yet fall, but, with
hardly any doubt, ingenious censorship methods will be applied after the local elections
on March 30, 2014.3
The state, apparently, jealously and secretively grasped Istanbul’s urban land,
3
A week took to prove my premonition true;the government pulled the plug on twitter on March 20. See,
Sebnem Arsu and Dan Bilefsky, “In Turkey, Twitter Roars After Effort to Block It,” The New York Times,
March 21, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/22/world/europe/turks-seek-to-challenge-twitterban.html.
387
gripping it so tightly that scarcely any area of import in the city remained untouched by
the revelations exposed in the alleged wiretaps. Ağaoğlu’s intricate exchange with the
PM’s son, the permits he received from the metropolitan municipality, his reluctant
handing over of a large swath of land in Ataşehir to the PM’s sons’ waqf, and that waqf’s
pecuniary interests on land granted by the Fatih, Üsküdar, and metropolitan
municipalities, Zorlu towers’ huge stepping over the borders of planning and building
regulations in Zincirlikuyu –which, even the minister of urban development was
allegedly in shock, though powerless- gross expropriation of public land and its
subsequent lease to a myriad of government connected waqfs for material gains or for use
as dormitories for college students, rampant graft that involved almost all the main actors
of real estate development in Istanbul, and last, but not least, an alleged demand by the
government from the biggest, and richest, state contractors of Turkey, that almost
approached levels of extortion, to buy a media conglomerate –complete with two
newspapers with a combined circulation of 450 thousand, and a network channel, one of
the most watched, and a cable news network- for the amount of USD 600 million to
prevent it from falling into the hands of the international media conglomerates –likes of
Murdoch and Time Warner- or, turning it into a relatively independent media corporation
that permits it to voice criticism of the government. The state contractors subject to that
demand were supposed to pay USD 100 million each into a shared pool, where a
consortium was supposed to buy the media conglomerate. The media company, which
was sold to Çalık Holdings in 2007 for USD 500 million, where PM’s son-in-law had
worked as CEO until very recently, is said to have lost enormous sums of money,
hindering the repayment of credit allegedly received from the publicly owned state banks
388
–allegedly, the credit line was specifically opened for that purchase.
The question of concern here, is not how such corruption, such byzantine
intrigues, such unprecedented graft could be kept from public scrutiny for so long, nor
why it took a rivalry between those who held the reins of state mechanisms in their hands
for an unraveling to take place –definitely, not a good sign for the condition of Turkish
democracy, nor the capitalist classes’ overwhelming influence on the inner workings of
the state, or Islamism’s articulation to capitalist circuits of accumulation. What is really
interesting here is, once again in Istanbul’s history, speculation over urban land had
prevailed over all fractional interests of the ruling classes and dominated every stage of
capitalist accumulation, while, all that exists in this seemingly heavenly city is subject to
the wretched perishing forces of creative destruction that donned the guise of equitable
redistribution. In part, the unfettered power of the real estate developers owed their
success to the publicly shared euphoria surrounding the rampant urban sprawl, and PM
Erdoğan was not too far off the mark when he said that, Zeytinburnu apartments are now
worth at least double, after the completion of the Marmaray tunnel –his argument found
wild applause and wide approval among the Zeytinburnu populace, at least the propertyowners. What happened after 2002 was an integral extension of the gecekondu building
processes, that quiet encroachment of the ordinary, that mass appropriation of public land
had to return back to where it hypothetically belonged – the circuits of capitalist
accumulation.
Yet, a discerning eye can call the difference between grassroots boosterism and
state-led entrepreneurial wholesale transformation of Istanbul; the mechanisms that made
a vapid real estate speculation a ubiquitous phenomenon, a Goliath to the landless,
389
dispossessed, renting masses of Istanbul, deserves an interest on the actors of production
of concrete space.
In this chapter, I will first examine the divergent scales of the production of
concrete space, from the small-producers of housing, the yapsatçı, to the state contractors
and their labyrinthine relationships with the state. In the making of new state-spaces of
Istanbul, they played an immense role together. Here, using a sample of 250 thousand
housing units built in the last two and a half decades, and statistics concerning Istanbul’s
growth of construction of housing units, I tried to capture the discussions that were
raised in that meeting room of the mentioned developer’s headquarters. In this chapter, I
will focus on how the construction industry and the massive commodification of urban
land made the middle class a solid reality of Turkish social, political, economic, and
cultural relations in Istanbul. The underlying question here is the nascent shape of urban
political-economy, the trends of housing construction, the cycles of boom and bust, and
the mechanisms of capital accumulation in tandem with the state’s centralizing control
over space. In such a discussion, I will also explain how that space, rather, the
representations of space concretely imagined by the advertisers, marketing agents,
architects, and mainstream journalists, reproduced the middle class as a reflection of its
aspirations.
6.1
The Actors: Proponents of the Political-economy of Production of
Space in Istanbul
In this social formation, Istanbul, three main historico-geographical actors,
products of divergent layers of interrelations between social classes, capital formations,
390
labor processes, scales, and state capabilities, carried the onus of shaping the urban form.
These three main actors have traditionally been operational in the housing market of
Turkey and their activities varied according to the degrees of intensity of the predominant
regime of accumulation: the state, private capital, and small-scale self-employed
contractors. These three actors have not functioned as mutually exclusive economic
entities, yet, they have had tangible attributes in the particular mode of labor control,
articulation to the wider economic system, in terms of backward and forward linkages in
the production of housing, and most importantly, in their particular methods of access to
urban land slated for development. In other words, they differed in terms of scale, but not
in terms of either capitalist accumulation, or labor controls. Their access to the acreage of
land was substantially different, their power in commodifying land have wildly oscillated
between mega-level developments (five thousand homes at one single stroke of pen was
not an unknown feat of the Turkish government incursion in Istanbul in the last two
decades) and modest, four-floor, 10 to 20 unit apartment buildings erected on 200 sq.
meters of gecekondu land.
The state has worked in tandem with the big private capital. The newfangled
Turkish nation-state has long been analyzed simultaneously as an extension of the
centralized imperial bureaucratic class which has undertaken the task of forging an
exclusively Turkish bourgeoisie. One of the more prominent ways of the transfer of
wealth was through the construction industry. Both the Republican People’s Party and the
Democratic Party governments had witnessed rampant speculation about the way a class
of crony entrepreneurs were fed by dint of construction projects, as well as extensive
middle-class oriented housing programs that began during Özal’s neoliberal structural
391
adjustment era.4
The question is of course, how had a neoliberal structural adjustment that
instigated wide and powerful dispossession of the working classes in the 1980s led to the
state’s resurfacing interest in urban land? Would not state incursion in urban space entail
a return to the national developmentalist logic of a previous political-economic
hegemony? Isn’t the increasing public share in housing development a sure sign that the
state finally took its space-making role seriously? My answer to these questions will be in
the negative. The Turkish state does not act as an arbitrator of different class interests –as
liberal state theorists propounded- nor is a committee of capitalists, as Marx argued. It
behaves as a class itself, fervently looking after its own interests, treating the rest of the
social actors as its tributaries, acting through granting closely guarded material and
positional resources to its handpicked allies, hence reproducing itself as an enduring
political and economic coalition. It is a strange mix between neoliberalism and statism.
In 1969, Lefebvre suggested that under the circumstances of contemporary
capitalism two main mechanisms of control are exerted over space: neoliberalism and
neo-dirigisme. Neoliberalism “maximizes the amount allowed to private enterprise,…to
developers and bankers” and neo-dirigisme “promotes the intervention of specialists and
technocrats and state capitalism” with a certain consideration in planning. Yet, these two
are not mutually exclusive processes. On one hand, neoliberalism promotes a role for the
“public sector” and despite manifest discourse of the state’s non-intervention, seeks for
There are a few but brilliant accounts of early republican construction industry, see: Tekeli and Ilkin,
Cumhuriyetin Harci. The oldest and most important –until a decade and half ago- Turkish construction
firm’s, named STFA, founders and leading engineers also wrote their memoirs that depicted the
transformation of the business in the last six decades, see especially: Firuzan Baytop, Şantiyecilik Diye Bir
Şey! (Istanbul: Yapı Endüstri Merkezi Yayınları, 2005).
4
392
particular government services. On the other hand, “[n]eo-dirigisme cautiously
encroaches on the ‘private sector’.”5
Furthermore, possible coalitions always endure the explicit tension between the
two, and are strategically located at points of collisions in order to permit the safe passage
through mediated forms of collusion. Thus it is not uncommon to recognize a “tendency
toward centralized planning or even socialization in agriculture, liberalism in housing
(limited) planning in industry, circumspect control of the movement of capital,” and even
large-scale nationalization of banking systems. Yet “[t]he global level accommodates the
most general, and therefore the most abstract, although essential, relations, such as capital
markets and the politics of space.”6
Similarly, the Turkish state attempts to continuously accommodate these two
seemingly divergent, but intrinsically related phases, it is both neoliberal and neodirigiste. By means of its almost unquestionable monopolization of urban land, the state
can command the flux of housing production, the shaping of built environment and
through its carefully crafted market mechanisms, wherein state institutions effectively
privatized large swaths of land in secretive land deals with private developers. The
expansion of the built environment is in essence a multi-layered, processual extension of
state capabilities in Istanbul’s urban geography. The hints of such an extension of statespace is laid bare by the transformation from gecekondus and yapsatçı to the state’s
deliberate coalition with the private developers that led to TOKI-KIPTAS-Emlak Konut
to emerge as the ultimate actor in production of residential spaces in the real estate
5
Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution, 78–9.
6
Ibid.
393
market. An overwhelming proportion of state interference in housing construction is
oriented towards private developers and housing for the middle classes, and social
housing is either an afterthought, or a mechanism to remove impoverished masses from
the inner urban areas and resettle them in the peripheries.
As a matter of fact, this was indeed what the capitalists had in mind when they
entered into an unwilling coalition with the state. In one of my interviews with the top
executives of the real estate development business, I had the chance to directly question
what they had in mind when they began developing land. The executive belonged to a
once mighty corporation from central Anatolia. The 2001 crisis struck them hard and
their bank collapsed, for which the treasury came to the account holders’ help, while,
taking over vast wealth under direct state control. After almost a decade -we talked in
2010- the corporation had barely recovered from its losses, but, luckily, they still had
enormous amounts of land in the peripheries of Istanbul. They had a modest office in one
of the oldest office towers in the downtown area of Beyoğlu-again, with an impeccable
view. I tried to learn what kind of cooperation they had had in mind when the state
entered the housing market with its behemoth organization called TOKI. The executive’s
answer was pretty straight-forward - he said, TOKI should not construct buildings and as
a state institution, it should rather be distant from the market mechanisms. But, what
about urban land, I followed up with another question, - here and everywhere in Turkey,
but specifically in Istanbul, where urban land is scarcely in private hands, and any land
that is not yet developed is public land. He said, TOKI should better provide private
developers with land and the rest assured, there will be plenty of affordable housing
available. I did not object to his reasoning.
394
Apparently, the massive privatizations of the last two decades –during which time
any publicly owned economic enterprise, including such diverse sectors as
telecommunications, steel-making, utilities, chemicals, oil refineries were sold to the
highest bidder- took its toll and ingrained in the minds of capitalists that they deserve
getting their fair share from the common wealth. Though, the state was not so forgiving
or equidistant to each fraction of the capitalist class and had other plans. If it is
unavoidable to break up the commons and sell them for trinkets in the competitive global
markets, if urban land is to be commodified through entrepreneurial municipalities thanks
to a global wave of neoliberal dispossession, then, the Turkish state was still alive and
kicking to coordinate a capitalist rentier class of its own making, of its own ilk. First, we
have to foreground the trajectory of urban development and real estate speculation in
Istanbul.
6.2
Production of Housing in Istanbul: Agents, Actors, and Re-ordering
of the State-spaces
Forty or fifty years ago, Anatolian shores from Haydarpaşa
to Pendik, or from Moda to Bostancı, was not in high
demand. For instance, in Moda, there were the villas that
belonged to the British colony’s commercial families, in
Bostancı, Hügnen’s –the director general of the Anatolian
railroads- mansions stood. Along the [railroad] tracks,
Hamidian pashas of the Privy Council, rich retired pashas,
higher echelon state officials’ mansions were recognizable.7
Real estate speculation is no alien to Istanbul’s long and arduous history, as I have
described in the preceding chapters. But, a common belief prevailed that until the 1950s,
7
Şanda, “Şehre Doğru,” 180.
395
during the golden age of Kemalist republicanism, real estate speculation was non-existent
in Istanbul. On the contrary, the early republican elites were not impervious to the sirenlike call of earning handsome amounts of money through rent. When Hüseyin Avni
Şanda wrote during the World War II years, he complained vociferously against the
rampant land speculation in Istanbul –and compared to the fin-de-siècle, he noticed that
huge tracts of land, especially alongside the course of the Anatolian railroad, had been
rapidly developed. He added that the administration of the Anatolian railroad tried to
ramp up population on this route to make its suburban lines profitable. In order to do that,
the administration distributed passes to the residents of the adjacent neighborhoods and
carried construction material for cheap, nevertheless, Şanda argued, the area –today’s
high density inner city districts Moda, Göztepe, Bostancı, Maltepe, Kartal, and Pendik
coastline- remained exclusive domain of rentiers and high-level officials, who did not
have to commute daily.8
He also pointed out a familiar reason underlying heated real estate speculation,
that during the war years, the only profitable business was export and import and these
commercial activities were being tightly controlled by the few chosen by republican
power elite. The elite saw that the end of the war would lead to an enormous devaluation
of the lira with the cease of lucrative commerce between sides at war and, as
accumulation of wealth in foreign currency was banned by law, they invested heavily in
land. Şanda explained that a boom in demand led to the land prices to inflate tenfold in
the small strip of coastal land from Caddebostan to Küçükyalı extending to Maltepe and
Kartal, all on the Asian side. The rampant speculation continued in its feckless inflation
8
Ibid.
396
of urban land values, and Zincirlikuyu and Mecidiyeköyü on the European side were
filled to the brim at the time of Şanda’s writing, and he presciently argued that soon, the
vast empty land between Mecidiyeköyü and Büyükdere (today’s central business district
which includes the skyscrapers of Maslak) would be soon looted by the very same
speculators. He asked pointedly “Where would this expansion end? What form will
tomorrow’s Istanbul take?”9
So, real estate speculation was not a novelty by the time of Menderes’
Haussmannesque re-ordering of space in Istanbul. A comparatively novel phenomenon
arrived belatedly in Turkey with the saturation of the population in emerging industrial
urban centers from the 1950s onward. Four main reasons triggered an insurmountable
and uncontrollable growth in Turkish urban areas in the latter part of the 20th century:
massive flows of rural population to the cities, an ineffective financial sector that failed
terribly providing credit for housing, the expansion of grassroots politics as a
redistributive apparatus, and rampant inflation that arrested any savings and funneled
those into urban land.10 Between 1950 and 1965 the public sector’s contribution to the
housing supply in the urban areas would not be more than 30.000 units, and at that level,
it is even lower than the supply provided by means of cooperative building societies.
Tekeli estimated that, duly built and officially registered housing supply would total no
more than 3 percent of total housing supply.11
Ayşe Öncü wrote in the 1980s that the constant flux of immigrants in the previous
9
Ibid., 181.
10
Öncü, “The Politics of the Urban Land Market in Turkey: 1950–1980,” 40–44.
11
Tekeli, Türkiye’de yaşamda ve yazında konut sorununun gelişimi, 97.
397
two decades that exceeded an annual population growth of two hundred thousand, came
to the bottle-neck of land available in Istanbul. The previous two decades saw the
squatters appropriate land in peripheral Istanbul and effectively consume any zone
pertinent for further development. The latecomers, especially the immigrants from
eastern Turkey, the Kurdish immigrants, were left with no choice but to pay exorbitant
sums to buy land from the already existing networks of gecekondu land usurpers –the
land mafia, as I mentioned in the previous chapter.12 She aptly pointed out that the
scarcity of land would lead to new ethnic geographical divisions. This was exactly what
transpired with the clear-cut segregation of mahalles between Kurds and Turks, between
Black Sea people and the rest, between the Alevis and Sunnis.
Yet, she also argued that the “absolute scarcity of centrally located land” –which
was due to the heavy build-up of high-rise apartment buildings from the 1950 on- would
ultimately lead to the drop in construction. She foresaw a decline in demand, a glut in the
already contested supply of housing in urban areas. The ubiquitous one-man construction
firms would be the first ones to be affected by this glut in the urban land market in
Istanbul. The crisis of the 1970s was more than a temporary slump. It was rather an
indicator of the coming recession and stagnation in urban property markets. These smallscale producers of housing would be the potential losers, since land prices and financial
costs would obviously increase and many would end up bankrupt.13 However, this did not
happen, and contrary to her suggestion, the housing construction skyrocketed by the end
of the 1980s, reaching unprecedented levels. Why would that be? Did she exaggerate the
12
Öncü, “The Politics of the Urban Land Market in Turkey: 1950–1980,” 59.
13
Ibid.
398
glut in urban land markets? Were the one-man firms more resilient than her analysis had
suggested? Did these small-scale constructors command a larger pool of financial
resources?
Firstly, Ayşe Öncü’s analysis was correct to the full extent of data available.
According to the reports of the Ministry of Environment and Forestry, even by the early
2000s, 69% of the land in the province of Istanbul was publicly owned, and of this, 49%
was forest land.14 Of that public land, it would not be a far-fetched estimate that a third
was squatted by the gecekondus and only in the last three years, an amnesty had been
passed through the parliament by AKP that recognized ownership rights of the squatters.
Even now, the amnesty is not an unequivocal success and only a limited amount is
collected from the squatters of public and forest land as fees for amnesty. Öncü’s
estimates for the size and scale of available urban land for development were quite
moderate given the fact that the state actively partook in expanding the limits of urban
development.
Each bridge built, each highway paved, each coastal parkway opened, each
highway intersection assumed to fix the unbearable traffic, each and every solution
purported for the panacea of rush hour jam, brought alongside a massive appropriation of
public land facilitated by the state and municipal intervention to accelerate the
redistribution of imagined commodity of urban rent. Öncü’s estimates were quite
conservative compared to the greed and public approval of expansionist urban boosterism
championed by the state policies. If Öncü was conservative, indubitably, the early
14
N. Musaoglu et al., “Istanbul Anadolu Yakası 2B Alanlarının Uydu Görüntüleri Ile Analizi,” in TMMOB
Harita ve Kadastro Mühendisleri Odası 10. Türkiye Harita Bilimsel ve Teknik Kurultayı (Ankara, 2005),
10.
399
urbanist of the 1940s, Şanda would have been left speechless faced with the throes of
unhindered urban development in Istanbul. The rhythm of Istanbul’s expansion took
place in unprecedented beats of growth that added several cities of its own size in each
decade. The irrelevance of the historic city’s core, the intra-muros Istanbul, its reduction
to a mere open-air park for the fifteen million tourists each year, its social, political, and
cultural decay attests to this ineradicable growth. The city is no longer interested in its
erstwhile core and has grown multiple times over the kernel that breathed life to herself.
The kernel is but a relic of the past, a cherished but uninteresting past for the
conservatives, nationalists, and Islamists alike, and a blasphemy for the few Istanbulites
who had the luxury to recognize the everyday life which once existed in that part of the
city.
Yet, the historic Istanbul is now an afterthought. None could have foretold that in
the last two decades alone, between 1992 and 2013, the built environment for housing in
Istanbul has expanded 378 sq. kilometers, or 146 sq. miles (See, Figure 6.2). This is the
amount of area that received permission for construction of new homes. That means, an
area as large as Philadelphia's (or almost Denver's, or Detroit's) whole urban land area is
added to Istanbul as a concrete monument to the inexorable urban sprawl. The sprawl
was not merely horizontal, what Öncü termed as high-rise apartment buildings would
have been dwarfed by the extent –and height- of new skyscrapers built since 1992 in
Istanbul. For a time, the tallest building in Europe was in Istanbul before the Shard was
erected in London. Still, the Sapphire in Maslak, a 238- meter steel and glass tower, is the
seventh tallest building in the whole of Europe, inclusive of Russia.
400
Housing Construction Permits 1992‐2013
Actors of Production
180000
160000
140000
120000
100000
80000
60000
40000
20000
0
Total
Government Institutions included in the General Budget (TOKI)
Government Institutions with special budgets
Municipalities (KIPTAS)
Public Economic Enterprises
Private enterprises
Building cooperatives
Enterprises with majority ownership by state and public enterprises
Figure 6.1: Actors of new home building: Housing construction permits according to the type of builders in
Istanbul, 1992-2013 15
The glut in the urban land market has only begun to hit the developers in the last
Source, TURKSTAT construction permit reports: TURKSTAT, “Yapı İzin İstatistikleri,” Yapı İzin
İstatistikleri, accessed March 20, 2014, http://tuikapp.tuik.gov.tr/Yapi_Izin_App/giris.zul.
15
401
decade, and a top-level executive of one of the biggest developers on the Asian side told
me in 2010 that they would re-focus their strategy in skyscrapers from then on. Steel and
reinforced concrete and the limits of modern engineering were no match for their
ambitious plans, I have been to the 63rd floor of a reinforced concrete skyscraper in Şişli
–with, of course, exquisite views of both the Bosphorus and the Golden Horn. The
executive of that skyscraper rightfully bragged about how they had reached the upper
limits of reinforced concrete design and engineering with 67 floors they erected on an
ancient river basin. In the last two decades, this construction activity was enough to build
1,163 One World Trade center skyscrapers, or 1,222 Burj Khalifas.
Ayşe Öncü’s second estimate concerns the financial management and capital
procurement of the one-man companies, the characteristics of small-scale builders’
production processes and the extent they could tap into untouched reserves of the middle
class savings. The small-scale builders, the yapsatçıs, provided a supply of new homes in
Istanbul, overwhelmingly in the period between 1966 and 2002, less dominantly but still
a commanding portion since 2002. She possibly overlooked the fact that the yapsatçı, the
small-scale builder, developed his housing projects in either complete absence of
relations to financial services, or merely by facilitating simple banking services –
checking accounts, deposits for the payments of raw material, security deposits for
bidding in public contracts, transfers for permits, etc. Until the mid-2000s, housing
industry, at least a predominant part of it controlled by the yapsatçıs, had been devoid of
any real, tangible, material connections to the banking system. The credit system for
homes did not come into full effect until 2005, before then, banks just functioned as
intermediaries between the builders and the wholesalers of cement, timber, steel, paint,
402
etc. Even then, the check –which, until 2011, was sacrosanct in Turkish financial and
legal system. Hence, bank checks played a tremendous role in Turkish criminal system as
well, and any unpaid check meant a prison sentence of 100 liras per day for each check
that bounced. Still, bank checks were secondary to more informal methods of financial
transactions: word of mouth, handshakes, signed bill of payments, and if all came to
naught, extortion by mafia was a preferred and reliable method for securing the money
lent. Under inflationary pressures, many opted for mafia extortion than face inexorable
interest rates demanded by the banks, or the merciless justice served by the state –which
took an inane amount of time to be delivered and was unmistakably severe in its
punishment. That’s why the small-scale builders, the yapsatçıs, survived two economic
crises and one deep recession (respectively, in 1994, 2001, and 2009), when consumer
demand plummeted, banks collapsed due to an unexpected devaluation of the currency,
and the exports oriented growth strategy came to a screeching halt.
At those moments when inflation became an uncontrollable social force, it led to a
gradual and hidden redistribution of wealth from the fixed-income middle and working
classes to the coffers of rentier capitalists, to financiers of the debt-ridden crooked state,
the period between the post-1980 neoliberal encroachment to the gloriously manifest
implosion of the whole tributary state system in 2001, home ownership served as a sure
way of keeping one’s savings as an alternative to the bank deposits-though, with
unsustainably high and speculatively irresponsible levels of interest, paid banks were at
an advantaged position. However, the prevailing logic that corroborated demand for
home ownership was the fact that banks were prone to crises, and may very well
collapse-the consciousness of this fact which contributed greatly to the housing boom
403
since 2002. Two short, but painful waves of bank runs helped deeply ingrain in the
Turkish public opinion that banks were no safe bets, and not immune to tumultuous
periods of political economy.
The first wave of bank run happened in the mid-1980s, during the most
ostentatious get-rich-quick frenzy of Özal’s neoliberal reforms. One-man banks, aptly
called “banker” in Turkish, accepted deposits from the public, promising exorbitant
returns on the savings. Some bankers simply embezzled money and fled abroad, leaving
behind thousands of disgruntled and broke people; some invested in real estate and an
array of other presumably high-return areas, all of which collapsed and left the bankers
with an onerous burden. In the absence of regulatory banking institutions, the lucky few
received back their deposits, only years later, after hyper-inflation reduced them to mere
banknotes. The first wave was a typical shock therapy on the hitherto protected, highly
regulated, parochial Turkish financial markets. Even the state guarantee on bank deposits,
came into effect after the bankers’ debacle of mid-1980s, would not be sufficient to
safely guard the savings of the middle class. This lesson was learnt by the public through
the pain and tumult of the 2001 financial crisis. In theory, it was legally possible to
receive your deposit –since the bank deposits were guaranteed by the state- but it might
take years in the excruciatingly slow Turkish bankruptcy courts. Then, one would still
require the assistance of a reliable attorney and some connections at higher-up places. In
the worst case, it was made known after the 2001 crisis that some banks did not keep
deposits on their books, did not file them with the relevant regulatory institutions, and
basically embezzled money. In other cases, the deposits were made in off-shore accounts,
with the promise of extraordinarily high-interest on those customers’ savings.
404
Apparently, as the owners of those accounts were informed after the collapse of
the banking system, the off-shore accounts were not under the purview of Turkish
banking regulations, hence, their money was not recoverable.16 Depositing your money in
the Turkish banks was a shaky business, and, in any case, an important proportion of
Turkish people were inimical to the interest-bearing banking system due to the Islamic
teachings –the scriptures stipulated that receiving interest payment is akin to waging war
against god. They kept their savings predominantly in gold: as jewelry, coins pressed by
the Turkish treasury which circulated as the primary method of gift-giving in marriages,
circumcisions, births, etc. Yet, keeping one’s savings in gold is always precarious,
because not only have the global gold prices fluctuated wildly in the last three decades,
but also the obvious problem of keeping it safe presents a great risk.
Investment in real estate, on the other hand, is comparatively safer than both
banks and gold. As soon as you receive your title, you would have your peace of mind.
Even in the occasional case of the developer going bankrupt, the title given in the
beginning of the project entitles one to a share of land. The land cannot disappear, and all
it takes is finding a new contractor to finish the building. The lousiness of the developer’s
construction materials, the lack of proper engineering, and the control of safety
The financial crisis of 2001 began in 1999 with the government takeover of 7 banks which were unable
to withstand an emergent bank run, in December 1999. After more than a year, it became apparent that
Turkish financial system was exclusively built upon the bank’s lucrative lending of high-interest deposits to
the treasury. As soon as the treasury stopped borrowing in exorbitant interest rates –it was evident that such
high rates were unsustainable, since the state coffers were no longer able to finance the internal debts
without either heavily borrowing from the world markets, or by printing off banknotes, which would
indubitably lead to hyperinflation. Between 1999 and 2003, 22 banks were nationalized and USD 47 billion
were spent to re-capitalize those banks. Some were merged into bigger banks and re-privatized, for others
the huge costs of re-capitalization meant, their previous owners were under obligation to the state. As
recent as 2013, Cukurova Group’s media group and industrial truck assembly plants were nationalized due
to debts from the mismanagament of Pamukbank. Imar Bank, which belonged to Uzan family, was the
most notorious example of mismanagement, greed, and crony capitalism. Some deposit holders have never
received their state-guaranteed money back, since, their accounts were not recorded in the bank’s books.
16
405
procedures would not pose a significant problem, as long as you hung onto your title, that
home belongs to you: you can fix the insides of the apartment later, you can pay extra to
another contractor to strengthen the building against the impending earthquake, you can
rent it or sell it as soon as the prices go up. A home is proven to be an unshakable
investment, the returns are almost certainly above the inflation rate in Turkey, and in
Istanbul, the immense speculative rush helped prices to double on inflation, surpassing
the bank deposits and gold –before the most recent trough, gold however, reached epic
highs due to the global recession of 2007-9- and foreign currency became the most
lucrative form of savings. The price indices announced by the Central Bank are rather
conservative, in my view, and especially the inner city neighborhoods saw irrationally
immense increases in prices.
At least a few of my informants bragged about their deft investments in the real
estate market. A typical apartment -100 sq. meters, two or three bedrooms, on a higher up
floor - that was bought for around 180.000 liras in 2009 in central middle class
neighborhoods like, Kadıköy, Cihangir, Şişli, was worth in late 2013, after almost five
years, triple the amount. They felt vindicated and immeasurably rewarded for the reason
that their investment in real estate paid off handsomely. The interest rates did not exceed
10% between 2009 and 2014, gold skyrocketed and went belly up, foreign currency and
the stock market –three quarters of which was owned by foreign funds until late 2013,
and not really a source of Turkish savings- could not even come close to the roughly 40%
annual interest paid on urban rent.
Today, it is a commonly held belief shared by developers, contractors, municipal
authorities, builders, and the general public that investment in real estate will always pay
406
back in Istanbul. The rise in prices is the not sole aim here, rents also climb steadily in the
central locations, while hundreds of thousands homes built in the last decade on the
peripheries of Istanbul spell a housing oversupply which translates into a fall in rent
levels. In both cases, investment in real estate means that with the ongoing, insuperable
increase in Istanbul’s population, an apartment would not go empty for long, renters are
everywhere, wherever that house is built, and there will be someone willing to move in.
However, this brought together a vast discrepancy between home prices and rents: today,
a new home which sells for more than 600.000 liras, can barely fetch 18,000 liras in
annual rent, and it takes more than 25 years to recoup the cost of new home buys. In
some extreme cases, the rent levels and home prices are completely out of sync, so that a
million liras could buy a house with 12,000 liras in rent.17
The divergence between these two price levels can indicate two things. Either the
buyers, who continue to pay hefty sums on the interest of the credit they borrowed –of
upwards to 15 percent- harbor a certain belief in the fact that rent increase, as well as
housing prices, will double the inflation rate of the last decade, 6 to 7 per cent, or they are
blindingly betting on a real estate bubble. Thanks to the Great Recession of 2007-2009,
we now know to what extent the bubble can expand and the scale of the ensuing burst,
how it meant the creative destruction of the built environment for the urban space, while
The only reliable source for rent and new home purchases is online realtors, like sahibinden.com –the
Turkish equivalent of ebay- and hurriyetemlak.com.tr –the most selling daily’s real estate website. The
problem is that they only recently began collecting and releasing to the public wider data on housing prices
and rent leveles, and their data is not reliable either. The statistics of house prices provided by Turkstat is
notoriously unreliable, ditto, The Central Bank’s housing price indices. During collecting data for the
sample of housing projects since 1990s, I used all available sources, sahibinden.com, hurriyetemlak.com.tr,
and a specific website, emlakkulisi.com –a real estate website oriented towards new home buyers and
sectoral specialists alike- in addition to the web sites of real estate developers. My estimates are heuristic
and unfortunately, are approximations based upon my observations in the sector.
17
407
millions of consumers from Florida to Detroit, from Ireland to Spain, suffered for the
unpaid mortgages while witnessing the annihilation of their sole savings in the form of
housing.
To enable an understanding of the scale of the real estate bubble, scrutinize the
main actors of speculation, the patterns of the real estate developers’ economic behavior,
the geographic distribution of their activities, their effect on the dispossession of the
working classes, their relationship with the state and local institutions –remember, the
state was, is, and will be the ultimate decision-maker when it comes to urban
development in Turkey. Before that, however, Istanbul’s social structure, how classes are
shaped geographically in this both ancient and novel city, how they act upon their spatial
setting, and what they make of this unprecedented wave of speculative commodification
of urban land must be understood. I previously discussed the innovative responses of the
gecekondus, how these squatter settlements reflected upon and acted on the absence of
state agents with a massive appropriation of public resources. Yet, I will show how the
gecekondus paved the way for successive waves of speculation on urban land rent in
Istanbul and how a peculiar spatial actor, the yapsatçı, was born out of the gecekondus.
408
Housing in Istanbul by Construction Area 1992‐
2013
35000000
300
30000000
250
25000000
200
20000000
150
15000000
100
10000000
50
5000000
0
1992
1993
1994
1995
1996
1997
1998
1999
2000
2001
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
0
Average Construction per House
Total Construction in Sq. Meters
Figure 6.2: Housing Construction in Istanbul by Area18
6.3
Social and Economic Trends in the Making of Space: Istanbul and
Turkey
I have a question that still reverberates in my mind -the question is related to the
picture of Turkey’s class structure we discussed at the end of the previous chapter. A
hypothetical question: how would that rural structure transform into the everyday realities
of an urban and industrialized way of life in the latter part of the 20th century, if its basic
qualities of small-scale economic activities and relative egalitarianism stayed the same. I
have underlined the fact that the middle class in Turkey, as inherited from its Ottoman
past, largely consisted of a privileged class fraction, the askerî class, the militarybureaucratic elites –parallel to the decimation and forced population exchanges of
Christian peoples. The petty commodity producers of the countryside mostly presented an
18
The per house square meter amounts here indicate the gross construction area that includes stairwells,
balconies, parking lots, elevator shafts, and other necessary building elements. For a list of individual home
size in Istanbul in the last decade, see Figure 6.16. All data is compiled from TURKSTAT construction and
residential permits reports, see, TURKSTAT, “Yapı İzin İstatistikleri.”
409
undifferentiated mass of peasants and were not subject to massive exploitation as
experienced by the peasants in feudal Europe’s early modern history. What kind of
position would that wide swath of small rural producers take if they moved into the cities
by their own volition? Unlike the European and American cases, where a tremendous
amount of people lived in absolute poverty most of the time before the end of World War
II, where relatively small number of bourgeois lived in luxury, employed millions of
household labor as a capitalist form of slavery, what is supposed to be witnessed in the
cities, given the lack of a social safety net provided by the state, be an equal sharing of
wealth in the bottom and an absolute absence of the middle class that would serve as a
cushion for the bourgeoisie’s greed and their rampant and undeserved accumulation of
wealth. Or else, as the U.S. presented in the post-war era, we might be able to recognize
in the Turkish context a powerful middle class, where almost everyone claimed to be a
part of it, while an extremely limited fraction of the bourgeoisie controlled the expanded
reproduction of capital.
The figure below shows that, inasmuch as any qualitative research of any length
would attest to, eighty per cent of Istanbul’s population, the poorest eighth decile, has an
interestingly level distribution of income. Among this particularly egalitarian distribution
of income, the seventh decile has earned a little more than four times the poorest decile in
2006, and in 2012 the income gap between the poorest ten per cent and the third richest
ten per cent was closed to somewhat a little less than four times. The Gini index in
Turkey, the authoritative indicator of wealth discrepancy, was horridly high in 1994.
With a .49 index, it was worse than almost all notoriously unequal countries of Latin
America and the United States. In the mid-2000s, the Gini index fluctuated somewhere
410
between .37 and .40, thereby a grossly unjust distribution of income had turned into a
merely quite unjust distribution of income. Yet, even with the amelioration between
incomes of the lower percentiles and the richest decile, the picture portrayed rather
resembles contexts where racism is an indelible feature of social structures, like in the
US, and some Latin American countries, or in newly established capitalist economies
where wealth was hijacked by a few robber barons who built themselves an oligopolic
top-heavy system of power, as in the case of former Soviet republics.
In the Turkish context, however, the difference between the poorest first eight
deciles is barely recognizable, the gradation in income is very moderately increasing and
under daily observations, it would be almost impossible to distinguish between these
groups. Their consumption habits would be strikingly similar, they would be expected to
live side by side, they would watch similar TV shows, support very similar social and
cultural views –incumbent upon, of course, on their religious and ethnic backgroundsspeak more or less the same language that defined the Turkish ideology. Each decile
receives only one per cent more of the overall income than the decile below, up to the
ninth decile. The ninth decile shows a significant diversion from the trend beneath. The
richest ten percent is, on the other hand, not only remarkably wealthier than the rest, but
also its fortunes do not follow the trajectory of the lower 90 percent of the population.
The lower 80 percent is not only very similar in terms of its share of income, and
the income distribution is also very homogeneous within these groups, where the median
income is more or less the same as the average. However, in the richest ten percent
median income is twenty percent less than the average income, indicating that the richest
five percent control an immense wealth. Everyone is equal in Istanbul, but some are more
411
equal, especially the richest five percent. Discounting the richest ten percent, Istanbul’s
income distribution, according to my very rough calculations, shows a Gini index of 27,
very much alike the social democratic countries of Western Europe. However, economic
inequality in Turkey is not as blatantly evident as in other developing countries –in South
Africa, Gini index is at a record level with 63, while in Brazil and Chile, the figure stands
in the mid-50s, while, Mexico, Peru, and Argentina hover around the mid-40s.19 On the
other hand, in Turkey the Gini index has stubbornly stuck in the higher 30s and lower 40s
for the last two decades. The relative fall in income inequality in the first decade of JDP
rule seems to give way to a return to an increased gap between the richest segments of the
population and the rest.
Unfortunately, TURKSTAT quit reporting income distribution on the basis of
deciles after 2012. This was understandable though, since in 2012, the richest decile’s
income is 11 times the lowest decile’s income.20 Instead of deciles, TURKSTAT began
reporting quintiles, which is meaningless given the import of income differences and the
undifferentiated grouping between the lowest 80 percent.21 In the last seven years, an
easily observable, quite tangible improvement is evident in household incomes. The very
well circulating public opinion that everyone got rich during AKP’s tenure is not exactly
The Gini index indicates that a point of 100 means perfect inequality, and 0 as perfect equality. See, The
World Bank, “GINI Index,” The World Bank Databank, accessed April 25, 2014,
http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.POV.GINI?order=wbapi_data_value_2009+wbapi_data_value+wba
pi_data_value-first&sort=desc.
19
TURKSTAT, Gelir ve Yaşam Koşulları Araştırması 2012 (Income and Living Conditions Survey 2012),
4143 (Ankara: TURKSTAT, 2013), 8.
20
I found income distribution data from the year 2012 on TURKSTAT’s web page using Google Search,
and it was announced as a pre-statistical report, but apparently never found its way to the final publication
of the household consumption and income report in 2012. See, http://www.tuik.gov.tr/
PreIstatistikTablo.do?istab_id=1386
21
412
far from the truth, and it is not pure election rhetoric, yet it is only partially true.
Between 2002 and 2007, everyone, at least in Istanbul, received their fair share of
developing economic conditions, the shameful chasm between the rich and poor started
to close, all sectors of society benefitted from the growth instigated by a bolstered
emphasis on export oriented development strategies. But since 2008, the richest ten
percent have continued its upward trend, while the rest have slowed down tangibly. In
2007, the richest decile earned almost eight times the poorest decile on average, while the
gap rapidly expanded in the last five years, the richest ten percent’s income is now more
than ten times the poorest ten percent. The last half of the decade is a testament to the
unhindered development of the richest ten percent. The rich get richer, while the rest is
stuck at the same pace of protracted waiting for the trickle-down effect.
Turkish exports have not shown significant increases since the global recession of
2009, while at the same time, imports have skyrocketed, thanks to which, record levels of
trade imbalances and current account deficits have become commonplace. This situation
directly contributed to the rising levels of household indebtedness, due to the ubiquitous
credit cards and easy consumer credits provided by the banks –which, by the way, owe
the money they sell to Turkish consumers to the global financial markets. For the last two
years, the Central Bank has used a plethora of tools –increasing its reserves by making it
compulsory for banks to deposit their reserve amounts as foreign currency, increasing
compulsory bank reserves several times, applying different frames of interest rates to the
banking sector –varying between 5% to 7.5%- to finally limiting credit card installment
durations through regulations established by the banking regulator. Yet, still, in the last
three years credit rose around 30 percent each year, severely limiting the savings levels.
413
What is not known is how the fortunes of the richest decile increased so rapidly in the last
half of the decade. Here the picture can only be completely understood with the rampant
real estate speculation in Istanbul and the ongoing process of investment in the built
environment. Turkey is rapidly approaching what David Harvey described in his “third
cut” in crises theory. At this level emerges the most expansive, deeply spatial, paradigmshifting, regionally proliferating form of crisis rooted in capital accumulation in the built
environment.22 Real estate has become the determining aspect of fictitious capital under
Turkish circumstances and capital accumulation that is sunk in urban land has grown
exorbitantly in the last decade. Without sufficiently understanding the extent and impacts
of capitalist speculation in Istanbul’s built environment, its geographical premises and
political-economy, it will not be possible to gauge the scale of the real estate bubble.
“The ‘first-cut’ theory of crisis...dealt with the underlying source of capitalism’s internal contradictions.
The ‘second-cut’ theory examined temporal dynamics as these are shaped and mediated through financial
and monetary arrangements. The ‘third-cut’ theory...has to integrate the geography of uneven development
into the theory of crisis.” Harvey, The Limits to Capital, 425; See, also, Harvey, “The Urban Process under
Capitalism: A Framework for Analysis.”
22
414
120000
100%
90%
100000
80%
70%
80000
60%
60000
50%
40%
40000
30%
20%
20000
10%
0
0%
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
Figure 6.3: Income Distribution in Istanbul, 2006-201323
The commodification of housing in Istanbul, financialization of land and real
estate markets, and their emergence as a predominant investment and savings instrument
is conventionally thought to be a result of the post-1980 neoliberal turn instigated by the
military junta and the Özal government. However, the real impetus that helped engender
a housing market as an extension of money-capital first arose in the latter part of the
1960s. In the previous chapter, I explained how gecekondus emerged in the late 1940s
and 1950s as a response to the lack of housing and urban land suitable for development,
and I also underlined the possible debate surrounding ownership of property until the
passing of the Condominium Ownership Act of 1965. With the passing of the act, the
The bars represent share of income according to each 10% of population. The lines represent the trend of
each decile’s average household income. Source: TURKSTAT household income surveys. TURKSTAT,
“Gelir Dağılımı ve Yaşam Koşulları İstatistikleri,” Gelir Dağılımı ve Yaşam Koşulları İstatistikleri,
accessed March 20, 2014, http://www.tuik.gov.tr/PreTablo.do?alt_id=1011. See,
http://www.tuik.gov.tr/PreIstatistikTablo.do?istab_id=1386
23
415
Share of each Decile
Annual Household Income in TurkIsh Lıra
Annual Household Income and Share of Income in Istanbul
in Deciles 2006‐2012
construction of new homes –which was tepid up to that point- had rapidly grown. In
1969, it reached a new height with construction permits issued for 40 thousand housing
units in Istanbul.
I would like to take a detour here, and point out a common problem faced by
almost every social scientist who studies the housing question in Turkey. Municipal
authorities in Turkey, issue two types of permits related to new home construction –at
least, in theory, the law stipulates that each new home has to obtain two permits. Again,
in the spirit of the law, these permits help municipal authorities control the basic features
of housing, apply rules and regulations concerning construction, planning, access to
public resources, and basic qualities of housing. The first permit issued is the
construction permit, without which nothing can be built, not even a single nail be driven
in; it is the legal authorization given by the state to a developer, contractor, or cooperative to begin construction. It is issued by the municipalities after lengthy and
tiresome processes, involving a great deal of red tape, connections at higher-up places,
cajoling, and bribery. To receive the permit one has to submit architectural and
engineering blueprints in addition to the electric and insulation sketches, all of which
must abide by the zoning regulations and building code. Also, the contractor should pay
important sums of money as fees to the municipality and if he or she seeks revision in the
municipal zoning plans, a further application is necessary to increase the construction
area, which involves bringing the revised plans to the city council vote. It is no secret that
construction permit issuance is the most lucrative position in any municipality and
localities with highly active new home construction is for long assumed to be cash cows
for the political bosses. As long as everyone involved receives their fair share and higher
416
echelons take their cut of the transaction, the system works as a shadow market of
influence trading.
The second permit issued for new home building is the residential permit that
approves the finished construction of a residential housing unit. It is also issued by the
same municipal authorities, and is only given after construction ends and homes are made
ready for moving in. The process for obtaining the residential permit is even more
complicated than the construction permit and each municipality can come up with extra
requirements for insulation, weather-proofing, parking, greenery, elevators, etc.
According to the books, without the residential permit a building is not fit for living,
hence, power, water, sewage, gas, and telephone connections should not be made by the
utility companies, the municipality should not serve the building, not assign addresses,
and the land registry offices should not issue separate titles for apartments without
residential permits-they would rather receive, a land title proportional to their share in the
total construction area. Yet, all of these are stipulations on paper, and in practice, one can
connect power, water, sewage, gas, telephone - the municipal authorities create no
trouble, nor do the utilities bother with cutting the unpermitted homes off the grid. Only
recently, power utilities began charging extra, generally 10%, for electricity used by
homes without residential permits. Again, banks are not allowed to lend money for
homes without residential permits, but, more often than not, they find a way to sidestep
the issue.
An overwhelming proportion of homes built in Turkey in the last five decades
currently do not have residential permits. The only exception that construction permits
issued match residential permits is during the military rule between 1980 and 1983.
417
Apparently, the officers appointed as mayors and municipal administrators showed their
strict discipline in matters related to real estate. Other than that, only one third of the
homes constructed in the last five decades received residential permits. Yet, municipal
authorities have kept on serving apartment buildings without residential permits, as they
served the gecekondu areas-please note that the gecekondus are developments that did not
even obtain construction permits. These apartments can serve as collateral in financial
transactions and it was only in the last decade that mortgage institutions were precluded
from lending for the buying of homes without residential permits. Even then, the number
of residential permits only began to catch up to the construction permits after the 2005
mortgage law was passed in the parliament, and when PM Erdogan asked his
municipalities to be stricter in following the regulations for residential permits. That’s
why in this chapter, I count on construction permits as the reliable data, and not the
residential permits. For any building, once ground is broken for the foundations, it will be
completed in one way or another in the end –a construction permit is not something
cheaply obtained; while millions could, and did, live in apartment buildings without any
residential permits.
418
Construction and Residential Permits
Turkey 1970‐1991
600000
Housıng unıts
500000
400000
300000
200000
100000
0
Construction Permit
Residential Permit
Figure 6.4: Construction and Residential Permits in Turkey 1970-199124
Construction Permits
1991
1990
1989
1988
1987
1986
1985
1984
1983
1982
1981
1980
1979
1975
1974
1973
1972
1971
1970
1969
1968
1967
90000
80000
70000
60000
50000
40000
30000
20000
10000
0
1966
Housıng unıts
Construction and Residential Permits in Istanbul
1966‐1975 and 1979‐1991
Residential Permits
Figure 6.5: Construction and Residential Permits in Istanbul 1966-199125
Source: TURKSTAT Construction and Residential Permits Annual Reports.TURKSTAT, “Yapı İzin
İstatistikleri.” Reports are not available online before the year 1991 and they are only available in either
TURKSTAT office libraries or in some public university libraries.
24
25
Source: TURKSTAT Construction and Residential Permits Annual Reports.
419
Construction and Residential Permits in Istanbul 1992‐
2013
180000
160000
140000
120000
100000
80000
60000
40000
20000
0
Construction Permits
Residential Permit
Figure 6.6: Construction and Residential Permits in Istanbul, 1992-201326
6.4
The Yapsatçı as a Bridgehead of Real Estate Development
While an overwhelming proportion of immigrants from the countryside found
gecekondus as the most accessible point of access to the urban environment, they have
gradually assimilated into the urban economy, straddling ahead of their erstwhile
underprivileged, and to an extent outcast, position of mere working hands. A crucial
factor, inasmuch as the growing industrial sector with significant increases in wage levels
provided by a successful unionization of the workers, albeit limited to the core and
engendering a workers’ aristocracy, was the opportunities of land ownership provided by
the politically motivated amnesties for squatters.27
Thence arose a special class of builders: the yapsatçı. Literally an abbreviated
form of make-and-sell, the word denotes the entrepreneurs who build and sell, the
26
Source: TURKSTAT, “Yapı İzin İstatistikleri.”
E. Guloksuz, "Negotiation of Property Rights in Urban Land in Istanbul," International Journal of Urban
and Regional Research 26, no. 3 (2002).
27
420
yapsatçı was a new class of urban entrepreneurs, who-akin to Miller’s salesman, lived on
his ability to pursue land and that was appropriated by either the gecekondu dwellers or a
single family.28 Almost immediately a racially motivated stereotype was constructed
around the notion of the yapsatçı: the Lazi contractor. I have underlined above, that the
first immigrants were from the Black Sea region, and even today, people with a family
background in the wider Black Sea area make up around a third of Istanbul’s overall
population. Although this stereotype has undergone different variations, the Lazi (or
Karadenizli, peoples of the Black Sea coast) developer has been widely portrayed as
cunning, self-centered, ignorant -of both ways of proper (read, modern) construction
techniques and urban etiquette- manipulative, and brutish in his relations with the
construction workers. Yet, similar to the characteristics of the construction industry in
Western countries, where a significant amount of economic activity and an overwhelming
proportion of employment is undertaken by small-scale contractors, the Lazi contractorand his Kurdish colleagues- had controlled a major stake in housing output. However, by
the early 2000s droves of yapsatçı projects were failing, bankruptcies were ubiquitous;
and the familiar scene of three to four story apartment buildings in the traditionally
middle class neighborhoods of Istanbul has receded, or silently been removed to the
outskirts of the city.29
See also, Orhan Esen and Stephan Lanz, Self Service City: Istanbul, Metrozones, 4 (Berlin: B-Books,
2005).
28
29
This trend is not a particular characteristic of the Turkish construction industry, a similar onslaught of
small-scale housing builders took place in Britain with the onset of neoliberalism in the early 1980s. See,
John Burnett, A Social History of Housing, 1815-1985, 2nd ed. (London ; New York: Methuen, 1986),
326-27. Burnett noted that “the general trend in British industry towards fewer, larger firms” has not been
reproduced by the building industry, even though the state’s role was paramount in providing housingcouncil housing in the British case. The trend since the 1980s is unsavory in the Western context: the statecapital coalition has rolled back from its entrenched position of union-backed control of the labor market by
dint of deregulation in the last three decades. This helped usher in a period of growth in employment and
421
There are three main reasons that need emphasis to understand the meteoric rise
and demise of the yapsatçı. First, the withering of the developmentalist state’s effects on
the housing market and the political and economic parameters that beset the efficient
turnover of small-scale self-employed contractors require further elucidation. It was a
losing bet against scale, so, the yapsatçı had to cut corners to get rich –and he had done
that by using sub-standard building materials, and, more importantly, by rapaciously
limiting an increase in wage levels. He had been an adept in ruthlessly suffocating the
working class he had tapped into. Second, the entrance of the private ‘big’ capital, hand
in hand with the state intervention, either through revenue-share housing developments,
or through the direct sales of public land, in the upper and upper middle class rungs of the
housing market has affected a landslide in the direction of the profits. Third, the
deficiencies inherent to-as much as the novelties underlying- the production processes
employed by the yapsatçı requires a deft eye in order to be able to draw similarities and
contrasts between what had ensued in the small-scale contractors’ activities in the
production of living space.
It is an oft-repeated saying in Turkish that no rhetoric is without lies and no
wealth is made without sins. The yapsatçı, the small-scale contractor, earns very little,
from the outset, half of all land belongs to the landowners, if not more. Marx, in the third
volume of Capital, cited from a speculative builder’s testimony to a parliamentary
committee on banking, named Edward Capps, he bluntly explained the trick of his trade:
I think a man who wishes to rise in the world can hardly expect to rise by
real estate speculation, these two, however, eventually triggered a segmentation of the labor market –a dual
structure with unionized workers as against precarious, almost informal, self-employed, mostly immigrant,
and unskilled workers, in addition to the mortgage-led boom and bust of housing sector. See also, Gerhard
Bosch and Peter Philips, eds., Building Chaos: An International Comparison of Deregulation in the
Construction Industry, Routledge Research Studies in Business Organization (London: Routledge,2003).
422
following out a fair trade…it is necessary for him to add speculative building to it,
and that must be done not on a small scale; …for the builder makes very little
profit out of the buildings themselves; he makes the principal part of the profit out
of the improved ground-rents.30
Marx pointed out that “in cities that are experiencing rapid growth, particularly
where building is carried on factory-style, as in London, it is ground-rent and not the
houses themselves that forms the real basic object of speculative building.”31 The highly
speculative and fictitious nature of ground-rent actually harbors a quality strikingly
resembling a Ponzi scheme. In any development area, the first to enter the market would
be the ordinary, small-scale yapsatçı. He would act as a bridgehead that breaks potential
dissent in the neighborhood against urban development, sets the ground-rent levels for
the succeeding waves of development projects, and establishes local connections –he
might even be one of the locals. Unlike the Ponzi scheme, the early venture is not
guaranteed to have the highest returns, since the ground-rent in this case is paid not in
inflation-adjusted installments, but as a lump-sum payment: the price of a housing unit.
The real benefit falls to the latecomers, this is an inverse pyramid scheme, the ones who
enter later, reap the most. The street layout, the urban patterns, the commercial areas,
public parks, and utilities become gradually emergent as construction activity permeates
through the yapsatçıs piecemeal work. Soon, their territory expands, more and more
landowners show interest in signing a contract with the contractor.
Due to his perennial need for capital, the yapsatçı, more often than not, does not
become a landlord himself. His business is structured around a rapid turnover of capital
30
Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 3 (Penguin Classics, 1993), 909.
31
Ibid.
423
and a minimal amount of outright capital advances. He does not pay the landowner once
the deal is struck, but promises that as soon as construction permits and land share titles
are issued, the landowner would be able to sell his own apartments, or, the yapsatçı can
sell landowner’s apartments for a commission, using his own devices. In that sense, he
does not only build, but also he acts as a realtor: finding interested buyers, arranging
payment methods, charging fees.
The real factors of cost in the yapsatçıs’ business model are threefold: the
acquisition of construction permit, the procurement of building materials, and labor. And
among the three the first one is the most onerous, since it involves a significant amount of
drudgery, political and social connections, and payments in cash. It is an arduous task
though, preliminary and revised architectural sketches for the building must be obtained,
and they should be approved by the local Architecture’s Chamber –at least, until the last
year this was the case, when the Erdogan government decided to deprive his political
enemies from this much- prized source of income and transferred architectural approval
authority to his Ministry of Urbanism and Planning. Normal procedure is employing a
newly graduated architect for this job. His main task would be to revise the measures at
hand to the already existing design sketches. Increasingly, in the last decade, college
students, or new graduates of the architecture school are employed for 3-D rendering of
those sketches to provide a visual representation of the building, as a marketing tool.
Then, civil engineer-drawn sketches and plans for load-bearing columns and walls must
receive approval following a similar process to the architectural sketches –the two,
engineering and design plans, would be later merged into one large file, which provided a
crucial income opportunity for printers, since, municipal offices –nor the Architectures’
424
Chambers- accepted electronic formats. Finally, to be able to receive a residential permit,
the yapsatçı must prove to the authorities that he does not owe any back taxes, any
obligations for the workers’ social security pays –which used to be his responsibility,
until sub-contracting became the norm of doing business. Frequently, the yapsatçı would
owe money to the state, either in expectation of usual tax amnesties, or, basically bent on
declaring his personal company bankrupt, to establish another one, under a different
name. So, it is no wonder that residential permits are usually skipped by the contractors,
as soon as the building is completed, and it becomes the new owners’ problem and the
yapsatçı moves onto his next building.
The second factor, the building materials, can be bought on credit, and since
unpaid checks and bonds are no longer punishable by prison sentences, nobody’s really
using such means of financial securities, but rather prefer bank drafts, or bank issued
credit cards. As one yapsatçı becomes known for his work, he receives informal credit
from his suppliers; and perhaps, cement, sand, paint, wooden scaffolding for pouring the
concrete, further wood for scaffolding for painting, steel rebar, and door and window
frames can be bought on such verbal agreements based on trust. Yet, the most important
wholesale cost item, concrete –the bread and butter of construction business- cannot be
bought on long-term credit, since concrete is industrially produced, distributed, and sold
on spot in a tightly controlled cement and concrete market ruled by three, or four
companies. Only large scale construction projects can afford to establish their own
concrete plants, pumps, and necessary technical equipment. For the rest, the solution is to
buy concrete straight from the corporates, paying for the concrete pumps, and the premixed concrete itself-though, with Turkey being one of the prime producers of concrete
425
and cement, prices are lower compared to the developed world. Before ready-made
concrete and concrete pumps, the yapsatçı was supposed to buy construction grade sand,
pebble, and cement, and mix them at the construction site. More often than not, the
ingredients would be far off the construction standards, and the consistency and quality of
the concrete was poor.
The third factor, labor, is the one where the yapsatçı has the highest level of
control. As I mentioned in the last chapter, the first yapsatçıs were the engineers and
architects of the 1960s, who quit that line of work in the face of stiff competition from
less-educated rivals. These rivals were erstwhile employees of those engineers and
architects, the foremen and master masons who climbed up the ladders of hierarchy as
soon as they gained necessary know-how to construct an apartment building. While the
engineers and architects themselves moved on to large scale projects, receiving contracts
from the nascent building co-operatives, or becoming sub-contractors in the state-led
housing developments and infrastructure projects, the humbler blue-collar worker
excelled in small-scale construction.
The yapsatçı as a self-made man had many advantages compared to his better
educated competition. First, he could command a large army of workforce through either
his expanded family, or hometown network. Second, the willing apprentices scarcely
made any scenes at work, and blood was certainly thicker than money, or the need for
workplace organization of labor. The pay included lodging –almost always, the
construction site itself, depending upon the situation, it meant either a shack, or, after the
first floor is finished, a hastily arranged room with bare necessities. Much later,
containers served as an accommodation for the workers before the completion of the first
426
floor. Third, he could speak the language of the gecekondus, sign better deals, which
meant that he could get better apartments as his share of the deal –since, lower levels, and
apartments with scarcely any sunlight were neither desirable, nor saleable on the market.
Finally, he had the extraordinary ability to keep his household expenditure under
control. The sales of homes has never followed a straight-forward path which meant
long months of unpaid bills, disgruntled workers, and an unhappy household. He had the
uncanny talents to defer payment of the bills, struck a deal with the workers –by at least
paying their “cigarette moneys”- and, keeping his own household necessities to the bare
minimum, and in those moments, he was no different from his own workers. What
differentiated the yapsatçı were the trademarks of his profession, a shiny and expensive
suit, possibly a golden watch, or at least, an imitation of a pricy watch, a well-decorated
office –to impress the buyers- and finally, but most importantly, an imported car,
preferably a Mercedes-Benz, that shouts out his name as a money-making builder. The
car also played its significant role as a source of credit, as noone would have thought
twice about lending money to a guy in a Mercedes-Benz, and if things were going
downhill for a moment, he could sell his car easily to obtain cheap cash, without using
expensive and burdensome bank credit.
As Figure 6.7 shows, the first wave of the housing boom began in Istanbul at the
end of the 1960s and lasted until 1980 at full steam. Contrary to the commonplace notion
that the street-level armed violence of the late 1970s brought all economic activities to an
abrupt halt, the building of new homes did not immediately slow down. 1977 saw a peak
in construction of new homes, with almost 48 thousand units built in Istanbul, and that
level was not surpassed for a decade until 1986. In 1978, a gradual drop was observable,
427
it continued in 1979, but the real collapse took place in 1981, in the first full year the
military junta run the city, and construction permits granted fell to a record low of 13
thousand units, to the levels last seen in the mid-1950s.
The second part of the 1970s saw for the first time the introduction of large-scale
apartment building activities in the inner city neighborhoods. An immense, devouring
development wave was led by the small-scale, one-man building corporations, the
yapsatçıs rapidly expanded their territory into the old quarters of Istanbul: Beşiktaş,
Fulya, Şişli, Mecidiyeköy, and Beyoğlu’s eastern and the more affluent neighborhoods
were already subject to building in the latter part of the 1950s, but the mid-1970s
witnessed the disappearance of the last remaining gecekondus and wooden mansions
alike, the last standing houses were often burnt in a night to open way for more
development. Across the Golden Horn, Aksaray, Çapa, and Kocamustafapaşa in the subprovince of Fatih, the historic core of Istanbul was rapidly transformed from its centuriesold street and architectural patterns, where wooden row houses were the norm, and was
replaced by six to eight- floor reinforced concrete apartment buildings. On the Asian side,
a thin strip that stretched east to west between Bağdat Avenue and its northern parallel,
Minibus Avenue, was the most heated loci of development. Fin-de-siècle wooden
mansions, Ottoman bureaucratic elites’ leisure homes, and expropriated non-Muslim
houses were torn down and high-rises were erected in their stead.32
The architecture of the period was strictly functional, in a developer’s sense, of
course, and function meant the construction of the most area possible, where the building
Tanyeli, İstanbul 1900-2000; Tanyeli, Rüya, İnşa, İtiraz; Kuban, İstanbul, Bir Kent Tarihi; Tekeli,
Development of the Istanbul Metropolitan Area; Giz, Bir zamanlar Kadıköy.
32
428
code was a relic of the past, permits were easily obtainable, architecture was an
afterthought, and the production of the highest number of homes in the shortest time
possible was the mantra. The end product was unsightly, the face of the city was
blemished by the ghastly rectangular high-rises dotted with large, cast-iron balustraded
balconies. Grey, pale yellow, pastel green, pale pink were the favorite color of those
developers, and possibly, it was a result of landowners and contractors mutual agreement
on price and frivolous color choices. This was the time of Lazi contractors, who were
stereotypically caricatured in popular culture as money-mongering, greedy, lazy,
dictating bosses with an impeccably ridiculous Black Sea accent-which, of course, had no
relevance to the ancient languages, dialects, and accents prevalently spoken in the Black
Sea region. In the utter absence of the state, the yapsatçıs, as the first truly private real
estate speculators, ordered the city space through the incessant uniformity of rectangular
apartment buildings.
429
Housing Construction Permits in Istanbul 1954‐2013
180.000
160.000
140.000
120.000
100.000
80.000
60.000
40.000
20.000
1954
1956
1958
1960
1962
1964
1966
1968
1970
1972
1974
1976
1978
1980
1982
1984
1986
1988
1990
1992
1994
1996
1998
2000
2002
2004
2006
2008
2010
2012
0
Units
Figure 6.7: Housing Construction Permits in Istanbul33
Another important fact the trends in housing supply indicate here is that by the
mid-1970s, after three decades of population surge, finally, enough homes were being
constructed. The annual average population growth between 1975 and 1980 was 160
thousand in Istanbul –which surpassed the 200 thousand threshold only after 1980. Given
the fact that a typical Istanbulite household at the time was home to more than 4 people
on average –still, significantly less than the rural areas, and presumably, most of the
population increase owed itself to the migrants- 40 thousand new homes built per annum
would be more than enough for the city. Yet, even in this case, gecekondus continued to
disperse on public land and right at the same time where private development reached its
apex, new squatter neighborhoods like The May Day neighborhood were established.
Years 1954-1966 are derived from Tekeli, Development of the Istanbul Metropolitan Area. The rest is
derived from TURKSTAT annual statistics of construction and residential permits reports.
33
430
This can be partly explained by the pent-up demand for housing since the 1930s. There
were 303 thousand housing units according to the building census of 1960.34 Between
1965 and 1980, 430 thousand new homes were built: even without the gecekondus,
another city was added in a mere fifteen years. But, how come both went on their
unhindered expansion, both the apartment buildings and gecekondus succeeded to expand
horizontally, how come housing supply did not fall once a massive appropriation of
public land went underway. That phenomenon possibly owes its existence to the fact that
apartments and gecekondus as two distinct spatial forms, two separate housing patterns.
Up to a certain point, the gecekondu dwellers showed no interest in moving to the
apartment buildings, and we can be fairly certain that the other way was out of the
question from the onset. Apartments and gecekondus were themselves concatenations of
two different class practices that found their expression in the concrete space of Istanbul.
However, this situation changed in the late 1980s.
DİE, 20 Şehirde 1960 Mesken Şartları Anketi Örnekleme Sonuçları, 428 (Ankara: Devlet İstatistik
Enstitüsü, 1962).
34
431
Annual Average Population Growth in Istanbul
600.000
500.000
400.000
300.000
200.000
100.000
0
19271935194019451950195519601965197019751980198519902000200720082009201020112012
Figure 6.8: Annual Average Population Growth in Istanbul35
After the 1980 Coup, the first housing boom in Istanbul came to an abrupt end.
We cannot be sure if it was the burst of the real estate bubble or the total seizure of the
Turkish political system by the military that led to the collapse of construction. But, we
know that even after the first democratic elections, construction activities did not return
immediately to the peak it had reached before the coup. The Özal government, however,
triggered a new wave of growth in the built environment for housing by means of TOKI
(a newly established state institution, controlled by the prime minister’s office) and
Emlak Bank (a state owned bank established for financing real estate property
developments). Facilitating TOKI and Emlak Bank as his tools for intervening in the
housing market and as a legal authority for opening up large swaths of land for
development –remember, Menderes was indicted for his development efforts in the 1950s
and unsurprisingly, any state intervention in the built environment required a wellgrounded legislative basis since then.
35
Source: TURKSTAT Census Data.
432
Further development efforts were undertaken by the co-operatives and the ease of
obtaining public land as state sanctioned co-operatives helped engender an expansion of
housing development on that front as well. Özal’s brand new developments, Anatepe
(later, after Özal’s Anap fell from power, renamed as Ataşehir) and Bahçeşehir were built
on public land and heralded a new language of real estate speculation based upon the then
new promise of Western-style “satellite cities.”
Two striking aspects of this second real estate boom are worth noting. First, one is
the new mode of the state-led development in Anatepe and Bahçeşehir, as well as other
large-scale housing projects built in Ankara. Previously, the state entered as the provider
of social housing and laid claim on the whole development. In some cases, especially for
the logements, subsidized housing for state employees, the state did the construction job
itself and did not subcontract the process. This was especially the case with the military
base developments and for long, the military employed thousands of engineers and
architects as college graduate conscripts who designed and oversaw the construction of
extensive military facilities using the unpaid labor of uneducated conscripts. In the late
1970s, under Ecevit, the state social security agency even established its own
development corporation, which contributed heavily to the construction of the then one of
the greatest industrial investments in Turkey, the Iskenderun Steel Mill. Özal, changed
this system and sub-contracted development to a plethora of construction companies. The
agreement between the state and the contractors involved not cash payments, but a share
of the housing units built. It was a frequent source of criticism in the late 1980s that Özal
sub-contracted Anatepe for a mere 20 to 30 percent of housing units built to Selim Edes,
the owner of ESKA, one of the great contractors at the time. Still, Emlak Bank remained
433
the intermediary institution that provided credit for the sale of homes and, presumably, all
financial transactions between the sub-contractor and the state went through that bank.
Later, Emlak Bank became the hub of scandals surrounding the ANAP government and
led to their downfall in the 1991 elections.
The second important aspect of this second real estate boom in Istanbul was the
reinvigorated zeal of the yapsatçı. They found extensive support from the government
and the municipal authorities –Özal was famous for his dictum that “my state officials
know how to get the business done” implying bribery as an efficient way to smoothen out
the working of the bureaucratic system according to his critics. Bolstered by this tacit
support, the yapsatçıs began moving into the gecekondu neighborhoods, as the land was
plenty, prices were still low, building codes were not properly applied, and this helped
gecekondu dwellers to own apartments and meant their transformation from working
class to urban rentiers. A series of gecekondu amnesties for appropriated public land –
each timed precisely before the local elections to boost support- helped the squatters
receive their titles, which rapidly led to further development. Both right-wing,
conservative parties like Motherland Party and WP (Welfare Party, the precursor to the
present JDP), and left-wing, social democratic parties like SPP and RPP used this method
to solidify their popular support among the gecekondu dwellers. As the land for
development became extremely scarce in the inner city neighborhoods –unless, new
planning permissions for higher buildings were passed at the time- gecekondus became
the next frontier for thousands of small-scale developers. On the other hand, hitherto
untouched areas –a mix of forest, public and agricultural land- opened for further
development in newly established sub-provincial municipalities in Avcılar, Beylikdüzü,
434
Esenyurt, Ümraniye, and Başakşehir.
The second land grab, the vastly successful real estate development in this era
reached its apogee with the Islamists’ taking over of local governments. In 1994, Recep
Tayyip Erdogan was elected mayor of Istanbul in a three-way race, with a miniscule
plurality of votes. The leader of his party, Necmettin Erbakan, started a new housing
development project on the European side, where pristine public land existed. Başakşehir
–taking its meaning from the ear of the grain, the symbol of Felicity Party- was a gigantic
real estate development mainly constructed by the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality’s
development corporation, KIPTAS. Later, Başakşehir was incorporated as a municipality
and has become an important suburban neighborhood. Similar to Erbakan’s Başakşehir,
another Islamist group, Ihlas Holding, an off-shoot of the Iskenderpaşa congregation,
began building Bizimkent in between Avcılar and Beylikdüzü. This was one of the most
expansive housing developments solely undertaken by private capital and it greatly
contributed to the real estate boom that took place on the E-5 highway. Still, the yapsatçı
was the prime market maker at the time with his candid versatility in signing deals, and
his unprecedented pace in building and selling.
The yapsatçıs’ move to the peripheries brought with it a rampant speculative
encroachment on the gecekondus. Zeytinburnu was one of the first to be developed into
apartment buildings in the 1980s. The classical gecekondu urban pattern rapidly faded
into five, six, seven floor high-rise apartment buildings, wherein dead ends, narrow
streets, meandering pathways stayed the same and took a labyrinthine well-shape wedged
between the high-rise concrete giants. The north and south of the route E-5 highway
followed on both the European and Asian sides could not avoid a similar fate to
435
Zeytinburnu. Topkapı, Merter, Ataköy, Bahçelievler, Esenler, Güngören, and Yenibosna
on the European side, and Ümraniye, Üsküdar, Kozyatağı, Yenisahra, Bostancı, Dudullu,
Kayışdağı, Maltepe, Uğur Mumcu, Kartal, Pendik, and Sultanbeyli had turned into vast
fields of rectangular concrete. For the first time in its long history, the city was
fragmented into many suburbs which barely touched upon each other –aside from the
highway that connected them, and a multi-zonal center of competing central business
districts emerged at that time, thanks to the high concentrations of population housed in
high-rises.
The decade between the late 1980s and 1990s was also the first time that class
division changed its geographical and spatial characteristics. Public opinion at the time
still dwelled upon a clear-cut separation between the gecekondu and apartment living as a
spatial representation of the chasm between traditional and modern, religious and secular,
rural and urban. The single-channel public broadcasters’ Sunday night comedy series,
Bizimkiler, played on this difference where the story of a multi-family apartment building
was told. The only person who had a fleeting resemblance to a gecekondu dweller in the
show –who married a girl from the gecekondus- was the shrewd but unrefined doorkeeper
of the building. Even though public opinion almost exclusively centered on a middle
class imagination and a succession of social science research focused on the presumed
alienation, threats of cosmopolitanism, and the withering of traditional social bonds
wrought on the urban apartment dwellers, the gecekondus were rapidly moving into the
apartments in the same decade.
Apartment living had a manifest advantage over the gecekondu,-heating was no
longer a hassle, hot water was always on, and the sewage system was in better order.
436
Gone were the stoves and coal or wood carrying to the stoves. Apartments had a much
better insulation system compared to the gecekondus. Yet, apartment living severely
limited the liberties taken for granted in the gardens of the gecekondu. Especially, the
1980s construction material and equipment created a profound source of disturbance in
the apartment buildings, and crying babies, unruly kids, loud music- listening teenagers,
arguing spouses were often pictured vignettes of that era’s cultural discontent.
Apartment living, however, led to an unusual nuclear-family oriented reconfiguration of
Istanbulite families. Women gradually left the job market to take care of the kids –Hart’s
estimate, as underlined in the previous chapter, never came to fruition- with the coming
of TV broadcasts and the dying off of Turkish cinema screens, public interaction meant
indoor interaction. The living room became the sole scene of socialization.
The only access to the outside were the ubiquitous balconies, and gained such
dogma status that any housing development built without large balconies meant suicide
for the yapsatçı. In addition to that, balconies served as a useful tool on the side of the
yapsatçı to circumvent construction area limits cited in the building code. The balcony as
an architectural form became the new vernacular of the Turkish house. It was an opening
to the outside world, and during the hot and humid summer months it spelled respite for
the residents. For women, the unpaid domestic workers of whom less than one fourth
actively worked, the balcony was a site of work: the laundries were dried there, the rice,
bulgur, lentil, beans, etc. sent from their hometowns were kept there during the cooler
months. It served as a store room for the vacuum cleaner, for the rags and cleaner fluids,
and during the warmer months of spring and summer, it became the dining room –at
least, before the proliferation of satellite TV. After the 2000s, with the import of cheap
437
Russian gas, the costly central heating systems were uninstalled and balconies were
turned into heating compartments of the home. Soon, first the aluminum, then the
polypropylene frames became widely available and cheap to install. For many balconies
this was the end of the road, and they were enclosed for either expanding the living room,
or to keep the inside free from the dust of the surrounding street traffic, or to keep out the
noise, or just to protect and expand the storage room. Of course, no one applied for
construction permits to enclose their balconies.
6.5
A Transitory Parenthesis: Co-operatives as Middle Class Building
Initiatives
Construction by Building Cooperatives in Istanbul
1992‐2013
25000
30,0%
20000
25,0%
20,0%
15000
15,0%
10000
10,0%
Percentage of Total Permits
2013
2012
2011
2010
2009
2008
2007
2006
2005
2004
2003
2002
2001
2000
1999
1998
1997
1996
1995
0,0%
1994
0
1993
5,0%
1992
5000
Number of Housing Units
Figure 6.9: Construction by Building Cooperatives in Istanbul36
Co-operatives first appeared as an alternative to the capitalist economic growth
models in the late 1960s as Bülent Ecevit’s brainchild.37 Ecevit was the son of an upper
36
TURKSTAT Construction and Residential Permits Annual Reports.
37
Sinan Ciddi, Kemalism in Turkish Politics: The Republican People’s Party, Secularism and Nationalism
438
class family, his background was very much akin to a Turkish aristocracy and he was
brought to the party by İsmet İnönü in the 1960s to revive a Westernized reformist branch
of the static and stale RPP. And as an American Robert College graduate, who spent
years as a journalist in Britain, Ecevit promised to instigate innovative, Western inspired
policies in his parties ruling circles.
The primary task of the co-operatives legislation, which was passed in 1969, was
to increase the scale of land cultivated by the peasants in the countryside –the Turkish
landholding pattern was very fragmented- in order to raise agricultural production and
productivity. The effect of co-operatives on rural structure was very limited and remained
constricted to a few, but highly lucrative cash crops-hazelnuts, olives, sunflowers, etc.
Although Ecevit’s initial inspiration came from Scandinavian social democracy, what
transpired in the end was no different than local building societies in the US. In an
inflationary economic environment, where banks only functioned as creditors to large
corporations, co-operatives gained a crucial role as the financial structures for urban
development. By the late 1980s, almost every state institution’s employees, public
economic enterprises, state and private banks’ pension funds, school teachers,
academicians, policemen and policewomen, military officers, non-commissioned
officers, artisans, grocery store owners, taxi cab owners had established their own urban
development co-operatives; sometimes more than one was founded. The members of the
co-operatives put their limited savings in the hands of the co-operatives in the hopes of
owning a piece of the increasingly heated real estate pie in Istanbul and other urban
centers of Turkey.
(Routledge, 2009), 41.
439
First, the members convened and elected administrators for the co-operative, these
figures would be the same as the instigators of the scheme in the first place. Next, the
administrators would bring their proposals for acquiring land to the co-operative’s
executive board. Then, the initial savings would be calculated and allocated for a
negotiation with the landowners. After the negotiation and contract signing, the cooperative administrators begin signing in more membership, while making sure that the
members keep paying their dues. The hardest part comes with the persuasion for a
project. The project can change, it can be a gated community made up of villas, a highrise in which everyone will have their first homes, a seaside summer resort complex
where the colleagues at work would spend the rest of their lives during retirement side by
side, or merely a lucrative investment in real estate.
As soon as the shape of that project becomes clear and enough money is collected
in the coffers of the co-operative, the second hardest phase comes: striking a deal with a
contractor. In the absence of large-scale construction work and limited private
development opportunities where yapsatçıs were the market leaders, contracting work for
the co-operatives laid the basis for many future fortunes, not the least, one of Istanbul’s
biggest private developer today, Teknik Yapı, comes from a similar background and
entered the business as a co-operative contractor in the Uğur Mumcu neighborhood of
Asian Istanbul.
Of course, signing the deal with a contractor is not devoid of its own problems.
On the part of the contractor, timely payments for the job done needed solid assurance. A
mutual consent on the price increases was absolutely necessary in the inflationary
atmosphere of the 1980s. On the part of the co-operative management, they had to rely on
440
the contractor’s building quality, his reliability in finishing the business on time and not
asking for much in return. Many contractors had gone broke due to the disagreements on
prices and they left the job, which meant the whole process for selecting a contractor
would begin anew with a myriad of pressure from the co-operative membership. More
often than not, the smooth working of things depended on the close relationship between
the management and the contractor, though that brought an irrepressible curiosity on the
part of the membership concerning whether their representatives actually sold them out.
Cronyism was an unavoidable consequence of those close relations, many friendships
were broken at the workplace due to those gossips, a cold and hostile environment
prevailed until the finished homes were delivered to the members-even then, not a few
members would harbor long-running grudge against the managers for the reasons of the
quality of homes, the place of their apartment-it was decided by lottery. Yet, sociable,
business-minded state officials found an extra source of income as managers of cooperatives and the most successful ones, were literally called kooperatifçi, who adopted
co-operative management as their primary job. The heyday of the co-operatives began in
the 1980s and lasted until late 1990s, at one point, providing close to a quarter of
Istanbul’s new home construction.
In the early 2000s, as the real estate bubble burst, co-operatives entered a dormant
phase. From 2003 on, the state first entered the real estate market as a giant private
developer and opened up large tracts of land for new housing construction, and then
passed legislation that deregulated mortgages, letting the banks take a much bigger slice
in providing credit to new home buyers. When the mortgage law was passed in the
parliament in 2005, for the first time in Turkish history home buyers found a better
441
alternative than the co-operatives. The banks provided credit in long-terms (relatively, the
longest term mortgage lending is 10 years in Turkey) at low rates. This was the last nail
in the coffin of co-operatives.
Instead of blindly putting your trust in co-operatives run by some acquaintances
from the work –or, worse, on an acquaintance’s acquaintance- and submitting your life
savings in a housing development for long periods of time, most of the middle class
fixed-income earners found mortgages acquired from banks much more reliable and
predictable. For the contractors, co-operatives were nothing more than another
intermediate between their products and the customers. They could gather an array of
banks for their developments, get paid in cold cash immediately as their apartments were
sold. They could build more homes, better ones at that, and sell more of those, in much
less time and had to deal with much less bureaucracy. I have listened to many stories of
co-operative developments gone sour, I can easily estimate that a typical co-operative
housing development took somewhere between five to ten years from the beginning of
construction to the end-not counting the time passed before the acquisition of the urban
land. Today, there is no such thing as a cash strapped developer, as long as the homes
find buyers, he will be paid. From start to finish, it takes around a construction year –
from breaking the ground in early March to closing off the roof in November- for a small
developer to finish an apartment building with up to 30 units with much less hassle.
6.6
The Little Apocalypse of 1999 and the Collapse of the Yapsatçıs
Although the co-operatives offered a comparatively cheaper alternative to the
yapsatçıs in the real estate market, the dominant role of those small-scale builders were
not really hurt by their wide success in the 1980s and 1990s. However, from the mid442
1990s on, the low quality of construction, the sub-standard material used in buildings, the
brusque and crudely uniform designs of homes, raised question marks about the work of
the Lazi yapsatçı. These one-man construction companies survived the 1994 crisis
relatively unscathed, largely due to their disconnect from export markets –cement and
steel. The two most important cost elements of their work was produced in Turkey and
sold in a price-regulated market, while steel production was monopolized by state
economic enterprises. Yet, the Marmara Earthquake in 1999 has blown an irreparable
damage to their reputations. Hundreds of buildings constructed and sold by small-scale
developers collapsed in two consecutive earthquakes, thousands died beneath the rubble
of houses that imploded like house of cards. In an arch that traversed the Avcılar district
in Istanbul, Kocaeli, Yalova, and Sakarya millions of people woke up trembling in shock
of the uncontrollable movement of the floors beneath their feet, at 3:07 on August 17.
The minor quakes that followed it continued for months, and on the evening of
November 12, struck Düzce. In total, 18 thousand lives were lost. The ineptitude of the
government, its insensitivity to the extent of the mayhem, its inefficient and terribly late
help efforts led to an introspective scrutiny on the part of the public regarding the
capabilities of the state. The first ones to arrive at the disaster scene were civilian, selforganized, volunteer search and rescue teams. They received accolades and were
deservedly venerated as selfless heroes. In the aftermath of the disaster, Turkish social
sciences paid a prolonged attention to the reasons of the state’s ineptitude; the only
answer they could come up with was the immature, undeveloped state of the Turkish civil
society. Fortunately, this euphemistic and highly myopic interest in Turkish civil society
and its corollary enthusiasm regarding the non-governmental organizations did not last
443
long and left barely visible traces.
The yapsatçı was seen as the main culprit of the unprecedented scale of
destruction. With their corrupt methods, they were alleged to steal from building
materials, skirted building codes and heavily bribed their way into building cheaply in a
small amount of time. Veli Göçer, a yapsatçı who built and sold hundreds of summer
houses in Yalova, turned into public enemy number one after his developments
completely collapsed and hundreds died there. The earthquake did not merely hit private
developments, public hospitals, schools, administrative offices, and even the then
almighty and most reliable of all Turkish institutions, the Turkish Armed Forces’ –which
staged an intervention and forced PM Erbakan to resign just two years before- the Naval
Headquarters in Gölcük collapsed and many navy men were lost. At the time, due to
understandable reasons, the armed forces were not subject to criticism. The yapsatçıs and
their cronies in the local authorities had to shoulder the onus of blame in public view. The
lengthy processes of justice, however, found only Veli Göçer as culpable for
manslaughter. The rest of the actors of rampant and uncontrolled development were
never brought to the court. Göçer served a sentence of 7.5 years.
The immediate effect of the earthquake in Istanbul’s real estate market meant the
burst of the bubble. Especially the middle class lost its confidence in their homes. The
real estate sales collapsed in a matter of months, hundreds of developments with
thousands of units waiting to be sold stopped at their tracks, and these sites turned into
ghost towns. Today, in 2014, it is easy to forget how the real estate bubble burst in the
early 2000s, but back then, in Beylikdüzü, Küçükçekmece, Avcılar, and Ataşehir, one
could see nothing but endless tracts of construction sites, with cranes sitting as haunting
444
signs of ambition and greed. It is scarcely studied so far in Turkish social sciences
whether the collapse of the housing market after 1999 had any effect on the 2001
financial crisis. The overwhelming feeling of loss, collapse, doom, and catastrophe
reached millenarian levels by the end of 2001. The construction industry was thought to
be a goner in the long run. Employment in the construction industry entered a protracted
phase of recession. Scores of engineers, architects, and accountants and hundreds of
foremen, skilled laborer left the country for job offers in the former Soviet bloc or in the
Middle East. The burgeoning economic development in those areas of the world, some of
which were recovering from the equally devastating impact of the 1997 Asian Crisis,
helped Turkish construction companies gain a foothold in the global industry. These
Turkish companies still remain in the top levels of global construction businesses; some
of which, like ENKA, is a behemoth in Russia and a seldom referenced behind-thescenes actor of Russia’s showcase development of Sochi for the 2014 Winter Olympics.
The worst blow was felt by the hundreds of thousands of unskilled construction workers.
In my estimate, at least half of Istanbul’s 400 thousand construction workers were out of
work for a long while, at least until 2005, and with their families, they faced conditions of
absolute poverty, and even hunger.
6.7
The Return of Austerity and the Beginnings of State instigated
Private Developments
The construction permits issued for housing in 2002 hit rock bottom, with the
exception of the time under the military junta and the coup, the number of new homes
built was less than the amount in the mid-1960s. Prices in the real estate market followed
445
the stock market and other financial instruments and collapsed. Middle class Istanbulites
began pondering the possibilities of leaving the city for good, since an impending
earthquake would spell the death of hundreds of thousands more in the ragged and unruly
apartment developments in Istanbul. For the first time in Turkish history, the white collar
class bore the brunt of the economic crisis, and wide-scale layoffs at established
corporations of the city contributed heavily to an asphyxiating sense of instability.
At that tumultuous moment, social scientists vocally expressed their fearsome
predictions, as the economy had gone through recession two years in a row, as the nonfarm unemployment reached the upper teens, where almost half the youth population
were unemployed, as everyday scenes of stampedes for the measly food aid for the poor
became a staple of the news, they thought an impending social explosion was at the
doorstep. The first spark came in 1999, immediately after the government’s signing of
IMF loan agreements when the Minister of Education Hikmet Uluğbay, one of Ecevit’s
most valued ministers with a portfolio, who initially served as the Minister of the
Treasury, attempted suicide when he shot himself in the mouth. The second spark came
from the police forces in 2001, the uniformed police officers staged a demonstration in
Ankara calling for an immediate raise in their wages. But the most memorable protest
came from a shopkeeper, who threw his cash register at Prime Minister Ecevit as he
entered the PM offices in Ankara. Once the most inert segments of society took to the
streets; it became evident that the political vitality of the government was at stake. The
government appointed Kemal Derviş as the Minister of Economy –who was not even
living in Turkey before his appointment and was a World Bank official for a long time in
the US. Derviş’s neoliberal austerity programs further stymied the working people, as
446
prices went up, a series of publicly owned enterprises were put up for sale. The coalition
partners had neither the will, nor the wherewithal to continue ruling. They called for an
early election, a fateful decision that fundamentally altered the political, cultural, and
social balance of the country.
The early elections were held on November 3, 2002. It was a political bloodbath.
The parliamentary majority party, and the bigger partner of the coalition, DLP
(Democratic Left Party) and Bülent Ecevit, lost almost all of its support in the ballot, with
the biggest swing in history, 22 percent, and fell to 1.5 percent. The nationalist right-wing
party, the coalition partner, NMP (Nationalist Movement Party), fell below the election
threshold, like other right-wing parties, TPP (True Path Party), and Motherland Party.
Only two parties passed the representation threshold of 10 percent, JDP (Justice and
Development Party, its Turkish initials AKP) and RPP. JDP gained more than two thirds
of the seats with 34 percent of the electoral support, its parliamentary representation was
enough to change the constitution on its own. RPP gained 20 percent of the votes and
solidly established itself as the only unopposed center-left party. Unfortunately, RPP’s
unrivalled position did not help the party usher in increasing its votes but rather led to its
realignment towards the right in a bid to attract the voters of the collapsed center-right.
Failing in that, the party became the mouthpiece of hard-core secularist military and
bureaucracy, which, undoubtedly contributed to its stagnant share of the electorate.
447
Housing Construction and Prices in Turkey
1969‐2013
140.000
900.000
800.000
120.000
700.000
100.000
500.000
80.000
400.000
60.000
Average Prıce
Housıng Unıts
600.000
300.000
40.000
200.000
20.000
100.000
0
1968
1970
1972
1974
1976
1978
1980
1982
1984
1986
1988
1990
1992
1994
1996
1998
2000
2002
2004
2006
2008
2010
2012
0
Average Unit Price (2014 adj. Prices TL)
Total Housing Permits
Figure 6.10: Housing Construction and Inflation Adjusted Unit Prices in Turkey38
6.8
The Third Real Estate Boom in Istanbul and Corporate Take-over:
JDP, TOKI, and Enlarged Capitalist Accumulation
Once it came to power as the stalwart of Turkish re-orientation toward Europe and
as the fierce defenders of democratization and transparency, JDP earned fervent
accolades from the global financial watchdogs due to its loyalty to the austerity program
initiated by Kemal Derviş after the 2001 crisis. Between 2002 and 2007, the Turkish
economy went through its highest growth period in history and the burgeoning stock
market and still high interest rate treasury bonds attracted an uninterrupted flow of
Source: TURKSTAT Construction and Residential Permits Annual Reports (1968-1991) and
TURKSTAT, “Yapı İzin İstatistikleri.”
38
448
foreign capital. The US dollar hit record lows in the face of such flow of capital. Cheap
credit became the norm and this fuelled a boom in consumer spending. In the nine years
since the passage of the Mortgage Act, mortgage based credit reached almost half of all
disposable household income in Turkey.
JDP and its leader, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, initiated a vast housing
development program and announced in 2003 that in the next ten years the governmentled TOKI (Housing and Urban Development Administration) would build 500 thousand
housing units in Turkey; they surpassed that number. This massive urban development
had a tremendous effect on built environment all across Turkey, and especially in
Istanbul. TOKI, Emlak Konut (the rump of what is left from Özal years’ debacle was
turned into a publicly owned real estate development company under TOKI’s
management), and KIPTAS (the Erbakan initiated Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality
development corporation) together built more than 160 thousand new homes in Istanbul.
Since 2002, 1.36 million construction permits for new homes were issued.39 Given the
fact that the 2000 Building Census reported 3.4 million housing units in Istanbul, the new
development frenzy, this unrivalled gargantuan expansion of concrete buildings and
concrete spaces meant Istanbul’s built environment has grown 40 percent in the last
decade and half.40
39
Ibid..
DİE, Building Census 2000, 2471 (Ankara: Devlet İstatistik Enstitüsü, 2001). It might be argued that 3.4
million units included gecekondus and these gecekondus torn down to open way for new apartment
buildings. However, for each gecekondu torn down, at least 20 new homes were built in the period. So,
their numbers are largely insignificant now.
40
449
Public Construction of Housing in Istanbul
1992‐2013
25000
25,0%
20000
20,0%
15000
15,0%
10000
10,0%
5000
5,0%
0
0,0%
Share of Public Construction
Number of Units
Figure 6.11: Public Construction of Housing in Istanbul41
In this process, to prevent his predecessors’ –Menderes and Özal- unhappy
dalliances with the built environment reoccurring, Erdogan created an extensive legal
shield through several laws passed by the parliament. The necessary legislative
framework was installed bit by bit in the last decade. As a consequence, TOKI is
currently not subject to the Public Tenders Law, not subject to the only public fiscal
watchdog, Sayıştay’s (the Court of Accounts) annual checks on the institutions’ books,
not subject to the eminent domain laws, and can expropriate any land it deems fit, can
decide any building as unfit for residence and tear it down. Since 2011, TOKI has also
been tasked with constructing public buildings, hospitals, schools, campuses, etc.
basically anything the government wants built is TOKI’s responsibility. The institution
has replaced one of the oldest Turkish republican governmental institutions, the Ministry
41
Compiled from TURKSTAT Construction and Residential Permits Annual Reports.
450
of Planning and Construction.
The state intervention in urban space surpassed its earlier, much more timid,
efforts in bolstering private development, and was no longer limited to the bureaucraticmilitary classes. Since 2002, in Istanbul, the state’s share of housing units built has
occasionally reached one fifth of the total construction efforts, especially in the years
2009 and 2010 when the global financial crisis finally hit Turkey and set off a recession.
Whenever the private sector development showed weakness, the state picked up the slack
and pumped more money into further development.
The political rhetoric surrounding this vast development, and in some inner city
neighborhoods, re-development, effort was based on social equality, expanding the riches
of the few select elites to the dispossessed masses, and providing housing for the people
with low income who were unfortunate, disadvantaged, and unable to tap onto the
benefits jealously guarded by the “White Turks.” Erdogan successfully employed TOKI
and his housing development schemes as the high point of his government’s
achievements and as his unmatched propensity and attention for the betterment of the
condition of working classes. In the JDP government’s electoral marketing campaigns
TOKI was the solution to poverty and inequality. Their zeal for development was no
match for the inert, inept, and corrupt left-wing governments of the previous era, and the
Gezi riots, protests against the third Bosphorus Bridge, the call for Northern Istanbul
forests’ preservation were all representative of left-wing adversity in the face of further
development.
The question is, in essence, whether TOKI really meant a successful redistribution
of wealth as it replaced the gecekondus. The fact of the matter is that only a limited
451
fraction of TOKI, or other public institutions, provided affordable housing to the lower
classes, The pre-conceived notions of JDP’s urban development reflected an unrivalled
housing program that made people homeowners in large numbers. The conventional
wisdom necessitated that of the more than hundred thousand new homes built, a
predominant amount should have been owned by the propertyless masses as a long-run
program of state redistribution. And, pundits –both pro and con- said that JDP’s greatest
achievement was in its making millions of renters homeowners both in Istanbul and in the
rest of Turkey.
The reality on the ground is not so rosy though. In Istanbul, only a third of
TOKI’s projects are directed towards lower middle classes, and only two of them were
actually specifically built for the economically disadvantaged people. TOKI, KIPTAS,
and Emlak Konut, are not public housing and urban development administrations in the
strict sense of the term; the way they function closely resembles private developers. They
run after real estate speculation, and they seek a gradual increase of land rents on the
territory they control, they purposefully push some developments on hold, while setting
others in motion with higher bidders, they deliberately spin some projects as high-rent
generating projects, while limiting their already limited social housing developments to
the fringes of the city.
TOKI Housing Developments in
Istanbul
2002‐2014
Place
Housing Units
Halkalı
28071
Kayabaşı
19920
Ispartakule
11261
Tuzla
10223
Ataşehir
10164
452
Gaziosmanpaşa
Bahçeşehir
Ayazma
Maslak
Sultangazi
Çatalca
Pendik
Çekmeköy
Bakırköy
Esenler
Başakşehir
Ataköy
Silivri
İkitelli
Kozyatağı
Mimar Sinan
Sulukule
Davutpaşa
Ümraniye
Seyrantepe
Küçükçekmece
Taşdelen
Başıbüyük
Şile
Üsküdar
Ortaköy
Kağıthane
Fenerbahçe
Grand Total
5739
4170
4085
4000
3123
2756
2180
2095
1721
1198
1037
950
820
812
800
666
577
499
440
400
372
354
300
296
208
72
70
10
119389
Table 6.1: TOKI housing development in Istanbul districts42
TOKI’s urban development projects can be categorized under three main
headings: social housing, private development, and urban renewal. Even though TOKI
cryptically categorizes its development projects under eight different headings –
infrastructure and social developments, housing for the poor (at least for one project this
Source: TOKI, “Toplu Konut İdaresi Istanbul Projeler,” Toplu Konut Idaresi, January 3, 2014,
www.toki.gov.tr.
42
453
is the exact wording on its website), lower-income housing, administration projects
(denotes developments under TOKI’s own brand), Emlak Konut projects, urban renewal
projects, developments initiated for capital growth, and revenue share developments. In
my view, it is more precise and explanatory to downscale these eight into three main
headings.
The definition of social housing is debatable, especially in the absence of rentcontrols, subsidized housing, council housing, LHMs, etc. In the Turkish housing market,
we have to devise our own method to define what social housing is. First, social housing
should be sold at lower prices, somewhat subsidized by the state inclusion. Second, there
should be no intermediaries between the public authorities and the buyers, so, any project
sold by other companies, advertised on their web sites, on the newspapers, TVs, and
radios shall be counted out, since that would mean extra costs. Third, as a consequence of
the previous reason, it shall be contracted to relatively unknown companies. For instance,
Ağaoğlu would never enter a deal concerning a social housing construction with TOKI,
but smaller companies, who are more specialized in construction and less attuned to
marketing and advertising would definitely be interested in bidding for the tender offer.
Fourth, of course, social housing should be sold on long-term credit with low interest
rates.
On the basis of these four aspects, I have grouped together Istanbul’s TOKI
developments into two parts initially: social housing and private development. However,
I believe urban renewal also deserves a grouping of its own, since the aims of its building
is significantly different than the other two. I will not go into the details of a burgeoning
urban renewal literature. Unfortunately, gentrification had found a too easily admitted
454
role amidst the wider Turkish literati and the rest of critical urban thought was relegated
as mere nuisance. Life in Başakşehir, Kayabaşı, Tuzla, Ispartakule, even in Beylikdüzü is
still not a matter of interest for the well-heeled Turkish academic, while his usual habitus
in Cihangir, Beyoğlu, Kadıköy, Fener, and Balat has grown an out-of-proportional shade
over his work. That is quite reminiscent of Turkish filmmakers. The films themselves try
to make sense of everything that has existed under the sun in two hours, while the whole
story takes place in Cihangir –the Istanbulite Village.
The not so surprising finding here is the share social housing took in TOKI
activities. Applying those four points quite liberally, I found that only a third of TOKI
housing construction in Istanbul could be counted as social housing. These developments
are reasonably priced for lower middle class and middle class families and are sold on
long-term, low interest credit. The truly social housing, counterpart to the US projects, or
British council houses, or French HLMs, can only be found in four cases, in Ikitelli,
Tuzla, and Şile, all of which consist of 1640 homes, less than 1.5 percent of the total. In
these developments, the prices are not only subsidized by the state to an extent –or,
maybe, given the condition of buildings, possibly constructed with sub-standard materialand the interest rates are the lowest. The only pre-requisite for eligibility to such social
housing is that the immediate family members should own no other property. But,
generally, these developments receive huge demand and are sold out on the first day of
the announcement. The same is true for other TOKI developments, since the
administration is thought to be both lenient when it comes to the payments, and its prices
are always lower than the market. Another apparent feature of social housing is its
peripheral locations; none are built near the planned development zones, none are even
455
near the outskirts of the city center, and they are all sold on the promise that one day
subway will begin service to their neighborhoods. Tuzla, Kayabaşı, Halkalı, and
Ispartakule are the only areas where TOKI constructed social housing, while other, much
more valuable regions –like Bahçeşehir, Kağıthane, Sarıyer, and Seyrantepe- remained
the domain of much more expensive development projects TOKI entered conjointly with
the big name actors of Istanbul’s real estate market (See Figure 6.12).
TOKI Contractors in Istanbul
Ağaoğlu
10%
Ege Yapı & Artcon &
Emlak Pazarlama
3%
Avrupa Konutları
9%
Soyak
4%
Kuzu
6%
Others
56%
Mesa & Kantur‐
Akdaş
2%
TEKNİK YAPI
4%
Varyap (Teknik Yapı)
3%
Emlak Pazarlama &
Fideltus & Öztaş İnş.
3%
Figure 6.12: Public (TOKI) Housing Development Contractors in Istanbul43
The second category TOKI deals in real estate market is urban renewal. Urban
renewal is already a well-traversed –almost worn-out- subject of speculation in Turkish
social sciences and urbanism in Istanbul, especially recently. However, its most
publicized urban renewal project in Sulukule for instance, is but a mere asterisk in the
gargantuan development effort. With 577 homes built, it was not a desirable development
Source: TOKI, “Toplu Konut İdaresi Istanbul Projeler,” Toplu Konut Idaresi, January 3, 2014,
www.toki.gov.tr.
43
456
for the agency itself –due to the bad press it attracted- nor did it fetch the inflated price
estimation once the development was finished. In other contexts, in Ayazma, in Halkalı,
urban renewal served as a “perimeter clean-up” demolishing gecekondus surrounding its
most recent, glitzy developments constructed in tandem with the corporate developers. It
is an attempt in spatially ordering unruly, unsightly classes, yet, its extent is merely
cosmetic, and does not surpass 5 percent of TOKI activities in Istanbul.
Distribution of TOKI Development Projects
Urban Renewal
5%
Private
Development
62%
Social Housing
33%
Private Development
Social Housing
Urban Renewal
Figure 6.13: Distribution of TOKI housing developments according to the type of development44
The third category in the list of TOKI activities in Istanbul is private development.
This can be thought of as Emlak Konut, revenue share or capital growth project. These
projects involve an established real estate developer, a marketable location, an unusual,
or at least flashy architecture, catchy names, extensive marketing budgets, continuous and
very expensive media campaigns, advertising agencies and more often than not, an
adjoining shopping mall complex, a classy spa within the housing complex, a well-heeled
Source TOKI, “Toplu Konut İdaresi Istanbul Projeler,” Toplu Konut Idaresi, January 3, 2014,
www.toki.gov.tr.
44
457
investment in the security of the gated community. Although unbeknownst to most of the
social scientists, media and vocal pundits, TOKI’s primary engagement in Istanbul’s built
environment is in building gated communities, not social housing.
The evident reason for TOKI’s role as the primary developer at the higher-end of
real estate market is that Istanbul’s higher prices help the state to earn enough for
constructing affordable homes in the rest of the country. However, if that were true, why
build more of TOKI’s upmarket developments in Istanbul, 80 thousand houses, more than
two thirds, and less social housing, 40 thousand of those? Do more people in Istanbul
own their homes compared to the rest of the country? And, has all that development
activity in essence led to a burgeoning middle class, who dwell in gated communities,
enjoy the plentiful life provided by the expanding credit and rushing foreign investment
in Turkey?
Ye House
ar holds
Owneroccupied
% of
Total
Ren % of
ted Total
Employer
owned
% of
Total
Nonowner
Nonrent
10291
13099
68,3%
67,3%
3604 23,9%
4637 23,8%
310
299
2,1%
1,5%
730
1.420
4,8%
7,3%
1,1%
0,9%
131
260
5,1%
7,0%
% of
Total
Other/Un
known
0,9%
Turkey
‘00 15070
‘11 19454
0,0%
Istanbul
‘00 2551
1477
57,9%
893 35,0%
28
2238
60,6%
1163 31,5%
33
‘11 3694
Table 6.2: Home ownership in Turkey and Istanbul, 2000-201145
0,9%
0,0%
Compared to the picture of home ownership in Turkey as a whole, fewer people
owned their homes in Istanbul as a proportion of the population. Sixty-eight percent of
the Turkish population lived in owner-occupied homes in 2000, while in Istanbul that
Source: Census data, sections on home ownership and population and housing, see, TURKSTAT, “Genel
Nüfus Sayımları.”
45
458
figure was almost 58 percent, ten points below the country average. Remember, a country
which dwelled on its past as petty commodity producing peasants would be thought to
own their homes, and Turkey in general is a homeowner country. Yet, the situation is not
so bright in Istanbul. Moreover, in the last decade, with more than 1.3 million homes
constructed in Istanbul, home ownership has only slightly changed. More than one third
of households in Istanbul were living in rented homes in 2000, eleven years later, in
2011, only one in ten renters had the opportunity to move into homes either they, or their
parents owned. Slightly less than one third of Istanbulites live in rented homes. Home
ownership has increased by only 2.8 percent of families. There is a problem here, a
profound problem.
The reasons can be numerous. The households could be counted wrongly, but the
typical Turkish family structure, a nuclear family with two kids being the norm, where
extended families are not out of ordinary, belies that assumption. A total of 3.7 million
households is meaningful, given the population distribution and the overall employment
structure of the city. Yet, as I explained above, today there is somewhere between 4.6 and
4.8 million housing units in Istanbul. An abundance of homes prevails, though not in the
center of the city. Altogether, this means that between 800 thousand to 1 million homes
are in oversupply. What about the surplus apartments, who lives there? Are they empty,
waiting for the squatters? Are there more people in the city the census does not count?
And, most important of all, why do we have so much new home construction going on in
Istanbul?
First, possibly, of the 500 thousand university students in the city, at least half are
from out of town, and again, at least around 100 thousand students –who are not obliged
459
to register for the census where they study- live in their own apartments in the outskirts of
the city. However, this only makes up a fraction of the surplus apartments. Another
possibility is the highly invisible, fluctuating, but significant existence of a transient
population in Istanbul. It is not uncommon to hear stories from home owners that there
are people who live six months there and three months there, skipping the rent, hopping
from one apartment to another. On the other hand, the possibility of a moveable working
class who actually lives in another city and works in Istanbul is also plausible.
Unfortunately, there is no reliable way of counting those people; TURKSTAT only
provides employment data on the basis of the firm’s hometown.
On the other hand, there is something rotten in the state of statistics, perhaps, in
the state of real estate bubble. The Building Census of 2000 gave the number of housing
units in Istanbul as 3.4 million, while the same year’s census shows less than 2.6 million
households.46 The oversupply can simply be a glitch in the census, if Istanbul’s
population was consistently underrepresented between 2000 and 2011, then the close to a
million apartments would make sense. Yet, election data in Istanbul would have revealed
that problem if not in 2000, but definitely in the last decade during the most heated
electoral discussions of the country. It is highly unlikely that Istanbul’s population is
significantly more than what is announced by the census.
In the face of real estate bubbles, I believe, a sustained investment in apartments
made the oversupply in housing an important part of Istanbul’s urban fabric. The bubble
is not purely the making of the JDP’s years in power, but it is rather a continuation of
what took place in the 1990s. Real estate has once again replaced financial instruments
46
DİE, Building Census 2000.
460
completely, bank deposits only imperceptibly increase –in 2012 bank deposits totaled 285
billion liras, and Turkey is notorious for the lopsided class ownership of bank deposits.47
My assumption is that this oversupply of apartments has actually functioned as a bank for
the richest ten percent: the 2000 figures show that the decade before that witnessed the
construction of more than 600 thousand new homes, and most of that expansion in the
real estate market played the role of a reliable, safe, dependable medium of savings, until
the bubble burst in 2001. The same is true for the last 12 years, and the amount that is put
into new home sales is more or less the same as the deposits in interest bearing accounts.
The only crucial difference is that today, Turkish households owe 10 percent of their
disposable income for mortgages on average in 2012, while their savings was 7.3 percent
of their income in 2010.48
Then, if there is an oversupply, it would not be unusual to see lots of empty
apartments, waiting for renters, with realtors’ signs hanging on their windows. This is
exactly the case when one wanders outside of the city. The average home price does not
go down significantly –even in the remotest districts of Istanbul, the real estate market
found its minimum- yet, the rents begin diving as one moves outside, the occupied streets
become fewer, more signs are hung on the windows, the spookier it gets when the
darkness falls, the quieter it is in these remote communities with high-rises.
Unfortunately, aside from anecdotal evidence, I do not have proof that there are more
than half a million vacant apartments in the city. The ease of finding an apartment on the
outskirts of the city, where TOKI has been highly active and the abundance of apartment
47
TCMB, Finansal İstikrar Raporu, 14 (Ankara: Türkiye Cumhuriyet Merkez Bankası, 2012), 31.
48
Ibid., 26–35.
461
for rent signs are the sole evidence at this point. The actors of the real estate market are
not really masters of keeping secrets, but the number of unsold homes, the inventory they
keep, is perhaps their best hid secret.
After going through the ups and downs of real estate speculation in Istanbul in the
last five decades, I will explore the relationship between the state and space in the next
part. How did real estate developers become the right-hand men of the people in power,
and why do the existence of developers and contractors persevere, while the names
change as fast as the ruling parties ebb and flow? These are the questions to consider
now, while also juxtaposing the development of these two forces on Istanbul’s urban
geography.
6.9
The State-Corporate Alliance and the Fate of State Contractors:
Meteoric Rises and Stellar Falls
For the purpose of coming up with an understanding of private urban development
and its agents in the last two decades, I brought together a sample of significant housing
projects completed in Istanbul by important private developers. In this sample, I
geocoded 98 different developers’ 270 developments and more than 250 thousand homes
built by those developers. I used both anecdotal data I compiled during my conversations
with the specialists from the sector, in addition to the developers’ own websites. Of the
98 developers, only 10 companies’ histories can stretch back to the period between 1990
and 2001. Table 6.3 shows that those oldest developers were either only slightly bigger
than the yapsatçı in terms of the scale of their activities, or they were involved few
projects with important sizes. The market was made by the yapsatçı, I already
462
emphasized that fact, but more importantly, the typical developer of the period was either
an extension of the state, or else, a co-operative itself. Also, it is crucial to note that the
co-operative was nothing more than an organization of state employees.
In this sample, a few important aspects of production of concrete space became
apparent. First, the developers of Istanbul have replicated the territorial behavior of the
yapsatçı. Ağaoğlu, for instance, was a developer of the Asian side; it did not cross the
Bosphorus until it grew considerably in late 2009. The same is true for other big name
developers, Dumankaya consistently stayed close to the E-5 highway, Varyap never
veered away from the Ataşehir vicinity, Avrupa Konutları was almost always on the
European side of the city, and never wandered far from the TEM highway, Ihlas was one
of the big ten, but its developments were located on the outskirts of the city, and never
really reached the price tag their competitors demanded. There are a few exceptions to
the rule though. Soyak, the oldest of big developers, crossed the Bosphorus several times,
never hesitated in entering the riskiest businesses, but not handsomely paid as it was in
the early 1990s. Its specialty was on the eastern part of the Bosphorus. Sinpaş is a rare
breed; again, one of the oldest developers, sold huge amounts of apartments on both sides
of the Bosphorus.
The second aspect is of determining import in understanding Istanbul’s built
environment and the state-space nexus. Once I began noting down the developments,
entering them in the tiny cells of a spreadsheet, I figured out that what I saw as
commodities sold on the market were in essence products of agreements struck between
the state and the real estate capitalists. Of the 250 thousand housing units constructed,
more than 70 thousand were built as a result of TOKI and private sector cooperation, not
463
including the almost 20 thousand homes built by Emlak Bank between 1990 and 2001.
Of the 120 thousand homes built by TOKI since 2002, 70 thousand were the making of
private developers. It was no wonder that some of the biggest names in the private real
estate development sector were also the biggest names of TOKI contractors and/or
cooperators list. For instance, Ağaoğlu topped the list as the biggest real estate developers
of the last 12 years, as well as Avrupa Konutları –they owed almost all their activity to
TOKI and Erdogan’s government.
There are a few exceptions to this rule though. Yeşil İnşaat for instance, is third in
the list with a colossal development of 14 thousand homes. Yeşil was in the shoemaking
business, one of the biggest suppliers of the Turkish army. They possibly bought the land
in the 1980s, when land was cheap in that part of the city and when they were awash with
money from lucrative army contracts. Today, they are a giant real estate developer in
Beylikdüzü, but they are no longer a significant shoe manufacturer. Apparently their
investment in land has paid handsomely in return.
The third point in this analysis of urban development initiated by the private
sector is the fact that only the state led developers, like Ağaoğlu and Avrupa Konutları,
had the chance to concentrate large numbers of units in a comparatively limited number
of projects. Ağaoğlu was fortunate enough to begin construction of a residential complex
with 4000 units complete with shopping malls and office facilities thanks to its close
relations with the state intervention in assigning that public land and facilitating the
serious revisions in planning and zoning rules through its hefty influence in the local
government. Otherwise, the rule is that any private developer would move in phases. The
farther from the state intervention a development corporation is, the more likely it divides
464
the land signed for construction. For instance, Dumankaya built five different
developments on the same strip of land, while Sinpaş typically divides the land it owns
into different parts, successive phases and distributes its risks in time to avoid what I
termed as the “curse of the developer.”
That is related to the fourth prominent aspect of private real estate development
industry in Istanbul: the predominant financial relations of doing business. The curse of
the Turkish developer is his inability to procure financing for the duration of the
construction process. Banks have traditionally stayed away from housing developments,
understandably, not to carry the burden of unfinished homes on its balance sheets. So, a
developer needs customers with deep pockets who can buy even before the first phase of
construction –laying the foundation- is completed, a group who has absolute trust in their
investment choice. GYOs (Gayrimenkul Yatırım Ortaklığı, Real Estate Investment
Funds) were established in the last decade to ease funding opportunities for new
developments. In the end, even if you sold enough homes to finish the foundation, you
would still need to find buyers to complete the rest of the construction. The GYOs are
still seriously under-capitalized and are rather treated as a fund that runs unsold inventory
of the developers, presumably, to gain some tax advantages.
The developer cannot get financing for any homes on its ledgers unless until they
are 80 percent finished –and, in practical terms of construction, there is no difference
between an 80 percent finished home and completely finished home. Yet, the developers
increasingly depended on their ties to the financial institutions to tap onto some lending
privileges. Again, in the last decade, the Turkish banks have turned into huge real estate
agencies, with hundreds of developments showcased on their web sites, as preferred
465
partnerships. Even then, the developer has to recognize that a tangible slice of its profits
are already taken by the banks. To control more of the profits from home sales, the
developers started to provide their own in-house financing, or, in the case of smaller
development corporations, began looking for partnership opportunities with Islamic, the
so-called, non-interest banking institutions. The latter are still out of mainstream
financing structures, and, unlike what the name suggests, they charge the same interestrate as the competition, though, euphemistically that rate is called, “the share of profit.”
Big 10 Private Real Estate Developers 2002‐2014
Developer
Housing Units
Average Price per m2
No of Projects
Ağaoğlu
22047
4560
15
Avrupa Konutları Artaş
17150
4768
11
Yeşil İnşaat
14000
2000
1
Dumankaya
12428
2873
24
Teknik Yapı
10608
4604
6
Eston
10097
3400
5
Soyak
10029
3671
7
Sinpaş
8287
4179
14
İhlas İnşaat
7722
1750
2
Varyap
5424
8250
4
Total Big 10
117792
4006
89
Grand Total
219094
4729
249
Table 6.3: Big 10 Real Estate Developers of Istanbul
Survived Real Estate Developers in Istanbul 1990‐2001
Developer
Number of Units
Average Price per m2
No of Projects
Emlak Bankası
17497
2833
İhlas İnşaat
6175
1000
Sinpaş
2359
2625
Soyak
1800
2000
Osmanlı Bank Cooperative
1358
1500
Acar İnşaat
937
8000
Dumankaya
888
1167
Garanti Koza
768
3500
466
3
2
4
1
1
1
3
1
Ağaoğlu
Eston
Tepe İnşaat
Tuzla Cooperative
Metiş
Grand Total
598
420
401
150
96
33447
3000
2500
10000
4000
20000
3762
1
1
1
1
1
21
Table 6.4: Survivors of 2001 Economic Crisis
The sixth factor in my evaluation of private (or, actually, semi-private, given the
weight of state development and land allocation in their business) real estate sector in
Istanbul, is the geographical and price dispersal of active firms. In the last 25 years, six
places in Istanbul appeared as areas of convergence of construction activities: on the
Asian side, the area between E-5 and the TEM highway, wherein the May Day
neighborhood lies to the West of the most important hub of development activity in
Ataşehir; Tuzla around the area that connects the two highways, and the strip by the
newly built Şile highway to the north of the TEM highway. On the European side, west
of Büyükdere Avenue in Şişli, the 20 mile long but thin strip of area adjacent to the TEM
from Kağıthane to Bahçeşehir, and the 5 mile by 5 mile area between Bahçeşehir and
Beylikdüzü coast pivotal on the E-5 highway. In addition to these high-density housing
developments, much more expensive, small-scale gated community building activity took
place in Beykoz, on the Asian side, and in Sarıyer, between Zekeriyaköy and Kumköy on
the Black Sea shore.
Şişli and Kadıköy were the scenes where very expensive developments in
extremely vast scales took place; with some earlier exceptions, they were all built as
skyscrapers, or very high-rise towers in dense settlements. The competition was ruthless
and only a handful of corporates signed revenue share contracts with the state for those
467
areas. But once they succeeded in signing contracts, they were in an excellent position to
reap the benefits, since as location is the king in real estate, they could charge exorbitant
prices that started from 4 thousand liras and climbed as high as 15 thousand liras per
square meter.
On the European side however, aside from the area bordering Bahçeşehir –
immediately to the east of Alkent 2000 on the map 8.1- the scale of development was
even much more inflated than the other examples, while prices were at least half of what
others asked in more central areas. Esenyurt, in that sense, is especially notorious, since
the largest projects in terms of number of homes built were announced there, though the
municipality later withdrew its planning revisions, rendering a whole array of projects
unprofitable and leading to at least a few bankruptcies there.
The northernmost part of the European side is the place where the most expensive
houses are built, and it is getting increasingly hard to find any suitable land to build upon
there. Of course, the pricing of real estate there, in Zekeriyaköy for instance, is a bit
perplexing, since the area is far away from both of the main highways, sequestered in the
far end of the forests, and its location is the most distant one from the historic Istanbul. It
is partly the deliberate choice of Istanbul’s bourgeoisie; they built Zekeriyaköy as an
exclusive country estate during the 1990s, as the brainchild of one young developer Esat
Edin.
Edin’s development company went bust during the 2001 crisis, and he later died
in a tragic camping accident with two of his kids. The residents of the gated community
decided to put their own money to buy large tracts of surrounding land to preclude the
possibility of some “unwanted” elements buying land there and starting unsightly
468
developments. Turkish bourgeoisie is extraordinarily inept as a class, clumsy in its
political volition, and owes these to its exceptional lack of basic education in liberal arts,
and therefore, had consistently attempted to geographically isolate itself from other
classes in ostentatious ways. Yet, they failed again, terribly indeed. Not only the ascent
Islamic-conservative bourgeoisie bought land in the neighboring areas in Kemerburgaz
and built its own gated community there, the government they controlled started the
construction of the third Bosphorus Bridge that traverses the pristine forests to the north
of Zekeriyaköy. In a decade or so, the old establishment’s dreams of an idyllic suburban
life would vanish into dust and traffic jams would become the least of the problems in
Zekeriyaköy.
Aside from Acarkent, in both Sarıyer and Beykoz –which were constructed by
Acar family, in a protracted legal struggle with the ministry of Forestry due to the zoning
regulations- few upper class residential complexes are known by the name of their
developers. The most famous of these, Sedadkent in Sarıyer, for instance, were built in
the late 1980s by Metiş –a rather successful construction company in infrastructure
projects, one of the most well-known state-contractors back then- and the complex was
one of the last works of Sedad Hakkı Eldem, hence the name, Sedad City.49 In our
present day, that gated community still stands as one of the least recognized
achievements of Turkish architecture, since no other piece of architecture has become so
enmeshed with its creator in Istanbul before, perhaps, with the ultimate exception of
Sinan.
49
Tanyeli, Sedad Hakkı Eldem.
469
Figure 6.14: Unit Heat Map of Corporate Housing Development
Figure 6.15: Price Heat Map of Corporate Housing Development
The eighth factor in understanding those real estate developers is their novel –and,
supposedly innovative- approach to marketing, design, and advertisement –Yeşil’s
residential complex is called Innovia, possibly, another sign of their newfound interest in
470
innovation. The names are basically representations of highly imaginative upper scale
aspirations. One development in Acıbadem, built by Taşyapı, is called, Almond Hill –
almond is the name of the place in Turkish. The supposed hills are everywhere, while
none of the geographical hills in Istanbul could actually match up the height of those
skyscrapers. In the last five years, with the government avowedly moving to the right, the
English development names were replaced by Turkish ones, the pinnacle of which was,
of course, Maslak 1453 by Ağaoğlu –an exaggerated reference to Istanbul’s taking over
by Mehmed II in 1453.
In essence, those developers are barely more than one-man companies of the
previous yapsatçıs. Even though they build vast developments, they do not employ more
than a few experienced engineers, one or two newly graduated architects, a small number
of accountants, and the higher echelons of the organization is made up of financiers with
good connections to either the banks or the government, or both. As a rule, they do not
employ any blue-collar workers. None of the workers at the construction site are actually
on the payroll of those development corporations. Basically, those developers are akin to
a bubble boy, with a huge head, but a small body.
The old timers tell the stories of the great infrastructure projects, the housing
complexes built by the once almighty state-contractors. As they were directly controlled
as contractors by the state, they had not employed sub-contractors. All the workers at a
construction site were in the payroll of one company –one MESA engineer told me how
they fired all of their employees after they tried to get unionized at the workplace. They
were construction companies, their employment structure consisted of engineers,
architects, and blue-collar workers. ENKA and STFA, the most important of those old
471
construction companies, which later created many offshoots, were first and foremost
known according to their technical acumen. Showing off was out of the question,
advertisement was only for the corporate benefit, not for the sales. The teams were made
up of engineers, not of salespersons.
The new generation of developers, although still called construction companies –
müteahhit- colloquially, are only involved in construction in name. Construction activity
is actually run by sub-contractors. No worker who toils for Ağaoğlu towers is paid
straight out of Ağaoğlu’s payroll, and it is very unlikely they see any Ağaoğlu engineers,
other than a handful control engineers –who are sub-contractors themselves as wellduring their tenure at the construction site.
Instead of construction, these developers are primarily involved in building an
image. The image of a successful, rich, trustworthy, quick, glittering, and innovative
company is worth much more than the image of a reliable engineering and construction
company; they have learned their lesson well from the likes of Donald Trump. There are
no longer important meetings between engineers, since they are mostly replaced by
keeping a tab on the sub-contractors’ progress at the construction sites. The crucial task at
hand is solved in meetings between salespersons, marketers, public relations people, and
advertisement agencies. And at the highest level of the corporate structure, the decisive
meetings take place behind closed doors between the local and central state authorities
and the bosses.
I sat across the table with a public relations specialist and one of the bosses of the
Asian side’s biggest developers. The boss seemed bored, as if citing from a ready-made
speech previously by his public relations specialist that they value elements of design,
472
characteristics of architecture, and innovation. He boasts of green structures his company
built. It was apparent that “green” was not a commanding principle, but a discursive
element; architecture was an opening towards fetching higher price on the markets, their
projects were not located on the most favorable lots, so, they opted for raising prices by
borrowing heavily from American and European playbook of developers. I asked him if
their insistence on design, on architectural values, and green development created any
additional costs. He was straightforward in saying that out of the project’s total budget,
ten percent was spent for such extra cost factors. I followed up on that answer, and asked
further, if their prices reveal that extra cost, and he nodded, of course, he said, our target
audience is an elite group. He also said that the company would no longer seek smallscale projects, or any housing complexes, but rather professionalize in skyscrapers –
which are presumably much more profitable. I checked the price tags on condos, lofts,
and apartments in their promotional flyers, and, without any doubt, the extra costs
incurred for going green have been more than recouped on that price point.
The names of their developments follow the same architectural logic, though it
would be hasty to argue that a developer’s mindset found its expression in those names.
Modernist designs, on the other hand, are much less favored by Istanbul developers; in
that sense, they took a risk with their skyscrapers. The norm among the Istanbul’s highrises is keeping the balconies intact, not paying attention to the glass and steel
architecture of 20th century modernism, but instead employing faux stonemasonry
façades with some out-of-place classical references. The windows are large, balconies as
well –one of the novelties is using all frame windows, with aluminum balustrades
outside, called the French balcony. It is the most replicated spatial form from the most
473
extensive development projects to low-brow, peripheral yapsat apartment buildings.
Stucco is favored; it is cheap, easily applied, and can be given any shape. The mixture,
however, is strange, somewhere in between 1960s modernism and Stalinist architecture
of the 1950s. The “new” middle class is the professed target audience for all these
developers, the professionals, urban people –the term “urban” in Turkey does not carry
the racially tinged condescending connotation it has in the USA.
The developers are trying to understand this new middle class, the urban
Istanbulites, They do not aim to attract the interests of the migrant, transient populations.
The trials can be interesting, the development corporation started airing a new ad on TV,
where a futuristic skyscraper concierge –from the not yet finished development- speaks in
a robotic voice and heralds the coming of a new age for the professionals: they should not
worry about their meetings, they can use the offices in the skyscraper as theirs –possibly,
in return for a basic fee- they should not worry about their homes, they will be insured,
cleaned, well-kept by the concierge, they even provide a free locksmith service. Nothing
is futuristic in their offerings, and a lot is straight out of the 19th century. The more I see
their advertisement spots on TV, more I worry about the condition of this self-proclaimed
green developer. And, a robotic speaking secretary is no real help if you are living in a
building with hundreds of other neighbors.
In my view, contrary to the vocal support architectural design receives from the
developers, their enthusiasm in bringing modern architecture is less than persuasive. As I
discussed above, architectural discourse is extremely limited to the fringes of bourgeois
tastes in Istanbul. The real estate developers have not actually contributed to a significant
change in the situation. TOKI wholeheartedly embraced yapsatçı rectangular
474
architecture, with larger balconies perhaps, in a massive scale to hasten construction
processes, to build more in less time –the end result resembles more and more the
Khrushchev era pre-cast concrete blocks built during the 1960s. Only in the last few
years, with a reinvigorated public interest in the evisceration of city centers TOKI
admitted its guilt, though has not yet pointed out a direction to solve the problems
prevalent in its stale, dull, monotonous, and monolithic architecture. Adding insult to
injury was the decrease in the average size of apartments built, meaning that more are
squeezed into less space, and studio and 1-bedroom apartments are increasingly
becoming the norm in the peripheries of Istanbul.
Average House Size in Istanbul
2002‐2013
20000000
140
120
15000000
100
80
10000000
60
40
5000000
20
0
0
2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013
Average House Size
Construction directly related to houses
Figure 6.16: Average Size of New Homes Built in Istanbul: 2002-201350
On the other hand, private real estate developers have only worked with a handful
big-name architects, stifling competition and actual innovation in the organization of
urban space. These architects –actually, architectural design offices- have turned into
50
TURKSTAT, “Yapı İzin İstatistikleri.”
475
brands themselves, and their names have become a part of the development costs. Han
Tümertekin, Murat Tabanlıoğlu –whose father was an influential modernist architect,
Hayati Tabanlıoğlu, who designed the Ataturk Cultural Center in Taksim- Emre Arolat,
Adnan Kazmaoğlu, and a recently deceased Japanese architect Tatsuya Yamamoto –he
later took Turkish citizenship. The Turkish architects are commissioned in the highest
rate developments, and a typical project with a price tag of 2 thousand to 4 thousand liras
per sq. meter is usually designed by in-house architecture departments of the
development companies. However, once the prices reach the level of 10 thousand liras,
the Turkish brand name architects find themselves in a tight spot, since their offerings for
their services would now be in the same league –in terms of cost- with global giants of
architectural design: Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM), Norman Foster, and Zaha
Hadid have come to Turkey in the last decade for commissions for designing new
developments, and, in Hadid’s case, for extensive re-development designs in Kartal. Yet,
whatever those global brands have designed had to go through the drafting boards at the
offices of well-established, but lesser known, second-tier architectural offices to
implement and fulfill the Turkish and Istanbul building and zoning code’s requirements.
Architecture is still a big question mark for both the buyers of new homes –or,
investors- and developers themselves. It might be a matter of allodoxia as Bourdieu
pointed out,51 that the middle class individuals developed a sense of spatial design as they
did in other ritualistic fields of life –irrepressible desire for faster, sexier cars, a
newfangled interest in internal decoration that is triggered by IKEA catalogues, designer
fashion, haute couture, haute cuisine, proliferation of easily consumable art- which owed
51
Bourdieu, Distinction.
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its genealogy to a stunted, a particularly accentuated interpretation of bourgeois tastes
and identities. Meanwhile, the historical origin of the bourgeoisie in Turkey is crucial.
From the outset, the ruling class functioned as an extension of the state apparatus, nestled
safely inside the mechanisms of centralized, concentrated power, whereas the spatial
characteristics and urban traces of the erstwhile bourgeoisie of the Ottoman Empire, a
cosmopolitan, non-Muslim class were deliberately erased from the face of Istanbul. The
bourgeoisie of the Ottoman Empire was a product of the ethnic division of labor
prevalent in its own social order, and under those circumstances, urban aesthetics, and a
certain sense of refinement was inherently an element of such ethnic distinctions. It is no
wonder that as the other ethnicities were forcibly removed from the streets of Istanbul,
spaces of the others, openings for the incipient middle class’ sense of entitlement and
refinement have been obliterated as well.
6.10 The State-Space Conundrum
So far, I discussed the demand side of the housing equilibrium, since scrutinizing
the economic, social, cultural, and political behavior of the middle class in Istanbul is
easier to ascertain. On the supply side, however much one spends time in the upper
management meetings, is much more opaque, fleeting, and problematic. Moreover, the
inclusion of the state into the equilibrium creates all sorts of analytical problems. Yet, the
state has apparently made its interest in Istanbul’s built environment manifest: social
housing for the poor at the peripheries of the city, but first, and foremost, boosterism for
the rampant real estate speculation that permits the transfer of resources of the middle
class in the form of urban rents to a newfangled private corporate development, and
possibly their partners in the higher places of the state mechanism.
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The burning question is why the once powerful industrial and financial capitalists
have turned into real estate developers in a manner closely following the often ridiculed
Lazi yapsatçıs. Zorlu, Akkök, İş Bank, Özdilek, Doğramacı, Tahincioğlu, Ülker, and
Boydak, the complete roll-call of Turkish industrial and financial capitalism did not blink
a moment when they entered the business of making profit out of urban land rent. The
answer lies in the processes of capitalist accumulation and the particular internal
contradictions of those processes that were borne out of the state’s central role. Why
would an individual capitalist choose an obviously problematic method of accumulation
–amidst all other options open to his will and his capabilities as an agent of exploitation,
why not, commodity-capital, merchant-capital, money-capital? Why would one choose
the longest, most precarious, riskiest, and opaque method that carries no real significance
other than tapping into the hardly accumulated surplus value of the tangible relations of
concrete production? Why would one sink his capital in land, in the passive, unmoving,
inert, and withering form of urban rent? Besides the apparent answer in the short-run
irrationality of decision-makers, I believe the answer needs an explanation in the intricate
ways of how the state made the capitalist an agent of production of space. I foregrounded
that explanation through Istanbul’s different lives and by positing the state-space nexus as
a crucial determinant of those eventful histories.
Henri Lefebvre gave an answer that resonated forcefully in the 1970s Marxist
ascendance in critical thought. He bluntly explicated the proponents of what he termed as
the state mode of production, and how the state-led growth and neoliberalism went hand
in hand in concentrating the concentration of capital, people, value, and power in the
concrete production of space in the city. Inasmuch as the state mode of production
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dominated capitalist relations of power, the city supplanted the factory as the site of
production of surplus value. And, although neoliberalism has turned into a dogma, an
alter-ego, a pervasive enemy, and cited as the ultimate culprit of all that went wrong the
post-Reagan era, it is still quite far from a true elucidation as an object of analysis, let
alone its intricate and intertwining relations with the state.52
In Turkey, political power has always had its great builders on its side. It is not
that easy to turn an industrial, or financial, capitalist into an obedient, ardent, and
dedicated supporter of power –in one way or another, a capitalist’s individual interests as
a class would always trump his personal political persuasion. The bourgeoisie did not
emerge in a day, and it is extraordinarily talented, subtle, and calculating when it comes
to its own survival. Not every reigning ruler can build his own industrial and financial
capitalists; the modern world-system is extremely complicated to permit that to happen in
a day. Yet, in theory and practice, a developer is no different than a yapsatçı. Yapsatçı
and the great builder are one and the same –they differ in scale, but nothing else. Each
reigning political and military power in Turkey found its own builder, the 1980 junta and
Özal’s relations with Selim Edes and the famed Kurdish state contractors, the Ceylan
family; Demirel and Bayındır Holding, and STFA; Erbakan and Ihlas Holdings and
Başakşehir; and, finally, in the last decade, Erdogan, and new, powerful, and numerous
developers of Istanbul.
Erdogan and JDP’s greatest success was in his ability to cloak the harm his
For some recent analysis of neoliberalism, see Lefebvre, Brenner, and Elden, State, Space, World.
Brenner and others, employ one key term, the “rascal concept,” as coined by Neil Smith in his early
criticism of postmodernism in the 1980s. Brenner and others claim that neoliberalism is one such “rascal
concept.” Also, see, N. Brenner, J. Peck, and N. Theodore, “Variegated Neoliberalization: Geographies,
Modalities, Pathways,” Global Networks: A Journal of Transnational Affairs 10, no. 2 (2010): 184.
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policies did on the small proprietors, on the erstwhile gecekondu owners, on the
beneficiaries of the previous great redistribution of urban resources, on his staunch
supporters. 53 Make no mistake, this is the new middle class. It is not the fanfare
surrounding the white-collars of the FIRE industry in Istanbul that fuels the seemingly
undying fervor of real estate speculation, nor the old guard of the republic, the militarybureaucratic elites and their cronies in the established industrial-financial capital, but a
seriously underestimated class, who were called by right-wing politicians the silent
majority –in an apparent allusion to American republican politics. They are no longer
silent, they are no longer the docile gecekondu dwellers, but they have earned their place
in this newly minted consumer society, and in this system, the foundations of their
economic power is in the built environment and their newfound role as urban rentiers.
Even the most upscale of the developments are frequented by lots of people who plan on
selling a few apartments here and there –i.e. now central, once peripheral gecekondu
zones of Istanbul- and moving into better, upwardly mobile, glitzy, safe, and secure
developments.
Erdoğan’s government has achieved this twofold feat: while they helped capital
concentrate more and more in every nook and cranny of productive activities –not, the
least of all, is of course construction and development- the redistribution of urban
The least researched, but most obvious and readily observable consequence of his policies is groceries.
The grocery retailers died off as an urban phenomenon in the last decade, the once ubiquituous small
vendors, bakkal, was replaced by the BIM discount stores. Droves of BIM discount stores were opened in
middle class and lower class districts alike. BIM, the discount store modeled after ALDI, commands a
revenue of TL 12 billion at 4000 locations employs 24 thousand people and works with an impressive net
profit margin of 3.5 percent. In fifteen years, the corporation became the biggest retailer in Turkey from
scratch. See, “BIM 2013 Faaliyet Raporu,” BIM Magazacilik, March 27, 2014,
http://www.bim.com.tr/Uploads/dosyalar/BIMAS%20Faaliyet%20Raporu%202013.pdf. A101, on the other
hand, is an enterprise supported by Fethullah Gulen’s religious community and since its founding in 2008 is
rapidly catching up with the market leader.
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resources –that is, land- that took place previously, and the relatively egalitarian
ownership of property patterns have fed unto a shared illusion of getting richer. This is
extremely similar to what happened in the core economies of the world-system before the
2008-9 crisis. Homes turned into the life savings of the wide swaths of middle class,
making it possible for the homeowners to continue spending on the basis of presumed
increase of real estate prices. The cruel fact was that homes had turned into fictitious
capital, unfettered from its geographical limitations and circulating in the global financial
markets as an element of increasingly speculation-laden, grossly jargonized, and
technically specialized circuits of capital. And once the party was over and the masks that
kept the illusion awake dropped, it was not the finance-capital who bore the brunt of the
debacle, but the enthusiastic middle class, millions of whom lost their homes and life
savings to foreclosures.
The illusion, the ability to invoke desire, the unhindered passion for owning
property is a talent in itself. As the Erdogan government slowly but surely undermined
the material bases of the urban small property owners and small producers, a plethora of
actors connected to the corporate real estate development world turned the process into
an enjoyable spectacle. On any given Sunday, if you hop onto your car and have some
time to kill, you can have a great tour of urban developments on Istanbul’s main arteries.
The Sunday supplements of the newspapers would be awash with full-page ads. The sales
offices would be full with people and if you hit there earlier, you could have your brunch
for free while being a willing participant of the walk-in tours of the mock apartments.
Mock-ups have nothing to do with the finished apartment you will buy, of course, it is
just a new level in bolstering the illusion. I have been to lavishly decorated apartments
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where the developers hired five famous designers to produce five different mock-ups,
each in different, and completely unrelated, styles. Though if you probe enough, you
would be informed that these upscale apartments are sold as barebones –no kitchen or
bathroom cabinets, no finished paint job, not even the floors are installed. Yet, for an
extra fee, the developer was proud to tell, they can decorate your apartment in any of the
styles you would like.
In this immense housing rush, reminiscing other periods of irascible spikes in
demand and prices, not only was the middle class mesmerized by this brilliant illusion,
but also the capitalists, real estate developers, financiers, bankers, and industrialists alike,
have harbored an irreducible optimism for the sustained growth of the bubble. That’s why
any conversation with those capitalists irredeemably smacks of the 1980s brilliant Oliver
Stone film, “Wall Street” and its insubordinately rogue evil genius, Gordon Gekko’s
legendary motto: “Greed is good.”
The reference to Gordon Gekko is not merely about the whole situation. Turkish
developers themselves uncannily started to look like that paramount figure selling
inflated dreams. I noticed that after a while in my meetings with the real estate business’
most influential figures, it was a matter of style, a style they built upon the imagination of
homes they sell, that dwelt upon the cultural iconism they tried to engage in. The sharp
looking, handsome, talker, and confident aura they tried to pompously present is met in
personal appearance with the pricy brand-name suits, expensive watches, offices with
exquisite views, and furnishings that followed the most fashionable trends that can be
observed on the pages of global magazines.
During a conversation with one of those sharp-looking developers, a princeling in
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his father’s construction empire, lit up his cigarette –the indoor ban was already in effect,
but, apparently, it would not show its effect on the bosses. He offered his own pack; I lit
one from my pack of cigarettes. Things turned into a slightly masculine tone, where the
women from the public relations departments –one, from the company, the other one
from a news magazine, which is actually only a notch above a public relations
departments in Turkey- stood silent, while us, two smokers, entered an interesting
conversation. Their corporation was growing at a rapid pace, they signed onto the biggest
and most valuable development deal with TOKI, their architectural design is both
ambitious and unprecedented in Istanbul, and the initial sales were apparently a success. I
asked him, what’s next –that’s a boring question, I admit, but, in Istanbul, that question
means land, and they were already building on the last remaining vacant lot on the Asian
side. He took a puff from his cigarette, things started to eerily resonate with the film, I
thought, and showed me the neighborhood across his office. There, he said, our next
development will be there. I looked at that direction. And felt myself in the shoes of the
character played by Charlie Sheen, Gekko, was trying to put an end to his father’s
company and lay off hundreds of workers. Here, this guy in the fashionable black suit
was telling me that they would raze the May Day neighborhood and construct their
lifeless blobs of skyscrapers. I objected and asked him whether he knew what he was
pointing at. He said, of course, I know. Then, how you will persuade thousands of people
living there to sell their lands to you, I added. His response summed up everything I
explained in this chapter: It’s not us, it is TOKI who will enter there. They will follow
TOKI, and employ the might and power of the state as they re-developed one of the most
important and one of a handful of remaining gecekondu districts in Istanbul. He took
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another puff and killed his cigarette.
6.11 The Instances: Representations of Space and the Manufacturing of
Desire in Built Environment
It is apparent that the middle and upper classes hoard homes as their financial
assets. The prices skyrocketed, developers got bigger and bigger, while the state’s role as
the arbiter of land acquisition was solidified. Construction activity in Istanbul in the last
decade alone is enough to build mid-sized metropolitan cities in the US from scratch.
According to the US census bureau, at the peak of the American housing boom,
construction permits for 2.15 million housing units were issued in 2005. In the last three
years alone, municipalities in Turkey issued construction permits for 2.24 million
housing units. The same figure for 2012 is, in the New York metropolitan census area, 27
thousand, in the Houston metropolitan area, 43 thousand, in the Washington DC metro
area, 22 thousand, and in Los Angeles, it is 17 thousand housing units. In Istanbul,
construction permits were issued for 131 thousand units in 2010, 147 thousand units in
2011, 159 thousand units in 2012, and 153 thousand units in 2013.54
In the face of such rampant real estate speculation, a new form of semi-financial
bubble arose, quite similar to the gold rush of the 19th century, an incipient housing rush
emerged in Turkey. I explained the main proponents of the expansion of building
activities in Istanbul and geographical delineations of this new form of political economic
redistribution efforts instigated by the state. I would like to end this chapter with two
inherently related instances, the first one is related to how an individual from the middle
M. C. D. US Census Bureau, “US Census Bureau Building Permits Survey,” accessed April 5, 2014,
http://www.census.gov/construction/bps/uspermits.html.
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class imagines life in those new housing complexes, and, the second one concerns the
way corporations analyze that very person. The first instance begins during one of my
peregrinations at Topkapı, I got off the metrobus, and slowly walked toward the
industrial complexes to the west of the E-5 highway. I arranged an appointment with a
guy who showed some interest in buying a home at the complex I mentioned in the
beginning of this chapter.
The Topkapı industrial blocks were constructed in the late 1970s and throughout
the 1980s as attempts in moving light industries from out of the city center to the
peripheries –and, in two decades, that periphery has become the new center, at least, part
of that center. In these reinforced concrete blocks –which followed too closely the
architectural fashion of brutalism in the 1970s- are a plethora of small-scale industrial
manufacturers, and increasingly, industrial distributors and wholesalers located.
Machinery parts, plastic wholesalers, printers, electrics and electronics wholesalers and
few manufacturers, car mechanics, auto parts stores, hundreds of petty-commodity
producers are alive and kicking in these ghastly, grim, and grandiose concrete blocks.
On the second floor, among the printers’ section of the industrial complex, I
entered a shop, where a stocky guy in his 30s with pitch black hair sat down behind a
stately desk. The place does not look like a shop floor at all. I asked him the purpose of
the store, the sign in the front says matbaa (printer), but, there is nothing like a printing
machine around. He pointed the curtain and said, our printing machine is there, we do not
print in large sizes, so we do not need much space. Then, across his desk, he showed a
cabinet full of small stuff, coasters, napkins, serviettes, menus, small shampoo bottles. He
said “We work for the hotels.” He gave me one coaster, you can keep it he said. I asked
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him, in the full knowledge that there would be no real answer, how much he made.
Enough, he responded, we do not need anybody. He was neither rich, nor poor, nor trying
to make ends meet, nor particularly well-off, a typical member of the small-scale
producing class, who can afford to pay one million liras for a villa in a gated community.
He planned to sell his apartment in Bakırköy –inherited from his parents- to finance at
least a part of the new house. The rest will be paid in cash.
I asked him the reason for his move from the European side to the Asian side.
Apparently, it was not his decision. He was a Bakırköy boy, born and raised there.
Though he was on the verge of marriage, and his wife showed great interest in those
glitzy housing developments, gated communities, and villas with beautiful gardens. It is
not in his interest, given the fact that he works six days a week. Yet, what his soon-to-bewife decides was important for him. He wanted to be on good terms with his wife,
wanted his wife to feel safe and secure. The unpaid domestic labor of women is paid in
the form of housing, in men’s minds. This was not the first time I heard those lines that
he should not worry about his wife and kids when he went away for business. Young and
old, bosses and newly minted white-collars, comfortably bourgeois or on the first steps of
the upward mobility ladder, all men referred to their wives as the decision makers. The
new gated communities, the image of safety sold as a part of that package, has found an
interested party, even though the streets of Istanbul are not particularly dangerous, let
alone subject to such inflated logic of crime and justice.55 The middle class is still
A burgeoning literature on the rise of gated communities in Istanbul is available: A. B Candan,
“Emerging Spaces of Neoliberalism: A Gated Town and a Public Housing Project in İstanbul,” New
Perspectives on Turkey 39 (2008): 5–46; F. Yirmibeşoğlu and N. A Yönet, “Gated Communities in
Istanbul: Security and Fear of Crime,” n.d.; S. Genis, “Producing Elite Localities: The Rise of Gated
Communities in Istanbul,” Urban Studies 44, no. 4 (2007): 771–98; L. Berköz, “İstanbul’da Korunaklı TekAile Konutları: Konut Kalitesi ve Kullanıcı Memnuniyetinin Belirlenmesi,” İTÜ Dergisi A 7, no. 1 (2009).
The discourse of crime and safety as an element of gated communities have been widely researched and
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searching for ways to define its own identity, trying to claim its own spatial being, and
seeking a part of everyday life where it can rightfully appropriate its making. The
developers extensively play on this idea of the safety and security of women, on the
pristine imagination of a perfect family –built, sustained, and protected by men, where
women play the role of homemaker.
The second instance comes from an interview I conducted with a bank manager. I
had the chance to visit him at his office. He was a senior level branch manager at a
private bank’s busy branch on the E-5 highway, around Bostancı. His branch is located at
what is an essentially a strip mall of banks, all very busy, frequented by not only the
middle class, relatively affluent residents of nearby Bostancı, but also, by the owners and
workers at the nearby industrial complex for small-scale production. The mechanics,
spare parts distributors, electronic wholesalers, some textile manufactories, and textile
and garment wholesalers of Istanbul’s Asian side are concentrated around that strip mall.
He is forty years old, married with a child. His wife is also a white-collar
employee, working at one of the wholesalers. It looked like he had been recently
promoted to his position –a tier just below the branch executive. He was given a cubicle
of his own on the second floor of the bank, away from the prying eyes of the bank
customers. They live in Kartal. They bought their home a few years ago from a local
yapsatçı. He told me he really liked where they live, near the parks at the Kartal
shoreline. The house has three bedrooms and a living room, is newly built, and resistant
to earthquakes. The apartment was bought with the money he inherited from his
grandfather’s land in Büyük Çekmece, Istanbul.
written on, see, Setha M. Low, Behind the Gates (Routledge, 2003).
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He grew up in Büyük Çekmece. His family is one of the émigrés from the Dersim
province who moved to Mersin and later immigrated to Istanbul. Normally, Dersim
people, who are both Kurdish and Alevi, a rare breed among both Alevis and the Kurds,
would not feel comfortable with strangers, and more often than not, they keep their
origins a secret, rather giving the name of the place they immigrated from Dersim as their
hometown. Once he mentioned his interest in learning how to play bağlama –a historical
Anatolian folk music instrument- I asked plainly if he was an Alevi. Carrying the
physical signs of a left-wing academic –long-hair, an earring, an Istanbulite accent- he
trusted me answering in the positive. And, given the fact that he was educated not at a
university in Istanbul, but in Konya –the epicenter of Turkish Islamism- tells me that he
is adept in finding his way among a sea of Turkish, Sunni people.
He told me how in Büyük Çekmece his childhood passed freely roaming the
streets, surrounded by orchards, tomato fields, and the sea. He said that he grew up in his
grandfather’s apartment building in Büyük Çekmece. During the interview, I thought he
was talking about a gecekondu, later, when I checked the recording I realized that was
not the case. Apartment buildings in Büyük Çekmece were not more than a handful in the
1970s. It was possibly a multi-story gecekondu, though his white-collar, bank manager
status did not permit him to tell it so.
The rest of our interview completed the perfect middle class picture he had drawn.
They just recently bought a summer house in Bodrum, on the Aegean Shore, using some
credit, and some of their savings. Now, their home in Kartal was no longer enough for the
couple. He told me that “I am adamant that I will learn to play bağlama, I have to.” Then,
he said, “I want a place for myself, my own hi-fi music system.” A manpad, within a
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family home. That’s why they started looking for a detached, or, a semi-detached home, a
villa with a garden of its own closer to the TEM highway. Basically, what they were
looking for was a suburban home. Why, I asked. He gave me the canned response –which
I had received so many times before: “We’d like to feel the earth, to step on our own
soil.” The canned response included a self-referential future they planned for their child,
where he would be safe and under the purview of his mother at all times at that garden.
Where would you get the financing for a new place? Will you sell your current
apartment? He told me that a land his father owns in Büyük Çekmece, 18 decares, will be
sold soon. It will be a small fortune, I thought, and he knew it will be. He said he is not
interested in selling any of his real estate, since the future was in property. What about
the credit rates, I retorted, since you know banking? At the time of my interview, credit
rates were around 20 to 25 per cent per annum. He frankly answered: “the interest rates
today do not make sense, perhaps, a maximum duration of 5 years is meaningful, but,
beyond that, it does not make sense due to the exorbitant interest rates.” We shake hands,
I told him best of luck with the new investment, and left the bank. I was greeted by a
thunderstorm of the worst kind outside. While trying to find a cab ride, I thought how
strange it was in this city that the bankers do not buy the credit they sell, the advertisers
do not buy the homes they advertise, the construction workers do not live in the
apartments they build, and the architects do not dwell in the places they design.
The third instance takes place at an appliance store, in Bostancı’s center. The store
is owned by a husband and wife, both in their late 30s, early 40s. The location of the store
is pretty good. At the intersection of the Minibus Avenue and the street to the shoreline,
this place used to be one of the prime affluent neighborhoods in Asian Istanbul. Yet, in
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our conversation, the husband told me that their sales were barely enough for the rent –
which was 6000 liras in 2010. He said that he tried to earn extra by playing the stock
market and buying and selling cars.
Both of them grew up in the area where their store is, in the erstwhile middle class
suburb between Bostancı and Suadiye –a thin strip of high rise apartments built during
the real estate boom of the late 1970s and again, during the second boom of the early
1990s. The woman went to a private university. The man talks about it as if it was
indicative of the class difference between the two. He said “Her father paid 10 thousand
dollars a year for her education at a private college.” He adds in a puzzled tone, “It’s not
really much money today...Though, still.” He paused. Later on he added that he
graduated from a state university, got his degree as an accountant. “I” he hesitantly says,
“got my diploma framed, hung it on my store’s wall...But I sell fridges. I don’t know
what good that diploma is, hanging on the wall.”
A couple of years ago they moved from Bostancı to the west, Ataşehir –where the
new middle class high rise apartment buildings stand across the May Day neighborhood.
I am curious about how they chose their home. Their answer was much more detailed and
cognizant than I would have imagined:
Teknik Yapı constructed our building, under TOKI’s control, and, yes, it is
something like a high rise, kind of, but, the construction is trustworthy. They are
all evident, everything’s relatively out there, enabling us within our social
conditions. We are actually in a search [of a new home]. We are looking for a
place down to the earth, low rise, less crowded. But, you know, unfortunately, we
can’t find that place in these metropolises in any case.
I question their reason for moving from Bostancı –an extremely central location,
close to both their workplace and other downtown amenities in Asian Istanbul- to
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Ataşehir, a suburban area with few facilities. They begin speaking together. In a few
seconds, the woman takes the lead; at the beginning of the interview, the husband
responded to the questions. She said that there are cars all around, and worse than that,
“cars, kidnappings, everything” creeps around. They have an eight year old daughter.
They say that the gated community’s pools is perfect for their child. She is not vulnerable
in a suburban environment: she goes to a private school, the school bus takes her to the
school every weekday and the mother does not work during the weekends. Thanks to the
abundance of sun and poolside enjoyments they say that they decided to sell their
summer house in Silivri –a northwestern sub-province in Istanbul.
I ask them the differences between Ataşehir and Bostancı. As an appliance
salesman he makes it quite simple for me:
Here, [in Bostancı], you can’t find someone who is young, newly married, or with
kids. In our gated community [in Ataşehir] 70% of automobiles are rental cars, all
of them are white-collar, all, all own something some place, most would be
paying for their mortgages.
What about Ataşehir, I keep on with my questions. They are apparently
developing some kind of rapport with me; the earlier distrust is dispelled. Why not
Maltepe, Küçükyalı, Üsküdar, or Ümraniye? They say they moved into Ataşehir to be
away from the religious types. They are very averse to religious people, and use the word
sıkmabaş to describe religious women. Their downstairs neighbor is such a sıkmabaş,
they both nod, that she takes everybody’s pictures in their gated community, follows
everyone, and her husband has an habit of knowing everything about everyone. After a
point –actually, at the exact moment when they claimed these neighbors of theirs
followed everyone- I started to see exquisite conspiracy theory believers. This conspiracy
is of course extending to appliance retailing. While the couple I am talking to are selling
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an appliance a day, the Islamists, they argue, sell dozens a day –all due to their
conspiratorial solidarity. I played the role of devil’s advocate, and asked, what if they
move into Ataşehir one day? Will you move out of your gated community? He bluntly
stated his answer:
Look, they are not coming this side, the thing is, that they do not come. As
husband and wife we are really into this, you know where they move into, you
know the Ikea, you know the Kiptaş sign over there. They go there. They don’t
come to Ataşehir.
At the end of the interview, the man tells me that he was suspicious in the
beginning, that he wondered whether I was “one of Tayyip’s men.” I told him, no. I try
not to judge. I just try to understand people.
The fourth scene took place in several forms, not once, but replicated at different
times and places. The developers are in a constant search to recognize their target
audience. They routinely bring together advertisement agencies, creatives, social
scientists, retired professors, newspaper columnists, marketers, public relations gurus,
etc. In one such meeting, sides are sitting across the aisles. On two different sides of the
table, we come face to face. The developer was planning to enter another metropolitan
city, Ankara, and tried to dig deeper in his strategy to locate the development. A retired
professor, who writes weekly columns about how to cook better breads in Hurriyet daily,
argued that their development can only be used as second homes for the rich, since the
project site is far away from the city center. What he said was purely inane, he still
thought that Ankara was the city he grew up half century ago, but the developers bought
his argument. He is the authority.
The developer had another problem, a more profound problem than positioning
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his sales strategy. In one of their projects, half of the apartments remained unsold after a
series of ads run on the TVs and newspapers. They hired a well-known architect, but
what he designed, and the urge to build more on less land, made the end-result look like
an apartment building of two duplexes. The lower duplexes were sold all right, they had
their own gardens, even swimming pools. The duplexes on the third and fourth floors
however, remained stuck in their roster. They decided not to work with that architect any
longer. The advertisement agency was furious against not only the architect, but the
location itself –the development was in the middle of an industrial zone.
Somehow, the issue came to the price –normally, price would be only an
afterthought, and not really the domain of the advertisers, or marketing consultants. I
asked the management the range of income of their target customers. The answer is in the
vicinity of 8 thousand liras. The apartments were priced between 700 thousand and 1.2
million liras, and they expected their prospective buyers to pay half of their income as
bank credit. And their estimated household income of 96 thousand liras per annum meant
that in 2009, not even the richest 10 percent could be fully in their league. They intended
only the top 2 percent, perhaps, I said. The young management executive, in his dark blue
suit and not matching red tie, responded, 8,000 Turkish Liras is not our estimate for
household income, it is the per person income. Well, I retorted, then, we are talking about
not more than one percent of Istanbul. They quickly got angry with me; management
never likes to be questioned in front of outsiders, especially by academics in front of their
bosses.
Later, I tried to make sense of what happened there. They had been in the business
for a long time; they would not be making up numbers. The problem is in what we look
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at. I, as a sociologist, looked at the figures of income, they, on the other hand, actually
refer to wealth. Compared to my time in the aforementioned gated community, I can say
that none of the people I’ve met there were of the 1 percent. But, there was no question
that they made 8 thousand liras per month –not even mentioning 16 thousand liras. They
basically sold what they had in the central locations to move into these new suburbs, or
else they used the rents they receive from one or two apartments they inherited from their
parents to finance their payments. None would have afforded those prices on the basis of
their wages.
The developers were right in pointing out their organic knowledge of the issue,
they know how capital circulates, but rightly, they do not care about the exact form that
money takes. As long as that money finds its way in the coffers of the corporation there
would be no problem. All sorts of information is in plentiful supply, income distribution,
prices based on location, prices of competitors, bank credits, consumption habits, several
market researches, tailor-made surveys for particular projects, etc. Yet, all of them are
myopically related to a single goal: sales. That is the reason for their great ignorance once
the topic is architecture, they really do not know anything about consumer choices. They
know that women like large kitchens and at least balconies as large as that; they have
learned from the yapsatçıs that French balconies are beautiful, they practically figured
out that the more sunlight there is, the better the apartment. But, they have not paid any
attention to the design in general. They harness the marketing language in every
discussion they enter as the ultimate authority: A plus –the name of the uppermost
socioeconomic status category- would like that, no, this would sell in A and B, but A plus
would hate that, we can catch C, but A and B would certainly detest that image –unless
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you live in their world, it is pure gibberish. But, still, even in their world, what they made
of the people and their own business is pure gibberish as well.
Capitalists are powerful though. They do not only own the system –they are the
ones who built the system in the first place- they know how to affect things, how to
produce concrete urban spaces, how to manufacture desire, how to employ millions of
people’s savings as an extension of their fictitious capital accumulation, how to make
workers construct for a pittance of the profits they make. However, they will never be
able to ascertain the most basic knowledge regarding the system: their consciousness will
always be an economic consciousness, and in this economic blindness, they will never be
able to find what they seek-possibly, that’s what made accumulation for accumulation’s
sake the determining element of the capitalist mode of production. Lukacs wrote long ago
that the bourgeoisie was victim of a very simple dialectical relation, as long as bourgeois
consciousness remained confined to economy, they would never be able to overcome the
cyclical destruction wrought by the internal logic of capitalism.56 Here, a further question
is worth pondering: would not capitalists seek the help of another class, or class fraction,
to expand their sterile, one-dimensional consciousness? Middle class enters the equation
at that exact moment. Neither capitalist, nor proletariat, the middle class lacks the
economic basis, but in return, is endowed with a consciousness. The middle class,
following Lukacs, can be said to stand as the only class that lacked corporeal substance,
while its existence is incumbent on mere consciousness. That’s how they can partake in
the production of space. Both symbolically and concretely, urban space is crafted for the
middle class. Istanbul is no exception to that.
56
Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics (MIT Press, 1971), 64.
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Engels was right when he wrote that bourgeoisie’s fix for the housing question of
the working class was moving them from one place to another in the city. Bourgeoisie
made the working class an aliquot part of the urban problem as the masses struggled to
survive in the slums, in the gecekondus, in cholera ridden nightmares, in rented
apartments waiting to be ripened as new re-developments or as part of urban
gentrification, and at countless tales of urban exclusion. Yet, today, it is not only the
working class that has to move from place to place. As the owner of the printing shop I
referred above thought, like many other people tried to decide to which development is
better for investing their money, or if their homes are worth enough to buy an apartment
at a new high-rise complex, if the rent they collected next year would be sufficient
enough to buy another home for his marriage age children, the middle class is constantly
in motion in Istanbul. Property owning classes in Istanbul play an interesting game where
everyone else watches how they build higher and higher towers, how they sell more and
more apartments, how the prices still go up and above. This is the beginning of the end of
Istanbul’s latest reincarnation, a city of concrete where the middle class consumes space
as easily as it is produced. The middle class in Istanbul is running after a fata morgana,
and once the music and visions stop, the fall will not be as enjoyable as the preceding
run, though it is still uncertain when that fall will take place. One thing is certain though,
the concrete space produced during the belle époque is here to stay for the coming
decades. This is the Istanbul of future and it only gets worse from here.
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7
Conclusion
This dissertation began as I sought a simple answer to a simple question: why are
homes built in such huge numbers in Istanbul? Besides the obvious answer of providing
shelter, population increase, or mere greed for more real estate speculation, things got
gradually complicated. First, I tried to pin down Istanbul at some constant timeframe.
Istanbul did not fit that frame. Without 19th century Ottoman modernization experiences,
the rubble and nostalgia of the Kemalist Istanbul did not make sense, without the
development boom in the 1970s, the whole blame fell on Özal’s shoulders –not to mean
that he was blameless- in the 2001 burst of the real estate market. I think Marx, Lefebvre,
and Harvey taught me well that no social phenomenon exists in a vacuum, and if one is
interested in unraveling the underlying dialectics within social relations, then the task
ahead would be to pose the question as a totality –not, as a totalization, not as a means of
sacrificing the details for the sake of safe, easy to understand inferences. But, totality
meant a highly dynamic, richly laced set of multifarious social relations rooted in time
and space.
The urban question in Istanbul is still a perplexing question. The state is of
paramount importance. I have discussed extensively on how the relations between the
state and Istanbul have mutually shaped each other. It is not a one-way relationship.
That’s also why state-space is an important term; it could have been space-state we are
discussing here, although, the connotations would be much more different, I suppose. The
perplexing nature of the question begins to make itself felt once the survival of the state
power becomes apparent. I told myself several times during both my research and writing
processes that this city was made to be a center of power, it needs other cities, other
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countries, other peoples to survive. And, we have seen what happens once that lifeblood
withers as the events of the 19th century incorporation of the Ottoman Empire to the
world-system and its aftermath showed.
The crucial observation of this dissertation was the role played by the migrant
workers in Istanbul –if the first fifteen centuries of the city’s history was not hectic
enough, the last seventy five years had without any doubt added onto the frenzied pace of
change in Istanbul. This was a tragic reversal of Istanbul’s fortunes: once, the city tapped
onto the toils of the millions of peasants, invisibly controlled their lives, expropriated
their surplus product, and paid in terms of state coercion and limited, capricious
protection. Now, in the last seventy five years, the peasants left their land, came to the
city, and ironically, claimed their share of the enormous wealth this city concentrated
within its borders.
Of course the wealth was no longer there, so they settled with a much less
valuable –at the time- but more robust form of wealth: land. The city was the setting of a
grand social experiment. How would that great land grab mold a new city, I thought I
would have asked if I was a social scientist in the 1940s. Amazement, a mesmerized state
of stupor, and a visceral reaction to the perceived incivility of the migrants permeated in
the mindset of Turkish state’s decision makers, power elite, and intellectuals. As late as
in the 1990s, I vividly remember the still favorable fix for the population increase in
Istanbul: issuance of visas for residence and work in the city. Now, it means something
else, perhaps they never intended to issue visas, regiment migrant populations, but the
power elite announced their lack of a grasp of capitalist mode of production. If the labor
is not free, at least conceptually, then capital would not be free either.
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Yet, the permanence of state power, its incessant incursions in Istanbul’s urban
development, its willful coalition making capabilities with rent-seeking capitalists, its
peculiar modes of production of concrete space, told me that the shots are called by the
state. The contemporary state is not the same state as the Kemalist state, it is not the same
as the Ottoman state machinations, that’s for sure, though, a certain kernel of
governmentality kept on succeeding replicating itself, transferred from generation to
generation, as it entered and left voids –historical ruptures- its basic tenets stayed the
same. This is a tributary state, organized around a charismatic authority, preferably, but,
in the lack of such charisma, professing the true faith –Sunni Islam, and/or Turkishnesswould suffice, and even in the absence authority, or at the times of interregnum, the
system is continuously reproduced by a military-bureaucratic class. The militarybureaucratic class has fortunately never reached the rationalistic, scientific excellence
witnessed in other comparable situations in post-Meiji Japan, Bismarckian Prussia, or
even Stalinist Soviet Union, and in times of relative prosperity, that class failed in
unifying its particularistic interests.
Even at the exact moment of the first gecekondus’ building in Zeytinburnu, the
first rush to public land, one segment of the bureaucratic institution turned a blind eye to
the developments, while another segment vowed to get rid of those settlements at its first
convenience. The nature of Istanbul’s making of its own space was fundamentally
political, though, not exactly in the way I interpret. It was not a war of positions between
the state and the civil society. As the migrant working classes quietly encroached on
public resources, they used all connections, networks, openings, possibilities, and money
they could gather to protect their grounds. Inönü or Menderes, Demirel or Ecevit, the
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names, party programs, promises, even the most determining elements of Turkish history
–ethnicity and faith- did not play prominent roles at that point. The acquired land had to
be protected at all costs. Istanbul’s political prominence was in its ability to provide land
to the dispossessed masses. In seven decades, the city has become the beacon of hope that
spelled the words, give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, send me your
homeless. They were not sent, they came by their own volition.
As the consolidation of urban land in Istanbul was completed, yet another
tumultuous phase of production of concrete space began. The gecekondus rapidly gave
way to the concrete apartment blocks, first in the city center, then in the peripheries, until
every square meter of the city turned into a seamless sea of reinforced concrete. The
gecekondus were no longer the spaces of the subaltern, carefully hidden, faceless,
bodiless, voiceless, and disenfranchised masses. They became the active participants of
public discourse, enthusiastic followers of political processes, producers of cultural
commodities. Yet, they were still not within the bounds of Turkish social science, and
they could not become proper Istanbulites themselves.
The gecekondus and their owners turned into a significant part of the middle class.
The redistributive project paid handsomely; they did not only own their own homes, but
they became instigators of further real estate development. They found their long
deserved role as the determinants of political economy of urban rentier classes. In three
cycles of real estate boom, 1965-1980, 1986-1999, and the most recent one that began in
2003, the built environment was once again transformed, the city has greatly expanded,
and housing became both a commodity and a sound opportunity of investment –at least,
in commonsensical terms. The rich got richer in the last decade of the latest real estate
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boom, while the lowest 80 percent’s incomes rose perceptibly, but not significantly.
The age old question about the limits of Istanbul’s growth is once again in wide
circulation. It had been speculated in the 19th century, written about extensively in the
1940s, turned into a lurking specter in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, authoritatively declared in
the 90s that the end has arrived for Istanbul. Yet, none came to actual realization. The
city still grows, in a suffocating way, yes, but nevertheless, continues its expansion. And
the middle class enthusiastically partakes in this seemingly endless cornucopia of urban
development.
There is no question that the American Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing,
which began in 2008 and continued with the historic low interest rates in the last six
years, helped bring an unprecedented amount of capital to Turkey. The real estate sector
in Istanbul sucked the excess capital as a suckling infant and devoured money as it built
more and more, sank capital into taller and taller buildings. Ali Babacan, the deputy
Prime Minister with an economy portfolio, spoke at a meeting that the luxury
consumption and luxurious spending in real estate are not good signs for the future of the
country when low levels of industrial investment are present. He also pointed out the
enormous trade deficits Turkish economy suffered through in the last couple of years. He
not only rang alarm bells for receptive ears, Babacan also said that monopolistic activities
in the real estate markets are causing disruptions in the Turkish economy. His public
speech is the first time a high level JDP figure openly criticized the blatant real estate
speculation currently going on in Turkey.1
1
AA, “Babacan: Üretmeden, Krediyle Lüks Alışveriş Türkiye’yi Çıkmaza Sokabilir,” Hürriyet, accessed
July 23, 2014, http://www.hurriyet.com.tr/ekonomi/26871256.asp.
501
The question, of course, is whether this is a sustainable method of growth. Can
capitalist accumulation in Turkey continue with rates of building new homes apace with
the American construction industry?2 The tremendous amounts of capital sunk into urban
land has never been a reproducible method of capital accumulation wherever the
capitalist mode of production prevailed. The population increase is only viable to a
certain extent; foreign capital can be kept pumped into the Turkish banks for only a given
time, ordinary citizens will only buy into the idea of never-ending real estate expansion
only for a given period. Then, what happens next? It is not a matter of this dissertation to
come up with conjectures on what comes next. The real task of this dissertation is related
to the question why?
I began with an exploratory question, and aim to finish with an explanatory
answer to that question. In Istanbul, the hegemonic power elites found a groundbreaking
formula to bring forward a wholesome change all over the country. They think that
formula is powerful enough to save the country from its self-imposed, or Western
dictated, underdevelopment. The leading members of the current power elite explained
this publicly, they reiterated time and again their unswerving belief that the more homes
built, the richer people would get. The totality of state-space relations are incumbent
upon this assumption. The practical implications of such political economic decisions are
evident in every nook and cranny of the system. This is the third state-space modality I
tried to explain. Part of the problem is the underlying political mentality and ideological
The Turkish and American new home constructions are more or less equal in the last five years, since the
collapse of the mortgage market. Even after the resurgence of new home building in the U.S. the latest
figures suggest that around 800 thousand new homes are being built, which is the same with Turkey’s
homebuilding. Neil Irwin, “A Drop in Housing Starts,” The New York Times, July 17, 2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/18/upshot/housing-starts-fell-in-june-heres-why-thats-bad-news.html.
Keep also in mind that Turkey’s population is less than one fourth of the U.S. population, and its GDP per
capita is less than one fourth of the U.S. GDP per capita.
2
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underpinnings of such policy-making decisions. This is only partly an issue of the object
of analysis in this dissertation. What I described here was how in the concrete case of
Istanbul, such rationality found its basis amidst urban, albeit until recently, dispossessed,
and disenfranchised classes.
The Kemalists who defined themselves as urban, modern, and positivist –although
they had conscious and unconscious issues with all these terms- have released the grabs
of power in the last decade. The Kemalist power elite defined themselves as urban; the
problem was that they denied anyone else the same definition: they were the only
urbanites in this country. The Kemalist power elite has largely been replaced by the
Islamist power elites in the last decade. They have one advantage over the Kemalists:
they never defined themselves primarily as an urban movement, so they never felt the
need to acquire the seal of approval from an urban viewpoint. They easily won the hearts
of the dispossessed and disenfranchised masses in Istanbul’s erstwhile gecekondus. What
they accomplished was a Sisyphean feat; they have not only rendered the gecekondus as
the springboard of their political achievements, but they also have grown with those
gecekondus. They did it with rampant real estate speculation, with the labor and toils of
the yapsatçıs, through the redistributive power of the state, of the state development
corporations, TOKI and KIPTAS. The problem is dialectical. What made them
extraordinarily successful and powerful once –which exceeded the wildest estimatesnow carries the risk of taking their accomplishments down. Perhaps Marx was right.
Perhaps capital is an irresolvable, utterly resilient creature: a mole. Even sinking it deep
beneath the surface, burying it underneath, sending it to the land of Hades is not enough.
It finds a way to haunt the living creatures.
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Bob Jessop and others pointed out that under the circumstances of capitalist
relations of production, the key to theorizing the space and state nexus involves four
levels: territory, place, scale, and networks.3 In this dissertation, these four levels made
themselves felt in three different modalities of state spaces. In the fourth chapter, the
dissolution of a world empire and the pangs of incorporation to a world-economy
emerged with its particular modality. Territorial breaking up of the empire surfaced in
Istanbul as the old, intra-muros Istanbul gradually faded away and gave way to the
northern expansion of the city towards Pera and today’s Beşiktaş. The place making of
the time involved rebuilding and replicating European capitals in smaller scales, with an
arabesque accent, as the new imperial palaces showed. The scale of that particular
modality is the most problematic part, since Istanbul as the capital of a world-empire had
its own peculiar scalar characteristics, wherein, a vast hinterland, and a nodal
concentration of surplus produce made the city up to that point. Finally, the networks of
the world-empire were rapidly replaced by new attempts in establishing an enlightened
military-bureaucratic class obedient to the Ottoman center. These four levels played out
in Istanbul. I tried to depict the interplay between these four levels throughout this
treatise by way of three different historical modalities. (See, Figures, 7.1, 7.2., and 7.3)
3
Jessop, Brenner, and Jones, “Theorizing Sociospatial Relations.”
504
Territory
Place
State Spaces of the Bosphorus'
Western Shores
Pera, Galata, Beşiktaş
Extending old bourgeois
Neighborhoods
Pera as a Western Commercial
Colony
Networks
Scale
Mahalle‐qua‐the‐State
Big landowners and merchant
capitalists
Ethnic and faith‐based
distribution of power and
resources
Non‐mediated transfer of power
Figure 7.1: State-space Modality I
The second modality of state-space owes its emergence to the closely guarded
privileges of the military-bureaucratic class; this time, however, under a novel disguise:
Kemalism. The territorial aspect has depended on the dispossession of non-Turkified
minorities, the wiping away of their traces on the newly established country’s territory,
and most important of them all, in re-territorializing Istanbul’s urban land. Pera became
Beyoğlu, Tatavla turned into Kurtuluş, etc. The peasants were willful partners in this new
territorial expansion of the state-space, as long as they subscribed to the predominant
ideological apparatuses of the state, their massive appropriation of space was overlooked,
or implicitly encouraged. Thence, the gecekondus arose. The place making was
nationalistic in appearance, but under the surface, it was pragmatically organized: the
May Day neighborhood attests to that fact. It could have been named Ecevit
neighborhood, or even, after Süleyman Demirel. On the other hand, places of the
505
republican identity permeated, bolstered, and strengthened the military-bureaucratic
elite’s claim on power and their imagined historiography. The scalar needs of this second
state-space modality was subordinated by a national developmentalist industrialization
drive. The more the merrier was the motto, the city went beyond its historical borders,
remade itself in the image of an insuperable growth machine. The networks have been
well scrutinized: clientelism, ethnically and religiously motivated hometown connections
did not only survive intact, but they found a new lease on political, cultural, and social
influence by dint of local level redistribution of urban resources in the hands of the state.
Territory
Place
Outside The Walls
Zeytinburnu, the May Day
Neighborhood, Bomonti, Kuştepe, etc.
Around the Industrial Establishments
The Periphery
Dispossession (and re‐possession) of
Non‐Muslim Owned Inner‐City Land
Public Lands
Extending and Re‐inventing old
bourgeois Neighborhoods
Scale
Networks
Gecekondu & Mahalle
Migrant networks of ethnic &
religious hometown connections
Individual Self‐Help Building
(Gecekondus)
Emergence of Yapsatçıs
(Entrepreneuralism)
Power elite's military‐bureaucratic
network
Figure 7.2: State-space Modality II
The third state-space modality is still emergent. Its final shape, future possibilities,
probable contradictions, and survival strategies are yet only incipient. This new modality
of state-space nexus is incumbent upon the second, national developmentalist mode,
though, under the asphyxiating weight of worldwide seizure of neoliberal policies. Its
territorial ambitions are manifestly global. However, Istanbul is not yet a global city, and
506
possibly, will never be one. It has tapped onto a huge financial valuation of hitherto
untouched lands, primarily, erstwhile gecekondu settlements, secondarily, inner-city
neighborhoods with the heavy presence of public ownership of land. The place produced
by this novel mode of state-spaces is heavily indebted to an ethos of middle classhowever, none can be sure of whether that ethos is significantly different than the petty
commodity producers’ highly peculiar work ethics, aesthetics, and political
consciousness. The scale this new Istanbul heralds is very similar to its territorial
ambitions –deterritorializing in essence for the sake of an unswerving faith in the
powerful growth machines of fictitious capital sunk in land. Hence, the apartment
buildings –hundreds of thousands of them- dot the face of the city. Nothing is modest, the
sky is the limit. However, no single capitalistic form of accumulation, not even the petrodollars (or, actually, the petro-liras and gold) of the Gulf countries can sustain this
limitless expansion. Finally, and without any doubt, in a very interesting manner, the
networks that gave birth to this new mode of state-space in Istanbul are no different than
the previous mode: it is still the ethnically and religiously motivated hometown
connections, Sunni and Turkified identities, and proximity to the actual power that
determines the asymptotes of state and space making. If anything, under this new mode,
the networks of the erstwhile migrants, current proud Istanbulites, are augmented. The
most recent ruptures in this conservative, right-wing, Islamist coalition can be a sign of
the upcoming transformations in this network, though such networks are built in a long
time, and their gravitas can only be measured under extreme duress.
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Place
Territory
Ataşehir, Kemerburgaz, Bahçeşehir
Highways
Gated Communities
Satellite Cities
Gentrification of old bourgeois
Neighborhoods
Reclaiming the public land
Apartmentalization of Gecekondus
Networks
Scale
Party in power
International and national
A new Power elite
Finance‐capital circuits
"White Turks"
Financialization of Housing
The "New" Middle Class
Figure 7.3: State-space Modality III
Istanbul is an honorable exception, since it is the sole city on earth that had the
chance to make and re-make a state-to be precise, at least three states in succession. In
other words, in Istanbul’s case, the making of space, the concrete and abstract production
of space, is synonymous with the processes and techniques of state-making. Without the
state, the longue durée of early modern and modern gradations and processual cycles of
state-making, it is not possible to delve into the spatial aspects of this city.
It is apt to recall how Neil Brenner delineated state projects and state effects. He
said, inasmuch as theoretical practice is concretely actualized through knowledge effects,
the plethora of state projects have produced their own state effects. 4 The visible and
disguised procedures, interventions, retreats, and gradual encroachment of the
gecekondus, yapsatçıs, state contractors, and private developers have been all but carriers
4
Brenner, New State Spaces : Urban Governance and the Rescaling of Statehood, 85.
508
of such state projects. In whatever form they have taken, they were the key surface
phenomena of the state’s activities in space. Still, this is no one-way street. Winston
Churchill was surprisingly accurate in yet another one of his aphorisms: we make
buildings, and in return, buildings make us who we are. The same is true for the state. In
making the spaces of production and reproduction of social relations in Istanbul, the
Turkish state has in turn succumbed to its own dialectical loophole: gecekondus were a
brilliant and unprecedented redistribution of wealth, though the irreverent plebeian land
grab had unmistakably reshaped the political sphere and made local governments mere
replicas of the national, centralized, and monolithic power located in Ankara.
It is not my task to speculate, nor is my reason for penning this dissertation to
raise estimates about further growth potentials. I began writing this dissertation as a
distant admirer of Istanbul. After traversing her streets, witnessing the rich texture of her
history and her alternate realities, I am impressed by her unbent insistence for being
herself at all costs. Istanbul is an aleph, though the Aleph of all alephs. For the writers of
these sentences, she is unmatched in beauty, unrivalled in her persistence, unequalled in
the radiance of power. As I approached the concrete and abstract of Istanbul, they
become more alike, as production of space has turned into an imaginative and endless
progress in breaking the bondages imposed by the representations of space, my object of
analysis escapes to the thirdspace. And I am not afraid to think of imputing a subjective
consciousness to my unit of analysis. Istanbul alone could have endured so much for so
long, and indeed she did. Istanbul withstood.
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Glossary
Abdulhamid II:
(1842-1918) The Ottoman Sultan who reigned between 1876
and 1909. Responsible for the abolition of the1876
Constitution and the parliament, he ruled as an enlightened
despot. His political and cultural influence still looms large in
contemporary Turkish politics.
Adnan Menderes:
(1899-1961) The first democratically elected Prime Minister
of Turkey, he governed as the leader of the Democrat Party
between 1950 and 1960. He was overthrown in the May 27
1960 Coup d’état and was sentenced to death along with 14
other members of his ruling party and the President of the
Republic, Celal Bayar. Only Menderes and two other cabinet
ministers were executed by hanging on September 17, 1961.
He is the founding figure of contemporary right-wing politics.
Ağaoğlu
A private development corporation owned and operated by
Development Co.:
Ali Ağaoğlu. The actual name of the company is Akdeniz
Construction Company, though the developer is known
publicly by the last name of its owner. The firm is the biggest
recipient of TOKI public tenders for development in Istanbul.
Founded in the early 1990s as a small-scale one-man building
company, it has expanded rapidly in the last decade and a
510
half, currently acting as the biggest private developer in
Istanbul.
Aleph:
A metaphorical symbol first employed by the Argentine
author, Jorge Luis Borges, in his short story, “The Aleph,”
first published in 1945. Later, the story was published in a
collection of Borges’ short stories in 1949, named “The Aleph
and Other Stories.” The first letter of the Hebrew alphabet,
aleph, as well as alif in the Arabic alphabet –also,
etymologically related to the alpha- denotes a spatial
mechanism that brings together all the spaces of the universe.
The concept was introduced to urban thought by Edward
Soja’s work in the early 1980s, and closely represents Henri
Lefebvre’s ideas on the production of space.
Alevism:
A belief and faith system based on the teachings and life of
Ali, the cousin and son-in-law of prophet Muhammad.
Although mainstream scholars of Islam show a tendency to
evaluate Alevism as a minor branch of Shiite Islam, the role
played by the Sufi sects in Alevite religious practices and the
tremendous import attached to Ali raises issues regarding the
Islamic character of the belief. The Alevites have been
historically a minority faith in Turkey and Syria. The rituals
511
and beliefs of Syrian and Anatolian Alevis differ significantly.
In addition to a sizable Turkish Alevi population in Anatolia,
a minority of Kurds in Turkey –especially from the Dersim
province- profess Alevism. Alevis have been routinely
persecuted for their rituals, practices, and belief. More than a
quarter of Turkey’s population is thought to be followers of
Alevism, though no official data exist.
Apartman
A Turkish term –borrowed from French- used for both
expressing a reinforced concrete apartment building and a
singular flat as property.
Arabesk music:
A popular music form that brought together Turkish classical
music, Turkish folk music and tonal and artistic elements of
Western and Arabic influences, especially Egyptian figures
like Umm Khultum. First popularized in the early 1970s,
Arabesk music was treated as a corrupt and debased form of
art by the establishment. Performers were banned from public
radios and TV until the late 1980s.
Askerî class:
The Ottoman bureaucratic class that was composed of three
sections: military, religious, and administrative.
512
Bülent Ecevit:
(1925-2006) The leader of RPP from 1972 to 1980. Under his
leadership, RPP reached historic electoral successes, and he
served as Prime Minister in three different coalition
governments in those years. After the 1980 coup, he was
banned from politics which lasted until 1987. Afterwards, he
did not assume the leadership of RPP, but instead, established
his own party, DSP, Democratic Left Party. He led two more
coalition governments from 1999 to 2002, only to see his
party vanish in the electorate due to the 2001 economic crisis.
Cemevi:
A house of worship for Alevis, which can be translated
literally as the house of congregation.
CUP:
Committee of Union and Progress. The political and
paramilitary organization of the Young Turks, the party was
the main organization that triggered the 1908 Revolution
against Abdulhamid II. CUP was a member of a powersharing agreement between different sides between 1908 and
1913. After 1913 coup d’état, they ruled as a single-party state
until the defeat in the First World War and the armistice in
1918 and eventual collapse and dissolution of the Empire.
Divanyolu:
The main artery in the historic Istanbul peninsula centered in
513
the midst of the old walled city. The road replaced the Roman
Mese during Ottoman times.
DP:
Democrat Party. Founded in 1946 by opposition figures
within the then single-party Republican People’s Party. DP
won the general election in 1950 and was in power until the
May 27, 1960 coup. The party is accepted as the progenitor of
succeeding right-wing parties in the ensuing decades.
Emlak Konut:
A public housing development corporation established in
1953 under the auspices of its namesake bank –Emlak Bank.
Until the late 1990s, the corporation acted as the only state
enterprise active in housing development. After the 2001
Banking Crisis, the bank ceased its operations, and in 2002
the development corporation became a real estate investment
corporation under the control of TOKI.
Erdoğan Bayraktar:
The chairperson and CEO of TOKI from 2002 to 2011. In
2011 he was elected a member of parliament from his
hometown, Trabzon, and appointed in the third Erdoğan
cabinet as the minister of Environment and Urban
Development-a position specifically established for Bayraktar.
After the illegally recorded police wiretaps were made public,
514
he resigned from his position on December 25, 2013.
Felicity Party:
Saadet Partisi, in Turkish. The second successor party
established in 2001 by Necmettin Erbakan’s followers after
the Constitutional Court’s ban on the Welfare Party and
Virtue Party. The party was the main Islamist political
organization until the founding of the Justice and
Development Party in 2002. Currently, it is a fringe party with
a more pronounced Islamism, with an electoral share of 5
percent.
Gecekondu:
A Turkish term first employed by the newspapers that literally
means ‘dropped-in-a-night’ to denote the squatter settlements
at least since the 1940s. By the mid-1960s, the term was also
appropriated and used in legal texts, most importantly in the
public housing alleviation and land re-distribution programs
and amnesties passed in the parliament.
Gezi Park Uprisings:
A nationwide series of demonstrations and protests against the
proposed demolition of Gezi Park in downtown Istanbul and
its replacement with a shopping mall modeled after a 19th
century Ottoman military barracks. In 79 provinces of the
country, 2.5 million people –according to government reports-
515
joined in those protests that began on May 31, 2013 and lasted
until June 15, 2013.
Harem:
In Islamic terminology, harem expresses the forbidden and the
sacred. In a Turkish context, this came to represent the
privacy of family, especially the female members of that
family and the residential space of that family.
Imaret:
A collection of charitable works conjoined to the Waqfs,
imarets included public hospitals, soup kitchens, religious
philanthropic establishments, poor houses, etc.
JDP:
Justice and Development Party. Initials in Turkish are AKP,
however, the party leadership vehemently opposes such public
use, and instead encourages the use of AK (White) Parti. This
self-described conservative party was established as a
consequence of a leadership struggle in the Virtue Party in
2002. Led by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, it has been in power
since 2002, has won 8 elections in the last twelve years, and is
the main right-wing party.
JP:
Justice Party, AP, in Turkish, is the successor party to Adnan
Menderes’ Democrat Party. Established after the 1960 coup as
516
one of the two offshoots of the Menderes Democrats, the
party rose to prominence under the leadership of Süleyman
Demirel, who won a landslide victory with 54% in the 1965
elections. Demirel and his Justice Party had to resign after the
March 12, 1971 coup. Throughout the 1970s, JP ruled as part
of a coalition with NMP and Erbakan’s Islamists. In 1980, JP
was banned with the other political parties by the military
junta.
KIPTAŞ:
In Turkish, abbreviation for Konut (Housing), Imar
(Building), Plan (planning) industries, it is the semi-private
housing development arm of the Istanbul Metropolitan
Municipality.
Mahalle:
From the classical Ottoman period, ‘mahalle’ refers to an
urban settlement built around a wakf-imaret complex,
composed of low rise wooden semi-detached houses, smallscale shop-owners, and a mosque with a local congregation.
The term still endures in contemporary Istanbul, albeit in a
rapidly changing fashion, and points to a nostalgic tightly-knit
community.
Mese:
The urban backbone of Roman and Byzantine Constantinople,
517
it traversed the main political, religious, and cultural centers
of the city and connected to wider commercial routes along
the Balkans. The Mese was mostly replaced by Ottoman
Divanyolu from the sixteenth century onward.
Motherland Party:
A political party founded by Turgut Özal in 1983. The party
attempted to bring conservative, nationalist, and liberal
tendencies together and hung onto the right-wing inheritance
from Adnan Menderes on. It entered the elections as the only
party not condoned –or, founded- by the military junta and
surprised many by earning the majority in the parliament.
Under Özal’s leadership, the party was responsible for the
liberalization of the economy and financial markets. After
Özal’s passing in 1993, the party entered several coalition
governments as a junior party, only to be crushed in the 2002
general elections. In the last decade, several attempts were
undertaken to re-establish the party, however, they failed to
receive significant electoral presence.
NMP:
Nationalist Movement Party, Milliyetçi Hareket Partisi, in
Turkish, is a right-wing party established by Alparslan Türkeş
–a member of the May 27, 1960 junta- in 1969. The party was
active in the 1970s as an extreme right-wing and anti-
518
communist organization with a paramilitary wing (the Ülkü
Ocağı). The party was a prominent actor in street level clashes
with leftist and socialist organizations. After the 1980 coup,
several members were executed by hanging for their roles in
violent actions. Electorally receiving around 5% of the votes,
the party shed its street level activities in the 1990s, and after
the passing away of Türkeş, under the leadership of Devlet
Bahçeli, got more than 20% of the votes in the 1999 elections
and became an equal partner in the coalition government
between 1999 and 2002. Currently, the party has the third
biggest parliamentary representation and received more than
13% of the votes in the most recent elections.
Necmettin Erbakan:
(1926-2011) He was the founding figure of Turkish Islamism,
the leader of various successive parties established in this
vein, was an engineer by training, and one of the most
influential politicians in the post-1980 coup era. He
contributed to galvanize a diverse array of Islamist
movements in the late 1960s and early 1970s behind his own
brand of political movement, named Milli Görüş (National
View). His movement first took part in Ecevit’s first cabinet
in 1973-4 as a minor coalition member and later, throughout
the 70s, Erbakan supported Demirel’s Milli Cephe (National
519
Front) coalition governments. In the 1994 local elections, the
party became a major actor in politics, garnering more than
20% of the votes and electing mayors in Istanbul and Ankara.
Later, in the 1995 elections, his party, the Welfare Party,
received more than 21% of the votes and became the leading
party. Until 1996, due to military pressure no other political
party was willing to be coalition partners with Erbakan. In
1996 he became Prime Minister in a coalition government
with the True Path Party. On February 28, 1997, the military
issued an ultimatum which ultimately led to the downfall of
his government. Erbakan was banned from politics and his
party was closed down by the decision of the constitutional
court.
Pir Sultan Abdal:
An Alevi poet and a mystic figure who is thought to have
lived in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. He
was one of the leading voices against the Sunni majority and
Ottoman state apparatus that dwelt upon this Sunni belief
system. In the latter part of the twentieth century his poems
found ready acceptance and widespread influence among
leftist and socialist organizations.
Recep Tayyip
(b. 1954) The current Prime Minister and the leader of JDP.
520
Erdoğan:
He was educated as an economist and was one of the earliest
supporters of Erbakan’s Islamist movement in the late 1970s.
During the Islamists’ ascent to power, he ran for MP from
Istanbul in 1991 but lost. In 1994, with the Islamists’ electoral
surge, he was elected the mayor of Istanbul Metropolitan
Municipality. In 1998, as a consequence of the February 28,
1997 military ultimatum, he was tried and sentenced to 10
months’ imprisonment for incitement to religious hatred. He
served 4 months in 1999, and had to resign his mayoral
position. In 2001, he left Erbakan’s movement to establish a
new conservative party, JDP. Next year, in 2002, his newly
founded party won a landslide victory in the elections. But
only after necessary changes were made to the election laws
was he elected to the parliament and took over the Prime
Ministerial position in 2003.
RPP:
The Republican People’s Party, Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi in
Turkish, was founded by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and the
military leadership of the Turkish War of Independence in
1923. From 1923 to 1946, RPP ruled the country as a singleparty regime, with nominal, non-representative elections. Its
official ideology was Kemalism and the six principles of
Kemalism (republicanism, nationalism, secularism, populism,
521
etatism, and revolutionism) were amended to the party
program which were also the official state policy. Ismet Inonu
led the party after Atatürk’s death in 1938 until 1972. After
1946, the political regime was liberalized and in 1950, the
single-party rule ended. In the late 1960s, under the influence
of a young general secretary of the party, Bülent Ecevit, the
hitherto anti-communist, right-wing party shifted its position
and announced itself as a center-of-left political party. Ecevit
replaced Inonu as the leader of the party in 1972 and carried
the party to historic shares of the electorate by means of his
left-wing populism. The party was banned by the 1980
military junta, alongside other political parties. After its reestablishment and subsequent mergers with other left-wing
parties, it is currently the main opposition party in Turkey,
with a quarter of the electoral support. Today, the party is the
main left-wing party in opposition.
Sedad Hakkı Eldem:
(1908-1988) One of the most prominent and prolific architects
of Turkey in the twentieth century, Eldem was educated in
France, England, and Germany. Upon his return to Turkey in
1934, he took up a tenure track position as a professor of
architecture in the Academy of Fine Arts in Istanbul. Until his
retirement, he held a determining sway with his teaching at
522
the Academy and shaped contemporary Turkish architecture.
He received the Agha Khan Architectural Prize in 1986 for his
design of the Zeyrek Social Security Services’ Complex.
Selatin Mosque:
The mosques that were built under commission of the
Ottoman Sultans. The classical Ottoman mosques in
Istanbul’s historic peninsula are prime examples of these
majestic buildings, although, in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, smaller and Western inspired styles were employed.
SPP
In Turkish, Sosyaldemokrat Halkçı Parti, in English, SocialDemocratic Populist Party, was the main successor party to
RPP after the September 12, 1980 Coup closed down all legal
parties. The SPP showed a remarkable success in the 1989
local elections and was the junior partner in the governing
coalition after the 1991 general elections. In 1995, the party
merged with the newly re-established RPP and took its name.
Süleyman Demirel:
(b. 1924) The eighth president of the Republic. He served as
prime minister seven times between 1965 and 1993, had to
relinquish power twice-in 1971 and 1980- due to military
interventions. With an education in engineering, and a brief
spell in the USA, his career started at DSI (Devlet Su Isleri,
523
State Waterworks and Irrigation Administration) and was a
handpicked poster boy of the Menderes government in the
1950s. For almost five decades, he was the leader of rightwing politics in Turkey before he supported the military
intervention of February 28, 1997. He served as the President
of the Republic from 1993 to 2000.
Tanzimat:
Literally meaning reformation, it was a period of Western
influenced re-organization of state institutions and
reformation of social, political, and cultural structures that
began in 1839, with the declaration of the Gülhane Edict and
ended with Abdulhamid II’s enthronement in 1876. As the
most important attempt in modernizing the Ottoman social
structures, the period had deep effects in contemporary
Turkey. Both the CUP and Kemalist RPP had had their
intellectual roots in the Tanzimat era reforms.
TEKSIF:
One of the oldest trade unions of Turkey, the trade union of
textiles and garments workers, Türkiye Tekstil, Örme ve
Giyim İşçileri Sendikası, was first established in the 1940s.
After 1960, it became part of the TURK-İŞ the biggest
confederation of trade unions in Turkey.
524
TOKI:
Toplu Konut Idaresi in Turkish, literally, Mass Housing
Administration, is a state institution with special law and
budgetary allocations established in 1984 under the Özal
government. Akin to the U.S. Department of Housing and
Urban Development, TOKI was first oriented towards
providing financing for affordable housing. In the 1990s, this
role was subdued in the financial turmoil the country went
through. After JDP came to power in 2002, TOKI was
reorganized and given new legal powers and budgetary means
to build housing developments, to allocate public land for
public and private development, to buy and sell real estate that
belonged to the public, and later, to undertake any public
construction project without due processes related to public
bidding competitions.
True Path Party:
The successor party to Süleyman Demirel’s Justice Party –
banned by the 1980 junta. The party was established in 1983
and due to Demirel’s political ban led by his proxies. After the
ban on Demirel’s political activities was removed in the1987
referendum, he took over leadership. In the 1991 elections, the
party came first in the elections and Demirel, for the seventh
time, became PM of a coalition government with SPP. In
1993, Demirel became president. The party, under the
525
leadership of Tansu Çiller –the first woman PM in Turkeyestablished a coalition government with Islamist Erbakan’s
Welfare Party, which ended in a military intervention in 1997.
In the elections of 2002, the party failed to pass the
representation threshold and later dissolved itself.
Turgut Cansever:
(1921-2009) He was a prominent architect and an
architectural critique who earned well-deserved accolades for
being the earliest and most fervent Islamist in architectural
circles. Educated at the Academy of Fine Arts in Istanbul as a
student of Sedad Hakkı Eldem, Cansever first came under the
spotlight during his tenure as the chief of Istanbul’s urban
planning after the May 27, 1960 coup. Although his tenure
was brief, his designs for the Beyazıt Square came to fruition
at this time. He received the Agha Khan Architectural Prize
for his work in Bodrum. In the last two decades, his writings
on the relationship between Ottoman-Islamic culture and
urbanism have attracted attention and a widespread following.
Turgut Özal:
(1927-1993) He was the first democratically elected Prime
Minister of the post-1980 coup period and elected the eighth
President of the Republic. Before the coup, Özal was a highranking bureaucrat with good connections (his brother was the
526
Minister of Interior during the 1970s right-wing coalitions).
The coup government installed him as the deputy Prime
Minister. He liberalized financial and labor markets,
instigated a whole new series of neoliberal reforms by the
single-party rule of his newly established party, the
Motherland Party, between 1983 and 1989. After 1989, as
President of the Republic, he actively promoted the first Gulf
War and Turkey’s inclusion in the American-led invasion.
Özal died of a heart attack and today, his death is still
rumored among the right-wing circles as the act of the deep
state.
TURK-IŞ:
Confederation of Turkish Trade Unions, is the largest
organization of labor unions in Turkey. The confederation
was established in 1952 under close supervision of the state
institutions. It is the only trade union that survived the 1980
coup intact and today claims a membership of 1.5 million.
Varoş:
A derogatory term employed to express squatter settlements
especially in the outer and impoverished regions of
metropolitan cities. Possibly coined in the mid-1990s, the
term replaced the relatively value-neutral gecekondu in
newspaper and TV reports and gradually seeped into
527
academic discourse. The closest relevant term is in Hungarian
and it means an urban district or neighborhood.
Virtue Party:
The successor party to the Welfare Party and Necmettin
Erbakan’s Islamist branch of politics. Established in 1998
after the constitutional court banned the Welfare Party from
politics. Later, in 2001, the Virtue Party was also banned by
the court. The founders of JDP split from the Virtue Party due
to disagreements with the Erbakan appointed leadership.
Wakf:
A religious endowment ruled and controlled by the laws of
Islamic sharia. The religious endowments in the Ottoman
classical context were the main economic actors of economic
accumulation of wealth. Although in theory established as
charitable organizations, they acted as state approved forms of
property and money holding and rent-collecting institutions.
Welfare Party:
An Islamist party founded by Necmettin Erbakan. The party
was founded in 1983 and dissolved after the constitutional
court’s ban on the political activities of the party and its
members in 1998.
Yapsat:
Literally meaning, build-and-sell, it was coined in the late
528
1970s and early 1980s to describe the small-scale building
activities in urban areas. The term applies to the one-man
construction companies who finance their own developments
mainly through selling unfinished apartments in the market.
Beginning in the late 1960s, the yapsat type of small-scale
housing development overwhelmingly dominated the urban
expansion of Turkish cities. Yapsatçı, with the Turkish suffix
–çı, denotes a person who engages in this kind of building
activity.
529
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