European Istanbul - Springer Link

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European Istanbul and Its Enemies: Istanbul’s Working Class as the Constitutive Outside of the Modern/ European Istanbul Deniz Yonucu

Introduction Nomination of Istanbul as the 2010 European Capital of Culture probably made many Istanbulites feel proud of their city. After all, Istanbulites believe that they live in the Western/ized part of Turkey and this nomination could be considered as proof of that. Istanbul, as a city, was considered to be one of the important European centers even in the 1800s and has always represented the Westernized face of Turkey (Türeli et. al., 2010). This chapter discusses how the modern image of Istanbul is established by the ‘Otherization’ and exclusion of its working classes. First, attention is directed towards examination of the contemporary working-class history of Istanbul as the ‘constitutive outside’* of Istanbul as a modern city, and the ways in which Istanbul has been imagined as a Western city by continuously highlighting the differences between its legitimate and illegitimate residents are considered. Second, focusing on the struggle of the working classes to open a space for themselves in the city, the paper also discusses the place of workingclass housing ( gecekondu) in Istanbul’s urbanization and illustrates how these places are becoming the targets of urban transformation projects as a significant portion of Istanbul’s working class becomes redundant in the city. D. Reuschke et al. (eds.), The Economies of Urban Diversity © Darja Reuschke, Monika Salzbrunn, and Korinna Schönhärl 2013

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The chapter argues that the working class of Istanbul, who have never been regarded as ‘real’ Istanbulites and who were the objects of paternalistic civilizing discourses in the 1960s, had by the 1990s become the absolute Other of the city. While the discourses against the city’s working classes defined them as the people who do not fit in modern city culture and their gecekondu housing as places that should not exist in the city, until very recently this population found shelters in the city. However, today, as will be discussed, parallel to the redesignation of Istanbul as a global European city, the places of the working classes have become the excesses of the city that are being gradually removed from sight by large scale gecekondu demolishment led by recent urban transformation projects.

Establishment of Shantytowns/Gecekondu Neighborhoods in Turkey: Urbanization from the Ground The latter half of the 1940s and the 1950s witnessed the beginning of a large-scale migration from the rural areas of Turkey to the big cities. This migration wave was largely a result of radical structural changes in rural areas and the emergence of new industrial factories in the big cities (Şenyapı lı, 1981; Keyder, 1987). As large-scale industrial factories were established in the vicinities of the big cities, the number of residents increased drastically in the 1940s and 1950s.1 The rural population from various ethnic backgrounds and from many different parts of Turkey migrated to cities and constructed makeshift houses, named gecekondu, for themselves. Law 775, of July 20, 1966, defines gecekondus as “the dwellings erected, on the land and lots which do not belong to the builder, without the consent of the owner, and without observing the laws and regulations concerning construction and building” (Karpat, 1976, p. 16). As Karpat (1976) notes, during the 1950s “[i]t has not been unusual to see empty hills covered over a single night with a great number of shacks in which tens of thousands of people moved with their belongings in a matter of hours” (15).2 With the absence of any state-promoted housing policy, immigrants were indeed solving their housing problems by themselves. In the early years gecekondu people were not welcomed by the government of the time.3 In a speech given at the Turkish National Assembly in 1947, gecekondus were mentioned as a ‘disaster’ for the city (Şenyapı lı, 2004, p. 56). This new kind of ‘urbanization from the ground’ was considered to be a serious threat against the modern/civilized image of the nation and rural migration to the big cities was considered to be

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an ‘invasion’ of an alien culture (Karpat, 1976; Içduygu, 2004). Hence, from the very beginning differences between rural migrants and longestablished Istanbulites were highlighted by the media, the state elites, and academics. The incessant highlighting of the cultural differences between the (real) urbanites and gecekondu people has served as a legitimating argument and mechanism for the demolishment and destruction of gecekondu neighborhoods for decades. A very well-known newspaper headline written 50 years ago points out this boundary-drawing process very clearly: “The people rushed onto the beach, so that citizens could not swim”4 (Akçay, 2005). The article shows that citizens who are ‘civilized’ and ‘modern’ urbanites do not want to swim at the same beach as rural migrants because of their ‘uncivilized’ habits. The ‘citizens’, of course, not only did not want to swim at the same beach as the people, but also did not want to live in the same city as them. Karpat (1976, p. 26) observed that The influx of rural migrants naturally causes profound reaction. The old city inhabitant that is the established families with old middle class values regarded the migration as a villager invasion. Complaining about the disappearance of city manners and of privacy and accepting at face value the rumors of rising crimes in squatter settlements, they hoped to prevent this migration by every possible means.

According to the academics of the time, gecekondu people were the people stuck between rural and urban cultures.5 Karpat (1976), for example, the author of the much cited book Gecekondu Phenomenon, defined gecekondu people as ‘liminal’ people who must become completely alienated from their former culture before they achieve full identification with the city (p. 113).6 Similarly, K ıray (1998) defines the “gecekondu issue” as a problem central to big cities and argues that the solution to this problem lies in forgetting the rural past and becoming an urbanite by working in large industrial factories (p. 45). Hence, it is clear that gecekondu people and their culture were not respected and accepted as such. The acceptance offered to them was conditional. They would be accepted only if they were assimilated into the norms of the modern urban class and became modern. Hart’s (1969, p. 80)7 statement offers an excellent example of what the social scientists actually meant by modernization: I believe that in time more women will start to work in factories, offices and department stores. Today, a young girl [second-generation immigrant woman] who lives in Zeytinburnu [Zeytinburnu is one of the first and biggest gecekondu neighborhoods of Istanbul] is an urbanite. She is an urbanite with her behaviors and tastes and with her miniskirts and high-heeled

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shoes. If she finishes secondary school or high school she will find a job in a bank or in an office in the city, or she will work as a shop assistant in a department store . . . If she fails to finish high school, she will find a steady job in a good factory . . . Her grandmother worked in the fields; her mother, perhaps, worked as a domestic worker. But, she herself, as a married woman will work in a factory or have a semi-skilled job. This is the women’s front of Turkey’s modernization and industrialization. And I think that it is a vigorous and nice front. (author’s translation)

Hart’s expectation about second-generation immigrants was right, as they became workers. However, for Hart, the story would be completed when gecekondu women developed middle-class tastes, wore miniskirts and high-heels, and got a decent job. However, another story started as more and more gecekondu people became modern industrial workers. As I shall discuss in the following section, that story is the story of Turkey’s working class. From late 1940s on, gecekondu neighborhoods witnessed a constant fight between soldiers and gecekondu dwellers during the destruction of the gecekondus. While the building of new gecekondu neighborhoods mostly faced strong opposition from the government, already established ones gradually began to be accepted. The two main reasons for this acceptance were the need for cheap industrial labor and gecekondu people’s persistent fight for their “right to the city” (Lefebvre, 2003). Factory owners, also, played an important role in stopping the demolition of gecekondus. For instance, gecekondu people’s first meeting with the governor of Istanbul was held in a leather factory. Moreover, factories provided rural migrants with some necessary construction materials (i.e., cement, bricks, etc.) to build their houses (Şenyapı lı, 1981). Gecekondu houses built around the industrial zones (i.e., Zeytinburnu, Caglayan, Ikitelli) did not face as much opposition from the government as the ones built at the outskirts of the city. However, in some neighborhoods, especially those associated with the strengthening revolutionary movement of the time, gecekondu people had to face violent and aggressive attacks by soldiers and police forces. For instance, soldiers killed 15 gecekondu dwellers and wounded several others who were trying to protect their houses in 1 Mayis Mahallesi, on September 2, 1977 (Aslan, 2004). Gecekondu Neighborhoods as Working-Class Neighborhoods As is argued in the Marxian tradition, the proximity of home and the workplace8 raises a sense of solidarity and common culture, beliefs, and


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interests among the workers (Castells, 1985; Engels, 1969; Harvey, 1985; Katznelson, 1982; Wright, 2005). The high concentration of workers in factories and in the surrounding neighborhoods and the rise of the socialist movement in Turkey in the 1960s were important factors that rendered gecekondu neighborhoods working-class districts and made workingclass culture flourish among gecekondu residents.9 Put differently, by the 1960s working-class districts, which created their own culture based on their class identity, emerged in the big cities of Turkey for the first time in Turkish history (Baydar, 1999, p. 211). Gecekondu people took an active part in the revolutionary socialist movement that flourished in the 1960s. Hundreds of thousands of gecekondu residents were organized under revolutionary Marxist-Leninist organizations and revolutionary trade unions (Aslan, 2004; Kaya, 2005; Keyder, 1997). Resistance and demonstrations of the time were not limited only to the factories but also spread to the neighborhoods (Baydar, 1999). In effect, gecekondu people had by the 1960s become important political actors in the country. The rising power of the socialist movement pulled the center party CHP (Republican People’s Party) to the left of center. While CHP was against gecekondu houses and had considered rural migrants as ‘uncivilized’ people in earlier periods, the party supported the strikes of the workers from gecekondu neighborhoods in the 1960s. More importantly, gaining the consent of gecekondu people became so crucial to being elected that Ecevit, leader of CHP, started his election campaign in a gecekondu neighborhood in 1973 (Kaya, 2005). As the revolutionary movement reached its peak in the early 1970s, some gecekondu neighborhoods became home to urban guerrillas and were named ‘liberated zones’—zones liberated from the state, hence, from police control. Autonomous local governments were established in some neighborhoods (Aslan, 2004; Aslan and Şen, 2011). These local governments were examples of participatory direct democracy. As Harvey (2008) notes, “the right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city” (p. 23). Gecekondu people, thanks to their struggle to stay in the city, not only opened a space for themselves in the city, but they also aimed to change their social and material conditions by becoming one of the key elements of political struggle in the country. However, their participation in the political struggle did not last long. The military coup of 1980 put an end to the mass mobilization. The state of emergency policies introduced with the coup, shut down all of the existing political parties. Thousands of leftists were imprisoned, thousands were killed and tortured, and thousands became refugees in Europe (Çelenk, 1988; Mavioglu, 2006).

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Economic Liberalization and Istanbul after the Coup The social and economic landscape of Turkey had begun to change drastically by the 1980s (Içduygu, 2004; Kasaba, 1997; Keyder, 1987 and 2003; Zührer, 1993). Economic liberalization and structural adjustment became the main projects of the governments after the coup.10 These projects aimed at fundamentally breaking with the national developmentalist strategy11 of the previous decades, attempting to reduce both the scope of the state sector and to pave the way for Turkey’s full integration into global capitalism (Asikoglu and Uctum, 1992; Keyder and Öncü, 1993; Onis, 1992; Sayari, 1992). In this process, Istanbul became a symbol of the country’s economic liberalization. It began to be designed as a hub of finance, trade, and tourism, and started to attract much more foreign capital than in the centuries before. For instance, all of the new foreign banks opened after the economic liberalization polices were introduced in Istanbul (Erkip, 2000; Öncü and Keyder, 1994). Seventy-five percent of service firms receiving foreign capital that opened after the coup were also located in Istanbul (Tokatli and Boyaci, 1998, p. 69). In addition, 12 new deluxe hotels were opened in Istanbul in the early 1980s (Öncü, 1988, p. 57). As making the city attractive to foreign investment became one of the key policies of the local governments of the post-1980 era, industry left the urban core and new industrial centers developed outside the city (Erkip, 2000; Keyder, 2005; Keyder and Öncü, 1993). With the move of the industrial factories, employment opportunities increased drastically and inequalities among Istanbul’s residents were sharpened (Erkip, 2000; Keyder, 2005). In contrast to the secure working conditions of the past, which had been supported by welfare policies and the trade unions, from the 1980s onwards more and more workers began to work under insecure conditions. As Göztepe (2007) in his study about the changing labor market in Turkey shows, after the 1980s real wages, unionization rates, and the number of working people protected by collective labor agreements substantially decreased in Turkey. And Istanbul was the city most affected by this new process. Employment rates did not rise in Istanbul after 1980 and, to make things worse, the redistributive policies were dismantled (Keyder, 1993). The progressively increasing unemployment rates reached a peak of 16.8 percent in 2010 in Istanbul,12 showing not only the significance of the unemployment problem in Istanbul, but also highlighting the decrease in workers’ bargaining power. Moreover, 59.6 percent13 of Istanbul’s working population employed in the service sector work under flexible working conditions (Arslan, 2011). This fact again shows us the vulnerability of Istanbul’s workers in comparison to earlier decades.


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Moreover, several hundred thousand Kurdish people migrated to Istanbul after the 1990s due to the forced displacement policies of the Turkish state.14 Most of these impoverished Kurdish immigrants ended up as tenants in gecekondu neighborhoods (Keyder, 2005; Şenyapılı, 2004).

Gecekondu People: “Contra the City”15 As gecekondu people, who used to be important actors in Turkey’s organized labor force, began to be excluded from large-scale industrial production and secure working conditions, gecekondu neighborhoods were renamed and redefined by the media. The term gecekondu was replaced by the term “varoş,” which has strong pejorative connotations (Aksoy, 2001; Demirtas, 2008; Erman, 2001; Etöz, 2000). According to varoş discourse, gecekondu neighborhoods are the places where various ‘terrorist’ organizations and violence prevail (Bozkulak, 2005) and gecekondu people are “a population attacking the city, its values, its political institutions and the very core of its ideology and its social order” (Erman, 2001, p. 997). Hence, while in the past there was a modernist hope that believed in the assimilation and integration of the gecekondu districts into the imaginary city culture, by the 1990s the gecekondu people had become ‘the Other’ of the ‘city’ who not only strongly rejects getting urbanized, but also poses a serious threat against the well-being of the city. Gecekondu people’s alleged threat against ‘society’ was portrayed in highly exaggerated ways in the media. For instance, in the 1990s news about the ‘varoş’ included melodramatic, incendiary headlines such as: “Ümraniye exploded,” “Pendik may explode,” “Varoş: Bombs that are ready to explode,” “Varoş said I will explode” (Aksoy, 2001, p. 46). Portrayal of varoş / gecekondu neighborhoods as bombs that are ready to explode and destroy the whole of society contributed to the discursive construction of working-class neighborhoods as no-go areas. Moreover, these portrayals offer an example to provoke fear and anxiety among the other inhabitants of the city, contributing to the erosion of channels of communication among different classes. The portrayal of the old gecekondu neighborhoods as extremely dangerous places continued in the 2000s as well. Crime statistics had rarely been a part of public debate in Turkey. However, by the beginning of the 2000s crime stories began to occupy the front pages of the newspapers.16 Newspapers alarmed the public through their headlines: “Crime has risen 80%,” “Crime is out of control,” “Istanbul: The Crime Heaven,” “Varoş: Harlem of Istanbul,” “The Code name of varoş: Crime.” In 2005 the National Security Administration declared that while crime rates had

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risen by 86 percent in Istanbul in the last ten years, they had risen by 285 percent in 14 gecekondu neighborhoods of Istanbul.17 This statistic was widely circulated in the media in 2005. Moreover, in one of the discussions at the Turkish National Assembly on the issue of crime, it was argued that the varoş/gecekondu youth who emulate those who are living in high standards are solely responsible for the increasing crime rates.18 The media, too, accused the inhabitants of varoş of being solely responsible for crime.19 Gecekondus / varoşes were defined as the ‘viruses’ that surround Istanbul and poor people’s so-called desire to be rich and their ‘moral depravity’ have become the sole explanation of rising crime rates in this new process.20 As Etöz (2000) puts it, “in this construction of the varoş . . . where poverty rules, illegal activities dominate and crime and violence grow varoş emerges as contra the city.” Re-marking the places of the working class as dangerous places, not only draws sharp boundaries between the working classes and middle and upper classes, but also automatically re-marks the city as a powerless place that needs to be protected from the dangerous elements that have taken shelter in it. Put differently, depiction of the working classes as dangerous people who are ready to destroy the city’s community contributed to the legitimation of the destruction of their neighborhoods. Hence, it is not a coincidence that gecekondu neighborhoods are described as enemy lands in the Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s declarations, as he frequently emphasizes how determined the government is in its struggle against gecekondus to create a modern city.21 This ‘struggle’ is most explicitly materialized in the urban transformation projects introduced in the first half of the 2000s. Neoliberal Reorganization of Space: “The Revanchist City”22 Studies on the neoliberal reorganization of space highlight the commodity value of the city and illustrate that cities in the neoliberal era are being redesigned and reimagined as commodities for global investment and consumption (Hackworth, 2007; Mbembe and Nuttal, 2004; Sassen, 2001; Zukin, 1995). One of the most important aspects of this redesignation is gentrification.23 Gentrification processes have usually, if not always, been accompanied by discourses of crime and the portrayal of workingclass neighborhoods as dangerous places (Bourgois, 2003; Caldeira, 2000; Smith, 1996; Wacquant, 2008). In gentrification processes, workingclass neighborhoods and slums become the spaces for ‘revival,’ ‘renewal,’ ‘regeneration,’ and ‘cleansing’ (Smith, 1996). Although from the 1980s onwards Istanbul became the symbol of economic liberalization in Turkey, until the beginning of the 2000s urban


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working classes could find shelters in the city. In 2003, however, the Istanbul municipality announced a large-scale transformation project for Istanbul. The urban transformation project aims at redesigning Istanbul as a ‘modern,’ ‘civilized,’ and ‘secure’ global city. According to the statements of the mayor of the Istanbul municipality, the first and most important thing to be done to ‘re-create’ Istanbul as a world city was to demolish gecekondu neighborhoods and move their inhabitants out of the city. The transformation project involves many different subprojects, such as “Gecekondu Transformation Projects,” “Prestige Projects,” “History and Culture Projects,” and “Natural Disaster Projects” (Bartu and Kolluoğlu, 2008). However, as Bartu and Kolluoglu note, despite the fact that they are packaged differently, all of them have similar repercussions in terms of the increase in the value of urban land, the displacement of significant numbers of people, the relocation of poverty, and dramatic changes in the urban and social landscape of the city. As part of the urban transformation projects, 11,543 buildings were demolished between 2004 and 2008 (Kuyucu and Ünsal, 2010). In 2010, the municipality declared that one million houses would be demolished in total.24 The main targets of the projects are the working-class neighborhoods, which are located on easily marketable lands. For instance, the municipality aims to totally demolish Basibuyuk, Armutlu, and Gulsuyu, three workingclass districts with a sea view. After the demolishment of the existing buildings, expensive houses will be built in their place. The other explicit targets of the projects are the places where the poorest live. As the poorest people mainly consists of Romani/Gypsy and the dispossessed Kurdish population who had to migrate to Istanbul in the 1990s, it would not be wrong to claim that impoverished ethnic minorities suffer the most from urban projects. Two of the already completely demolished neighborhoods were a thousand-year-old Romani/Gypsy neighborhood (Sulukule) and a Kurdish neighborhood (Ayazma). Ayazma residents consisted of Kurdish people who had been forced to leave their villages in the 1990s. The neighborhood was completely demolished in 2007 and the residents were moved to a housing project at the outskirts of the city away from their places of work. Among the 396 house owners who moved to their new homes from Ayazma, 123 received evacuation notices for failing to pay their monthly installments only five months after they moved in (Karaman, 2008:522).25 Having no other affordable alternatives in the city, some families built makeshift shelters within the ruins of their former homes. More than 30 families had to live in tents without any access to running water and sewage facilities during the summer of 2008 and the winter of 2009 (Karaman, 2008). Hence, while the municipality claims that they offer new houses to the gecekondu people in new housing projects, these places are not at all affordable for them.

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The demolition of ulukule took place in February 2010. Houses of 571 families were demolished and they could not afford to live in the housing projects offered to them by the government.26

Conclusion This chapter has discussed the relationship between the re-designation of Istanbul as a modern/European city attractive to foreign capital and investment and the emergence of exclusionary spatial policies against the city’s working classes. As Istanbul is turning into a global European city pleasing the touristic gaze and attracting global capital, the city’s working classes are losing their shelters in the city, which they gained through a long-term struggle for their right to the city. It has been shown that the legitimation of the destruction of the gecekondu neighborhoods has been achieved through the continuous highlighting of the differences between the gecekondu neighborhoods and the rest of the city. Since the very beginning the gecekondu people were seen as aliens in the city, the urban transformation projects that aim at the total destruction of approximately one million gecekondu houses gain their strength from the longterm stigmatization of gecekondu residents. Though gecekondu people have been seen as people who do not belong to the city, which was by its very definition assumed to be modern, the chapter has also tried to draw attention to the very constitutive role of this population in imagining Istanbul as a European city. The chapter has argued that thanks to the journalists, officials, and scholarly representations of the gecekondu population as those who are almost entirely different from the (real) Istanbulites, Istanbul’s middle and upper classes could imagine themselves as Europeans. Put differently, the highlighting of the differences with reference to an issue of civilization and Westernization automatically marked Istanbul’s middle and upper classes as already Westernized people. Hence gecekondu people, who have been kept outside of the imaginary real Istanbul, have been the ‘constitutive outside’ of Istanbul as a European city. Turkey’s new spatial policies are indeed familiar from the European perspective. As some contemporary studies show, the external enemy is being replaced by the internal enemy in European countries such as Britain, France, and Italy (Balibar, 2004; Bauman, 2005; Campani, 1993; Diken and Laustsen, 2005; Hansen and Stepputat, 2005). Poor immigrants to the Western metropolises, who were included as a cheap labor force in the past, are becoming surplus populations due to the neoliberal reorganization of the economy, and as such are being regarded as


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‘enemies’ and as threats to ‘proper’ citizens. They are seen as inherently violent and dangerous people. Thus the immigrants who have become economically redundant are now being regarded as “garbage humans to be thrown away, out of the city” (Balibar, 2004, p. 141). However, what is unique in the Turkish case is that, in the very absence of the outsider immigrant, similar exclusionist mechanisms operate against urban poor who are indeed official, legal citizens. Thus, it is not a coincidence that in the news reports about the uprisings in Paris in 2005, mainstream Turkish media associated the gecekondu neighborhoods of Istanbul with the suburbs of Paris. Notes * I use the concept of “constitutive outside” a la Butler. Butler defines it as ‘for there is an “outside” to what is constructed by discourse, but this is not an absolute “outside,” an ontological thereness that exceeds or counters the boundaries of discourse; as a constitutive “outside,” it is that which can only be thought— when it can—in relation to that discourse, at and as its most tenuous borders (Butler, 1993, p. 8). 1. During the second half of the 1950s, the population of the cities of Turkey rose by 80.2 percent (Şenyapı lı, 1981, p. 13) and one of every ten villagers migrated to the big cities (Keyder, 1987, p. 131). Moreover, in this period, the number of workers who worked in the factories that employed more than ten people rose from 163,000 to 324,000 (Keyder, 1987, p. 136). 2. The number of the gecekondus in Turkey: 1955: 50,000; 1960: 240,000; 1965: 430,000 1970: 600,000; 1980: 950,000. Source: Keleş and Payne, 1984, p. 181. 3. The political party in power was CHP (Republican People’s Party). 4. Although this is a widely cited headline, unfortunately the exact date of the headline remains unknown. 5. See Hart (1969); Karpat (1976); Keleş (1984); Şenyapılı (1981); Tekeli (1991). 6. While in the period between the 1950s and 1980s there were a number of studies on the gecekondus and the gecekondu culture, there was no study on urban culture (Erman, 2001, p. 982). Thus, we cannot learn what sort of culture it was into which the rural migrants were expected to be assimilated. Öncü (1999) also emphasizes that there were no definitions of the urbanite in general and the Istanbulite in particular. She argues that to be an Istanbulite was a myth and a series of privileges that were understood without telling (p. 46). Erman (2001) notes that speaking Turkish with an Istanbul accent, wearing Western types of clothes (miniskirt, suit, tie, etc.), listening to classical or Western music were regarded as some indicators of being a (modern) Istanbulite (p. 985). 7. Hart is a Chicago School American anthropologist. He is the first social scientist who conducted an anthropological study in a gecekondu neighborhood in Turkey.

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8. For instance, in Zeytinburnu 90 percent of gecekondu inhabitants lived within walking distance of their workplaces in those years (Hart, 1969, p. 64). 9. I employ the concepts working-class identity and culture according to Thompson (1963): “Class is taken to be a historical phenomenon that is forged and created by people; it is not a thing but a set of social relations and experiences and it is not an entity or ‘permanence’” but as Harvey (1999) asserts, it is fundamentally a process. 10. The structural adjustment program was introduced in January 1980 in collaboration with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (Onis, 1992, p. 74). 11. During the post World War II era, developmentalist policies became globally dominant and they dominated the economic and social policies of Turkey until the 1980s (Gü lalp 1997; Keyder, 1987). The aim of these policies was to catch up with the Western countries, which were regarded as already developed. In this catching-up process, industrialization was considered to be the key vehicle of development and accordingly, development involved displacement of the agrarian civilization by urban-industrial society (See Lerner, 1958 and Rustow, 1967). 12. Source: Turkey’s Statistical Board, TurkStat. Information available at: http:// www.worldbulletin.net/index.php?aType=haber&ArticleID=60421 (last visited: December 1, 2011). 13. Source: Istanbul Development Agency. Information available at: www.istka. org.tr/Portals/iska/images/istdev.pdf (last visited: December 1, 2011). 14. According to the Turkey Migration and Internally Displaced Population Survey (TGYONA), between the years 1991 and 2000 1,201,200 Kurdish people were displaced from the eastern and southeastern regions of Turkey for security reasons (Yılmaz, 2008, p. 18). While in 1980 the permanent resident population of Istanbul was 4,133,759, in 2000 it was 10,018,735 (State Institute of Statistics 2003). 15. cf. Etöz, 2000. 16. For a detailed analysis of crime talk in Turkey see Gönen and Yonucu (2011). 17. Source: http://www.egm.gov.tr/asayis/istatistik.asp (accessed on October 2011). It has to be noted that the Turkish Security Department does not provide public access to crime statistics. Hence, changes in the crime rates and spatial distribution of crime in Turkey cannot be examined. 18. Turkish National Assembly Reports. December 9, 2003. www.tbmm.gov.tr /meclistutanaklari/aralik00 (last visited: October 2011). 19. This kind of stories were mostly, but not only, reported in the pro-government newspapers such as Zaman, Akit, and Turkiye. 20. See: “Bastirilmis Tuketim Duygusu” March 26, 2004 Turkiye; “Kendinden Korkuyor,” November 9, 2005 Yeni Asir; “Cok ince Elersek Un Ufak Edebiliriz” November 22, 2003 Sabah; “Suc Istanbul’a Goc Ediyor” January 30, 2005 Radikal; “Sürekli Vicdan Azabicekerekyasiyorduk” May 19, 2004 Sabah. 21. Turkiye, April 13, 2006; Turkiye, October 3, 2004; Sabah, July 16, 2005; Yenisafak, November 30, 2005.


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22. Neil Smith (1996) uses this term to refer to the right-wing “revanchist” populist movement in France. This movement reacted violently against the relative liberalism of the second empire and the socialism of the Paris commune during the last three decades of the nineteenth century. Smith makes an analogy between the spatial exclusion of the working classes from the city centre and the revanchist movement. 23. According to Smith (2002, p. 440) gentrification is a “the new global urban strategy” to displace working class residents from the urban centre. 24. Radikal, September 26, 2010. 25. Even those who have legal deeds in Ayazma have had to pay the price gap between the values of their old houses and those of the new more expensive houses in the projects. 26. Information available at: http://www.cnnturk.com/2010/yasam/01/12/sulukule .nereye.gitti/559116.0/ (last visited: December 2011).

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