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Bulldozer Neo-liberalism in Istanbul:The State-led Construction of PropertyMarkets, and the Displacement of theUrban PoorJohn Lovering a & Hade Türkmen aa School of City and Regional Planning, Cardiff University, UKVersion of record first published: 26 Mar 2011.

To cite this article: John Lovering & Hade Türkmen (2011): Bulldozer Neo-liberalism in Istanbul:The State-led Construction of Property Markets, and the Displacement of the Urban Poor,International Planning Studies, 16:1, 73-96

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Bulldozer Neo-liberalism in Istanbul: TheState-led Construction of Property Markets,and the Displacement of the Urban Poor

JOHN LOVERING & HADE TURKMENSchool of City and Regional Planning, Cardiff University, UK

ABSTRACT Istanbul is undergoing a radical and dramatic restructuring as the authorities seek tobring about a ‘Neoliberal Modernisation’ of the city. This centres on the promotion of market-oriented rationality, and private property. Current plans envisage restructuring huge swathes ofthe city to bring about functioning land and property markets. The resulting threat to residentsand communities has provoked widespread but sporadic resistance. This paper sets the pressurefor the social ‘purging’ of Istanbul in the context of the global spread of AuthoritarianNeoLiberalism. After describing the main features of the Turkish variant, and noting the parallelsto autocratic rule in late Ottoman Istanbul, it traces the impact on local communities. Threecases studies of responses to regeneration plans, drawn from both the European and Asian sidesof the city, reveal the diversity of local responses.

Introduction

Like all cities, Istanbul is at once a unique case and an exemplar of more general trends and

processes. The current redevelopment of Istanbul reveals a highly authoritarian form of

neo-liberalism, in which global discourses and policy models are combined with local

traditions and institutions to rationalize a radical–conservative project to rebuild the

city and its socio-cultural characteristics. In the first part of this paper we set the inter-

national and historical context, and in the second we draw on three case studies to illustrate

the dynamics at work.

Part One: Modernizing a Mega-city of Migrants

As the largest urban agglomeration in both Europe and the centre of the Turkic-speaking

region of some 200 million peoples extending from the Aegean Sea to beyond the Caspian,

Istanbul has long been a magnet to migrants. Migration fuelled its astonishing growth from

its post-Ottoman-Empire low of 700,000 people, to over 12 million in 2000. Istanbul’s

planners today aim to keep the population of the metropolitan area below 16 million,

but it may have passed this already. In recent years migration has given second place to

International Planning Studies

Vol. 16, No. 1, 73–96, February 2011

Correspondence Address: John Lovering, Cardiff School of City and Regional Planning, Glamorgan Building,

King Edward VII Avenue, Cardiff CF10 3WA, UK. E-mail: LoveringJ@cardiff.ac.uk

ISSN 1356-3475 Print/1469-9265 Online/11/010073–24 # 2011 Taylor & FrancisDOI: 10.1080/13563475.2011.552477

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public policy as the main determinant of Istanbul’s growth and development. For almost a

decade the city has been the prime target of an ambitious Turkish State strategy for ‘urban

regeneration’, ‘transformation’ or ‘re-development’ (these terms have slightly different

resonances in Turkish policy debates compared with their European or American equiva-

lents). Whatever we call it, this is intended to trigger a wide-ranging process of urban

destruction and reconstruction, in both physical–environmental and social–cultural terms.

Although Istanbul is the largest city in Europe, it has received curiously little attention

in the English-language literature on cities and planning. This may be because it does not

score highly on the indicators of financial and corporate flows used in conventional

attempts to rank the world’s cities (for example, Beaverstock et al., 1999). It may also

be because writing on Turkey by foreign-based social scientists has often followed the

post-modern western gaze, favouring ‘exotic’ topics such as the revival of headscarf

wearing and public statements of religious identity (for example, Gole, 1997). As a

result we have to turn to non-academic writings to get a feel for the transformative

nature of recent events. A vast ‘grey’ literature serving the world of ‘policy-makers’,

and journalistic coverage in the business and international relations press, emphasizes

Turkey’s remarkable economic and political transformation since this century began.

The end of hyper-inflation, the spectacular rate of growth of gross domestic product, an

export boom, growing inward investment and tourist numbers, and so on, are seen as

signs that a new economic era has dawned. Many also assert that the emergence of an

ostensibly democratic, if somewhat compromised, political Islamism, marks a new

chapter for Turkey (Mango, 2005; Tugal, 2009; Yavuz, 2009).

In the relative modest serious social scientific literature on Istanbul published in English, a

handful of Turkish scholars have ventured more substantial and critical accounts. The most

significant of these in the present context revolve around the idea that the current transform-

ation of Istanbul marks a quantum leap in a ‘neo-liberal’ direction (Cinar, 2005; Keyder,

2005; Tugal, 2009). Under the heightened impact of market forces and the competitive-

ness-seeking ‘market state’, Istanbul is rapidly losing its uniqueness, while acquiring a

new set of problems. European Capital of Culture (ECOC) visitors who escaped the

tourist traps in summer 2010 might have come across a modest exhibition in an ex-industrial

building in the gentrifying area of Cihangir that offered challenging insights into what this

transformation means ‘on the ground’. Organized as part of an international series by the

Refuse Diwan group, and accompanied by rushes of the film Ecumenopolis by Imre

Balanli, the exhibition explored the connections between Istanbul’s global aspirations and

its deepening internal divisions. Suggesting comparisons with other sprawling and

divided cities from Africa to South America, it highlighted the conflicts and injustices

associated with the rise of market forces, new urban elites, and their influence over the state.

Neo-liberalism in the Turkish Context

Istanbul offers a case study in the construction and implementation of a broadly ‘neo-

liberal’ approach to development, but with the distinctive local characteristic that this is

being pursued under the authoritarian influence of the highly centralized Turkish State.

So on the one hand, the dominant approach to urban development in the institutions of

urban governance and the accompanying official rhetoric shows similarities with most

cities around the planet. But on the other, the ethical rationale for these developments,

and the patently undemocratic style of urban governance through which they are being

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encouraged, are justified – especially for domestic and Middle Eastern audiences – in

terms of an ostensibly Islamic approach to government and political culture. Urban regen-

eration as envisaged by the AKP requires no less than a massive programme of demolition

and resettlement in order to erase much of the physical and social legacy of the past half-

century, and allow the emergence of property and labour markets. This is portrayed as

necessary partly because Istanbul allegedly needs to become more ‘normal’ in this

sense. They are simultaneously portrayed as consistent with Islam as it is officially ima-

gined in the Turkish context1 ((White, 2003; Cinar, 2005; Yavuz, 2009). Market inequal-

ities and the accumulation of private wealth are deemed to be compatible with piety, as

well as being essential to ‘economic growth’.

Globally, the neo-liberal turn since the mid-1970s centred on institutional reforms

intended to establish the kind of property rights and market behaviour that Liberal theorists

in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries regarded as natural (Desai, 2004; Lovering,

2007). These had been forgotten (so the neo-liberal story goes) in the mid-twentieth

century due to a misplaced faith in the potential of the modernist state. This ‘error’ was

shared by nationalists, socialists, and statists of various species alike (Hayek, 1944/2001; Freidman, 1962). In the USSR it took the form of Communism. In the United

States it took the form of Roosevelt’s 1930s New Deal and Johnson’s 1960s Great

Society. In Britain it took the form of the Labour–Conservative ‘Butskellite’ consensus

over the Welfare State and Keynesian economics. In Italy and Southern Germany it

took the form of Social Catholicism. In Turkey it took the form of ‘Kemalism’, the cult

of Kemel Ataturk, the founder of the New Turkish Republic in 1923. Ataturk, and his suc-

cessors, derived their developmental ideas from the belief that the roots of Ottoman ‘back-

wardness’ lay in the weakness of the Ottoman State and an excess of popular religious

piety. The solution lay in adapting the model of the strong directive State that Ataturk

believed (wrongly, in the neo-liberal view) was the lesson of France and other ‘successful’

Western European nations (Mango, 2005). The mission of the AKP has been to modify this

developmentalist impulse in a neo-liberal, and Islamic, direction.

In the middle of the last century, state-centred developmentalist theories justified the partial

replacement of economic mechanisms (markets) with political mechanisms – what Polanyi

(1944) called the ‘Great Transformation’ that was needed to calm the stormy seas of unbridled

capitalist competition. In its own terms this approach worked for a while, but in the longer

term the result proved to be growing inefficiency, hesitant growth, a tendency towards

hyper-inflation, chronic under-employment and un-employment, an ever-swelling public

sector and tax burden, and clientelism (Friedman, 1962; Desai, 2004; Stone, 2010). The his-

torical mission of neo-liberalism was to reverse all this by getting back to a more spontaneous,

less managed form of market capitalism. The State needed to withdraw. But this process

would necessarily take distinctive cultural and institutional forms depending on the local

context (Lovering, 2007). In Turkey this meant the overthrow of an apparatus of ideas and

institutions that had emerged in the 1960s and 1970s and given rise to an organized

working class, and a chaotic pattern of urban development based on uncontrolled migration

from the underdeveloped countryside to the cities, especially Istanbul.

The New Focus on Property Rights

In recent years the neo-liberal message has most famously been distilled and popularized

by Hernandez De Soto, whose book The Mystery of Capital (De Soto, 2005) became a

Construction of Property Markets, and Displacement of Urban Poor 75

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global bestseller. This asserts that the best way to ameliorate urban poverty, especially in

the exploding mega-cities, where most of the world’s one-billion-plus slum dwellers live,

is to extend, rather than limit, market forces. De Soto echoes Hayek’s argument (in turn

derived from a narrow reading of Adam Smith) that, for all its imperfections, the

market is less likely to be corrupted by powerful elites than is the State. In the case of

cities with many property-less slum dwellers, granting property rights will convert an

informal relationship into a marketable asset. Property ownership is the other side of

the coin of identity, the pre-condition for entrepreneurship, and the motor of growth

(see also Hsing, 2010).

The absence of such property rights is, in the neo-liberal worldview, a result of a his-

torical mistake. Since the 1940s, in many countries, left-wing, nationalist, religious, and

populist politicians shared the well-meaning but actually counter-productive assumption

that housing should be a right, not a commodity. The long-term result of large-scale

state allocation of ‘public’ housing (or in Turkey’s case the tolerance of land-seizures)

was to undermine market incentives for investment in housing, worsen the quality of

the built environment, exacerbate property price inflation, and deepen the divisions

between an affluent property owning class at one pole, and a poor clientelism-dependent

group of tenants, and un-titled squatters at the other. The neo-liberal cure would remove

the State from housing allocation and would treat housing as essentially only a particular

class of financial asset (Schwartz & Seabrooke, 2009).2

Since the 1980s this discourse has been vigorously promoted through the financial,

policy, and academic networks that make up the sinews of globalization. And it found

fertile ground in Turkey. Turkish urban development in the preceding decades had been

shaped by large-scale land seizures and illegal constructions. This had been made possible

by the laxity of local authorities and the police (see other contributions to the present

issue). The blind eye turned by officials and by communities to the theft of land reflected

the fact that the Turkish republic, essentially a top-down creation by a military elite

imposed on a peasant population, failed to engender a political culture in which the

collective public realm is recognized as legitimate and inviolate (Samim, 1981).

Politicians and bureaucrats, not least planners, prospered by exploiting the rent-earning

potential and social influence implicit in their privileged position as gatekeepers to state

power. This lingering ‘Ottomanism’, whereby those with access to state power were

able to use it in combination with familial and clientelistic relationships, made it possible

for millions of country dwellers to move to the cities, where they provided industry with a

much-needed mass workforce (Keyder, 1967). After a new constitution in 1960 installed

civil rights and legitimized small political parties and trades unions, politicians began to

grant amnesties to ‘illegally’ settled migrants in exchange for promised votes on a more

or less regular basis (see also the articles by Enlil and Turkun in the present issue). In

Turkish political discourse this came to be known as ‘populism’, although it rested on

theft from both the public realm and from private owners whose property rights in

effect went unrecognized. As a result, migrants gradually became de facto property

owners, if not fully de jure, and family homes were converted to apartments with

rooms to let. Squatter settlements evolved into substantial serviced suburbs. But inequal-

ities between Gecekondu dwellers widened. For three decades his distinctively Turkish

ad-hocery served the short-term interests of industrialists, workers, politicians, religious

networks (‘tarikats’ that were officially illegal but in fact increasingly influential), and

family heads alike.

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In the 1970s the economic circumstances permitting this arrangement disintegrated (see

also the articles by Enlil and Turkun in the present issue). Import substituting industrial-

ization and protected manufacturing became increasingly inefficient and unaffordable,

balance of payments difficulties mounted, and debt to the International Monetary Fund

led to increasing pressure to reform official economic policy (Keyder, 1967). And as

employment growth faltered and wages stagnated, working-class politics became a field

of increasingly bitter contestation. The Republic’s experiments at industrial modernization

had brought modest economic growth, but its introduction of a formal liberal–democratic

system meant that Turkey had a sophisticated political structure, formalizing some worker

and squatter rights, well ‘in advance’ of its socio-economic development (Samim, 1981).

Meanwhile, university expansion transformed large numbers of the sons and daughters of

rural migrants into articulate people with professional ambitions and global reference

groups. Against the background of widespread poverty, and undemocratic politics, this

fuelled the proliferation of political sects. As the right-wing historian Norman Stone

(2010) puts it, Turkey experienced in sharpened form the general social and state crisis

of the 1970s. The squatter areas of the cities became battlegrounds fought over by nation-

alist, fascist, Maoist, Guevarist, anarchist, socialist and Islamist factions. By the end of the

1970s more people were dying of political violence than during the War of Independence

50 years earlier.

In September 1980 the army intervened, suspended the formal democratic process,

imprisoned and killed activists and trades unionists, replaced suspect academics with com-

pliant ‘Pyjama Professors’ appointed overnight, and drew up a new and less permissive

constitution. Economic reform was placed under a former World Bank employee –

Turgut Ozal. When the army returned to the barracks three years later Ozal remained as

Prime Minister, institutionalizing the turn towards what would later be called neo-liberal-

ism. Turkey became an exemplar of ‘authoritarian neo-liberalism’.

Authoritarian Neo-liberalism in Theory and Practice

The chief proponent of the theory of ‘normative neo-liberalism’, Frederic Hayek, was well

aware that the creation of a culture conducive to market order and property rights is a long,

complex and conflictual process (Hayek, 1944/2001; Lovering, 2007). Where statist or

communitarian traditions are well entrenched, a massive programme of social and cultural

‘re-engineering’ may be necessary to shake out unsustainable assumptions and institutions

so that rational market behaviours can develop and markets begin to work ‘properly’. The

harsh realpolitik of this ‘neo-liberal’ interpretation marks its distance from the earlier and

gentler classical liberal view that a community of shared goals and values, a degree of

equality, and substantial democracy are preconditions for economic development, and it

is the proper job of the state to bring these about (Smith, 1759/2002). In the late twentieth

century, neo-liberalism stood this on its head to provide a license for state coercion to bring

about the creation of markets, especially in labour, land, property, and credit. The social

and ethical dimensions would have to follow later.

While Hayek’s theorizing remains the core of the academic debate over neo-liberalism,

most advocates of authoritarian neo-liberalism today rest their case less on nineteenth-

century liberal social theory than the apparent evidence of twentieth-century events, and

in particular, events in China, Chile, and Turkey. In each case a new phase of market-

centred growth emerged only after an interlude of State-centred coercion. On 11

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September 1973 the coup in Chile led to the suspension of formal democratic procedures,

military rule, the extermination of thousands of opponents, and the eventual construction

of new political and economic institutions. The Pinochet coup was the model for the

‘Evren coup’ in Turkey seven years later (‘even down to the choreography’ according

to Stone, 2010). Although outside agencies played a role,3 in both Chile and Turkey the

main actors, motives and beneficiaries were domestic. And in both cases supporters

were later able to claim that the lessons of experience showed that market forces and prop-

erty rights trump a reliance on the State because they can be seen to ‘work’.4

The 1980 coup triggered a long and uneven process of neo-liberalization in the Turkish

state and economy. This brought to an end the de facto tolerance of informal and often

illegal housing that had provided, albeit chaotically, the main sources of urban social

inclusion and economic growth for three decades (Bugra, 1999; Keyder, 1999). In the

1990s the neo-liberalizing push weakened somewhat as various post-Ozal governments

compromised on strategy and familiar forms of corruption re-emerged. But this fuelled

the growth of a succession of new Islamist political parties that were able to present them-

selves as comparatively untainted by corruption, and also close to the new ‘pro-market’

orthodoxy. By the mid-1990s Islamists were running many local governments where

they established a good record (Yavuz, 2009). The initials of the AKP – formed in

2002 by the former mayor of Istanbul, Tayyip Erdogan, and Abdullah Gul, poster boy

for the emergent Anatolian ‘Muslim business class’ – deliberately made a pun on the

Turkish word for ‘clean’. The AKP was able to present itself as fresh, democratic and

economically rational, especially to global audiences. But at home it energetically

deployed informal networks, clientelism, donations and favours, and the media, to con-

struct an image of itself that stressed its consistency with Islam and what the AKP

chose to present as Turkish tradition. The latter includes the popularity of aggressive, char-

ismatic (and male) leaders amongst the peasantry and the Faithful (now increasingly resi-

dent in the cities). Tayyip Erdogan is Turkey’s latest and most post-modern example of the

‘Big Man’ (Tugal, 2009; Anderson, 2010). As Tugal (2004) stresses, the site of domination

for the AKP is civil society. We could add that the same goes for the ideology of neo-

liberalism.

Once in power nationally, the AKP picked up the neo-liberalizing agenda begun two

decades previously, at the same time tightening control over the media and educational

appointments. The development strategy sought to create investment opportunities attrac-

tive to domestic and foreign private investors, and to bring about a changed socio-cultural

environment in which faith in redistributive state policies is displaced by a reliance on

‘naturalistic’ market forces, all ultimately endorsed by religion. The strategy was focussed

on the city, and above all Istanbul.

Since the early 2000s the problems of Istanbul have been re-envisaged as rooted in the

need to ‘normalize’ the urban economy relative to its recent past, relative to other global

cities, and relative to neo-liberal assumptions concerning the proper division between

public and private (Keyder, 2005). The patterns of land usage that made Istanbul distinc-

tive must become things of the past. But while Istanbul in this respect exemplifies the glo-

balization of the ‘property rights approach’ to urban development, the form and the means

adopted are distinctively Turkish. Organizationally, the implementation of this approach is

centred on one enormously powerful and effectively unaccountable state agency, respon-

sible directly and only to the Prime Minister. TOKI (of which more below and in the other

contributions to the present issue) was reinvented in the 2000s as the single most important

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player in urban regeneration in Turkey. It thereby became the main instigator of large-

scale social displacement (Gough & Gundogdu, 2008). While the institutions are new,

however, many of the underlying developmental assumptions are not. Attempts to force

economic growth from above, via semiformal networks combining state power with

various forms of cultural authority, and with little regard for those at the receiving end,

have been evident in Istanbul for some 200 years. The new urban dynamics of Turkey

manifest neo-liberal perceptions and goals, but within a political culture and State appar-

atus that might best be described as neo-Ottoman.5 A brief historical diversion is necessary

to explain this.

Modernization, Capitalism and the City: Istanbul from the Ottoman Empire to the

Turkish Republic

The growth of anti-Turkish sentiments in Europe in the late 1800s encouraged many to

believe the Russian claim that the Ottoman Empire was inert (the ‘sick man of

Europe’). In fact the Empire was a laboratory for a series of ambitious experiments in glo-

balization and modernization, most of them focused on Istanbul (Hanioglu, 2008; Gul,

2009). A visitor to the city a century ago would have been struck by media stories of

the economic miracle being brought about by the latest in a 100-year-old series of mod-

ernizing Sultans, Abdulhamit II. Massive foreign lending and imports of foreign equip-

ment and experts were transforming the look and functioning of the city. A state-of-the-

art bridge would soon connect the Asian to the European shores of the Bosporus. European

technologies were transforming travel patterns: French steam ferryboats conveying com-

muters to work, and German railways bringing tourists and business delegations from

Europe, migrants from Anatolia and emissaries from the empire (who disembarked at a

super modern station straight out of Bavaria). A series of ever more extravagant palaces

expressed the elite’s vast wealth and obsession with all things global and modern

(Italian architecture, British naval guns, French electric trams and underground railways,

German engineering, etc.). The Europeanized area of ‘Pera’, which the Empire had long

tolerated as the space of the Other who served Ottoman needs in banking, industry, and

trade, was a glittering display cabinet for the latest global consumer goods and cultural

innovations, from publishing houses to fashion and music (in sharp contrast to the conser-

vative and dowdy Muslim city the other side of the Golden Horn).

Late Ottoman Istanbul was also a city of intense social inequality. The state frequently

intervened to tackle the new ‘urban problem’ posed by the presence of growing numbers of

migrants. In Shanghai, and in St Petersburg, at this time the influx of migrants was forming

the material from which a working class, and revolutionary organizations, would soon

emerge. But in Istanbul migration was regulated. Nineteenth-century sultans periodically

banned in-migration (although Muslim refugees were being driven out of Christian

countries to the north and west in their millions) and resettled resident migrants in the

countryside (Gul, 2009). But the problem they faced outlasted the Sultans, and haunted

the new republic that replaced them. The relationship between the peasantry and the

State’s modernization project remained problematic. Meanwhile, its neighbour to the

north – the Soviet Union – made migration and industrialization the centre of its devel-

opment strategy. The forcible relocation of the peasantry to collective farms and urban

industries was the motor of record levels of industrial growth, at enormous human cost.

In Shanghai, a city of similar size and historical significance to Istanbul at the other

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pole of the Asian continent – the concentration of migrants in new industries led to the

emergence of the Communist Party.

The early Turkish Republic celebrated the peasant, not the proletarian. The foundational

myth of Kemalism imagined Anatolia as the true heartland of the Turk, and idealized the

peasant life (Bozdogan & Kasaba, 1997; Mango, 2005). For ideological, political and

economic reasons, the policy from the 1920s to the 1940s was therefore ‘to keep the pea-

sants in their villages, discourage immigration, (and) downplay the attractions of city life’

(Gul, 2009:82). The contradiction at the heart of Ottoman strategy – the desire to maintain

the social order and yet bring about an economic (and especially military–technological)

revolution, remained in place. Feeble economic growth and the urgent needs of post civil-

war recovery meant its effects were muted during the first decades of the republic, but they

resurfaced with a vengeance after the Second World War when economic growth began to

increase significantly to expand the demand for urban labour. The dynamic of migration

and urban change that transformed the USSR and China emerged in full force in

Turkey only in the 1950s.

Migration and the Rise of the Gecekondu

The post-Second World War European economic recovery created an export boom for

Turkey, and triggered the explosive growth of urban industrial centres. When the export

market became more competitive a few years later, Turkish industrialists and the military,

with overseas support, were able to replace the official export drive with an import substi-

tuting industrialization strategy (in common with many other developing countries at the

time). This lead to the consolidation of a set of protected industrial corporations, a new

state-industrial managerial elite, the growth and urbanization of an industrial working

class, and the institutionalization of one-way rural–urban migration. The typical urban

Turkish worker was a peasant come to town – as Serif Mardin famously put it ‘in the

1970s and 1980s the ruralisation of the cities outran the urbanisation of the new

comers’ (Anderson, 2010:439). Even today most Istanbulus have important rural contacts

and networks that enable them to sustain standards of living beyond those their formal

incomes permit. The arrival of rural immigrants on a large scale was manifested in the

rise of the ‘Gecekondu’.6 By the end of the 1970s Turkey had evolved a de facto model

of social and economic policy in which state industries acted as employer of last resort,

agricultural policies sustained the small family farm, and the Gecekondu provided the sol-

ution to the urban housing problem; ‘these kept in place a social economic order where

family solidarity could compensate for the absence of a formal social security system’

(Bugra, 1999:458).

But in Turkey as elsewhere, development based on state protection of key sectors under

the heading of ‘Import Substituting Development’ became increasingly costly. From the

1960s industrialization faltered. The failure of the economy to provide growth and jobs

became severe. Between 1980 and 2004 the working-age population of Turkey grew by

23 million, but only six million new jobs were created (World Bank, 2006:12). The

flow of refugees from the war in the southeast that broke out in the mid-1980s made com-

petition for urban jobs even more severe. In terms of labour-market participation rates,

especially for women, Istanbul became and remains Europe’s most unsuccessful city.

Migration now created, rather than solved, the urban economic problem. But its legacy

also created the materials for a new kind of populist politics.

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The Islamic ‘Takeover of the City’

From the early 1990s observers inside and outside Turkey began to talk of a new ‘Islamic

conquest of the city’. Thanks in part to the new rules installed under the 1980 Constitution,

very small parties found it harder to get elected, while medium-sized groupings including

various new Islamic parties fared better. The Welfare Party won the 1990 municipal elec-

tions in Ankara, Istanbul and other cities. For the first time Istanbul became a city with an

overtly Islamist mayor, Tayyip Erdogan. Erdogan increasingly embraced the key tenets of

neo-liberalism, despite the hopes of some grass-roots supporters (White, 2003; Tugal,

2009). In 2002, when the AKP (effectively a successor to the banned Welfare Party)

swept to power at the national level, Erdogan became Prime Minister. With him ‘fiscal

discipline became the watch word, privatization the grail’ (Anderson, 2010:449). The

inflation rate fell dramatically, investor confidence revived; growth averaged an unprece-

dented 7% per annum, until the 2008 recession. Foreign capital investment increased and

employment, especially in construction, expanded (although not sufficiently to reduce

inactivity rates and raise wages).

Particularly significant here is the impact of these developments on the culture of econ-

omic life. The AKP sought to make ‘neoliberalism for the first time something like the

common sense of the poor’ (Anderson, 2010:450). In the domain of vernacular religion

(White, 2003) this meant overcoming those ‘anti-Modernists’ who believed that Islam

was antipathetic to capitalism, and who opposed growing inequality. The rise of the

AKP has been seen by some as representing the development of a Turkish–Islamic

version of ‘Prosperity’ Protestant Christianity: the pious should also be successful, the suc-

cessful should show it, and the unsuccessful are less deserving of admiration. The concept

of the ‘undeserving poor’ is implicit, and sometimes explicit, in the new discourse of right-

eous economic development. In the urban sphere the new ‘common sense’ is encouraged

through the enthusiastic official embrace of the property market. As Onis (2006) notes, the

AKP is based on a class alliance. He fails to note that this alliance extends only to those

with a stake in property ownership. This excludes a large part of the Istanbul population.

The construction of a neo-liberal neo-Ottomanism has had profound implications for the

handling of the Gecekondu population. This transformation shows itself in the cultural

realm in the stereotypes applied to Gecekondu dwellers.

Re-imagining the Gecekondu in the Age of Neo-liberalism and Rising Urban Land

Values

In the 1950s many middle-class city dwellers saw the new immigrants as a useful addition

to urban resources, helping economic growth and boosting the supply of servants, house-

maids, fast-foods, and so forth. From the 1960s the scale of migration, and the social char-

acter of the migrants, tended to be seen as more threatening (Pamuk, 2000). To the

westernized sophisticated urban middle class, the migrants ‘arabesque’ popular culture

of music, dress, and public piety was particularly dismaying. In the 1970s the Gecekondu

was increasingly painted by the media and politicians as the site of dangerous extremism;

first of the revolutionary Left and the fascist Right, and then of radical Islamism (White,

2003). In the 2000s the Gecekondu is officially re-imagined as the space of criminality and

social inadequacy; Gecekondu dwellers are personally deficient, and socially burdensome.

In the words of Erdogan Bayraktar, the notoriously unsubtle head of TOKI:7

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Today, the gecekondu is one of the most important two or three problems that

Turkey faces. It is well known that such things as terror, drugs, psychological nega-

tivity, health problems and oppositional views all come out of gecekondu zones and

irregular areas. For this reason, a Turkey that wants to integrate with the world, that

wants to join the European Union, must rid itself of illegal dwellings . . . Turkey can

not speak of development without solving the gecekondu problem.

TOKI is aware that Gecekondu areas include some of the potentially most valuable land in

the metropolis. But it will not be marketable to the existing population who lack the

resources. TOKI therefore set out to remove them.

According to a United Nations-sponsored inquiry into forced evictions in 2009, evic-

tions in the eight neighbourhoods the team visited would displace 80,000 people.

TOKI’s ambitions extend to rebuilding almost one-half of the city – amounting to what

Gough and Gundogdu (2008) call the ‘class cleansing’ of Istanbul (although the term

‘class’ blurs many divisions here; see Kuyucu, 2009). The upheavals this requires are of

a massive scale. But they are not predetermined. Nineteenth-century Ottoman planning

failed because religious and state authority was not sufficient to ensure control of

events on the ground (Hanioglu, 2008). The neo-Ottoman fantasy of a top-down coercive

transformation to a functioning and harmonious market system is no less unrealistic. To

illustrate this we turn in the next section to three case studies of TOKI-driven urban regen-

eration projects in Istanbul. These illustrate the local effects of the strategy described

above of maximizing urban land values, via the use of state power to commodify space,

erasing existing usages and displacing the existing population. But they also indicate

the contingency of events and local responses.

Part Two: Case Studies of Resistance to Urban Regeneration Proposals in Istanbul

Ayazma

Ayazma is the name of a (now demolished) Gecekondu village on the edge of a small valley

near the western edge of Istanbul. The Kucukcekmece district straddles the main motorway

to Europe and two others that provide access round Istanbul and to the main international

airport. TOKI proposed to build a set of new mass housing projects, plus up-market

private estates to be built by its subsidiaries or by public–private ‘revenue-sharing’ projects.

The district plans highlight two ‘flagships’: the Kucukcekmece Lake Tourism and Cultural

Centre Urban Transformation project (designed by Korean ‘starchitect’ Ken Yeang) and the

Olympiad Village project. The latter is centred on the Olympiad stadium that opened in 2002

(and where U2 finished off the ‘Capital of Culture’ events in 2010).

In 2004 the municipality announced that the Ayazma and Tepeustu neighbourhoods just

across the valley from the stadium would become regeneration areas. Four days after the

Municipal Council gave its approval, TOKI, Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality and

Kucukcekmece Municipality signed a joint protocol. By June 2004, the project was

fully underway.

Compared with most Gecekondu neighbourhoods in Istanbul, Ayazma was relatively

young and poor. Set up too late to benefit from the series of amnesties granted to Gece-

kondu dwellers from the 1970s to the 1990s (see Turkun in the present issue), it was

mainly formed of ‘forced migrants’ driven from southeastern Turkey by the conflict

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there that erupted in 1985. Some 30,000 people were killed in the conflict and thousands of

villages were destroyed. Refugees fleeing the war faced very different problems and

opportunities compared with earlier migrants. They migrants found themselves at the

lowest rank in the urban social hierarchy (Keyder, 2005). But one result of this was that

they tended to develop dense and supportive social networks amongst themselves.

Ayasma was one such case.

The main reason given for moving to Ayazma was that it was close to a factory district

(55%), and relatives and earlier migrants from the South East lived nearby (31%) (Turgut

& Ceylan, 2010:66). By 2006 Ayazma was home to around 1243 houses and 8875 people,

of whom 130 households were classified as tenants. One-quarter were in regular work, sus-

taining the rest, but few had any job security. One-third was illiterate, the proportion being

higher amongst women. Nearly all were Kurdish, and most women did not speak Turkish

well. Since they were identified as both Kurdish and poor, the people of Ayazma were sub-

jected to a number of indignities. During the 2005 UEFA Cup Final, for example, they

were warned to switch off all lights, so that the settlement would not attract the attention

of international visitors nearby. If they refused, the power would be cut.8

Kucukcekmece Municipality was to ‘clean up’ the area near the new stadium and trans-

fer the land to TOKI for development as upper-class housing for rent and sale. TOKI

approached the residents of Ayazma with an offer. As in other Gecekondu renewal pro-

jects, the municipality was first to determine who were the ‘rightful owners’9 of the build-

ings (tenants were also initially regarded by the Municipality as ‘rightful’, but this was

forgotten later in the project). ‘Rightful owners’ were offered the chance to buy a new

TOKI-built flat in Halkalı-Bezirganbahce (visible from Ayazma a few kilometres to the

south), for 200–250 TL per month, increasing in six-monthly periods, for 15 years.

Those who had title deeds could return to Ayazma if they paid the difference between

the value of the new houses to be built there and the Gecekondu they had vacated. But

the financial details were mysterious, as was the timetable for completion of the new

housing, which few thought they would be able to afford. In the event all but a handful

agreed to move to the new estate. Although a formal agreement was signed between

TOKI and the inhabitants of Ayazma, the result was in effect an eviction.

The typical pattern of resistance in such situations in Istanbul is for an initial phase of

active conflict and outright rejection to mutate into a protracted bargaining process. At this

stage the resistance fragments, as those with some kind of property claim are encouraged

to identify their private interest as lying with the development. Gecekondu owners often

come to the conclusion that their best interest lies in increasing the value of their house

rather than protecting the neighbourhood and community as a whole; they may eventually

be able to sell the building and use the money to build a new and better Gecekondu else-

where (Kuyucu & Unsal, 2010:15).

In the Ayazma case the development of a collective opposition to TOKI’s proposal was

particularly difficult. This was partly because this was one the first new regeneration pro-

jects and local people did not know exactly what to expect. In addition it was implemented

very rapidly, leaving residents little time to consider what was happening and develop a

collective response. Like many Gecekondu, Ayazma was composed of a variety of com-

munities formed by people coming from the same village or province, according to the

well-established hemserilik pattern of migration10 in Turkey. The authorities took advan-

tage of this and targeted the dominant figures in each of the ‘hemserilik’ groups. Decision-

making in the settlement was in effect undertaken not collectively but ‘micro elites’.

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The inhabitants of Ayazma as a whole were isolated, both geographically and socially,

with few connections to other neighbourhoods or the kind of professional groups that pro-

vided help elsewhere (see below). Meanwhile Kucukcekmece Municipality, referring to

Ayazma, asserted that:

It is essential to redevelop existing sub regions – which are problematic, unhealthy,

lack urban quality and life security, are socially corrupted and centres of crime – as

healthy and liveable places. (2007, 6)

In addition, the Kurdish identity of most of inhabitants gave the authorities added leverage,

which they were not slow to exploit. TOKI’s public rhetoric played upon the racist preju-

dice according to which Kurdishness is equated with political disloyalty, quasi-feudal pri-

mitivism, general anti-social attitudes and criminality. The background noise provided by

the high-profile Turkish media coverage, that uniformly celebrates Turkish soldiers killed

by the PKK as ‘martyrs’ while their opponents are ‘terrorists’, heightened the reluctance of

Ayazma residents to display public opposition. Many Kurdish residents said they feared

they would be labelled as “terrorists” if they created a collective resistance to the devel-

opment. One tenant, who continued to live in the demolished buildings on the site,

(Figures 1, 2, 3) described the context:

Our fear, as the media films us and broadcast the situation, is that if the municipality comes

tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow with machine guns, they will say ‘They were

terrorists, they were PKK’. How many time have they already come in, raided us,

thrown us out, and the media only report that ‘They are Kurdish’. We are living with

this fear (From TV documentary Peril En La Demure, dir. Derya Ozel, Istanbul 2008).

The extraordinarily crude use of racist stereotypes by an agency of the Turkish State

exhibiting Ottoman tendencies rather than European aspirations is shocking to outsider

observers. And it arouses opposition, creating space for critique, in Turkey. Here the

role of intellectuals is important – and again distinctively Turkish.

Turkish urban politics is characterized by the activism of a large number of both pro-

fessional and informal groups and movements (and resort to the law and lawyers to an

almost American degree). At one pole, professional organizations vested with a consti-

tutional role, such as the Chamber of Architects and the Chamber of Planners, play a

very important role in highlighting, critiquing, or legitimizing developments, often

through protracted negotiations in the courts. The Chamber of Architects in particular

has been a major player in seeking to resist or improve urban development projects (it sup-

ported the Divan exhibition mentioned at the start of this article). At the other pole of the

urban policy community lie a wide variety of activists coming from diverse political

groups and ethical stances. Towards the end of the Ayazma story, a number of other neigh-

bourhood associations and activists groups, including professionals, academics and stu-

dents, were drawn to support the campaign and publicize TOKI’s action by the

provocative words and deeds of the authorities. By that time the Gecekondus had been bull-

dozed, but a group still remained on site and drew the attention and support of outsiders.

Tenants had been told early in the negotiation process that they were ‘rightful’, none were

eventually recognized by as such by Kucukcekmece Municipality. Paying 50–150 TL

monthly rent in Ayazma, they were unable to find equally cheap accommodation elsewhere.

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Figure 1. The last stages of the demolition of the village of Ayazma, a few remaining families survivingin the ruins. In the background, luxury new housing developments close to the Ataturk stadium.

Figure 2. The Ataturk stadium, centre of the regeneration project opposite Ayazma.

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Some held out the hope of moving into the new houses to be built on the site, and to this end

stayed there after the site was bulldozed, 42 families hung on in sheds amidst the ruins. When

the authorities then demolished these, 24 families gave up but 18 families remained on site,

amidst appalling conditions, for almost two years. Their ties with other neighbourhood organ-

izations and groups became stronger. They contacted AKP members of parliament and the

media. The most useful contacts proved to be AKP Istanbul MPs and some of the media

channels. As a result, the final demolition raid attracted media coverage and roused ‘outsider’

public sympathy. In response, the Mayor of Kucukcekmece Municipality, and the president of

TOKI, promised to find a ‘better solution’ (the Mayor made this promise during a live

television reality with tenants from the area).

This did not, however, change much. Although various groups have offered support, a

grass-roots movement has not developed, and the displaced Ayazma residents have had to

accept a fait accompli. In some respects, living conditions in the TOKI tower blocks in

Bezirganbahce to which they have been relocated are worse than in Ayazma. Many

have discovered that they cannot afford to live there after all, and about one-third of

those who moved in have since left. Social exclusion in these estates seems to have

been worsening and the tension between Kurdish and Turkish residents is often palpable.

The loss of local community networks has left many women, in particular, feeling in a

worse plight than when they lived in Gecekondu in Ayazma. Some say they feel they

are now living in a prison (see also Advisory Group on Forced Evictions, 2009;

Bartu-Candan & Kolluoglu, 2008; Baysal, 2010; Kuyucu, 2009).

Basibuyuk and Gulsuyu–Gulensu

In Ayazma the authorities succeeded, brutally, in achieving their development goals. In

other cases, however, the outcome was more compromised. The Ayazma clearance took

Figure 3. The mass housing units at Bezirganbahce to which Ayazma residents were moved.

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place at roughly the same time as two other regeneration projects got underway in much

older Gecekondu on the Asian side of Istanbul. Neither had quite the outcome that TOKI

intended.

Maltepe district lies between the old business area of Kadıkoy by the Bosporus, and the

later-developing industrial area of Kartal further East by the Marmara Sea. Maltepe was a

gentle hillside of farms and villages until the 1960s when the import-substituting industri-

alization drive rapidly transformed it into a shanty town of workers from nearby factories.

The first Gecekondus were built on private and public lands stretching into the valleys and

hills to the north of the factory zone. Some migrants paid money to individuals who set

themselves up as sellers of the land. The settlements developed rapidly and buildings

became substantial. As time passed the city expanded to the east, bringing Maltepe

within easier reach of the city centre. As de-industrialization got underway in the

1980s, the area was redeveloped around suburbs and retail centres. The changing geo-

graphical context meant that the land occupied by Gecekondus all along Anatolian Istan-

bul’s coastline has become increasingly valuable. New transport infrastructures are

making these areas increasingly attractive as suburban residential districts. In the 2000s

the new greater municipal government launched a series of ambitious transformation pro-

jects targeted on these areas.

The latest and most spectacular of these is the Kartal Coastal Line Urban Transform-

ation Project designed by Zaha Hadid to become the second major central business district

in Istanbul. Another is the Dragos Special Project Area, designed by Turkish architects.

The latest 1/25,000 Istanbul plan targets the area south of the E-5 motorway running par-

allel to the coast for tourism and cultural businesses. The old Gecekondu areas to the north

of the motorway are to become urban regeneration areas through joint initiatives by the

district municipalities, Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality (IMM) and TOKI.11

New development pressures have been impacting on the Maltepe Gecekondu area from

the 1990s. In 1998 a new private university was established in Maltepe Region Park. In the

2000s the valley between the hills, an important water-collecting basin and forest, became

a construction site for upper-middle-class housing. The forest has shrunk and the exposed

soil is drying out. But the loss of environmental quality has not dented the marketability of

the area. Having first lost their economic position to de-industrialization, the long-estab-

lished Gecekondu areas are now losing their residential security as a result of the city’s

property-focused urban development strategy.

Two Hills, Two Different Communities, Two Different Responses

The Basibuyuk, Gulsuyu and Gulensu neighbourhoods developed as Gecekondu neigh-

bourhoods from the 1950s to the 1960s. Gulsuyu and Gulensu are adjacent on the same

hill (and since they share a neighbourhood organization, we refer to them henceforth

only as Gulsuyu). Across the valley in the direction of the sunset lies Basibuyuk. Both

hills stand high above the coastline have spectacular views of the Marmara Sea, the Prin-

cess Islands and the old city of Istanbul. Since 2000 this fact has acquired a new salience;

the authorities have identified these as profitable locations for investment in private prop-

erties attractive to middle-class buyers.

In 2004 Maltepe Municipality’s announcement that the northern side of the E-5 (D100)

motorway would become an urban transformation area had immediate implications for all

the above neighbourhoods. But the responses turned out to be very distinctive in each case.

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Although they had originated at roughly the same time, and the socio-economic structure

of the neighbourhoods is similar, they had developed very different political cultures. The

Basibuyuk neighbourhood was known as quietist and conservative, with some Turkish

nationalist groups and fundamentalist Islamist groups present. In the 2004 local elections,

72% of Basibuyuk voters opted for the AKP, typical of devout and poorer areas of Istan-

bul. Local people believed that they would not be as vulnerable to development proposals

as the more ‘radical’ and ‘problematic’ Gulsuyu neighbourhood across the valley. They

were particularly shocked to discover that they were just as exposed and reacted angrily

when urban regeneration proposals translated into direct intervention by TOKI and the

police.

Gulsuyu, a couple of kilometres to the east (Figure 4), is more ethnically mixed, with a

significant proportion of residents being Alevi.12 A variety of left-wing groups have long

been active since the 1970s, firstly as a legacy of the growth of the worker’s movement in

the factories nearby, and secondly as a result of the arrival of waves of Kurdish refugees

from the mid-1980s. The streets feature prominent graffiti from many left-wing groups, the

PKK, and general anti-capitalist sentiments. The central park is loomed over by obser-

vation cameras and a police vehicle is permanently stationed nearby. One local woman

described how she feels the area is perceived:

If I say ‘I am from Gulsuyu’, the boss would say that they don’t have a job for me.

[. . .]. For example, I applied for a job in a textile factory and I said ‘I come from

Gulsuyu’’ and gave a friends name as a reference. He said ‘Your friend came

here, and talked about trade unions, increase in wages and so on, and organised

the workshop. You might do the same; there is no job for you here’. I had the

same experience at another workplace. (Tumer & Kutluata, 2010:10)

In Gulsuyu, politics plays an important part in everyday life. So when the urban regener-

ation project was announced, the neighbourhood quickly investigated the plan and ana-

lysed its implications, drawing on assistance from friendly planning professionals and

academics. The community then rejected the plan and organized a petition that was

signed by 7000 people. In addition, 32 applications were submitted to the administrative

court to cancel the plan.

This vigorous and rapid local response forced the authorities to revise the plan, and to

promise that there should be no further planning without the participation of local

people. It is important to note in this context that the first plan was prepared by the district

municipality and it was thanks to the municipality’s planning department that it was sent

back for revision. In most urban regeneration areas, the central government agency, TOKI,

is the planning authority, and since 2007, with Law 5069, it has been the planning auth-

ority in all Gecekondu areas (see Turkun in the present issue). The initial success of the

Gulsuyu resistance in forcing a revision would probably not have been possible if

TOKI had prepared the original plan.

The energetic response of local people in Gulsuyu led on to a wider engagement with

urban redevelopment issues in Istanbul. Gulsuyu/Gulensu neighbourhood association

organized opposition to a local plan, and proposed an alternative plan. This was taken

forward by a Solidarity Planning Studio, with the participation of staff and students

from universities, which met in the neighbourhood through 2007. Some participants criti-

cized this for lack of substance, and the ‘alternative plan’ never appeared. But the

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neighbourhood’s response to the development proposal strengthened the neighbourhood

association. And it stirred a wider neighbourhood interest in urban issues. Gulsuyu–

Gulensu neighbourhood association became one of the leading actors in the establishment

of the ‘Istanbul Neighbourhood Associations Platform’. And it also extended help to its

traditionally more conservative neighbours the other side of the valley, in Basibuyuk.

In the Basibuyuk neighbourhood, the pattern of resistance was rather different. One

factor seems to have been the generally more conservative and cautious political culture

of the neighbourhood, but another was the earlier and more active involvement of TOKI.

In 2004, nearly 99 acres (400,000 square metres) were earmarked for urban regeneration

area and the project was passed to TOKI. The Chamber of Map and Cadastral Engineers,

the Chamber of Architects and the Chamber of City Planners went to court to demand can-

cellation of the plan. Two years later a revised version declared that the regeneration area

would cover all of Basibuyuk neighbourhood. The green park at the centre, owned by the

municipality but used by local people (originally for its water wells, more recently as a

place to meet and a children’s playground) would be filled with high-rise housing. TOKI

would build 300 housing units (in the first stage) to which local ‘rightful owners’ would

be transferred. The space created by demolishing their Gecekondus would then be used

for the next stage of regeneration (although the content was, and remains, unclear).

In 2007 TOKI, IMM and Maltepe Municipality signed a new regeneration protocol. In

response, Basıbuyuk neighbourhood began to organize their opposition. Neighbourhood

representatives forwarded their demands to Maltepe municipality and local MPs. Mean-

while TOKI hired a private contractor to begin work on build the six high-rise blocks in

the park. When the contractor arrived on site, a group of Basibuyuk people welcomed

him with the ironic gift of a symbolic tomb.13 The contractor withdrew. TOKI called

Figure 4. Gulsuyu neighbourhood, with new middle-class housing developments in the valleybelow.

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on the police to accompany the contractor and ensure that equipment was moved onto the

site to begin work despite opposition. The confrontation was dramatic and violent. As

local people, most of them women, many of them old, stood in the way of the construction

vehicles, the police used high-pressure water cannons to disperse them. This was the first

of a series of violent conflicts that occurred almost every day for two months, some result-

ing in serious injuries. The violence deployed by the police was deeply shocking to resi-

dents of Basibuyuk, a quiet family neighbourhood that had never before been involved in

any kind of collective confrontation with the authorities (Figures 5, 6). It had been gener-

ally assumed that if there urban regeneration was to lead to trouble in the area it would be

with their overtly radical neighbours on the next hill. In fact it began in Basibuyuk, and the

‘leftist’ Gulsuyu community later joined in with support. In the process both neighbour-

hood associations were strengthened, and established a working relationship.

Although the mainstream Turkish mass media channels did not report the extraordinary

incidents in Basibuyuk they were publicized in left-wing newspapers and websites. As a

result, various groups and individuals offered to help by supplying more information about

local regeneration projects, organizing support meetings in other neighbourhoods and gen-

erally trying to raise awareness. In the local elections of 2009, Basibuyuk expressed

its dissatisfaction by switching its vote from the AKP to the CHP, the stridently secular

‘Kemalist’ opposition party. The chairman of the Basibuyuk neighbourhood association

was also elected as a member of the (CHP controlled) Maltepe Municipality council.

After two months the violent confrontations ceased. The neighbourhood agreed to allow

the transfer of equipment to the site in order to prevent further police violence, and

approached the agencies to seek a less confrontational bargaining process. At this stage

some confusion amongst local people emerged as to the real drivers of the project.

Figure 5. Basibuyuk residents attending a meeting to protest against the proposed ‘regeneration’project, watched by the police. The water cannon was used to clear demonstrators from the area.

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Many blamed the Mayor of Maltepe municipality for what they saw as the extremely

‘cruel’ behaviour at the site, not realizing that Maltepe municipality was in effect only

the messenger for TOKI. Maltepe municipality promised not to start any construction

activity without the agreement of local people, but TOKI started construction work,

even though several applications put to the courts by the neighbourhood association

were still in process.14

The uncompromising nature of TOKI’s approach was made clear by its head, Erdogan

Bayraktar:

We prepared a project in Maltepe. But construction couldn’t start as local people

were against us. So we sold flats to policemen in the area, and told them ‘protect

us’. This meant that construction could at last begin.

As overt conflict gave way to complex negotiation, divisions began to emerge within the

Basibuyuk community. Bargaining soon led to discussions about the potential market

value of individual dwellings and the financial gains they might be made from re-

development. Some, mostly those lacking legal documents confirming existing property

ownership, agreed to move to the new residential blocks. One motivation was the hope

of being able to sell the apartment and make a profit sometime in the future.

Late in 2008 the Administrative Court ruled that the urban regeneration project in Basi-

buyuk had violated the public interest and principles of urban planning (Kuyucu & Unsal,

2010:10). The rest of the project would not go ahead. But by this time the park was lost and

the apartment blocks were complete.15 In July 2010 the three neighbourhoods signed a

Figure 6. Mass Housing Agency tower blocks built on former shared land in the centre of Basibuyuk.

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petition demanding title deeds and construction rights from the municipality. But Maltepe

Municipality was in reality unable to provide these, as authority over the land had been

effectively transferred to TOKI.

Conclusions

These case studies indicate something of the distinctive nature of urban regeneration in

Istanbul, but at the same time they point to commonalities with regeneration in cities else-

where. On the one hand, the promotion of rising land and property values is the key ingre-

dient of the urban development strategy, the explicit goal of key authorities charged with

urban development, the key to engaging private investors, and the main resource that the

authorize use to win local consent. The ‘liberalization’ of the urban economy and culture is

globally familiar (Lovering, 2007; Anderson, 2010). But on the other hand, the insti-

tutional and ideological framework through which neo-liberalization is accompanied by

authoritarianism is uniquely Turkish. The centrality of effectively unaccountable state

institutions, the unabashed use of physical coercion, the use of public relations media to

‘talk-up’ developments, the celebration of exotic proposals drawn up by foreign ‘star’

architects as lures for global investors, and the resort to a version of ‘modernizing cultural

politics’ to disadvantage inconvenient groups resisting removal, in order to create a city

appealing to elite groups, all have Ottoman echoes. Neo-liberal urbanism is compatible

with a variety of ideological dressings, and Istanbul demonstrates vividly the specificities

of the contemporary Turkish case.

But the case studies outlined here also show that there can be a big gap between inten-

tion and outcome. The confrontational and coercive approach to urban development in

Turkey, institutionalized in the form of TOKI, carries no guarantees. For the response

of local communities may make plans unrealizable in their original form. In Ayazma

the authorities were able to rapidly force their plans through against an acutely disadvan-

taged and unorganized community. In Gulsuyu they had to compromise, and effectively

withdrew when faced with firm opposition (at least for the time being). In Basibuyuk

the authorities eventually achieved their goals, but only after costly interruptions arising

from the local communities’ spontaneous, but disorganized, resistance

This suggests that, for all the grand strategic pronouncements by prime ministers or

heads of development agencies, the urban and social geography of regeneration in Istanbul

is likely to develop in a much less tidy, much less coherent, much more contingent manner

than current plans assume. This is essentially because the target population, and its

relationship to its existing housing, vary so much. Not least, the degree of collective

engagement and organization are uneven.

Turkey’s highly centralized and top-down approach provokes local reaction and resist-

ance first, and secures assent and cooperation only afterwards. To European eyes this

seems simply unintelligent; why not adopt a more subtle approach to secure cooperation

that would serve the state and the developer interests better? Perhaps the answer lies in the

fact that this would sit awkwardly with the ideological and institutional character of

Turkish politics. The machismo neo-Ottoman emphasis on the charismatic ‘Big Man’

seems to be important in sustaining the political credibility of the current regime,

especially in the media (Tugal, 2008; Anderson, 2010). This lends itself to a brutalist

approach. But at the same time the sophisticated structure of the Turkish state apparatus,

the result of earlier phases in its republican development (Samim, 1981) means that

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various ‘counter-balances’ are still present. One critical feature of the Turkish scene is the

constitutional role of organizations such as the Chamber of Architects, which the neo-lib-

eralizing government has not yet been able to marginalize. The case studies illustrate the

characteristic Turkish pattern of repeated resort to legal counsel by all parties. A more

thoroughly Ottoman response would be to abolish such ‘counter-balances’. But this

would be incompatible with the desire to retain a pluralistic image, especially to an inter-

national (and especially European Union) audience. In short, the neo-Ottoman neo-liberal

combination is fraught with contradictions, but not so severe as to render it unworkable.

Our summary case studies also draw attention to the role of ‘grass-roots’ actors in what

might be called (somewhat tendentiously in the Turkish case) ‘civil society’. Some move-

ments have been able to engage significant support both from within their host commu-

nities, and more widely. To do so they have drawn heavily on the role of

neighbourhood representatives, trade unionists, friendly professionals, academics and

students. These have played an important role in giving community movements a sense

of identity and purpose, and strategic tools. And they have drawn heavily on modern

media, especially the Internet and mobile phones.

Perhaps the main lesson of these three cases is that, for all their geographical and socio-

economic differences, poor people in areas targeted for development face similar pro-

spects and problems, and they often react in similar ways, at least initially. Even in appar-

ently a-political communities, the most conservative social groups can sometime manifest

extraordinary militancy and courage – as the women of Basibuyuk demonstrated in the

face of water cannons and bulldozers. The task facing those who wish to reinforce the

ability of poor people to resist, and to reconstruct urban development strategizing in a

more inclusive and sustainable mould, is to find ways to nurture these spontaneous

groups and their implicit or explicit ‘alternative’ development ideas (Harvey, 2008).

This can be only one aspect of a longer term project to develop a more powerful and demo-

cratic public sphere that can enrich and empower alternative conceptions – alternative to

the neo-liberal property oriented approach – of what urban development might mean.

Notes

1. It is conventionally claimed that Turkey is a secular republic. This is not secularism as most Europeans would

recognize it so much as state-religion. Since the 1930s the state has funded religious training (Imam Hatip)

colleges and paid the salaries of Imams. From the 1980s the resources allocated by the State to organized

religion expanded enormously, subsidizing hundreds of new mosques and millions of Korans, and boosting

output from Imam Hatip schools. Non-state religious Muslim organizations, especially various Sufi tarikats,

and the enormously rich and influential US-based Gulen movement that runs television channels, schools,

and hostels, also have a huge influence on access to education and job opportunities.

2. Critics such as Harvey (2008) argue that the implementation of ‘property titling’ in the Favelas of South

America will mean that settlements with attractive views and good locations will pass into the hands of

the affluent middle class, their present occupants using the money to move elsewhere and built new

squats in less visible and marketable parts of the city. This tendency is emerging in Istanbul (see the case

studies).

3. In both Chile and Turkey the extent to which the United States influenced the coup is hotly debated. Turkey

was from 1947 a US frontline against the Soviet Union, becoming in the 1960s a base for US nuclear weapons

targeted on Russia and Ukraine. After the Shah of Iran was overthrown in 1979, Turkey’s strategic impor-

tance to the United States was renewed. Cold War intelligence services and covert operations linked the

United States and the Turkish Army, although much mythologizing has exaggerated and simplified this

relationship. Turks are famous for their love of conspiracy theories (Mango, 2005), but not without reason.

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4. How much these upheavals really did ‘work’ is a matter of interpretation. The post-Pinochet economic devel-

opment of Chile was unremarkable compared with most countries where no military coup had occurred

except for a brief boom period in the 1980s. The longer term saw labour market contraction, urban segre-

gation, widening inequalities and environmental losses (Winn, 2004).

5. The rise of the AKP has been accompanied by and bound up with a fashion amongst the ‘Muslim middle

class’ for neo-Ottoman styles in dress, house design, hotels, fabrics, music, and so forth. Tayyip Erdogan

embodies the Ottoman tradition of strong personal leadership. And his ambition to modernize Istanbul

echoes all the nineteenth-century Sultans. But as Tugal notes, the neo-Ottomans are very different from

their predecessors in some crucial respects: ‘rather than preserve the historical fabric of the city, the

current AKP metropolitan municipality seems set on pulling down the original Ottoman buildings and recon-

structing ersatz versions. It is secularists, rather than Islamists, who are now resisting such redevelopments,

accusing the municipality of wanting to re-create the historic centre of Istanbul in glossy tourist fashion’

(Tugal, 2008:76).

6. Translates as ‘built overnight’. A similar pattern characterized the industrial revolution in Britain, as migrants

pitched temporary accommodation to get a foothold near the new coal and slate industries, and later turned

these into permanent dwellings and enduring settlements.

7. Erdogan Bayraktar in 2007 to the Urban Regeneration and Real Estate Investment Conference, organized by

the Urban Land Institute. See Zaman Newspaper, 13 November 2007; Sabah Newspaper, 13 November 2007.

8. Interviews with Ayazma residents in 2008 by Hade Turkmen.

9. Amnesties have given some Gecekondu residents title deeds. These have two meanings: first, having the right

to use the land (tapu tahsis); and second, having a deed to the land (Bartu & Kolluglu, 2002:21). But these

rights are effectively cancelled out if the local municipality does not register the house or the owner, and this

is common.

10. The pattern whereby migrants from a particular locality contact fellow villagers, often via family or religious

networks, who help them settle nearby in the city.

11. The entre province is under the responsibility of IMM. IMM is the authority for planning at the 1/5000 to 1/

25,000 scale. Plans at the 1/1000 scale are prepared by the 39 district municipalities. In addition, TOKI has

recently become in effect the main urban planning authority (see Turkun in the present issue).

12. The Alevis are a distinct social group in Turkey, generally characterized by secularism and broadly left-

liberal political leanings. Regarded by some (but not all) as deriving from a variant of Islam close to

Shi’ism, they have often been discriminated against by orthodox Sunnis. Alevi Kurds have suffered particu-

larly at the hands of Turkish nationalists (see Shankland, 2003).

13. Kentsel Donusum Projesi Gecekondu Lobisine Takıldı, 28. November 2007, Zaman Gazetesi.

14. While negotiations and court actions were in process, construction work went on nearly 24 hours a day. The

workers dried the concrete with flames from LPG tanks. After six months the six apartment blocks were at

full height.

15. Technically therefore they are illegal buildings – like the Gecekondu.

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