The Honorable Exception: State and the Social Production of Concrete Space in Istanbul

Sinan Tankut Gülhan

This dissertation examines Istanbul as a geographical and historical totality and focuses on four different and integral parts of this totality: its Ottoman past, its dalliances with modern planning attempts, the city’s death throes in the face of rabid industrialization efforts, and its first true real estate boom. These divergent parts are scrutinized through the relationship between the state and space. This work investigates the different modes a city takes under different configurations of a state composed of, but not limited to, cultural, ethnic, religious, class-based, formal, and spatial elements. By studying Istanbul alone, it is possible to gauge divergent trajectories of the production of space that the city takes. The changes in Istanbul’s state-spaces are studied in five stages: the first involves the urban theory that engendered my critical stance on Istanbul and the production of space and how revolutionary urbanism can be harnessed to a re-evaluation of a semiperipheral metropolis. The second part is related to an attempt in unraveling the early modern historical characteristics of the city and its overdetermining role in the formation of state mechanisms. The third part unearths the rupture that modernity instigated in the urban fabric and conjoining state institutions and mentalities that shaped the city. The fourth part focuses on the industrialization and population boom of the second part of the 20th century and locates the consequence of social developments in the urban space: the squatter settlements, the gecekondus. The fifth part grasps the cycles of boom and bust in the real estate investments in Istanbul and is concerned in the concrete production of space of the five decades since 1965. Amidst the interplay of various elements, the emergent middle class in Istanbul and its social and historical moorings in the urban built environment are revealed to be rooted in the erstwhile squatters, in the gecekondu areas.

THE HONORABLE EXCEPTION: STATE AND THE SOCIAL PRODUCTION OF CONCRETE SPACE IN ISTANBUL BY SİNAN TANKUT GÜLHAN BA, Middle East Technical University, 2003 MA, Binghamton University, 2005 DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology in the Graduate School of Binghamton University State University of New York 2014 UMI Number: 3641987 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. UMI 3641987 Published by ProQuest LLC (2014). Copyright in the Dissertation held by the Author. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code ProQuest LLC. 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, MI 48106 - 1346 © Copyright by Sinan Tankut Gülhan 2014 All Rights Reserved Accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology in the Graduate School of Binghamton University State University of New York 2014 August 5, 2014 Çağlar Keyder, Chair Department of Sociology, Binghamton University William G. Martin, Member Department of Sociology, Binghamton University Denis O’Hearn, Member Department of Sociology, Binghamton University Kent F. Schull, Outside Examiner Department of History, Binghamton University iii ABSTRACT This dissertation examines Istanbul as a geographical and historical totality and focuses on four different and integral parts of this totality: its Ottoman past, its dalliances with modern planning attempts, the city’s death throes in the face of rabid industrialization efforts, and its first true real estate boom. These divergent parts are scrutinized through the relationship between the state and space. This work investigates the different modes a city takes under different configurations of a state composed of, but not limited to, cultural, ethnic, religious, class-based, formal, and spatial elements. By studying Istanbul alone, it is possible to gauge divergent trajectories of the production of space that the city takes. The changes in Istanbul’s state-spaces are studied in five stages: the first involves the urban theory that engendered my critical stance on Istanbul and the production of space and how revolutionary urbanism can be harnessed to a re-evaluation of a semiperipheral metropolis. The second part is related to an attempt in unraveling the early modern historical characteristics of the city and its overdetermining role in the formation of state mechanisms. The third part unearths the rupture that modernity instigated in the urban fabric and conjoining state institutions and mentalities that shaped the city. The fourth part focuses on the industrialization and population boom of the second part of the 20th century and locates the consequence of social developments in the urban space: the squatter settlements, the gecekondus. The fifth part grasps the cycles of boom and bust in the real estate investments in Istanbul and is concerned in the concrete production of space of the five decades since 1965. To locate the configurations of state-space in Istanbul, four elementary iv components that create the state-space relationship are employed in this analysis: territory, place, scale, and networks. Amidst the interplay of these elements, the emergent middle class in Istanbul and its social and historical moorings in the urban built environment are revealed to be rooted in the erstwhile squatters, in the gecekondu areas. v To my father and uncle, For they taught me the “Builders’ Song” vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This work is a product that came out of a travel through a long and winding road, which I traversed mostly alone. I have a habit of keeping the work to myself until I believe it is finished –but, not polished- form emerges, until the ideas come to life in their final shape and acuity. So, any flaws in the following pages are entirely mine. I have not used any institutional funding for the research and the writing process. I made a decision in the beginning to protect my peculiar writing style and the way I construct ideas and arguments. For that reason, it took longer than usual –five years, from start to finish. I worked as a white-collar employee during my research process and as an adjunct lecturer at both private and state colleges in Turkey during my writing. I am especially indebted to my fellow white-collar workers and to my students and colleagues throughout this long process. One of my white-collar fellows from those days, Mustafa Akçınar, who later became a colleague as well, merits special thanks. He provided the initial impetus and persuaded me that I should sit down and write –instead of spending precious moments of my life to make some bosses richer, and some other white-collar workers well-fed and employed. I was perhaps not one of the most enthusiastic students in Professor Çağlar Keyder’s classes, but, I can easily claim that I have been one of his most avid readers. I had the chance to have him as the chair of my committee. His writings provided the sociological basis and questions unearthed in this work. I am indebted to him, for not only his role as a helpful chair with lots of constructive criticisms, but also for his role in Turkish social sciences since he laid out the fundamental questions many sociologists in vii Turkey are still seeking answers for. Professor William G. Martin taught me the necessity of patience, meticulousness, and ambition to seek out the invisible layers of historical problems. Professor Martin’s classes instigated a new form of consciousness that social inequality can only be overcome by dissecting the sociological underpinnings of the reasons. I, of course, thank other members of my committee for their important contributions. Professor Sencer Ayata deserves a special thanks, because in my quest as an academic he was the first one to grab my then flimsy and ephemeral attention with his urban sociology class when I was just an undergraduate student. Professor Ayata and I had long discussions in those days and these discussions were foundations of my understanding of social sciences and how one can carve a grasp of social phenomena out of seemingly unrelated issues. Kenneth Barr is another influential figure in this dissertation. I only have had the chance to work with him during my undergraduate years. His ideas, his open vision of academia, his helpfulness, honesty, and friendship were the main reasons why I went to Binghamton. I now understand, how a small bar like Belmar can have immense effects in the production of space. In Binghamton, I have had many good friends. Though none of those friends have known what I wrote in this dissertation, they contributed dearly to my project. Evrim Engin not only pushed the envelope, which is my mind, she continuously pinned me down to theoretical dead-ends and always lent me a hand to get out of these seemingly endless conundrums. Çağdaş Üngör was a source of support during my bleak and dark years in Istanbul. I would especially like to thank friends who shared my pain and my joy viii over writing –in addition to my constant enthusiasm for a good drink and great conversation: Utku Balaban, Nazan Bedirhanoğlu, Kaya Akyıldız, Marcin Grodzki, Güllistan Yarkın, Çağrı İdiman, Axel B. Çorluyan, Kristen Tran, Nikolay Karkov, Müge Serin, and Hakan Atay. I would also like to thank Şafak Erten, who read this dissertation, and moreover, shared his ideas on practically whatever I have written so far. He is possibly the best friend one can have and whenever he was around my often miserable life turned into an odyssey to the moon. I do not recall a word I have had with him that did not constantly turn into sparks in my mind. I owe much to Professor Feridun Yılmaz in Bursa, Uludağ University. He has inspired me with a new belief in academic oeuvre. Also, colleagues and friends in Bursa were of much help during the process of writing this dissertation. Especially, during the heady days of May-June 2013 and the summer of 2014, the friendship of Hüseyin Çellik was invaluable. I would also like to thank Mustafa Demirtaş, Hasan Yeniçırak, Bahadır Uzun, Hüseyin Damak, Müslüm Demir, and Berkay Altunay. When I was twelve or thirteen, my father, Ihsan Gülhan, told me about Nazım Hikmet. One of the first poems he recited from Nazım Hikmet was the “Builders’ Song.” And he and I saw together how every one of the stanzas coming out of Nazım Hikmet’s pen decades ago were true at the end of the 20th century. Later, my uncle, Ismail Yeter, showed me how the builders worked, lived, thought, and persevered. My father imagined this project, my uncle has seen it as a fata morgana. What befell on me was to pen their dreams, to write their travails. They had the vision, I had the opportunity and ambition to turn that vision into real, concrete, tangible words. I hope they can find a part of their ix Istanbul in this work, that their work is told as alive, as vivid, and as searing as the stories they told me when I was growing up. My mother, Sevil Gülhan, was an indefatigable source of resilience –a word frequently misplaced, but, I assure you, certainly apt in her case- who helped me weather the innumerable storms of my life. If my father and uncle had the vision, she had the wherewithal to bring the dreams into life. If only she was born somewhere else at some other timeline. My brother, Ilhan Gülhan, has never quit being there for me. Without my family, this work could not have come to fruition. This work is a profound expression of joy. I was bereft of joy for a long time, and, hence, my words were stale, my pen was dry, my drive was pointless. I owe much of regaining what I have lost in terms of the joy of life to N. Pınar Özgüner. She taught me how to enjoy a laugh again. I took her patience for granted –while I was buried in my office, writing. Thanks to love we built bit by bit, that joy we found in each other’s minds, this work is complete as befits Istanbul. In the end, I owe all of it, for better or worse, to Istanbul. x Table of Contents LIST OF TABLES ...........................................................................................................XV LIST OF FIGURES ....................................................................................................... XVI 1 INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................... 1 1.1 Purpose of the Study ..................................................................................................... 7 1.2 Approaching the Object: Unit of analysis................................................................... 10 1.3 Towards an Understanding of the Modalities of State-Space: Contributions and Possibilities .................................................................................................................. 12 1.4 Chapter Layout............................................................................................................ 33 2 THEORETICAL UNDERPINNINGS........................................................................... 39 2.1 The Site: Istanbul as an Aleph .................................................................................... 40 2.2 The Social Production of Concrete Space: Towards unearthing Space as Commodity ....................................................................................................................43 2.3 The Urban Revolution: Theoretical practice and the Question of the State ............... 51 2.4 An epistemology of State-space(s) ............................................................................. 57 2.5 The Spaces of Class: Divergent Representations of Space......................................... 59 2.6 The State-Space in Turkey: The State as an Episteme ............................................... 62 2.7 New State-Spaces and the Emergence of Unhindered Boosterism ............................ 65 2.8 Method .................................................................................................................. 69 3 EMERGENCE OF AN OTTOMAN URBAN TOPOGRAPHY .................................. 74 3.1 Land tenure in Ottoman Istanbul ................................................................................ 78 3.2 Commerce and the Ensuing Incorporation to the World-economy ............................ 86 3.3 The Spatial Characteristics of Classical Ottoman Istanbul ......................................... 95 3.4 Qualities of Pre-modern Istanbul’s Urban Fabric ..................................................... 102 4 IMPOSSIBLE PLANS AND THE CENTRIFUGAL SPATIAL FORCES: URBAN xi PLANNING AND MUNICIPAL ORGANIZATIONS IN MODERN ISTANBUL ..... 119 4.1 Plagues and Cholera: Hüzün and Tristesse and The Breaking up of a Spatio-Physical Order ................................................................................................................ 125 4.2 Rationing and Rationalizing Urban Space: Early Attempts in Planning in the Ottoman Istanbul ................................................................................................................ 132 4.3 Cosmopolitan Istanbul: Population and Ethnic Distribution of Neighborhoods during Fin-de-Siècle ................................................................................................................ 140 4.4 An Uneventful Series of Urban Plans: Tanzimat and Attempts in Reforming the Urban Space in Istanbul .................................................................................................. 152 4.5 Try Again, Fail Again: A Fruitless Series of Planning Attempts, von Moltke, Bekir Pasha, Arnodin, and Bouvard ......................................................................................... 158 4.6 The Demolition of Walls .......................................................................................... 165 4.7 The Expansion of the City: Railroads, Grand Boulevards, and Public Squares ....... 167 4.8 Modern’s Calling: The Urge to Urban Planning....................................................... 174 4.9 Henri Prost, Modernity without Modernism............................................................. 181 4.10 Prost in Turkey: The Mystery of the Lost Report and the Pains of an Urbanist..... 190 4.11 New Planning Commission and the Board of Professors: 1952-1956 .................... 197 4.12 Menderes and the Reproduction of Haussmannism in Istanbul.............................. 201 5 MEANDERING THE PATHWAYS TO THE PERIPHERY: THESES ON THE RISE AND FALL OF THE GECEKONDUS........................................................................... 209 5.1 The Gecekondu as a (Theoretical) Problem.............................................................. 214 5.2 Gecekondus as the Denigrated Growth Machines in Istanbul: Towards a Politicaleconomy of the Quiet Encroachment.............................................................................. 223 5.3 A Concise History of Gecekondus............................................................................ 234 5.4 A Genealogical Look at the Origins of the Gecekondu ............................................ 243 5.5 Theses on the Rise and Fall of the Gecekondus ....................................................... 261 5.6 The Development of Land Tenure in Turkey ........................................................... 274 5.7 Municipal and Institutional Organization of Istanbul ............................................... 281 xii 5.8 Charles Hart and Zeytinburnu ................................................................................... 294 5.9 Squatters in the Time of Cholera: Impending Epidemics and the End of Turkey’s Belle Époque ................................................................................................................ 305 5.10 The Rise and Fall of Gecekondus: The not-so-quiet Encroachment of the May Day Neighborhood ................................................................................................................ 310 5.11 From the Objective to the Subjective: May Day Neighborhood and Residual experiences of an urban sojourner .................................................................................. 328 5.12 The Distance that Brings Us Closer: Differences, Similarity, and Simultaneous Histories ................................................................................................................ 349 5.13 Bridging the Theoretical Gap: From Rural Societies to the Urban Areas, Transformation of the Petty Commodity Producers ....................................................... 362 6 BUILDING THE MIDDLE CLASS, BUILDINGS FOR THE MIDDLE CLASS: THE STATE-CORPORATE ALLIANCE AND THE GREAT HOUSING RUSH OF THE 2000S .................................................................................................................... 378 6.1 The Actors: Proponents of the Political-economy of Production of Space in Istanbul ..................................................................................................................390 6.2 Production of Housing in Istanbul: Agents, Actors, and Re-ordering of the Statespaces ..................................................................................................................395 6.3 Social and Economic Trends in the Making of Space: Istanbul and Turkey ............ 409 6.4 The Yapsatçı as a Bridgehead of Real Estate Development ..................................... 420 6.5 A Transitory Parenthesis: Co-operatives as Middle Class Building Initiatives ........ 438 6.6 The Little Apocalypse of 1999 and the Collapse of the Yapsatçıs ........................... 442 6.7 The Return of Austerity and the Beginnings of State instigated Private Developments ..................................................................................................................445 6.8 The Third Real Estate Boom in Istanbul and Corporate Take-over: JDP, TOKI, and Enlarged Capitalist Accumulation .................................................................................. 448 6.9 The State-Corporate Alliance and the Fate of State Contractors: Meteoric Rises and Stellar Falls ................................................................................................................ 462 6.10 The State-Space Conundrum .................................................................................. 477 6.11 The Instances: Representations of Space and the Manufacturing of Desire in Built Environment ................................................................................................................ 484 xiii 7 CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................ 497 GLOSSARY ................................................................................................................... 510 BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................... 530 xiv List of Tables Table 4.1: Population of Istanbul between 15th and 20th centuries ................................. 142 Table 5.1: Istanbul Population and Annual Average Growth ......................................... 247 Table 5.2: Squatter Houses in Important Turkish Cities................................................. 250 Table 5.3: Turkish Urban and Rural Populations ........................................................... 261 Table 5.4: Istanbul's Population as a rate of Turkish Population.................................... 282 Table 5.5: Employment Structure according to the type of Economic Activity in Istanbul ......................................................................................................................................... 374 Table 6.1: TOKI housing development in Istanbul districts ........................................... 453 Table 6.2: Home ownership in Turkey and Istanbul, 2000-2011 ................................... 458 Table 6.3: Big 10 Real Estate Developers of Istanbul .................................................... 466 Table 6.4: Survivors of 2001 Economic Crisis ............................................................... 467 xv List of Figures Figure 3.1: Istanbul in 1500 AD ....................................................................................... 86 Figure 4.1: The Prost Plan .............................................................................................. 190 Figure 5.1: Construction permits for new housing units in Istanbul 1926-1950 ............ 246 Figure 5.2: Construction Permits for Housing Units in Istanbul, 1954-1965 ................. 246 Figure 5.3: Annual GNP Growth Rate of Turkey 1924-2005 ........................................ 264 Figure 5.4: Average Growth of Economic Sectors ......................................................... 264 Figure 5.5: Annual Average Growth of Istanbul Population .......................................... 265 Figure 5.6: Distribution of Istanbul’s Population according to the Paternal Registration ......................................................................................................................................... 266 Figure 5.7: Distribution of Istanbul Municipalities' Population (TURKSTAT data) ..... 289 Figure 5.8: Ataşehir Map ................................................................................................ 312 Figure 5.9: Share of overall employment according to the enterprise size in Turkey .... 372 Figure 6.1: Actors of new home building: Housing construction permits according to the type of builders in Istanbul, 1992-2013 ......................................................................... 401 Figure 6.2: Housing Construction in Istanbul by Area ................................................... 409 Figure 6.3: Income Distribution in Istanbul, 2006-2013 ................................................ 415 Figure 6.4: Construction and Residential Permits in Turkey 1970-1991 ....................... 419 Figure 6.5: Construction and Residential Permits in Istanbul 1966-1991 ...................... 419 Figure 6.6: Construction and Residential Permits in Istanbul, 1992-2013 ..................... 420 Figure 6.7: Housing Construction Permits in Istanbul.................................................... 430 Figure 6.8: Annual Average Population Growth in Istanbul .......................................... 432 Figure 6.9: Construction by Building Cooperatives in Istanbul ..................................... 438 Figure 6.10: Housing Construction and Inflation Adjusted Unit Prices in Turkey ........ 448 Figure 6.11: Public Construction of Housing in Istanbul ............................................... 450 Figure 6.12: Public (TOKI) Housing Development Contractors in Istanbul .................. 456 Figure 6.13: Distribution of TOKI housing developments according to the type of development .................................................................................................................... 457 Figure 6.14: Unit Heat Map of Corporate Housing Development.................................. 470 Figure 6.15: Price Heat Map of Corporate Housing Development ................................ 470 Figure 6.16: Average Size of New Homes Built in Istanbul: 2002-2013 ....................... 475 Figure 7.1: State-space Modality I .................................................................................. 505 Figure 7.2: State-space Modality II ................................................................................ 506 Figure 7.3: State-space Modality III ............................................................................... 508 xvi Who built Thebes of the 7 gates? In the books you will read the names of kings. Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock? And Babylon, many times demolished, Who raised it up so many times? … Every 10 years a great man. Who paid the bill? So many reports. So many questions. Bertolt Brecht, Questions from a worker who reads1 1 Introduction This dissertation examines Istanbul as a historical, geographical, and material unity, as an urban space produced by the tensions between the processes of state-making and formations of capitalist relations of production. The main thesis that shaped my understanding of Istanbul is the need to treat the city as a whole. To be able to grasp the long history of this great city, one has to bring forward an analysis engrained in the longue dureé, since nothing in this city has emerged from the thin air, as nothing has disappeared without leaving deep cuts in the urban fabric –traces that endured. Today, Istanbul is at the forefront of international spotlight due to its role as the site of one of the rarest social phenomena in Turkish history: the Gezi uprisings. As wide scale urban rebellions that shook the city, as well as the country, from early June to midSeptember in 2013, Istanbul took the helm as one of the rebellious cities. My interest here is oriented towards the culminating effects, the deep waves of social relations and historical structures that gave birth to Istanbul we recognize today as an urban entity. The 1 Bertolt Brecht, Poems, 1913-1956 (New York: Routledge, 1998). 1 urban entity, and the reality that created that abstract entity are two different things, which I will grapple with in the chapter on the theoretical underpinnings of this dissertation. This work is divided into five parts: the first involves the urban theory that engendered my critical stance on Istanbul and the production of space and how that revolutionary urbanism can be harnessed to a re-evaluation of a semi-peripheral metropolis. The second part is related to an attempt in unraveling the early modern historical characteristics of the city and its overdetermining role in the formation of state mechanisms. The third part unearths the rupture that modernity instigated in the urban fabric and conjoining state institutions and mentalities that shaped the city. The fourth part focuses on the industrialization and population boom of the second part of the 20th century and locates the consequence of these two interlocked developments in the urban space-namely, in the form of the squatter settlements, the gecekondus. And finally, the fifth part grasps the cycles of boom and bust in the real estate investments in Istanbul and is concerned in the concrete production of space of the last five decades, since 1965. When I began writing this thesis in 2009, the Turkish newspapers were rife with news of urban development projects: Donald Trump-the behemoth of the American real estate market- recently announced a joint project of condominium towers with a fullfledged shopping mall located in central Istanbul with a glitzy high society party attended by a thousand prospective buyers; Zaha Hadid’s urban renewal project for Kartal-the metropolitan gates opening to Anatolia- attracted attention not only due to its complete tabula rasa treatment of one of the most congested, and almost crippled, districts of the city but also with a five billion dollars bill attached to the construction; Zorlu Holding, 2 meanwhile, did not hesitate to sink more than a third of the returns (eight hundred million dollars out of 2.3 billion dollars) they received from the sale of one of the top-ten consumer banks in Turkey (Denizbank) to a European bank in a hitherto forgotten stretch of land that belonged to the Department of Transportation right in the midst of the projected new CBD growth zone-naturally, their initial sketches indicated an upscale condominium tower or two adjoining another shopping mall with plenty of executive office space; Dubai’s monarch Al-Maktum family emblazoned with the vigor of an alltime high sovereign fund thanks to skyrocketing oil prices joined the new gold (or land) rush by successfully bidding seven hundred million dollars for an eleven acre land plot that belonged to the Metropolitan Municipality- which served for decades as Istanbul’s main bus depot, and the central nerve center of transportation for the city. However, infatuation with towers-the development was presumably to be christened as Dubai Towers- did immediately attract the ire of the public opinion.2 Meanwhile, TOKI (Toplu Konut Idaresi, literally: Mass Housing Administration) and the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality (with its special quasi-private development company, KIPTAS) announced new housing development projects while breaking ground at an unprecedented pace of forty thousand residential units per year.3 Facing the immense power of financial markets, the ubiquity of land speculation, the immense reconfiguration of Istanbul’s built 2 Ceren Karasu and Gokhan Kosetas, “Trump Towers’a Muhteşem Tanıtım Partisi,” Hurriyet, April 20, 2008; Fikri Turkel, “Ünlü Mimar Zaha Hadid’in Tasarladığı Kartal’ı Ilk Siz Görün,” Zaman, Cumaertesi Eki, January 12, 2008; Yasin Kilic, “Kartal’a 5 Milyar Dolarlık Dönüşüm Projesi,” Zaman, February 21, 2008; “Karayolları Arazisi Resmen Zorlu’nun,” Hurriyet, May 20, 2007; “İETT Garajı 1.15 Milyar YTL’ye Dubai Şeyhi’ne,” Hurriyet, March 21, 2007. Ismail Altunsoy, "Biz Olmazsak Insaat Mafyasi Dogar," Zaman, 31st of October 2007, Ahmet Kivanc and Yurdagul Simsek, "Carpik Yapilasmaya Dev Nester," Radikal, 20th of November 2006, Emre Boztepe, "Istanbul'un Trafigini 15 Milyar Dolar Acar," Radikal, 2nd of January 2007, Saray Sut, "500bin Konut Yapacagiz, Hedefimiz Alt Gelir Grubu," Zaman, 18th of June 2007. 3 3 environment, I thought that at no other time had the “city” undergone such deep cutting and extensive restructuring; neither the Menderes governments of the 1950s, nor Turgut Özal could have imagined the extent of transformation achieved by the modern prince of capital disguised in twin shrouds of real estate (re)development and urban renewal.4 This oldest, and for almost a millennium-albeit intermittently- the most populous metropolis of Europe was undergoing its Haussmannesque moment rather belatedly, and under completely different circumstances.5 Today, in early 2014, all of these real estate development projects unraveled amidst a new rush for political power. The cultural and political coalition between two different Islamist movements came to an end and this brought a hitherto unimaginable web of quid pro quo relationships mostly embedded in trades of cash and influence.6 The Trump Towers opened in fanfare, its partnership structure changed at least a couple of times, one contractor had to resign, and Donald Trump’s name stuck only as a very expensive tag on the buildings. In the half decade since, nothing has happened in Kartal. Hadid’s blueprints turned into a promise of über-intensive real estate speculation and the ground has not been broken. With the opening of the Istanbul Anatolian side’s subway service and the imminent prospect of the Marmaray connection as the ultimate suburban railway system between the eastern and western parts of Istanbul, Kartal once again came 4 Especially of note here are two essays by Cihan Tugal: Cihan Tugal, “Nato’s Islamists: Hegemony and Americanization in Turkey,” New Left Review 44, no. March-April (2007): 5–34; Cihan Tugal, “The Greening of Istanbul,” New Left Review 51, no. May-June (2008): 64–80. On the demographic scale of Istanbul in early modern history, see, P. Bairoch, Cities and Economic Development: From the Dawn of History to the Present (University Of Chicago Press, 1991). 5 “Ministers’ Sons, Businesspeople Detained in Major Graft Probe - Today’s Zaman, Your Gateway to Turkish Daily News,” TODAY’S ZAMAN, accessed January 9, 2014, http://www.todayszaman.com/news334187-ministers-sons-businesspeople-detained-in-major-graft-probe.html. 6 4 to the forefront as the hotbed of rampant urban renewal. Yet, Hadid’s plans stopped at the legal tracks; it was overturned five times by the administrative courts for the plans were deemed detrimental to the public good.7 Even if Hadid’s plans found the chance for application, there is scarcely any proof that it would not succumb to the intensive concrete building frenzy prevalent elsewhere in the city. Istanbul’s never been fateful when it comes to plans. Denizbank was bought by Dexia, a Belgian financial behemoth who started to feel the shattering effects of the 2008 global recession and had to be bailed out in a joint re-financing operation by the French and Belgian governments.8 To balance its already fragile checkbook and save itself from the red, the bank sold its Turkish operations for a sum of $3.6 billion to the Russian Sberbank.9 A more than fifty-percent return in five years –discounting the exorbitant rate of profits collected meanwhile- is even above the wildest success stories of the extraordinary hedge fund managers. Meanwhile, the Zorlu Group used the cash not only for buying the land to build upon, but also –apparently, as the most recent investigations revealed- to set the bureaucratic cogs of the authorities in action to raise the zoning permits, to help inspectors overlook the already dense construction. The glittering shopping mall adorned with four monstrous concrete towers opened in December 2013 waiting for hungry customers and buyers from oil rich gulf countries, since Turkish customers seem to no longer be in the mood for the “Zaha Hadid ve MİA Planlarına Mahkemeden Ikinci Kez Red! | Kartal Gazetesi,” accessed January 9, 2014, http://www.kartalgazetesi.com/23317-zaha-hadid-ve-mia-planlarina-mahkemeden-ikinci-kez-red. 7 Reuters, “Europe Approves Dexia Bailout,” The New York Times, December 28, 2012, sec. Business Day / Global Business, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/29/business/global/eu-approves-dexia-bailout.html. 8 9 “Sberbank close to Buying Dexia’s DenizBank in Turkey - Today’s Zaman, Your Gateway to Turkish Daily News,” Today's Zaman, accessed January 9, 2014, http://www.todayszaman.com/news-281448sberbank-close-to-buying-dexias-denizbank-in-turkey.html. 5 shopping craze. Al-Maktum royalty’s plans transpired to be short-lived; the administrative courts did not turn a blind eye to them as they did to the Zorlu family.10 The actual zoning limits to construction on the lot made construction impractical, or, rather not-profitable for the amount paid; they did not pay the full price of the title to the Istanbul metropolitan municipality, hence, the land returned to its original owner. Istanbul mayor, Kadir Topbaş, was sued at the council of state for this sale, punishable by up to three years in prison. There are rumors that the December 17, 2013 investigations are related to the IETT land as well.11There are still rumors of another bidding for prospective buyers, and the Mayor is said to have put the price tag at least at $1.1 billion for this prime stretch of land in the skyscraper center of Istanbul. Finally, TOKİ and KİPTAŞ, fulfilled, and surpassed, their goals of producing 500,000 housing units in Turkey and more than a fifth of those in Istanbul, even if, contrary to their initial announcements, only a sliver of those were built as social housing. These two state companies flooded Istanbul’s urban real estate market with over-priced, hyper-inflated, glitz-laden homes aestheticizing a mix-up of Stalinist architecture of mass housing complexes with a glimpse of post-modernist neo-baroque and Greek revivalist themes for the wealthy and powerful, hand in hand with a plethora of developers- the nouveaux riches of yet another imperial ascendancy of Istanbul. In the beginning, everything went “İETT Land Payment Halted by Ongoing Trials - Today’s Zaman, Your Gateway to Turkish Daily News,” Today's Zaman, accessed January 9, 2014, http://www.todayszaman.com/news-112607-iett-landpayment-halted-by-ongoing-trials.html. 10 “İstanbul Mayor to Stand Trial for Abuse of Authority - Today’s Zaman, Your Gateway to Turkish Daily News,” Today's Zaman, accessed January 9, 2014, http://www.todayszaman.com/news-215137-istanbulmayor-to-stand-trial-for-abuse-of-authority.html; “Prosecutor Removed from New Graft Probe amid Concerns of Cover-up - Today’s Zaman, Your Gateway to Turkish Daily News,” TODAY’S ZAMAN, accessed January 9, 2014, http://www.todayszaman.com/news-335036-prosecutor-removed-from-newgraft-probe-amid-concerns-of-cover-up.html. 11 6 quite smoothly, booming real estate market, rising rent levels, a redistributive state policy unmatched in scale and scope thanks to the breaking up of the floodgates of rampant speculation. Yet, as a student of this majestic city, I had to admit, the moment of such speculation was neither unprecedented, nor unequalled. Istanbul definitely had a mesmerizing power over the ones who controlled her. The more I write, read, experience, touch, be touched, and ultimately transformed by Istanbul herself, the more I sense that, this Aleph of the Alephs, was established as an imperial capital of power. Istanbul corrupts, absolute spaces of Istanbul corrupt absolutely. Thus, this text is the story of Istanbul in her various different lives, a tale of incorruptible decaying force of urban reality. 1.1 Purpose of the Study This dissertation examines the production of space that gave birth to several Istanbuls with a particular emphasis on the state’s determining role. The “new” Istanbul, in close inspection, is yet another novelty indebted to the profound contributions made by the central, and centralizing, authority of the state. The unraveling of the state and space conundrum at the level of spatial organization is the object of analysis in this dissertation. Focusing upon the production of concrete space and its integral components, real estate development, urban re/development and/or renewal, the construction industry, and the urban process in general, I will primarily grapple with the historical processes of the production of built environment. My objective in this dissertation is firstly, to pose Istanbul as a theoretical question. What would that entail, how could a city be a theoretical problem? Istanbul is first, and foremost, a construct, a second nature, a space 7 that is produced by means of human endeavor that traversed through variegated relations of production, relations of consumption, relations of theoretical practice, ideology, historiography, and as a historico-geographical entity made itself –or, reproduced itselfas a totality. In doing so, I will deal with the structure and organization of the production of space in Istanbul. Here, I develop an explanatory framework that is capable of portraying the transformation of the production of space, its components in the state-making, inasmuch as the metamorphosis of the socio-spatial conflict in Istanbul led to the emergence of new modalities of state-spaces. The prevalent, and puzzling, question here is the incipient effectiveness of the state in the last two decades, and the emergent reconfiguration of the primary agents in the housing market.12 The contemporary state in Turkey, unlike preceding periods of boom and bust cycles, has undertaken an active role in promoting urban (re)development, either through opening up a swath of hitherto pristine land that borders metropolitan regions (through redrawing laws on forest reservations) to private development interests,13 or by privatizing public land by dint of joint housing development projects.14 The institutional and social framework for the See A. Öncü, "The Politics of the Urban Land Market in Turkey: 1950–1980," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 12, no. 1 (1988), Kemal H. Karpat, The Gecekondu : Rural Migration and Urbanization (Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976). 12 One of the key points of contention between the AKP government and the secular elite in their first years of government was the planned amnesty for the unlawful occupants of the degraded/converted forest lands. According to the proposal of the Erdogan government -submitted to the parliament as a change in the clause 2-B of the Forest Law therefore known by public as the 2B controversy- the degraded/converted forest lands were to be sold to the current private occupants with prevailing market prices. Some estimates pointed out that this would bring in 25 billion US Dollars as extra budget revenues. Gürhan Savgı, "2-B Yeniden Geliyor Hedef 25 Milyar Dolar [Back to the 2-B(Reform): Target 25 Billion Dollars] " Zaman, 0410 2008. 13 A particular characteristic of urbanization in Turkey is the shape of land ownership. According to the reports of the Ministry of Environment and Forestry, 69% of the land in the province of Istanbul is publicly owned, and of this 49% is forest land. N. Musaoglu et al., "Istanbul Anadolu Yakasi 2b Alanlarinin Uydu 14 8 former was set up by the residual forms of housing development, namely the self-help housing of the gecekondus, or through the small-scale production.15 The encroachment of the urban land, the Turkish model of suburban sprawl or what Keyder and Öncü described as the globalization of a Third World metropolis, has been costly in terms of natural habitat and greatly contributed to a solidified feeling of urbicide in Istanbul.16 An important role in my research in this dissertation was given to home building as a matter of analysis. Not only because housing today represents a tremendous transformation both in regards the structural features of Turkish economy by dint of rampant real estate speculation and consequently in terms of incisive reconfiguration of the built environment, but also, house itself ensconces the kernel of all social relations in its innocuous reality: its form, its production process, its circulation. All these characteristics make up a multi-layered expression of totality. Three developments mark this structural transformation: first, the unprecedented intervention of the state in urban development; second, the withering away of small-scale self-employed contractors and the shifting of hitherto dominant logic of production of space-and state spatiality, and Görüntüleri Ile Analizi" (paper presented at the TMMOB Harita ve Kadastro Mühendisleri Odası 10. Türkiye Harita Bilimsel ve Teknik Kurultayı, Ankara, 2005). It is crucial to note that private ownership of land, agricultural or urban, is a relatively novel phenomenon in Turkey. Land had become a commodity in 1858; the private property rights on land was extended to foreigners in 1867. Çaglar Keyder, State and Class in Turkey : A Study in Capitalist Development (London ; New York: Verso, 1987), 43. I Tekeli and S Ilkin, Cumhuriyetin Harci, 3 vols., vol. 3 (Istanbul Bilgi Üniversitesi Yayinlari, 2004).The full development of commodification of housing had to wait until 1965, when the “Flat Ownership Act” passed in the parliament. See,.B. Batuman, "Turkish Urban Professionals and the Politics of Housing, 1960-1980 (1)," METU JFA (2006): 61. The dominant relations of private property ownership of land had long been confined since the state appeared to be the unquestionable monopoly owner of especially urban land. Ayse Bugra, "The Immoral Economy of Housing in Turkey," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 22, no. 2 (1998). 15 16 C. Keyder and A. Oncu, "Globalization of a Third-World Metropolis: Istanbul in the 1980's," REVIEW 17 (1994), Ç Keyder, "Transformations in Urban Structure and the Environment in Istanbul," in Environmentalism in Turkey: Between Democracy and Development?, ed. F. Adaman and M. Arsel (Ashgate Publishing, 2005). 9 finally the altered composition of the workforce-heavily indebted to the success of subcontracting and various other forms of flexible production schemas- in a rapidly transforming labor process. As the number of new homes built in the last two decades attests to an overreaching and ambitious period of growth in the housing provision in Istanbul, a unique transformation in Turkish society has taken place.17 1.2 Approaching the Object: Unit of analysis In this dissertation, Istanbul is taken as a geographical and historical totality, and in four different parts -in its Ottoman past, in its dalliances with modern planning attempts, through its death throes in the face of rabid industrialization efforts, and in its first true real estate boom. Although the shape, size, scale and the borders of the city changed, I intend to take Istanbul as a totality.18 Of definite interest here -more than the lofty deed of immersing one’s self in the inner workings of a locality, is the fecund openings, possibilities, broken dreams and promises, and the strange but, continuouscentripetal tendency of the city. For centuries-or, millennia, perhaps- the city has risen and fallen in the ebb and flow of fortunes of imperial forces and as the core of a historical unity, has never let the incessant currents of centrifugal and centripetal waves of change by-pass this beautiful city.19 According to the census reports, from 1984 to 2000 the number of buildings in Istanbul increased 72%, while the number of housing units sprang 146%. It is safe to argue that in the last two and a half decades Turkey has undergone a thorough urban revolution -perhaps, aptly put, the “apartment revolution.” The rest of Turkey has also undergone such revolutionary transformation alongside a population boom. 17 See, for brilliant monographies on localities in Istanbul: Sema Erder, Istanbul’a bir kentkondu Ümraniye (Iletişim, 2001); Şükrü Aslan, 1 Mayıs Mahallesi 1980 Öncesi Toplumsal Mücadeleler ve Kent (Istanbul: Iletısım, 2004); Ayşe Derin Öncel, Apartman: Galata’da yeni bir konut tipi (Kitap, 2010).: 18 19 In itself, the city has been a part of a crucial dynamic of Mediterrenean world-economy and the rise and fall of several World-Empires for at least a millenium and half. See, Stefanos Yerasimos, Ela Güntekin, and Aysegül Sönmezay, İstanbul: İmparatorluklar başkenti (Türkiye Ekonomik ve Toplumsal Tarih Vakfı Yurt 10 It’s pertinent to point out that a world-historical approach which acknowledges the Braudelian longue dureé, who spent an important amount of the second volume of his Civilization and Capitalism on the elusive question of how the birth of a new worldeconomy skipped the Ottoman Empire centered economically, administratively, and politically almost exclusively around its capital city, and the world-systemic approach developed by Immanuel Wallerstein, who showed glimpses of an answer to how a northern capitalism was already in the process of making, even at the apogee of an ascendant Ottoman world-empire.20 These have been immensely valuable contributions in envisioning the insuperable waves of building frenzies in Istanbul, how the city was damned at the end of the first World War, and how it was exalted once more beginning with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of Cold War, and how it became one of the engines of growth in a disconnected nexus between surplus-value accumulation at a grand level (the global circuits of capital) and a national economy, fully subordinated by a triumphant neoliberal discourse, almost fully owing its existence to the economic power of the city. Inasmuch as London owes its financial world city status, not to the British economy or the inner workings of the British production, consumption, and technology, but solely to its financial prowess and the newfangled white-collar aristocracy of the business services sector, Istanbul is bent upon loosening its ties to the Turkish economy in general. An essential quality of this dissertation is its intent to keep its focus on the urban Yayınları, 2000); Stefanos Yerasimos, İstanbul, 1914-1923: kaybolup giden bir dünyanın başkenti ya da yaşlı imparatorlukların can çekişmesi (İletişim, 1997). 20 Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century: The Structure of Everyday Life (University of California Press, 1992); Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century, With a New Prologue (University of California Press, 2011), 32. 11 built form. Unlike much of the undertakings in the field of urbanism and development of urban areas in Turkey, my study will primarily focus upon the urban form-either as gecekondus, or as the haphazardly built yapsatçı lots,21 or, as the gigantic TOKI skyscrapers and apartment towers formed alongside the newfangled rings of highways that strangled the historic urban core- and then question through what sort of historicgeographical relations did this urban totality come into being. I chose to embark upon a chronological study of this Istanbul’s historical formation. Unavoidably, history lurked beyond all spatial explanations in this one of the oldest and most important cities of the world. Yet, this is definitely neither a study of urban form, nor an architectural history.22 The aim of this study is but to delve into how predominant forms transformed the experiences of the city for ordinary human beings, and how the class positions of these ordinary human beings came into play through urban representations.23 1.3 Towards an Understanding of the Modalities of State-Space: Contributions and Possibilities I began writing this dissertation with a simple exploratory question. From the first Literally meaning, build-and-sell, yapsat was coined in the late 1970s and early 1980s to describe the small-scale building activities in urban areas. The term applies to the one-man construction companies who finance their own developments mainly through selling unfinished apartments in the market. Beginning in the late 1960s, the yapsat type of small-scale housing development overwhelmingly dominated the urban expansion of Turkish cities. Yapsatçı, with the Turkish suffix –çı, denotes a person who engages in this kind of building activity 21 22 On the development of urban form in Istanbul, Uğur Tanyeli, İlhan Tekeli, and İhsan Bilgin have written extensively on the issue; for the development of pre-modern architecture, see Doğan Kuban’s works. Jean-François Pérouse, Istanbul’la Yüzleşme Denemeleri (İstanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 2011); İlhan Tekeli, Development of the Istanbul Metropolitan Area: Urban Administration and Planning (IULA, 1994); Erol Tümertekin, İstanbul, insan ve mekân (Türkiye Ekonomik ve Toplumsal Tarih Vakfı, 1997). It is crucial to note this project owes a great debt to the steadfast research conducted throughout years by especially Tümertekin and Tekeli, under different contexts. 23 12 moment that I embarked upon constructing the treatise it was evident that Istanbul was to be my object of analysis. However the usual questions scarcely let me off the hook. What about Istanbul? What will your study focus on? What is the framework of your analysis? The birds and bees of Istanbul? The Bosphorus? People? Which particular aspect of the city will your analysis investigate? What kind of conceptual, historical, or relational piece will you scrutinize? In the beginning, I had no clear-cut answer to these questions, and, honestly, it did not make sense to come up with a categorical definition or a pigeonholed description of social phenomena. Perhaps that’s why the Aleph is apt here as an allegory. The Aleph is both an abstract and a concrete sign of how urban imagination can play a fecund and creative thought experiment in my endeavor to conceptualize Istanbul as an ordinary exception. Is Istanbul an exception? Of course not. For a student of history, as Fernand Braudel so aptly pointed out before, events are nothing but fleeting dust in the wind. Yet, as soon as that wind dies down, the dust and flotsam and jetsam settles, we face the seriousness of the unchanging power of geography. However I admired Braudel’s exquisite explanation that treats event as dust, I must admit, I always had a thinly veiled interest in the beauty, velocity, and viscosity of dust in the wind. Dust and rock-they are of the same substance. And the thing that turns one into another, in the vicious cycle of life, could only be time. I imagine that would be Spinoza’s response. Dust and rock, immanent and ephemeral, time and space, change and permanence: although uncanny, they seem to me one and the same. Actually, the term Aleph precisely refers to that fact. Aleph is both unique and not. The Turkish people have a tendency to treat Istanbul as unique, whereas the opposite is as true as it gets. 13 On top of that, one has to add into the equilibrium Istanbul’s extremely intricate and articulate history as the capital of three world-empires. Not only was the city shaped and reshaped many times, but also, each social and cultural context had carried on the heritage of the previous –akin to the Russian dolls. I have written somewhere else that the Aleph conjoins an essence of two different objects. First, the one with capital A, the Aleph, is unique, one-of-a-kind, invaluable, preciously singular pointing to the exceptionality of the concept. In that sense, Istanbul is exceptional. But, the second aleph, the one with the small-case a, is just an aleph among others. The beauty of Borges’ allegory lies in his ability to wink at the reader when the main protagonist uttered the words that there are speculations as to the existence of many other mythical alephs.24 So, the object of analysis is not spectacularly singular. It is rather one of a series of exceptionalisms that bring together different phenomena within the confines of its unique totality. It is true that Istanbul can be likened to Rio de Janeiro. With its gigantic slum settlements that cordoned off the whole city –the favela is definitely counterpart to the gecekondu. The same can be said about most other urban centers of the global South: Sao Paolo, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Johannesburg, Bangkok, Manila, Mumbai, etc. All of these cities share the burden of peripheralization, unequal distribution of income, proletarianization of the hitherto peasant masses during the incorporation to worldeconomy. Overall, especially from the latter part of the 19th century on, these cities were the solid examples of the growth of underdevelopment. This process was actively supported by the core Western countries for harnessing the cheap labor of the East (and, 24 J. L. Borges, The Aleph and Other Stories, 1933-1969, trans. N. T. Di Giovanni (Pan Books [ua], 1973). 14 later, the global South) to the cogs and wheels of capital accumulation. Beginning in the mid-20th century, the global South turned towards a model based on the lessons learnt from Western modernization and import-substituting industrialization became the dominant mode of organization of production and consumption. The nation-state was at the helm during this phase and a series of etatist industrialization attempts led to an unprecedented population growth in these cities. By the mid-1970s, a global backlash –disguised under the Cold War realpolitikagainst the ISI mode of state organization culminated in many military coups. Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, Mexico, Turkey were among the few. But, only in the early 1980s, with the center of the world-economy’s move towards neoliberal economic policies the final blow that devastated the ISI national state-centric developmentalism came to a decisive halt. In the 1980s, while Reagan and Thatcher deregulated, privatized and butchered the trade unions, the global South underwent a re-orientation of state policies. The state withdrew from productive activities. Economic policy was re-drawn on the basis of Austrian economics: state-owned enterprises had to be returned to private capital, the competitive qualities of each national economy was to be foregrounded, and unnecessary investment in productive sectors had to be culled. In addition, price subsidies on many basic goods –grain, gasoline, electricity, tele-communication, housing prices, education, municipal services, in other words, almost everything the Marxists deemed as collective consumption- was removed. This new system inaugurated a homo homini lupus scene globally where each national economy was left to its own devices to attract investment. The only way toward economic development was export oriented growth and cheap production for global markets by employing cheap home-grown labor, 15 which became the newly enshrined principle of development across the global South. All of a sudden, this made millions of people concentrated in the erstwhile rapidly industrializing Southern urban metropolises redundant. The golden mantra of the postwar world-economy, the promise of full employment was suddenly nowhere to be found. Under inflationary pressures both in the North and the South –though, in the South, this was more often than not a hyper-inflationary descent towards chaos- the social contract that writ the full employment as the state institutions’ primary responsibility was the first casualty. Crime rates sky-rocketed. A public political frenzy of justice and order permeated every city in the world. Yet, each Southern city has had its own peculiar story in this common trajectory of massive dispossession of the working classes. Unfortunately, Western urbanists have had a long tendency to treat the phenomenon of slums under the umbrella term of underdevelopment or Third World urbanization. A series of different cases, different narratives, contrasting issues, and last, but not least, divergent ethnic, religious, and racial issues are lumped into the same urban bandwagon. This is, in essence, reflective of an earlier Marxian dictum: de te fabula narratur. While the Western urbanists saw in the slums an unwavering source of agony and victimization of the working classes, the unconscious symptom underlying this vision was that one day, a class-based movement would overwhelm global capitalism. De te fabula narratur implicitly indicates that each social formation follows a strict historical progression –what you see in one sufficiently developed context will next be your story. The problem, though, concerns whether that narrative of development ever followed a straight line of progress, let alone historiographically problematic assumption that 16 development is linear under different contexts. As a matter of fact, maybe that story would never be another’s story and my story would deviate from the previous examples. An umbrella victimization of the dispossessed classes does not alleviate the conditions of those classes, but rather carries the risk that the liberatory possibilities and contingent potentials are overlooked. Contrary to mainstream representations of his work, Marx himself did not employ such a simplistic theoretical framework. In Grundrisse, SurplusValue Theories, and the much later published Resultate section of Das Kapital, he argued in plain sight that what makes labor is the sum of the possibilities.25 What constitutes the hypothetical political power of the working class is the contingency to disrupt the dialectics between labor and capital. Only after the 1960’s urban revolutions a questioning regarding the possibilities entailed in the working class came to center stage. The great urban rupture brought forward by the new classes –which were born and nurtured during the unprecedented period of economic growth in the post-war worldhave helped me locate the gist of the problem not in the narratur framework, but in the endless possibilities the urban question continuously posits. This does not mean a wholesale objection to the interconnected nature of worldeconomy. That would be a gross misrepresentation. Especially after the Great Recession of 2007-2009, the essential qualities of circuits of global accumulation of capital became much more evident alongside their effects on urban structures. The collapse of the mortgage market and subsequent crash of the inter-bank credit system have led to historically low interest rates. For the deft central banks of the developing and emerging 25 Karl Marx, Grundrisse; Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (rough Draft) (London,: Allen Lane, New Left Review, 1973); Karl Marx, Capital : A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes (London ; New York, N.Y.: Penguin Books, 1981); Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus Value: Volumes OneThree (Prometheus Books, 2000). 17 markets –who learned a great lesson from the 1997 Asian financial crisis in keeping exchange rates stable- global finance capital heralded cheap and abundant credit. While speculative capital fled from the safety of below inflation rate treasury bonds in Western markets, the global South reaped the benefits of their relatively liberalized and flexible financial markets. However, apart from a few examples in East Asia, that flow of cheap money did not materialize as an expansion of productive capacities in the South. Finance capital flowed from the North to the South in huge numbers, but this barely put a dent in the export-oriented productive sectors. Real estate provided the safest, easiest, and the shortest path to sumptuous return on capital. Cycles in real estate speculation and the ups and downs of land rent on a global scale would be an excellent research agenda, a feat worthy of Kondratieff inspired political economists.26 In the last seven years, as the financialization of land rent –via, mortgage loans- collapsed in the North, finance capital flowed in droves to the South. In places like China, where already depressed levels of wages still have room to contract and where hundreds of millions of people are looking forward to gaining their welldeserved spots among the “middle class,” this might be sustainable. Here, the ethos of the middle class, which mystifies and glorifies ownership of automobiles, homes, and electronic goods has emerged as the panacea. Yet, in a country like Turkey, where the whole system of production is geared towards exports of cheap second generation industrial goods (textiles, garments, automobiles, steel, and processed food products), this D. Harvey, “The Urban Process under Capitalism: A Framework for Analysis,” in Urbanization and Urban Planning in Capitalist Society (London ; New York: Methues, 1981), 91–122; David Harvey, The Limits to Capital (Oxford [Oxfordshire]: B. Blackwell, 1982); D. Harvey, “Land Rent and the Transition to the Capitalist Mode of Production,” Antipode 14, no. 3 (1982): 17–25; D. Harvey, The Urbanization of Capital (Blackwell, 1985); D. Harvey, “Flexible Accumulation through Urbanization: Reflections on ‘PostModernism’ in the American City,” Antipode 19, no. 3 (1987): 260–86; D. Harvey, Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography (New York: Routledge, 2001). 26 18 does not bide well. With one of the lowest rates of education among the OECD countries –on average, a typical Turkish individual receives 6 years of formal education- economic growth in Turkey since 1983 has been limited to short bursts of growth financed by flows of foreign capital immediately followed by dire crises. In this global flow of finance capital between the North and the South, the real source of attraction for today’s urbanists has been the centers of accumulation. These urban nodes of global capitalism are unfettered from their own national circuits of capital and have become centers of business services and other auxiliary and legal operations. These unfettered nodes of global capital accumulation have also greatly contributed to the urban concentration of social injustice. The global city has come to represent a nascent complex named FIRE: Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate. Unfortunately, urban analyses in the last two decades are squeezed into two polar opposites: the South as a planet of slums, and the North as a network of global cities run by FIRE executives, managers, ultra-rich CEOs, and inhabited by a nascent creative middle class. The task I set myself here in this dissertation is to move beyond this well traversed duality and go beyond these choices. Here, I employ urban anthropology in the hope that anthropology is capable of re-seating the orientalistic urbanism it helped engender – the most popular example of which was of course The Children of Sanchez, a study conducted in 1950s Mexico City by American anthropologist Oscar Lewis, and its namesake motion picture shot in the late 1970s.27 The slums are not the sites of victimization; yesterday’s slum dwellers are today’s middle class-though they do not utter that loudly. Oscar Lewis, The Children of Sanchez: Autobiography of a Mexican Family (Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2011). 27 19 I use the term middle class in a heuristic fashion. The middle class itself only appears in social relationships. It is not dependent on economic structures –like, bourgeoisie and proletariat, nor can it be understood as a position of social status or cultural capital. The middle class appears at the moment of ideology, where culture becomes an all encompassing language of power relations, and under late capitalism the middle class has become an integral element of reproduction of capitalist mode of production. Hence, the middle class is approached in this work as an exploratory apparatus and points to the ones who are neither industrial workers, nor owners of means of production. This middle class is a vast collection of interests, a mediating class that helped usher state-spaces in a new level of effectiveness.28 On the other hand, perhaps as an obverse image of erstwhile anthropological orientalism oriented towards the slums, a novel resolute interest in the middle class presents the gated community as a new urban object worthy of analysis. A tremendous amount of interest shown in the gated communities owes its existence to the tacit assumption that the middle class is a social facilitator that overcomes social and economic injustice. This assumption is not only widely circulated in academic circles, but also reproduced journalistically in a ubiquitous fashion. I call this the mission civilatrice attested to the middle class: a neutral, successful, objective, productive and consumptive class fraction that harbors democracy, an institutional basis of capitalist economic relations, and technological advancement as ideological anchors. Of course, in close scrutiny, nothing could be further from the truth. The middle class is based upon its I owe this heuristic definition to Anton Pannekoek’s short treatise on the changing patterns of old middle class in fin-de-siècle Europe. See, Anton Pannekoek, “The New Middle Class,” International Socialist Review, 1909. 28 20 talents in suppressing a plethora of differences: ethnic, religious, racial, class-based. Essentially, the middle class is the idealized embodiment of the state –in a sense, the middle class is the state incarnate- and hence, state-spaces (or, the new state-spaces) have become where the middle class lives, consumes, and produces. What befell a social scientist is the task to locate this dual existence of the middle class on the cross-section of layers that make up the state-space. At that point, the main objective of this dissertation appears, to find the exception to the ordinary in Istanbul, as well as the ordinariness of urban exceptionalism. What makes this dissertation unique is its insistence on the exceptionalism of the ordinary. A certain allure, I admit, exists in the paradigm of global cities: the attraction of worldwide circuits of capital, mind-blowing mushrooming of the gated communities, the triumphant pilgrim’s progress of the nascent middle class, and the mechanisms of political power embedded in transnational networks. Yet, in the beginning, I set my eyes on a more alluring empirical object: the historical and geographical totality of a city, Istanbul. I will make my understanding of totality clear in the next chapter when I discuss Henri Lefebvre’s thought and his conceptualization of totality. In this dissertation, I perceived Istanbul’s totality in two integral parts: the first is on the paradigm of historical sociology and its possible resonation within urban sociology. The third and fourth chapters are built on top of that paradigm. The second part continues the historical streak but turns its focus towards an intersection of urban political economy, urban semiotics, and culture. The fifth and sixth chapters are written on that premise and are an attempt in bridging the gap between spatial form, everyday life, language, and politics at a local 21 level. The latter part is where the more audacious statements of this dissertation lies: the rich heritage of the slum settlements, the transformation of the slum dwellers into the new middle classes, and the changing shape of state-space nexus are the three underlying themes. The difference of the ordinary rises at this moment. Any precursory glance at Istanbul’s built environment would suffice to augment the feeling that this city is rudimentarily built. The city is surrounded by shoddily rising reinforced concrete apartment buildings of bludgeoning boredom, colored by the dull, grey, and amorphous forms, and is routinely butchered by highways and haphazard housing developments that seemingly grow out of nowhere, brutally asphyxiated by the monolithic power of the concrete. Hence, the concrete in the title serves a dual purpose: it symbolizes the building material as well as the objective situation the city –and its residents- find themselves in. This is a binding agreement between Istanbulites and the city: the ephemerality of the dullness here becomes the determining essence of the urban fabric. This agreement owes its existence –and origin- to a common denominator of all urban citizens: the deference to the state. Before any religious teachings, before the first signs of subjectivity, even before the first step is taken on earth, citizens of Turkey learn how to internalize an omnipresent and omnipotent object: the state. On the one hand, unavoidably, the state is Kafkaesque in the Turkish context; inasmuch as any other nation-state, the state is there as the grand inquisitor. Everyone waits at the gates of the state. Yet, in the Turkish case, the state not only makes you wait, but also waits for you as well. Neither the citizenry, nor the state give up on waiting for each other. This state is an extremely centralized and concentrated state with very few resources and fewer resources 22 than it can command at any point. The hollowness of the state is legible – the waiting is long, the outer shell is hard as granite, but, inside that shell, few have managed to dwell for long. The actual state is but a shadow of what it projects outwards. In this dissertation, I examine a problematic which was abandoned by Marxists a long time ago. Although it is uncanny to point out, I’d like to reiterate that I want to bring the state back to the center of the discussion. It is true that the state as a determining component of spatial and geographical relations has been studied in great detail. However, a great deal of the research agenda was either oriented towards Ankara, where the overwhelming presence of the central state is obscenely observed, or attuned to coming up with solutions for underdevelopment, in which the state is treated as rationally incapable of giving order to an unruly urban phenomenon. Here, I investigate the different modes a city takes under different configurations of a state –composed of, but not limited to, cultural, ethnic, religious, class-based, formal, and spatial elements. By studying Istanbul alone, it was possible to gauge divergent trajectories of the production of space that the city takes. The starting point of this idea is the determining role played by the state on the formation of urban geography. However, this does not imply that the state is a thinking, reified object. On the contrary, the state acts upon the city through a mix of conscious, unconscious, and unintended actions. The agglomerations of these conscious, unconscious, and unintended actions make up what I understand as the state-space. It is also imperative to underline the fact that this whole process is neither static, nor a one-way relationship. To unearth the configurations of state-space in Istanbul, I paid predominant attention to four elementary components that create the state-space relationship: territory, 23 place, scale, and networks. These four do not carry unchanging qualities that one can freeze in time, but rather dynamic relations in constant flux, and, hence, they can only be recognized historically. The easiest to describe, but to hardest to pinpoint, among the four elements of state-space relationship is territory. I define territory as an aspect of urban geography, where borders, limits, boundaries, and uses of land are made by the intricate play between the state and social forces. What is defined by the state as urban? Where is out of bounds? How does a certain state institution enter the fray to define what is within the territorial limits of the city? How is outside defined? What are the principles and ideological and practical considerations of the state in delineating the borders? Who are the citizens of the city? How is urban citizenship defined? What is the distribution of population within the pre-determined territory? What are the boundaries of different religious, ethnic, and racial groups, and in the Ottoman case, how are the relations between different millets structured within the given territory? How does the city expand? Are the planners, political decision-makers, or immigrants the predominant actors of territorial expansion of a city? These questions are explicable through the study of territory encapsulating the urban structure, both from within and outside. Place, on the other hand, is the most theoretically seductive of all four. While urbanists have a certain soft spot when it comes to discussing the role of place, the fertile possibilities of social interaction harbored in locality, plenty of research has been interested in actual geographical coordinates –basically, in territorial aspects. Treated as such, place is nothing but a vector, it is not described, as it should be, as a set of meanings, as representations of space. What I suggest in understanding place is deeply 24 related to how we grasp subjectivity. For instance, the notion of place and its relevant patterns of subjectivity ensconced in the capital of a world-empire and in a rapidly expanding industrial center of a peripheral underdeveloped nation are completely different things. Inasmuch as imperial hubris starkly contrasts with the melancholia grounded in the gradual feeling of collapse, a forceful centralizing gravity and a dazzling speed of centrifugal withering of power are separate from each other. Local identities built around incessant waves of cholera, plague, fires, and catastrophes born out of constant warfare are not comparable to the interplay of fast commodified neighborhoods, a burgeoning drive for consumption complete with shopping malls, high rises, and suburban living. As an extension, the place of the Marxists is essentially not comparable to the place of liberal mainstream geographers, and the difference is no less than the gap between how urban planners conceive locality and how sociologists operationalize it as a dependent variable. Similarly, the gated communities of the advertisement agencies – although seemingly pointing to a similar phenomenon- are not the same thing as the construct of these class indicators in the sociological imagination. Place, in itself, is the site of nominal collective memory. It is where the irascible remembrance etches itself in the collective conscience--where signs, symbols, symbolisms, names, references, utterances, phonemes, and language that binds all of these together meet. The dreams and creativity of people who reside there and the ongoing insurmountable destruction of time intertwine at that place. The flow of everyday life, routine imbued with politics, the pains of poverty and wealth, all come together as an almost imperceptible nature. Scale, the third layer of understanding state-space relations, has only begun to 25 gain its prominent position recently within urban social sciences. Yet, like other useful concepts, the study of scale is laden with an incipient danger, turning it into a cure-all explanatory device, a sort of deus ex machina. In my conceptualization of scale employed in this dissertation, scale serves two main functions. First, it is a collection of capabilities, inherent abilities of social actors on the whole of the urban structure. Among these actors, the state has an exclusive monopoly via its power to define and impose scales on the spatial framework. Therefore, a certain tendency to treat scale as mere state-making activities is foregrounded, especially in the Turkish social science circles. As a corollary, such perspectives that are primarily focused on the unhindered development of statemaking are limited in their assumption that the scale is nothing more that intra and interstate levels. Although it is true that scale is part and parcel of a series of relations that makes intra and inter-state relations possible, it risks relegating scale as a mere interface between the state and the city. Thus, in my view, a second re-evaluation of scale is in order. This should be a more comprehensive reformulation of scale that takes into consideration the relative concentration of social, economic, political, and cultural relations. In other words, economic capital has a certain predetermined scale of its own: holding companies, joint stock corporations, stock options, bond markets, stock markets, derivatives, hedge funds, sovereign funds, etc. are basically divergent elements of concentration of social relationships, and hence, imply different scales. Similarly, social and to an extent, cultural, capital have their own scale: differences in taste, assumptions of refined taste and aesthetics –or, what makes taste socially distributed- country clubs, golf clubs, alumni organizations, public radio memberships, library cards, reading groups, faith- 26 based institutions, etc. Scale is made up of the distances, of changing arrays of the qualities of social, economic, and cultural qualities. In the Turkish context, the state holds an undeniable sway on how individuals are distinguished among divergent scales. The Friday Prayer communities at the mosques, fraternal organizations of the Main Streets, parochial schools, political party affiliations, college graduations, ethnicity and its inseparable markers in distinctive accents of speech, physical traits, gender roles and their representations in music, cinema, in routine habits and rituals, all point to the multiple spectral division of scalar relations. And, yes, under scrutiny, class-based traits make more sense as scalar distributions of relationships. What makes the state invincible when it comes to understanding the question of scale is its ubiquitous role in all of these seemingly scattered realms. The state is the allegorical black hole in Turkey: it breaks and bends, destroys and mutes, soothes and extends whatever enters its domain. Remember, the veil was banned in college campuses for a long time in Turkey. The critiques of the government and the military establishment argued that the headscarf was a political symbol, and therefore, should not be permitted in the campuses. As the squabble went on for more than two decades, the embodiment of the Turkish state, Prime Minister Erdogan, uttered an innocuous question: What if the veil is political? So what? The debate died down, the PM, on his own, single-handedly redefined the whole question of scale: the gender question is out the window, politics filled in.29 The state would know what is political, where politics begin and end. A more proverbial example for the role of the state as a black hole of the scale can be better 29 Robert Ellis and Steve Trumble, “Turkey’s Religious Bent,” Los Angeles Times, accessed July 23, 2014, http://www.latimes.com/opinion/la-oew-ellis28mar28-story.html. 27 revealed by an older example. One RPP mayor-governor, in the 1940s, was so furious with the socialists –who went through absolutely horrific tortures during his time- is said to have shouted out that, “If it’s deemed necessary [and beneficial] to bring communism to Turkey, we [the state] would be the ones bringing it.” That’s why, as you will read in the fourth chapter, a history of urban planning in Istanbul is never free from the incessant nuisance of state intervention. At that point, the networks promise a respite from the dead-weight of the state. Unlike scale, networks are, more often than not, in need of formalized systems of recognition. Yet, on the one hand, a network is a layer where the scale is crystallized. I would like to describe how to conceptualize –and, visualize- a network, by borrowing a vivid imagery from Henri Lefebvre’s brilliant work, The Urban Revolution, which continues to be a constant source of inspiration for me.30 Lefebvre suggests having a look down under during a night flight; the urban network presents itself in its entirety via the lights. I think we have to hang onto that vision as a clear image of the networks. It is a tangible expression of urban networks. And the scale of it is evident as well –a bird’s eye view is one’s scalar position in the entangled web of different possible positions. The networks lay themselves out in all their glory: where the territorial distribution and separation of the city are, where the workers go to work, where they live, who the bosses are, where the cars are, where the dark corners are located on the urban geography of the world, which cities are connected to the network, which are not. Of course, social phenomena do not reveal themselves as evidently and as clearly Lefebvre wrote: “The urban is most forcefully evoked by the constellation of lights at night, especially when flying over a city-the dazzling impression of brilliance, neon, street signs, streetlights, incitements of various kinds, the simultaneous accumulation of wealth and signs.” Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 118. 30 28 as what one sees in a night flight. Some social relations are more powerful than others; they are inescapably present. Some other connections are barely visible, but they contain the power of weak links; they are made up of thinly threaded, but resolutely strong webs. When I first started to write this dissertation, I sought to answer how one person whose parents immigrated to Istanbul from a provincial village sixty or seventy years before still keeps on calling herself a member of that provincial community and not an Istanbulite. I believe the networks –especially the weaker kind- are the party to blame in this social relationship. And, I believe, I found the answer to that question in Istanbul’s massively successful redistribution of public land to those immigrant provincials. The answer is embedded in the redistribution of social resources. A great many socialist revolutions tried to claim the throttles of power and establish themselves as the true guardians –vanguards- of the dispossessed multitudes. While the socialist revolutions –mainly, peasant revolutions, perhaps with the glaring exception of the Paris Commune and the Bolshevik October Revolution- predominantly depended upon a thorough redistribution of land –and even the decades’ long reign of the Mexican PRI (Party of Institutional Revolution) owed its existence to an extensive land reform, Turkish republicanism largely refrained from meddling with the affairs of large landowners. And, actually, the state itself was the largest landowner for a long time especially in the western half of the country.31 What made the republican state enduring –apart from the The amount of land held by the state was first made public in the late 1990s, during the relative liberalization of the state institutions. The head of National Estates Administration, Doğan Cansızlar, told the newspapers that the state owned 54% of land in Turkey and these properties were registered to the treasury –thence, the Turkish name of public lands: hazine arazisi, means treasury’s land. “Türkiye’nin Yarısı Internette Satılacak,” Hürriyet, January 17, 2000. Later, Turkish professional urban planners’ organization referred to this well publicized figure. ŞPO, “Plansız Hazine Arazilerinin Satışının Durdurulmasına Ilişkin Genelge Hakkında Rapor” (Şehir Plancıları Odası, September 13, 2006), http://www.spo.org.tr/genel/bizden_detay.php?kod=186&tipi=4&sube=0#.U9pqMvmSx1c. According to the web site of the National Estates Administration, 240.000 sq. kilometers of land –around one third of 31 29 apparent use of coercive methods- was its successful redistribution of urban public land which lasted decades and helped working class masses integrate into the industrializing urban centers. Yet, what really made the republic feasible and long-lasting was the Democrat Party’s post-1950 redistribution of public resources. This statement is contrary to what the mainstream Turkish scholarship argued: the academic dogma prescribed that although the Kemalists were scarcely interested in land reform, the peasants’ popular support for the regime owed its existence to the military achievements of the founding elites during the War of Liberation. Gecekondus –the Turkish squatter settlements- were the greatest and most egalitarian contribution of the DP and its right-wing successors in Turkey. If one of the unique contributions of this dissertation to the urban studies in Turkey is the transformation of the state-space nexus in Turkey, the other one would be the greater transformation of rural immigrants into the nascent middle class of the last two decades. Istanbul, in her subjection to this unpredictable and spontaneous project of egalitarian redistribution of public resources, is a young city. It is not the only city that was subject to this humongous wave of squatting, not even the biggest in terms of size. What makes Istanbul exceptional is not the size of squatter settlements. It’s not even the exceptional scale and active networks that partook in the gigantic schemes of expansion. Istanbul is a moveable feast, a city that always changes shape, but nevertheless stays intact. This is a city with a peculiar character, a soul of its own, and an unstained melancholia of times past. Istanbul has an exceptional talent to withstand the corruption Turkey’s landmass, is registered as owned by the treasury, including 160.000 sq. kilometers of forest land, 20.000 sq. kilometers of arable land, and 60.000 sq. kilometers of land with not distinction. But the web site does not clearly state the amount of unregistered land –mostly in the areas where cadastral work is not completed. See, http://www.milliemlak.gov.tr/187 30 of time. The famed British historian William Gibbon wrote in the 18th century that the oldest known precursor of Istanbul, Byzantion, was an honorable exception. At a time when spoils of war, benefits of imperial majesty, extravagance in betrayal and in violence exceedingly permeated the Roman Empire, Byzantion was the only city that resisted the siege laid by the armies of Septimus Severus for more than three years. In Gibbon’s words, at a time when no other city in the whole Mediterranean basin showed the slightest example of struggle, Byzantion risked its existence in a show of defiance. In the end, the whole city –whoever remained after a long and torturous period of starvationwas decimated, the walls were said to be demolished by the Severan forces. Yet, the city was an honorable exception in a sea of backstabbing drudgery of intricacies.32 This peculiar spirit of resistance is what makes Istanbul an honorable exception. Although, in 2013, this spirit was gloriously on display during the Gezi Uprisings, I chose the title way before the beginning of the demonstrations. I thought that the resilient spirit is not merely about the social movements that brought life to a joyous halt for the first two weeks of June, 2013. It is also evident in how the city transformed the millions that flooded the streets, the greenery, the walls of the old city, the rivers, and the shores of Istanbul in the last century. The city stood against the exorbitant forces of industrialization, urban sprawl, commodification of land, commercialization of history, and the touristic assault on its character. People came to Istanbul, not for the sake of Istanbul, but for the sake of a new, prosperous life they lacked at home. Istanbul gave herself, and, in return, gained millions of Istanbulites. Different each time, each wave of Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1776), 123. 32 31 immigrants ended up contributing to the city in a spectacular fashion. The urban characteristics remained firm. It has been a long, troubled, arduous, painful, and destructive process. Yet, the city is intact-however beleaguered, fraught, and broken. In the beginning of the 21st century, Istanbul gave birth to another state, a strange brew of a novel state-space. This happened after a long hiatus between the mid-19th century and the late 20th century, when the political forces, centralizing agencies first in the modern world-system, and second, in the Turkish national context stymied the city, Istanbul reinvented itself as the primary site of capital accumulation and as the promised land of a triumphant class. This new class, actually a class fraction, is the subject matter of the second part of this dissertation. The middle class came to be reckoned as the new face of the city. The problem is related to its emergence and the structures that prepared its appearance. The third major contribution of this dissertation is the claim that today’s ascendant middle class owes its existence, its geographical and metaphorical place, and its abilities in determining the scale of social and economic relations in the city to the erstwhile gecekondus. The emergence of the middle class in Istanbul is a consequence of the appropriation of public resources in an earlier era by the gecekondu dwellers. Today, that particular class fraction has become recognizable in a novel form thanks to extensive commodification of land, financialization of housing markets, and rampant real estate speculation. In other words, an endeavor to understand the characteristic attributes of the middle class in Istanbul does not only entail research in Nişantaşı, Suadiye, or Kemerburgaz –some of the most affluent neighborhoods of the city, but it also means 32 incursive research that comprises the erstwhile gecekondu neighborhoods, places like Zeytinburnu and the May Day neighborhood. I suggest that beyond the typical expressions of the middle class culture that held automobiles, gated communities, and higher education in high esteem, a vibrant, particularly Turkish middle class life exists in the old gecekondu neighborhoods, an urban culture embedded in small-scale producers’ language, life-style, and everyday habits. These old gecekondu districts now play the role of trend-setters in a wider circle –a reach unimaginable by the old Istanbulite middle class. And they partly owe their existence to the small-scale entrepreneurial developers and contractors’ infinitesimal efforts in profit-mongering through the transformation of the built environment in the last two decades. In this dissertation, I at least hope to shed some light on how the gecekondus transformed into the new growth machines of an ascendant middle class. On the other hand, the question of the middle class and its ideological and discursive existence is a problem that goes far beyond the confines of this dissertation. My primary concern here is not the theoretical construct of a new class, but the selfprofessed being of a nascent social phenomenon. My task is to locate the emergence of the middle class in the matrix made up of territory, place, scale, and networks and to bridge the gap between the knowledge on state and the practices of space in Istanbul’s peculiar context. 1.4 Chapter Layout In the next chapter, I will discuss the theoretical framework underlying the arguments laid bare herein. I will examine the theoretical issues surrounding the study of 33 Istanbul as an object of analysis and the ensuing questions regarding the empirical study of the city and space, the spatial configurations of the state and how the spatial form of housing in Istanbul has come to represent the newfangled urban revolution-in the second, implicit, meaning of the term according to Henri Lefebvre- in Turkey. The urban revolution, as hinted by Lefebvre incessantly, replaced the industrial revolution –and as such, starkly provided a much more explanatory framework than the post-industrial revolution. In Lefebvre’s view, as the societies increasingly urbanized and rendered any dialectics of urban and rural obsolete, urbanization replaced industrialization as the main growth machine of capitalist accumulation. He named this new social and economic structure as the state mode of production.33 Here, under this new mode of production, the ubiquitous mechanisms of state-making skilfully disguised its personality through its dual modes of stealth –neo-liberalism and neo-dirigisme- produced a social space that wed consumptive production to productive consumption. The last three decades in Istanbul had bared the stealth, made the invisible glaringly naked to discerning investigators, but, still, the state mode of production was not simply formed by the capitalistic mode of production. The second chapter retains the indelible question of a world-empire’s capital and investigates the Ottoman characteristics of the city that have irretrievably shaped contemporary spatial relations. In this chapter, I answer the fundamental Braudelian question: how does a center of a complex world-empire amidst the intricate and interwoven structure of cultures, civilizations, economies, and certainly temporalities 33 Henri Lefebvre, Neil Brenner, and Stuart Elden, State, Space, World: Selected Essays (U of Minnesota Press, 2009); Neil Brenner, “State Theory in the Political Conjuncture: Henri Lefebvre’s ‘Comments on a New State Form’.,” Antipode 33, no. 5 (November 2001): 783, doi:Article. 34 comes into being? And, more to the point, how does one center of political power evolve, throughout time and through immense vicissitudes, in its relative weight and how is this change reflected through divergent and centrifugal geographical qualities of the city? Of special import here is the peculiar land tenure prevalent in Istanbul, and how the role played by non-Muslims helped secure an incipient urban social class –a protobourgeoisie of sorts- that played a crucial role in the tumultuous years of incorporation to the modern world-system in the 19th and early 20th centuries. In the third chapter, modernity is the protagonist of Istanbul’s emerging life. As modernity ascended in Istanbul’s tragic history of endless transformations, what I dubbed as the succession of Istanbul’s various divergent lives is brought under scrutiny. In this chapter, I situate the spatial responses from a particularly Ottoman class fraction, the askerî class, the military-bureaucratic class that was made by the state, and in return, perhaps as an irony of dialectics, they held the state as their hostage, as their ransom for keeping a hollow social formation alive way after its expiration date. This intervention in the spatiality of Istanbul from above –from the state elites, professionals, architects, planners, Westerners, Europeans, sultans, novelists, modernizers and the modernized as the complete cast- produced a city that is both peculiarly Ottoman, and surprisingly, though adamantly, unfinished. Here, the elites -including the power-elites as perfectly pictured by C.W. Mills, and my tongue-in-cheek neologism regarding the Turkish intelligentsia, the powerless elites, the professionals, the bureaucrats of the state, intervened time and again with the requirements of a crumbling empire, from the early 19th century onwards, with the Tanzimat reforms. Tanzimat (which means reform in old Ottoman Turkish) found its 35 immediate spatial form and the endless possibilities in its engagement with modernity in İstanbul; i.e., the very encapsulation that gave rise to the set of beliefs ensconced in the zeitgeist. The disorderly city came to be disciplined incessantly by waves of reformers. The reformers earned nothing in return but heaps of hüzün, an acerbic, yet enduring nostalgia, a class-based trait, that defined the early 20th century Istanbul, as well as its depictions in art. The fifth chapter focuses upon a truly Turkish phenomenon, the squatter settlements called gecekondu. Here, I discuss the questions of their beginnings, the reflections that they elicited from the power-elite, how the squatter houses proliferated in İstanbul, how that became a consistent phenomenon in Turkish politics from the 1950s until the late 1990s, and how they fared in terms of the political economy of Turkish industrialization in the 20th century, and finally, how they began their long and protracted dissolution in the rampant real estate speculation of the early 21st century. In the first part of this chapter, I dissect the intellectual, academic, and bureaucratic responses to the social phenomenon of squatters from the 1940s on. In the second part, based upon a thorough comparison of my field research, and previous research in two historically opposing ends of the processes of building gecekondu settlements, in Zeytinburnu and May Day neighborhoods, I underline their function as the true growth machines in urban politics, economy, and culture in both Istanbul and Turkey. The sixth chapter focuses attention toward the actors of an unprecedented wave of real estate speculation, how thousands of acres were commodified into precious and overinflated housing units with the extravagant encouragement of the state, and how these new state-spaces became important factors in determining the urban shape and 36 architectural form of Istanbul. Here, as a permanent undercurrent of urban phenomena, I describe an ascendant Turkish middle class identity in Istanbul. How this new middle class created their own spatial perceptions as an implicit extension of new state-spaces while increasingly articulating its connections to the global circuits of capital is one of the main themes of this chapter. As a consequence, the so-called “new” middle-classes have not only carved a living space in the core of the metropolis, but they have also claimed Istanbul of a different kind. Here, a dual play is at stake, the discursive truth tells a story of Istanbul that fastened itself to the world-economy and gradually partook an irreplaceable role in the worldwide circuits of capital; i.e., a global city of flows. The flip side of the coin, however, indicates a massive annihilation of productive capital, a merciless dispossession of the working classes, and an unyielding belief in the creative potential of the capital sunk in urban land. Money does not grow on trees, nor can the seeds of productive expansion of capitalist accumulation be sown there. What is reaped is intra-class warfare, as the last months of 2013 showed in its full indecency. In this chapter, I consolidate these loose ends –the space produced by the whim of middle class, the silent encroachment of the gecekondus and the ensuing silent flight of the impoverished masses from the urban core, and discuss how these two anti-thetical processes took place in the space expropriated by the accoutrements of a neoliberal state apparatus. As the state flexed its muscles through appallingly populist –and at times, glaringly totalitarian- tendencies and policies, this gave rise to subsequent new state spaces, and a whole array of newfangled capitalists from the periphery of Turkish capital accumulation nestled themselves in the seemingly safe net provided by the all-encompassing state mechanisms of power brokerage and 37 patronage. 38 2 Theoretical Underpinnings In this chapter, I build a scaffolding which will connect a historico-geographical theoretical understanding with the concrete reality of the making of Istanbul. Here, I will tap into several foundational ideas on urban reality, how it is formed, how divergent trajectories of transformations were made possible, and how sociologists have dealt with the fleeting phenomena of the urban question. First, I investigate what Istanbul as an object of analysis might indicate at the moment one embarks on a research program that aims to make sense of the city as an expressive totality.1 Then, I portray how the relations between the state and urban space can be studied from a critical perspective. There, I draw heavily upon a defining moment in the formation of urbanism in the 20th century. By studying what I call the epistemological products of the urban revolution of the 1960s, I intend to open a passage toward the state-spaces. I interpret state-spaces as both tangible and invisible embodiments and mechanisms of state actions on the urban built environment. Hence, the state-space is an indelibly ingrained essence of the city from the outset. But, what befell a social scientist is to unearth the modulations prevalent in different historical contexts, under changing historico-geographic conditions. In the final part of this chapter, I briefly summarize my field research and how I concretely approached my unit of analysis. For a comprehensive explanation of different modes of totality, see, Martin Jay, Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukács to Habermas (University of California Press, 1986). 1 39 2.1 The Site: Istanbul as an Aleph In Istanbul, one shall not primarily see a geographical landscape, nor an ocean of historically differentiated layers of architecture, nor the heart of a particular social formation which is getting rapidly linked to the other nodes, layers, and scales of global accumulation, nor the plight of a Third World city confined to the procrustean bed of slums that continuously produce deviance, sustainable poverty and/or surplus humanity, nor a revanchist discourse of neoliberalism shrouded in the new clothes of the world-city, nor an irrepressible memoire involontaire implicitly underlying in all forms of historicism which seeks an inversion where the modern, in its recurring images of beaux arts or garden cities, came to gloss over a past that was never there.2 First, an important caveat should be underlined here regarding my approach to Istanbul. Each one of these concerns, in itself, valid, relevant, and worthy openings, yet they are, under the current circumstances of theoretical practice, indicative of a deeper, historically determined phenomenon where the division of (intellectual) labor reiterates the already existing compartmentalization; i.e., the urban ideology.3 What I discern in Istanbul is an aleph-not the Aleph, with a capital A, nor a singular entity, nor an unprecedented attribute of urban phenomena, nor a World-City, 2 Saskia Sassen, The Global City : New York, London, Tokyo, vol. 2nd (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001); Zeynep Çelik, The Remaking of Istanbul: Portrait of an Ottoman City in the Nineteenth Century (University of California Press, 1993); O. Isik and M. M. Pinarcioglu, Nobetlese Yoksulluk: Gecekondulasma ve Kent Yoksullari: Sultanbeyli Ornegi, 2001; Christine M. Boyer, The City of Collective Memory: Its Historical Imagery and Architectural Entertainments (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1994); Teresa Pires Do Rio Caldeira, City of Walls: Crime, Segregation, and Citizenship in São Paulo (University of California Press, 2000); Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (London ; New York: Verso, 2006). 3 For a discussion of urban ideology, see Peter Saunders, Social Theory and the Urban Question (London: Hutchinson, 1981), 152–82. For a recent revival of the discussion see K. Goonewardena, “The Urban Sensorium: Space, Ideology and the Aestheticization of Politics,” Antipode Antipode 37, no. 1 (2005): 46– 71. 40 nor an Ordinary City.4 Instead Istanbul as a subject of scrutiny accommodates a multilinear set of matrices grounded in the social relations of production. Such definition necessitates an assured footing in the already overwhelmingly beleaguered terrain of urban theory. What is the cornerstone-perhaps, the essential element- of this complex matrix? How are we to approach a city unlike any other? Or, how are we to conceive a city just like another one that can hardly be unique? What makes the urban phenomena both so speculatively similar under different contexts, and at the same time strangely unfamiliar? In other words, is it possible to grasp “the city” through a parallax view, that is as both an in-itself, unique entity and as a mere moment in the universal and total production of space.5 Unique, in the sense that it entails a name; nominally each city, each spatial formation is different from another. Istanbul is historically determined; the phases of its development could not have been more distinguishable, more accentuated than, Johannesburg, Milano, or Paris. However, each city reproduces similar traits-incumbent upon a shared matrix of distribution, production, consumption, similar dislocationscriminalization, law and order discourse, the carceral city- similar encroachments-social classes, urban politics, social movements- based upon a crosscutting and totalizing social relationships under a capitalist mode of production. It is rather the similarities, instead of Peter J. Taylor, World City Network: A Global Urban Analysis (Psychology Press, 2004); Jennifer Robinson, Ordinary Cities: Between Modernity and Development (Routledge, 2013). 4 The city as the Aleph has been a persistent theme in LA School’s study of Los Angeles. See, Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London ; New York: Verso, 1989); M. J. Dear and Steven Flusty, “Postmodern Urbanism,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 88, no. 1 (1998): 50–72; D. M. J. Dear, The Postmodern Urban Condition (Blackwell Publishing, 2000); M. J. Dear, “The Los Angeles School of Urbanism. An Intellectual History,” in Urban Geography in America, 1950-2000 : Paradigms and Personalities (New York: Routledge, 2005). 5 41 subjective uniqueness, that rendered an analysis of urban phenomena possible-and arguably, constituted the kernel of the former. This has been a consistently reproduced problem of urban sociology since Max Weber raised a similar question in his groundbreaking work The City, and revived by Louis Wirth’s triadic formula of size, density, and heterogeneity.6 In my view, Istanbul presents the researcher with an invaluable opportunity: as an urban structure portraying a rare heterotopia it is the site where a possibility to bridge the analytical gap between the structured totality and expressive totality is incipient.7 Finally, it is apt to emphasize that Istanbul represents a fecund universe of urban study with a population exceeding 13 million people housed in close to 5 million dwellings, producing almost half the GDP of Turkey, driving the neoliberal exportoriented growth machine as being the main export port to the rest of the world. As the beacon of post-1980 export oriented industrial growth, Istanbul has also reclaimed its position as the seat of the political power.8 The genuine Gotham of the Turkish context has not only become the site of affluence, accelerated capital accumulation, rampant real estate speculation, but also turned into a junkyard of dreams with a stark contrast of Max Weber, The City (Glencoe, Ill.,: Free Press, 1958); L. Wirth, “Urbanism as a Way of Life,” American Journal of Sociology 44, no. 1 (1938): 1; RE Park and EW Burgess, The City (University Of Chicago Press, 1984). 6 7 Lefebvre argued that historically the heterotopic character of the urban structure emerged during early modernity alongside, and in reaction to, the political character of the city. He further pointed out that heterotopy is pure difference, hence “[t]his difference can extend from a highly marked contrast all the way to conflict, to the extent that the occupants of a place are taken into consideration.” Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution, 38. Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan’s political career had been catapulted to stardom during his tenure as the mayor of Istanbul from 1994 to 1998, before abruptly coming to an end during the postmodern coup of 28th February, 1997, during which period he had to spend 3 months in prison for inciting hatred by reading a poem thought to be written by Mehmet Akif Ersoy-early 20th century Turkish Islamist poet, who also wrote the lyrics to the Turkish national anthem. 8 42 income, with novel forms of ghettoization that harbor a peculiar form of a home-brewed racialization where the Kemalist motto of Turkishness as the “classless, non-privileged, molten body of people” had faltered both in the eyes of the subject populations and the power elite, and replaced by a dystopian urban landscape of homo homini lupus. Dotted by pockets of wealth-symbolized by the newly sprung gated communities, humongous SUVs, and rabid habits of conspicuous consumption- the city has now come to reckon with a future where fear and calls for social control, prosperity and misery, exclusion and protests for a better future are intertwined. 2.2 The Social Production of Concrete Space: Towards unearthing Space as Commodity A thoroughly methodical study of urban space would entail first and foremost an inquiry into the discursive constellation of urban episteme. Arguably this could pose a curious, but not necessarily productive, task, which would be a discursive analysis of divergent noumenal qualities of these concepts. Harvey, for instance, refers to the urban process, instead of urbanization, to emphasize the processual and relational qualities of space.9 Urban political economy and Marxist approaches, on the other hand, seem at home with the categorical definitions of real estate development, the question of rent, the categories of rent (differential rent, type I and type II, absolute rent, monopoly rent), and definitely the labyrinthine problem of rent vs. surplus value as the prime explanatory 9 See, Harvey, “The Urban Process under Capitalism: A Framework for Analysis.” Also see the relevant discussion in Neil Brenner, New State Spaces : Urban Governance and the Rescaling of Statehood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 43 conceptual framework.10 Furthermore, the building industry appears to be of scant interest for both the sociologist and geographers, and is barely of note in scholarly journals, apart from the literature on industrial sociology.11 Urban development, meanwhile, implies a much more problematic phenomenon, and hence serves the function of mystification regarding the discussion on “creative destruction.”12 The concept of built environment emerged as the unchallenged common ground without disciplinary reservations and/or epistemological ruptures. However, in my view it lacks the theoretical refinement necessary for a concept that can be productive for both the explanandum and explanans, and is rather inclined toward a static treatment of spaceakin to the methodological pillars of urban ecology of the Chicago School.13 Henri Lefebvre, meanwhile, genuinely contributed to the urban question by historically juxtaposing the urban revolution with the industrial revolution. Once industrial production dominated and carried forward the urban development, created boomtowns, made industrial beacons like Manchester, Chicago, and Los Angeles out of thin air, dictated the geographical patterns of growth through extensive exploitation of natural M. Ball, “Differential Rent and the Role of Landed Property,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 1, no. 3 (1977): 380–403; D. Harvey, Social Justice and The City (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973). 10 See, Susan S. Fainstein, The City Builders : Property Development in New York and London, 1980-2000, vol. 2nd, Studies in Government and Public Policy (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001).For a historical account of the development of construction as a capitalist enterprise see an excellent work: L. Clarke, Building Capitalism: Historical Change and the Labour Process in the Production of the Built Environment (Routledge, 1992). 11 See, Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air : The Experience of Modernity (New York, N.Y., U.S.A.: Viking Penguin, 1988); David Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity (New York: Routledge, 2003); Sharon Zukin, Landscapes of Power : From Detroit to Disney World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). 12 Gottdiener voiced a similar concern in his critique of the Chicago School and put his emphasis on the production of space approach. See, M. Gottdiener, The Social Production of Urban Space, vol. Second (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985); Manuel Castells, “Theory and Ideology in Urban Sociology,” in Urban Sociology: Critical Essays (London: Tavistock, 1976). 13 44 resources –the urban agglomeration of the Ruhr Valley, centered around coal, or the northeastern springboard in the US, and determined the production of space. This was the structure-in-dominance up until the late 1950s, until the successful consolidation of the capitalist world economy. Since then it has been the urban structure which determines and molds the shape of industrial development, as well as the economic structure.14 Hence, my choice of a paradigmatic approach, the production of space –albeit its shortcomings- provides an ample grounding in both theory and practice.15 Therefore, the main problematic does not merely aim at the discursive structure of the epistemic scaffolding. In my view, the predominant mode of urban analysis has the tendency to interpret space as the “product”; the point, however, is to unearth how it is concretely produced. Hence, the concrete processes of the production of built environment are the underlying assumption of this dissertation. It is my task to both scrutinize and overcome the problematic inherent in the social production of social space. The question is to go beyond the “social” element in parentheses and to pose the nexus between the abstract and the concrete qua social. The connecting thread lies in the ability to primarily locate urban space as a commodity. In other words, the building, firstly in its life as the housing, can only be grasped as an “objectivity,” and second, it is resurrected “as a congealed mass of human labour,” as the built commodity, for the built commodity Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford, OX, UK ; Cambridge, Mass., USA: Blackwell, 1991); Henri Lefebvre, Writings on Cities (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996). For a concise elucidation of Lefebvre’s understanding of the “urban revolution” see, Andy Merrifield, Henri Lefebvre : A Critical Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2006). 14 Castells was the first to point out the empirical deficiency of Lefebvre’s paradigmatic approach. He claimed that Lefebvre’s treatment of space was not only beleaguered by a certain form of utopianism, but also severely limited in terms of its determinism. For Castells, if the Chicago School was theoretically inapt due to its ecological determinism, Lefebvre was irrelevant because of spatial determinism. The debates of the last decade have proven otherwise. Manuel Castells, The Urban Question : A Marxist Approach, (London: Edward Arnold, 1977). 15 45 exists as a thing that is simultaneously different from the tangible reality of the “building” and also common to all other commodities.16 Yet, a major question still lingers: Why should city be studied as a first and foremost an aggregate concrete product? Urban space has been the object of a myriad of different responses, a good amount of which can be traced back to the epistemological rupture of the late 1960s.17 Prior to that rupture it was a matter of a war of positions: the Chicago School elaborately projected onto the space theses ingrained in the logic of classical economy, thence arose a certain ecology of an overdrawn type of Robinsonnade.18 On the other hand, the actually existing socialism, after a brief, but innovative, spell of constructivism, turned oblivious to urban theory as counterrevolutionary, denigrated all attempts in devising a novel spatiality in the name of early Marx-who saw the development of capitalism best reflected in the urban-rural dialectics, thereby effectively barred any cogent approach toward a socialist appropriation of space.19 Then comes the rupture whereupon the study of spatiality as a representation of urban ideology and/or the grounded locality where divergent interests and layers of theoretical practice was undertaken in a numerous and prolific fashion. Hence, space is studied as both a secondary consequence and an ultimate container of capital 16 Marx, Capital : A Critique of Political Economy. Aleksandra Sasha Milicevic, “Radical Intellectuals: What Happened to the New Urban Sociology?,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 25, no. 4 (2001): 759–83; Sharon Zukin, “A Decade of the New Urban Sociology,” Theory and Society 9, no. 4 (1980): 575–601; M. Gottdiener and Joe Feagin, “The Paradigm Shift in Urban Sociology,” Urban Affairs Quarterly 24, no. 2 (1988): 163–87. 17 18 Wirth, “Urbanism as a Way of Life”; Park and Burgess, The City. 19 Anatole Kopp, Town and Revolution: Soviet Architecture and City Planning, 1917-1935 (G. Braziller, 1970); Karel Teige, The Minimum Dwelling: L’Habitation Minimum = Die Kleinstwohnung : The Housing Crisis, Housing Reform, trans. Eric Dluhosch (MIT Press, 2002). 46 accumulation, as the site of class formation -or of the misery of working classes and of the ghastly setting of Dickensian exegeses- wherein the proletariat ought to grab itself by the hair and to rise above the confines of an sich consciousness.20 Urban space is studied: as both a consequence and container of capital accumulation, as the site of class formation, or as a subcategory where rent, as the reified mediator of social relations, is summoned to existence through its different lives: absolute rent, monopoly rent and differential rent. Perhaps as the space gets hollowed out by the temporality imposed by the requirements of capital in circulation, some attempted to reverse the urban fortunes by questioning how “the urban settlement “gets built,” instead of the way place figures in the production apparatus or in the misery of the working class. And yet, the definitive answer, to an extent teleologically, set the space as a growth machine-akin to a ceaselessly spiraling thread wheel- left to the capricious and inwardly particularistic whim of local political coalitions.21 The city is a factory, albeit in a metaphorical and extended sense. It produces circulation; circulation of commodities, circulation of abstract labor, circulation of capital-albeit in a fictitious form, circulation of places, circulation of signs, circulation of power. Risking echoing Henri Lefebvre too closely, I have to recall his words that the This latter trope can be dated back to Engels’ Conditions of the Working Class in England in 1844, and Raymond Williams did not hesitate to trace this dystopian, Dickensian vein as far back as the thirteenth century. See, Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (Chicago: Academy Publisher, 1984); Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York,: Oxford University Press, 1973). 20 Harvey Molotch, “Growth Machine Links: Up, Down, and Across,” in The Urban Growth Machine: Critical Perspectives Two Decades Later, ed. Andrew E. G Jonas and David Wilson (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1999), 247–66; John R. Logan and Harvey Luskin Molotch, Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place (University of California Press, 2007); Andrew E. G Jonas et al., eds., The Urban Growth Machine: Critical Perspectives Two Decades Later (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1999). 21 47 urban space produces concentration, and furthermore, concentration of concentration.22 The built environment is the constant production and planned destruction of constant capital, of the consumption fund, and it is of a prolific kind that recuperates and reanimates both the dead labor and the faux frais of production in itself.23 No commodity is more complicated, no study of the circulation of capital is more beleaguered, no analysis of rent is more dubious, no grasp of the labor process is more concealed than what is already conspicuously absent in an understanding of the built environment. Built form is of the protean nature, yet, like Menelaus –the mythical but often overlooked hero of the Odyssey, the forgotten protagonist, the second Ulysses- who shaped his own destiny due to his powerful grasp of the mythical sage of the sea, Proteus, social scientists today must try to capture the elusive behemoth in one of its guises.24 Hence, in the second part of this dissertation, from the fifth chapter on, I start from the singular, from the building, from the city, from the individual dwelling called gecekondu, as an object of state-making, as the concrete form of state-spaces. In this state-space exists a pervasive reality, the city as commodity, the built environment as facilitator of capital accumulation, the perpetrator of a growth machine whose eternal fate is connected to the centralizing state. Thence arises the object, from the crystallized form 22 Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution. To recall some of the fertile discussion of the 1970s those of which essentially posed the urban problematic, see Edmond Preteceille, “Collective Consumption, the State, and the Crisis of Capitalist Society,” in City, Class, and Capital : New Developments in the Political Economy of Cities and Regions (New York: Holmes&Meier, 1982); Castells, “Theory and Ideology in Urban Sociology”; Manuel Castells, “Is There an Urban Sociology?,” in Urban Sociology: Critical Essays (London: Tavistock Publications, 1976); D. Harvey, “On the History and Present Condition of Geography: An Historical Materialist Manifesto,” The Professional Geographer 36, no. 1 (1984): 1–11; C. G. Pickvance, “Marxist Approaches to the Study of Urban Politics: Divergences Among Some Recent French Studies,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 2, no. 1 (1978): 219–55. 23 24 Paul Plass, “Menelaus and Proteus,” Classical Journal, 1969, 104–8. 48 that is the object of accumulation, the all too innocuous and innocent aliquot part of the city: the residential building, or its crystalline form of housing as commodity. More so than the building in its multiple modalities, the curious moment of production of space as reflected in the concrete building presents my intention. It is the moment of resurrection, when the dead weight of generations is revived and is “infuse[d]...with life so that they become factors of the labour process” and ushered into a new life to form new products.25 It is the built form that is at once a commodity and dead labor, embodies in itself the dialectics of rent and profit, and is located at both levels of circulation and reproduction. Hence, the urban space is the reified mode of production. It is production per se; it is the production personified in the totality of relationships that perpetually restructures the spatial practice. It is true that “[t]he built environment’ is…a gross simplification, a concept which requires disaggregation as soon as we probe deeply into the processes of its production and use.”26 Yet, this disaggregation shall not merely suffice with the statement of the abstract-“the aggregative processes of production, exchange and consumption”- but rather undertake the concrete production of space as its object of inquiry. In such a maneuver that aims at an understanding of the concrete practice, concrete labor, and commodity in its barest existence, we can delve into the annihilative space, the instrumental space, space that “[removes] every obstacle in the way of the total elimination of what is different.”27 It is commonplace to claim that the changes in economy in general, and the 25 Marx, Capital : A Critique of Political Economy, 308. 26 Harvey, “The Urban Process under Capitalism: A Framework for Analysis,” 105. 27 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 371. Naturally, a crucial problem is the distinction between abstract space and concrete space, or our ability to juxtapose the movement from the abstract labor to the concrete labor as ensconced in its mirror image in the movement from the abstract space to the concrete space. 49 corresponding technological oscillations- the industrial, and/or postindustrial productiondetermine our lives and the built environment that envelops those lives. However, the vicissitudes and vagaries of the production of space, the way it reflects on and reacts to our everyday experiences, the significant sway it holds over both abstract and concrete layers of material relations has been deliberately dissected from the purview of political economy. In other words, those words are not unbeknownst to the minds vetted in the colloquial debates on social theory in the latter part of the twentieth century that culminated in the catch-all phrase of economic determinism;28 political economy of spatial formations resides at the first floor of the idiomatic house, while the semiotic, symbolic, cultural, the panoply of lived and conceived experiences has been confined to the upper levels-if permitted at all. On the contrary, to the extent that economy is not grasped through a sterile theoretical imagination and not merely attributed to the temporalities of production, circulation, and distribution, the possible opening towards a cogent interpretation of the spatio-temporal reproduction of society and capital-labor dialectic is self-evident. Hence, economy as a certain technology of (re)production of human subsistence would further implicate that the state, inasmuch as politics, law, philosophy, religion, literature, and art, is an economic factor.29 See a crucial debate that more or less sealed a series of similar theoretical questions: D. Harvey, “Three Myths in Search of a Reality in Urban Studies,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 3, no. 2 (1987); Neil Smith, “Rascal Concepts, Minimalizing Discourse, and the Politics of Geography,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 3, no. 2 (1987). 28 As Engels put in a letter to Starkenburg late in his life, in order to clarify some of the misconceptions surrounding his and Marx’s study of societies: “It is not the case that the economic basis is cause, is solely active and everything else is only a passive effect. Rather, there is an interaction which takes place upon the basis of the economic necessity which ultimately asserts itself.” Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: Selected Correspondence, 1846-1895: With Explanatory Notes (International publishers, 1942), 516. 29 50 2.3 The Urban Revolution: Theoretical practice and the Question of the State In the 1960s, a fissure, an opening towards a spatio-temporally conscious approach appeared in urbanism. It was first the new urban sociology that had taken an issue with the space-state nexus. Leaving aside the already polemical discussions instigated by the Poulantzas-Miliband debate, and its repercussions in the PoulantzasLojkine debate on the essential nature of state under capitalist mode of production,30 one can attest to the central role played by the state both in Castells’ “collective consumption” thesis and in David Harvey’s three cuts of crisis theory. The state did not only occupy the new urban sociology at the abstract level, but also, in my view, its sudden political and economic alteration at the end of 1970s prepared the imminent collapse of the new urban sociology. The urban critique fueled by the 1968 world revolution withered in the face of the neoliberal backlash in the early 1980s. Arguably, the new urban sociology was a product of advanced capitalism or as Lash and Urry argued, of organized capitalism.31 I will not go into the detailed aspects of the organized capitalism, or the discussions surrounding the academic explanations of postwar Western societies. Monopoly, state monopoly, organized, advanced industrial, or welfare, these different conceptual frameworks shared similar features; most common of Pickvance, “Marxist Approaches to the Study of Urban Politics: Divergences Among Some Recent French Studies.” 30 Scott Lash and John Urry, The End of Organized Capitalism (Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987). 31 51 all was of course the ongoing existence of capital-labor dialectics. Similarly though, every theoretical account of the postwar capitalist expansion in the West attaches a significant role to the transformed characteristics of this dialectical relationship. Most recognizably, it is the state intervention, either in the form of containing labor militancy in the face of rising working class insurgency created by the existence of not one but several workers’ socialist states, or through buying out the obedience of the working class for facilitating an increasing relative surplus value creation (and real subsumption of labor) that marked the three decades following the end of the Second World War. Two distinct but complementary visions of the urban structure has dominated the discussion here. On the one hand, Castells determinedly relates the urban phenomena to the question of collective consumption –which has state as its central instigator- and on the other hand Harvey situates the built environment in the circuits of capital. Manuel Castells reiterated the crucial role played by collective consumption in terms of understanding the urban question. In The Urban Question he definitively states that “the essential problems regarded as urban are in fact bound up with the processes of ‘collective consumption’, or what Marxists call the organization of the collective means of production of labour power.”32 Collective consumption is the ground for everyday life, where housing, education, health, culture, commerce, and transport are located.33 It is a consequence of the increasing socialization of consumption under advanced capitalism. The everydayness of the phenomenon turns it into a matter of political conflict and ultimately into an element of class struggle. The state not only acts upon the built 32 Castells, The Urban Question : A Marxist Approach:440. 33 Manuel Castells, City, Class, and Power, Sociology, Politics, and Cities (London: Macmillan, 1978), 3. 52 environment as the last resort of credit, since a disproportionate amount of collective consumption goods are left to the state by the capitalists, but also as the final arbiter of the class conflict. Hence, [T]he state increasingly intervenes in the city; but, as an expression of a class society, the state in practice acts according to the relations of force between classes and social groups, generally in favour of the hegemonic fraction of the dominant classes. It is in this way that specified problems become globalised, the urban question increasingly relates the state to daily life, and provokes political crisis.34 Yet, resonating Lefebvre’s argument that neoliberalism exists in an uneasy tension with neo-dirigisme, Preteceille emphasized that the pressure to reduce collective, public-funded consumption is even greater than that to reduce individual commodity consumption because, even if the former is in many ways oriented towards and subordinated to the logic of profit, it nevertheless also limits the field of direct capitalist production and circulation.”35 In his theoretically incisive analysis of state spaces, Lefebvre described three universal movements. First, he saw that state power proliferates unobstructed throughout the globe, “it weighs down on society in full force…crushes time by reducing differences,” and “promotes and imposes itself as the stable center” and hence, “neutralizes whatever resists it by castration or crushing.” Second, within the same space the state’s violence is countered by negation in the form of the violence of the subversive movements, either through revolutions and triumphant victories of these movements, or by way of defeats and ceaseless continuation of wars. For Lefebvre normality dictated by 34 Ibid. 35 Preteceille, “Collective Consumption, the State, and the Crisis of Capitalist Society,” 10. 53 the state can neither establish, nor normalize, the disappearance of difference. Thus, in the third instance, the working class enters the picture as the lone beholder of the sufficient power to induce revolutionary change.36 Further along the lines of his discussion regarding the nexus between the state and space, Lefebvre claimed that there is “[n]o institution without a space.”37 The implication of this argument is not that the state is the sole claimant to the organization of space. Although the state is granted extraordinary executive powers to render places extra-territorial (the consular offices, the United Nations, certain international border zones) or altogether instigate absolute spaces (the military zones, states of exception, special zones of customs and commerce, and definitely war zones), more often than not this power is mediated through institutions.38 The gist of the matter, as ensconced in Brenner’s elaboration, and deciphering, of Lefebvre’s highly abstract notions garbled in the highfalutin meta-theoretical debates of 1960s French intellectualism, is that the state is an intrinsically spatial structure that is reflexively proactive on the very self-same space that begets itself. A recent decisive attempt at solving the Gordian’s Knot, the state-space conundrum, called for a research program where space is juxtaposed to a multi-scalar governmentality poised to grapple with the hegemonic linearity of the state. Neil Brenner argued that the debates on scale and state spaces is positioned to fill the conceptual void left behind by the waning theories of collective consumption.39 The state-space, as 36 Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution. 37 Neil Brenner et al., State/Space: A Reader (John Wiley & Sons, 2008), 84. For an interesting note on the extra-territorial spaces see, Keller Easterling, Enduring Innocence : Global Architecture and Its Political Masquerades (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005). 38 He argued that the scale problematic was intrinsic to the critical geographical political economy since 1960s: “A case in point is Manuel Castells’… The Urban Question, which defined the urban scale in terms 39 54 conceived by Neil Brenner qua a Lefebvrian state mode of production, is not meant to transcend the problematic of the state, nor regard the space as a passive instrument of the state machinery, but aims at a multidimensional relationality that mutually transforms the statehood in its different forms and spatial practices.40 Brenner, borrowing the scaffolding of his argument from Jessop’s strategicrelational framework on state theory and from Lefebvre’s conceptualization of the state mode of production and the production of space, defined the state space primarily as a process “rather than as a static thing, container, or platform.”41 Echoing Lefebvre, the underlying principle of his study also critically delineated space-as-process. In other words, space is constantly in flux, is mutually constitutive vis-à-vis the circuits of capital, the juridico-political realm of state, and the life-world of capitalism.42 Hence, the state of its role in the reproduction of labor-power and, more generally, in what he termed ‘collective consumption’. As a number of researchers subsequently argued, this crystallization of collective consumption functions at the urban scale during the postwar period and was closely intertwined with the historically specific scalar divisions of regulation that emerged under the Keynesian welfare national state, which relied heavily upon local and municipal state apparatuses as instruments of public service provision and infrastructural investment within a broader, nationally configured administrative geography.” N. Brenner, “The Limits to Scale? Methodological Reflections on Scalar Structuration,” Progress in Human Geography 25, no. 4 (2001): 595. For a better idea on the scale debate see N. Brenner, “Global, Fragmented, Hierarchical: Henri Lefebvre’s Geographies of Globalization,” Public Culture 10, no. 1 (1997): 135–67; N. Brenner, “Globalisation as Reterritorialisation: The Re-Scaling of Urban Governance in the European Union,” Urban Studies 36, no. 3 (1999): 431–51; S. A. Marston, “The Social Construction of Scale,” Progress in Human Geography 24, no. 2 (2000): 219–42; S. Marston and N. Smith, “States, Scales and Households: Limits to Scale Thinking? A Response to Brenner,” Progress in Human Geography 25, no. 4 (2001): 615–19. Brenner, “Global, Fragmented, Hierarchical”; Brenner, “Globalisation as Reterritorialisation: The ReScaling of Urban Governance in the European Union”; N. Brenner, “Beyond State Centrism? Space, Territoriality, and Geographical Scale in Globalization Studies,” Theory and Society 28, no. 1 (1999): 39– 78; Neil Brenner, “State Theory in the Political Conjuncture: Henri Lefebvre’s Comments on a New State Form,” Antipode 33, no. 5 (2001): 783. 40 41 Brenner, New State Spaces : Urban Governance and the Rescaling of Statehood, 82. Bob Jessop gave hints of the relationship between space and capital when he defined the ecological dominance: “ecological dominance refers to the structural and/or strategic capacity of a given system in a self-organizing ecology of systems to imprint its developmental logic on other systems’ operations far more than these systems are able to impose their respective logics on that system” Bob Jessop, The Future of the Capitalist State (Wiley, 2002), 25. One who is keen on intellectual genealogy can hearken to the resonance 42 55 space can only be grasped through an analysis that is open to and knowledgeable about the processual, polymorphic, and multiscalar attributes of the relationship. 43 Contrary to the territorial and nation-centric modes of knowledge production -which can be likened to a fetishism prevalent in geographical and sociological studies, Brenner argued that the state space is more than a mere territorial concentration of political power and its activity in the form of centralized authority. The geography of state spatiality “must be viewed as a presupposition, an arena, and an outcome of continually evolving political strategies. It is not a thing, container, or platform, but a socially produced, conflictual, and dynamically changing matrix of sociospatial interaction.”44 The questions he has raised as the paradigmatic pillars of his approach to the unfolding matrices of state-space relationships are also of crucial import: “First, why does statehood under capitalism assume a specific spatial, territorial, and scalar form? Second, how and why has the spatial, territorial, and scalar configuration of statehood evolved during the history of capitalist development?”45 From these premises, I argue that state intervention in the production of space is not a consequence of readily made decisions, but indeed a continuation of the process. There exists no state without a particular spatiality, and as Brenner argued, “[t]he state is the site/generator/product of between Althusserian structure-in-dominance and the ecological dominance. For a further understanding of affinities and disagreements between Jessop and Althusser qua Poulantzas, see Bob Jessop, Nicos Poulantzas: Marxist Theory and Political Strategy (Macmillan, 1985); Bob Jessop, “On the Originality, Legacy, and Actuality of Nicos Poulantzas,” Studies in Political Economy 34 (1991) . 43 Brenner, New State Spaces : Urban Governance and the Rescaling of Statehood, 74. 44 Ibid., 76. 45 Ibid., 82. 56 strategies.”46 2.4 An epistemology of State-space(s) If the primary purpose of this dissertation is to unearth the social production of concrete space at the economic instance, of equal importance is the deciphering of a mode inherent to this spatial formation: the state-space. Grappling with the state-space requires a study engrained in both concrete and abstract formulations of state, as well as an analysis that is reflexive of the spatio-temporal spectrum. The initial layer of such questioning entails rehashing well-worn discussions such as the nature of the state, the social, cultural, and ideological transmutations of the state, and its processual formulation under a higher level of abstraction-the statehood. Furthermore, a relatively new mode of inquiry grounded in spatial analysis and critical urbanism invoked-and laid bare the need for- a critical examination towards reinvigorating space as an element of sociological study, providing an ability to better grasp the socio-spatial dialectic. Third, a novel conceptualization of the relationality between the state and space, what Brenner defined as state spatiality, provides an elaborate social, geographical, and historical imaginationin addition to conceptual tools of explanation- while raising deeper, cross-cutting, and at times, paradoxical questions. My aim is to question the possibilities for an interpretation of the state as an active agent in the formation of the built environment. This necessarily implies a state spatiality Ibid., 87. Here comes into the picture an old Althusserian formulation borrowed qua Jessop-inasmuch as it is impossible to talk of knowledge in itself, it is redundant to formulate the state as an insulated, isolated objectivity. Hence, just like the theoretical practice being realized in material shape through knowledge effects, the state is realized “through the mobilization and consolidation of state projects- which attempt to integrate state activities around a set of common, coherently articulated agendas- that the image of the state as a unified organizational entity (‘state effects’) can be projected into civil society.” Ibid., 85. 46 57 that is continuously reproduced via the flux of global capital accumulation. Hitherto the state and space, the two proposed axes of processual investigation, has been studied either as objective parallels with clear-cut relationships of causality, or two nonintersecting reified entities.47 On the one hand, the state, as a form of reification that is primarily subject to the whims of economic, and/or juridico-political logic; i.e. the forms and modes of different economic regulations would causally transpire divergent institutional, ideological, and organizational arrangements of statehood. In other words, Fordism as an accumulation regime is conjoined to the Keynesian Welfare State as the mode of regulation that begets, for instance, spatial configuration best exemplified by the suburban sprawl and functional architecture, while similarly, post-Fordism found its paradigmatic Schumpeterian Competitive State form that permeates architectures of fear, confusion, and/or bedazzlement. Under the premises of such spatial imagination, one can deem this as another form of hegemonic discursive transposition that treats space as object, space becomes the empty container. Much like historicism of an earlier era-in which history was perceived to be nothing but a series of disconnected events- space is treated as mute, docile, and at best, spectral.48 While the former treated the spatiality of the life-world as a tabula rasa, yet, the latter tendency was inclined towards constructing reified objectivities-space as pure Neil Brenner has brilliantly summarized the arguments regarding the state-space nexus.He suggests that three assumptions are the underlying factors in the conceptual separation of the state and space. These are: spatial fetishism, methodological territorialism, and methodological nationalism. These three in effect mold the hitherto prevalent state-centric epistemology in social sciences. Brenner, New State Spaces : Urban Governance and the Rescaling of Statehood, 37–47. 47 The gist of the argument presented here is indebted to the great work of Edward Soja, see, E. W. Soja, “Between Geographical Materialism and Spatial Fetishism: Some Observations on the Development of Marxist Spatial Analysis,” Antipode 1, no. 1 (1979): 3–1; E. Soja, “The Socio-Spatial Dialectic,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 70, no. 2 (1980): 207–25; Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory. 48 58 geography, as mere nature that is devoid of any social qualities, unchanged, untouched, a static entity. State therefore, was deemed to be an externality. In the eyes of the 20th century western Marxists the state was ontologically instrumental-an extension of class domination that represented nothing other than a baton that regulates social relationships of production in order to continuously produce consent. For others, the state was an apparatus of redistribution, a wedge to extend the functional operations of different social strata, a neutral arbiter, and the end result of the pluralistic political process. Yet, such perceptions of the state and space had for a long time heavily underestimated the multitudinous depths of their relationality, overlooked the possibilities of the state to materially, and mentally, mold new spatial forms that reflect the state’s immanent conflicting qualities, its incipient, and at times, fettered developmental tendencies, and its vicissitudinous role in the capital circuits. 2.5 The Spaces of Class: Divergent Representations of Space The question is still relevant then: the question of how to relate space and the state. One of the figments of articulation regarding the nexus between the state and space suggests space as a passive container-the state, either via its form as the ultimate agent of redistribution, or by dint of its exercise in terms of mere and scantily clad brutal force (law, is also a brute force, just like urban planning in its various guises) could act upon space. It is the state of authoritarian envisioning of the power, Speer's architectural behemoth in the service of Nazism, the fascist Roman revivalism, the Stalinist hallucinations of grandiosity ensconced in the abysmal reordering of space and citizenry; it is the ultimate mode of control bequeathed to a notion of totality –i.e. a Schmittian, radically concentric, one-way structuration of the whole determined by the body-politic59 and undoubtedly, the wet dreams of countless dictators, to mold space, according to his vision.49 Yet, Churchill recognized the obvious fact that “first we shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us.”50 Therefore, an effort towards locating a new space state should not directly begin from the state with the capital S, or the state proper. Through my studies in Istanbul, I came to recognize two main lines of possibilities concerning the state: state with a capital S, or, the reified, representational noumenon, that dwells in the minds, habits, interactions, and cultures of people.51 Yet, there exists another layer to the study of the state, a state that exists in the minutiae of everyday life, that perspires, that bleeds, and hungers for more power embedded in the real, tangible, day-to-day relays of divergent interests –imagined or concrete- that simultaneously make and break the continuous processes of building a city. An allusion to the power elite is apparent here and I will examine it further throughout the discussions on the state and private capital’s visions concerning Istanbul. Yet, in this dissertation, I intend to demystify a fallacious assumption that has prevailed in the Turkish imagination regarding the long and pernicious assault on Istanbul. The argument that is almost unconsciously held onto can be summarized as such: that Istanbul had been a beauty, the crown jewel, the “payitaht,” the “dersaadet” (the city of joy), the promised land and the state has turned a blind eye to the bile and See, Kim Dovey, Framing Places: Mediating Power in Built Form (Routledge, 1999); Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, trans. G.L. Ulmen (NY: Telos, 2006). 49 50 Winston Churchill, We Shape Our Buildings, 1943. Without a doubt, such reification smacks of a highly structuralist view of social phenomena as exemplified by Althusserian thought, see, Louis Althusser, Essays on Ideology (London: Verso, 1984). 51 60 putrid overtaking of the masses, and effectively succumbed to the “barbarian invasion” of the Anatolian immigrants. Hence, with minor modifications the story goes like this: that Istanbul is the place where the selfless, disinterested planners’ miraculous solutions and development programs had been betrayed relentlessly by parasitic elements, by “clientelistic” politicians, by reckless and incompetent municipal authorities and due to the overwhelming power held by the sheer numbers of the newcomers the state succumbed to their continuous digressions and pressures. While space is the prerogative-and de facto extension- of the state in terms of Turkish Ideology, democracy has somehow greatly contributed to the defiling of the crown jewel. This acute sense of decay and insuperable decadence, the near-delusional elegy for Istanbul can be as innocent as nostalgia voiced in newspaper columns and municipal publications (recall the periodical yearnings for an Istanbul long gone, the reinvention of useless transport routes in the form of Beyoğlu and Kadıköy tram lines as mere tourist attractions), or be as crudely violent as everyday racisms against new immigrants and attempted pogroms against Kurdish people. It is crucial to note that both ends of this phenomenon represent a transformation of the same kind of beast: beginning with the ultimate privileges bestowed upon the urban specialists, architects, planners, and bureaucrats one steps through subtle gradations, by dint of representations of space (recall the empty containers of space, the signless signifiers, glitzy advertisement images, where a certain hue of whiteness – resonant with the now ubiquitous term of White Turks- came to dominate the Sunday papers, the billboards, the streets without souls, the image of brutal, but non-lethal, power.) 61 In a sense, this dissertation dwells upon this notion of a fallen Istanbul. It begins with a conflict that is lost-without the slightest whimper of a fight put into it. As my field research taught me in different ways, my words here will attempt to raise an awareness, that Istanbul is not the one and only thing all of us see at the same time. There is the squalid Istanbul, living in the slums, there, next to the still smoking chimneys and the asphyxiating smell of coke burning stoves of gecekondus, lies the soon to be rich erstwhile squatters, and there lies the Bosphorus, a scion of paradise on earth, the reason for most humble souls to withstand the endless hours of rush hour traffic, torments of kilometers of lines to travel across the continents (Asian peninsula and the bridges connecting Asia and Europe were designed to create new residential territories, and in effect created the biggest bedroom community of Europe), and the endless concrete boxes heaped upon each other along the highways circumambulating the gargantuan mega-city’s arteries. 2.6 The State-Space in Turkey: The State as an Episteme In the 1960s and 1970s, Turkey witnessed a novel, unabashed, conscious, internationally comparative interest in fertile discussions on the foundational characteristics of the Turkish state. The relationship between the state and society, between different classes and their roles in the state strategies has found receptive audiences within academic circles. The delayed modernization, the maladroit national developmentalist strategies that are subject to the vagaries of the ebb and flow of cold war politics, the stunted development of underdevelopment, the late incorporation to the world-economy, the tension between the centripetal and centrifugal forces that played out in the political and ideological antagonism of the center and periphery, and the unraveling 62 of this tension at the realm of politics played a prominent role in efforts to grasp the uniqueness of the state and society relations in Turkey.52 The latter has gained an articulate emphasis especially in the last two decades with the increased significance of the “urban question” –albeit belatedly compared to its Western counterparts. More strikingly, the changing governmental landscape and its emergent discursive means under the disguise of neoliberalism, have contributed greatly to a marked interest in urban studies. Thence emerged a revival of interest in the spatial forms of the early Republican period, in the divergent architectural representations of Kemalism, in the failed modernity of urban development in Turkey, in the variegated perceptions of gecekondu as indicative of the grand malaise of underdevelopment, and finally the ubiquitous state projects of urban renewal and gecekondu rehabilitation instigated a galvanization of interest in urban studies.53 Traditionally the Turkish state had functioned in a national developmentalist mentality with a curious twist. Quite unlike the Fordist-Keynesian response to the housing problem in the West, that either promulgated state as the chief financial regulator Şerif Mardin, “Center-Periphery Relations: A Key to Turkish Politics?,” Daedalus 102, no. 1 (1973): 169–90; Şerif Mardin, “Ideology and Religion in the Turkish Revolution,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 2, no. 3 (1971): 197–211; Şerif Mardin, Türk Modernleşmesi, 4. Baskı (İletişim, 1995); Çağlar Keyder, “Small Peasant Ownership in Turkey: Historical Formation and Present Structure,” Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 7, no. 1 (1983): 53–107; Çağlar Keyder, Emperyalizm Azgelişmişlik ve Türkiye (Istanbul: Birikim Yayınları, 1976); Korkut Boratav, Çağlar Keyder, and Şevket Pamuk, Kriz, Gelir Dağılımı ve Türkiye’nin Alternatif Sorunu (İstanbul: Kaynak Yayınları, 1984); Korkut Boratav, Tarımsal yapılar ve kapitalizm (Ankara Üniversitesi Basımevi, 1981). 52 Gülsüm Baydar Nalbantoğlu, “Silent Interruptions: Urban Encounters with Rural Turkey,” in Rethinking Modernity and National Identity in Turkey, ed. Reşat Kasaba and Sibel Bozdoğan (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997), 192–210; Sibel Bozdoğan, Modernism and Nation Building: Turkish Architectural Culture in the Early Republic (University of Washington Press, 2001); Güven Arif Sargın, ed., Ankara’nın kamusal yüzleri: başkent üzerine mekân-politik tezler (İletişim, 2002); Güven Arif Sargin, “Displaced Memories, or the Architecture of Forgetting and Remembrance,” Environment and Planning D 22, no. 5 (2004): 659–80; Ayşe Öncü, “The Myth of the ‘Ideal Home’Travels Across Cultural Borders to Istanbul,” in Space, Culture and Power: New Identities in Globalizing Cities, 1997, 56–72; Ayşe Öncü and Petra Weyland, Space, Culture and Power: New Identities in Globalizing Cities (Zed Books, 1997). 53 63 of the housing market by means of mortgages or through actively pursuing building housing for the socially disadvantaged, the Turkish state’s response to the housing question was much more passive.54 Especially as a consequence of the 1960s policymaking decisions, a non-interventionist planning perspective was approached, and in the 1960-1980 period 70% of housing investment was in private hands.55 The state did not hesitate in undertaking grandiose schemes of infrastructural projects, irrigation canals, hydroelectric power plants, and highways while marginally involved with the housing market.56 The miniscule state contribution in urban development was mainly oriented towards provision of heavily subsidized residence construction for the swelling ranks of apparatchiki- teachers, officers, university professors, doctors, cross-cutting the social landscape under the mantle of unquestioned allegiance to state bureaucracy.57 The western response to the urban question moved between two different polar opposites in terms of planning: the American case where the private investment is the ultimate organizer in the post-war suburban boom, and the French case, in which the state was the paramount regulator of urban land use and housing construction. See, M. Ball, “The Development of Capitalism in Housing Provision,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 5, no. 2 (1981): 145; Barry Checkoway, “Large Builders, Federal Housing Programmes, and Postwar Suburbanization,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 4, no. 1 (1980): 21–45; M. Dagnaud, “A History of Planning in the Paris Region,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 7 (1983): 219–36; J. M. Goursolas and M. Atlas, “New Towns in the Paris Metropolitan Area: An Analytic Survey of the Experience, 1965-79,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 4, no. 3 (1980): 405–21. 54 B. Batuman, “Turkish Urban Professionals and The Politics of Housing, 1960-1980,” METU JFA, 2006; Ruşen Keleş, Kentlesme Politikasi (Urbanization Policy), 11. Baskı (Ankara: İmge Kitabevi, 2010). 55 56 Suleyman Demirel can be seen as the ultimate embodiment of state spatial logic in this period. He served as prime minister seven times between 1965 and 1993, had to relinquish power twice-in 1971 and 1980due to military interventions. With an education in engineering, and a brief spell in the USA his career started at DSI (Devlet Su Isleri, State Waterworks and Irrigation Administration)was a handpicked poster boy of the Menderes government in the 1950s.. His economic perspective reached a climatic culmination with a grand irrigation project in the Kurdish areas of southeast Turkey-GAP (Guneydogu Anadolu ProjesiSoutheastern Anatolian Project) modeled after the New Deal projects like the Tennessee Valley Authority. A borrowed word from French, the “lojman” –logement- has long created an interesting residential segregation, an archetypal gated community, and in Kurdish areas definitely resembled a colonial compound. Unfortunately, this peculiar aspect of urbanism in Turkey has been ignored for so long-perhaps, due to implications of political interference in academic research. The golden era of the lojmans came to an end with the neoliberal policies imposed upon the governments of the last decade by IMF programs. Aside from the housing for the military, intelligence, and security personnel in the Kurdish cities of southeastern 57 64 While these apartment complexes served as the beacons of an urban way of life in Turkey, the loyalty of the apparatchik residents was not only solidified through housing subsidies, but also their self-reflexive consciousness of vanguardist Kemalism had contributed dearly to what some described as the core-periphery conflict in Turkish politics.58 2.7 New State-Spaces and the Emergence of Unhindered Boosterism The decisive end to the passive government stance towards housing and urban planning came with the passage of Housing and Urban Development Act of 1984. This act established a Housing and Urban Development Fund (TOKI, in Turkish). The Fund was -similar to military funds- exempt from effective parliamentary control. The Fund (controlled partly by the Housing and Urban Development Administration) was allocated a certain percentage from the sales of tobacco and alcoholic products, in addition to a notorious cut from every employee’s payroll, and a levy on every citizen for their foreign travels.59 However, the TOKI administration was inefficient and lethargic throughout the 1980s and 1990s; its housing projects were merely oriented towards upper middle classes-to ones who could afford up to 80% down payments in an already overpriced housing market. From its establishment to early 2003 -until the current neo-Islamist government of Erdoğan came to power- the administration constructed around 30,000 Turkey, thousands of lojmans were either privatized, or began to be competitively priced. Çağlar Keyder, State and Class in Turkey : A Study in Capitalist Development (London ; New York: Verso, 1987), 47–8. 58 59 This cut was euphemistically called Konut Edindirme Yardimi-Housing Provision Aid, even though the ones who aided the government to eventually get home ownership got nothing in return. The Fund was later dissolved in the late 1990s under the directives of the IMF and the European Union. 65 housing units, and marginally contributed to the financing of the housing industry.60 The Erdoğan government was ambitious from the start. A widely publicized episode between the chairman of the TOKI administration, Erdoğan Bayraktar, and Prime Minister Erdogan illustrates the extent of his ambition very well. As told by Bayraktar on national TV, PM Erdogan asked the newly appointed chair for a briefing on the current conditions of TOKI. In this briefing, Erdogan inquired on the projections of housing construction. Bayraktar promptly replied that it was in the range of 30,000 housing units, either in the process of construction or waiting for the government’s green light. Erdogan was taken aback, and had further questioned if the number he was briefed on was per annum. Learning that it was indeed the projections for the next five years, he ordered Bayraktar to immediately start planning for 100,000 housing units per annum, and the rest would be assured by his government. The rest of course was more complicated than it was suggested by Bayraktar-he was in tears, conspicuously under the impression of Erdogan’s dedication and visionary leadership, when he recounted the story on TV- and included certain legislative arrangements that grants TOKI with power to borrow from international financial markets without Treasury backing or interference, the authority of eminent domain for urban renewal projects in gecekondu areas, and definitely, the government’s full backing regarding the appropriation of public land. Since 2003, TOKI has embarked upon an unprecedented construction plan, in the last six years 300,000 units have already been built, or are in the process of construction, and the plan is to finish 500,000 units by 2013-approximately 100,000 of which are slated to be built in Istanbul. Bayraktar was later paid handsomely in return for his tears; he was appointed as 60 See TOKI (HUD Administration) website: www.toki.gov.tr 66 the minister of Environment and Urban Development after the 2011 elections: a post specifically created for him. In appropriating a free-market logic-contrary to earlier state-led construction projects in Turkey in which the state directly undertook the role of the project management and building process- TOKI developed, and is in the process of developing all its housing projects through tenders to the private contractors and developers. The process can be more or less summarized as follows: TOKI announces a development project on public land and seeks private parties as development partners. Contractors enter into an agreement with TOKI. In return for public land, they would build for TOKI’s social housing-effectively allocating a certain percentage of the housing units for a subsidized market. Thereafter, TOKI would provide generous long-term low-interest loans to the middle and lower classes, while the private developer markets the adjacent apartment at prevailing market prices mostly through mortgages secured by private banks. It is interesting to note that the state-led urban development strategy closely follows the precedent set by the yapsatçı whereas the state assumes the role of erstwhile gecekondu owners, and the private developers expand the scale to unprecedented levels.61 The juxtaposition of the state-spaces with the everyday experiences of the building process necessitates a methodological framework grounded in four spatial dimensions of social relations: territory, place, scale, and networks.62 The Turkish state, as any other state, functions through modal arrangements among these four dimensions. A moderately scaled TOKI housing project would involve building of 1,400 units. In contrast, a typical yapsat contract is limited to 20 to 40 apartments. The yapsatci is constrained by planning regulations, the lack of capital, and certainly by the scarcity of urban land suitable for development. 61 Bob Jessop, Neil Brenner, and Martin Jones, “Theorizing Sociospatial Relations,” Environment and Planning. D, Society and Space 26, no. 3 (2008): 389. 62 67 And I can aptly state that these four dimensions roughly equal to, at the territorial level, the mutations of Turkishness from an ethnically based identity that claims suzerainty over an ambiguous contingence that mythically extends from Asia to the Adriatic, and the indivisible unity of the state and the people at home to one that portends a deeper understanding of constitutional citizenship, civil rights, and the multifarious ethnic, cultural, religious identities. The place, in this context, can be best grasped through a notso-subtle metonymy that has long prevailed in Istanbul, the governmentality that invokes ruling by naming-naming and renaming streets, buildings, squares, even whole neighborhoods- in addition to the state-sanctioned hidden racisms, open discrimination, and fuelling of ethnically motivated division of labor. The scale, or the constant rescaling of the Turkish state in the last two decades refers mainly to the tension between a centralist (unitarian is the code-word in the language of the Turkish power elite), top-tobottom organized state apparatus and the incipient requests of an internationally integrated (to the global capital circuits and decision-making bodies) and horizontally structured form of statehood that is a member of the European Union. And finally, the networks represent the means of resilience and transformative potentials of an economic formation that carries the utmost crisis tendencies for the transformation from a smallscale employer dominated system to one that faintly resembles monopoly capitalism in new clothes.63 63 Ibid., 393.Ibid.: 393. 68 2.8 Method The method employed in this dissertation will carefully balance quantitative and qualitative data. I spent more than two years between December 2009 and January 2012 doing field research in Istanbul. Of that time period, I spent 3 months as a participant observant in Zeytinburnu and May Day neighborhoods, as more of a flâneur in Zeytinburnu –since I have much deeper connections and rooted experiences in that part of the city- and as a concerned sociologist in the May Day neighborhood. Between December 2009 and May 2010, I had the opportunity to conduct participant observations among the upper echelons of the development industry: working at a marketing research firm provided me with ample time and chance to meet and talk with the decision-makers on the supply side of the issue. In addition, for a year, between August 2009 and September 2010, I visited several construction sites, albeit intermittently, to conduct interviews with the engineers and architects. The evidence in itself plays a major role to elucidate and bridge the gap between what I have described as the two deficiencies in urban sociology: the abstraction of the built form and the state fetishism. Hence, to overcome the apparent risks of reproducing the state-centric spatial territorialism-bound by the academic reports, the governmental statistics, and international non-governmental and governmental agencies’ studies are supplemented by a qualitative approach. The implicit task is to foreground the production process of housing in Istanbul. Therefore, the data for this research are drawn from my participant observation in the gecekondu districts, informal conversations with the engineers, architects, developers, advertisers, marketers. Some of those are conducted journalistically, and some were semi-structured according to a set of issues sought after, 69 some were mere fleeting conservations, observations, or comments. Not only the general division of labor within the construction industry is scrutinized but also, perhaps of equal import, a wide array of other “consumers” of space were also kept in perspective. The housewives of the affluent classes, the increasingly atomized white-collar toilers of the metropolis and the aspiring “new” middle classes, the fata morgana that circumvents the heart and soul of every new buyer of a “gated community” condo, also played an important role for locating variegated contours and layers of an insipidly dynamic society. I had the chance to talk to many prospective buyers (25, to be precise), spent some time and socialized with the residents of upscale gated communities. In addition, I had the chance to conduct seven in-depth interviews with the toplevel executives of Istanbul real estate developers, the CEO’s, or Chairmen of gigantic developers, the so-called captains of a non-existent industry, and mesmerized by their bottomless optimism regarding the bull market in housing –as evinced by their insatiable appetite for more- producing around 20 to 30 thousand housing units in İstanbul alone (most are priced in the vicinity of 200 thousand US dollars, which makes them in total, one of the biggest enterprises in Turkey, by revenue). The desires of the “new” middle class, and the appetites of the capitalist have met in this bull market, where new house prices have been on the rise continually for the last two decades-at least, since the devastating crises of the mid 1990s and early 2000s. On the other hand, the concrete production process of urban space is of crucial concern here due to two important aspects. First, the manual workers, from the unqualified sixteen year old worker to the experienced ironworker, plumber, concrete 70 mason, electrical technician are expected to carry significant variations according to the different ethnic, class, and professional divisions of labor at the work site, which is, due to limitations in gaining access to the work site (being a frail, 30 year old, 5’5’’ academic does not get me very far in the business of construction) their experiences are not voiced to the extent I hoped for in the beginning of this project. Yet, I had ample opportunity to mingle with the workers and their supervisors, and especially, get into the depths of the hierarchy prevailing in construction. And a glaring, scarcely mentioned second aspect made itself felt: the engineers, architects, the controlling middle class at the workplace – who are overwhelmingly in the left-wing, socialistic, Kemalist mold in terms of personal politics- put an immense barrier between themselves, and the myriad of workers. There happens to exist a heartfelt gap between the worker –the unskilled, menial, labor- and his controller –the skilled, intellectual, supervising labor.64 This gap was nevertheless lost in an intricately organized, a skillfully choreographed web of sub-contracting; which was merely disguised under purely economic precepts. So, I tried to employ what I call a guerilla ethnography to delve into the corrals of the actual production of space in Istanbul. In order to get a glimpse of a comparative perspective in terms of inter-operation of the different actors described above, I used journalistic sources, newly established industry blogs, web sites, and most importantly, Of course, a myriad of studies have been done to explain the ideological positions of these middle class roles; while exploited by the capitalists, they hold a curiously contradictory role in the workplace and have a dominating role in every part and parcel of the production process. These class contradictory locations have found excellent explanations from Nikos Poulantzas’ highly abstract and theoretical oeuvre to Pierre Bourdieu’s empirically conscious studies to Erik Olin Wright’s lengthy but definitively comprehensive studies: See, Erik Olin Wright, The Debate on Classes, ed. Erik Olin Wright (New York: Verso, 1989); Erik Olin Wright, “Framework for the Analysis of Class Structure,” in The Debate on Classes, ed. Erik Olin Wright (New York: Verso, 1989); Nikos Poulantzas, Classes in Contemporary Capitalism (London: New Left Books, 1975); Nikos Poulantzas, “On Classes,” New Left Review 78 (1973): 27–54; Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (Harvard University Press, 1984). 64 71 gossip that permeated in the underbelly of the developers’ tightly protected realm of action. Insofar as conditions permitted, an ethnographically oriented study of the different segments of housing production is used here to corroborate the everyday experiences relayed through in-depth interviews. When I began this research, very few studies took the trouble of bringing together a variety of statistical sources on urban development, a few had compiled construction data, but except for one invaluable study, nobody seemed to pay any attention to the quantitative development of the urban space in Istanbul –or, any other city in Turkey. Ilhan Tekeli’s meticulous attention to detail, his stubborn interest in bringing out the infinitesimal qualities and aspects of urbanization in Istanbul have been an extra-ordinary source of influence for this study.65 Finally, I have drawn on newspaper archives, websites, developers’ own publications, and my observations in the city to bring together a database of private sector real estate development in the last 25 years in Istanbul. I collected 98 development corporations’ more than 270 separate developments that consisted of more than 250 thousand housing units in a database, and entered GPS coordinates for each of them to get an accurate view of the development industry in Istanbul. It proved to be a fertile source, and promises to be of great use in the future. That database was of immense use in the sixth chapter.66 In the next chapter, I will remove the cloak of Istanbul’s multi-variegated, rich, and complex history to gain an insight on contemporary developments. Rem Koolhaas 65 Tekeli, Development of the Istanbul Metropolitan Area. 66 You can access the database online: http://bit.ly/1iWjFek 72 argued that understanding New York actually requires understanding the earliest European settlement there; in other words, it means making sense of the gridiron shape of urban planning laid out in the 17th century.67 In Istanbul’s case, things get much more complicated. It is not merely a Turkish city, not even a city that belongs to the previous millennium. It is one of the oldest centers of human history that has housed a series of the most important world-empires. First, I delve into the ways the Ottomans appropriated Istanbul as the nadir of their political power, and how the fate of the empire merged with its capital city. 67 Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan (Monacelli Press, 1994). 73 3 Emergence of an Ottoman Urban Topography The urgency of repopulating the city owed its existence to the crucial role of the commercial and politico-administrative qualities of Istanbul. Moreover, these same important qualities contributed to a limited –and highly relative-egalitarian streak that permitted a modicum of understanding between different communities and helped nonMuslim groups succeed in commercial functions. The first developments in the city, after the sacred Eyüp mosque complex, was the Grand Bazaar (Kapalıçarşı/Bedesten) built in the midst of Constantine Forum (today’s Çemberlitaş) and Tauri Forum (Beyazıt).1 The political apparatus was not far away from the commercial apparatus. Adjacent to the Grand Bazaar, on the remainder of the Tauri Forum, Mehmet II’s palace was built, and the palace remained as the main administrative center until the latter part of the 17th century, when Süleyman I moved his household and offices to the Topkapı Palace. 2 This new palace, which initially served as the residential palace for the sultan’s harem, was most possibly in the ruins of Augusteion and Byzantium’s old Acropolis.3 Mehmet II’s symbolic gestures towards the city’s Roman heritage was not merely limited to its imperial significance, he also ordered a mosque to be built in his honor, named after himself, the Fatih Mosque, which also contained his planned burial site-that Halil İnalcık and Donald Quataert, An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire Vol. I: 13001600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 18. 1 Inalcık wrote that sultans’ slaves were employed for the construction of this palace for wages comparable to what Janissaries received then, and this was paid in order to ease these slaves’ payments for their freedom, see, Halil Inalcik, “The Policy of Mehmed II toward the Greek Population of Istanbul and the Byzantine Buildings of the City,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 1969, 236. 2 D. Kuban, İstanbul, Bir Kent Tarihi: Bizantion, Konstantinopolis, İstanbul, trans. Z. Rona (Türkiye Ekonomik ve Toplumsal Tarih Vakfı, 2000), 206. 3 74 would later become a shrine in his honor- on top of the already half-demolished Holy Apostles Church. The Holy Apostles Church was the burial site of Constantine and until the 6th century restoration of the Hagia Sophia was the official cathedral of the Eastern Roman state where emperors were crowned. After the mosque was built, a new neighborhood, complete with bazaars was erected around the külliye.4 Hence, the first stage in the Ottomanization of the city was completed. The old backbone of Constantinople, the Mese, gradually lost its central character and was replaced by the Grand Bazaar’s crucial access to the Golden Horn docks, and the erstwhile spatial topography that axially moved through the forums and symbolically carried on by the balance between the Holy Apostles Church and Hagia Sophia Cathedral was reinvigorated by the visually powerful play between the Fatih Mosque and the newly Islamicized Ayasofya Mosque. There were three main suburbs outside the city walls: Galata, Eyüp, and Üsküdar. Üsküdar was the first Islamicized suburb; the area saw Muslim communities flourish before Mehmet II’s takeover of the city. After the conquest, newly built imarets further solidified the Islamic character of the neighborhood-which quietly, but resiliently continued for centuries. With Eyüp and Fatih, Üsküdar had played the role of TurkoIslamic anchor of Istanbul’s cultural self-description. Although Eyüp remarkably lost its significance in the latter part of the 20th century, from the conquest onwards, for almost five centuries, acted as the spiritual and spatial representation of the Ottoman reign over the domain. The Eyüp Mosque and its külliye rapidly became a hub of Islamic resettlement from the 15th century on. The 18th century and early 19th century Western 4 Ibid., 199–202. 75 travelers wrote that the neighborhood was still overwhelmingly Muslim, and indeed, the vicinity of the shrine and the tomb of Eyüp and his namesake mosque was then off-limits for foreigners and non-Muslims.5 Galata, or Pera according to the non-Muslims, was able to keep its privileges as a commercial colony, and presented a stark contrast to the other areas across the Golden Horn and other main suburbs with its predominant non-Muslim population. Even though Mehmet permitted the autonomous self-rule of the Galata colony, let the Genoese and other Italian and European merchants self-administer themselves –churches, lay people, as well as commercial exchanges- through his hand-picked podesta, he and his followers still kept a tight lid on the suburb by converting a –possibly- cistern to the Bodrum Mosque near the eastern gate of the suburb, building cannon foundries by the northern walls, later known as Tophane (literally, cannon house, in Turkish), armory and shipyards by the southern gates (in today’s Kasımpaşa), and establishing schools for the enslaved Janissary soldiers in the midst of the suburb. The privileges were later abrogated in 1682, right before the great wars with the Habsburg Empire began.6 The suburb of Galata was not free from the homogenizing influence of the gradually centralizing Ottoman state apparatus. Yet, Galata has always played the role of an alter-ego, a sublimated envy, a thinly veiled desire against the mainstream Sunni Islam’s strict control over bodily joys.7 For a quiet interesting and an almost apolitical orientalist heist, see, Charles MacFarlane, Constantinople in 1828: A Residence of Sixteen Months in the Turkish Capital and Provinces: With an Account of the Present State of the Naval and Military Power, and of the Resources of the Ottoman Empire (Saunders and Otley, 1829), 300–308; Edhem Eldem, “Istanbul: From Imperial to Peripheralized Capital,” in The Ottoman City between East and West: Aleppo, Izmir and Istanbul, ed. Edhem Eldem, Daniel Goffman, and Bruce Masters (Cambridge University Press, 1999), 152; Halil Inalcik, “Istanbul: An Islamic City,” Journal of Islamic Studies 1, no. 1 (January 1, 1990): 1–23. 5 6 See, Eldem, “Istanbul: From Imperial to Peripheralized Capital,” 151. 7 Ibid., 150. 76 Aside from these three suburbs, the early Ottoman Istanbul was a natural example of any pre-modern city, albeit in overblown proportions. On the one hand, the Old and New Palaces, the military installations, barracks, armories, foundries, and shipyards adorned the urban fabric in its peculiar militaristic political vein, on the other hand, the old Constantinople delineated by the Theodosian Walls still functioned by many gates and docks that dotted the walls as umbilical cords that fed the city.8 One of these docks was more important than the others. Unkapanı, the main grain dock of the city, and vicinity became the focal point of growth with the increasing population. The ancient peninsula was crowned by the military-administrative elites, between the axis of the Old and New Palaces, while the civilian population was segregated according to faith. Muslim quarters were located in the heart of the peninsula; Jews, Greeks, and Armenians lived on the periphery- the well-to-do were closer to the main docks and ports, the less fortunate were left in the cramped quarters by the walls. Greek quarters were on the shores of the Golden Horn and the Marmara; Armenians lived on the strip from Yenikapı to Samatya, and on the western part of the peninsula by the Topkapı gate (not the same place as the palace, actually, Topkapı palace was not called as such until the late 18th century) and Jews lived along the Golden Horn shores, across two neighborhoods on each side of the Horn: Balat and Hasköy.9 The areas immediately adjacent to the Theodosian Walls were the only empty spaces in this almost continuously crowded city, and these places remained empty until the mid-20th century-in some cases, even until very recently. Today, although nominally Unkapanı (meaning flour depot in old Turkish) stays intact among the once countless points of entry for the city’s sustenance, there were other well-known places, like Yemiş İskelesi (the port of the fruits, which stood until the late 1950s and served as a main port for passenger transport across the Golden Horn ), Odun Kapısı (the gate of timber), etc. See, Ibid., 162. 8 9 Ibid., 152. 77 These vacant lots served a function similar to that which they did during the Byzantine times, as the fruits and vegetable gardens of the city –partly, also as orchards- provided fresh produce to the city.10 3.1 Land tenure in Ottoman Istanbul The significance of Ottoman urban topography, however, owed its long-lasting existence and enduring vitality to a particular aspect of the Empire’s political economy. The unique features of land ownership had determined the growth of the urban structure in the Ottoman Empire. As Halil Inalcık explained in detail, private ownership of property emerged quite late in the history of the empire. Similar to some of its contemporary world-empires, especially the Chinese Empire, the land almost exclusively belonged to the state, and as the personification of the state, its control laid in the hands of the ruling dynasty. As Eric Wolf reiterated Max Weber’s definition in his discussion of this domain type over land as a prebendal domain, private landholding was to a large extent limited, and the land could not be transferred from one generation to the other, as in what he called patrimonial, or feudal, domain, but rather belonged to a centralized state.11 Inalcık, and other prominent social historians and sociologists argued that the Ottomans inherited, or followed closely, this land tenure system from the RomanByzantine imperial regimes, and in this continuity, the domain over land became integrated with Islamic legal jurisdiction and formed an indubitable part of the traditional J. Koder, “Fresh Vegetables for the Capital,” in Constantinople and Its Hinterland: Papers from the Twenty-Seventh Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, Oxford, April 1993, ed. C. A Mango, G. Dagron, and G. Greatrex (Aldershot, Cambridge: Variorum Publishing, 1995). 10 11 Eric R Wolf, Peasants (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1966), 51–3. 78 land ownership patterns.12 Thus, until the Tanzimat reforms of 1839, the right to own land in the Ottoman Empire only belonged to the state and the sultan and to whom he may see fit.13 As a consequence of the rulers’ absolute claim on the domain of land, the land was strictly preserved as a non-commodity; not bought and sold on the market, the transfer of land in any pecuniary form was precluded from the outset. On the other hand, feudalistic tendencies and the centrifugal forces of the empire were kept on a tight leash, the localization of any contention against the throne was brutally punished, the sole challengers remained limited to the intricacies of palace politics, more often than not with dire results for the sultan himself, but palace politics never extended to an open risk against the dynasty, nor the Sunni-Islamic hegemony. This was the subject of a lengthy discussion –an acrimonious polemic, indeed- whether this land tenure is an example of Asiatic Mode of Production, or a different form of feudalism, wherein the prebends were already commodified, albeit in a proto-capitalistic vein.14 In any case, the Ottoman İnalcık and Quataert brilliantly summarized the landholding regime prevalent –though gradually changing- under the Ottoman Empire: “The state (miri) lands, about 90 percent of all the arable lands were…run accourding to a sultanic law code drawn up by the civil bureaucracy. It was this law code, actually a combination of Islamic and local practices related to the Roman-Byzantine legacy, which administered the relationships in Ottoman landholding and taxation. In fact, the system was closely analogous to that of previous Islamic and Byzantine states, and there was no reason for the Ottomans to revolutionize tested methods as long as the state received its revenues.” See, İnalcık and Quataert, An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire Vol. I: 1300-1600, 105–142. 12 Or, as İnalcık and Quataert described it, “[T]he Ottomans…regarded the family labor farm system as the foundation of agricultural production and rural society…Maintenance of these two institutions [the other being craft guild system] formed, so to speak, the constitutional underpinnings of the traditional imperial system until the nineteenth century, when the Tanzimat reformers discarded them in favor of Westerninspired liberal policies.” Ibid. 145. 13 Erdost wrote lengthy, at times acerbic, even combative critiques against the former camp, whose proponents were well-established academics like Korkut Boratav and Çağlar Keyder. Unfortunately, Erdost, an agronomist by training, an old guard socialist, had limited sources at hand, and his findings were mostly historical data’s pigeonholing to some theoretical doxa, and his influence was immense, almost ruinous for a generation of scholars and socialists. See, Muzaffer Ilhan Erdost, Asya üretim tarzi ve Osmanlı Imparatorluğunda mülkiyet ilişkileri (Onur Yayınları, 2005). 14 79 Empire’s predominant land tenure significantly differed from that of Western Europe, and this difference shaped remarkably distinctive relations of production.15 Here, though, the land tenure in Istanbul begets particular attention in comparison to the rest of the empire. Inalcık underlined the fact that 90% of all land available in the empire was subject to the miri domain regime; i.e. owned by the state, and as the personification of the state, belonged to the sultan. Yet, a considerable portion of urban land in İstanbul, houses and shops, an important stock of residential and commercial buildings that remained from the Byzantine era were granted the mülk status –i.e. could be bought and sold, rented and inherited as waqf property- in order to rapidly repopulate the city. There were of course some glitches, and a few steps were taken back to protect the central state’s control, Mehmet II gradually diminished his mülk grants, and furthermore, sanctioned new regulations to collect rent from the bequeathed mülk property. Even then, a backlash against his whimsical interpretation of land tenure was born, so in its stead, he expropriated some of these mülk properties, including properties that were already turned into waqf, thanks to his administrators’ loose application of sharia laws concerning property regulations. He was blamed for subsuming sharia law under his ‘urfi law practices.16 This issue portends a quite interesting and much debated phenomenon inherent in the Ottoman social structure and its impermeable resistance to a capitalist mode of production, echoing Marx’s arguments of an Asiatic Mode of Production. Yet, İnalcık and Quataert prefer to accentuate the çift-hane system, and the peculiarity of the Ottoman case. See, İnalcık and Quataert, An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire Vol. I: 1300-1600, 107–108. In the late 1970s, a contested polemic surrounding the characteristics of Ottoman social and economic structure and its legacy to contemporary Turkey created much sound and fury, yet, it is of scant interest here, and will be discussed with those questions at the end of the next chapter. 15 16 Inalcik, “The Policy of Mehmed II toward the Greek Population of Istanbul and the Byzantine Buildings of the City,” 239–245. 80 This conflicting character of private property and its inherent link to the whim of political authority, inasmuch as its accentuated prevalence in Istanbul, compared to the rest of the country, raised a profound question regarding the proto-capitalistic characteristics of ownership in the Ottoman capital. Inalcık pointed out that urban land rent –even if exerted by the state- would be thought to be synonymous with a Marxian framework –wherein, land rent played a parasitic role on merchant and industrial capitalists- and this might indeed portray some parallels with the sharia teachings on rent –wherein, interest was sinful and forbidden for the Muslims and profits from merchants’ exchange relations and rent were mere means of accumulation, or hoarding17 It is made sufficiently apparent by historians, that muqata’a –a form of tax farming- was a protocapitalistic form of rent, which side-stepped Islamic sharia regulations on interest by turning the interest payable on capital borrowing –on land, state structures, merchandise, etc.- as some form of service.18 So, urban land rent, in a very similar way to financialization of mortgage credits, carried a potent but latent possibility for triggering capitalist accumulation. Yet, all the might of the Ottoman state was not enough to turn urban land rent collection as an established institution. It could barely be recognized in gradual attempts to formulate a robust fiscal and financial system, though it was withdrawn in each attempt in the face of popular and elite resistance, and, in most likelihood, served as one of the elements of the palace elite’s sticks or carrots game İnalcık and Quataert, An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire Vol. I: 1300-1600, 107, 145–53. 17 18 As Inalcık argued: “In Ottoman state finances the term muqata'a means in general the leasing or farming out to an individual-after agreement on the sum which the individual will pay-of a source of state revenue. In the context under consideration the term is to be understood as "rent." Inalcik, “The Policy of Mehmed II toward the Greek Population of Istanbul and the Byzantine Buildings of the City,” 241. 81 repertoire. Due to this ambiguous situation vis-a-vis the state’s role and willingness to encourage an urban private property regime (at least, as the kernel of exchange relations), from the 15th century on, the predominant mode of ownership and domain on land in Istanbul became the wakf-imaret system. For instance, one of Mehmet II’s first economic decisions of the city after the conquest was building the Grand Bazaar as the wakf of the Ayasofya Mosque.19 Not only were the monumental urban structures of the city subject to this wakf-imaret system, but the wakfs primarily established by the sultan’s family, and secondarily by higher officials and pashas built imarets –charitable soup kitchens which turned into urban institutions complete with mosques, hospices, schools, and caravanserais. Whole neighborhoods were built around these wakf-imarets, and many of the city districts were named after these central institutions of the urban growth.20 The predominant features of Istanbul’s urban dispersal and residential topography were defined not by the residents themselves, but by the imarets in the eye of these settlements.21 In other words, the city was made by the powerful military and religious elite and “those who provisioned the city were also its builders.”22 İnalcık definitively stated that high-ranking members of the ‘askerî class [palace officials, army officers, ulemâ and “bureaucrats”] were…far richer than merchants and craftsmen, and were Inalcik, “Istanbul,” January 1, 1990, 12. For instance, the waqf of Ayasofya Mosque received rents from 2,350 shops, 4 caravansaries, two baths, and 987 houses. See, Inalcik, “The Policy of Mehmed II toward the Greek Population of Istanbul and the Byzantine Buildings of the City,” 243. 19 Nur Altinyildiz, “The Architectural Heritage of İstanbul and the Ideology of Preservation,” Muqarnas 24 (2007): 282. 21 Ibid. 20 Çiğdem Kafescioğlu, “The Ottoman Capital in the Making: The Reconstruction of Constantinople in the Fifteenth Century” (Harvard University, 1996), 321. 22 82 more inclined to found wakfs, partly perhaps for reasons of social and political prestige, but also as a means of retaining within the family’s control capital derived originally as income from the Public Treasury.23 From the 16th century onwards, these classical urban institutions, the waqf complexes, shaped the toponymy of the city, although, until late 15th century, Byzantine era monuments and buildings were still definitive of the urban layout. The wakf-imaret system was the truly Ottoman contribution to the city. Inalcık further argued that mahalles, built around imarets, were themselves selfascribed auto-cephalous, almost autonomously controlled, self-administered units with their own unique cultural significance. However, this argument seems to tacitly address Max Weber’s discussion -and, eventually, his normative definition- of urban structures. Max Weber’s conceptualization of the city and its intrinsic relations to the capitalist development in the West have deeply influenced studies in urban history and sociology, in addition to a plethora of other fields, but was especially determining of the main parameters in modernization theory and area studies-at least until the late 1960s. Weber thought the sole genuine urban experience that led to the emergence of capitalism and modern civilization could be found in the Western city. And the Western city had five basic properties that made it historically peculiar and helped it play the springboard for further progress: a certain degree of protection and city walls, a marketplace, relatively free and autonomous laws and courts, a specific form of association, or urban notion of citizenship, and finally, a relative auto-cephaly or ability in self-administration.24 23 Halil Inalcik, “Istanbul,” The Encyclopaedia of Islam 4 (1973): 235. “An urban “community,” in the full meaning of the word, appears as a general phenomenon only in the Occident….To constitute a full urban community a settlement must display a relative predominance of trade-commercial relations with the settlement as a whole displaying the following features: 1. a 24 83 Weber’s normative definition, perhaps his overly idealized typification, would have presented an almost insurmountable hurdle for scholars in Ottoman history and Islamic urbanism. A city court, or civil laws specifically writ for autonomous courts was highly irregular for Islamic jurisprudence, and in essence, contradictory to the spirit of sharia. However, Inalcık, appears to find a leeway for the Islamic city to claim a comparable role as the hansestadt of late feudalism. In his arguments, it was not the city in toto that carried Weber’s qualifications, but the mahalle. Mahalles elected their own kethüdas (somewhere in between sheriffs and wardens) who were responsible for the well-being of the community, the wakfs by means of their boards and imams of their mosques were mediating institutions between the state and the community, and public order was protected by the active participation of the residents. At least two guards kept the streets safe, while at least two garbage men were tasked with the duty to clean up the streets whose pay came out of the mahalle’s communal funds and imams (or, GreekOrthodox, Armenian-Orthodox priests, or Jewish rabbis) led their communities in this urban quasi-grassroots local administration. Until 1826, imams and other religious figures, were the de jure leaders of the urban communities, when a new elected position – muhtar- was established for such role.25 What needs to be emphasized, however, is that the idealized Ottoman multiculturalism, as the underlying quasi-decentralized autonomy of the mahalle shows, was rather a mere temporal cross-section of a highly dynamic social, political, and economic fortification; 2. a market; 3. a court of its own and at least partially autonomous law; 4. a related form of association; and 5. at least partial autonomy and auto-cephaly.” Weber, The City, 80–81. 25 Inalcik, “Istanbul,” 1973, 238–242. 84 system. The presumed self-control of the mahalle was almost always crushed in the face of state intervention, and as the guilds’ and religious orders’ powers faded, the bureaucratic-askerî apparatus did not hesitate to exert its force towards a centralized uniformity.26 In that sense, it is possible to interpret the wakf-imaret system as the precursor and facilitator of a bureaucratic-askerî hoarding of urban land. Hence, economic monopolization of urban land and concentration of political power and influence, were easily kept under lasting control by this comparatively small class fraction. This system, and its main activities in the making of Istanbul’s state-space was in itself inimical to the capitalist mode of production, especially the modern worldsystem’s unfettered and circuitous interplay between commodity-capital and moneycapital, but was rather at home with land rent and money hoarding. Although this question found few interested parties, the wakf-imaret system’s lasting effects on Turkish political-economy and ideological habits is a subject of profound interest, especially given the fact that the current ruling party’s shadowy deals on land –and public contracts- were almost exclusively conducted through wakfs. I will return to the repercussions of this system in the sixth chapter. Ebru Boyar and Kate Fleet, however, describe a different duality between the mahalle and waqfs. In their research, contrary to the mahalle’s asphyxiating social control and pressure on the everyday life –of especially women, wakfs present a breath of air with their intrinsic liveliness and heterodoxy that prevailed in market relations. Boyar and Fleet gave a determining role to the wakf as a fundamental building brick of the economic and social structure of Ottoman Istanbul. Defined as such, the role that wakfs play represent the most important features that produced social space in Istanbul. See, Ebru Boyar and Kate Fleet, A Social History of Ottoman Istanbul (Cambridge University Press, 2010), 125–8. 26 85 Figure 3.1: Istanbul in 1500 AD27 3.2 Commerce and the Ensuing Incorporation to the World-economy Istanbul, the most populous metropolis of the world until the 18th century, had kept on with its Roman inheritance: the city required a vast hinterland to be fed, kept warm in cold winters, to build sheds for its burgeoning population, to produce and sell a huge array of goods to the rest of the Mediterranean, to protect the state machinery, and 27 Inalcik, “Istanbul,” 1973. 86 to reproduce this very machinery’s constant drive for survival. 28 This long list meant that the more the concentration of power in a city, the more the need for subsumption of territory. Hence, this territory hungry empire’s extraordinary capital needed Egypt –the grains depot of the Mediterranean since pre-historic ages- the Balkans and Western Anatolia to be fed, and the Crimean peninsula and most of the northern Black Sea to build sheds (until 19th century houses built in İstanbul were exclusively wooden).29 Imagining that the supply of such variety of resources from such an expansive geographical reach was provided purely by force, by expropriation, or by sustaining an idyllic semi-feudal countryside –again, mainly by the might of the sword- was neither possible, nor reproducible in the long run.30 As Edhem Eldem succinctly described, “Istanbul was…a trading place of an exceptional nature, in all ways distinct from other Ottoman ports and cities.”31 Istanbul in the 16th and 17th centuries was the epicenter of Ottoman imperial institutions, complete with the artisanal manufacturing prowess of the guilds and thanks to its gigantic scale monetization of exchange relations, attracted eastern Mediterranean trade. The availability of money payment, and indeed, the widespread use of money, the powerful P. Bairoch, Cities and Economic Development: From the Dawn of History to the Present (University Of Chicago Press, 1991); Zafer Toprak, “Istanbul’da Mekan ve Sayısal İlişkiler,” in Aptullah Kuran Için Yazılar-Essays in Honour of Aptullah Kuran (Istanbul: Yapi Kredi Yayinlari, 1999); Zafer Toprak, “Tarihsel Nüfusbilim Açısından Istanbul’un Nüfusu ve Toplumsal Topografyası,” Dünü ve Bugünüyle Toplum ve Ekonomi, no. 3 (April 1992): 109–20. 28 29 Eldem, “Istanbul: From Imperial to Peripheralized Capital,” 162–163. In dire times, the Roman and Byzantine emperors employed either one of these three methods, or all, mostly in vain. See, P. Magdalino, “The Grain Supply of Constantinople, Ninth-Twelfth Centuries,” in Constantinople and Its Hinterland: Papers from the Twenty-Seventh Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, Oxford, April 1993, ed. C. A Mango, G. Dagron, and G. Greatrex (Aldershot, Cambridge: Variorum Publishing, 1995). 30 31 Eldem, “Istanbul: From Imperial to Peripheralized Capital,” 161–3. 87 imperial elite’s ostentatiously excessive luxury consumption, the perpetual cycles of military expenditure, the controlled environment of merchant transactions and the relative transparency and competitiveness of trade relations made the city a beacon for contemporary traders. With the high levels of monetization, Westerners’ attention was also continuously directed towards the markets in Istanbul, and for Europeans, the city became the single most influential magnet for merchants.32 The city, in pre-modern terms, was a vast hub for a great variety of commodities and functioned as a central depot for an array of consumption goods. A cornucopia of consumption goods (tanned leather, cotton and silk yarns and all sorts of woven fabrics, rugs and carpets, ropes, soap, etc.), building materials (bricks, logs, wooden material of different kinds), fresh produce, processed food (dried fruits, olives and olive oil, spices, nuts, sesame, all kinds of cheese, and definitely yoghurt), salt, and finally grain, flowed into the city to keep it well-fed and content.33 What really set Istanbul apart from other capital cities of the contemporary worldempires, and other competing Eastern Mediterranean ports, was the extent of its dynamic system of economic exchange.34 Although an urban geographical segregation and discrimination was gradually incipient, and on top of that, a static and starkly limited guild system defined the contours of artisanal production and exchange, the city’s markets were dynamically located in a seldom witnessed coming together of different 32 Ibid., 178–179. İnalcık and Quataert, An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire Vol. I: 1300-1600, 180– 183; Eldem, “Istanbul: From Imperial to Peripheralized Capital,” 178–179. 33 Eldem, “Istanbul: From Imperial to Peripheralized Capital,” 158–160. Eldem details a heavily stereotypical account written by a Westerner, and calls it a form of “commercial anthropology.” The stereotypical, and almost racist accounts provided by these visitors were rather the product of the state’s compartmentalization of trades and its over-reliance on the guild system. 34 88 faiths and ethnicities. In other words, according to İnalcık, in İstanbul there had always been Jewish, Greek, and Armenian mahalles, but never a Chinatown, nor a ghetto. The residential segregation came to be irrelevant in the marketplace. Of course, this is Inalcık’s rather rosy interpretation of Istanbul’s inter-ethnic guild based commercial structure; on the other hand, Eldem’s account of an Armenian sarraf (goldsmith, and not so infrequently, money-lender) in the mid-18th century is definitely not so optimistic.35 In my opinion, an important debate from the 1990s sheds light on the protocapitalistic characteristics of İstanbul. Jan Luiten Van Zanden, in a well-received book and two further essays, argued that the capitalist mode of production emerged through the merchant capital’s concentration in trading cities of Amsterdam-as it did before in the Italian city states of the Mediterranean, Genoa, Venice, and Florence, and would later happen in London. The debate echoes Henri Pirenne and Max Weber’s early twentieth century arguments –that the urban structure owed its existence to the adventurous traders and their able sense in hoarding large sums of gold-money. In this vein, merchants’ capital precedes the capitalist mode of accumulation, and van Zanden described the situation of Amsterdam and other protestant cities in 16th century Europe as an archipelago of capitalistic accumulation in a sea of feudalism. Immanuel Wallerstein penned a harsh critique of this argument, and to an extent, rightly so, and blamed van Zanden for putting the cart before the horse and misinterpreting the cause-effect relationship between merchant-capital and the capitalist mode of production. In a candid vigor, van Zanden’s argument would imply that capitalist mode of production existed In its stead, the sarraf, Yakoub Hovenessian, was tortured after the downfall of his protector in the Porte, “his dead body was decapitated and flung aside ath the entrance of the palace with his severed head positioned between his legs.” See, Ibid., 164–174. 35 89 during the Roman Empire’s centralized system of trade in the Mediterranean, or, for the same purpose in the classical Ottoman Empire, and the Chinese Empire, as well as Mughal India. As Marx and Weber argued at several places in their study of modern capitalism, pure profit mongering does not mean capitalist accumulation and the conditions of gold-money’s transformation into capital is much more complicated than the simple drive for hoarding. In any case, İstanbul can be seen as a failure in that regard, compared to lesser cities of the 16th century, and the paradigmatic features of this failure would be of much interest.36 While Amsterdam and other Dutch cities brought together an accumulated merchant capital (or hoarding of gold) even before the provenance of the capitalist mode of production, Istanbul could not translate this pre-capitalistic accumulation of money into a fully-fledged modern world-system and a world-economy built around itself. One thing is certain, the extent and power of İstanbul’s trade relations in the 16th century Mediterranean was, at least at the same level, if not more, compared to the Habsburg Spanish Empire –so skilfully explicated by Fernand Braudel. What Ottomans lacked in the Potosi silver mines and the slave labor of the New World, they recuperated with the slave labor of Africa –even before the Europeans, though not mainly oriented towards production- and resources of the constant expansion into the Balkans and Northern Africa. Although discerning and useful in such comparison, the world-systems analysis paid scant attention to the role played by cities in the shaping up of the processes Jan Luiten van Zanden, “Synopsis of the Book: The Rise and Decline of Holland’s Economy: Merchant Capitalism and the Labour Market,” Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 20, no. 2 (April 1, 1997): 189–92; Jan Luiten van Zanden, “Do We Need a Theory of Merchant Capitalism?,” Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 20, no. 2 (April 1, 1997): 255–67; Immanuel Wallerstein, “Merchant, Dutch, or Historical Capitalism?,” Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 20, no. 2 (April 1, 1997): 243–54. 36 90 of uneven development that begot the modern world-system and the world-economy. The city remained as a synecdoche, as an allusion to bigger economic and political developments that took place in the longue dureé. 37 What is generally overlooked in this analysis was that the longue dureé, as Henri Lefebvre so aptly put it in his rhythm-analyses of the urban structures, was not impervious to the temporal and spatial aspect of the city, but rather encapsulated and flourished within miniscule movements of everyday life as a representational space in time. Treating the longue dureé as spatial –and, endowed with a plethora of multi-layered wealth of geographical and cultural differences- temporality, would, I believe, firstly, permit Fernand Braudel’s theoretically rich historiography. Second, it would open the way for understanding the divergent fates of different cases of incorporation into the world-economy, and especially, help engender an understanding of the discursive gap, chasm to be more precise, between East and the West. Why is the question of Orientalism, and its Siamese twin Occidentalism, or auto-Orientalism so pervasive in the periphery? Why did the late Ottoman experience, as the empire collapsed, try to come up with a top-down approach in centralized reformation, that came to be known as the Tanzimat era, that left indelible marks on the psyche of the Turkish and Kurdish peoples, and subsequently annihilated the non-Muslim minorities’ physical existence on this land? And how can the effects of peripheralization be long lasting that not only shaped the late Ottoman governmentality but lived on almost verbatim, in the Kemalist republican entity? The questions can be numerous and will be a prominent, if implicit, theme of the next chapters. However, the third contribution of reformulating the longue dureé at a For a similar critique, see, Jan Nederveen Pieterse, “A Critique of World System Theory,” International Sociology 3, no. 3 (1988): 251–66. 37 91 spatial scale further enables foregrounding cities as meaningful entities that have determining power in the world-economy and the inter-state system of the modern worldsystem and assigning to these cities a proportionate role as an element of my object of analysis. Thus, it is pertinent to pay special attention to the geographical rhythm of incorporation into the world-system. The incorporation that began with the Balkans in the early 19th century continued in the Eastern Mediterranean with the gradual devolution of Egypt, and finally, current Turkey’s Western borders entered a long phase of peripheralization in the 1830s.38 The process of incorporation gave birth to a novel capitalist class rooted in İstanbul with links to the worldwide capital circuits while a whole pre-modern set of relations of production was uprooted and gradually obliterated along with the ethnic, religious, and cultural connotations of such a system. As Europe entered 19th century with a series of wars, the hangover effect of the French Revolution, in a manner of speaking, the askerî class in the Ottoman Empire, lost the last vestiges of its power and had to shoulder the burdensome and much belated reforms, and, eventually, the turmoil of the Tanzimat era. Stefanos Yerasimos wrote in the 1970s that the empire’s relations of production up until the 19th century were almost exclusively built upon an ethnic division of labor that centered on the redistributive hub of İstanbul. Yet, the 18th century brought a change in this ethnic division of labor, possibly due to the abolition of the devshirme system the non-Muslim population in Anatolia increased both in absolute and relative terms. By the end of the 18th century, the share of non-Muslims in the Anatolian population increased 38 Huri İslamoğlu and Çağlar Keyder, “Agenda for Ottoman History,” Review 1, no. 1 (1977): 53. 92 from 8% to 20%. In addition to this relevant rise in population share, the traditional roles played by separate ethnic and religious groups changed significantly in the early part of the 19th century. The Phanariote aristocracy of Greeks (they were granted specific privileges by Mehmet II, served as the foreign emissaries of the Sublime Porte, and for eight decades in the 18th century ruled Wallachia and Moldova principalities as their own fiefdom) lost their strategic and administrative influence after the Greek Independence in 1829 and then slowly turned into financiers next to the Armenian goldsmiths. Add to that the most ancient merchants of the Orient, the Levantines, the incipient characteristics of the merchant and finance capitalists of the empire were apparent: they were overwhelmingly non-Muslim, from several Christian beliefs and with extensive knowledge of and contacts in the ascendant Western world. They would be the kernel of a truly Ottoman bourgeoisie. Moreover, the loss of Wallachia and Moldova to Russia at around the same time, the withering of Porte’s tributary rule over Egypt, and most crucially, the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 that paved the transformation of Western Anatolia to one of the significant sources of grains imports to Britain had greatly affected the predominant pattern of peripheralization of the empire. Already scarce labor power was devalued further with the establishment of çiftliks-the large-scale manufactories of agricultural products. Finally, the unfettered access of European textiles to the Ottoman markets was the last blow that broke the back of the camel and shredded to pieces what remained of the barter economy and non-commodified agricultural relations of exchange.39 A key issue made itself felt in all its seriousness at this conjuncture. Çağlar Stefanos Yerasimos, Azgelişmişlik Sürecinde Türkiye 2. Tanzimattan 1. Dünya Savaşına (İstanbul: Gözlem Yayınları, 1975), 607–624. 39 93 Keyder brought attention to this question in his seminal book, State and Classes in Turkey, wherein he pointed out that the sole class fraction of hypothetically imputed power to act upon and reorder this social system prone to implosion at any moment was the non-Muslim merchant capitalists. In a rapidly changing atmosphere with the overwhelming power of the Western world and the perpetual threat posed by a newfangled entrant on the stage, the Russian Empire, it was evident that the askerî class had already forfeited its hard-earned right in ruling this vast empire. Though they still had the de jure authority, their knowledge of this new system and the material basis of their power in this system rapidly eroded. The newly emerging bourgeoisie gained the de facto authority by means of capital accumulation, yet lacked the muscle power to establish a new system. The nominal abilities of the bourgeoisie could not find the grounds for its own realization.40 They were indeed the ruling classes on paper. Perhaps this could have been the reason for Ottoman incorporation to the modern world-system as a peripheral economy, unlike Russia, which had entered the fray as a semi-peripheral economy.41 This will be of determining importance when I discuss the surreptitious conscience collective that permeated with increasing might in İstanbulites’ spatial perceptions. A state apparatus that is highly inept, uncoordinated, corrupt, and delusional about its capabilities entered into a war of positions against a presumably ruling class of a new capitalist order, a bourgeoisie that is mostly made up of Christians, and İstanbul played out as the urban setting of this unjust war against the minorities. Before that, though, I will define the architectural and urban qualities of classical Ottoman İstanbul. 40 Keyder, State and Class in Turkey : A Study in Capitalist Development. Immanuel Wallerstein, “The Ottoman Empire and the Capitalist World-Economy: Some Questions for Research,” Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 2, no. 3 (January 1, 1979): 389–98. 41 94 3.3 The Spatial Characteristics of Classical Ottoman Istanbul A question asked of any layperson about the architecturally defining qualities of classical İstanbul, what could best represent İstanbul symbolically, the answer would indubitably be the mosques, their minarets, and a handful of Byzantine monuments. All these soul defining imperial monuments have carried a single person’s artistic imprint since the 16th century: Great Architect Sinan (1490-1588). In İstanbul alone, Sinan designed and built 120 structures, and with more than 300 buildings attributed to him throughout the empire, he shaped the fundamental style and form of classical Ottoman architecture.42 The main spatial solutions Sinan employed in his structures were an answer to the limits of pre-modern building techniques and an attempt in overcoming technological limits: relations between monumentality and scale, domes, arches, and vaults necessitated solving the underlying engineering problems in craftsmen’s practically confined abilities, and further required a systematical, mathematical reassessment of Hagia Sophia and baroque churches. All of his efforts in solving these structural problems with both innovative and traditionally receptive methods made Sinan comparable to Leonardo da Vinci.43 Not only had Sinan always preferred, “structural clarity… to spatial chaos”44 in his design approach, but also undertook the dome as the principle element of design as “the unit that defined the limits of the scale, and [the element that treated] supporting foundations in a continuous volume.”45 42 Çelik, The Remaking of Istanbul, 26–27. 43 Kuban, İstanbul, Bir Kent Tarihi, 234–235. 44 Ibid., 235. As cited by, Çelik, The Remaking of Istanbul, 26–27. Çelik pointed out that according to “Doğan Kuban, Sinan’s central design principle was to use “the dome as the measure-giving unit and the supporting base as 45 95 However, it is still a matter of debate whether Sinan represented an architectural genius, a matchless talent of centuries, or his métier was rather a fusion between Byzantine Empire’s building techniques and repertoire of spatial forms and OttomanIslamic embellishments and a highly detailed set of motifs. Moreover, the latter explanation –that sought the mending of two different architectural cultures in his workforegrounded the collective institutional aspect of the Ottoman architect’s craft. The prevalent argument today is that his countless mosques, bridges, caravanserais, fountains, etc. were instead of being the product of a single man’s genius, a collective making of palace.46 The one-man-genius argument’s discursive value is evident. The story of a nonMuslim craftsman –who, possibly was not literate until his adoption by the palacebeginning as an enslaved soldier, converting to Islam, slowly rising in the ranks of the askerî class, becoming the master architect of the empire with the formidable education he gained in palace schools and bridging the gap between the predominant Ottoman Turko-Islamic building techniques and Roman-Byzantine architecture to single-handedly reformulate a novel, long lasting, and influential architectural language is definitely appealing. Sinan was thus the embodiment of all things good about the Ottoman culture. The opening words on Sinan’s wakf contract ossifies this story: “Ayn-ı âyân-ı mühendisîn, zeyn-i erkân-ı müessisîn, üstad-ı esâtizetü’z-zaman reis-i cehabizetü’ddevran, oklidisi’l-asrî ve’l-evân, mimar’ı sultani ve muallim-i hakani.”47 In recent years, however, this narrative opened up for further debate. The veracity a mass continuum.” 46 Uğur Tanyeli, Rüya, İnşa, İtiraz (İstanbul: Boyut, 2011). 47 As cited by Kuban, İstanbul, Bir Kent Tarihi, 233. The translation is: “The apex of all advanced engineers, the ornament of the leauge of great builders, the master of masters of the age, the leader of the learned men of the times, the Euclid of the times, the architect of the Sultan and the tutor of the khan.” 96 of the one-man-genius narrative is questioned given the extent of knowledge on the architectural history of the period, and critiques raised their doubts if, instead of Sinan’s particular ingenuity in coming up with new techniques, the Janissary Corps’ hierarchical organization, their advanced level of technical knowledge, the Corps’ elaborate and highly skilled workforce , and the transmission of Byzantine architectonic experiences and building technologies were the underlying reasons for most of Sinan’s work. Thus, Sinan, as the head of the Janissary Corps’ builders, might have been unjustly recognized as the single culprit of their collective and anonymous labors. And, indeed, it is really of much further interest, since the most mundane details of Sinan’s biography is not based upon facts, but on pure conjecture.48 Tanyeli is right when he suggested that employing one-man’s genius as the predominant theory for explaining architectural progress in Turkey is rather tantamount to an autarchic, parochial mentality that imagined an alternative idealized history without inter-relations of subjective and objective phenomena. Of course, it is possible to explain the great man narrative from another perspective, though this explanation is dabbled in the crassest of Orientalisms. The Western travelers in the late 18th and early 19th centuries tried to delve into the hitherto incognito land of the East and through their detailed travelogues one can encounter thorough descriptions of the built environment. Although Ottoman architects, neither Sinan, nor the ensuing masters, piqued their interest, the travelogues provided a sound Tanyeli, Rüya, İnşa, İtiraz, 49–53; Yasemin Bay, “Tanyeli: Mimar Sinan Muhayyel Biri,” Milliyet, August 1, 2007; Yasemin Bay, “Sinan Hayali Değil Ama Abartı Var Tabii,” Milliyet, August 2, 2007, sec. Kültür-Sanat. For further discussion of Sinan’s tradition as an architectural and ideological invention, see, Gülru Necı̇ poğlu, “Creation of a National Genius: Sı̇ nan and the Historiography of ‘Classical’ Ottoman Architecture,” Muqarnas 24 (January 1, 2007): 141–83. 48 97 picture of the pre-Tanzimat era Ottoman urban landscapes. A common assumption of these Western travelers was that Turkish architecture was not really worthy of merit, but owed its principal characteristics to the Greek architects, particularly to the spatial design of Hagia Sophia: “[t]o Greek architects the Turks are indebted for the erection of their mosques, which have evidently Hagia Sophia for their model, with slight variations in the ground-plan.” 49 The seminal argument that brought forward a daunting dent in the cultural formation –and undeniably, the confidence- of hegemonic Ottoman ideology was voiced by Charles Texier, in the 1840s: For a long time it has been said that the Ottomans (Osmanlis) do not have an architecture particular to their nation (nation); being tribes with tents, they remained strangers to the art of construction, and their public edifices are the works of foreigners, Arab and Persian architects initially, and Greek architects afterwards. No other type of edifice provides better proof of this fact than their religious monuments.50 Another traveler reiterated this well-worn argument in 1827: “[t]he other mosques, which are chiefly of Turkish origin, and modeled after St. Sophia, bear the names of their founders.”51 For Brewer, the American missionary, the decisive essential feature of the Turkish mosque architecture that set it apart from Hagia Sophia was the introversive use of the public square that surrounded the main building and the use of 49 James Dallaway, Constantinople Ancient and Modern: With Excursions to the Shores and Islands of the Archipelago and to the Troad (Cadell & Davies, 1797), 59. As cited in, Necı̇ poğlu, “Creation of a National Genius,” 143; Charles Texier, “Notes Géographiques D’un Voyage En Asie Mineure,” Comptes-Rendus Des Séances de l’Académie Des Inscriptions et BellesLettres 5, no. 1 (1861): 125. In Texier’s original wording, this issue is raised during his visit to Bursa, apparently, he –rightly- saw that Bursa, unlike Istanbul, was house to a more authentic architectural tradition of the Turks, he wrote: “Il y a longtemps qu’on l’a dit; les Osmanlis n’ont pas d’architecture particuliere a leur nation; tribus de la met, ils sont restés étrangers a l’art de bâtir.” 50 51 Josiah Brewer, A Residence at Constantinople in the Year 1827: With Notes to the Present Time ... (Durrie & Peck, 1830), 83. 98 fountains: “You will find most of them surrounded with a large open court, in which are shade trees, fountains and cloisters, for the purposes of ablution.”52 Brewer was shaken by the unhygienic conditions prevalent in the city and terrified by the prospect of plague, rabies, and a myriad of other epidemics in the city and locked himself in the only cloistered space, the Prince Islands for protection from the diseases, fleas, stray dogs, and rats. Appalled by the general lack of maintenance and hygiene in Istanbul, his sole commendatory mention was about the easy access to water: “The fountains are very numerous, both in the city and by the way-side, and are an example worthy of imitation in Christian countries…The public baths are likewise an object worthy of notice.”53 Ten years later, Charles Texier commented on the distinctive properties of Ottoman architecture (unlike other travelers, he used the term, Ottoman, not Turkish). Texier’s evaluations were extraordinary in terms of his travels in the three continents of the empire; he found plenty of possibilities to compare different examples of Islamic, Greek, and Byzantine architecture, he saw and wrote about the mosques of Istanbul, Cairo, Bursa, Adana, Tarsus, and as far as Algeria in elaborate descriptions. He recognized in Bursa’s Grand Mosque the traces of Seljukid architecture and gave a list of features found in other Seljukid structures. What Texier found intriguing and worthy of further speculation was the fact that the Seljukid influence in building forms, once predominant in the two earlier capital cities of the empire, Bursa and Edirne, was completely missing in Istanbul. He wrote that “[c]hose curieuse, la ville de 52 Ibid., 83. 53 Ibid., 85. 99 Constantinople ne contient pas un seul modéle de ce genre [Seljoukides].”54 And he repeated the other travelers’ opinion almost in verbatim: “Dés ce jour toutes les mosques qui furent construites dans l’empire Ottoman furent imitées de l’eglise de SainteSophie.”55 In Texier’s view, classical Ottoman architecture was nothing but a reproduction of Justinian era Greek churches. The sole novelty in Ottomans’ interpretation of Justinian built forms was the use of domes supported by vaults, the brighter interiors due to the light permitting pendantive windows, and the ubiquity of fountains.56 This cornerstone of Ottoman civilization, the classical era mosques, owed its existence to the Byzantine culture. Yet, it was critically emphasized time and again that even in this indebtedness, the free borrowing from Byzantines could not help the Ottomans in surpassing the size and scale of the Hagia Sophia and its dome.57 Contemporary architectural historians pointed out through a lengthy analysis of Sinan’s work beginning from the Şehzade Mosque, to the Süleymaniye Mosque, and coming to perfection in one of his last works, the Selimiye Mosque in Edirne, and decided that Sinan’s shortcomings in size, scale, and grandiosity –compared to the Byzantine monuments- were more than surpassed by his mastery of excellence in motifs, simplicity and harmony of functional elements, and his C. Texier, Asie mineure: description géographique, historique et archéologique des provinces et des villes de la Chersonnèse d’Asie (Didot frères, 1862), 126. 54 55 Ibid. Ibid. “une salle quadrangulaire decoree ou non de colonnes a l'intérieur, mais toujours couverte par une voute ou pendentif eclairee par de nombreuses fenetres. Le harem precede la mosquée, et les nombreuses fontaines coulent aux alentours de l'edifice pour l'usage des croyants.” 56 57 Dallaway, Constantinople Ancient and Modern, 59. 100 holistic approach to spatial configurations.58 Whatever the case is, whether as a product of an artisanal engineers’ corps, or making of a genius, whether pure novelty, or a reinterpretation of spatial solutions of the Byzantine architects, Sinan’s külliyes are the definitive seal of Ottoman and Islamic Istanbul. These külliyes, the plethora of wakf-imaret complexes, contributed greatly to the urban topography of the city and added new axial dimensions that still stand today. As Zeynep Çelik argued, these külliyes “are integral units organized around a central structure and have no major arteries connecting them to the surrounding environment.”59 The well-described introversive characteristic of Ottoman urbanism is broken at the point of külliyes’ geometrical patterns, and albeit grandiose in scale, they succeeded in permeating the whole city, and indeed, once again, inherently meshed monumentality with the urban layout.60 Istanbul had always been a monumental city, and the külliyes remarkably reintroduced such monumentality in a new architectural and functional language; the Roman forum was replaced by the Islamic mosque complex. However, I will not simplify this transformation nor hesitate to criticize the ahistorical treatment of the Islamic city as built around the mosques.61 As Istanbul was repetitively built and rebuilt in the imagination of the sovereign, she kept some of her traits intact –the interest showed in sheer size and monumentality, for instance- and shed some –the role played by Kuban, İstanbul, Bir Kent Tarihi, 231–249; Aptullah Kuran, Mimar Sinan (Hürriyet Vakfı Yayınları, 1986). For a critical re-evaluation and revision of Sinan’s work and architecture, see, Gülru Necipoğlu, The Age of Sinan: Architectural Culture in the Ottoman Empire (Reaktion Books, 2005). 58 59 Çelik, The Remaking of Istanbul, 26–27. 60 Ibid. Ira M. Lapidus, Middle Eastern Cities: A Symposium [at Berkeley, Calif., October 27-29, 1966] on Ancient, Islamic, and Contemporary Middle Eastern Urbanism, 1969. 61 101 the mese. Certainly, Western cities had gone through such evolutions, but, what made Istanbul outstanding was the gigantic scale, in early modern notions, she was a beast, a monstrosity. 3.4 Qualities of Pre-modern Istanbul’s Urban Fabric Even at the time of its lowest population concentration, the city –the intra muros core of Istanbul- was home to more than 400,000 souls. All of these people lived in a tightly packed area within the walls, confined to the narrowest of the streets frequently made up of dark, airless alleys and dead ends that shaped the chaotic urban morphology.62 It was not merely the chaotic hustle and jostling of people from different backgrounds, genders, ethnicities that made the early modernist literati uncomfortable and discontent. Modernity’s great interlocutors had a profound problem, from the 18th century onward, with the lack of order: the tight and seemingly spontaneously erected buildings, the haphazardly developed streets, the amorphous and porous relations between the houses and the streets were a source of constant disturbance. The relations between hitherto organically defined dualities –streets and buildings, houses and gardens, houses and other houses, homes and rooms, and mahalles and külliyes- had to be reordered, since their mere existence as they are indicated a ruined system rooted in the past, a dark age that needed to be erased, a mind that needed to be taught and trained, and a present that had to be unfettered from the shackles of the Ancien regime.63 Çelik, The Remaking of Istanbul, 4. For a very similar evaluation, see also, Ebru Boyar and Kate Fleet, A Social History of Ottoman Istanbul (Cambridge University Press, 2010), 271. 62 Such allusions were commonly made around the same 19th century frame regarding the prisons. The modern gaze saw that the prisons are ghastly, buildings are either public houses, or extensions of pubs run by the same patrons and are shacks in the midst of community with quiet permeable relationships with this community, and haphazard collections of rooms merely to confine, inmates are nothing but a rowdy bunch 63 102 James Dallaway, a member of the late 18th century British ambassador’s retinue, wrote in his very well received book, Costantinople, Ancient and Modern –published in 1797 to great acclaim and translated into German four years later- that Istanbul’s streets were altogether an entanglement of a whimsically connected, haphazardly placed, and chaotically related collection of passages: “The great founder left the streets to the arrangement of chance, and it is probable, that they were scarcely more regular than at present.”64 Besides the disorderly chaos of the urban setting, frequent fires routinely devastated the city in a rapid fervor due to the overwhelming proportion of wooden houses and Dallaway noted with allusion to the Byzantine historians that little had changed in the city in the last millennium. Brewer, on other hand, found it quite amusing that under the invasively constant of irrepressible career crooks and/or are frequently made with regard to earlier methods of punishment and imprisonment from late 18th century onwards. A legion of examples can be found in a plethora of writings ranging from John Howard’s accounts of European, Russian, Ottoman, and British prisons to later prison reformers of the 19th century, and best summarized by M. Foucault’s seminal work, of course, and underlined by many distinguished historians of crime and punishment. See, Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish : The Birth of the Prison, vol. 2nd Vintage Books (New York: Vintage Books, 1995); Norval Morris, The Oxford History of the Prison: The Practice of Punishment in Western Society (Oxford University Press, 1998); David J. Rothmann, The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic (Transaction Publishers, 1971); Pieter Cornelis Spierenburg, The Prison Experience: Disciplinary Institutions and Their Inmates in Early Modern Europe (Amsterdam University Press, 2007).Yet, it was Thomas Markus who aptly pointed out the spatial modulations prevalent in modernizing mentality. He argued that an architecture of power was built around the subjectivities of the sad (mental asylums), the bad (prisons), and the mad (mental asylums and hospitals again). Perhaps the East should be added to this concomitant movement of spatial disciplining, since, the Orientalist gaze delved into the fabric of the Oriental city, beginning with Istanbul, in its quest to bring orderliness and hygiene (in terms of class relations, in as much as defining racial lines of segregation). See, Thomas A. Markus, Buildings and Power: Freedom and Control in the Origin of Modern Building Types (Routledge, 2013); T. A. Markus and H. Mulholland, Order in Space and Society: Architectural Form and Its Context in the Scottish Enlightenment (Mainstream, 1982); T. A. Markus, “Buildings for the Sad, the Bad and The Mad in Urban Scotland: 1780-1830,” in Order in Space and Society: Architectural Form and Its Context in the Scottish Enlightenment (Mainstream, 1982), 25–114. Dallaway, Constantinople Ancient and Modern, 70. Alas, his last dalliance with publishing fame was this book; his other ventures into penning successive volumes for Gibbon’s Roman history failed due to his loss of notes for the book. John H. Farrant, “Dallaway, James (1763-1834),” ed. Brian Harrison, H.C.G. Matthew, and Lawrence Goldman, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: OUP, 2011), http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/7040. 64 103 threat of endless fires, old houses fetched higher prices in the market than the newer ones, since it implied that the older a house gets, the less fire ravaged that district was. To prove his point he cited figures from unnamed sources, in 1782 seven or eight thousand houses were burnt down, in 1784 almost twelve thousand was razed, in 1788, the whole city was at the verge of complete demolition, and in 1826 –two years before his writinga devastating fire captured the city from “one see to another.” With an uncanny nonchalance he described what he witnessed in the ruined mosques, caravanserais, bazaars, houses, and countless fountains: “It was estimated that an eighth part of the city was destroyed, and on an average, the whole city is burned down and rebuilt, once in twenty years.”65 With an interesting gaiety, he summed up his miles of wandering in Istanbul streets, and in a strangely brilliant way recognized the cycles of pre-modern creative destruction. Fire had been an inherent part of Istanbul’s identity since the beginning. And although there was a limited attempt in the latter part of the 17th century to keep fire under control, until the 20th century successive waves of great fires were an integral part of the city’s urban lore and as long as the use of wood in construction lingered as the predominant material, this situation did not change.66 It was part and parcel of the gradually emerging Istanbul blues, a specific blues that was colored by flames and unavoidable destruction. Dallaway, three decades before Brewer’s writing, began seeing this blues, this melancholy, and with unprecedented Orientalist condescension argued that even if all the wealth and technical accoutrements of Europe were channeled to this once almighty 65 Brewer, A Residence at Constantinople in the Year 1827, 111. 66 Kuban, İstanbul, Bir Kent Tarihi, 272–274. 104 capital city, “Constantinople, under its Ottoman masters, has fewer conveniences than the worst of them; and all it can claim is a sort of gloomy magnificence in the vicinity of the great mosques, or as approached through the widely extended cemeteries.” He was brusque, crass, unforgiving, and definitely racist, when he argued that this city of the seven hills, although her population was proud of the mythical essence of these hills, was scattered with an endless array of labyrinthine streets, dangerous and aggressive stray dogs –which he claimed descending from wolves- filth, vermin, and an interminable sense of poverty.67 After two centuries, it is rather interesting to note that these benevolent actors of the Enlightenment, of rampant modernization, who claimed to be the champions of progress and advancement for mankind, for all things humane, were in great moral panic when it came to the stray dogs and cats wandering in great numbers on the streets of Istanbul. Certainly, rabies and plague played a great role for long in decimating urban populations, and dogs, rats, and all sorts of vermin were rightly seen as culprits-though, the exact mechanisms of infection were not understood until much later.68 A specific anthropocentrism pervasively determined their descriptions; the almost seamless relationship between people and the stray animals, their access to urban communities, the warm welcome they received from everyday folk, and their unquestioned role as living organisms of the streets rang bells of alarm in all its force. The Eastern tolerance to stray dogs and cats was irrational according to these common assumptions of the Orientalists. What the Easterner saw in animals was unbeknownst to them, an alien concept, yet the 67 Dallaway, Constantinople Ancient and Modern, 70–1. Ebru Boyar and Kate Fleet also point out to the same observation shared by many 19th century travellers. See, Boyar and Fleet, A Social History of Ottoman Istanbul, 272–4. 68 105 Western man saw bestial disregard for hygiene; where transparency between all kinds existed until early 20th century in Istanbul, the Westerner called for an immediate end to this hazardous health conditions. In my view, although latently implied but never discussed openly, the Westerner equated the animal with the Eastern human being-they were one and the same: dangerous, unpredictable, unruly, infected, sentimental, and irrational. The Orientalists’ accounts of stray animals would procure much further insight into the foundational pillar of Enlightenment thought: anthropocentrism. MacFarlane, for instance, an officer, had kept his whip close at hand during his long walks. Brewer, however, was not so lucky. Once the stick he was carrying proved useless against the well-seasoned dogs of the city, he began paying passing locals to protect him against the dogs.69 Brewer’s anxiety reached epic proportions, in almost Woody Allenesque hyperchondria, he left Istanbul proper after three months of agony full of constant fear of diseases and epidemics, and moved to the Prince Islands. The rest of his tenure in Istanbul, 9 months –contrary to what his books’ title suggested- was spent in complete quarantine in the biggest one of the Prince Islands. During that time, as consolation – though he was away from most of the stray dogs and rats, he kept on complaining that his room was full of bugs and vermin- he tried to proselytize the Orthodox Greeks of the Island, to no avail. The most important fruit of his time on the island, perhaps, not for himself, but definitely for social scientists, was his impeccable description of life in these islands and how the Hagia Georgios Monastery in the 19th century functioned as a mental asylum, where “the sad and the mad,” those affected by psychological problems were 69 MacFarlane, Constantinople in 1828; Brewer, A Residence at Constantinople in the Year 1827. 106 confined in the monastery. He vividly detailed the cruel conditions then existing in this early mental asylum and how the priests mercilessly treated their patients.70 It becomes more interesting once I realized that without its Greek congregation, the monastery –on top of the highest hill of the Prince Islands- became a sort of tourist location in the last two decades, and how ordinary Istanbulites –Muslims and non-Muslims alike- today come to pray in the small remaining church and leave rags on the tree branches along the narrow and steep path up the hill for their wishes on the day of St. George. Dallaway went beyond what Brewer did, and had ample occasions, a wide range of connections to the higher up echelons of the Ottoman elites, and plenty of money to delve into the daily lives of Istanbul’s Muslims at the end of the 18th century. His depiction illustrated a society centered on domestic life; i.e., homes –the ultimate places of privacy- played the pinnacle that organized flow of people, culture, and goods on the streets of Istanbul. Once the evening prayer of the day –also signifying the sunset- was heard from the minarets, thousands rushed to their homes, leaving behind a dark void on the streets from sunset to the sunrise, the city “becomes an unoccupied space, like a desert. One hour after sun-set every gate of the city is shut, and entrance strictly prohibited.”71 As a proto-anthropologist, who failed terribly at gaining access from the gatekeepers of the community, and as an Orientalist deeply compromised by his unswerving allegiance to mission civilatrice, he tried to make sense of the empty streets. He was lucky; he had few friends in the palace –remember, he was one of the British ambassador’s men- and had first-hand experience of the venerated Ottoman houses. 70 Brewer, A Residence at Constantinople in the Year 1827. 71 Dallaway, Constantinople Ancient and Modern, 72. 107 For Dallaway, the insides of these houses were no different than their outsides: the interiors were, in stark contrast to the surrounding streets, tidy, neat, clean, and well taken care of. This contrast would later present one of the most repeated arguments of Turkish mainstream –and, academic- discourse on space: the meticulously ordered homes against the unruly, filth-ridden streetscapes. The decisive element, in the Westerner’s behold, was the harem. Harem was located in the most opportune, accessible, relevant part of the house. The harem was usually adjacent to an internal open-air court, which was more often than not adorned with an embellished fountain. The ornate embellishments, intricate handicraft woodwork furnishings were a frequent theme in the late 18th century homes, according to Dallaway, and the inherently ostentatious displays of wealth were presented at all costs to the homeowners. This was, in a sense, representations of what later would be called conspicuous consumption. Yet, in Dallaway’s view, these houses were “comfortless wooden boxes” in general, cool during the summer months, though frigidly cold during the winter, and poorly equipped to handle the rainy season. They lacked fireplaces and were heated by earthen stoves that produced more smoke than heat. Worse, said Dallaway, the ground floors were barely an extension of the public street, even then, the entries were inadequately lit, the second floor stairs were mostly shoddily built out of wood, and they were narrow, dark, and dirty.72 Without the apparent condescension and ill will, the homes portrayed by Dallaway were more or less the staple of 20th century Turkish architectural discourse 72 Ibid. 108 surrounding the issue of tradition.73 Thus, residential buildings were perceived as merely transitory, fleeting in a sea of change, and ultimately ephemeral to the deeper and wider social transformations. To the extent that the Ottoman house provided amply for its function as a shelter, its symbolic importance, how it was related to the class distinctions prevalent at the time, was not of real interest: “the symbolic social value of housing is very low…[and] [w]hat lacks in Turkish [classical] houses was not grandiosity, but the notion of permanence.” Furthermore, “it is possible to argue that all Turks built their homes like tents.”74 It is of course a matter of lengthy debate, if and when the Western pre-modern housing fits Kuban’s –and multiple other architectural historians’- criteria. The predominant mode of production, feudalism, or Asiatic mode of production, and the determining social and economic relationship with nature bound by the capricious tides of weather, crop cycles, droughts, and the limited state of forces of production, the primitive notions of physical and material tools of building houses had all set insuperable barriers in constructing permanent structures. Under any pre-modern circumstances, comparing housing with the magnanimous structures –Egyptian pyramids, Gothic cathedrals, Grand Umayyad mosques, Justinian churches, etc.- is not doing justice to the limited civilizational capabilities that existed at the time. Even the long lost palace architecture –where the Byzantine Magnum Palatium presented the paramount examplehad to wait for the 16th century’s sweep of centralized state abilities and the concentration of coercive facilities in the hands of the kings and aristocracy; Versailles was not built in 73 Kuban, İstanbul, Bir Kent Tarihi, 274–277. I preferred to stick with the literal translation-also widely in circulation in colloquial speech, but what these tents referred to was akin to yurts-the Central Asian-Turkic notion of nomadic shelters. Ibid., 276. 74 109 a day, and its heyday came with the Sun King in the 17th century. On the other hand, Turgut Cansever would voice a well-founded argument against treating Ottoman houses as mere transitory tent-like structures and tried to focus upon the complex relationship between the houses and the street. He admitted that the Ottoman understanding of home necessarily implied an intentional distance between the street level public life and the hidden expanse of private life. However, this entails rather an organic integration of houses as imaginations of universe. Cansever’s notion of the Ottoman spatial relations was not based upon the modernist notion of private individuals coming together in the civic relations established at a public space. First, public and private could not be delineated by means of drawing a property line between the street and the built edifice; home itself contained a certain degree of public characteristics. The more public the insides of homes become, the less functional and necessary were the streets-one can still recognize such tendency in contemporary Istanbul. In a sense, home itself was a re-enactment of the universe in general, when Cansever pointed out that the Ottoman city was a representation of Islamic cosmogony –where the city acted as the metaphoric replacement for Heaven on earth, and the state and the sultan reigned supreme above the disorderliness of the urban communities- home emerges as another layer to that urban imagery. In this vein, Ottoman urbanism, perfectly depicted in Istanbul, could be seen as Russian dolls: the land belongs to the sultan, rule by him alone; the city is a smaller replica of the land, again ruled by the sultan, but in cases other than Istanbul –being the capital city- the sultan’s rule can be relegated, the mahalle, subsumed under the city, is again subject to a similar hierarchical organization, and finally, the home, as the singular 110 representation of patriarchy. Women of the house lived in the harem, only visible in front of other women-the same principle applied to other layers from bottom up. The sultan was the ultimate sovereign, ruled by fiat, and after the 16th century, became the leader of the faith with his title Caliphate; the father of the house, similarly, ruled without any objections, or any intrusions from outside. Second, as a corollary to the latter point, a single mechanism of power, perhaps Foucault would see a figment of pastoral power relations in it, controlled multiple layers and reproduced its logic in an omnipotent manner. Yet, Cansever’s definition that such patterns instigated an inherent organicism was widely off the mark-his imputed organicism in Istanbul was not comparable to the Western modernism’s organicism. Cansever’s organic urbanism was organic not by dint of increasing division of labor and specialization of integral parts of the system, the city was deemed as organic, because he saw a pristine proximity to nature, wherein nature implied unadulterated, untouched, traditionally preserved beauty bestowed on earth by the creator of all things. Thence the paradise allegory: the more organically related the mahalles become, the lesser the intervention of engineers, architects, and the modernizing rationality. In his rejection of classical modernist urban planning hierarchies –the grid plan, the city-square-boulevardstreet-house pattern of top-to-bottom organization- Cansever attempted a nativist repudiation of corruption brought forward by capitalist accumulation in general. 75 Following a similar logic, it would be in vain to seek the public-private separation, to look for the sources of the communitas, to focus upon the civitate, since these had compartmentalized, subjected the intricately disguised –and, heavenly- hierarchy that Turgut Cansever, Osmanlı şehri: şiir’den şehir’e (Timaş Yayınları, 2010); Turgut Cansever, İslâm’da şehir ve mimarı (Timaş Yayınları, 2010); Turgut Cansever, İstanbul’u anlamak (Timaş Yayınları, 2008). 75 111 prevailed in Istanbul. In such reification, the Ottoman home would wither away, once the social conditions that begot such spatial arrangements are put in motion -with the peripheralization of the Ottoman economy- the whole artifice that was built upon a series of tiny minutiae would implode onto itself. Of course, similar to the Ottoman houses, which did not function as references to social, political, and economic relationships, “the Ottoman room’s essential characteristic is its aversion to playing a role in the inside circulation of the house…[r]oom in the Ottoman house served not as an accessory to circulation, but as the ultimate destination.”76 Tanyeli outlined that architectural practices until the mid-19th century were oriented towards controlling access: each room was not reached by more than one single doorway as entry points and these doorways were located asymmetrically in the general layout to limit the gaze of the stranger, of the visitor, of anyone not belonging to the mahrem. 77 Movement in the home was strictly controlled. Not only within the house, but also at every instance, at every spatial layer, it was a closed system. Each moment in this system was bound within its confines, not conversant, not relatable, but valued in its endurance in keeping the totality of the artifice intact. This closed system of sub-systems can be further applied at different scales, as much as rooms served a stop-gap function within the whole house, külliyes served a similar function in limiting movement within the mahalle. Külliyes worked not as passageways, as the gist of public interaction within the community, but as communal private spaces; common in many pre-modern methods Uğur Tanyeli, İstanbul 1900-2000: Konutu ve Modernleşmeyi Metropolden Okumak (Akın Nalça, 2004), 138. 76 77 Ibid., 138. A key concept appears here: mahrem. It has been studied extensively in the last two decades, but the term itself is still of immense interest for locating a great deal of issues within Islamic past and present, see: Nilüfer Gole, “The” Forbidden Modern: Civilization and Veiling (University of Michigan Press, 1996), 27–63. 112 of social control, participation in a community of believers entailed a strict observance of rules and orders and was synonymous with private control of the individuals. Kuban, the architectural historian, saw in these structural urban patterns of the city something akin to a “molecular” organization. He argued that “the Ottoman city was a functionally molecular structure” and each unit in this city was resonant of Leibniz’s monads, they were neither designed, nor geographically distributed, nor built according to a connecting common principle, hence, they reflected a nature of serial randomness.78 In this serial random patternization, there is not a diachronic interpretation of urban space. For a deeper scrutiny would only provide the synchronic nature of the built form in Istanbul. Even an awareness of this synchronic historicity of the built form is limited use for a discerning, critical look, since old and new were not functionally separated from each other then. Historical preservation and cultural appurtenances of such sensitivity in historic continuity were products of the late 19th century and mostly of the 20th century. The serial randomness in building translated itself into a tolerant nonchalance, for the classical Ottoman urban built form was primarily indebted to the continuation of the millet system and the system’s immanent hierarchy and closed characteristics-which, without any doubt, would contribute immensely to the impending implosion of the city with the onset of forces of modernity.79 But, in the short run, only the subversives were met with the brutal coercion of the state, while the multi-layered segments of the Ottoman society were generally left to their own devices within strictly defined limits. As long as one stuck within her ascribed sandbox, the imperial governmentality, and its 78 Kuban, İstanbul, Bir Kent Tarihi, 340. 79 Kuban, İstanbul, Bir Kent Tarihi. 113 apparatuses in the urban order, was fine with it, and would not bother with extra efforts in social control. Secondarily of import was the merciless functionalism of the urban state-space nexus. The pre-modern city was simple, gritty, crude, and crucially oriented towards function, contrary to the mainstream glorification of the Gothic past in Europe –thanks largely to Viollet-le Duc’s Second Imperial style –almost photo-shopped- radical restoration of Medieval era monuments, and the Turko-Islamic past in Turkey –here, it was the making of the notoriously unreliable and nationalistically doctrinaire Turkish education system that inculcated the invaluable, irretrievable magnificence of the past, of times of purity where the Turk was the master, and others followed him as blind subjects. Therefore, one era’s monument would be torn down without any second thoughts and its remainders, its stones, would be employed as the foundation stones for the next imperial monument-Magnum Palatium was left in disarray earlier; the late Byzantine imperial palaces depended on the fortunes of the emperor, and even Constantine’s great Tetrarchs statue was taken to Venice during the Great Sacking of the city. It is no great wonder that the Holy Apostles Cathedral laid the foundation for the Fatih Mosque, nor would be a surprising find that the Ibrahim Pasha Palace was built using the remainders of the Magnum Palatium-the palace was right across the Hippodrome from the Old Palace, and the second most expansive palace complex of the Ottoman reign. In that sense, the Ottomans continued the urban logic immanent in Istanbul. That’s possibly the reason for the very limited change observed in the city’s urban features during the first three and a half centuries of Ottoman rule. The city kept its basic wedge shape, the Golden Horn played its decisive role as the main commercial port of the city, the mese slowly became 114 the Divanyolu, and though most of the forums were torn down, their functions were carried into the külliyes and bazaars, and the geographical elevation, the hills and winding narrow paths were intact, the citizens still walked these streets, and pedestrian traffic was the main mode of transportation, the porters -not the beasts of burden, due to the vast population- were the preferred carriers of goods, and the minimal planning intervention in the city’s urban fabric permitted the continuation of the Byzantine Constantinople as Ottoman Istanbul with few minor changes.80 Later on, while the contesting spatial imaginations of modern Turkish architecture’s foundational figures sought for an examination of the repercussions of Ottoman-Islamic tradition’s everlasting traces, the contemporary Turkish nationalist discourse, on the contrary, saw rupture as the constituting element of a new state-space relationship. In Edhem Eldem’s view, the most important change of the late 18th century was the explosion of the city’s traditional borders. As a consequence, the seeds of a multinuclei city of the 19th century were sown.81 In the same time, for the first time since the city’s founding, the ruling classes –dynastic family’s, pashas, and other militarybureaucratic elite’s residence crept to the seafront, which meant a long lasting expropriation of the shores by the rich and powerful. Furthermore, a modern military complex began to be installed. An elaborate and vast complex of army barracks –built out of stone to replace a wooden barracks presumably designed by Sinan- was built on the Anatolian shore, nearby Üsküdar, named after the sultan who ordered construction: the Selimiye Barracks. Possibly to keep the non-Muslim and European subjects of the empire 80 Ibid., 340–345. 81 Eldem, “Istanbul: From Imperial to Peripheralized Capital,” 195. 115 in check an artillery barracks was built outside the Galata Walls, partly on Armenian cemetery, named Topçu Kışlası, and a little more than a century later, in 1909, this place would be the site of a counter-revolt against the parliamentarian-constitutionalist revolution of CUP (Committee of Union and Progress) that finally helped CUP to depose Abdulhamid II and install a puppet sultan.82 Along the Anatolian shores, north of Üsküdar, the cavalry barracks were builtthough, with scarcely any drilling area, since the steep slopes of the vicinity still forbids highway construction. The new developments of the late 18th century were forever enshrined in a Western traveler’s engravings –who would later be employed as one of the court architects: Antoine Ignace Melling.83 Orhan Pamuk later described Melling as a beholder of an Istanbulite vision, as someone who sees Istanbul as Istanbulites do, but who depicts Istanbul with the ascertaining descriptive faculties of a Westerner-to whom the city owes its architectural heritage rooted in eclectic forays between the Eastern and Western styles.84 The building of Nur-u Osmaniye Mosque (ordered by the Ottoman court, its name means, the sacred light of the Ottomans) at around the same time signified the introduction of such eclecticism.85 Meanwhile, Mahmud II’s abolition of the Janissaries and establishment of a new army modeled after the West made apparent the Another century on, in 2013, the site was the focal point of the largest and longest lasting popular uprising in Turkish history, where massive protests against the ruling government’s decision to raze a public park, Gezi Park, –which was built after the demolition of the fire damaged (because of the 1909 uprising) barracks in the 1940s- and re-build the barracks, this time as a shopping mall. The Gezi Park protests ended in 7 deaths, thousands of injuries, and at least 35 persons’ loss of eyesight due to indiscriminate use of plastic bullets and tear gas canisters as projectiles. 82 83 Eldem, “Istanbul: From Imperial to Peripheralized Capital,” 195. 84 Ibid.; Orhan Pamuk and Maureen Freely, Istanbul: Memories and the City (Vintage International, 2006). 85 Kuban, İstanbul, Bir Kent Tarihi, 322–324. 116 two pressing needs for re-ordering Istanbul’s state-space. The leading forces of Westernization were prominently in a dualistic relationship: military and architecture. And their movement greatly contributed to the changing shape of Istanbul.86 In this chapter, I foregrounded the continuities prevalent in Istanbul’s history. The decisive breaking point, however, arose in the late 18th century. From that point on, as Europe was geared towards at least five decades of intermittent revolutionary fervor, Istanbul withstood a phenomenal shift of power relations. And in this case, change in Istanbul was not exclusively triggered by the masses, but by the military-bureaucratic elites, the so-called askerî class. With the declaration of the Gülhane Edict in 1839, which heralded the beginning of a long –but, tumultuous- era of reform, known as the Tanzimat period, Istanbul entered a protracted process of re-making itself under the deadweight of modernity. Here, I presented several lives of Istanbul that converged upon one uninterrupted flow of cyclical ups and downs, insuperable movements of rise and demise. As concluding remarks, three main emphases are in order. First regarding Istanbul’s historical continuity, the urban topography of the city did not significantly change under whatever name and form it was ruled, and to the extent that it kept its original role as the capital city of a pre-modern world-empire, state-spaces barely budged in their purported aims; i.e., to produce awe and subordination in the minds of the willing subjects. Therefore, in a millennium and half, the city, albeit with devastating results, continuously hung on to its imperial past. Second, the determining spatial logic of the city, before the introduction of modernity and the capitalist mode of production, was ingrained in the 86 Ibid., 323; Eldem, “Istanbul: From Imperial to Peripheralized Capital.” 117 central consciousness of a world-empire and that was geographically shown in the city through the symbolic power invested in the palaces, mosques, and külliyes built through waqfs of respective sultans’, family members of the dynasty palaces, pashas, and mainly the members of the askerî class-the military-bureaucratic elite. Third, the city kept its defining features as the capital city until the collapse of the empire, and being the heart of an empire carried on its central positions as the concentration of ethnic, religious, political, and cultural aspects that made the empire a unique petri dish of failed multicultural modernity–barring the exceptionally short durations of invasions, famines, plagues, droughts, wars, and fires. Only after the foundation of Ankara as the new statespace tailor-made for a nation-state was Istanbul deprived of her symbolic throne. The next chapter focuses on the urban implications of the processes of incorporation to the world-economy, how Istanbul coped with the juggernaut called modernity, and what kinds of transformations took place in the state-space nexus during this period, and how a gradually inflating drive to order space re-configured the city from within. 118 4 Impossible Plans and the Centrifugal Spatial Forces: Urban Planning and Municipal Organizations in Modern Istanbul Corruptio optimi pessima1 In the midst of the 19th century, as the ineradicable movement of modernity and its accompanying plethora of efforts in political, social, and economic reconstruction, a deep-cutting and vast project of reordering society in its own monolithic perception of nature, industrial towns emerged as the places where all came together. This superlative concentration of power in newfangled urban industrial settings had also meant the triumphant reproduction of nature in a completely different disguise –as the environment donned its utilitarian accoutrements - and while industrial production broke hitherto untouched boundaries of material production, an unsurpassable optimism heralded hither and thither a kind of plentiful future that no one before had witnessed, nor imagined –and this discourse pervasively insinuated in the capillaries of everyday life. The most mature and artistically excelled expression of such pervasive will to better one’s self as much as the subjectification of the world to this unfettered optimism found its expression in the bargain Dr. Faust made with Mephistopheles. Dr. Faust ambitiously partook in this great trade off of one’s soul against powers to act upon the then innocently passive nature. Yet, as soon as it became apparent that human beings were altogether willful, but unknowing, 1 Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope (Blackwell, 1986), 20. In Bloch’s piercing words “fraudulent hope is one of the greatest malefactors, even enervators, of the human race, concretely genuine hope its most dedicated benefactor. Thus, knowing-concrete hope subjectively breaks most powerfully into fear, objectively leads most efficiently towards the radical termination of the contents of fear. Together with informed discontent which belongs to hope, because they both arise out of the No to deprivation.” 119 extensions of that nature, Dr. Faust appallingly came to a recognition of his fruitlessly arduous toils. The better the intentions, the more horrendous the results, the more his knowledge to fix things up in impeccable smoothness of scientific efficiency, the more painful and unforgiving were his effects on his beloved ones. Although Faust was definitely not an allegory of the urban vicissitudes, it carried the kernel of modernity’s irresolvable dilemma: how to build things, produce the long prophesied world of plenty, overcome scarcity, make reason –though, in its peculiarly Western, white-man centric garbs- the uncontestable authority on Earth, and build an unshakable trust in the forward march of “mankind” while things fall apart in the slightest intervention of this benevolent, omniscient White-man’s incursion, rationality single-handedly destroyed its castles made out of sand in its temper tantrums of large scale annihilative gestures. Slavery in Africa, Late Victorian era Holocausts in the Indian sub-continent, massive direct exploitation of non-white peoples of the world, ruthless colonization of the hitherto free world, and, if might was not enough to prove its right, then, flooding of the preindustrial markets with cheaply produced industrial goods that wrought havoc in the daily struggles of millions of craftsmen; these were the dark side of modernity in the peripheries of the newly established world-economy. In the core of the system, coercion and exploitation did not take its blunt shape – neither colonization, nor slavery of several different forms- nevertheless, the mass dispossession of the peasants –by varying means, enclosures, expropriation of the commons, criminalization of the propertyless class, and indeed, the invention of modern criminality and punishment, the foundation of a police force, novel institutions of social control- served the same purpose: to let capitalist accumulation surround the world as 120 swiftly and deeply as possible, and to turn every item of human conduct, every aspect of mundane human existence as mere commodities bought and sold in the marketplace. If for the former, the colonial others, the predominant site of state and space encounter was archetypally the plantation, for the former it was the gigantic metropolis. The emergent poetic modernism approached the latter with a tragedy peppered with a pinch of salt, while the former developments for long remained a matter of in-yer-face condescension, which showed its ugly face with the ubiquity of racist farce later in the early part of the 20th century. Tragedy met comedy in the city. Here it was farcical, once Mephistopheles got into the mind of Dr. Faust, and there, as Goethe so succinctly showed, poetical modernism is the moment of laughter turning into tears. Once modernity, or its twin demi-gods -the all-powerful actors of the capitalist mode of production- described by Marx as Madame La Terre and Monsieur Le Capital circumambulated Europe, they were at first welcomed by thinly disguised envy and childish hesitation; though in the land of the Ottomans, especially in its epicenter Istanbul, their circumlocution meant ruinous prospects for the already fragile empire. Modernity’s travails in Istanbul, at least in its adventurous first century and a half, were synonymous with a perpetual struggle for existence in this spitefully competitive worldeconomy –for which the empire and its ruling classes were barely prepared- and opened up a spiraling dizziness of self-questioning, if beyond the ruinous present laid the promised land of sunshine and military might –where the empire would once again stand on its own feet- whether the promise of the future meant the obliteration of the forsaken past, and, whither the valued remnants –for few, privileges- of the ancient order for an unknown set of values deeply ingrained in reason and technological certainty of progress. 121 For those who had a fleeting glimpse of the 20th century, Istanbul was the place where hope and despair, new and old, reason and faith, angst and will to power, presence and lack, furtive meditation and disheveled action, ruin and magnificence came together; it was an Aleph for its own sake. Today, Istanbul might be synonymous with an unending festival, a sleepless metropolis, a dynamic motor of seemingly unstoppable national growth, a modern Babylon with denizens that come together in this cramped, traffic-jam laden, with stark scenes of glittering wealth and gut-wrenching poverty, with all its chaos, and irreversible concentration of capital, culture, and revolutionary spirit. Yet, when modernity entered this side of the earth and set foot on Istanbul, it was not met with enviable curiosity of hungry consumers of a post-industrial era –as what transpired in the last three decades- but instead was met with a gloom perhaps unprecedented. The prevalent mood of the mid-19th century –which lingered until the end of the 20th- was definitely a dark, sinister, Janus-like, but almost palpable feeling. It is called hüzün. In this chapter, I first identify the cultural and spatial traces of this common feeling and explain this incipient sense of lack through the dim silhouette of Istanbul’s urban reordering since modernity’s arrival. Then, I focus on the successive spatial undertakings of the Ottoman Empire as it tried in vain to join the modern world-system as a core country, as one of the main powers, just to see itself deprived of few comforts granted by its long protected isolation from the world-economy. The sick man of Europe emerged as the rampant peripheralization continued in the 19th century and meanwhile, Istanbul underwent a rapid geographical expansion and reconfiguration of its urban functions. It would serve not merely as the imperial hub of a tributary system of military control, but rather turned into the beachhead of capitalist accumulation and mechanisms 122 of incorporation to the world-system. Partly to compensate for the dizzying pace of growth, and partly to appease the imperial elites’ unswerving belief in themselves, a series of attempts in modern planning were made. I describe this series of unfortunate attempts, attempts so sterile that none even came to the point of actual implementation. A puzzling multiplicity of urban spaces prevailed at this time, and at around fin-de-siècle several ethnic, faith-based, and cultural layers of the city came to represent what was best about this seemingly ethereal empire. Not more than two decades after the fin-de-siècle, as Istanbul’s political, cultural, and economic structures collapsed onto itself under its own unbearable weight and as the empire that Istanbul made vanished into thin air, all that rendered this city special –people, languages, beliefs, byzantine politics, foreign emissaries, endless waves of immigrants, buildings, and power structures- were gone. Subsumed under the single-party rule of the new Kemalist republican ideology of monolithism, the city had but a distant resemblance to its former self. However, this was not just the making of Kemalist flag-bearer RPP (Republican People’s Party), their linear and uniform approach was shared by the right-wing parties (from the Democratic Party to the Justice Party, from the Motherland Party to the True Path Party, from the National Salvation Party to the current government of the Justice and Development party) from the first fair multi-party elections in 1950 onwards. Yet, under this crushing demand for uniformity, obedience to the Ankara-centric policy-making, and gradually strengthening obscurity of Istanbul –and concomitant with it the diminishing wealth and impact of the old bourgeoisie- a lasting inertia did set on the city’s fortunes. Istanbul’s role in the nation was once again reinvigorated in the latter half of the 1950s; Kemalist inertia and hostile indifference to the city was replaced by the first wave of Haussmannesque 123 reconstruction efforts instigated by Adnan Menderes. I will discuss the planning decisions and their spatial imagination of this transformation from passive indifference to active interventionism of this period. Istanbul has for long been the embodiment of the best things, a vessel of collective representation that brightly showed the excellence unmatched, of the unsurpassed beauty ensconced in this country; the city herself serving the country as the source of symbolic inspiration, has aspired people to be better, more powerful, richer, and wealthier. This was all relative; of course, one can barely categorize what is the best among all things, what can surpass the inimitable beauty-for the same purpose, what is the gauge for the aesthetic qualities of an urban setting? And it is more problematic given the fact that there had been only one other city –Rome, before the collapse of the empirefound worthy of comparison to Istanbul. Partly, what made Istanbul as we know her today, is this injured self-knowledge, a broken notion of herself that is stunted, corrupted and surrounded with a self-pity that frequently bordered unremitting self-flagellation. This city hates herself. If she had a mind of herself, she would have told us that her life would better end in painlessly protracted exhaustion. The city is irregular, its shape incomplete, borders and frontiers uncharted, vertically and horizontally unmapped, amorphous, but not devoid of any form, protean but indecisive, centrifugal but subservient to the will of overbearing political center, anxious but confident, delinquently innocent, servile in its rebellion, rebel in its gratitude; what makes Istanbul is this excited modernism. To the extent that Turkey, as an amalgam of peoples, but never a fullyfledged nation –perhaps, two, or three, maybe more nations- has weathered a deeply troubled relationship with modernity, Istanbul felt those troubles in her guts. Istanbul was 124 –and, to a certain extent, still is- a perfect unfinished oeuvre, an excellently ruined lack. Her excursus in modernity has been subject to endless autocratic interventions, though each met with resolute resilience. As the mirror image of Turkey’s injured and injuring experiences in modernity, what really attracted my attention was the multifarious phenomena of spatial relations, the richness of concrete processes of production of space and how these diffused spatial representations came together in a seemingly combustive mixture of practical realities. 4.1 Plagues and Cholera: Hüzün and Tristesse and The Breaking up of a Spatio-Physical Order Orhan Pamuk, in his autobiographical book Istanbul: Memories and the City, employed a viscerally evocative pair of notions to relate his existential experiences in Istanbul: hüzün and tristesse. Tristesse should be a familiar term for social scientists; Claude Lévi-Strauss, in his autobiographically oriented masterwork Tristes Tropiques, wrote his first-hand observations of the destruction of South American native peoples’ cultural practices between the two Great Wars. He described and detailed the shared anxiety of the people he encountered which was borne out of the inexorable and relentless attacks instigated by modernity. Many communities, hitherto untouched, unblemished by the advances of capitalist civilization were suddenly subject to the pounding march of industrial exploitation, and peoples’ lives were changed forever without recourse. In Lévi-Strauss’ account, Pamuk saw a parallel to his own experiences growing up in Istanbul: “[t]ristesse is not a pain that affects a solitary individual; hüzün and tristesse both suggest a communal feeling, an atmosphere and a culture shared by 125 millions.”2 In drawing this parallel, he admitted that poverty could take similar forms in different cities’ back streets of the world. Yet, the parallel between two concepts ends here. Istanbul’s problem lies in its much glorified history. Istanbul streets carried a heavy burden laden with a wealth of history; whatever similarities existed between the common anxieties of tropical cities of America and Istanbul, whatever spiritual kinship permeated these two geographically distant contexts, they vanish under this heavy burden, and hüzün becomes a nostalgic yearning.3 While the monumental structures, fountains, and arches surrounded the streets in a serpentine fashion and agonistically fell under the gloomy shadow of the blunt reinforced concrete monstrosities, the Westerner is greeted with an insurmountable shared conviction, and once more, hüzün and tristesse jointly encapsulates one in a mystical air brilliantly described by Lévi-Strauss.4 To harness the explanatory power of these dual terms, hüzün and tristesse, might not seem aptly drawn amid a plethora of allegorical description connected to Istanbul, especially in light of 2013’s June Gezi Park uprisings.5 However, hüzün has such resonance with Pamuk’s oeuvre and permeated both his writing and the actual 2 Pamuk and Freely, Istanbul, 101. Hüzün literally means sorrow, but in this case, this sadness borders melancholy, an unrelenting feeling of loss, a protracted sense of grief. Perhaps it can be thought as the grief, as the mourning for the beloved lost-though, hüzün, unlike mourning, does not recede, and it is not connected to remembrance. It is rather a generalized form of loss without recuperation. 3 Ibid. Perhaps,spatially, the Tropics as described by Levi-Strauss is not that far from Istanbul: “the change of hemisphere, continent, and climate has made it unnecessary for the Brazilians to erect the thin glass roof which, in Europe, creates artificially something of the same sort. It is as if Rio had taken the Gallerias in Milan, the Amsterdam Galerij, or the Passage des Panoramas or the hall of the Gare St Lazare in Paris, and reconstituted them in the open air.” Claude Levi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, trans. John Russel (NY: Criterion Books, 1961), 89. It is often remarked by Westerners how life is open out on the streets, and needless to say the Grand Bazaar is a web of streets in themselves that dwarfed its Western counterparts. Pamuk and Freely, Istanbul, 101. 4 Now, the shared feeling within a certain class fraction is not hüzün, but resistance at all costs. It is also interesting to note that, during the Gezi Uprisings, a Western journalist in Istanbul wrote that the gloom so saturated in the daily lives of Istanbulites miraculously disappeared in a day. Participants in the rallies throughout the three weeks all around Turkey would attest to this public exaltation. 5 126 dissemination of artistic representations of Istanbul’s spatiality, from his humble beginnings in his early realist novels The Silent House and Cevdet Bey and His Sons, the former set in a holiday suburb of Istanbul in Gebze, and the latter in Nişantaşı and Cihangir, to The New Life –where Istanbul played a springboard for a noir that takes place in the gritty backdrop of provincial Anatolia- to The White Castle and My Name is Red –first, his earliest dabbling in magical realism, and the second, perhaps an attempt in suspense, which were both set in pre-modern, classical Ottoman Istanbul as a metatheoretical investigation of the relations between East and the West- and finally his masterpiece, The Black Book, and most recent work, Museum of Innocence, were both illustrations of twentieth century Istanbul where the city herself gained a life, a tangible, powerful agency that lived in the miniscule details of the city, from the stairwells of the apartment buildings to the rooms as simulacra of the middle class’ existential furnishings, to the endless labyrinthine streets that secreted life and death, to the Bosphorus that hung on to the bodies of those deaths, one thing is certainly common: hüzün.6 In the last decade, hüzün seemingly left Istanbul’s psyche, to be replaced by a certain form of ambition, which will be examined in the next two chapters. Hüzün and tristesse, though, were remarkable inscriptions of a city that was rapidly pushed out of its central role from the late 18th century up until the early 21st century; as peripheralization ravaged the empire, the city was hollowed out in its own imagination by the endless perspirations of machinations, some its own making, some not. As Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence embarked upon a dissection of this city’s relationship to objects that made herself, this 6 Orhan Pamuk, The Black Book (Faber & Faber, 2011); Orhan Pamuk, The White Castle (Faber & Faber, 2012); Orhan Pamuk, The New Life (Faber & Faber, 2011); Orhan Pamuk, My Name Is Red (Faber & Faber, 2011); Orhan Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence (Faber & Faber, 2011). 127 predominant psyche, hüzün, was gradually replaced by a new form of resilience, perhaps akin to an obsessive will to reminisce the times past through objects of everyday life. But, before that, in another time and under completely different conditions, Western travelers were full of certitude in their analyses of Istanbul. What they observed was without any doubt, a depiction of hüzün, of melancholia. One, for instance, talked of the stately and regal embodiment of such feeling, Mahmud, who rose to the throne after the downfall of poor Selim, referring to another travelogue’s memories said “I had read in some traveler, that his complexion was deadly pale, and that the expression of his countenance partook of the doomed melancholy.”7 In another memoir, penned at the end of 1829, a different traveler thought, for a moment, that he saw prince regent Abdulmecid, who looked prosperous and well-clad. However good looking this man was, his future as the regent was far from being as stately as his looks: “[a] crumbling, or at least, a disputed scepter, one would think no very enviable inheritance in prospect.”8 In the Western traveler’s eyes, melancholia did not merely emanate from the worldly persons of power, but even the cornerstone of Ottoman existence in Istanbul, the Eyüp Mosque and its surrounding namesake neighborhood, its boulevards dotted with ancient plane trees that glowed with white painted houses all around, effervesced with unassailable melancholia. MacFarlane wrote that an unnatural, other-worldly transparency and luminance stemmed from this melancholic narrow opacity of these streets “like a glimpse of Paradise, caught through “the valley of the shadow of death.”9 7 MacFarlane, Constantinople in 1828, 500–508. 8 Brewer, A Residence at Constantinople in the Year 1827, 196. 9 MacFarlane, Constantinople in 1828, 500–508. 128 Brewer, the unfortunately hypochondriac missionary that voluntarily quarantined himself in the Prince Islands for protection against stray dogs and rats, rightfully pointed out that the disorderly city was not essentially the making of the Ottomans, but, perhaps always there from the beginning: “I have alluded to the filth of the city, and I might have spoken of it under the head of antiquities, for I presume it dates as far back as the time of Constantine.”10 As a good Protestant missionary, he did not refrain from coming up with his heartfelt generosity of advice, “[y]et even these Augean streets might be cleansed at a small expense. For a mere pittance, thousands of the poor could be constantly employed as scavengers.” 11 And still, vermin and pests would be the visitor’s least concerns, it seems. Brewer had conducted a thorough research before coming to Istanbul, and explained in detail the real source of fears for his well-being, something that the 19th century West forgot –gradually, at least, since the end of the 17th century- plague was wreaking havoc on Istanbul. Although, little research exist on this particularly gruesome period in the history of Istanbul, Brewer’s account described a city in the throes of an intermittent epidemic of plague that cost many lives and rendered the authorities powerless in the huge number of deaths. Brewer related that the frequent attacks of plague struck the city and turned it into an open air mortuary with thousands of bodies left untouched, without anyone to bury them. These ghastly scenes of mass deaths and the grim inefficiency of urban sanitation should have been a reason for the onset of melancholia in Istanbul.12 10 Brewer, A Residence at Constantinople in the Year 1827, 108. 11 Ibid., 93, 108. On historical accounts of plague in the Ottoman Empire and its 19th century effects on the city, see Nalan Turna, “İstanbul’un Vebayla İmtihanı: 1811-1812 Veba Salgını Bağlamında Toplum ve Ekonomi,” Studies of the Ottoman Domain 1, no. 1 (2011): 39–74. 12 129 As a matter of fact, in the 19th century, two epidemics, each with its own waves of attacks and differing intensities, plague and cholera, became an ordinary, albeit gruesome, phenomena in urban life of Istanbul. The city’s trials with plague was dated to the far past. The Justinian plague of the 6th century was argued to cost the loss of half the population of Constantinople and that irretrievably caused the collapse of the Roman Empire’s last vestiges of recapturing its hegemony in the Mediterranean.13 Even though the Ottoman Empire was not subject to a severe epidemic witnessed by Europe in the form of the Black Plague, from the 15th century to the 18th century, especially large cities like Istanbul, Thessaloniki, and Bursa were struck by the disease. As early as the 15th century, strict regulations for quarantine were put in place to prevent the spreading of the epidemic.14 The most notable and fatal of these epidemics took place in 1811-12, with 100,000 fatalities. Plague caused the loss of a fifth of the city’s population, thought to be 500,000 before the epidemic. Most likely, this was what Brewer read before he embarked on a journey to Istanbul, and when he arrived in 1827, he wrote that the disease was still causing widespread fatalities almost daily. In another bout of epidemic, in 1836-1837, 25,000 died.15 Plague was the primary originator of the Tanzimat era’s modern sanitary and hygienic regulations in Istanbul. Although the plague subsided with less intensity and less frequency throughout the 19th century in Istanbul, it was replaced by another fatal To some accounts, the great plague of AD 541-543 was the end of antiquity and the beginning of the medieval era, see: William Rosen, Justinian’s Flea: The First Great Plague and the End of the Roman Empire, Reprint (Penguin Books, 2008). 13 Turna, “İstanbul’un Vebayla İmtihanı: 1811-1812 Veba Salgını Bağlamında Toplum ve Ekonomi,” 31– 36. 14 Daniel Panzac, Osmanlı İmparatorluğu’nda Veba:1700-1850 (İstanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayınları, 1997); Turna, “İstanbul’un Vebayla İmtihanı: 1811-1812 Veba Salgını Bağlamında Toplum ve Ekonomi.” 15 130 epidemic in the second half of the century: cholera.16 Cholera had far reaching influences on the urban patterns of Istanbul, from the names and characteristics of neighborhoods –the poorest and worst built districts, more often than not, areas where Roma people lived, were called Cholera mahalles. This label became a staple of modern literature in otherwise troubled novelist Metin Kaçan’s works17 to the mainstream perception of these inner city neighborhoods as dens of iniquity, and hence, punishable by god for their transgressions; from being the instigator of modern sanitation methods to being the progenitor of the varoş and dangerous classes myth amidst the nascent middle classes from the 1950s on. From the Tanzimat period on, the Ottoman statesmen paid special attention to cholera, and it shaped their understanding of urban spaces. One of the most well-known public hospitals in Istanbul, Cerrahpaşa Hospital (literally, the Surgeon Pasha) owes its founding to the 1893 cholera epidemic. The Mayor’s office bought a mansion in the intra muros neighborhood of Kasap İlyas and opened a treatment facility for cholera. The wooden mansion (konak in Turkish) was later demolished but laid the grounds for the vast medical complex of present Cerrahpaşa Hospital.18 The zeitgeist of Istanbul in the 19th century was definitely formed by the injury and futility in the face of relentless pounding of epidemic diseases, and thence was born the indelible mark of hüzün and tristesse: any attempt in urban planning and sanitary re-ordering of the city, whatever its scale, had succumbed to this uncanny common Turna, “İstanbul’un Vebayla İmtihanı: 1811-1812 Veba Salgını Bağlamında Toplum ve Ekonomi,” 37. For further information, see: Mesut Ayar, Osmanlı Devleti’nde Kolera Salgını: İstanbul Örneği (18921895) (İstanbul: Kitabevi, 2007). 16 17 Metin Kaçan, Agir Roman (Everest Yayinlari, 2012). Cem Behar, A Neighborhood in Ottoman Istanbul: Fruit Vendors and Civil Servants in the Kasap İlyas Mahalle (SUNY Press, 2003), 173. 18 131 feeling of irreversible decay. 4.2 Rationing and Rationalizing Urban Space: Early Attempts in Planning in the Ottoman Istanbul The extent of plague, cholera, and epidemics and their fateful corollary, putrid urban poverty determined a great deal of discussions in a wide variety of circles in the mid-19th century. On the one hand, the newly formed socialist groups, in partnership with the workers’ trade unionist, or syndicalist movements, in a diverse array of examples, from the defenders of Lasallian workers’ industrial armies, to Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 and his collaborations with Marx and their revolutionary call for overthrow of the capitalist state, and to Ebenezeer Howard’s moderately formulated Garden Cities of Tomorrow, and, on the other hand, the developments in positive sciences, that found their practical application in penicillin and other vaccines, the discovery of the germs and importance of hygiene, and as a parallel, the import of Darwinism to establishment thinkers’ social theorizations, the popularity of Herbert Spencer’s “survival of the fittest” vulgarism in Britain and racially impinged conservatism of LePlay’s ideas that found widespread interest in Second Empire France, heralded novel, and bio-politically molded, state-spaces.19 Inasmuch as the worldsystem’s peripheral and colonial populations were subjected to the unforgiving and grossly fatal epidemic of cholera, in the core areas where industrial armies continuously devoured the newly formed working classes into the factories with celebrated 19 Harold L. Platt, “Exploding Cities: Housing the Masses in Paris, Chicago, and Mexico City, 1850-2000,” Journal of Urban History 36, no. 5 (2010): 577–580; Harold L. Platt, “From Hygeia to the Garden City: Bodies, Houses, and the Rediscovery of the Slum in Manchester” 33 (2007): 756–72. 132 smokestacks, the cities were beleaguered by a new epidemic: tuberculosis.20 As cited in David Barnes’ comprehensive social history of tuberculosis, David Armstrong, in his search for a “political anatomy of the body” pointed to the “dispensary gaze”, a strategy of controlling space within the city by mapping the movement of pathology within it.”21 Furthermore, Armstrong came up with a key notion and its relationship with urban space. When in 1866, it was written by one of the first crucial names in public health, Southwood Smith, and declared that the centuries old notion of quarantine was ought to be replaced by sanitary measures, a rupture in the social and spatial organization of diseases was imminent. As put aptly, Armstrong sees in this a development of reorientation, that“[i]nstead of a cordon sanitaire between potentially coalescing geographical spaces the new regime of hygiene monitored a line of separation between the space of the body and that of its environment.”22 The distinguishing aspect of this reorientation laid in how the spatial characteristics and subjectivities are treated; while, “[q]uarantine marked out a geographical space while sanitary science defined the space of the body.”23 So, the remarkable boundaries that helped set up the geographically conscious subjectivity as alive in the body distinct from its surroundings –and, simultaneously, reproduced to be separated from space encapsulating itself- is broken 20 The situation was so dire that in the midst of the19th century, it was reported that in Paris, there was not a single soul uninfected by TB. See, David S. Barnes, The Making of a Social Disease: Tuberculosis in Nineteenth Century France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). Thomas Mann, depicted wondrously in his masterpiece, the Magic Mountain, how TB did not know any class differences, and how the illness cut through all strata of society and how it befell on the general angst prevailing during the interwar years. Of course, the rich had their luxurious asylums and retreats –later to be the model for holiday resorts- for their sick, while the poor perished on the streets. 21 Ibid., 13. 22 David E. Armstrong, A New History of Identity: A Sociology of Medical Knowledge (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 7. 23 Ibid., 14. 133 from the 19th century onwards, while sanitary measures are ubiquitously applied throughout the capital cities of Europe, subjectivity as ensconced in physicality of the body has become an extension of physical space. That’s why one of the two underlining characteristics of Baron Haussmann’s planning principles depended upon sanitation. As I sit at the table across my laptop and carefully listen to the rallying cries soaring from the streets –the protesters are loud and clear even at a distance when they shout “Her Yer Taksim! Her Yer Direniş” (Taksim is everywhere! Resistance is Everywhere) among other calls for immediate ceasing of the brutal police oppression that led to the Gezi uprisings, in this northernmost neighborhood of the city –Büyükderewhere a small Armenian Bosphorus fishing village was stripped from all its historical features and turned into an upper middle-class suburb, I pondered that 160 years to the day of these sentences written, on the 29th of June, 1853, Emperor Napoleon II appointed Baron Georges Haussmann as the head of Seine prefect in Paris. From 1853 to 1870, Haussmann (1809-1891) controlled one of the greatest and far reaching redevelopment efforts as the Mayor of Seine prefecture. Haussmann’s downfall was instigated by his shady financial dealings, and his consequent loss of favor in the eyes of the emperor, before the Paris commune, few, if any, had succeeded in raising an effective dissent against his reconstruction of Paris. Yet, his plans, and the underlying ideas that delineated a specific type of space-state nexus were never absent from public discussions, or in the Turkish case, urban grassroots social movements’ struggles against large scale expropriation of urban land since his demise. Haussmann’s demise was never confined to French urbanism, neither to the 19th century, but his ploys in making power legible in urban structures proved to be a recurring theme of ensuing grand plans in redevelopment 134 and renewal attempts. Two main concerns shaped Haussmannesque urbanism and its spatial realizations in practical applications: regularity (order, uniformity, ease of social and physical control) and sanitation.24 Haussmann’s basic idea in urban spatial order was employing and carefully installing vacuums, voids once stylistic elements of Baroque architecture, and were harnessed in overblown proportions as instruments of grandiose social control. His tacit purpose in doing this was partly a construction of cordon sanitaire, a bio-political reflex ingrained in contemporary sensitivities vis-à-vis hygiene, but also partly a building of an imperial monumentality that aspired to instill awe and produce subordination from the subjects-which the 20th century dictatorships later excelled in their construction of gigantic spatial apparatuses of fear and terror.25 What Haussmann manifestly did was, however, rather different; his primary attempt was in manufacturing a perception of planning embroidered with large swaths of emptiness, that amounted “through systematic recourse to a kind of surgery which has since been considered vandalism.”26 The symbolic import of a vacuum here was merely the negation of spatial existence; rendering a place empty meant a resilience against social processes and relationships, a vindictiveness that culminated in the powerful –but, irrational- mantra of emptiness for the sake of emptiness and venerated the political will that kept it devoid of any social meanings. It was deeply related to sanitation, but was not a hygienic response to germs, 24 Françoise Choay, The Modern City: Planning in the 19th Century (NY: George Braziller, 1970), 10–18. Albert Speer, was the foremost influential architectural figure, who undertook an unfruitful attempt in designing a new Berlin, almost on dopes in terms of size, to dwarf the buildings of the old Reich, and adumbrate the immense and ineradicable power of Nazism’s state apparatus, see, Dovey, Framing Places. 25 26 Choay, The Modern City: Planning in the 19th Century, 18. 135 rather a sweeping hygienic impulse against social phenomena.27 In David Harvey’s view, regularization of urban space –and uniformly generalized social control over that space- was tantamount to an extraordinarily novel social transformation. Harvey quoted Haussmann’s own words and explained that instead of “collections of partial plans of public thoroughfares considered without ties or connections,” his main concern was a “general plan which was nevertheless detailed enough to properly coordinate diverse local circumstances.”28 Haussmann started from the totality, treated the city as a whole, and the difference underlying his schemes from the preceding ambitious development programs was this peculiar view that saw an organic complexity in the materiality of the urban structure, in a society exceedingly shaped by continuous movement of commodities, capital, and labor the city were supposed to be organized around the same principles of circulation. Furthermore, Haussmann divided Paris into 20 arrondissements, and although each of these districts had their own councils, naturally Haussmann himself was installed on top as the ultimate decision maker.29 David Harvey, in parallel to Marshall Berman, argued that modernity as a historical development and the cultural, intellectual, and behavioral patterns ushered in modernity themselves represented a rupture and this rupture involved an invention of the past as stasis, as a concentration of disorder, and modernity is the urge to shape, to reproduce the forward motion, to trigger the chain of reactions that helped all that is solid 27 Ibid. 28 Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity, 106. 29 Ibid., 107. 136 melt into air.30 The worthiness of the modern novelty is in its ability to regulate the unruly, to discipline and reorder the mess of differences; hence, the modern urge aimed to differentiate itself from the inherent differences. A “pure and schematic order” will be established from the disorder, chaos, amorphous crowdedness, and ambiguous realities of the past to help the future unshackle itself from the fetters of tradition, the dangers of unhygienic classes, and the unknowns of different peoples.31 Modernity is the unfettered movement towards the future, and in order to do that, Haussmann opened up two main axial roads, called grande croisée de Paris, the east-to-west and north-to-south roads intersected in the center of the city. For his aim was to construct an uninterrupted flow that made Paris a true totality where each point had access to another32 Apart from bringing the city together in the center, to inculcate in what Lefebvre called concentration of concentration, Haussmann had three other aims: 1. Extensive redevelopment…to make the centre both accessible and functional 2. To create a ring of boulevards around the central zone 3. [To establish] [d]iagonal streets through the central zone33 These aims of reshaping the city center had been surreptitiously applied throughout Europe with almost surgical precision. Minus the precision, Istanbul’s fate, through ambiguous detours as consequences of political failures and nation-state making processes, followed this example quite closely. 30 Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air : The Experience of Modernity. 31 Choay, The Modern City: Planning in the 19th Century, 17. She defined regularization as: “that form of critical planning whose explicit purpose is to regularize the disordered city, to disclose its new order by means of a pure, schematic layout.” 32 Ibid., 18. Thomas Hall, Planning Europe’s Capital Cities: Aspects of Nineteenth-Century Urban Development (London: Routledge, 1997), 79–81. 33 137 In this indelibly modernist spatial logic, Françoise Choay recognized a compression of meanings, perhaps akin to Harvey’s later conceptualization of space-time compression, wherein lies possible further connotations: the one-dimensionalization of multifarious urban semantics, the overwhelming domination of a new language produced by the powerful, and the determining force of the inherent logic of an incipient political economy-with all its appurtenances in colonization and proletarianization. Although Choay did not explicitly touch upon these issues, she pointed out that the semantic multiplicity prevalent on the pre-modern city –in which different sources of power contested each other- was replaced by a mono-semantics of industrial urbanization. Here, in this singularistic series of meanings, the urban mono-semantics dictated three things: 1. the virulence of the economic drive 2. the irruption of extraneous immigrants form the country, alien to the significance and functioning of the city’s institutions 3. the development of increasingly abstract means of communication…[i.e.]Railway, daily press and telegraph34 It would be naïve to claim that these three invincible and crucially determining spatial formulations had not touched 19th century Istanbul. Yet, unlike its peers in Western Europe, the historical heritage of the city, its inveterate formal articulations, fragile economic and political relationships and ill-defined ethnic and faith-based intercommunal relationships precluded a fully-formed rational dissecting scalpel from perfectly determining the urban geography. Furthermore, the Ottoman Empire’s governmentality as projected onto imagined state-space relationships and its relevant configurations in power structures were not indifferent to the cities. Stefanos Yerasimos wrote that the Ottoman apparatuses of power paid special attention to the rules, 34 Choay, The Modern City: Planning in the 19th Century, 8–9. 138 regulations, stipulations, and ratifications that ordered urban concatenations, and even before the Tanzimat period, intermittent interventions in the cities were a habitual mechanism of governing.35 Halil İnalcık, similarly, pointed out that contrary to the conventional view –which stubbornly diagnosed the Ottoman rule as uninterested, or, worse, ignorant of the urban administrative needs- the imperial administration’s active participation and particular attention in urban governance was evident, especially in Istanbul.36 Although these habits of active intervention and particular attention were stalwartly appropriated by the CUP and later Kemalist elites, a permanent drive for control over urban areas did not emerge and relevant formulations in legal regulations and administrative statutes were not established until the beginning of the Tanzimat reform period. After 1839, the modern urge for reform did not only shape the core of the power distribution in the imperial center, but also it was immediately reflected in Istanbul’s spatial structure. 37 One of the most influential figures of the Tanzimat era, Mustafa Reşit Paşa, in his quest for reformulating the existential basis of the Ottoman Empire defined four main pillars of the state power: first, Islam and caliphate; second, the Ottoman dynasty; third, Istanbul as the seat of power, as being the payitaht; and finally, government authority and its relevant institutions’ exclusive lasting control by ethnic Turks. Though he also promised a new understanding of equal citizenship for all ethnicities and faiths that had shaken the strictly imposed hierarchy between different millets, his ideas behind the four 35 Öncel, Apartman, 91. 36 Inalcik, “Istanbul,” 1973; Inalcik, “Istanbul,” January 1, 1990. 37 Öncel, Apartman, 91. 139 main pillars had much more enduring effects in politics. Another powerful statesman of the Tanzimat era, who served as adviser to three different sultans, Ahmet Cevdet Pasha argued that a failure in a single pillar would entail the collapse of all four and mean the collapse of the system.38 The troubled introduction of modernity to the Ottoman lands would transpire in the state-space configurations of Istanbul as well and play a pivotal role in ensuing transformations. 4.3 Cosmopolitan Istanbul: Population and Ethnic Distribution of Neighborhoods during Fin-de-Siècle As explained in the previous chapter, one of the crucial characteristics of Istanbul that sets its urban structure apart from other urban experiences was the oft-quoted fact that its metropolitan qualities do not owe their existence to the industrial revolution. Indeed, from its foundation, the city served as an imperial hub to one or another worldempire, and rendered innumerable services to the inherent bureaucracies of successive state structures as the host of their life-worlds, ideologies, and power distribution arrangements. Furthermore, this was a host quiet unlike other capitals, where multiethnicity and coexistence of different faith groups was rule, rather than the exceptionthough, this does not entail a de jure tolerance, but a well-defined set of hierarchy in communities. Yet, contrary to attestations of the burgeoning numbers of inhabitants, which followed an approximate historical cycle for both the Roman/Byzantine and Kemal H. Karpat, Ottoman Past and Today’s Turkey (BRILL, 2000), 21. Karpat added that “Ahmet Cevdet Paşa (d. 1895), the foremost adviser to the three Sultans, stated in a memorandum that Mustafa Reşit Paşa, the architect of the Tanzimat, believed that the Ottoman state stood on four foundations. Besides Islam and the Caliphate, the dynasty, and the capital of Istanbul, one of those principles was that the hükümet (executive) always be Turkish, and the loss of any one of the four would entail the disintegration of the state. The principles of Mustafa Reşit Paşa’s theory were listed, though in a different order, in various communications of Fuat Paşa and Sultan Abdulhamid himself.” Ibid. 38 140 Ottoman Empires of two centuries (for the Roman/Byzantine Empire, from the 5th century up until the 7th century, for the Ottoman Empire, from the 16th century to the 18th century) –which were cut abruptly by plagues, foreign incursions, and/or internal strifefrom the 19th century onwards modernity and subsequent incorporation to the modern world-economy made itself felt demographically. The population of Istanbul, parallel to other metropolitan capitals of European powers, showed a significant increase up until the early 20th century and before the onset of the disastrous decade of wars from 1911 until 1922. According to Halil İnalcık, Istanbul was subject to an immense state-led effort of repopulation, by dint of resettlement, coerced migration, and subsidies for skilled craftsmen. So, the figures in the following table –collected by İnalcık- suggests a different picture of population composition than what Fernand Braudel, Robert Mantran, and Halil İnalcık –in his earlier writings- and Paul Bairoch suggested.39 Year 1477 1489 1535 1690 1690 1826 1829 1833 1856 1918 1927 Unit khâne khâne khâne khâne poll-tax payers males individuals males khâne individuals individuals individuals Muslims 9,517 46,635 Christians 5,162 5,462 25,295 14,231 45,112 45,000 5,000 73,496 29,383 73,093 102,649 447,851 234,060 Jews 1,647 2,491 8,070 9,642 8,236 11,413 19,015 62,383 Total 16,326 80,000 359,890 700,000 690,911 Braudel wrote that: “we can justifiably say that Istanbul in the sixteenth century, with at least 400,000 inhabitants (and probably 700,000), was an urban monster, comparable in proportion to the largest agglomerations today.” Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century, 52. 39 141 Table 4.1: Population of Istanbul between 15th and 20th centuries40 The figures collected by Kemal Karpat point to a much more accurate estimate regarding the historical population figures. As I have underlined, by means of Fernand Braudel’s–and, Robert Mantran’s since, Braudel cited the figures from Mantran’s Istanbul dans la seconde moitié du XVIIe siécle- indications that İstanbul was a vast capital city with at least a population approaching half a million souls as early as the 16th century, which was termed as a monstrous urban concatenation by Braudel, seems to be quite off the mark. Similar to Karpat, Zafer Toprak follows the method used by Cyril Mango for Byzantine Constantinople41, and by using the figures of grain imported into the city (91.250 metric tons annually) comes up with a more moderate estimate of 300.000 for the 17th century.42 Also, the population concentration which reaches 15.00018.000 per km square in the old İstanbul, where a vertical architecture is not yet evident, suggests a different figure. Although, downplaying the destructive effects of the plague epidemic that had been a constant source of man-made disaster acting as a natural population control, Toprak’s estimate is that the city was home to 200.000 in the 16th century, reaching 250.000 in the 17th century seems more logical, though, far from explaining the great decimation of plague years in the early 19th century, which I have referred to above.43 The Tanzimat years saw a huge increase, from 1844’s 356,653 to 873,575 in 40 Inalcik, “Istanbul,” 1973. Cyril Mango, Le Développement Urbain de Constantinople (IVe–VIIe Siè Cles) (Paris: De Boccard, 1985). 41 42 Toprak, “Tarihsel Nüfusbilim Açısından Istanbul’un Nüfusu ve Toplumsal Topografyası,” 117–20. 43 Ibid., 119–120. 142 1885. The 1897 census counted approximately 1.1 million inhabitants, largely reflecting the flow of Muslim immigrants from the territories lost during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878- and the 1914 census, 909,978, though, the foreign population –which is estimated to be around tens of thousands, because of trade privileges provided to the subjects of European powers and the newly founded Balkan nations- are not included in these censuses. Kemal Karpat gave a higher estimate of around 1.6 million for 19141916. In censuses taken during the armistice, the figure is around 1,203,000. After the war, a huge drop in population was widely accepted. For instance, in 1922, the census taken from police jurisdictional areas, the population was given as 710,286, and in 1924, the decrease in population finally reached a trough with half a million inhabitants. The census of 1927 indicated some signs of increase up to 690,857 inhabitants. The population showed further signs of recovery only in 1935, with 741,148.44 Tekeli, Development of the Istanbul Metropolitan Area, 50; Toprak, “Tarihsel Nüfusbilim Açısından Istanbul’un Nüfusu ve Toplumsal Topografyası,” 120. 44 143 Istanbul Population: 1829‐1935 1800000 1600000 1400000 Population 1200000 1000000 800000 600000 400000 200000 0 1829 1844 1885 1897 1914 1916 1918 1922 1924 1927 1935 Year Figure 4.3: Istanbul Population 1829-193545 A comparison of these censuses reflect that the population of the city after the First World War first increased considerably, due to the war refugees from the Balkans and Anatolia, and later, the armistice and the foundation of Republican Turkey reckoned a city with half of its pre-war population, almost nearing population levels comparable to five decades earlier. Without a doubt, this decrease, on the one hand, owed a great deal to the Armenian depopulation instigated by the CUP (Committee of Union and Progress) which began on 24 April, 1915, with the deportation of Armenian community leaders and intellectuals (first thought to be around 250, but later in the year reaching thousands) from Istanbul under Talat Paşa’s orders.46 On the other hand, the long lasting war and the Tekeli, Development of the Istanbul Metropolitan Area, 50; Toprak, “Tarihsel Nüfusbilim Açısından Istanbul’un Nüfusu ve Toplumsal Topografyası”; Inalcik, “Istanbul,” 1973; Kemal H. Karpat, Osmanlı nüfusu: 1830-1914, trans. Bahar Tırnakçı (Timaş Yayınları, 2010). 45 46 See, Taner Akcam, A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility (Picador, 2007). 144 inept governments not only decimated Armenian population, but also contributed heavily to the emigration of Greek people-the second most populous ethnic group of the citythough, the Greek population was exempt from the population exchange agreement signed between Greek and Turkish governments at the end of the war. As Stefanos Yerasimos correctly pointed out, the population growth of Ottoman Turkey in the two centuries between the 17th century and 19th century, shows a curious and out of proportion increase of non-Muslims which significantly exceeded Muslim growth of population.47 In 1885, for instance, 44% of city’s population was composed of Muslims, while non-Muslims made up of 41% and a further15% were of foreign origin.48 According to Kemal Karpat's calculations, in 1897, Istanbul's population was 1.059.000, and of this population, 597.000, roughly 60 per cent, were ethnically Turkish-even though, Karpat, also gave the figures for Albanians and Kurds (two Muslim minorities). Since, the distinction between Turkish and Muslim did not actually exist for a long time in Turkish academic writing or for the purposes of collecting census data, it is better to treat the figure as solely the Muslim population. Otherwise, Muslim immigrants from Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia, Albania and other parts of the Balkans, as well as Caucasian Muslim immigrants –Lazi, Georgians, Circassians, etc. - would all be delineated as Turks. The Greeks were the second most numerous community numbering 236.000, and Yerasimos, used Omer Lutfi Barkan’s population figures for the year 1530, and out of a total Anatolian population of 6,5 million, non-Muslims made up of 8% of the total. Yet, considering Ubicini’s 1844 calculations, of the total population of 16 million corresponding to the contemporary territories of Turkey, 20% was composed of non-Muslims. Yerasimos explained this phenomenon –with some reserves- on the basis of a transformation from a Gazâ based military apparatus to the conscription army that is bound to a defensive –and non-extractive force- that befell on the Turkish-Muslim population. See, Yerasimos, Azgelişmişlik Sürecinde Türkiye 2. Tanzimattan 1. Dünya Savaşına, 607–9. 47 48 Tekeli, Development of the Istanbul Metropolitan Area, 51. 145 made up almost a quarter of the city's population. By size, third is the Armenian community, with 162.000 people. Following these two ethno-religious communities (although, there were slightly smaller communities of Greek and Armenian Catholics, as well as protestants, they were nevertheless counted as Greek and Armenian), the third most populous community, was the Jewish community, with 47.000 inhabitants in the city.49 With the integration into the world-economy the hitherto inward looking geographical dispersal of various communities, which was more or less limited to their respective ghettoes inside the city walls, a geographical expansion of residential areas emerged. To the west, the growth of Makriköy (later to be known as Bakırköy) and Yeşilköy along the newly installed railway created two new suburbs, mostly populated by non-Muslims. Meanwhile, to the north, the almost ineradicable growth of Galata and Pera, instigated by investments by Levantines, foreign employees of foreign-held companies, and partly non-Muslims saw the first real estate boom away from the traditional core of Istanbul. This wave of real estate development and the first western style urbanization and commercialization was parallel to the northward movement of state functionaries and officials, spearheaded by the Sultan’s move- from Topkapı palace towards Tophane to the Ortaköy axis along the coast, defined by the Dolmabahçe and Yıldız Palaces-both of which served as the seat of the Sublime Porte throughout the 19th century at different times. Later, in the early 20th century, the first boom of real estate development, and would extend its reach from Pera to Şişli, through the TeşvikiyeNişantaşı axis. On the Anatolian coast, the opening of the Anatolian railroads and its final 49 Kemal H. Karpat, Osmanlı nüfusu: 1830-1914, trans. Bahar Tırnakçı (Timaş Yayınları, 2010), 220. 146 terminus at the Haydarpaşa train station helped transform the then idyllic resort areas east of Kadıköy into the first suburban settlements on the Anatolian side of the Bosphorus. Yeldeğirmeni was the first to join, with western style multi-level apartment buildings, and then followed by other suburban districts like Kızıltoprak, Göztepe, Erenköy, and Bostancı.50 This first and most defining geographical expansion of the city during fin-desiécle was unmistakably an outcome of the progressively increasing welfare of nonMuslim populations, who seemed to be on the verge of bringing together the first genuine middle-class of Ottoman Turkey.51 The Greeks continued their traditional existence in Fener where their residence had been recognized by Mehmed II since the conquest, and as an aristocratic extension of the Ottoman state apparatus. Fener Greeks represented a privileged class of Greek subjects of the emperor.52 Ayakapı, Cibali, Samatya, and Kumkapı were the other main non-Muslim intra-muros neighborhoods. They also established new neighborhoods in Makriköy (Bakırköy) and Yeşilköy. The Karaman Greeks lived between Narlıkapı and Yedikule in the intra-muros Istanbul. They also lived in Galata, Pera, Pangaltı, and in small fishing villages along the Bosphorus: Tarabya, Yeniköy, Arnavutköy-Kuruçeşme, Beşiktaş, Ortaköy, Rumelihisarı, Büyükdere, and Sarıyer. On the Anatolian side of the city, Kadıköy and the Princes’ Islands were overwhelmingly populated by Greeks, and they made up significant portions of neighborhoods in Çengelköy, Üsküdar, Beykoz, Kuzguncuk, and Selimiye, on the eastern 50 Tekeli, Development of the Istanbul Metropolitan Area, 42–3. 51 Keyder, State and Class in Turkey : A Study in Capitalist Development. 52 Yerasimos, Azgelişmişlik Sürecinde Türkiye 2. Tanzimattan 1. Dünya Savaşına, 610; Inalcik, “The Policy of Mehmed II toward the Greek Population of Istanbul and the Byzantine Buildings of the City.” 147 shores of the Bosphorus as well.53 The Armenian community was traditionally centered along the axis between Samatya, Kumkapı, and Yenikapı, intra-muros Istanbul, on the western coast of the Bosphorus, where the Patriarchate of Armenian Orthodox Church was, and still is, located. Topkapı, Narlıkapı, Yedikule, Balat, Makriköy, Yeşilköy; Hasköy, Galata, Beyoğlu, Surpagop, Pangaltı, Şişli, Beşiktaş, Ortaköy, and Kuruçeşme were also other neighborhoods with significant Armenian populations. On the Anatolian side, Kuzguncuk, Bağlarbaşı-Yenimahalle, Selâmsız, and İcadiye were neighborhoods where sizable Armenian communities lived alongside Muslims.54 Jewish communities existed in intra-muros Istanbul in the neighborhoods of Balat, Cibali, Ayvansaray, and Tekfursaray; yet, Hasköy was an important foci of Jewish settlement, on the north of the Golden Horn. As was the same case with other nonMuslims, Galata, Pera, Kasımpaşa, and Tophane along the aforementioned late nineteenth century real estate development axis, as well as the newly developed Bosphorus coasts of Beşiktaş, Ortaköy, Arnavutköy, and Büyükçeşme and Kuruçeşme had sizable Jewish communities. On the Anatolian coastline, Kuzguncuk –nearby Üsküdar- was an important Jewish population center, whereas they also existed in Çengelköy, and Üsküdar-mainly Muslim neighborhoods- and Kadıköy-mainly a Greek neighborhood.55 Levantines and citizens of foreign countries began to turn some then insignificant 53 Tekeli, Development of the Istanbul Metropolitan Area, 44. 54 Ibid. 55 Ibid., 44–5. 148 neighborhoods like Cihangir –adjacent to Pera- into new urban residential areas with art noveau apartment buildings that followed the latest trends in European architectural circles, while the British and French nationals built exquisite seaside palaces in Modaadjacent to Kadıköy on the Anatolian side-, Bebek, Kandilli, and Büyükdere –erstwhile northern villages on the western side of the Bosphorus. Close by, in Tarabya –a bay between Büyükdere and Bebek, called Therapia in Greek- French, British, German, and Italian Embassies’ summer residences were built, soon to be joined by the Russians in Büyükdere; indicating a permanent rush to the Bosphorus, somewhat following the Ottoman aristocracy’s earlier rush in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.56 It is important to note that, this earlier urban sprawl, triggered by Westernized bourgeoisie, was mostly pioneered by the privileged sectors of society protected under the foreign powers’ bilateral agreements with the empire. In 1882, more than a decade after the passage of the Ottoman Citizenship Law of 1869, close to half of the residents in Pera (110,000 out of a population of 237,000) still carried foreign passports.57 The classical Ottoman geographical governmentality, rooted in a neatly arranged tile-like distribution of Muslim and non-Muslim population in intra-muros Istanbul, somewhat continued well into the 19th century. Although, apparently cut off from the relevant circuits of capital and international trade, Muslims still dominated the old imperial core of Istanbul: Aksaray, Laleli, Şehzadebaşı, Zeyrek, Vefa, Süleymaniye, Çarşamba, Fatih, and Atikali faintly resembling the intercession of Byzantine forums and 56 Ibid., 46. Caglar Keyder, “Bureaucracy and Bourgeoisie: Reform and Revolution in the Age of Imperialism,” Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 11, no. 2 (1988): 161. 57 149 more or less still served the same functions. The two oldest suburbs of Istanbul were still overwhelmingly Muslim and contained the spirit and symbolism of the imperial past interwoven with dilapidated streets, wooden houses, külliyes that are hardly reminiscent of the past and the rather spatially and ideologically imposing hüzün that crept slowly but surely to the still ruling elite’s weltanschauung-ruling, but inept, incapacitated to interpret and change the cataclysmic turn of events that is already incipient by the end of the 19th century. Sütlüce, Kasımpaşa, Fındıklı, and Tophane were the working-class districts, wherein the laborers of the Haliç basin’s manufactories dwelt. Nearby the working-class districts, in a secluded valley, lived the outcasts of both Ottoman and later Turkish society, the Roma people, who earned their livelihood as musicians, street artists, publicans, dancers, etc.58 The bureaucrats of the rapidly centralized state machinery chose to –or were made to- live closer to the ultimate authority, either the Dolmabahçe Palace, or the Yıldız Palace, dependent on the sultan’s choice, so Beşiktaş, Yıldız, and Nişantaşı were the earliest Muslim upper-middle class neighborhoods, epitomized with some quaintly embellished Baroque-inspired row houses purpose built for the palace functionaries on Akaretler street. Muslims were a minority in both Kadıköy and the Prince Islands, but curiously, from the Abdulhamid era on, as more and more partook in the burgeoning riches –the nouveaux riches who were direct products of the growth of state machinerythe eastward shoreline of Marmara Sea -beginning from Moda and Fenerbahçe bays passing through Kızıltoprak, Göztepe, Erenköy, and Bostancı- a low-density Tekeli, Development of the Istanbul Metropolitan Area, 45; Reşat Ekrem Koçu, Eski İstanbul’da Meyhaneler (İstanbul: Doğan Yayıncılık, 2002). 58 150 suburbanization took hold.59 What was really remarkable about the fin-de-siécle Muslim population of Istanbul, from a demographical point of view, was their peculiarity regarding family planning. According to Alan Duben and Cem Behar’s study, “The Muslim population of Istanbul appears…to have been the first sizeable Muslim group to have a systematically and extensively practiced family planning.”60 The average household population in Istanbul at the turn of the 20th century was 4.2, and closely resembles the average household population at the turn of the 21st century, 3.85. Furthermore, from the beginning of the twentieth century, women in Istanbul began to hold back marriages. By the 1930s, the average marriage age for women was 23, while it was close to 30 for mennumbers not matched for most of the twentieth century once the long forsaken flood gates of rural immigration were opened with all their might. The long 19th century not only helped Istanbul become one of the pioneering global cities as the imperial domain integrated to the modern world-economy, but also contributed to a relative amelioration of women’s status and position. Duben and Behar, pointed to factors like, “education, entry into the work-force, the late Ottoman and early Republican [feminist/suffragette] movements” in addition to a growing sense of repulsiveness of polygyny and concubinage, the perceived increase in options and choice for marriage, and, perhaps, most well documented in Turkish literature, the influence (some contemporary critiques might say, disruptive and debased effects) of western ideas and notions regarding Tekeli, Development of the Istanbul Metropolitan Area, 46; Adnan Giz, Bir zamanlar Kadıköy: (19001950) : güzel Kadıköy, köşklerin dramı, Kadıköy’ün insanları (İletişim Yayıncılık, 1988). 59 Alan Duben and Cem Behar, Istanbul Households: Marriage, Family and Fertility 1880-1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 242. 60 151 marriage and love.61 In the next section, we will grapple with this rapidly changing society’s tremendously altered structures and their reflections on the built environment and how state authority came to terms with this change that often borders pure turmoil for most of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, and how in its endless quest for molding space, the state reorganized Istanbul in its broken and ruptured selfimage. 4.4 An Uneventful Series of Urban Plans: Tanzimat and Attempts in Reforming the Urban Space in Istanbul A key notion which all Ottoman historians from all creeds, left and right, Kemalist, nationalist, or socialist, seem to agree upon without contention is that the Tanzimat period was the beginning of the Ottoman Empire’s exploitation by Western powers.62 After the signing of the Anglo-Ottoman Trade Accords in 1838, prime minister Mustafa Reşit Paşa declared the Royal Edict on November 3, 1839 in Gülhane Parkhence, the name is still known as the Royal Edict of Gülhane. With the abolition of the millet system and the strict hierarchy and segregation of different faith-based communities under the Ottoman throne and the de jure primacy of the Muslims stipulated under the system, not only all subjects of the empire became equals, at least on paper, but 61 Ibid. See also Mardin, Türk Modernleşmesi., for a brilliant analysis of Turkish novelists’ inimical, outright hostile, responses to the corruption of Turkish/Islamic virtues of family life by the invasiveness of western values, which emasculated the male dominance in the household and let feminine sexuality loose in a rapidly changing materialistic society. 62 On this, Yerasimos’ otherwise commendable work, with a socialist unequal development framework, puts much of the blame on the Tanzimat era opening up of Ottoman economy: Yerasimos, Azgelişmişlik Sürecinde Türkiye 2. Tanzimattan 1. Dünya Savaşına. 152 also, a whole series of economic, political, social, and cultural changes began. The military-bureaucratic elite of the Ottoman Empire undertook a thorough reformation of the system, comparable to the Meiji in Japan, but ended up in a completely different trajectory. It is extensively researched and written that the effects of the Anglo-Ottoman trade deals were devastating, caused a rapid disorganization in the then predominant relations of production and shattered the enviously protected privileges of the guilds and demolished the guild-centered craftsmanship. The flooding of Ottoman markets with cheap British goods, especially woven yarns, had rendered the small-scale crafts organization of Ottoman manufacture non-competitive and irrelevant. On the other hand, the incessant demand for Ottoman agricultural produce, especially grains, for the British markets, instigated a proliferation of plantation-like enterprises, called malikanes, and further led to the proletarianization of landless peasants. Meanwhile, those who mediated these trade relations, non-Muslims of Istanbul and Smyrna, began accumulating capital and rose to an unrivaled position in the empire as the lenders of last resort. However, it is also suggested that the actual picture did not fit into the posited account and that small scale production and craftsmanship did not collapse until World War I, especially in areas where merchant capital could not reach, like Central Anatolia. Furthermore, similar claims were raised to the effect that the Anglo-Ottoman Trade Agreement was rather a restatement of the already existing agreements with other European powers, and its real objective was to fend off the threat posed by the ruler of Egypt, Kavalalı Mehmet Ali Paşa, and further served as a stop-gap for the gradually splintering off of Balkan nations triggered by the 1833 Hünkar İskelesi Treaty signed with Russia, which recognized 153 Czar’s protectorate over the Christian subjects of the Ottoman Empire.63 Whatever one’s evaluation of the Tanzimat era reforms, we cannot deny the plausibility of powerful, far reaching changes in Ottoman society. For the first time, bureaucracy was raised from its subservient status as the tabaa and began its long and arduous path in Turkish history as a proto-class.64 The differentiation within the labor force and relations of production became articulate –at least, the ethnic division of labor that prevailed in the Janissary army and amongst the servants of the Porte was gradually set free from the fetters of the sultan’s control, and in return, they had lost their influence in the intricate palace politics. A whole new array of social, political, cultural, and economic transformations kept the society in its grips, and ushered in a new mode of relations with the modern world-system, completely imposed by an unprecedented set of economic and governmental institutions. This was translated into concrete developments in Ottoman political economy. The first bank notes were printed, a private and public banking system emerged, a complex and highly centralized financial system started to gain ground in Istanbul, and a new fiscal structure and public and private accounting system modelled after European examples was for the first time employed by both the state and private enterprises. Private property on land and real estate was recognized by the Porte and a system of land registry and titles was established, a stock market was founded, first public bonds were issued, and as a consequence, Ottoman economic and Furthermore, this interpretation comes from quite different academic and political vantage points: Zafer Toprak, “Modernization and Commercialization in the Tanzimat Period: 1838-1876,” New Perspectives on Turkey 7, no. Spring (1992): 57–70; İlber Ortaylı, “Tanzimat,” Tanzimat’tan Cumhuriyete Türkiye Ansiklopedisi (Istanbul, 1985). 63 64 Mardin, “Center-Periphery Relations.” 154 social scaffolding was firmly moored to the modern world-system’s circuits of capital.65 The Tanzimat period spearheaded a thorough reorientation of Ottoman social fabric, and Istanbul was the primary setting of this economically instigated transition. To a large extent, the melancholia and hüzün attributed by Westerners in the early 19th century was due to the intense reaction to a pre-modern layout of the city. In the beginning of the 19th century, the width of Divanyolu –the Ottoman version of the Byzantine Mese, the most important avenue that connected the Grand Bazaar, the state institutions, and the külliyes of Beyazıt, Fatih, and Sultanahmet (the Blue Mosque) - did not exceed 6 meters, 65 feet, and the average width of the city streets were between 2 meters to 2.5 meters, 6.6 feet to 8.2 feet.66 Apparently, the physical characteristics of Istanbul’s urban patterns was no longer sufficient for a highly mobile system of labor and commodities exchange. Furthermore, the administrative structure of the classical Ottoman period was no longer capable of answering a wide variety of needs instigated by these transformations. The extension of central authority in urban areas, which was made up of mahalles, the kadıs, the proto-private form of ownership in waqfs, and strictly controlled artisanal guilds of architects and masons, and the wardens appointed by the sultans and a whole array of limitations on labor’s circulation, price controls, and inefficient legal framework; in sum, the accoutrements of the Ancien Regime were Toprak, “Modernization and Commercialization in the Tanzimat Period: 1838-1876,” 62.: “Compared to the pre-Tanzimat period, the economic history of the Tanzimat is characterized by the rise of modern economic and financial institutions, both public and private. The first paper money, the transition to a unitary monetary structure, state and private banking institutions, European-style budgets, the stock exchange, foreign debts, foreign chambers of commerce, in short a host of new economic and financial devices unknown to the previous era proliferated from 1838 onwards.” 65 66 Inalcik, “Istanbul,” 1973, 240. 155 overwhelmingly inept in fulfilling the requirements begotten by capitalist accumulation.67 One by one, each was subject to the modernist drive to reform. The rule of the day was, reform or perish-and we know that, the former was not exactly accomplished. The real difficulty in a reform of Istanbul’s urban structure laid not in the deficit of political will, or the lack of resources, but rather, in the orientation of that will. A short history of the Ottoman Empire and Republic of Turkey could be told in five seconds as a never-ending conflict between centralizing and centrifugal forces. Similarly, although the first municipal authority in the empire was established in Istanbul in 1855, named Şehremaneti,68 it was not functional. The first true municipal administration was founded in 1857, in the Pera District, named the Sixth Municipal District (the other five districts were supposed to be established gradually in other parts of the city). For a long time, the Sixth District remained as the sole municipal local authority in the empire.69 The Sixth District was an experiment in local administration, the first dabbling of the Porte in granting some authority to the people’s elected officials. However, this experiment also contained a double movement on the part of the Ottoman central authority: the non-Muslim population of Pera saw this as yet another attempt at extra taxation of their businesses, while the Porte partly aimed at establishing the Sixth District as both a way of diminishing the Christians’ –and European powers’- complaints of arbitrariness in administration. Furthermore, the Sixth District was useful in getting rid of 67 İlhan Tekeli, Modernizm, modernite ve Türkiye’nin kent planlama tarihi (Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayınları, 2009), 109. The name was of course symbollicaly laden, literally meant, the trustee of the city; which was an admission that the city belonged to the sultan, and his appointed mayor would run the city as his trusted person-the mayor’s name was also, Şehremini. 68 69 Tekeli, Modernizm, modernite ve Türkiye’nin kent planlama tarihi, 109. 156 the non-Muslim members of the Şehremaneti council. Once they had their own municipal council, the eerily familiar political strategy thought, they would refrain from dealing in the overall administration of the city. One thing which was not really understood by the Porte, was that the urban growth of the city in the midst of the century was almost exclusively the making of the non-Muslims. Aside from the Sultan’s move to the new palace of Dolmabahçe in 1856, which was naturally followed by his retinue and the high level government officials who moved into a complex of Baroque apartment buildings nearby, Pera was the sole epicenter of building activity in the period. This also brought Beşiktaş’ integration to the city –once a relatively unimportant port, and mooring place of sail ships, its adjacent forests were the hunting grounds of the dynasty. In the 1860s, the Sixth District administration started the demolition of the Genoese Walls surrounding Pera in order to pave the way for further real estate development, and by the 1870s a rapid wave of expansion helped the city’s center move towards this area for the first time in history.70 The Sixth District municipality’s already limited authority ebbed and flowed with the whim of the Porte as the only municipal administration in the empire until the early 20th century. In 1877, the first constitutionalists attempted to extrapolate this experiment to the rest of country, though this attempt in devolution of Porte’s powers was cut short by Abdulhamid II’s regime of restoration.71 Even if the municipal administrative reforms came to fruition, it was highly unlikely that a military-bureaucratic class vanguard 70 Murat Gul, The Emergence of Modern Istanbul (I. B. Tauris, 2009), 46–7. 71 Tekeli, Modernizm, modernite ve Türkiye’nin kent planlama tarihi, 109. 157 affected, or tolerated, a lasting change in the distribution of power. Since the Sixth District was relatively affluent and well connected to the international financial circuits, Pera went through a rare period of growth. For the rest of the empire, the peripheralization processes in the world-economy meant very limited possibilities for similar urban development.72 4.5 Try Again, Fail Again: A Fruitless Series of Planning Attempts, von Moltke, Bekir Pasha, Arnodin, and Bouvard It is peculiar that the German modernization attempts so closely followed the Ottoman modernization –albeit quite belated- and that one of the pioneering figures of German unification –by means of militaristic expansionism and Prussian dominationHelmut von Moltke was also the first urban planner of Istanbul. According to art historians and historians alike, the Von Moltke plans, the sketches of the famed Prussian general Helmut von Moltke (the Elder) who would not only pave the stones of the road that led to the Prussian expansionism, but also to the CUP/Kemalist consolidation –since, his writings were a source of endless inspiration for generals of the Ottoman army, not the least amongst them was Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turk- and are widely seen as the first plans that attempt to re-draw Istanbul on a western footing. Although there exist some rumors regarding von Moltke's plans and the authenticity of his authorship of these plans, there is a widespread consensus among historians regarding his favored status with the Sultan's court, and that his were the first such attempts in 72 Tekeli, Development of the Istanbul Metropolitan Area, 41. 158 bringing order to the pre-modern Istanbul. 73 On the other hand, according to Murat Gül’s recent research on the subject, there remains doubt regarding the authenticity of von Moltke’s plans. Possibly, the ambiguity concerning the authenticity and authorship of these plans owes its existence to the mistranslation of von Moltke’s notes on the subject.74 Yet, a prominent historian, Ilhan Tekeli argued that without any doubt, the plans drawn in 1836-47 by von Moltke are definitively the first attempts in urban planning in Istanbul.75 More important than the originator of the plans, von Moltke or someone else, what really matters is the underlying features of those plans. The plan laid down a grid organization that geometrically ordered the old, intra-muros city, sought to widen the already existing streets, and open up new arteries of circulation in the city on five new boulevards –each, at least 15 meters wide. On top of that, the plan stipulated that wood be replaced by stone, or brick as the primary building material. Also, monumental structures, particularly mosques, were to be foregrounded by cleaning up their surroundings to enable an unsullied view of Istanbul’s grandiosity.76 Von Moltke plans were not brought into actual implementation. Yet, in Von Moltke plan, the four modernist design principles; the application of a gridiron plan, the opening up of wide avenues, replacing wood with sturdier and fire resistant materials like stone and brick, and the imputed importance of monumental 73 Çelik, The Remaking of Istanbul, 50. 74 Gul, The Emergence of Modern Istanbul, 33. 75 Tekeli, Modernizm, modernite ve Türkiye’nin kent planlama tarihi, 109. 76 Çelik, The Remaking of Istanbul, 105–6. 159 structures with an urgent need for cleaning up of their vicinities, played a central role in the ensuing 150 years of an endless series of planning proposals. Istanbul remained without a master urban plan, though with several layers of fruitless plans, some implemented, some turned into statutes but never seriously applied, a mismatch of urban rationalism pervasively surrounded the city from the beginning of the Tanzimat era. İlhan Tekeli succinctly suggested this era, the period between mid-19th century and the declaration of the republic, was the time of shy or timid modernity. The state was wary in its approach to space, and almost without exception had undertaken small, reversing steps, which were bogged down from the outset with a series of paperwork and red tape, or, financially and technologically impossible to implement.77 However, the failure in the application of Von Moltke plans did not translate into the government’s permanent disinterest in the built environment. In 1839, a more modest attempt in following up the plan’s instigated ordering of the streets was undertaken, and the first urban planning regulations of the empire were declared. Later, in 1848, a Building Code (Ebniye Nizamnamesi) was announced to control the building activities in Istanbul. In 1864, similar regulations were extended to the whole country with the Building and Roads Code (Ebniye ve Turuk Nizamnamesi); in 1882 the Building Statutes were signed into law.78 The first grid-type street organization was built in 1856, and the first streets widened in 1866.79 Yet, a mere twenty years after von Moltke’s failed plans, another attempt at bringing the auspices of modern planning principles were undertaken 77 Tekeli, Modernizm, modernite ve Türkiye’nin kent planlama tarihi, 106–137. 78 Ibid., 109. 79 Gul, The Emergence of Modern Istanbul, 33. 160 by an Ottoman pasha. Bekir Pasha, a member of the "askerî" class, the scion of modernism in the post-Tanzimat Ottoman era, was sent to London by Sultan Abdülmecit and upon his return, appointed as the Director of Engineering School (Mühendishane-i Berri Hümayun Nazırlığı). According to Tekeli, Bekir Pasha prepared plans for Istanbul around the 1860s, though the plans were lost and the information regarding its date is far from being certain. Tekeli gave a detailed description of the plan as outlined by a relative of Bekir Pasha, Mehmet Eşref Bey. As precursor to the Beaux-Arts school of urban planning, his plans were said to foreground the monumental architecture of Istanbul, and place the Selatin mosques80 and the Hagia Sophia in the center of large parks connected by wide avenues. However, unlike the ensuing plans, which appropriated a large swath of the Topkapı Palace complex that had fallen into disuse by the time of Abdulhamid II’s reign (who is rumored to have said "for the railways to enter the city, I can sacrifice my whole palace"), Bekir Pasha's plans located the main railway station in Kazlıçeşme. Thereby Bekir Pasha’s plans prevented the railroad tracks entering the imperial city. The grand station was purported to be built across Yedikule, around the Yıldızlı Gate (Gate of the Stars), claimed to be the gate that saw the entrance of Mehmet II into the city he conquered. Adorned with an “Arch De Triomph alla Turca” the trains from Europe would have their terminus by the gate, and presumably, the visitors from the West would fall in awe of the ornamental power of the Ottomans. The connection between the train station and the These are the main mosques and külliye complexes of Istanbul, built under the orders of the sultans and paid for by the coffers of the imperial treasury-which, of course, before the Tanzimat reforms, were the sultan’s own property. 80 161 inner city was to be done by horse carts.81 During Abdulhamid II’s reign, Moltke and Bekir Pasha’s unfulfilled master plans were followed by Arnodin’s fantastically ambitious plans –which suggested and proposed finished drawings of two lavish stone bridges on the Bosphorus, one between Üsküdar and Sarayburnu, the other between Kandilli and Rumelihisar (approximately, on the location of today’s Bosphorus Bridge) and an outer ring road surrounding the city for easy movement of troops and commercial goods, but none of his designs came any nearer to application, and never went beyond beautifully drawn sketches with a resounding similarity to Jules Verne novels.82 Still, the Hamidian rule saw further attempts in urban planning, control of city’s growth and renewal of old districts, and Joseph Antoine Bouvard, a member of Beaux-Arts school, was employed by the Porte. Bouvard’s plan, was paid for by the French government, and although Bouvard had drawn these plans, he did it from the comfort of his office in Paris, without a single visit to the city. Bouvard’s plan attempted to reconstruct the Roman monumentality that was long buried underneath centuries of rubble. The Hippodrome was to be excavated, or rebuilt, and would serve as the main axial epicenter of the grid planned Istanbul. Naturally, to do that, Sultanahmet Mosque and the Külliye complex had to be razed, at least partially, but Bouvard apparently thought this could have been a small sacrifice for unearthing the beauty of the past. As any government with scarcely any human decency or ordinary sanity would do, the Porte flatly refused to tear down this most majestic example of classical Ottoman 81 Tekeli, Development of the Istanbul Metropolitan Area, 33. 82 Çelik, The Remaking of Istanbul, 107–110. 162 architecture. 83 Bouvard, on the other hand, seems to take his clue for design from Paris. In his plan, Beyazıt Square would portray the might of the Ottoman state. An imperial library, ministry of agriculture, ministry of war, and an Hôtel de Ville a lâ Parisienne would adorn an overblown reconstruction of the Tauri Forum. Yet, once again, a tiny nuisance stood in the way for the implementation of Bouvard’s plan: Beyâzıt Mosque and Külliye. The asymmetrical positioning of the mosque and külliye vis-à-vis the square and surrounding structures –especially, the monumental ministry of war, today, Istanbul University campus- portended an irresolvable problem for not merely Bouvard, but a series of architects and urban planners.84 Arnodin and Bouvard’s plans were perfectly representative of Abdulhamit’s rule, grandiose in its attempts, ostentatious in all its details, ambitious in all extents, but always incomplete, never fulfilled, and more often than not, left to rot in a forgotten place –either the imperial shipyards, as had happened to the new naval flotilla, or as myriad urban plans in the archives. The governmental apparatus was rapidly centralized in the person of Abdulhamid II, his part enlightened, part Oriental despotism tried to heal the wounds of the 1877-78 War’s catastrophic repercussions. Istanbul’s population increased significantly with the hundreds of thousands fleeing from the severed Balkans and Caucasus, and Abdulhamid had to make the decision to re-balance the center of gravity in the empire: returning back to the Danubian basin in the Balkans was no longer a possibility. He was the last sultan that reigned over a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, 83 Ibid., 109–125. 84 Ibid., 115–6. 163 universal empire.85 His talents were typically Ottoman: instead of relegating power to a bureaucratic elite, who deposed his uncle and predecessor Abdulaziz I and led to his death in uncertain situations, he concentrated all decision-making in his own small circle, and kept control of the unruly sections of society, especially the nascent professionalintellectual class, by means of constant surveillance provided by an expansive secret police and continuous censure of the press.86 He never left Istanbul during his 33 years of rule, not even for a day, and did not reside in his predecessors’ palace, but built for himself a new palace on the hills of Beşiktaş –possibly to fend off the vulnerability of the Dolmabahçe Palace. As the novelist Ihsan Oktay Anar so sarcastically dramatized in Yedinci Gün (The Seventh Day) Abdulhamid II turned the whole country into a huge panopticon, centered around himself, where even the sultan feared his own gaze.87 What remained of his empire, his 33 long years of sheltering himself in the confines of Yıldız Palace, and witnessed the gradual implosion, slowly metastasized collapse of Ottoman society was a collection of photographs –hundreds, perhaps thousands of them- taken from all around the empire, showing new railroad terminals, school pupils, clock towers, his subjects in different poses, his officials in brand new suits, his army –all of which waited for the day he’d give up the reins of power.88 İlber Ortaylı, “Son Universal İmparatorluk ve II. Abdülhamid,” in Osmanlı, vol. 12 (Ankara: Yeni Türkiye Yayınları, 1999), 889–98. 85 86 For a much more lenient treatment of Abdulhamid’s reign and ineradicable tendencies to centralize power, see, Ali Akyıldız, “Sultan II. Abdülhamid’in Çalışma Sistemi, Yönetim Anlayışı ve Bâbıâli’yle İlişkileri,” in Osmanlı, vol. II (Yeni Türkiye Yayınları, 1999), 286–97. One can say that Abdulhamid excelled in the social control techniques that emerged with the onset of the Tanzimat see: Cengiz Kırlı, “Kahvehaneler ve Hafiyeler: 19. Yüzyıl Ortalarında Osmanlı’da Sosyal Kontrol,” Toplum ve Bilim 83 (2000): 58–79. 87 İhsan Oktay Anar, Yedinci Gün (Iletisim Yayinlari, 2012). 88 For Abdulhamid II’s extensive collection of photographs taken throughout the empire, see, 164 4.6 The Demolition of Walls Although the plans of Bekir Pasha never actually came to fruition, nor Arnodin or Bouvard’s ideas for the same purpose, the gist of their designs would provide the cornerstone to the development of Istanbul in the next century and a half. The great walls of Istanbul would not only pose a physical barrier in the late 19th century. Once, the Roman walls made the "polis," the one and only city in world history that housed three empires (each from a different religious and cultural creed) and nurtured and isolated these world-empires to the point of their consumption. Yet, the very walls that made the city have also bequeathed the modern Istanbul with almost insurmountable problems. Leaving the walls intact would be to approve and to acknowledge the historical continuity of the idea of "polis" embedded in the geographical form of Istanbul. If New York City would be meaningless without the gridiron shaped frame laid out in the form of Manhattan, then Istanbul is but a void minus the historic core delimited by the ancient walls.89 Yet, the fate of the walls elsewhere in Europe was what befell on the lesser city. The demolition of the Galata walls took place in 1864 according to the plans drawn by http://www.loc.gov/pictures/search/?st=grid&co=ahii Of course the walls themselves are no longer ancient, they were demolished and rebuilt several times throughout history, the most recent being Mayor Bedrettin Dalan's revival of the walls as both a reference to the "glorious" Turkish-Islamic past and a boon to the then fledgling tourist attractions. As a matter of fact, the walls are still the farthest from being a tourist attraction, since, arguably, they are made by mostly factory-made bricks and mortars, in bright red color, and vociferously "new" in appearance. Yet, the vicinity around the walls have served as an ideological herding point, as a moment to be gathered around every 29th of May-the day of the conquest- during the mock-up ceremonies held at the Yedikule gates, or for a small fee, you can help engender feelings of nationalism in younglings by the nearby diorama gallery, called in a grandiose way as the "Panorama 1453 Istanbul Museum." See, A. Çinar, “National History as a Contested Site: The Conquest of Istanbul and Islamist Negotiations of the Nation,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 43, no. 02 (2001): 364–91. 89 165 Islah-ı Turuk (Roads' Reform) Commission, enforced by the Sixth District.90 The synchronous wave of the demolition of walls in Europe and Istanbul was the surest expression of the march of modernity and its accoutrements in the form of railroads, train stations and modern army barracks. The artillery and mass war machinery and techniques triggered by first, the Napoleonic Wars and then the Crimean War, meant that the fortification was not merely useless, but also an impediment on the necessary mobility required by the modern war making doctrines. As time and again proven by the failures of the Ottoman forces throughout the 19th century, the walls were of no military use, let alone protecting the city from foreign invasions, it severely limited the military maneuvering. Hence, almost all functions of the Ottoman army, navy, and armaments industry were built outside of the historic core. The Artillery Barracks were built in today's Taksim in the 1780s, while the Artillery Arsenal was for a long time located on the Tophane shore, the newly reformed Army (Nizam-ı Cedid, or the New Order Army) barracks were first built across the Bosphorus, to protect them from being taken over by the Janissaries in 1800, burnt down in 1806, and rebuilt in its current form between 1825 and 1828, and most importantly, the functions of the imperial headquarters were already removed from Topkapı Palace by early 19th century; while in the former part of the century, the Sultan's preferred Bosphorus palaces, the Dolmabahçe Palace (built in 1856) in Beşiktaş become the main seat of power and Yıldız Palace (built in 1880 and used solely during Abdulhamid II's reign) reiterated the move away from the historic peninsula.91 90 Tekeli, Development of the Istanbul Metropolitan Area, 35. 91 Ibid. 166 4.7 The Expansion of the City: Railroads, Grand Boulevards, and Public Squares Leaving aside the conservative strongmen Adolph Thiers' absurdity of a wall surrounding Paris (built between 1841 and 1844), Vienna and Istanbul were the last great cities in Europe that were still fortified, but for completely different reasons. While Vienna held onto the last vestiges of its scare regarding the beast from the east, Istanbul kept the fortifications partly due to its symbolic importance (as the last remaining sign of the glorious victories of the ancestors), in part because of its container effect on the populations kept inside, and mainly because its fortunes no longer laid with the imperial system that made its unique expansionary world-empire ascendant. The city's fortunes were clearly defined by the future represented by Pera, by the newly built Dolmabahçe Palace that took its visual cues from another absolutist monarchy from a different era (the Versailles Palace), and the bureaucratic elite to be employed by either one of these centers of powers-former financial, and the latter political.92 Just as the fortifications were being replaced by the wide avenues in European capitals93-to control and to quell the possible resistance movements that were without an exception all born in the city following the French Revolution's model- Istanbul was also in dire need of expanding its road networks. The new roads like Yenikapı Avenue, Şişhane Street, Büyük Hendek Street, Boğazkesen Avenue and Yorgancılar Avenue between Karaköy and Azapkapı, 92 By 1844, Vienna, was still enmeshed in the mold of tightly woven fortification, and as Schorske put: "Well after other European capitals had razed their fortifications, Vienna had maintained them. The massive defense works and the broad glacis which had protected the imperial capital against the marauding Turk had long since ceased to define city limits." p. 17 C. E Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (Cambridge Univ Pr, 1981), 18–19; Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity. 93 167 Galata Avenue connecting Karaköy and Azapkapı were built either from scratch or the already existing streets were widened by the demolition of walls.94 Furthermore, outside the Yedikule and Kazlıçeşme leather manufactures developed in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.95 A whole new array of manufacturing enterprises began to settle around the Golden Horn for two reasons: the ease of access to raw materials and markets, and the proximity of the workers. Decades after western industrialization ravaged waterways, the Golden Horn met the same fate firstly with Cibali and Feshane as the first industrial establishments, and rapidly Balat and Hasköy turned into slums, while Eyüp became a Muslim working class neighborhood providing the hands for the dockyards and industries.96 The European railways system and its most ostentatious –and without any doubt mystically Orientalized- arm, the Orient Express reached Istanbul in 1871. Contrary to Bekir Pasha’s plans, the railroads followed the western model of articulating and reformulating urban agglomerations by means of opening up the entrails of long closed districts and entered the heart of intra-muros Istanbul, akin to an open-heart surgery, replaced the Sublime Porte’s long tight grip of the city with a novel and heartless intrusion. The railroad tracks followed the course of the millennia old Theodosian –and later Ottoman- Walls along the Marmara Sea coast, leading to the demolition of most fortifications between Ahırkapı and Sirkeci, in addition to royal palaces. Not only did the rail tracks redefine the southern borders of the old city, but they also cut through the 94 Tekeli, Development of the Istanbul Metropolitan Area, 36. 95 Toprak, “Modernization and Commercialization in the Tanzimat Period: 1838-1876,” 60. 96 Tekeli, Development of the Istanbul Metropolitan Area, 47. 168 gardens and yalı and palace complex of the old throne of the imperial power –Topkapı Palace. Sultan Abdulaziz, contrary to his cabinet’s insistence on keeping the old city and imperial palaces complex intact, permitted the intrusion of railroads to the deepest and most secluded corner of state power in Istanbul. When the railroad tracks were completed, with the main terminal station right at the mouth of the Golden Horn, the city’s imminent integration into the world-economy was completed.97 The main terminal station, Sirkeci Garı, was built apropos the Orient Express imagination, rich in allusions to a mystical image of the east, an over-accentuated emphasis was put on the play between the rich ornaments and the distinctive identity of oriental forms. Designed by the German architect August Jachmund, with his newly hired apprentice Mimar Kemaleddin, and built between 1888 and 1890, this exaggerated eclecticism deeply marked Ottoman architectural character for the coming decades. The station was extended by the Sirkeci Port in 1900 and across the Golden Horn, the Galata Port was already built by 1895. On the other side of the Bosphorus, with the newly forged alliance between the German and Ottoman governments, the terminus of the Baghdad-Istanbul railroad, Haydarpaşa Station, designed by two German architects, Helmut Cuno and Otto Ritter, was opened in 1909, as an addition to the Haydarpaşa Port and Dockyards built between 1899 and 1903.98 Haydarpaşa Station did not only outmatch the grandeur and eclecticism of the Sirkeci Station in its design, but also portrayed the ambition of the Hamidian project to shift the Ottoman center of gravity eastwards; though, again, it was too little, 97 Kuban, İstanbul, Bir Kent Tarihi, 359. 98 Ibid., 360–1. 169 too late. Abdulhamid had lost his tight grip of power in the 1908 Revolution to the Young Turks, the Istanbul-Baghdad railroad never fulfilled its purported role, and in a decade, was a mere ghost of the old imperial will. However, as soon as the station was completed, it served as another booster for suburban expansion and filled the empty space between Kadıköy and Üsküdar. Now, with a regular tramway service, the two opposite ends of the Anatolian Istanbul met at the station and the gargantuan barracks of Selimiye and the neighboring mahalle.99 Meanwhile the city kept on expanding, once distant suburbs like Üsküdar, and later Kadıköy, were tightly being integrated to the periphery. Yet, unlike its European counterparts, Istanbul soon become a capital with a vast land mass, an urban organization that stretched two continents, a few islets, with scarce connection between each other, except rudimentary sailboats-or, rowboats, between the two shores of the Golden Horn.100 Toprak compared Istanbul to Paris, Vienna, Berlin and the Pest side of Budapest. At the turn of the century the surface area of these metropolitan areas were, 108 sq. km in Paris, 155 sq. km in Vienna, 107 sq. km in Berlin, and 227 sq. km in Pest, while in Istanbul the same area was 204 sq. km.101 The problem though, lies not in the physical vastness of the city, but in the axial distances.102 The north-south axis between Kavaklar and Köprü was, and still is, 24.35 km and the east-west axis, between Pendik and Küçükçekmece was 47 km (this expanded much in the last five decades), four times the length in Paris, Vienna, 99 Ibid., 360–361. See, Toprak, “Tarihsel Nüfusbilim Açısından Istanbul’un Nüfusu ve Toplumsal Topografyası,” 111; Toprak, “Istanbul’da Mekan ve Sayısal İlişkiler,” 454. 100 101 Toprak, “Istanbul’da Mekan ve Sayısal İlişkiler,” 454. 102 See, Toprak, “Tarihsel Nüfusbilim Açısından Istanbul’un Nüfusu ve Toplumsal Topografyası,” 111. 170 or Berlin. Bringing together this loosely connected whole, this vast dispersal of humongous city was possible first, due to the 19th century concentration between Pera and Sirkeci – the two sides of the Golden Horn. Second, hitherto unpassable forests, hills, and valleys were opened up by new roads and made accessible by filling up the Bosphorus shores. And third, the steam-powered boats made swift, predictable, and affordable transportation possible between suburbs and the new city center –at least, for the newfangled middle class. The first Bosphorus crossing steamboats began service between Eminönü and Üsküdar in 1845. Later, Şirket-i Hayriye (Auspicious Company) was established as a joint stock company with Russian and English capital and Ottoman pashas’ influential partnership in 1851, and began service in 1854. In 1858, the first car ferries began running between Kabataş and Üsküdar.103 The introduction of steamboat service that connected the most populous and predominantly Muslim suburb of Üsküdar to the city center was followed by the opening up of horse-drawn tramways between Eminönü and Aksaray in 1869, and in the intramuros Istanbul, and in 1871, between Karaköy and Ortaköy, the former, new business hub of the city, and the latter, the place where the Ottoman upper classes and aristocratic families lived. Karaköy –the financial and commercial hub of Istanbul then- was connected to Pera with the construction of a second underground railway (Tünel) –after the London underground- between 1871 and 1874. Tünel (Tunnel), was built with private money for the transportation needs of the Pera residents, who were overwhelmingly Christians and employed in Karaköy or Eminönü, and belonging to middle or upper 103 Kuban, İstanbul, Bir Kent Tarihi, 359. 171 middle classes.104 The 1880s saw the first row houses in Beşiktaş. The first modern, Western style residential buildings in Pera, Beyoğlu were erected after the 1850s - followed by Cihangir, Nişantaşı, and Teşvikiye.105 Tekeli stated that the oldest apartment buildings from that period in contemporary Istanbul can be dated to 1882.106 The first modern, Western style apartment buildings on the Anatolian side were built in 1907 in Yeldeğirmeni.107 During the fin-de-siécle, Pera, Büyükdere, Prince Islands and parts of Moda in Kadıköy were said to be spatially organized according to Western cities. The life style prevalent in these areas presented a stark contrast with how the Muslims lived in Üsküdar, or in the intra-muros mahalles of Fatih, Aksaray, and Süleymaniye.108 These Muslim populated mahalles, with heavily concentrated populations, scarcely any water sources nearby, and narrow streets and cul-de-sacs were frequently subject to fires that devastated whole neighborhoods, and sometimes, the neighborhoods were a mere collection of wooden sheds built in between devastating fires.109 So, when Doğan Kuban argued that the city was torn down and rebuilt at least three times between the reign of 104 Ibid., 359. 105 Öncel, Apartman. 106 Tekeli, Development of the Istanbul Metropolitan Area, 40. 107 Ibid. 108 Kuban, İstanbul, Bir Kent Tarihi, 366. Tekeli points to a study by Osman Nuri Ergin which showed that in little more than half century between 1854 and 1908, in 229 fires, 23404 buildings burnt down, in addition to Cibali and Hocapaşa which were devastated by 8 eight different fires in the same period, see, Tekeli, Development of the Istanbul Metropolitan Area, 11–2. 109 172 Mahmud II and 1914, he points to a perfectly natural cycle of creative destruction embedded in the second nature of Istanbul.110 This self-reproducing cycle of doom and rebirth, this almost whiggish insistence on the unalterable fate of Istanbul as the center of the known universe and the neverending waves of expansion in real estate –yet to be studied by urban historians- had turned upside down the death of the city, as well as the living residents. The travelogues, in the early eighteenth century, remarkably, and perhaps, grimly put that half of the city of Pera was made up of cemeteries; seemingly endless hillsides, down from the Cadde-i Kebir (the Grand Rue de Pera), filled with deceased of all faiths and beliefs.111 By the midst of the nineteenth century, the cemeteries were surrounded by one of the most rambunctious expansions of built environment hitherto experienced in Istanbul. Though, apparently the new residents were always on the verge of an uneasy coexistence with their ancient neighbors-and, alas, possibly, both the demolition of the Galata walls and the wide availability of cemetery-neighboring land made this unique modern real estate expansion possible. Taksim Square had first come into use, when yet another epidemic of the plague in 1865 finally led to the ban on inner city cemeteries. Thereby, the Armenian cemetery in Pera –present day Taksim Square- was moved to Şişli and the Catholic cemetery was transferred to Feriköy, in their place, a park designed according to the Beaux-Arts principles was built, and as a first of its kind, became a new form of attraction in the newfangled urban core of Pera.112 110 Kuban, İstanbul, Bir Kent Tarihi, 366. 111 MacFarlane, Constantinople in 1828. 112 Tekeli, Development of the Istanbul Metropolitan Area, 36. 173 4.8 Modern’s Calling: The Urge to Urban Planning In 1908, the authoritarian one-man rule of Abdulhamid II was overthrown by a popular movement spearheaded by officers of the Ottoman army, who congregated around an underground organization called Committee of Union and Progress. Abdulhamid stayed as the sultan for another year, but, when his supporters, especially led by the rank-and-file Muslim soldiers of the Artillery Barracks in Pera attempted to reinstall him to power again with a rebellion against their officers on April 13, 1909 (known as the 31st of March Rebellion, due to the calendar of the time), he was deposed and sent to exile in Thessaloniki -then, the most important city in the remaining Ottoman Balkans. From then on, the CUP gradually increased its control of the revolutionary parliament and government. Following defeat and loss of Macedonia, Albania, and western Thrace –the last remaining lands of the empire in the west- in the First Balkan War (1912), the leading CUP members forced their way into the government, and overthrew the then elected government through a coup in 1913. This junta, led by three pashas, Enver, Talat, and Cemal, established a single party rule, and very soon, the Empire entered the World War on the German side. This heralded the doom of the Ottoman Empire, as we know it, and by 1918, along with the Austro-Hungarian Empire, this last imperial entity dissolved. The leaders of the CUP junta were court martialed and sentenced to death in absentia. Talat was shot and killed in 1921 in Berlin by an Armenian activist for ordering the massacre of more than a million Ottoman Armenians. Cemal also fled to the newly revolutionary Soviet Union, to recuperate and to bring together an army to join the struggle against the Allied occupation; though he was assassinated in Tblisi by the 174 Armenian activists, for the same reason as Talat. Enver died while fighting against the Soviet forces to establish an Islamic Pan-Turkic state in the Central Asian steppes. Although, the leading figures of the CUP were slain a few years after the end of the war, the political and military machinery set up by these three figures was still intact, and a relatively unknown and younger pasha, Mustafa Kemal, led this organization from 1919 onwards. By 1922, the invading armies of Greece lost the war and withdrew from the occupied lands of western Anatolia, the Ottoman Empire and the dynasty were abolished. In 1923, a new parliamentary republic was declared, with Mustafa Kemal at the helm as president, Ankara became the capital of the new parliamentary republic, and a whole new set of modernizing reforms –many initiated by CUP- took a stern and relentless turn to modernize the whole country.113 Yet, even though the names of the protagonists changed, the old way of doing things in the country, the insuperable power of the bureaucratic class, the holy centrality of the body of sovereign, the sovereign central power’s omnipotent and omnipresent entity pervasive of infinitesimal minutiae of everyday life stayed the same. This line of reasoning, to which I agree with reservations, permeated the most enriching and analytically able research on social history of Turkey. From Mardin’s center-periphery antagonism to Keyder’s bureaucratic class, the sociological insights provided by such reading have left an indelible and lasting modicum of grasping social relationships which still endures in Turkish academia.114 113 It is Erik-Jan Zürcher’s suggestion that Kemalist Turkey inherited a great deal of its ideological and organizational qualities from the CUP. See, Erik J. Zürcher, The Young Turk Legacy and Nation Building: From the Ottoman Empire to Atatürk’s Turkey (I. B. Tauris, 2010). For extensive and brilliant analyses of the CUP ideological formation before they took over power, see Şerif Mardin, Jön Türklerin Siyasi Fikirleri, 1895-1908, vol. 1 (İletişim Yayınları, 1983); M. Sükrü Hanioglu, Preparation for a Revolution: The Young Turks, 1902-1908 (Oxford University Press Oxford and New York, 2001), http://www.lavoisier.fr/livre/notice.asp?ouvrage=1146790. 114 Keyder, State and Class in Turkey : A Study in Capitalist Development; Mardin, “Center-Periphery 175 A key caveat after the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and the foundation of the Republic of Turkey concerned Istanbul: no longer an imperial capital the city wasafter sixteen centuries as the site of one or another centralized state mechanism- finally a respite to be left to its own devices.115 The early republican elites had deeply entrenched qualms about the extent to which the city could be subjected to their reform agenda. After the suppression of widespread dissent in the Kurdish areas and the deposition of the opposition parties in the parliament in the early years of the republic, a window of opportunity was created in the late 1920s. Yet, the 1929 Great Depression made itself felt in this small agricultural republic, which was becoming more and more introvert in its quest for Turkifying the nation. Without any doubt, the cosmopolitanism embedded in the brick and mortar of Istanbul, its deep-rooted commercial connections to the world circuits of capital accumulation and the non-Muslim character of the ones who represented the connected citizens of the city, was if not anathema, certainly, repulsive for the republican elite groomed in the Committee of Union and Progress’ umbrella ideology Turkishness. Istanbul had to wait for the late 1930s for the draft of a master plan, and another decade and a half for even the partial adaptation of that plan. Meanwhile, the city lost its primacy in political, economic, and cultural landscape –which was almost second nature to Istanbul’s existence for almost sixteen hundred years. The almost mystical role played by the city was now replaced by a sinister sublimation: if Ankara was all things novel, modern, good, pure, clean, neat, Turkish, homogeneous, and patriotic –a perfect semblance to a desire towards spatial tabula rasa- Istanbul was undoubtedly ancient, Relations”; Mardin, Türk Modernleşmesi. 115 Cansever, İstanbul’u anlamak, 92; Gul, The Emergence of Modern Istanbul. 176 rugged, chaotic, old, dirty, ruinous, Western, Christian, heterogeneous, dark, and ominously representative of the great and costly past failures. Ankara was the new prodigy, a showcase for the great leap forward undertaken by the Kemalist republic, ambitious, hesitant to prove its worth, resourceful in its provincial loneliness, delicately resentful to her older –much older- elder sister, Istanbul. Ankara was power spatialized, there, it was no longer possible to speak of the nexus between state and space, since the single-party rule and personality cult around Mustafa Kemal meant that party was the state, and geography was not merely subject to the state- urban and rural alike, all geography was state’s ultimate embodiment. All the mediations of state and space relationships withered. Economy was no longer a restriction, the state simply expropriated –especially, land the belonged to the Armenian, Greek, or Jewish émigrésneither, politics, nor culture. The state became the space. Yet, in doing this, a frivolous envy bordering schizophrenia emerged: German Reich’s blown out proportions were appropriated, architectural scale was boldly pushed further, ordinary Turkish peasants turned into muscular men and women of the new Republic –like, any other revolutionary regime, they also sought, at least in part, to forge a “new man”- stone masonry was employed by brutally capacious projects, and a certain sense of sterilization was laid down by dint of a new urban planning. On the other hand, Kemalists, a clique within the ruling elites, sought the salvation of the masses through a close reading of the Soviet Union’s unprecedented optimism and self-confidence in remolding the imperial cities inherited by its imperial past. So, Kemalists developed a profound angst, an indecisive oscillation between a pure and untamed show of industrial and military force represented by the Reich, and planned rationalism harnessed for the 177 exaltation of the working classes as the Soviets.116 Under these circumstances, once Ankara tapped onto already limited capital reserves of the newly founded country, there were not enough resources for the reconstruction of Istanbul. And, in the beginning, Kemalists had scarcely any interest in this complex multi-layered city, which was simply resistant to the imposition of uniformity. The situation changed in the 1930s, once the contestants to power was forcefully eliminated and Kurdish uprisings were brutally suppressed and the Takrir-i Sükûn laws crushed the freedom of speech. The Kemalists and the single-party regime of the Republican People’s Party felt confident enough to deal with Istanbul. A competition for Istanbul’s urban planning was announced and three European planners were invited for participation.117 These three invitees were most well-known planners of the time: Alfred Agache, H. Lambert, and Hermann Elgoetz. Agache was a fervent supporter of Frédéric LePlay’s sociological ideas –rooted in social Darwinism and elitist conservatism- and previously he had prepared the urban plan of Rio de Janeiro. Lambert partook in urban planning efforts in Paris, New York, and Chicago, while Elgoetz was responsible for Essen’s planning. Elgoetz won the competition. The gist of Elgoetz’s planning was a well-worn suggestion to foreground the monumental structures of the city. Though, his planning proposals differed in his treatment of the main traffic arteries, unlike previous proposals, he argued for the removal of circulation from the vicinity of the monuments of the inner city. Similarly, and insightfully, he proposed the removal of the industrial Between the two extremes, Ankara was also the setting for a highly experimental vanguardist architecture briefly in the 1930s, instigated by the German emigrés who fled the Nazi regime. This brief period was known as Ankara Cubism in architectural history. See, Bozdoğan, Modernism and Nation Building; Sargın, Ankara’nın kamusal yüzleri. 116 117 Gul, The Emergence of Modern Istanbul, 90–95. 178 establishment from the Golden Horn and zoned the area as non-industrial. In this proposal, he also suggested the transfer of the docks from the Golden Horn to a new port facility to be built in Haydarpaşa. Elgoetz’s plan was never implemented, rather it waited in the archives as proposals for Istanbul’s development.118 In the course of these developments, Istanbul gradually recovered from the decay of the post-war years, between 1927 and 1940, and the population increased from 690,857 to 793,749. The first slum areas appeared during this time period. The new immigrants, overwhelmingly coming from Anatolia, had paid scant attention to the fast deteriorating inner city. Coupled with state initiated industrialization efforts, a workforce was needed, and neither the hüzün of ruins meant anything for this dynamic laboring classes, nor could the city harbor this burgeoning wave of newcomers. It was evident that Istanbul, if intent on playing its role as the industrial epicenter of this predominantly agricultural country, needed a plan to be drawn and implemented immediately. In 1935, another international competition was opened. Two of the names who responded to this call for competition are very important: Le Corbusier and Henri Prost. Prost, at the time, was Le Corbusier’s arch-enemy, and their urban imaginations reflected a head on collision. Prost, a proud progeny of the French Beaux-Arts tradition, was the head of Paris urban planning administration and designed the archetypal spatial representations of French colonialism in North Africa. Le Corbusier was, on the other hand, the scion of CIAM, the harbinger of International architecture, high modernism, a product of unhindered geometricism, a leading vanguard of purist architectonics, and a prominent Kuban, İstanbul, Bir Kent Tarihi, 384–385; Stéphane Yérasimos, “La Planification de L’espace En Turquie,” Revue de l’Occident Musulman et de La Méditerranée 50, no. 1 (1988): 114, doi:10.3406/remmm.1988.2257. 118 179 enemy of all things traditional. His proposal for Istanbul, which he summarized in a brief letter to Mustafa Kemal, befitted his fame. He offered to leave the ruinous past untouched and rebuild a new city from scratch immediately to the west of the ancient walls. There, he argued, it was possible to build an enormous industrial city, unfettered from history’s asphyxiating weight, the true and revolutionary potential of the Turkish revolution could have been put on pedestal. The ultra-modernist Le Corbusier was at play, he later would formulate his notion of housing as machinery for living, streets as circulatory mechanisms in a complex organicism of the industrial city and for nature to remain untouched, suggested going upwards, and designed skyscrapers with dense residential populations, surrounded by an idyllic countryside. His letter went unresponded, and he lamented his peculiar judgment on ancient Istanbul –and possibly, on the dearth of the Ottoman past- and especially regretted the particular comment when he had heard that Henri Prost won the competition. 119 Henri Prost’s proposal was much more moderate, and in essence, followed the main outlines of von Moltke and Bouvard’s plans. He arrived in Istanbul on May15, 1936 and remained the head of Istanbul Municipality’s planning unit, the master planner, the urbanist of Istanbul, until the first months of the Democrat Party rule in 1950.Yet, his fate was no different than the preceding planners’ grand designs. Only a minority of his proposals –the opening up of public parks in Maçka and Taksim, and clearing of Eminönü square- came to the point of actual implementation. On the one hand, bureaucratic inefficiencies hurt already tight budgets and scarcely any money was 119 Gul, The Emergence of Modern Istanbul, 96. 180 available for extensive appropriations of land, and on the other hand, the onset of World War II had shelved any near term possibility of its actualization. Nevertheless, Prost’s plan was the culmination of a century long experiment in modernist urbanism, and remarkably signified modernism as a technical talent capable of reorganizing space according to the state’s desired configurations. Prost’s designs, akin to Schroedinger’s cat120 may have been realized or not: the question is, whether his proposals transpired to become concrete realities and meanwhile withered as abstract notions, or vice versa. We might never know the answer. 4.9 Henri Prost, Modernity without Modernism A curious gap, however, exists in Turkish architectural and urban planning history. Henri Prost, who perhaps was the single most influential actor in modern planning in Turkey, undertook a complete and unprecedented overhaul of urban topography, and coincidentally architecture, in Istanbul. Prost as an urban planner has scarcely attracted any interest apart from his ideas. His blueprints for Istanbul’s development portending the ultimate rationalization of a city feeling the cumbersome throngs of industrial and modernist explosion of growth has been eagerly studied. It is true that, household figures in Turkish architectural and planning history attempted to locate his role in a diachronic fashion- how from Von Moltke to Henri Prost, via Hermann Jannsen, they contributed deeply to a teleological coming of rational and modernist planning in Istanbul-and, thanks to Jannsen, in Ankara. The diachronic 120 Schroedinger’s cat is a famous thought experiment employed by physicist Erwin Schroedinger to illustrate the applications of quantum physics in everyday life wherein, a cat is both dead and alive at the same time. 181 attempts are no doubt laudable, in their great efforts to locate the Turkish discourse on space, urbanization, and industrial growth. Yet, the synchronicity of Prost’s efforts, and the context of his Weltanschauung barely received any attention. Albeit a symptom of Turkish manifest destiny-that, unlike the Americans, this trope retells a story of how Turkey is unique in its underdevelopment, how in all its isolation, it had come up with weirdly syncretic forms and modes of thought, and will ultimately succeed in becoming our “lonely, but beautiful country,” that even in its glory, as well as in its mirth, our country is fatally flawed in its intractable plethora of problems; the lack of attention to Prost’s time and ideas is nevertheless interesting. Meanwhile, Prost’s undertakings in planning in Europe and its colonial expansion in the Maghreb, and his own spatial underpinnings and perceptions which owes its existence to the brief spell he spent in Istanbul in the fin-de-siécle attracted scant attention. Paul Rabinow, in his brilliantly written book, French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment articulated how a certain product of a zeitgeist came to shape the cities of the Mediterranean basin, inasmuch as it shaped the minds of the peoples of what is colloquially called as modern. Henri Prost’s plans almost reverberated perfectly with the prevalent notion of temporal-spatial connection in Turkey: space was to be annihilated, the cities had to be created anew, but not like the Soviets doing-with merciless acts of erasure as it happened with the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, nor akin to the Germans or Italian fascists’ unquestioned belief in technological excellence embarked in the purification of race would have sufficed or calmed down the Turkish ruling elites’ already unmoored anxiety towards their identity. Rabinow suggested that, 182 “if, following Jurgen Habermas, we define modern neo-conservatism as an uncritical embracing of economic and technological change combined with a longing for social stability and a legitimated social hierarchy” –it’s eerily similar to the Turkish republican governmentality- then, such neo-conservatism comes alive in Prost’s plans.121 So, Le Corbusier, would have never made it in any case, since, Prost’s basic reduction of modern planning as a tool, an instrument of conservation, and an act of reintroducing and reinventing the past, is in itself, the definition of Kemalism –in various guises- in a nutshell. Henri Prost’s prolific and brilliant career began when he was awarded a multiyear scholarship at Villa Medici, Rome in 1902. The other scholarships went to talented architects and urban planners who would play crucial roles in Europe’s urbanization in the first half of the twentieth century. Tony Garnier earned the scholarship in 1899, Paul Bigot’s tenure, whose work concerned Rome, began a year before Prost, in 1901 Leon Jaussely –who dwelled upon the concept of a truly democratic city while preparing for a competition on Barcelona- moved into Villa Medici in 1903, and soon Ernest Hebrard joined these formidable figures. Prost, at the time, was working on his sketches and drawings he made during his time in Istanbul. 122 All these names earned their professional degrees in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts technique. This exceptionally influential style, which deeply changed the cities of its time, put the onus of aesthetic beauty on the singular characteristics of monumental Paul Rabinow, French Modern : Norms and Forms of the Social Environment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 224. 121 122 Ibid., 222–224. 183 buildings and purported to bring these buildings to the forefront and attributed them a crucial role for building an axially symmetrical harmony in urban space. The Villa Medici scholars were obviously inspired by the Ecole des Beaux-Art professors Julien Gaudet and Auguste Choisy, but their sources of influence also extended to Camillo Sitte, the late 19th century planner of Vienna, and Ebenezer Howard, the seminal urban utopian.123 In Rabinow’s opinion, amongst the names, although Garnier attracted the most attention, Prost deserved particular interest and is at least as influential as Garnier, if not more, given the scope and impact of his work.124 Prost (1874-1959), after winning Prix de Rome and awarded with the scholarship that permitted his stay in Villa Medici, won the urban planning competition for Anvers’ with his renovation and development proposals, ran the urban planning department of Morocco under Lyautey’s management, made Cote d’Azur’s regional development planning, produced the first regional plans for Paris, and shaped Istanbul’s urban planning from 1937 to 1950. Rabinow aptly pointed out that, even though figures like Lyautey, with his own urban manifesto and an impressive personality, were subject to much research, it is lamentable that someone like Prost with a crucial role in bringing together a wide variety of experience in urbanism is so easily overlooked.125 Prost was different than the others from the outset. Like all other Villa Medici scholars, he studied classical Roman architecture –Prost conducted his research in 123 Ibid., 212. 124 Ibid., 232. 125 Ibid. 184 Pompeii-, and he also went to nearby Greece with his colleagues for his architectural survey of classical Greek architecture and drew architectural reliefs of the monuments. Yet, unlike others, his next stop after Greece was Istanbul, and he made detailed sketches of the Hagia Sophia, produced drawings of the reliefs and Islamic decorations. He had a special interest in Byzantine architecture and the condition of the Hagia Sophia was a source of worry for him. He wrote to Paris, complaining about the decrepit, rundown condition of this once most magnificent architectural monument of the Roman Empire. His behavior was highly unusual for his time, as he dared to step outside the confines of contemporary architectural teachings, which delineated that ancient Greek and Roman styles were the main subjects of form. Prost’s other noticeable feat was, of course, his ability to gain access to the mosque. It was forbidden for any Christian to enter mosques at the time, and this being one of the most important mosques of the time, made it doubly interesting, given the fact that in an actively used mosque with thousands praying each day, a European man drawing sketches for hours would definitely be a source of inquiry for those faithful Muslims. Prost mentioned a certain pasha in his letters. This pasha once served as an ambassador of Porte to Rome, and during Prost’s visit he was the minister of Ewqaf.126 Thanks to his close relations with this apparently Europeanized pasha, he found the chance to extensively document the Hagia Sophia, shielded both from police harassment 126 Evqaf is the plural of waqf; the ministry of waqfs was –and still, is- responsible for the accounts and legal works of the waqfs. With limitless resources and almost absolute authority, the waqfs functioned as a bank, securities commission, and registry of quasi-private property. During the republican era, the ministry of Vaqfs turned into one of the biggest landlords of the country, established a state bank, and unlawfully expropriated Armenian, Greek, and to a lesser extent, Jewish emigrés urban properties. Only in the last decade, with the European Union accession talks, the ministry of vaqfs decided to return non-Muslim vaqf properties to their rightful owners, albeit in an excruciatingly slow procession. 185 and faithful Muslims’ intrusions. According to Rabinow’s conjecture, an architect like Prost, without any political affiliations or indeed, with well documented aversion to politics, isolated himself professionally. Due to his outward neutrality and his connections to people in higher places, he comfortably traversed the intricacies of Turkish and Moroccan societies at different times in his career.127 It is no wonder that successive generations of Islamists and conservatives in Turkey have a guttural hatred for Henri Prost and his plans, seen as a senseless, alien, imperialist extension of the Kemalist government. He is also widely held to be the culprit for the conversion of the Hagia Sophia (Ayasofya) from a mosque to a museum, but given the dates, this assumption is apparently held wrongly –or, as a mere extension of blatant Occidentalism which blames everything corrupt on the ineradicable influence of Westerners. Whatever the case, it is rather an interesting fact that without Prost’s drawings we would have barely had any visual clues to the early twentieth century Hagia Sophia (Ayasofya) as a mosque. Prost’s close proximity to the powerful entails a well-disguised motive for shaping the urban built environment under the watchful eye of the political authorities. We can find the echoes of his power-centric approach in his definition of urbanism.128 As the self-claimed progenitor of urbanism, Prost argued that urbanism was "a visual art which directs itself to our senses; a beautiful city which we love is one where the edifices have a noble beauty, the promenades are agreeable, and where our everyday life is surrounded by an agreeable decor producing in us a sentiment of profound harmony.”129 127 Rabinow, French Modern : Norms and Forms of the Social Environment, 232–4. Even though, Cerda first used the term in the context of 19th century Barcelona, Prost argued his was the first formulation of urbanism. 128 129 Rabinow, French Modern : Norms and Forms of the Social Environment, 234–6. 186 It would be unrealistic if this visual art merely concerned itself with the principles of aesthetics. The task of the urbanist is to create a wide-scale adaptation to the given context, and sociologists, architects, engineers would help him enable in his envisioned reconstruction of nature that reorients the society towards better and more hygienic forms of shelter, and provides for the circulation of human beings and goods, production at a humane scale. For Prost, this is tantamount to a simple matter of administration, and bluntly argued that: “the amenagement of cities has been for the last few years one of the gravest governmental preoccupations; it has become one of the dominant objects of contemporary civilization.”130 A city needs order, and order is provided by the political authority; the urbanist, on the other hand, supplies the blueprints for the foundations of such order. In this, Rabinow saw something peculiar to Prost- that he was technically modern, and his modernity is rather devoid of modernism in its essence. The remarkable difference between Prost’s fin-de-siécle urbanism and the preceding Haussmannesque neo-conservatism was the incipient understanding that urban structure and built environment were not particular phenomena free from the social relationships that shaped them. Prost, primarily figured out that especially productive facilities and the transportation infrastructure were an extension of regional and national patterns. In Anvers, his planning approach focused upon railway terminals and highways in tandem, and treated infrastructure not as mere externality to the aesthetic anxiety, but as integral elements of urban totality. Of course, when not possible to integrate some unsavory parts –like, prisons, or hospitals, for different reasons- to the functionally central and 130 Ibid., 236. 187 aesthetically indispensable areas –like, working class housing- zoning became the centerpiece of his urban strategy. The teachings of Beaux-Arts school was not availed with completely, public monuments, statuesque flair of the core areas, intensive and the critical use of emptiness, and an articulate emphasis on public squares still made themselves felt.131 Prost was no Le Corbusier, he was a product of modernity, inspired by modernism, but not a heartfelt modernist. His approach was a mélange between neoconservatist principles, neo-Baroque sensitivities to scale, and modernist optimism regarding the role of rationalist principles of ordering space. Rabinow aptly put that his unique style was rooted in his distance to modernism, and called Prost’s approach as techno-cosmopolitanism: his allegiance was to the technological advancement of modernity, not to the rampant dualism.132 That is eerily similar to the Turkish experience: modernity was exalted, venerated, enviously sought for at all costs, because it was technically superior, technologically mesmerizing, desirable, and hence, Turkish ruling classes were infatuated with it. But its baggage was not what they wanted, just as how Prost thought zoning would single-handedly render undesirable elements of society, or the gross injustice colonialism wrought in Morocco, the Turkish power elite thought, a technically competent modernity would serve them best, without the corrosion of their stranglehold on social relations. What they missed terribly in their assessment was fairly simple, - the broken soul of Faust. Faust’s insurmountable loss was being cheated in his bargain with Mephistopheles- the irrecoverable feeling of deception did not foreshadow 131 Ibid. 132 Ibid., 211–212. 188 his ultimate understanding of the dialectics of modernism, that all that is solid melts into air, that everything that exists deserves to perish, and wretchedly so. It is the story of the Turkish power elite and its intellectual appurtenances as well, be it the ‘anxious moderns’ –a contemporary euphemism for liberal-secular intelligentsia-, the Grand Chief and his tightly knit cadre of advisors –as the current Prime Minister came to be recognized- or the Kemalist vanguards, the common ground was the timid modernism –grand in technical illusions, calculating and haphazard in appropriating the reality. 189 Figure 4.1: The Prost Plan133 4.10 Prost in Turkey: The Mystery of the Lost Report and the Pains of an Urbanist In 1936, when Henri Prost arrived in Turkey, as any other astute planner would do, he attended a lavish ceremony held by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, was received warmly and tasked with turning around the fate of a rapidly decaying imperial capital. He drafted a master development plan for Istanbul in two years, and in 1939 his plan came to force. 133 Çelik, The Remaking of Istanbul, 162. 190 His plan laid out the contours of Istanbul that we have come to recognize. The most immediate application of his plan was the reordering of ancient peninsula. Lütfü Kırdar, the appointed mayor of Istanbul municipality, and the governor of Istanbul province, was primarily responsible for the realization of Prost’s plan between 1938 and 1950. The vicinities of Beyazıt Mosque in Beyazıt and Yeni Mosque in Eminönü were cleared of small-scale shops and residential buildings by large-scale appropriation initiatives and turned into public squares. The most striking element of the plan was the central role played by the newly made Beyazıt Square (parts of which were the ancient Tauri Forum), which was designed as the core of circulation in Istanbul, and was the beginning point of an urban axis that extended to Şehzade Mosque. The Roman Hippodrome –or the spatial vacuum to be filled by archaeological excavations- was to be accentuated as the pinnacle of a grand archaeological park that contained Topkapı Palace and Sultanahmet Square.134 Furthermore, the Unkapanı-Aksaray axis was transformed to a secondary alternative route to the old Galata Bridge that connected two sides of the Golden Horn -adorned with the renovated Valens Aqueduct-a picturesque touch still visible. Though, the opening of this route brought extensive land appropriations, demolitions, and serious damage was done to the Ottoman heritage. The end point of this new route was Yenikapı via Aksaray Square –Yenikapı was purported to replace the Golden Horn as the main port of the city. The new route was named as Ataturk Boulevard. Nearby, a vast structure was erected for the Istanbul University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Immediately to the south of Süleymaniye Mosque’s külliye, the sheer scale and ambitious allusions to Reich architecture attracted plenty of criticism, least of 134 Kuban, İstanbul, Bir Kent Tarihi, 385–7. 191 which was Prost’s lamenting that it harmed his planned vision of the old city. Sirkeci Terminal was renovated with new extensions to fit the expansion –and clearing up- of Eminönü Square. A new ferry service between Sirkeci and Haydarpaşa began.135 For all these development and demolition efforts, it is reported that 1,148 structures were appropriated by the state during Kırdar’s tenure.136 However, the real lasting impact of the plan was felt on the other northern side of the Golden Horn, where the new republic was fervidly intent on bringing the area under its own control, since Pera, renamed Beyoğlu, was where the minority population concentrated, and actually made up the majority. First, on the eastern approach to Taksim Square, Dolmabahçe Palace stables and servants’ quarters were razed and the first modern sports facility of the city was constructed between 1939 and 1947: Dolmabahçe Stadium, changed in 1973 to İnönü Stadium, after the president of the 1940s. The Artillery Barracks (designed and built in 1806 by Krikor Ballian), where the 31st March Uprising against the Constitution of 1908 was sparked by the NCO’s of the Imperial Artillery Barracks. The barracks had been in disuse since the CUP (Committee of Union and Progress) stalwarts shelled the huge stone complex, and the internal courtyard had been used as the main soccer field for city’s competitions before the opening of Dolmabahçe Stadium. In 1940, three remaining wings of the Artillery Barracks –the northern wing had been demolished during the 1908 Revolution- were torn down and a new park was built in its place. The park was one of the two main parks designed by Prost in the neighborhood. The park, with a rectangular central square surrounded by 135 Ibid., 387. 136 Tekeli, Development of the Istanbul Metropolitan Area, 124. 192 landscaped trees, was named İnönü Promenade until 1950, and later, Taksim Promenade. Promenade, was translated into Turkish as Gezi (leisurely walk, a literal translation), hence, after the 1970s, it was known colloquially as the Gezi Park. A new Opera House was built on the northern boundaries of the expanded Taksim Square. Another barracks building, Taşkışla, five hundred meters to the west of the square was assigned to the Istanbul Technical University after renovations. Since, 1909 it had also been in disrepair because of skirmishes between the brigades guarding the sultan and the CUP forces. Further west, towards Harbiye, a new exhibition hall and a radio house was built. The street between Taksim and Harbiye was widened, the neighboring Armenian cemetery was torn down –and, apparently not moved, but buried deeper into the ground- and a series of apartment buildings erected on the former cemetery’s premises. The critiques voiced that these were mere cheap replicas of Parisian apartment buildings. To the north, across the valley between Taksim and Nişantaşı, Prost designed another park in his plan Maçka Park was built here, adjacent to several villas. The villas created a great deal of debate at the time, and the opposition claimed that they were built for İnönü and his family. Seven kilometers to the north of Taksim, and on the west of Beşiktaş, on the land that Abdulhamid I granted to Admiral Hasan Pasha, called Levend (sailor, in Ottoman), the first large scale modern housing complex construction began.137 Thereby, Harbiye and Şişli joined in an urban sprawl, with an extension to Beşiktaş. During the construction of İnönü Stadium, the Beşiktaş-Taksim road was opened by way of Gümüşsuyu, so, a continuous path from Beşiktaş to Taksim, Harbiye, Şişli, Mecidiyeköy and Levent was complete. Prost’s plan foresaw a bridge across Bosphorus connected to a 137 Kuban, İstanbul, Bir Kent Tarihi, 387. 193 grand boulevard in Beşiktaş, though nothing was accomplished to that effect during the RPP rule. A few critical voices against the Prost plan were raised by journalists and social scientists at the time. In 1942, the sole voice of Turkish academics and intellectuals, a magazine with a socialist bend –though, socialism was strictly banned and punishable by law- Yurt ve Dünya (Country and World) published a critical account. The essay began with a vignette of how Prost’s plan was sold to the public, and interestingly, still vivid in delivering the point of how spin is used for building public consensus for urban development projects. In 1939, at the exhibit halls of Galatasaray High School in Beyoğlu, where the “Domestic Goods Fair” was held, one of the poster presentations was titled “Istanbul of Tomorrow” (Yarınki Istanbul). In that presentation, the details of Prost’s plan were laid out and it was shown how modern planning techniques would change Istanbulites’ lives for the better. According to the critique, of course, this served as nothing but a signal for speculators to buy cheap plots of land which were slated to be development zones, for they were orchards and gardens that cost little at the time of the presentation. And he argued that in the three years since the plans’ public announcement, “the main role in the development of the city was played by the land speculators.”138 Later, architects, urban planners and architectural historians wrote extensively that the complete and reckless transformation of the Golden Horn estuary into an industrial development area and the intense concentration of apartment buildings in between Harbiye and Şişli was the making of Prost, and his plan was greatly responsible for the 138 Hüseyin Avni Şanda, “Şehre Doğru,” Yurt ve Dünya 3, no. 18 (September 1942): 180–182. 194 initial corruption in the classical urban fabric of Istanbul.139 In intra-muros Istanbul, he was criticized as being oblivious to the Ottoman and Islamic cultural heritage, while bringing the Roman and Byzantine era structures to the fore. Another opinion was voiced regarding his approach to three main areas of plan implementation: Beyoğlu, ÜsküdarKadıköy conurbation, and Galata. He was panned for treating each of these regions separately and missing the integral unity of the city.140 Henri Prost’s contract was terminated by the Democrat Party after they came to power in the first free and fair elections in 1950. The termination of his contract was publicly announced, nevertheless he was called for one last hearing. He was accused of dereliction of duty, for the report he drafted between 1939 and 1947 and submitted to mayor and governor of Istanbul, Lütfü Kırdar, in 1948 was missing from the municipal books and registries. His report went missing in the archives thanks to the haphazard work of the municipal officials. Prost spoke bluntly in front of a committee established by Istanbul Municipality officials. His statement required no further questioning, and the bureaucrats not only succeeded in losing the planning report, but also implemented a building code he did not authorize, and basically did everything in their power while he was away: I stayed here without any intermission from the end of September 1939 to 29 June, 1947. My contract stipulated 16 months of stay, while I worked for 97 months. During my leave from 29 June, 1947 to 4 December, 1947, the planning office implemented the building and roads’ code without the slightest attention to public health…All of the reports I have drafted were sent to the commission [and] as a consequence, utterly failed as they stuck in the depths of [commission’s] file cabinet. To see all [his] efforts to vanish into thin air is very painful for this Kuban, İstanbul, Bir Kent Tarihi, 387; Cansever, İstanbul’u anlamak, 50; Tümertekin, İstanbul, insan ve mekân; Tekeli, Development of the Istanbul Metropolitan Area. 139 140 Kuban, İstanbul, Bir Kent Tarihi, 385–387. 195 [humble] urbanist of yours.141 What really caused Prost’s pains was essentially the misappropriation of his plans. He did not aim, neither supported, the development of low-density industrialization in the Süleymaniye neighborhood, nor condoned the construction of high-density public facilities. In the years 1942 and 1943, the RPP elites were overwhelmingly under the influence of Nazi Germany, and impressed by the Nazi triumphs of French and Russiansto which the same cadres lost the empire a little more than two decades ago. The RPP command ordered a grand university building and appointed two of the leading architects –one from each architectural faculties then existent: Emin Onat from Istanbul Technical University, and Sedad Hakkı Eldem from the Academy of Fine Arts. The final product of their collaboration was unmatched in its height, its out-of-proportion scale, its simplistic grandiosity, and its self-righteous disregard for the Beyazıt and Süleymaniye mosques and külliyes. Prost did not mince words in his criticism of the new building: “as a consequence of failing to implement our plans, it is observable that everywhere there emerges buildings and structures competing with the lamentable faculty of biology building that everyone wants to see demolished.”142 Aside from the university building, two other sore points remained for Prost: 141 The original of his statement in Turkish is: “Bilâ fasıla 1939 eylül nihayetinden 29 Haziran 1947’ye kadar burada bulundum. Kontratım mucibince (16) ay kalmam lâzım gelirken tam 97 ay çalıştım. 29 Haziran’dan 4 Aralık 1947’ye kadar devam eden gaybubetim esnasında, İmar bürosu en basit bir hıfzısıhha kaidesini bile nazarı itibara almadan yapı ve yollar talimatnamesini meriyete koydu…Bütün hazırlamış olduğum raporlar komisyona havale edilmiş netice itibariyle çekmecenin derin gözlerinde mahfuz kalarak tam bir akamete uğramıştır. Yapılan bütün gayretlerin nisyana karışmasını görmek şehirciniz için cidden pek acıdır.” “Henri Prost’un Kaybolan Raporu: 12 Senelik Şehircilik Mesaisinin Bilânçosu,” Milliyet, January 12, 1951. 142 In Turkish:“[n]etice itibariyle projelerimizin tatbik edilmemesi yüzünden, herkesin ortadan kalkmasını temenni ettiği şayanı esef biyoloji fakültesine rekabet edebilecek inşaat ve yapılar her yerde göze çarpmaktadır.” Ibid. 196 presumed plans for a parking lot next to the Yeni Mosque, and an attempt through informal means to gain a building permit from the municipal planning bureau for a tall building across from the university. The latter permit was issued not under Prost, but under another planning board later in the 1950s.143 After hearing Prost’s testament, and possibly, not coming up with a sensible explanation to the question of how a planning report was lost, the mentioned board told him that they will no longer need his services and the province’s council terminated his contract. Prost left Istanbul forlorn, before seeing the fruit of his labors in the city, yet, what he laid down, was enthusiastically implemented by the ones who terminated his contract, albeit in an overblown and ambitious way. 4.11 New Planning Commission and the Board of Professors: 1952-1956 On May 14, 1950, in the first free and fair elections of Turkish history, the Democrat Party was elected by a landslide, and its leaders took the helm of the country. Celal Bayar was elected as president by the parliament, and Adnan Menderes had been the unchallenged Prime Minister for ten years. The Democrat Party did not hesitate in gradually abolishing RPP’s decisions and publicly unpopular policies, though, left intact the highly centralistic institutional structure of the regime-which was actually designed for a single-party rule. Henri Prost (and his planning) was one of the earlier victims of the backlash. In the first three years of DP rule, a nationalistic language surrounded discussions on urban planning and growth policies. As a consequence of this political – 143 Although Cansever vociferously criticized Prost’s plan as culpable of ruining classical Ottoman Istanbul, he pointedly blamed the 1950’s planning commissions as responsible for opening up the Golden Horn estuary to industrial development, which incidentally caused the massive demolition of wooden Ottoman mansions on both sides of the estuary.Cansever, İstanbul’u anlamak, 50. 197 and, soon, cultural- backlash, Turkish professors, architects, and urban planners gained important positions in decision-making bodies; however, although undocumented, a quid pro quo agreement between these urban professionals and the politicians always held sway. A new Special Planning Commission was established after the termination of Prost’s contract by the provincial council. The new commission began its duties in June, 1952. The commission members were: Ahmet Kemal Aru, professor of urban planning at Istanbul Technical University, Cevat Erken, İmar Bank’s head of urban development branch, Behçet Günsav, art historian and lecturer at Technical School and a member of the high committee on the preservation of monuments. The commission was primarily tasked with determining the location and extent of low-priced or free land to be distributed to those in need. Moreover, another planning bureau was established to draft new regulations for traffic circulation in the city –which was deemed as lacking in Prost’s plan- and correcting and re-evaluating Prost’s 1:5000 scale plans, in addition to drawing new 1:500 and 1:2000 scale plans. The new commission, headed by Professor Mukbil Gökdoğan, was named “The Investigations and Documentation Bureau” and purported to complete its tasks in three or four years.144 Between 1950 and 1956, before the direct intervention by Prime Minister Menderes, influential figures that made Istanbul’s planning and development decisions were a few select Turkish professors and educators: Prof. Dr. Kemal Ahmet Aru, Prof. Dr. Mukbil Gökdoğan, Mithay Yenen, Cevat Erbel and Mehmet Ali Handan. Turgut Cansever later lamented the work in this period as 144 “Belediyenin Halka Satacağı Ucuz Arsalar,” Milliyet, April 6, 1952. 198 chiefly culpable of turning the Golden Horn estuary into an industrial zone.145 Yet, as mentioned above, their work mainly served the nativist lingo prevalent in public opinion and fed the backlash against RPP era policies. The nativist discourse in urban policymaking and architectural formation of the city helped a relatively new amalgamation of Turkishness and Turkified urbanism emerge as an exclusively political apparatus. In 1953, after the new commission came up with a new zoning and building code, the chairperson of the municipal planning division proudly announced to the newspapers that they no longer required the services of Prost, or any other foreign specialist. The initial geographical interest of the commission was oriented towards three areas: Beyoğlu master plan, the re-zoning of the Rami area as a site of industrial development, and the re-drafting of Prost’s zoning plan with the expansion of a previously limited Golden Horn industrial zone to the whole basin.146 From the 1950s to the 1990s, if gecekondus were the predominant aspect of urban expansion in Istanbul, the largely overlooked but highly integral part of this expansion was the transformation of inner city neighborhoods into slums and ghettos for the poor. The former grabbed extensive attention, while the latter was subsumed under the rubric of general distaste felt by the Istanbulite elites and their deep aversion to the immigrants. Süleymaniye, Saraçhane, Şehzadebaşı, Beyazıt-Soğanağa neighborhoods were transformed into transitory stages in the immigrants’ urban experience, they were the slums that first harbored them, until they found a way to save enough money, or until they built a reliable network of kinship and hometown affiliations to move through the 145 Cansever, İstanbul’u anlamak, 50. 146 Ibid., 145. 199 multi-layered labor market of the city that permitted them to relocate their families into self-owned gecekondus in the periphery.147 The decaying of these once core areas of ancient Istanbul was the making of the planners’ hastily drawn decision to expand the industrial permits to the whole Golden Horn basin. Yet, it is rather interesting that the Turkish intellectuals showed an immense reaction to the Golden Horn decision. The estuaries, the easily accessible water basins, and the docks and ports were an integral part of Western urbanization, and none of the early industrial centers had the luxury to skip waterside development. Given the level of technological advancement in the 19th and early 20th centuries, it was illogical to assume an industrial city could be built anywhere but the waterside. Extensive studies and detailed research of these waterside developments were elaborately written and published. So, it is rather an untenable argument to insist on blaming the commission decisions, especially in view of European urban planning policies prevalent in the first half of the 20th century.148 The industrialization of the Golden Horn estuary contributed heavily to a re-drawing of Istanbul’s class lines on urban geography, and although the industrial establishment is no longer there, this ineradicable class difference still determines the mapping of political affiliation, class characteristics, and employment opportunities in the area. 147 Ibid. The wrenching stink of the Thames in London reached such levels that in 1858, the famous British politician, and then the leader of the Commons, had to leave the parliament building and postpone the parliamentary meetings until the summer odor subsided: see, Julia Werdigier, “Plan Aims to Fix Sewers, but Its Cost to Residents Leaves a Bad Taste,” New York Times, October 21, 2013, sec. London Journal. The Turkish academy has to begin anew its study of the Euro-American industrialization and urbanization starting with Engels’ The Condition of the English Working Class in 1844 and Jacob Riis’ How the Other Half Lives to be able to rid of themselves the mesmerizing attraction of Western superiority. See, Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England; Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives (Applewood Books, 2011). 148 200 4.12 Menderes and the Reproduction of Haussmannism in Istanbul The influence of Turkish urban planners and architects –who were called collectively as the Professors’ group- continued until 1957, when Adnan Menderes personally decided to take over the helm in Istanbul’s urban development. The first thing he did was to acquire a European urban planner as his advisor; possibly, he thought the dual planning body –the commission and municipal bureau- and complicated red tape, prevented swift and decisive action in re-ordering space. He was not alone in this, as the strong-men of Turkish politics have always tried to by-pass what they saw as inefficient and burdensome collective decision-making processes and in its stead took over as the sole power at all levels. His hand-picked appointee in the implementation of new urban development was a German planner, Hans Högg. And his ambitions in this new phase of development were nothing less than the “second conquest of Istanbul.”149 Hans Högg, was no less modest in replicating his new boss’ grandiose plans, and he told newspapers that Menderes’ new development plan would shape the city in the way Baron Haussmann’s undertakings molded Paris a century ago.150 Menderes took a personal interest in the Istanbul development project. It is still related as an urban legend that Menderes traveled from Ankara at his slightest convenience to follow the clearing up and construction activities from the Eminönü port to the hundreds of buildings slated for demolition alongside the new boulevards. His interest had reached such high levels that as the Prime Minister he would even act as negotiator with the landlords for appropriation 149 Altinyildiz, “The Architectural Heritage of İstanbul and the Ideology of Preservation,” 295. 150 Ibid. 201 amounts, and if they were intransigent, used his powers to bring them to submission. He was not only the chief planner, executioner, and negotiator for the development plans, but as a steadfast engineer, he allegedly controlled the daily works of the construction crew.151 Under the watchful eye of Menderes, Istanbul’s historical core underwent the most extensive transformation. The opening of new arterial roads, which were feigned to be built at least since von Moltke’s plan, found its pinnacle with the trio of new boulevards Vatan-Millet-Ordu (Motherland-Nation-Army) named after the nationalistic craze of the time. The Theodosian Walls on the Marmara shores were demolished in Sarayburnu and paved the way for a new waterfront parkway. Karaköy square was cleared and a new wider avenue was built to connect Karaköy, Azapkapı, and Tophane. This avenue later reached Beşiktaş. A new boulevard was built in Beşiktaş that divided the neighborhood into two and was designed as the main connecting artery to the purported Bosphorus Bridge. The ground was broken for the first middle-class and upper middle-class housing project in Ataköy and the Ataköy housing complexes became the Menderes government’s trademark undertaking in providing modern housing for the urban population. A new highway, named E-5, later to be the Trans-European Motorway’s Turkish section, was built both on the European and Asian sides of the city. On the European side, the highway passed parallel to the Western walls of the historic city and reached Ataköy, on the Asian side, the new highway connected vast stretches of Later, of course, these urban legends turned into a coherent attack on his alleged corrupt methods of governing and became the sole sore point at his defense in the courts established after the May 27, 1960 coup. A great deal of the prosecution’s accusations were baseless –involving Menderes’ private life- and merely aimed at invalidating Menderes character in the eyes of the public. Yet, the hastily made decisions and rampant extortion of landowners during the Istanbul redevelopment project did stick in an otherwise abominable court process. See,“İstimlâk Davası Bugün Başlıyor,” Milliyet, April 17, 1961. 151 202 land between Kadıköy and Üsküdar; both of which greatly contributed to fuel the frenzy of real estate speculation and private housing development. On the Asian side, the decision was made to open up further land and tilt the balance of population to hitherto sparsely settled areas. Two new boulevards –Bağdat Avenue and Minibus Avenue- were either opened up, or widened at places to extend the land available for settlement.152 Highways and wide boulevards, their intersections and the pedestrian underpasses with a plethora of shops –which still exist with cheap peddlers of a cornucopia of Chinese made toys, electronics, and bicycles- dotted the squares of Aksaray, Saraçhane, Karaköy, and Topkapı and heavily contributed to the removal of pedestrian circulation from the public streets.153 Even during the early phases of demolition and construction of the Menderes development projects, a dissenting voice was heard in 1958. The haphazardly coordinated demolitions, clumsily designed renovations and destructive clearing and widening of streets attracted the scorn of the opposition parties. As a remedy to the nascent criticism, an Italian professor of urban planning, Luigi Piccinato was contacted and appointed as the coordinator of planning and development activities in Istanbul. In addition to the new coordinator’s position, İller Bankası (Bank of Provinces, the state bank that allocated municipal budgets) established another commission –parallel to Högg’s planning commission- named the Directorate of Development and Planning for Istanbul. Piccinato’s tenure in Istanbul helped confine the exorbitant wave of expansion Oğuz Öngen, “Ataköy Sitesinin Temeli Atıldı,” Milliyet, September 16, 1957. Kuban, İstanbul, Bir Kent Tarihi, 394; Tekeli, Development of the Istanbul Metropolitan Area, 121–124. 152 153 Kuban, İstanbul, Bir Kent Tarihi, 394. 203 and especially limited the northward development of the city. His plan proposals stated that the E-5 highway would act as the final border for the northern expansion-and this remained so until the early 1990’s when the second Bosphorus bridge and the connecting highway was built. Piccinato’s second invaluable contribution to the city was the delineation of the urban areas of Istanbul province. Placing the urban zoning permits on the Küçükçekmece-Büyükçekmece-Haramidere-Black Sea line on the European side, and between Şile and Tuzla on the Asian side, at least diminished further development for a while.154 Unfortunately, his attempts to limit and gradually diminish the traffic circulation in the historic peninsula were to no avail, and with the opening of Vatan and Millet boulevards he had to accept and revise his plan accordingly. The leading figures of the Democrat Party government persuaded Piccinato to account for a new north-south artery in the plan, as a consequence of which a new road between Beyazıt and Eminönü was built that connected to the Atatürk Boulevard to the west.155 Piccinato could not complete his 1:10,000 scale master plan before the May 27, 1960 coup. Once he submitted his final plan to the junta-run Planning and Development Ministry (Nafıâ/Bayındırlık Bakanlığı) in late 1960, the ministry’s military appointed bureaucrats argued that the newly instigated regional development plans and the soon-to-be-completed 1:5000 scale plans would entail radical revisions in the plan and denied approval. His plan, the closest to a fully legal implementation since von Moltke’s 1839 plan, faltered at the gates of bureaucracy.156 154 Tekeli, Development of the Istanbul Metropolitan Area, 125. 155 Cansever, İstanbul’u anlamak, 324–5. 156 Tekeli, Development of the Istanbul Metropolitan Area, 130. 204 Piccinato’s interventions, however, could not undo Menderes’ Haussmannesque dissection of the historic peninsula. The ancient urban core was already broken, and the middle-classes began leaving the area in droves for the newly developing residential neighborhoods in the Şişli-Levent axis, and Ataköy-Bakırköy area. The radical intrusion of grand boulevards and automobile traffic irreversibly harmed the urban fabric and rapidly led to the ghettoization of the Fatih district. His ambitious development projects ended in the demolition of 7,289 buildings total -given the fact that there existed around 65,000 buildings in the whole of the city- that meant more than a tenth of the city was razed to the ground. Of these, countless heritage sites from the Ottoman and Byzantine eras were either torn down completely, or severely maimed. One can still see the disfigured churches, broken down street patterns on the way to Tophane from Karaköy as well as the old Divanyolu (Mese).157 The extent of the demolitions and disregard for historical heritage reached such unseen heights that amongst the earliest victims of the clearing for roads was the gate that Mehmed II used to enter the city.158 Even an avowedly conservative-Islamist figure (since Adnan Menderes was held dear for this by his political kindred) like Turgut Cansever did not hesitate to label Menderes’ undertakings as “ferocious” in its scope. Cansever explained how he waged a struggle against the engineers of the highways administration. He waged a war against those engineers since Menderes employed his own handpicked institution, the Turkish Highways Administration, as the primary agent to implement the development plans in Istanbul in order to by-pass a democratic overview of the parliament and public opinion. 157 Altinyildiz, “The Architectural Heritage of İstanbul and the Ideology of Preservation,” 295. 158 Ibid. 205 Leaving aside the crudeness of Menderes’ political machinations and the fact that engineers without any interest in urbanism decided the development processes, Cansever pointed to the fact that the corner stone of Ottoman and Islamic existence in Istanbul, Eyüp mosque, was almost destroyed for the new highway bridge on the Golden Horn. Cansever claimed that his interventions saved this invaluable historical site.159 Cansever was installed as the head of the Planning Bureau, established on January 1, 1961, after the coup. 160 He was not well received in the municipal administration and was seen as a nuisance in Istanbul’s well-heeled echelons of power, and strongly disliked by the RPP oriented municipal bureaucracy. Yet, after the May 27 junta sacked Högg, turned down Piccinato’s plan, and closed down the İller Bankası Directorate, Cansever became the sole authority responsible for planning and development in Istanbul. Even though Cansever’s tenure did not last long –he resigned from his position in 1963- he designed and implemented the Beyazıt Square renovations, supported Charles Hart’s first gecekondu research in Zeytinburnu, and drafted the first regional plans, land use plans, and zoning regulations.161 The renovation and reconstruction of Beyazıt Square had not been completed at the time of his resignation, and only a fifth of the development was done.162 Neither the regional plan, nor land use and zoning regulations came into actual 159 Cansever, İstanbul’u anlamak, 51. 160 Tekeli, Development of the Istanbul Metropolitan Area, 130. For Cansever, Beyazıt Square was both a culmination of his professional life and a showcase of his talents as an architect and urban planner, but also a representation of Menderes’ hastily made decisions. See:Cansever, İstanbul’u anlamak, 283–328. For the discerning urbanist, his Beyazıt Square is still alive and the problems he detailed are apparent. 161 162 Ibid., 302. 206 implementation.163 Adnan Menderes’ indictment and his swift sentencing were carried out by the courts of the junta, and his presumed crimes included, but were not limited to, his involvement in the Ataköy housing development and the appropriations in the historical peninsula. He was executed by hanging in Yassıada in 1961. After Menderes, no other political figure dabbled in urban development projects, until Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The only urban plan approved and passed by the municipal council and parliament –and, Ministry of Planning and Development in Ankara- since 1839 had been the 1:100,000 scaled Istanbul Environmental Development Plan announced to the public in 2009. That plan has already been shelved with the Erdoğan government’s declaration of intent to build a third airport –the public bidding process won by a group of wealthy state contractors- and a channel to connect the Marmara Sea and Black Sea as a parallel seaway to the Bosphorus (the so-called ‘crazy project’), and the construction of the third Bosphorus Bridge and connecting highways. In that regard, Istanbul is a marvel, an exception: a city so vast, so historically crucial, so rich in its cultural heritage, but is nevertheless still lacking any urban planning, any architectural principle of preservation, or any principled zoning regulation. Things can change in the blink of an eye: already existing zoning regulations can be altered by municipal councils –presumably, for a good sum-, and high-rise buildings can be erected in the historical peninsula, even on top of the underground tunnels at the risk of thousands of commuters, and the government can change the rules of architectural preservation to raze the oldest buildings of Pera –as happened in Beyoğlu so pervasively163 Tekeli, Development of the Istanbul Metropolitan Area, 136. 207 or, it can change the rules of the game in the midst of the play, as what took place in Gezi Park in late May, 2013. Before dissecting the prevalent state-space logic of late capitalism in Turkey –which is the subject of the sixth chapter, I will present the effects of industrialization in Istanbul, and how that process introduced an irreversible current of plebeian appropriation of urban land as squatters flourished in the city. 208 5 Meandering the Pathways to the Periphery: Theses on the Rise and Fall of the Gecekondus On a sunny day in spring 2010, I walked towards the center of the May Day neighborhood. In my hand, I strongly held onto Şükrü Aslan’s brilliant work that heralded the breaking point in Turkish urbanism: 1 Mayıs Mahallesi: 1980 Öncesi Toplumsal Mücadeleler ve Kent (May Day Neighborhood: The City and Social Movements before 1980).1 Soon, I will meet the muhtars of the two mahalles and the people who have been there since the beginning of the old May Day neighborhood. The place has its own tangible aura, a sort of unspoken weight, since the neighborhood is still home to a wide array of Turkish socialist movements, and not but a few of them owe their genesis to this place. Not many districts in Istanbul have armed policemen and armored personnel vehicles guarding the entrances to their neighborhoods - alert at all times. The police station, though, is not anywhere near the district. Actually, there are two police stations serving the district, or aptly put, keeping a leash on the district: one heavily armed, the other one very well staffed. The former is located to the north of the district, in a strategic point between the middle class settlement of Ataşehir and the TEM highway onramps. The other one is within the borders of the May Day district’s southern neighbor, Örnek (literally, exemplary) district, and this one has plenty of police officers. Nearby the former police state, five hundred meters to the north of the May Day district lies one of the bigger middle class gated communities built by Soyak –one of the most well-known and successful developers of post-1980 Istanbul. The police station is not really 1 Aslan, 1 Mayıs Mahallesi 1980 Öncesi Toplumsal Mücadeleler ve Kent. 209 interested in that housing complex. Beyond the high walls, the gated community has its own security services complete with CCDs, badges, and trained guards. I entered the district from the northern approach, not, through the southern way, as usual. The E-5 highway, built during Menderes’ gigantic development in the late 1950s, serves as the main transportation artery for the Asian side of the city. With a series of intersections, and a newly completed subway underneath, the E-5 highway travels the borders between residential, industrial, and the gecekondu areas. The May Day neighborhood is located to the west of the Göztepe intersection, a mile before the E-5 turns toward the Bosphorus Bridge connection. To the south lies Kadıköy, to the north Üsküdar, and from where I walked into the neighborhood, a road climbs up the hills of Çamlıca –where the nouveaux riches of the Islamist AKP rule rendered the hills invisible with their gated communities. On this road, three miles to the west of the May Day neighborhood, Dubai’s famed Emaar Holdings is developing a skyscraper complex, complete with shopping malls and ultra-luxurious residences. The road zigzags along Çamlıca and arrives at Altunizade, where in the 1980s, a middle class residential apartment building boom literally invented a whole new neighborhood from scratch, and since the early 1990s, the earliest shopping mall of Asian Istanbul (called, Capitol), helped the only untouched area between Üsküdar and Kadıköy filled to the brim with yapsat style apartment complexes. So, the May Day neighborhood is suitably located at the convergence of two of the main arteries: the first one, the east-west axis of the E-5 highway between Kadıköy and Kartal, and its tributary parallels that extend as east as Dudullu, Sarıgazi, Samandıra, and Sultanbeyli with connecting roads to an emergent alternative axis of the TEM (the 210 newly built Trans-European-Motorway), Bağdat and Minibus avenues to the south. And the second one, the north-south artery that provides access from the E-5 highway to northern areas of Ümraniye, Kısıklı, Bulgurlu, Üsküdar, and Dudullu. In the 1950s, none of these areas existed –apart from Üsküdar and Kadıköy- and planning for development took Kadıköy as its pivotal point for further expansion along the Marmara Sea. The area between Kadıköy and Üsküdar was supposed to be preserved as a low-density residential area with seaside mansions and with its immaculate Bosphorus views. No-one had foreseen the mushrooming sprawl of gecekondus and their ensuing transformation to multi-floor apartment buildings until the 1970s. Today, as I traversed these streets, one of the last remaining undeveloped gecekondu areas laid before my eyes: the land strip between the E-5 and TEM highways present bountiful, crucial, and dynamic opportunities in real estate speculation. My usual route during my wanderings in the area began from the border between Kadıköy and Üsküdar, and the newly incorporated sub-province of Ataşehir. Istanbul’s delicate historical urban political geography crystallizes here: the neighborhood was named to commemorate the slain of the May Day 1977 massacre, where 37 died at a rally on Taksim Square during a stampede triggered by gunshots from the surrounding buildings. This is a mahalle named after a massacre, a neighborhood that took its fair share of oppression, murder, and demolition. The May Day mahalle is predominantly populated by Alevis or workers with a background in left-wing, socialist politics. Yet, the Ottoman governmental logic that intervened in population distribution seems to be at work here, and has been fully harnessed by the ruling parties since the 1970s. The neighborhood is surrounded by three Sunni mahalles: to the immediate north lies 211 Esatpaşa, to the west Örnek, and, though without any physical borders, Fetih (Conquest) lies to the northwest. Parts of Esatpaşa belonged to the earliest May Day neighborhood squatter, most of the mahalle was made up of gecekondus built by Sunni immigrants in the 1970s, simultaneously with the May Day squatters. Dilapidated blocks of social housing are located in the center of the Esatpaşa district. They are rundown because they have been slated for development since at least 2008, waiting for TOKİ and private sector contractors to come to an agreement and pass the necessary planning revisions. The Örnek mahalle is named as such (meaning exemplary in Turkish) for it was built in the late 1970s as an exemplary gecekondu area, ironically, gecekondu districts are overwhelmingly named as such in other Turkish cities as well, though, nothing is really exemplary, or worth modelling. The eastern borders of the neighborhood are limited by the highway and to the south lies a deep valley between the neighborhood and beyond that valley begins the Ataşehir residential development area, the upper middle class heaven. One can understand her entrance to the May Day neighborhood by visual and spatial clues alone: the minarets disappear, liquor stores emerge, women are unveiled, and a few actually work in the stores. The other symbolic borders are actually drawn by two mosques. The Mosques remind me of gates- gates that declared the land of the heathen lies beyond. And, tragically, the Turkish state did not spare any costs to build mosques in Alevi neighborhoods everywhere in Turkey. But, perhaps to diminish the injury, they are named after two figures held dear to the Alevis: Ali and Hussein. These two mosques, one on the street that passes through the Örnek district, and the other on the 212 northern approach from Esatpaşa, mark the northern and western limits of the settlement.2 In Anatolia, Alevis were subject to a similar fate as the Istanbulite non-Muslims, though their suffering began much earlier and their treatment had been heavy-handed from the beginning.3 In the 20th century, bolstered by the centralized state apparatus, the pogroms became systematic and ruthless. The low level planned political encroachments and gradual recruitment of secular Alevites to the Kemalist state machinery –and the manufacturing of Alevite allegiance to the state represented by RPP- came to several boiling points. In the late 1970s, pogroms were planned and systematically applied by the so-called “deep state” machinations in Çorum, Maraş, and Sivas which led to the deaths of hundreds of Alevis, and instigated a wave of immigration to the cities and especially, to Germany as gastarbeiter. The last massacre took place in 1993 in Sivas and its memory is still searingly fresh for my generation when live TV broadcasts showed hundreds of Islamists surrounding the Madımak Hotel, chanting slogans asking for the deaths of Alevi poets, writers, singers, and musicians who came to the city from all over Turkey to commemorate Pir Sultan Abdal -the most revered 14th century saint-like figure of their faith. The crowd set fire to the first floor curtains, and shortly the fire leapt to other floors. Exits blocked by the hateful mob trapped many inside and 35 died of smoke 2 It seems rather a habit grown out of political practices amidst the ruling classes in Turkey. When PM Erdogan finally delivered his much sought after democratic reforms in October 2013, it was not a promise fulfilled, but just another round in the decades-long game of norming by naming: the only reform ensconced in this package of basic statutory changes was the christening of Kırşehir University as Hacı Bektaş Veli University, Hacı Bektaş-ı Veli (yet, other statutes stipulated that the proper spelling was still forbidden, hence, the missing letter i), was one of the most prominent patron saints of Alevi belief. Two weeks late, Erdogan heralded the coming of his grandson, whom he proudly announces his intention to name Ali, after the fourth khalifa, without any doubt, as a good will gesture towards Alevis. The interpellation, the great game of calling the names still ensues. 3 Karen Barkey wrote on the Bektashi-Shiite uprisings in Anatolia from the 16th century to the 18th century and how bandits were integrated into the system. However, there is still a gap in the literature regarding the Alevite collective memory of forced resettlement, persecutions, exiles, and atrocities. See, Karen Barkey, Bandits and Bureaucrats: The Ottoman Route to State Centralization (Cornell University Press, 1996). 213 inhalation. Not all gecekondu districts are the same, not even all Alevite neighborhoods are the same.4 To the same extent that Irish workers lived and suffered in rotten neighborhoods on both sides of the Atlantic in the 19th century, and Polish immigrants hung onto their identities in the suburbs of Chicago in the early 20th century, while waves of Jewish, African-American, and Puerto Ricans dominated the Harlem, Istanbul was made up of a very delicately knit pattern of ethnic and racial communities. The May Day neighborhood is not only important for its location, it is also one of the only remaining socialist strongholds in Istanbul alongside Gülsuyu/Gülensu in Maltepe, Okmeydanı in Şişli, and Gazi mahalles where the Alevites and working classes are still actively organized. The May Day neighborhood presents a rich atmosphere of Turkish socialism-but, not Kurdish socialism, in comparison to other centers of dissent. In this chapter, I will juxtapose the transformation of the gecekondus as both a social construct and an element of urban imagination with the concrete spatial reorganization that has taken place in Istanbul since 1946. 5.1 The Gecekondu as a (Theoretical) Problem Wherever the state-capital coalition proved to be insufficient in terms of meeting the demand for housing, new formulations for production of space arose. Firstly through self-help housing, the gecekondu was initiated by accelerated immigration to the three urban centers-Istanbul, Ankara, and Izmir. It has been widely studied by scholars of 4 There is, thankfully, burgeoning literature on Alevi identity and transformations endured by Alevite communities in diaspora, whether in Turkish metropolitan environments, or in Germany-since, a great many people fled Turkey after the pogroms of the late 1970s. 214 urban studies.5 The enlightened consensus within the circles of academia and liberal media has long sought for the purge of these profit-mongering mongrels, and invited the state agencies to take over the decision-making authority in control, planning, construction, and design of housing from the unruly predicates of freewheeling market capitalism. On the other hand, an ambiguous stance prevailed within the left-leaning intellectuals engaged in the discussions of urban planning and architectural design. The appropriation of land by the immigrant working classes, through self-help housing, gecekondus, had been heralded as a novel, genuinely democratic, and redistributive movement, while in practice it propelled the hitherto dormant processes of accumulation by means of land speculation to an unprecedented extent. 6 From a historical point of view, it can be safely claimed that the process of capital accumulation primarily based upon rent -that reached a climax in the last decade- is heavily indebted to the waves of immigration, and to the conciliatory relationships between the state and immigrant/working class populations since the 1950s.7 Until the last three decades, Istanbul’s urban geography more or less followed the pattern described by geographer Erol Tümertekin in the 1960s: an archipelago of urban Karpat, The Gecekondu : Rural Migration and Urbanization, Bugra, "The Immoral Economy of Housing in Turkey." 5 Şükrü Aslan, 1 Mayıs Mahallesi 1980 Öncesi Toplumsal Mücadeleler Ve Kent (Istanbul: Iletısım, 2004), B. Batuman, "Spaces of Counter-Hegemony: Turkish Architects and Planners as Political Agents in the 1970s" (Binghamton University, 2006). Deniz Baharoglu and Josef Leitmann, "Coping Strategies for Infrastructure: How Turkey's Spontaneous Settlements Operate in the Absence of Formal Rules," Habitat International 22, no. 2 (1998), Halil I. Tas and Dale R. Lightfoot, "Gecekondu Settlements in Turkey: Rural and Urban Migration in the Developing European Periphery," Journal of Geography 104, no. 6 (2005), Charles W. M. Hart, Nephan Saran, and Odasi Istanbul Ticaret, Zeytinburnu Gecekondu Bã¶Lgesi (Istanbul: Ticaret Odasi, 1969). 6 Hence, the 1960s, or the second republic, can be dated as the genesis of urban revolution in Turkey. The legal superstructure of urban landscape and the state intervention in planning in Turkey was laid out during this period by two laws: the 1965 “Flat Ownership Act” and in 1966, the “Gecekondu Act.” 7 215 concentrations with loose links to each other, geographically distant and with poorly integrated function, administratively tangled up in a mess of residual rural statutes and urban municipal codes dictated by Ankara’s centralized government.8 In the 1940s, Şişli began to be colonized by apartment buildings that introduced middle class comforts to a nascent, but limited, portion of Turkish society, and simultaneously was taken over as a subject of fascination by Turkish novelists. While the gradually Turkified middle class and bourgeoisie were slowly but surely eating away the urban weight of the non-Muslim erstwhile bourgeoisie in Pera, in Bomonti, a mile north of Şişli, a new industrial district was born. From the slopes of the valley that reached Bomonti to Mecidiyeköy, on an arc that traversed Çağlayan, Okmeydanı, Kuştepe, a new working class neighborhood was formed as an accessory to the newfangled industrial development. Interestingly enough, although the residents of this arc lived and worked very close to the bourgeois and upper middle class neighborhoods of Nişantaşı, Fulya, and Şişli the two classes never mixedtheir lives stayed separate until the early 2000s, once a great land rush made the erstwhile gecekondu dwellers rich landlords. However, an invisible barrier still prevails. The lower one goes down the valley towards the north, from Şişli to Dolapdere and Çağlayan, - the easier to recognize the accoutrements of class differentiation: the street patterns, the small shops, the coffee houses. With one exception though, Feriköy and Kurtuluş withstood the pogrom of 1955, and as an Armenian neighborhood they barely budged, until the last decade’s bohemian-bourgeois surge. Gentrification, a truly unknown phenomenon until the new middle classes sought a spatial blank slate to define themselves amid the tumultuous period of the country in the last decade and half, only made itself felt in a 8 Tümertekin, İstanbul, insan ve mekân. 216 limited area from Beyoglu/Pera, Cihangir, and Kurtuluş. The real underlying process that defined Istanbul, more crucially than gentrification, was the transformation of gecekondus to apartment buildings. Hence, in several different lives of Istanbul that I tried to depict so far, the last decisive actor was the working classes that once built themselves a house on public landor, on land, that had loosely defined ownership- and, although not deliberate, they shaped the city in the second half of the 20th century. The story of the working class housing, the gecekondus, had brought together a rich amalgamation of colors, beliefs, material cultures, habits, and patterns of everyday life in the concrete reality of Istanbul’s urban geography. The circuits of capitalist accumulation were fastened to the state’s capabilities in the marketplace until the 1980s in Turkey and in this model of state-led importsubstituting developmentalism, the state was notoriously inept in providing housing. The reasons for this is manifold, some related to the heavy-handed response the Menderes government received from the 1960 junta, while some are deeply intertwined with the treatment of land as the state’s domain-a sort of pastoral territorialism that is ingrained in Turkish governmentality. Whatever the causes of the state’s shortcomings in providing housing, the working classes showed their mettle in their steadfast chipping away of urban land from the tight guardianship of the state and ultimately led to the most extensive income redistribution program in Turkey, albeit informal and in strides that spanned seven decades. This redistribution of wealth has reached its crystalline form in the last decade, under the neo-liberal economic policies of the AKP (Justice and Development Party) with large-scale planning and zoning changes, TOKİ and KİPTAŞ’s active privatization of 217 public land, and crony capitalism that pervaded every level of public-private relations regarding housing provision. The ascent of real estate led growth in capitalist accumulation had shown its desired effects in redistributing income by real estate speculation, but also, spelled the end of gecekondus as an exclusively Turkish urban phenomena. Once the gecekondus began disappearing, their place was filled by an endless assault of reinforced concrete apartment buildings, uniform in size, shape, and color. The new concrete of urban renewal portrays the dystopic present. As yet another life of Istanbul comes to an end, the social scientist cannot only attest to the withering away of gecekondus, but can also witness the grand, all-encompassing, gargantuan scale of such change. Or, as Lefebvre would have described it, this is exactly the moment to come to grips with the state mode of production at work that concentrates concentration, that centralizes everything just for the sake of centralization, that rips apart all that exists, that an urban revolution is underway to mimetically reproduces new –but, eerily familiarrepresentations of space just for capitalist accumulation to continue its interminable orrery of creative destruction.9 In this chapter and the next, I purport to convey the story of Istanbul’s modern urbanization as a product of the gecekondu. It is the rise and demise of the gecekondu that transpired in the current structure of the built environment. In doing so, answer a few questions: Why did the gecekondus exist at that particular point in history? Are the gecekondus of Turkey, and more specifically, Istanbul, a counter-part to the slums, tenements, bidonvilles, favelas, projects, different forms of ghettos of the working classes all over the world? How did the power elite respond to the gecekondus and their rapid Brenner, “State Theory in the Political Conjuncture”; Lefebvre, The Production of Space; Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution. 9 218 proliferation in Istanbul? How did a particular section of the power elite accommodate and extend their influence by means of gecekondus? To what extent were these gecekondus political? And amidst the tumult of plebeian transformation of the city, to what extent did their agency play a decisive role in molding Istanbul’s built environment? Concurrently, of course, it is of interest to lay down the contemporary social scientists’ notions and conceptualization of this rather peculiar phenomenon of gecekondus. Thereby, I will point to an underlying theme of my work, via an ideological critique, it appears that a certain shared sense of auto-orientalism pervasively prevailed in the genesis of social sciences. There, I will draw from a rich literature in Turkish urban sociology and urban planning, and to contrast, will refer to two seminal works from different ends of the phenomenon: Charles Hart’s Zeytinburnu research in the 1960s, and Şükrü Aslan’s May Day neighborhood study from the 1990s. The most legible effect of the gecekondus in social and political structure was the territorial distribution of newly established municipalities in Istanbul. I will also describe how the state-spaces respond to the gecekondus, either by means of territorial arrangements, by dint of legislative actions, or through actual interference to the production of space. Istanbul’s rural areas were sucked into this humongous movement, and the central state responded by a series of indecisive, ambivalent moves: gecekondus were first recognized, but further squatting was denied –to no avail- the public land was allocated for distribution to those in need –but the state hesitated in setting up the very institutions for distribution, hence, people took the initiative and built further gecekondus on that land- and finally, the state decided that it was the municipalities job to deal with the squatters, and gradually devolved land and budgetary tools to the local 219 administrations, then, suddenly, withdrew all power, and concentrated decision-making capabilities in Ankara-of course, the Turkish power elites’ endless bickering that led to the “each decade a new junta rules” dictum had greatly helped in such ambivalent policymaking. After a relative liberalization of Turkish politics and economy in the mid-1980s, a legion of newly established municipalities sprang upon Istanbul. In the next two decades, through blunt attempts in gerrymandering, an electoral map of local boundaries was made by mostly right wing governments. After decades of dynamic border-drawing the final shape to the municipal map was given in 2009, and even its current condition is subject to change. Yet, the gecekondus defined the municipal structure of the city: as early as in the late 1960s the inner city municipalities’ populations reached saturation and additional growth in population took place almost exclusively in the peripheries. Inner city municipalities like Beyoğlu, Kadıköy, Şişli, Üsküdar, Fatih, and Eminönü stopped growing in the mid-1970s, while the rest of the city had seen a demographic explosion. Istanbul’s new population distribution was defined by the highway routes: erstwhile fishing villages or seaside resorts of middle classes like Büyükçekmece and Avcılar were joined with an unprecedented sprawl in Beylikdüzü and extended to Bakırköy and Zeytinburnu in an uninterrupted chain of high-density development. Similarly, on the Asian side, Çekmeköy, Sancaktepe, Samandıra, and Sultanbeyli –villages, rural areas nothing more than green pasture and idyllic views of forests a mere two decades agowere rapidly deforested and opened up for urban sprawl. In essence, understanding the gecekondu phenomenon is delving into the urban development of Istanbul. In this endeavor of understanding, I will discuss my observations in the May Day 220 neighborhood and Zeytinburnu during my field research in Istanbul between 2009 and 2011. These two gecekondu areas helped me develop a grasp in two historically, ethnically, and politically different places, two different ends of the same spectrum, and helped me locate the ensuing changes in the built environment, which will be a matter of the next chapter. The variegated levels of transformations in these two neighborhoods, their different levels of incorporation into neoliberal market economy relations, the incipient middle class in the latter, and the lack thereof in the former, helped me situate a key agent in the ongoing restructuring of Turkish society and Istanbul’s role as the spearhead of that restructuring. The middle class was a phenomena oft-cited, but seldom researched in Turkish urban studies. The difficulty lies in where to locate the middle class. The predominant view, of course, saw gecekondus and the middle class as mutually exclusive, immutably external categories. The middle class was located in the inner city, in Kadıköy, Beşiktaş, some time ago in Beyoğlu, and in Şişli, etc. The frequently overlooked issue here is that the gecekondus themselves became the real boosters in upward social mobility in Istanbul, and the once denigrated, humiliated, rejected gecekondu dwellers themselves became the new pillars of social stability: thence, the mesmerizing electoral success of the AKP and its enduring power in making Turkish political discourse perceivable by a vast swath of society. It does not fit the mold of other populist, pragmatist parties –at least, it was significantly different until June 2013, before its ruthless clampdown on the Gezi protests, but this is a completely different matterbecause, it is the product of an upwardly mobile new middle class, and unlike its predecessors, it is neither rural, nor merely dependent upon disenfranchised and powerless urban poor-although, indisputably, they have a solid support among that 221 section of society- their driving force is the ability to harness middle class’ aspirations in climbing up the social ladder. In the final part of the sixth chapter, I will bridge a gap that existed between rural studies and urban studies in Turkey to shed a light on the characteristics of the middle class in Turkey and Istanbul. Without paying ample attention to the very well scrutinized problem of center-periphery relations in Turkey and its underlying political economy rooted in small commodity production, one can barely begin speaking about social relations in this country. Furthermore, the real question emerges at the moment of urban revolution Istanbul had gone through in the last five decades: what happened to the peasants in the city? Well, they became workers at the factories. That’s true as well. But, they also became teachers, engineers, poets, writers, bankers, realtors, mechanics, taxi cab drivers, real estate developers, politicians–at least, their sons and daughters did. Unfortunately, there are very few longitudinal studies on social stratification and mobility in Turkey, and they are somewhat unreliable. Yet, the stories of the people I met and talked to, their houses, their lives, tell the story of this grand transformation. The habits and traits, the traditions and reflexive reactions of small scale commodity production survived in the city, thanks to a successful urban redistribution of wealth, and it paved the way of a nascent middle class. I will focus on that middle class’s experience in the built environment in the next chapter, but, suffice it to say, the continuity of rural social relations in the urban atmosphere –the fragmented, small-scale, individualistic, and atomized characteristics of urban culture, is what makes Istanbul a most invaluable aleph among other alephs. 222 5.2 Gecekondus as the Denigrated Growth Machines in Istanbul: Towards a Political-economy of the Quiet Encroachment The frauds who have built Istanbul gecekondus sell them for something between 1000 to 1500 liras. If you touch one [gecekondu’s] roof, a couple of women rush to the newspaper offices, wailing, shouting, as the Syrian grievers hired for pay. Try to withstand it, if you have feelings. If these people are really in dire need of a room or two, and have the wherewithal to spend somewhere in between 500 and 1500 liras, isn’t it reasonable [for them] to find a rooftop to squeeze into in any district of Istanbul? A member of parliament, led the way by personally demolishing a gecekondu he built on land that belonged to a cobbler which he had rented to two women …An idea that said “let’s build a house on any land, the state provides us with electricity, water, gas and roads, anyways” has become well established. In no other time and era had the right to private property become so easily abrogated. Once the sultan used to expropriate [property], now the same is done by the[se] frauds.10 In the late 1940s, at the dusk of the RPP’s single-party rule, Falih Rıfkı Atay, a leading member of parliament and a close confidante of the late Ataturk, wrote an interesting piece, named “This is Bolshevism,” comparing squatters in Istanbul to the Bolsheviks, describing them as frauds who abolished private property for their own benefit. Unfortunately, we do not know if there existed a heated debate in the early Kemalist era regarding private property, land use, housing, and zoning regulations as the name of the publication, Emlak Sahiplerinin Mülkiyet Mecmuası (The Magazine for Landowners’ Private Property [Rights]), indicated.11 We know that before 1965, housing was developed prominently in lots, in a detached, or semi-detached form, so, the discussion on land ownership was apparently an unclosed business amongst the power Falih Rıfkı Atay, “İşte Bolşeviklik,” Emlak Sahiplerinin Mülkiyet Mecmuası 2, no. 8 (January 15, 1949). Cited from, İlhan Tekeli, Türkiye’de yaşamda ve yazında konut sorununun gelişimi (Ankara: T.C. Başbakanlık Toplu Konut İdaresi Başkanlığı, 1996), 61. 10 11 Ilhan Tekeli’s meticulous, brilliant works in the evolution of urbanism and urbanization in Turkey are definitive works in the field, but, there is an overwhelming wealth of data from the period that still waits to be investigated. Without Tekeli, I would not even like to speculate the situation of urbanism. Any Turkish urbanist owes an immense debt to him. 223 elite, maybe akin to the British “corn laws” which basically was a decades- long parliamentary –and, partly social- debate within the two fractions of the ruling class. Falih Rıfkı Atay provided the earliest example of a class warfare on the dispossessed, and raises a culturally rooted lament which would later become commonplace in the Turkish mainstream media and academia. In Atay’s view, bolshevism should not be investigated in the notebooks of lofty college students, but in the assault on the right to private property carried out by the gecekondu dwellers. The squatters who built on public land that did not belong to them commit a crime more serious than the one communists committed: they abolished the right to private property. In Atay’s evaluation, these frauds, these tricksters, these crooks committed theft in the slightest meaning of the term, they stole from the already scarce resources of the public. The way they did it varies, they were either performed by women and children’s exaggerated displays of selfvictimization, or by their monetary power, or through cronyism with volunteer cooperation of the politicians. In the face of this rabid invasion of the barbarians –this is my interpretation, but definitely not far from the tone of his writings, Atay and other fellow members of his class –since, he referred to the injured party as “us”- were deeply disturbed. Yet, apparently, he was neither disturbed by the masked racism –the “Arabs” is a shorthand for swearing that prevailed in spoken Turkish racism, applied in a wide range from blacks to actual Arabs- nor by the homeless thousands, or tens of thousands who had to live in houses without sewage, running water, power, let alone, gas. When this essay was published it must have caused remarkable repercussions in intellectual circles. Ekmel Zâdil, a professor at the Istanbul University, wrote a rebuttal. Though not directly addressed to Atay, he argued that human need for shelter cannot be 224 reduced to fraud, and instead of pointing fingers, it is rather the state’s responsibility to provide housing for the increasing urban population. 12 Apparently, his warnings were not heeded and the impervious RPP regime’s treatment of the urban gecekondu dwellers can also be counted as one of the reasons which led to their downfall in the 1950 elections. Atay’s writing is also indicative of the Kemalist tactic of reinventing history at a discursive level: the similarity he built between the gecekondus and the communists – during the time of Red Scare, when Turkey wholeheartedly embraced the US side and NATO as its protector and instigated yet another rounding up of the alleged communistsis deplorable, but, the way he drew a parallel with the Ottoman sultans is undoubtedly interesting. The gecekondu was an economic relationship between the ruling classes –or the fractional interests of those- and the nascent working classes and Atay seems to be one of the earlier proponents of posing it as such. Although never manifestly stated in the mainstream media by the Turkish academic intelligentsia, there was always an implicit consensus to refer to gecekondus as a way of unlawfully obtaining material gain. The extent of need was not the pressing issue here. In that vein, it definitely resonates with one of the foundational features of capitalist class relations in Western Europe: the distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor- a defining element of social control that first emerged as an instrument of discipline –an inalienable part of what Weber described as the Protestant Ethic. This distinction set barriers between different strata of urban poor, attempted to inculcate work discipline and instill an obedience at the workplace, and established the modern concept of punishment, built a set of social Ekmel Zadil, “İstanbulda Mesken Mes’eleleri ve Gecekondular,” Sosyal Siyaset Konferansları Dergisi, no. 2 (1949): 65–87. 12 225 control mechanisms around the idea of welfare and safety net, while dehumanizing a section of the poor as beyond reformation and turned them into a public enemy, as the embodiment of dangerous classes.13 The language on gecekondus reproduced a similar effect in Turkey, with the added benefit of a concept hitherto alien to Turkish public discourse: the free rider. Gecekondus exploited one of the scarcest of public goods, urban land, and not only expropriated and wrestled away the land that was supposed to belong to the urban citizens, but also put an unnecessary drain on further common resources like roads, water, electricity, sewage, transportation, education, health services, municipal items of collective consumption. In such governmental terms of imagination, they also threatened genuinely civilized urban cultures, provincialized high-culture, bastardized the authentic urban community, adulterated the city’s communal values with their feudalistic, backward, superstitious norms, corrupted morality, and brought ineradicable vice with themselves. In the 1990s, with the varoş literature, this class-based condescension took the form of outright hostility and criminalized the gecekondus. Yet, as the gecekondus stood fast, they changed, but barely budged in the face of such discriminatory discourse. Even in socialist circles, with a supportive stance towards the gecekondus, the urban underclass, the squatters, were seen as less of social agents who could barely follow their own individual benefits, let alone the common class interests. The socialists at the time treated the gecekondu as a conjunctural phenomenon that arose at the moment of state’s diminishing control over space or its faltering redistributive channels. We can E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Vintage Books, 1968); E. P. Thompson, “Eighteenth-Century English Society: Class Struggle Without Class,” Social History 3, no. 2 (1978): 133–65; Spierenburg, The Prison Experience; Foucault, Discipline and Punish : The Birth of the Prison. 13 226 certainly claim that the gecekondu as a social phenomenon presented a reality significantly different than what both the urban intellectuals and the power elite since the Tanzimat used to deal with. The Ottoman peasant rebellions left no enduring trace behind, and they were, unlike other peasant rebellions, coopted by the askeri class. The last serious peasant rebellion had taken place in the 17th century, and even then it presented no systemic threat. Although a few socialist intellectuals throughout the 20th century sought for a revolution modeled after China or Cuba, the Turkish peasants apparently did not share their view-though, the Kurdish peasants are a completely different story. Under these circumstances, where the state had an unchallenged monopoly over peasantry, the processes of urbanization –not the barrel of a gun- brought the peasants to a gradual parity with the urbanites. A recount of the most influential right-wing politicians of the last century tells the story of this gradual encroachment of the peasants, respectively by date: Celâl Bayar (the son of a Balkan émigré imam who settled in Bursa), Adnan Menderes (a big landlord in the western Aegean region), Süleyman Demirel (the college educated engineer son of a peasant family from Isparta in western central Anatolia, who spent his childhood shepherding the village herd, hence the nickname, “Çoban (Shepherd) Sülü (diminutive form of Süleyman), Turgut Özal (again, a college educated son of a Kurdish mother and Turkish father, an official in a state bank, from Malatya, southeastern Turkey), Necmettin Erbakan (a Ph.D. in engineering from Germany, mother from Sinop –a small town in northern Turkey- father, a judge who was appointed to this small town), and, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (a son of a coast guard mariner from Rize in northeast Turkey, who was born in Kasımpaşa, one of the poorest- half 227 gecekondu, half slum neighborhoods of inner city Istanbul, and who was raised in the ranks of Erbakan’s Islamist urban political movement). The gradations in their backgrounds reveal how Turkish urbanization, and political inclusion of immigrants from rural areas, progressed. A defining feature of the early republican era was the importance of higher education and its role as the sole catapult to upward social mobility; Demirel, Özal, and Erbakan graduated from the same university –Istanbul Technical Universitymajored in extraordinarily similar fields, respectively, civil engineering, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering; were one year apart from each other, 1949, 1948, and 1950; and all went abroad for either graduate studies, or professional training, to the USA, USA, and Germany. It is more interesting that between themselves, they ruled the country from 1965 to 1997. The only interruption –aside from their protégés short term rule- was Bülent Ecevit’s four terms as prime minister (1974, 1977, 1978-9, 19992002).14 Not only did the immigrant masses enter the great melting pot of Istanbul, but also, the political class –who, as the dominant argument in Turkish social sciences goes, developed a clientelistic and one-way relation with their power bases- learnt from those people, from the city, facilitated the capitalist accumulation circuits, organized around newly established patterns of social capital, and deftly employed one of the more probable ways for social mobility in this country- still starkly divided between urban 14 The so-called left-wing –represented by the previous autocratic single-party’s reorientation to center-left in the mid-1960s- had only two elected prime minister. The first one was Ismet Inonu, a CUP affiliated officer of the army, who was second in command during the War of Liberation after Mustafa Kemal, his successor as the president and the leader of RPP, and the other was Bülent Ecevit, the only son of an influential intellectual couple of the RPP era. Although Ecevit was known as the most erudite of his contemporary peers and challengers, he did not go to college, but graduated from an old American missionary school, Robert’s High School. 228 center that is highly educated and provincial periphery that is mostly subordinate. The pervasive Tammany Hall style politics and its economic roots in the distribution of urban land abruptly stemmed a possible path towards transparency in decision-making processes and democratization. Unfortunately, the heavy-handedness of the militarybureaucratic elite, the coercive state apparatus, invasive and opaque Cold War and international relations all contributed to the failure in building ideological norms around such liberal notions of parliamentary democracy, meritocracy, welfare state, etc. in Turkey and rather helped enshrine a winner takes all principle, that ended up in a tedium of intra-class skirmishes, cycles of violent uprisings and more violent and bloody suppressions of those who rebelled, street-level blood-letting, countless juntas, successful and less successful coups, and an asinine routine of failed state-making. If the statemaking fails, there goes the space-making. The gecekondu as an urban phenomenon was overwhelmingly equated to this failure, either as a reflection of failure, or a root cause of that very failed state. A new perspective is necessary to go beyond ascriptions of pariah status to the gecekondus. The gecekondu was a product of a dual movement: a project of economic redistribution and political integration. Only then, one can properly situate the concrete social fact and look beyond the mere surface phenomenon. To be able to do that, two previous studies laid an invaluable framework for each aspect of the duality: Asef Bayat’s Street Politics: Poor People’s Movements in Iran foregrounded a fresh history from below originating in Iran’s 20th century social movements history, and Harvey Molotch’s brilliant essay, The City as a Growth Machine: Toward a Political Economy of Place –first published in 1976 and later the centerpiece of Molotch’s book with John R. 229 Logan named Urban Fortunes, published in 1987- engendered an urban politicaleconomy built around the inveterate real estate speculation on land that laid the basic building bricks of late capitalism.15 Bayat’s starting point in his analysis was the fact that the urban poor have tapped into public resources without any monetary payments, either impervious to such demands, or, outright rejecting to spend their already limited material resources on such goods. As a result, their mere existence in the cities has turned into a massive public appropriation. The most salient example he gave was the street peddlers who were in constant struggle with the shopkeepers. These very peddlers –pesky, or resilient, depending on whose side you are on- withstood the harassment of the local authorities and the shopkeepers’ continuous objections and they were the most vocal supporters of the 1979 Revolution, active agents of a social movement that led to the overthrow of Shah Rıza Pahlavi and return of Khomeini which paved the way to a complete reversal of the political system. Bayat argued that the massive appropriation of public resources by the urban poor cannot be assumed synonymous to the corruptive influences of the “lumpen-proletariat” or the “dangerous classes.” Simply put, the situation the urban poor was in “represent[s] the natural and logical ways in which the disenfranchised survive hardships and improve their lives.”16 In this, Bayat saw a distinction between the classical social movement theories’ formulations for class or normative and value-based interest group mobilizations and the Asef Bayat, Street Politics: Poor People’s Movements in Iran (Columbia University Press, 1997); Logan and Molotch, Urban Fortunes; H. Molotch, “The City as a Growth Machine: Toward a Political Economy of Place,” American Journal of Sociology 82, no. 2 (1976): 309. 15 16 Bayat, Street Politics, 4. 230 urban poor’s silent, isolated, continuous episodically organized collective actions. There exists neither an open leadership, an ideology that was defined in certain terms, nor a structured organization. Not only these foundational aspects of modern social movements lack, but also, the urban poor’s collective action does not have to be completely antagonistic to the state interests. Bayat called this peculiar type of collective action “the quiet encroachment of the ordinary” and recognized a silent, patient, widespread, and long-haul resistance of the urban poor against the property owners and the powerful to sustain and better their lives.17 While the poor people sought for furthering their interests in the urban sphere individually, quietly, and gradually, their efforts in preserving their gains has been collective and vociferous.18 The humiliated and insulted earned their place in the urban society through overcoming numerous hardships, but once they had broken the surface and had taken roots there, they would not be easily removed. Second, what is crucial here is the economic relations the urban underclass entered into through their massive appropriation of public goods, and here Harvey Molotch pointed out invaluable aspects of the urbanization processes under capitalism. Molotch’s criticism can be read as integral to the 1968’s rupture in urban ideology. His critical approach directs its ire towards the leftist urban analysis which paid out-ofproportion attention to the relations of production and class, while overlooking the 17 Ibid., 7–8. Ibid. “The types of struggles I describe here may best be characterized as the “quiet encroachment of the ordinary” –a silent, patient, protracted, and pervasive advancement of ordinary people on the propertied and powerful in order to survive hardships and better their lives. They are marked by quiet, atomized, and prolonged mobilization with episodic collective action –an open and fleeting struggle without clear leadership, ideology, or structured organization, one that produces significant gains for the actors, eventually placing them in counterpoint to the state…[O]ne key attribute of these movements is that while advances are made quietly, individually, and gradually, the defense of these gains is always collective and audible.” 18 231 definitive characteristics of the cities where these relations took place. Unfortunately, said Molotch, “[t]o this day, the "urban" is often equated with troubles that happen to occur in cities, rather than with the mechanisms that produce space and the settlements where these ills are witnessed.”19 To enable a research agenda that focused on the mechanisms of production of space, John R. Logan and Harvey Molotch suggested treating the city as a “growth machine.” In offering such a paradigm they pointed out that “the pursuit of exchange values so permeates the life of localities that cities become organized as enterprises devoted to the increase of aggregate rent levels through the intensification of land use.”20 The city as a whole is turned into a capitalist enterprise; spatial diffusion, public goods, collective consumption, housing of the classes and historico-geographical interaction of these classes, the use of time, human being and existence, and every point of social reproduction of the system, within the system, is defined, limited, and permitted by this total growth machine. The growth machine called the city acts as an asymptote, it dictates the terms of public engagement, imposes the tone and content of public discussion, determines the issue at stake, delimits the cultural responses, and sets the newspaper headlines. A great deal of seemingly unrelated phenomena is actually knotted to the underlying logic of this machine. The growth machine functions as a perfect ideological Molotch, “Growth Machine Links: Up, Down, and Across,” 248. He added that the two exceptions to his critique were Henri Lefebvre and David Harvey’s studies in spatial relationships. They gave due attention to the autonomous movement of the city and urban space –like other social forms, economy, politics, classes, etc. Only then, the perpetuity of inequality and the mechanisms of production of space can be evidently studied. 19 20 Logan and Molotch, Urban Fortunes, 13. 232 apparatus, nurtures and permeates an urban ethic based upon boosterism, insuperable quantitative developmentalism and solidly represents the liberal democracies’ sacred principle of freedom of choice, in essence that choice is the sole option –the absoluteunder given spatial conditions.21 For Logan and Molotch, the urban growth machine was a consequence of historical processes, and they argued that the western expansion of the US, and the underlying frontier mentality, this credo of constant, insuppressible development is writ large into the American built environment.22 In Turkish social sciences one of the theoretical and empirical pitfalls of urban studies is to separate gecekondus from the wider political-economic characteristics of the late industrialization and peripheralization of Turkey and to treat it as a problem exacerbated by the neoliberal economic policies of the post-1980 era. The implicit assumption here is that the gecekondu is a transitory stage in Turkish modernization, which was represented in informal, inappropriate, exceptional, and corrupt urbanization practices that led to a city of peddlers, minibuses, disorderly mass of squatter houses, and the unbecoming cultures of the newcomers that flourished –invaded- everywhere. In this view, gecekondu was an anomaly born out of deficient, irresponsible practices of the policy-makers in Ankara, and the eradication of the squatters were incumbent upon a Molotch, “The City as a Growth Machine: Toward a Political Economy of Place”; Logan and Molotch, Urban Fortunes. 21 Logan and Molotch, Urban Fortunes, 13. One can follow a similar theoretical approach in the boosterism that prevailed in Los Angeles from its beginnings, see, a seminal work: Mike Davis, City of Quartz : Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (London ; New York: Verso, 1990). David Harvey gave ample evidence that solidified Molotch and Logan’s suggestions in plenty of writings during the heyday of neoliberal backlash, see, David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford; Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1989); D. Harvey, “From Managerialism to Entrepreneuralism: The Transformation in Urban Governance in Late Capitalism,” in Space of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography (New York: Routledge, 2001); Harvey, “Flexible Accumulation through Urbanization: Reflections on ‘Post-Modernism’ in the American City.” 22 233 cross-sectional, top-to-bottom organization of a new phase in modernization. I will argue that, to the contrary, gecekondu was an integrally determining part of Turkish modernization, and not a side-effect of that movement, but indeed was the primary party in carrying modernization to masses by means of becoming the one and only growth machine Istanbul –and, to an extent, other cities- came to recognize. With one caveat though, unlike what Logan and Molotch suggested and Harvey reiterated several times over, Istanbul did not turn into an enterprise in the course of capitalist urbanization. The state appropriated Istanbul’s urban space to project itself onto the daily lives of the Turkish peoples, and first, turned gecekondus into a formidable growth machine, roughly, from the 1950s to the late 1970s at differing tempos in various parts of the city and then, through a gargantuan effort in apartmentalization of housing, from the late 1970s up to now, and reignited the social role of the gecekondu as the incubator of a new middle class. To portray these processes, we first have to look at the origins of the gecekondus and question the particular epistemology produced by Turkish social scientists. 5.3 A Concise History of Gecekondus Although an academically established doxa is built around the suggestion that the appearance of the gecekondu owed its existence to the 1950s economic liberalization, a great many number of researchers conceded that the first gecekondus were built in the second half of the 1940s. Yet, the questioning should be less about when the first gecekondu was built, but more concerned with how the working classes of Istanbul lived before that. The working classes did not appear with the gecekondus, thus, in Zeytinburnu, Beşiktaş, Mecidiyeköy, and Kasımpaşa –the periphery of Istanbul in the first three quarters of the 20th century- the rapid increase in population had already begun 234 in the 1930s. The only difference was that those workers of the new state (and a few private) industrial enterprises followed the experiences of previous generations, and they stayed in bachelor’s inns, pensions, and communal houses which were so widely available in Ottoman Istanbul that those houses –which were concentrated in a tiny strip between Karaköy to Tophane in the early 1900s- were seen as the culprits of great fires. But, as the industrialization took hold, the workers stayed in Istanbul, did not engage in shuttling themselves back and forth seasonally, brought their spouses, families, and the first slum neighborhoods were born in Kazlıçeşme –an area adjacent to Zeytinburnu, where the tanneries and leatherworks were concentrated until the 1980s- Kasımpaşa, Fatih, Bomonti, and Beykoz. Their conditions were no different than the slums of Paris, Manchester, or the tenements of New York in the 19th century. The ones who lived in the multi-floor houses in Zeytinburnu, lacked water, toilets, electricity, cooking or heating gas, paved streets, and had to endure the stench of the tanneries for decades. In the last two decades, studies on immigration and working class formation in Turkey showed remarkable progress, and an elaborate social history of the working classes began to take shape, though a predominant portion of those studies scarcely paid attention to the geographical distribution of the working classes and spatiality of their new settlements. In any case, the underlying reason which triggered the emergence of the gecekondu must be a radical realignment in the way the state-space is publicly perceived. There had always been impoverished neighborhoods, ghettos, and “dens of iniquity” in this city’s majestically long history, but never before had the state permitted a transfer of ownership of land. Yes, the state granted land, and taketh it away at will, but it did not permit such wide-scale appropriation of urban land. We should also be aware of the fact 235 that the Kemalist state was not particularly revolutionary in spirit-it was nowhere near the CPSU, where an unprecedented land appropriation by the state and its redistribution cemented an urban working-class and peasant coalition. The state mainly left the relations of production and patterns of private property intact. A great deal of the Kemalist regime’s reform efforts were state-centric, most were largely cosmetic –the laws that made the wearing of the European hat compulsory is notorious, since at least tens of people were executed for not wearing hats. Some of the reforms were cultural and oriented towards breaking the power structure of a single class fraction, namely the religious institutions: the switch to the Latin alphabet, the establishment of “Turkish” historical and language institutions, school reform, the abolition of the khalifate, the omission of Islam from the constitution as the state religion, etc. Before the Great Depression, the worldwide rise in the price of agricultural goods helped the government to stay aloof from relations of production, and once the global market for its only exportable goods collapsed, it was too little, too late to hop on the bandwagon of state-led industrialization. However limited the industrialization of the 1930s, there was still a need for cheap labor, and as emphasized before, and Istanbul’s rapidly aging population –which already bore the brunt of the war years and the stasis that began with Ankara’s ascent- was no fix for that need. On top of that, the closing of the centuries’ old trade routes, the earlier iron curtain that fell on the border with the Soviet Union, made hundreds of thousands of immigrant workers redundant, and worse, their survival, once the trade with the Russian Empire was gone, was at risk. This must be one of the reasons which led to the movement of northeastern peasants’ flocking to the cities, especially to Istanbul 236 beginning in the late 1930s. Çağlar Keyder and Korkut Boratav’s research on the Turkish agriculture’s economic and social structure showed that western and central Anatolia were predominantly oriented towards small scale production, while the Kurdish regions of eastern and southeastern Anatolia represented a mode of social stratification akin to feudal large-scale landholding. 23 In the analyses brought to the fore in a Marxian mold, a glaring absence of Black Sea villagers is noticeable. Although, a lack of feudal bondage, and the relative equality of landholding in the northeast Anatolia can be comparable to the non-Kurdish rural areas, a significant difference rendered the use of such comparison ineffective. The rural land in the northeast was scarce due to the geographical features of the area, and the lack of grain farming made even the wealthiest Black Sea villager subordinate to the external markets and instigated an early proletarianization. The cultivation of cash-crops like tea and nut did not begin in wide-scale before the 1950s, and with the onset of a demographic boom, thanks to the Kemalist health reforms, the increase in population made immigration the sole alternative to starvation.24 A discerning eye, and a mindful ear, can recognize a pattern in immigration stories. The first wave of Anatolian immigrants came from the higher altitudes of the Black Sea mountains where animal husbandry was the only source of livelihood. It is also interesting to note that, the first Anatolian immigrants came to Istanbul not from the Çağlar Keyder, “Türk Tarımında Küçük Meta Üretiminin Yerleşmesi,” 1988, 163–73; Boratav, Keyder, and Pamuk, Kriz, Gelir Dağılımı ve Türkiye’nin Alternatif Sorunu; Boratav, Tarımsal yapılar ve kapitalizm. 23 For the emergence of tea as a cash crop and its effects on the eastern Black Sea region, see,Ildiko BellérHann and Chris Hann, İki Buçuk Yaprak Çay: Doğu Karadeniz’de Devlet, Piyasa, Kimlik (İstanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 2003). For divergent histories of immigration of the Hemshin people from the eastern Black Sea region -which is well documented unlike other ethnic-cultural groups- see, Uğur Biryol, Gurbet Pastası: Hemşinliler, Göç ve Pastacılık (İstanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 2007); Hovann H. Simonian, The Hemshin: History, Society and Identity in the Highlands of Northeast Turkey (Routledge, 2007). 24 237 nearby villages and towns from across the Marmara Sea, but from the farthest regions in the country, from the mountainous northeast. First, the mountain villagers of Trabzon, Artvin, Rize, Ordu, Giresun, Samsun, and Sinop left their villages, then the ones from the seaside provinces joined in this vast exodus, and eventually, rural people from northern parts of Gümüşhane and Erzurum joined them. Today, more people whose descendants can be traced to these northern and northeastern areas live in Istanbul, than people in those very provinces they originated -with, perhaps, the exception of Trabzon and Samsun due to their urban development as the two main centers in the Black Sea region. Another observation that I have to underline is that none of these provinces, except Samsun and Erzurum’s provincial centers, had railroad access to the rest of the country. While, even the deep Kurdish heartland was connected to Ankara by the early 1930s –Siirt, Kurtalan and Van’s Iranian border were the terminus on that route, beyond Samsun, northeast Turkey was simply beyond the reach of government. A typical immigrant’s story of travel to Istanbul from their village in the northeast involved a day’s walk from the village to the shore –where all the roads pass- taking a horse-drawn car ride to Trabzon, or, Pazar in Rize, or Rize provincial center –another day- and then boarding a ship for a journey that would typically last five to seven days. The vessels they boarded –ships that provided transportation at least until the 1960s- were converted merchant ships, so hundreds had to fit into the steerage, and they would normally carry their own bedding –straw or cotton beds- and food for the duration of the voyage. It is understandable that the rough terrain of the Kaçkar Mountains precluded the railroad network’s extension to the northeastern Turkey, yet, under further consideration, the equally harsh terrain of the Kurdish provinces was no problem for construction activities. 238 A cursory look at the railroad network constructed during the Kemalist rule (1922-1950) reveals a politically, and definitely, not economically, motivated development agenda. The railroad network, much like the dams built in the last two decades, served the purpose of social control. The increase in Istanbul’s population in the 1940s made itself felt with an increase in the number of shacks already built in 1940: there were 1669 shacks in Istanbul at the time. After World War II the number of shacks almost doubled, reaching 3218 in March 1949.25 Today, it is widely accepted that the gecekondus were a product of the war years’ hardships.26 Research by Ruşen Keleş and Charles Hart gives a rough estimate of 10 persons per household in the gecekondus in the 1960s. It would not be an exaggeration if I claim that during Istanbul’s population increase after the war, between 1945 and 1950, eighty eight thousand people, at least one third, found a shelter in the first large-scale gecekondu settlement of Zeytinburnu, which was estimated to house a population of thirty thousand.27 The heavily controlled movement of rural population –who suffered heavily during the economic depression of the war - began to move into Istanbul. And this movement followed an urban upward mobility, the bachelor’s rooms were traded for sloppily built shacks or slum houses in the peripheries or in the collapsing core of the city, and transferred into a massive appropriation of urban land through waves of squatting that began in 1946. The surviving first and second generation immigrants’ life stories fulfill the 25 Tekeli, Türkiye’de yaşamda ve yazında konut sorununun gelişimi, 45. 26 Keleş, Kentlesme Politikasi (Urbanization Policy), 493. Ruşen Keleş, Urbanization in Turkey, Working Papers of the International Urbanization Survey (New York: Ford Foundation, 1971), 84; Charles W. M. Hart, Zeytinburnu Gecekondu Bölgesi, trans. Nephan Saran (Istanbul: İstanbul Ticaret Odasi, 1969). 27 239 description; they –or their fathers, or uncles- stayed in bachelors’ rooms, but once they brought their families to Istanbul, they moved into old houses, occupied by many other immigrant families, in Kazlıçeşme, or Mecidiyeköy. And the common argument dates the beginning of the squatter settlements to 1946. Interestingly, it did not begin as a result of the gradual chipping away of land by immigrants, but as an unexpected and sudden rush to enclose land. The earliest squatters had scarcely any money to begin building houses immediately, so instead, they had enclosed their chosen land with visible borders made of stones collected from the area. They began with shacks, bribed the municipal authorities heavily, and had to endure unannounced visits, threats, and occasional skirmishes with the authorities. The sudden start of the gecekondus in Zeytinburnu is explicable given the time-frame. Yes, the war years’ pent-up need for housing found an expression by the appropriation of public land, but, the first multi-party election held in 1946 must have played a role in the this unexpectedly swift movement-old Zeytinburnu residents told me that, in a matter of a few months, no land was left for further claimants.28 The first power cables reached the neighborhood around the same time, but it took at least another five years for electricity to reach gecekondus farther from the center of Zeytinburnu. A remarkably quiet encroachment took place in an interestingly short span of time. Similarly, on the other side of the Golden Horn, to the north of Şişli a new locus of gecekondu settlement was born by the end of the 1940s. The ruling party RPP’s mayor and governor of Istanbul, Lütfi Kırdar (1889-1961) who served from 1938 to 194929, Yet, bear in mind that the 1946 elections were neither free, nor fair and heavily tainted by irregularities, it was later known as the election in which voting was public, but counting of the votes was secret. 28 As a medical doctor specialized in opthalmology, he was the most important politician in Istanbul during the RPP rule. However, he switched sides in 1957 and served as a minister of Health in Menderes cabinet between 1957 and 1960. He was arrested after the May 27, 1960 coup, sent to Yassıada, and died of a heart attack there. 29 240 pointed out to the growth in the area with his words: A long time before the fashion of gecekondu began, a lot of that kind of shacks were built in Mecidiyeköyü. While we were trying to deal with the squatters who occupied public and private land for no good reason the gecekondus became a phenomenon…With that in mind though, previously some of the occupied land in Mecidiyeköy was cleared through legal means and by court orders. 30 In Lütfi Kırdar’s description in the late 1940s,other than Zeytinburnu and Mecidiyeköyü, a squatter settlement in Yıldız had already been built –most likely on the thin strip of land on a steep slope up the hill to the Yıldız Palace park and today’s Serencebey street, which was comparable in size to Mecidiyeköyü, 200 to 250 gecekondus. In Şişli, there was another settlement by the Hürriyet-i Ebediye Hill (the Hill of Eternal Liberty, adorned with the Statue of Liberty erected as a commemoration of the March 31 counter-revolution’s suppression), composed of 100 houses-in the valley between today’s Çağlayan and Bomonti. Other than these main loci of squatter settlements, there were roughly fifty gecekondus in Kasımpaşa, Eyüp, Fatih-Çarşamba, Karagümrük, and a further fifteen in Şehremini. On a much smaller scale and in a widely scattered form, gecekondus could be observed on the Golden Horn shores, in Ayvansaray, on the Marmara shores in Kumkapı, and on the Asian side in between Çamlıca and Paşabahçe-Beykoz.31 The most important amongst these squatter settlements was of course Zeytinburnu, and its residents were also the first to recognize the importance of being organized. In 1948, in a first of its kind, the Kazlıçeşme-Zeytinburnu Gecekondu 30 Tekeli, Türkiye’de yaşamda ve yazında konut sorununun gelişimi, 45. 31 Ibid. 241 Neighborhood Association was established and, using their own resources, the residents paved their own roads and opened up water wells.32 The newly appointed mayorgovernor of Istanbul, Fahrettin Kerim Gökay, made a visit to the mahalle in July 1950, and broke the news to the residents that new plans were being drawn up for the area, which had at the time 5000 gecekondus and a population of 35000 people. He also promised that none of the gecekondus would be torn down –though, gave an implicit ultimatum that no further squatting would be tolerated- and new power lines would be added to bring electricity to the 56 unconnected gecekondus, and the owners of the houses should pay for at least half of the cost of this extension.33 Rather than seeing it as another hefty expenditure for living in the gecekondus, the people of the neighborhood enthusiastically celebrated the news, since this was the first time they were seriously received by any state authority –other than the usual intimidations and pesky business of paying the municipal officers. Furthermore, the neighborhood was to be divided into three different mahalles, which meant at least three positions opened up for the politically talented as their district’s gatekeepers to political influence. Two bakeries and a local farmer’s market were additionally promised to be built by the municipality. Gökay kept his promise to the Zeytinburnu dwellers, and the residents began receiving their land titles for the first time in 1951. For years to come, primarily Zeytinburnu, then, Mecidiyeköy, Gültepe, Bomonti, Beykoz, the earliest and oldest gecekondu settlements of Istanbul, proved to be steadfast supporters of Adnan Menderes and his successor rightwing parties. 32 Ibid. 33 “Zeytinburnu’ndaki Gecekonduların İmarı,” Milliyet, July 9, 1950. 242 5.4 A Genealogical Look at the Origins of the Gecekondu References to gecekondu, which literally means “dropped-in-a-night,” can be spotted in the newspapers as early as the 1940s, though, there exists scarcely any consensus on the origin of the term. In the mid-1960s, the state finally conferred upon gecekondus a legal status, recognized them as a social fact, and drafted the Gecekondu Act. The law that passed in 1966 defined a gecekondu as a “structure built upon land that belonged to someone other than the builder himself and built without the landowner’s permission against the planning regulations and building code.” On the other hand, Kentbilim Terimleri Sözlüğü, (Dictionary of Urban Sciences) defined a gecekondu in even stricter terms than the law, its evasive of planning and building codes, but in addition to that, any building activity on public land is referred to a gecekondu. Though, the dictionary adds that, the state and municipal administrations’ inefficiencies led to the impoverished sections of society to adopt such shelters.34 The Turkish state’s dealings with the gecekondu has a rich and tedious history, once the Planning Law No. 6188 passed in parliament in 1953, it included some marginal regulations concerning the newly emerging gecekondus. At the time of its passing, the estimates suggested that there were 80,000 gecekondus in all of Turkey, and at the end of the decade that figure reached 240,000 in 1960. It was 1,5 million in 1983, 1,75 million in 1990, and reached its apogee in 2002 with 2,2 million gecekondus all over the country that housed more than 11 million people.35 The 1966 Gecekondu Law far from solving already debilitating issues at stake, was drafted to solve the legally 34 Keleş, Kentlesme Politikasi (Urbanization Policy), 493. 35 Ibid. 243 ambiguous situation for the then existing buildings, and provided a legal foothold –a formalized understanding that granted legal ownership rights to the gecekondus built up to that point. Yet, it contained no stipulations regarding possible future squatter settlements, and no foresight regarding the increasing population pressures growing upon Istanbul. The city at that point, had a population of 2.3 million, and given other industrial examples it was bound to grow and an already bloated real estate market or private housing development was no cure for the millions without basic right to shelter. The effort to legalize squatter settlements as ensconced in the Gecekondu Law was too little, too late. Unlike what the conventional view almost religiously professed vis-à-vis the liberalization of the 1950s, the greatest population explosion, both in real and proportional terms, took place right after the passage of the Gecekondu Act, between 1965 and 1970. From then on, Istanbul’s population doubled every fifteen years and reached a staggering 14.5 million today. After 1965, the city’s population began growing more than 150,000 each year. Meanwhile, the nation underwent through an experimental period, an unprecedented social, economic, and political transformation that had wide repercussions for the peoples of Turkey. Social scientists today define this era as the import-substituting industrialization period, even though there remains some questions regarding the exact time brackets it lasted. Some argued that it was the period between 1950 and 1980, and other argued that it can be more precisely described as the period between 1953 and 1977.36 36 Roger Owen and Şevket Pamuk, A History of Middle East Economies in the Twentieth Century (I.B.Tauris, 1998); Boratav, Keyder, and Pamuk, Kriz, Gelir Dağılımı ve Türkiye’nin Alternatif Sorunu; Keyder, State and Class in Turkey : A Study in Capitalist Development, 141–165. 244 Under the circumstances of national developmentalism, an unfulfilled appetite was born for more urban labor to feed into the newly established factories, especially in the western parts of the country. For the first time in Turkish history industrial manufacturing played the role of the driving force, and this culminated in never before seen rates of economic growth. Concurrently, urban population has grown at least two times, and sporadically three times more than the overall population growth. People flocked to the city in droves, while the countryside was going through its last spell of breath –which without any question contributed greatly to the push factor decisive in people’s immigration- but the pull factor was almost irresistibly alluring. Electricity, public schools, health services, job opportunities, monetary income, relative gender equality, and the breaking free from the grips of the patriarchal system, were some, but not all of the perks of living in a city. However, the pace of housing production could not keep up with population growth in all of Turkey, construction permits for houses and apartment buildings did not exceed 60,000, even given the extended household sizes prevalent in classical Turkish families –the average household size was five for a long time- it was a mere pittance.37 The annual production of housing units in all of Turkey would barely suffice for the need in Istanbul. And, what is more striking is the fact that the shortages in housing provision had been an acute problem since the earliest years of the new Turkish republic. In Istanbul, from 1927 to 1948, annual housing units constructed did not exceed 2000, and even in an optimal estimation, this was not enough to shelter the natural population Source: TURKSTAT census data and Tekeli, Development of the Istanbul Metropolitan Area, 132-4. The construction industry did not really show any interest in development until the passage of the Condominium Ownership Act in 1965. 37 245 growth of the city, barring immigration from the calculation.38 Houses and Apartment Building Construction Permits in Istanbul 1926‐1950 1200 1000 800 600 400 200 0 Houses Apartment Buildings Figure 5.1: Construction permits for new housing units in Istanbul 1926-195039 Construction Permits for Housing Units in Istanbul 1954‐ 1965 20000 15000 10000 5000 0 Houses Apartment Buildings Total Housing Units Figure 5.2: Construction Permits for Housing Units in Istanbul, 1954-196540 38 Source: TURKSTAT census data and Tekeli, Development of the Istanbul Metropolitan Area, 132-4. 39 Source: Tekeli, Development of the Istanbul Metropolitan Area, 132. 40 Source: Ibid., 134. 246 Year Population Annual Average Growth 1927 1935 1940 1945 1950 1955 1960 1965 1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 2000 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 1,19% 2,44% 1,76% 1,63% 6,30% 4,54% 4,38% 6,32% 5,87% 4,29% 4,64% 5,02% 3,71% 3,64% 0,98% 1,72% 1,59% 3,84% 1,69% - 806.863 883.599 991.237 1.078.399 1.166.477 1.533.822 1.882.092 2.293.823 3.019.032 3.904.588 4.741.890 5.842.985 7.309.190 10.018.735 12.573.836 12.697.164 12.915.158 13.120.596 13.624.240 13.854.740 Table 5.1: Istanbul Population and Annual Average Growth41 Thus, the filling of the gap in housing provision with gecekondus is neither surprising, nor an abnormal situation. Human beings need shelter, if those shelters are not built via market mechanisms, or through state intervention in the built environment, then they would take matters at hand and embark upon self-housing. The emergence of the gecekondu, the massive appropriation of public urban land by the impoverished sections of the society, the quiet encroachment of the plebeian classes, however you’d choose to call them, is not interesting, neither anomalous. Yes, it is an apparent and blunt response 41 Source: TURKSTAT census data. 247 to the evident governmental inefficiency, a response that was truly organized by the grassroots in a silent, but resilient way to overcome the incompetency of the impotent state apparatuses. But, why had the Kemalist republic, a state machinery deeply enamored in its visionary imagined future for molding a new society, fail terribly in at least bringing a partial solution to the housing problem? Andy Merrifield wrote that first the Soviet Union, and later the Maoist PRC, had an acute disregard, a thinly disguised animosity towards everything that is urban and described how they explained their distance to urbanism through Marx and Engels’ – highly vulgarized- earlier texts.42 Especially in the last decade the proximity between the Nazi and Fascist regimes of the 1930s and ‘40s’ Germany and Italy and the RPP of the era drew ample interest, and a plethora of different consents were manufactured via newspaper columns, TV shows, etc. The overwhelming influence of European fascism had undeniably piqued the Turkish power elites’ attention, they had definitely engaged in racist and white-supremacist state-fetishisms, totalitarianism as a fantasy. Yet, the realization of their urban programs, or the mental idealization of urbanization significantly differed from those examples, as their urban imagination had nothing to do with Hitler’s Germania, Mussolini’s grotesque grandiosity of ersatz neo-classicism, a reinvention of Rome.43 Instead, the RPP elite, the decision-makers, the ideologists of the revolution, had followed a credo Stalin widely employed in the Soviet Union: the countrymen stay in the country, the urbanites stay in the city; no mixing is allowed, and Andy Merrifield, Metromarxism ; a Marxist Tale of the City (New York: Routledge, 2002); A definite read on the issue is, an early Marxist architects exposé of Stalinist treatment of urban space, see, Karel Teige, The Minimum Dwelling: L’Habitation Minimum = Die Kleinstwohnung : The Housing Crisis, Housing Reform, trans. Eric Dluhosch (MIT Press, 2002), 144–157. 42 43 Dovey, Framing Places. 248 the only way to overcome the urban-rural dialectic is to turn the city into nothing more than a control center for the vanguards, for the party apparatchik, and to transform the whole countryside into a huge industrial complex complete with industrialization of agriculture and a manufacturing establishment built far away from the existing citiesfurther away from the corruptive influences of the old metropolitan areas. This was certainly an anachronism, an attempt in turning back time, a misunderstanding of the internal characteristics of the industrialization of capitalist accumulation, and worse, a misrepresentation of Marx and Engels’ theories. Yet, the RPP elite seemed to enthusiastically embrace the idea, as the Village Institutes (Teachers’ Schools that attempted to educate the masses in the villages), Halkevleri (which replaced the Türk Ocakları, as the local organizations for the party), and tried to replicate the CPSU model of Pioneers, Komsomols, etc. The dissecting of the city from the countryside, given the already existing distance between the center and periphery –which was an integral element of classical Ottoman social stratification- contributed massively to the alienation of the two sides from each other and fed unto the mutual distrust between the two nations. It was an overblown idealism, an imagination that lacked solid foundations, not a single example had there been in world history that industrialized without extensive urbanization. The Sovietic response to urbanism –or, rather, the prevailing anti-urbanismfound easy appeal amidst the Kemalist intelligentsia, and until the late 1980s, the idealized mental construct of the cities determined most of the intellectual perceptions regarding the gecekondus. However, the parallels between the Soviet and Turkish governmentalities were limited. While the Soviets sought for the abolition of the city for the sake of an absolute ruralization of the whole country, the Turkish power elite was 249 much more ambivalent in its stratagem. They were never much in favor of the peasants, and had a profound distaste regarding their cultural habits and instead of lengthy applauds for the rural society they held onto a glorified Turkish man –which was a mere aphorism- that was moralistic, militaristic, and unabashedly obedient. In a sense, they succeeded in partly instilling these characteristics into the hegemonic discursive tool of surviving Turkish nationalism. The gecekondus –and increasingly the Kurds after the 1980s, or the urban Kurds of the gecekondus in the last two decades- though, presented a crucial hurdle along the way of building a homogeneous society. City % of Squatter Houses in total Housing Stock Ankara Istanbul Izmir Adana Bursa 65 40 25 59 22 Table 5.2: Squatter Houses in Important Turkish Cities44 % of Inhabitants of the squatter houses in the total urban population 65 45 35 45 25 However, as soon as the Gecekondu Law passed, it was nullified by the ebb and flow of the incessant waves of population growth. Not only did it preclude the newcomers from building their own houses on public land, but also the frequent passing of building and planning amnesties in parliament helped them flourish without any real threats. İlhan Tekeli, from the beginning of its implementation, saw the Gecekondu Law as an experimental take by a novice tailor on the fabric of the city: “If we replace the words housing with “clothing”, reformation with “patching”, demolition with “nakedness”, prevention with “re-clothing” [in the writing of the law], we can arrive at a 44 Keleş, Urbanization in Turkey, 122. 250 “mutatis mutandis” reading of that legislation in a very interesting way.”45 He was right, though with one crucial caveat, the tailor was the people of the gecekondu and, indeed, the clothing was tried on the government. The squat homes were demolished many times, and rebuilt again, without respite, for decades. The first demolitions started in the 1940s, and in one way or another, the haphazard attempts in razing the gecekondus extended to the late 1990s - by Municipal officials, work crews, trucks, and bulldozers. The title holders tried to retain the use of their land for decades in endless court procedures –and more often than not, they failed. From the 1970s on, first the socialist political movements, and then, the nationalist extreme right-wing attempted –and some succeeded to a certain extent- to establish their own rule and control over these districts. In the 1980s, their control turned into racketeering, and extortion, money was provided in return for keeping the homes safe, land squatted, authorities away, and it particularly helped further land –especially, forests- appropriated for settlement. In 1966, the first socialist party to be represented in the Turkish parliament, the Labor Party (of Turkey) proposed that not only public land, but also land that belonged to private persons should be taken under the purview of the legislation. Behice Boran, the legendary sociologist –who was kicked out of the academia during the 1942 purges- who turned out to be one of the leaders of the party, stated that the losses of the private persons should be paid for out of the state budget. It is a travesty of historical and political fate that, both the Justice Party (Adalet Partisi, the successor to Menderes’ Democratic Party) and the RPP vehemently opposed her proposal as they were the İlhan Tekeli, Konut sorununu konut sunum biçimleriyle düşünmek (Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayınları, 2010), 26. 45 251 primary beneficiaries and benefactors of gecekondu population’s enfranchisement as urban citizens in the next three decades. Although they scarcely had any commonalities at the time, they converged in wholeheartedly hanging onto the right of private property. A deputy from the ruling party (JP) argued that, “justice is the foundation of [private] property.”46 And, voiced his opinion that the state could in no way be an accessory to the expropriation of private property.47 The Gecekondu Law remained as legislation in name only, as a de jure arrangement, which held no real effect on the housing provision in Istanbul and other growing cities. Once the state let the flood gates of urban land appropriation open to development of any sorts in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the gecekondu neighborhoods became the de facto resources of land that were subject to the boundless developmental imaginations of the state and municipal enterprises –TOKİ and KİPTAŞ in Istanbul- and private capitalists. Yet, the dual perception regarding the gecekondus continued, they were legally absent, but empirically, socially, and economically there for the taking. The situation could only be grasped by the ones who were well-versed in the ways of Turkish state-space imagination: the ambiguity surrounding the social fact. A social fact can only exist as far as the state permits it, to the extent that the state turns a blind eye, overlooks the indelible existence of social reality, it can persist in a being that is dominated by There is a wordplay here, though, not beknownst to every Turkish speaker, the dictum is “adalet mülkün temelidir.” Mülk, here denotes the state-not property. A borrowed word from Arabic, mülk meant, primarily the state, the territory, though this was valid before the coming of private property in the 19th century. After that point, mülk conjointly meant land that was privately held. It is still writ large on every courtroom, though, and no longer refers to the state in public mind, but to property. 46 It is quite interesting to note that, all three parties with deep contention against each other unified for the protection of private property: İsmail Hakkı Boyacıoğlu, (AP-Burdur), Nihat Diler (YTP-Erzurum), and Arif Ertunga (CHP-İzmir) all wholeheartedly criticized Boran. Millet Meclisi, “Birleşim 107” (TBMM, July 8, 1966), 537–541. 47 252 nothingness - exists, but invisible. There, but away. Solid, but can willfully vanish the next day.48 At the ruptures of this dual existence was born what I can describe as a peculiarly Turkish socialism, a popular movement that was not indebted to the state –for the first time in history- but also, not seen by the state, as well. In the late 1960s and throughout the ‘70s the Turkish socialists skilfully maneuvered this ambiguous existence of Istanbul’s urban identity. They excelled in being erudite Istanbulites –hence, the leading intellectual cadres of the country, themselves coming from the most privileged familiesand being comfortable as the vanguard cadres of the working classes-though, their mental labor had to find other vessels to galvanize a mass movement. This was largely done through the novels of Yaşar Kemal, a poor writer coming from a rural background, who wrote an immensely successful and brilliant series of Memed, My Hawk as a glorification of armed rebellion against unjust feudal lords. On another level, this was done by Yılmaz Güney’s formidable screen persona, the “ugly king” of the Turkish cinema -which was going through a golden age, tens, at times close to two hundred movies a year, second only to Hollywood, and better suited than Bollywood to be the next locus of exporting of screen stories. Güney began with spaghetti westerns and genre noirs, where he played the good guy who happened to beat the bad guys. He was seen as the hero of the ordinary man, was not particularly handsome, and not really different from the other guy on the street. He was a heavy drinker, chain-smoker, gun-loving, womanizer, and famous for his machismo, and he had a strong affinity with the working classes. He was first sent to prison for aiding and abetting the revolutionary leftist youth after the March 12, 1971 48 Tekeli, Konut sorununu konut sunum biçimleriyle düşünmek, 30. 253 coup and served two years. In 1974, in a bar fight, he shot and killed a state judge and was sentenced to 19 years’ prison. While he was serving time, his cinematic language and his intellectual interpretation changed considerably and his socialist realism began with Arkadaş in 1974, continued with award winning films, Yol, Sürü, and Duvar. Although he escaped from prison in 1981, he died of cancer as a fugitive in France. After Yaşar Kemal, and perhaps more of an impact on the masses, Güney was the first person to transfer socialist ideals to everyday perceptions and represented the political consciousness of the working classes in the gecekondus.49 In music, a similar, but lesser attenuated interest in social inequality, found its expression in a new form called arabesque. Amidst the constant threat of demolitions, rampant discrimination, poverty, and exclusion Orhan Gencebay voiced the first arabesque tunes. Born in the minibuses that served gecekondus –the city buses did not begin service in the peripheries for some time, which gave rise to a new entrepreneurial class that provided public transportation- it was not as stale as classical Turkish music or, monotonously reminding of the rural past as the folk music was at the time, a truly popular music was born. The lyrics were pessimistic, almost fatalistic, but contained a grain of rebellion against the unjust system. Gencebay fortified his new-found fame with It is pertinent to note that, until the 1960s, under the heavy and almost suffocating grip of the Cold War international political scene, it was anathema to publicly espouse socialism in Turkey. The loosening of censorship restrictions, and the relative toleration provided by a strengthened the judiciary thanks to the 1961 constitution’s emphasis on the separation of powers, led to an explosion of interest in socialist literature, most prominently Nazım Hikmet’s poetry –which was banned until the 1960s, and unpublished in Turkey.Until 1991, the mention of class warfare and the political struggle of working classes was punishable by articles 141 and 142 of the Turkish penal code. These articles, stipulated that, any member of a socialist or communist organization –i.e. an organization defending a particular class’ domination of other classes- is punishable from 8 to 15 years in prison, and anyone disseminating socialist propaganda is punishable from 5 to 10 years. The leadership of these organizations was punishable by death. Thousands served time as political prisoners until these articles were replaced by a specialized law on terrorism, which of course, exacerbated the situation that led to thousands more to be incarcerated. The counterpart to these articles against socialist politics was article no. 163, that forbade Islamism as a political ideology. 49 254 a series of movies shot as backdrops to his songs and which found millions of viewers at a time when television broadcast was a privilege of the upper middle-classes- Turkish television broadcast did not begin until late 1971, and throughout the ‘70s and early ‘80s it was not commonplace.50 Türkan Şoray, the undisputed queen of Turkish cinema, the Turkish Catherine Deneuve, continued to hone her extraordinary talents in filmmaking, and directed two movies, Dönüş (1972) and Azap (1973), the former telling of the agonies of a village mother whose husband went to Germany as an immigrant worker-and returned with a German mistress- and the latter detailing again, another mother’s heartbreaking travel from her village to the big city to find a cure for her child. Her portrayal of a widow in a gecekondu neighborhood in Sultan (1978) was emblematic of the time’s cultural reorientation towards the gecekondus and was one of the first that showed a truer account of the urban underclass life. Sultan’s story, produced by legendary filmmaker Ertem Eğilmez and written by Yavuz Turgul, was built around the demolition of the gecekondus for the construction of apartment buildings and brilliantly tapped into the social anxieties of the ‘70s, when gecekondus were rapidly devoured by developers while the residents themselves were becoming an integral part of social struggles thanks to the emergent socialist movement. The defining cinematic representation of the gecekondus and the endless anxieties surrounding real estate developers’ creeping entry into those mahalles came in 1988, with Zeki Ökten’s film Düttürü Dünya.51 The film starred the comedic Meral Özbek, Popüler Kültür ve Orhan Gencebay, 11. Baskı (İstanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 2013); Martin Stokes, Türkiye’de Arabesk Olayı (İstanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 1998). 50 Zeki Ökten was once a close friend of Yılmaz Güney, and while Güney was in prison, shot his seminal script, Sürü (1978), on his behalf. There still exists some questions regarding the true artistic ownership of the film. 51 255 genius Kemal Sunal in a hitherto unseen dramatic turn, in which he played a poor musician, scraping by on his measly earnings as a clarinet player in the seedy night clubs of Ankara. His gecekondu is sold to a developer by his brother-in-law, who also employed him as a street-peddler. The developer asked for him to immediately move, and with his gecekondu soon to be torn down in the last ten minutes of the film, he plays his clarinet on the streets, defiant against the unjust world. During the convalescing of popular cultural representations around the social reality of the gecekondus, public intellectuals and academia stood impervious to such an amazing cornucopia of musical, visual, and artistic forms. The spontaneity in the building of a new set of symbols, largely devoid of the Kemalist regime’s strictly defined tracks of progress, was barely registered by the social scientists of the era. Instead of rationalizing, investigating, leaving aside the simple task of the social scientist as defined by Weber- an understanding, a crucial distance was taken to this unprecedented and unexpected phenomena. The argumentum ad hominem –as the worst kind of logical fallacy- was replaced by argumentum ad arabesqum, wherein the arabesque music was perceived as the culprit and embodiment of everything corrupt, immature, and underdeveloped about the gecekondus and the Turkish working classes. Contrary to what Karpat suggested,52 the gecekondu dweller was seen as not ripe enough for the adaption of urban values, and they were instead presenting grave challenges to the pristine and refined urban culture, imagined to be the caliban, the undeserving poor, the never-growing unruly kid. Nothing could be further from the truth. 52 Kemal H. Karpat, The Gecekondu : Rural Migration and Urbanization (Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976); Kemal Haşim Karpat, Türkiyede Toplumsal Dönüsüm (Imge Kitabevi Yayinlari, 2003), 332–3. 256 In the Dickensian tale of the two cities, the two classes had at least touched each other at different points in their lives. Here, in Istanbul, a habitual ostracism, an endogamy of the classes became the rule for the coordination of everyday lives. The favorite of the Cannes Film Festival, Turkish filmmaker Zeki Demirkubuz’s first movie, C-Block (1994) was a frontal assault on this idea of social segregation. A woman from a middle-class apartment building complex. Shot in the then fancy gated blocks of Ataköy that instills a dreary aesthetic of reinforced concrete, she sleeps with a poor, young boy – the boyfriend of her housekeeper- and shatters this mold to pieces. Soon after, new terms pervasively took over public discourse, and the middle-class Istanbulites wholeheartedly accepted the term “White Turks” to delineate their cultural and social refinement compared to other, ordinary, even “Black Turks.” During my two years of field research, cross-cutting the class boundaries between Nişantaşı and the rest of Istanbul, the term “White Turk” surfaced again and again. At first, I thought, the phrase was employed by these college-educated, some even PhDs, socially liberal, secular persons as a tongue-incheek reference to the inanity of the term. Instead, apparently the Whiteness was some exalted, idealized imagination of the embourgeoisement in the eyes of the upwardly mobile class segment. They were nowhere near to be a genuine part of the bourgeoisie – apparently, they were not aware of the fact- though, they equated themselves as the chosen few, the blessed minority, the true Istanbulites with taste, culture, and style. For the same people, the others, the Blacks were the ones who lived or came from the gecekondus. They actually came up with a new adjective from the 1990s infamously idiotic, disgustingly racist term: varoş.53 Varoş defined the style, the crude, Varoş comes from the Hungarian term, varos-which literally meant, neighborhood in Hungarian, where the central Budapest districts were known as belvaros. The linguistic root might be var, which means castle 53 257 underdeveloped, distasteful, ugly, extravagant, nouveau riche, uncultured, unrefined, and almost without exception, being Kurdish.54 I will not claim that such an excessively hostile perception is the making of Turkish intellectuals, but their adamant belief in portraying Istanbul’s history as a fall from heavens contributed greatly to form a racialized other who lived in the gecekondus. No need to reiterate, but the term varoş is still predominantly employed and facilitated in scholarly publications by Turkish social scientists. Given the social scientific indifference to the actual development of the gecekondus, this is adding insult to injury. Turgut Cansever, the preeminent Islamist architecture and urbanist, would voice an objection. Interestingly, Cansever was an unabashed critique of the gecekondus and he did not hesitate to lament their intrusion into the urban fabric: “once every family had a house in 1925; by 1960, half of the city’s people were without a home. Gecekondus surrounded the city as the most important urban issue and as a source of embarrassment for the [entire] community.”55 He argued that these gecekondus were the products of real estate speculation and the harm they caused led to the severing of the ties between the city and culture and civilization.56 At another point, as a product of the same intellectual mold with Falih Rıfkı Atay, Cansever raised the “frauds” claim: “We should cut the ‘my in Hungarian, and apparently followed, Pirenne and Weber’s idea that the city emanated from the castlelike structure. Unfortunately, nobody appears to know how the term entered Turkish suddenly in the mid 1990s,- a mistake in translation, a newspaper editor’s previous touristic visit to Budapest, an opinion columnists own invention, it is not known. Nevertheless, it is striking that, “varoş” in Turkish, almost completely follows “ghetto” as a mental map for the affluent classes; yet, while ghetto is appropriated as a defense mechanism by the underprivileged in the American context, I observed no one using “varoş” in a similar manner. 54 55 Cansever, İstanbul’u anlamak, 170. 56 Ibid. 258 citizens, my society, poor human beings’ crap. Those who come to Istanbul not for residency, but for looting the city should be stopped in their tracks.”57 Treating the gecekondus as less than a house, counting their dwellers as the actors of looting, and going as far as claiming them to be an embarrassment, makes his arguments actually troublesome, highly problematic, yet, once again, representative of the prevailing state-space logic of the era. Interestingly enough, even Sedad Hakkı Eldem tried to come up with a preliminary in-situ urban renewal project, and attempted to develop architectural sketches applicable to the gecekondus.58 Yet, Cansever rooted for gentrification from the outset, and barely paid any attention to the conditions that made gecekondus. In a short tract, possibly written in the 1970s, he suggested a program of urban renewal, a gentrification in the Prince Island which would eliminate the unsightly shacks and buildings -he coined the term, efendileşme as a Turkish equivalent of gentrification.59 He had an utter spite against one of the biggest gecekondu settlements on the Asian side of the city, and in an interview he said that as a republican making of the urban space, “Fikirtepe has nothing to do with fikir (thought).”60 Cansever’s urban imagination is attuned to a city without the gecekondu, without any doubt, his idealized Islamic city has no space for the poor, the unfortunate, and the rootless. It is rather a 57 Ibid., 126. 58 Uğur Tanyeli, Sedad Hakkı Eldem (İstanbul: Boyut, 2001). Efendi means master in Turkish, however, this refers to its secondary meaning, used for someone with venerable high morals. Possibly, he took his clue from the root of gentrification, the gentry and effendi can correspond to each other. But, gentrification and efendileşme does not. Cansever, İstanbul’u anlamak, 87. 59 One of the earliest public distributions of land, instigated by the republican power elite, Fikirtepe soon turned into a vast gecekondu settlement. Fikir means, thought or intellect in Turkish, and tepe means hill. I could not find any information on why the area was called Thought-hill, but, sounds familiar to earlier republican toponymy. Ibid., 337. 60 259 fetishized, a-historically frozen, anachronistically built fantasy that is doomed to hüzün and tristesse altogether. İlhan Tekeli, on the other hand, did not call the state to action for a surgical removal of the squatter settlements by the hands of the state. In his view, the gecekondu issue was rather the statement of the obvious. The housing problem rather extended into an urban cultural struggle due to the deferred urbanization of the gecekondu residents. His observations at the time led him to suggest that not even the second generation immigrants had been adapting to urban culture. His definition of the notion of an “urban culture” is definitely borrowed from Louis Wirth, a normative description of the urban way of life. Tekeli was moderate in his treatment of the gecekondu problem. His was a genuine surprise in the way that this population who heavily harnessed urban opportunities to better themselves and found novel ways to express their interests in urban politics had nevertheless, showed resistance to the adaption of urban culture. He gave the clear example of the arabesque music for this resistance. Arabesque music gave the in-between, neither urban, nor rural masses, a new form of expression as new urbanites to fully articulate their ideology, as well as make use of the market economy.61 These new urbanites not only built a hugely successful economy around this in-between identity, but they also set the tone of the national dialogue in the years of political oppression. Today, the popular forms of arabesque music are as Turkish as the apple pie is American, thanks to the gecekondus. The center of the Turkish social formation, cultural patterns, and economic relationships was built by the gecekondus. In order to understand the Turkish urban condition in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, one has to 61 Tekeli, Modernizm, modernite ve Türkiye’nin kent planlama tarihi, 122. 260 grasp their circumstances. Since, the gecekondus themselves harbor the most illustrious, oft-sought, seldom found, social agency imputed to an imagined middle class, they themselves are the ones who formed the middle ground in Turkey and Istanbul. Before moving on, though, a few myths regarding the gecekondus need to be debunked. Urban and Rural Population in Turkey 70000000 60000000 50000000 40000000 30000000 20000000 10000000 0 1965 1970 1975 1980 1985 Köy 1990 2000 2007 2011 Şehir Table 5.3: Turkish Urban and Rural Populations62 5.5 Theses on the Rise and Fall of the Gecekondus In this part, we will discuss how the gecekondu played the role of an urban growth machine. To be able to do that, a couple of corrections to the commonplace misunderstandings of Istanbul’s urbanization in the 20th century is in order. Otherwise, the discussion would succumb to an already stale and economically determinist, politically selective parameter of a failed state-making and liberalization of national markets argument. A majority of explanations in that regard strongly echoes the Census Data, TURKSTAT, “Genel Nüfus Sayımları,” Genel Nüfus Sayımları, accessed January 20, 2014, http://www.tuik.gov.tr/PreTablo.do?alt_id=1047. 62 261 governmental sentiment voiced by one RPP mayor-governor of the 1940s, that once the populace rushed to the beaches, citizens had left no place to join the sea –the relations between the newcomers and the already existing urban middle classes were not a zerosum game. There are two problems with such an explanation. First, it makes it impossible for social scientists to distance themselves from the adopted dogma. Second, it relegates political-economy as an afterthought to a deeper cultural struggle between Kemalist seculars and the Islamist right-wingers. As I mentioned above, a thorough study of the Turkish Ideology necessitates a much lengthier analysis, which I will not embark upon at this moment. However, the exact numbers regarding the gecekondus tell us a great deal about when and how they started and through what geographical patterns they proliferated in Istanbul. First, gecekondus are not the making of the relative liberalization of Turkish economy that took place between 1950 and 1960. The claim that they were solely a product of that period’s decisions overlooks the longer trend of Turkey’s industrialization. The Gecekondu as a social phenomenon was the direct result of a concentration of the working classes in the cities, whether that industrialization was done under the premise of comprador-bourgeoisie or by means of monopoly state capitalism is not really relevant to the question at stake here. What really matters is the fact that Turkish urbanization was no different than the Western urbanization models triggered by capital accumulation. Yet, it was only in around 1983 that the urban population surpassed rural population in Turkey. The gradual, fairly slow expansion of urban population was driven by industrialization that began to pass the rates of agricultural and services sectors only in 262 1955. So, the verbatim formula that suggested massive urban growth happened in the vicious decade of the Democrat Party rule is not only wrong, but also downplays the late blossoming of industrial development in Turkey. Turkey became a majority urbanized social formation only in the mid- 1980s, and its arduous travails in industrialization showed its truer side only in the second half of the 1950s. Of course, it is a matter of quarrelsome polemics whether industrial capital brought the workers into the cities, or the reserve army of labor found easily in the cities helped grease the machines of capitalist accumulation –though, my bet is on the former claim- but so far, I have tried to explain that the peasants migrated en masse to find jobs at industrial enterprises. A cursory glance at the tables below, would point out that the population growth in Istanbul and the development of the industrial sector which was organized around Istanbul as its focus strongly correlated. In essence, gecekondu construction and squatting activities expanded significantly during the longest period of prosperity the country had undergone until the 2000s. The period between 1963 and 1977 was the golden age of import-substituting national developmentalism in Turkey.63 Only with the abrupt break with that model triggered by a creeping junta –modelled after Augusto Pinochet’s experiments in Austrian economics in Chile- had the model changed. Only after Turgut Özal’s election as the Prime Minister in 1983 and his purported shock therapy and the ensuing rise of the robber barons had the economic growth engine restarted anew. Owen and Pamuk, A History of Middle East Economies in the Twentieth Century; Keyder, State and Class in Turkey : A Study in Capitalist Development. 63 263 Annual GNP Growth Rate and Average Growth Trend 40,0 30,0 20,0 10,0 ‐10,0 1924 1927 1930 1933 1936 1939 1942 1945 1948 1951 1954 1957 1960 1963 1966 1969* 1972 1975 1978 1981 1984 1987 1990 1993 1996 1999 2002 2005 0,0 ‐20,0 Annual GNP Growth Rate SOURCE: DPT 5 per. Mov. Avg. (Annual GNP Growth Rate) Figure 5.3: Annual GNP Growth Rate of Turkey 1924-200564 Growth of Economic Sectors 5‐year Averages 1929‐2005 20,0 15,0 10,0 5,0 2004 2001 1998 1995 1992 1989 1986 1983 1980 1977 1974 1971 1968 1965 1962 1959 1956 1953 1950 1947 1944 1941 1938 1935 1932 ‐5,0 1929 0,0 ‐10,0 Agriculture Industry Services Figure 5.4: Average Growth of Economic Sectors Figures 5.3 and 5.4 are compiled from www.kalkinma.gov.tr economic statistics. In figure 5.4 the second line indicates the 5-year moving average. 64 264 Annual Average Growth of Istanbul Population 7,00% 6,00% 5,00% 4,00% 3,00% 2,00% 1,00% 0,00% 1935194019451950195519601965197019751980198519902000200720082009201020112012 Figure 5.5: Annual Average Growth of Istanbul Population65 Compiled from TURKSTAT census data. The spike in 2011 should be disregarded, since it was probably a one-time correction of population figures due to the change in the census data collection. From 2007 onwards, the Turkish population census model was changed, however, the newly established residential-based population registration was not fully enforced until basic civic functions like voter registration, motor vehicle registration, land and real estate title databases were connected to this database 65 265 Istanbul Pop. Distribution 2013 Place of Registration Gaziantep 2% Kayseri 2% Kırıkkale 2% Others 10% Istanbul 16% Şanlıurfa 2% Zonguldak 2% Kocaeli 2% Tekirdağ 2% Trabzon 14% Van 4% Mardin 4% Samsun 9% Sivas 5% Malatya 5% Ağrı 5% Erzurum 6% Kastamonu 8% Figure 5.6: Distribution of Istanbul’s Population according to the Paternal Registration66 The most important element in Turkey’s state-making capabilities in the formation of the urban space is withdrawal. The state had almost retreated from the building of urban spaces with the sole exception of the period between 1955 and 1960. No other industrialized nation had attempted such a vapid withdrawal from the built environment, no other case presented such disregard for the housing of the working classes, and in no other example the supply of urban land was so willingly, in an uncannily deliberate way, limited by the central government, while that government 66 Compiled from TURKSTAT census data. The regions refer to TURKSTAT’s definition of IBB2 levels. 266 controlled an overwhelming proportion of the available land. As recent as the 1980s, in Western Europe and the USA, a crucial part of the housing supply was provided by the state or municipally undertaken social housing projects. Michael Harloe discussed in detail how the three different forms of housing define the post-war building of socialdemocratic and/or liberal welfare states in these two different regions. The three forms of housing tenure were: socially rented housing, which were either rent controlled, or rented by the state or municipal authorities outside of market relations, privately rented housing, and owner-occupied housing. In the early 1980s, right before the great onslaught of neoliberalism, social housing consisted one third of housing stock in Britain, forty per cent in Holland, almost one fifth in Denmark and Germany, and a little more than ten percent in France.67 Even a sliver of this analysis would tell someone working on Turkey’s housing problem a glaring fact: the apparent lack of social housing. 68 Brazil and Mexico –the closest examples to Turkey as similar models of underdevelopment and late industrializing countries- had dabbled in social housing to quell the restive militancy of urban populations. The Brazilian government built a gigantic capital city complete with housing for the middle class officials of the state, and Mexico had controlled the Michael Harloe, “The Changing Role of Social Rented Housing,” in Housing and Social Change in Europe and the USA, ed. Michael Ball, Michael Harloe, and Maartje Martens (London; New York: Routledge, 1988), 42–48. 67 The comparison between Turkey and the west is without any doubt quite interesting, and provides cues to grasp the expansion of housing supply through private market mechanisms. Social housing, up until 1980s, had been the primary means to provide shelter for the urban working classes, coupled with an uprecedented rise in welfare levels. This meant, urban settlements were safely guarded against the whim of market speculation. See, Michael Ball, Michael Harloe, and Maartje Martens, Housing and Social Change in Europe and the USA (London; New York: Routledge, 1988); Harloe, “The Changing Role of Social Rented Housing”; Ball, “The Development of Capitalism in Housing Provision”; John Burnett, A Social History of Housing, 1815-1985, vol. 2nd (London ; New York: Methuen, 1986). Even an apparently market-oriented housing regulator like the HUD in the USA, have provided plenty of housing –in comparison to the Turkish state- for the impoverished inner city neighborhoods. See, Harloe, “The Changing Role of Social Rented Housing,” 59. 68 267 land supply, while the Turkish state’s efforts seems to be trickle in the pond-housing for state employees, mostly for the soldiers and police, a few for the teachers, and nothing else. The gecekondu was a result, not a cause in the gross expansion of Istanbul, and this fact was undervalued for long. The newly immigrated working class, appalled by the despicable conditions of sheltering took initiative themselves and built their own homes.69 And, meanwhile, their massive appropriation of urban land led to some unintended consequences of a further redistribution in the Turkish economy, but they had to wait at least a few decades to reap what they had sown. Gecekondu building was a slick maneuver in terms of the working classes’ claim to the right to the city. Eventually, that claim became more than a right to the city, but it also turned into a right to a share of the windfall in capital accumulation instigated by the investments in the built environment–an unplanned, uncontrolled, gradually, and then, suddenly moving rhythm of economic redistribution. That provided a springboard for the dispossessed masses to gain a foothold in the city –that’s also why so many stayed and didn’t returned back to their ancestral homes, although they wanted to. It helped Istanbul gain a stable population, unlike other metropolitan centers in the world- the ones who moved in, stayed forever, never left, never to be replaced by another, cheaper reserve army of labor –since, as workers, they had the minimal dwelling to pursue their interests in the city. The permanence of settlement and the relative equality in the appropriation of urban land helped make Istanbul a crucial amalgam of ethnicities, cultures, and beliefs with a sizable middle class population. For instance, when Hart conducted his research in 69 Tanyeli draws attention to the fact that the gecekondu construction brought self-made housing back to Istanbul after more than a five- decade hiatus, especially after the devastation of wooden houses in the intra muros. See, Tanyeli, İstanbul 1900-2000, 130. 268 Zeytinburnu in the early 1960s, he reported that there were 3812 families in the area who were the owners –mostly without legitimate titles- of their own homes. First, the 1970s and ‘80s yapsat wave of developments and later, the state-induced TOKI and KIPTAŞ urban renewal projects led to a tremendous real estate speculation in the area. This urban transformation, the cooptation of the periphery, ended up in creating thousands of landlords, rentiers, and, eventually its own middle class out of those 3812 households. A moderate guess would suggest that each of those 3812 families had the fortune to own 10 apartments each on average –and this indicates that each family had only one parcel of land, and around 20 apartments were in each building, again, an estimate on the lower side of the spectrum, and they signed their contracts with the developers on the basis of half of the apartments, a perennially going rate in such developments. Then, this would amount to 38120 apartments, which is in line with the overall population of the sub-province of Zeytinburnu and the relevant household sizes there. The real estate website of the leading daily Hürriyet, Hürriyet Emlak, gives an average value of 2,276 liras per square meter at the end of 2013, given the average footage of 100 square meters in a typical Turkish apartment, and this makes 8 billion liras, somewhere around 4 billion US dollars. Here, also, bear in mind that, as Hart’s studies suggested, and my observations supported, this relatively small sub-province had almost a perfect egalitarian distribution of land, as very few families owned more than one lot. This was one of the most peaceful, less talked about, and fruitful redistributions of wealth in Turkish history.70 The biggest Turkish industrial company by revenues was TÜPRAŞ, the only Hart noted that, amongst the property owning families, only 15 to 20 had more than 4 houses or shops. See, Hart, Zeytinburnu Gecekondu Bölgesi, 40. 70 269 oil-refinery of a country of 76 million, and it was privatized for more or less the same amount.71 The extent of rent created and capital sunk into real estate, in essence, land, even in this relatively small-scale area, is mesmerizing. In the last half of the century, gecekondus were Istanbul’s main growth machine, and not only for this most important city, but almost all cities of Turkey were driven by their expansion in terms of population, political influence, and economic development. The population growth in Istanbul municipalities tell us how each region has grown, and how gecekondu development has moved geographically since 1965. The central municipalities of Istanbul, Eminönü, Fatih, Beyoğlu, Beşiktaş, Şişli, Kadıköy, and Üsküdar, have shown no real increase in population other than normal demographic expansion in this time frame –and, in this Eminönü and Fatih waned as erstwhile centers in the last three decades. While, the rest have grown according to the initiation of the gecekondus’ proliferation. The six waves of growth in the Istanbul gecekondus were: 1st Wave (1930-1950) Zeytinburnu, Mecidiyeköy, Bomonti, and Yıldız. 2nd Wave (19501965) Bayrampaşa-Sağmalcılar, Beykoz, Gaziosmanpaşa (Yıldız Tabya) 3rd Wave: (1965-1970) Bahçelievler (Yenibosna), Esenler, Sarıyer, Eyüp (Alibeyköy), Güngören. 4th Wave (1970-1975), Maltepe, K. Çekmece (Mahmutbey, Sefaköy), Kartal. 5th Wave: (1975-1980) Ümraniye, Bağcılar. 6th Wave (post-1980) Sultanbeyli, Sultangazi, Arnavutköy, Esenyurt, Avcılar. Ayşe Buğra correctly described this process as state redistribution, yet, unconscionably tagged it as an example of “immoral economy” betraying the urban habitat and environment. In my view, her pun on Thompson’s “moral economy” is once again, both inappropriate and politically incorrect. I cannot but imagine anyone in their right mind prescribing “projects” as “ghettos,” or, squatters, favelas as “immoral” –unless, of course, they are followers of the Austrian School. Her otherwise crucial analysis loses a great deal of its intellectual rigor by dint of addressing environmental impact as solely carved by gecekondu dwellers. See, Ayse Bugra, “The Immoral Economy of Housing in Turkey,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 22, no. 2 (1998): 303–7. 71 270 The commodification of the gecekondus and the land those gecekondus were built atop would follow a reverse order, except, some politically significant areas –which are the foci of anti-authoritarian resistance to the successive right wing governments in power- like Gaziosmanpaşa, the May Day neighborhood in Ümraniye –now, in Ataşehir, and Gülsuyu/Gülensu in Maltepe.72 The transformation of the gecekondus commenced in late 1970s, not in the ‘90s. The first private entrepreneurs that invested in the housing industry were not the largescale capitalists, but the small-scale contractors, known by the name yapsatçıs -pettybourgeois of the construction trade. As I will try to show in the next chapter, their efforts reached a pinnacle in the latter part of the 1970s, only to be reproduced in the late 1980s, this time with the helping hand of the state. The accelerated small-scale production of housing came to two abrupt halts in 1994 and 2001 due to two massive economic crises, only to be recovered after 2003, under a new accumulation regime directed by the AKP government. In other words, the proliferation of an apartment life, and the cultural depictions of the Lazi developer, the archetypal yapsat person, was quite accurate. Kemal Sunal’s Kapıcılar Kralı (King of the Doormen) represented the profound transformation in urban living, again, in another film by Zeki Ökten, made in 1977 which showed a doorman’s struggles with the endless demands of the apartment dwellers in Cihangir, Beyoglu. The small-scale schemes of enrichment instigated by the yapsatçıs which involved a know-how of the ropes of municipal permits prevalent in the 1970s turned into oligarchic backdoor deals involving grand sums of money –seven figures of US dollars- For GOP’s resistance to urban redevelopment and insistent preservation of its peculiar urban fabric, see:Pérouse, Istanbul’la Yüzleşme Denemeleri. 72 271 to break the ground for any typical undertaking in the gecekondu areas in the 2000s. Today, it is no longer called yapsat, but rather euphemistically spun as “urban renewal projects.” The land stock for housing in Istanbul had already been consumed to the fullest extent by the mid- 1980s, as Ayşe Öncü aptly suggested before.73 The limits in land suitable for housing developments were put in by the Prost plan of the 1940s, and Piccinato’s revisions in the 1950s, a city assumed to grow in an east-west axial directionwith one crucial exception in the 1980s, the second Bosphorus Bridge and its connecting highways. The gecekondus broke those limits and provided land through turning themselves into high-density neighborhoods. They brought their own demise as communities, but engendered a hitherto unseen enrichment of the erstwhile working classes. In the 1980s, Turgut Özal (leader of the center-right ANAP, Motherland Party, and Prime Minister from 1983 to 1989, and president from 1991 to 1994), initiated a housing program akin to Menderes’ Ataköy. Named, Anatepe (later, renamed, Ataşehir) and Bahçeşehir, these new massive housing complexes, with thousands of apartments in high-rise blocks were directed towards the upper middle classes. In the 2000s, Erdoğan’s government opened up Başakşehir, Kayabaşı, and Arnavutköy on the European side, and 73 Ayşe Öncü, “The Politics of the Urban Land Market in Turkey: 1950–1980,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 12, no. 1 (1988): 38–63. Yirmibeşoğlu investigates the highly lucrative real estate commissioner's geographical dispersal in Istanbul, the less land prone to development, the higher the commissions especially for the urban core. F. Yirmibeşoğlu, “Emlak Komisyoncularının Mekânsal Dağılım Süreci ve İstanbul’da Konut Piyasası,” İTÜ Dergisi A 7, no. 2 (2009). As a corollary, gecekondu neighborhoods, to the extent that they were protected from development efforts, had no commissioners operating within their borders. The renting and buying and selling of gecekondus depended on a different network than the highly public and commercialized real estate sector. 272 Sancaktepe, Çekmeköy, and Samandıra to real estate developers. But, without these exceptions an overwhelming part of the new housing development from the 1970s to 2000s was supplied by the demolition and rebuilding on gecekondu land. A great deal of land stock for urban development was acquired through state-led efforts. Though these state-led efforts were procedurally labyrinthine, gibberish to the uninitiated, and more often than not, involved bribery and clientelism, they nevertheless helped to expand the private housing market. The apartment buildings raised atop the one-floor, low density gecekondus and this helped produce an immense new supply of housing units in the urban market. The state cross-cut the division between its central planning roles and the responsibilities of the municipal authorities. The state originally envisioned municipalities as mere appendages to its already powerful organs in place. Municipalities, however, not only fulfilled those original goals, but they also brilliantly turned land into commodity, and fuelled the growth machine through waves of gecekondu expansions in between the building and planning amnesties. In doing so, the municipal structure presumably aimed at building a Sunni, Hanafi, and Turkish majority’s hegemony in Istanbul by way of political alliances. Thusly, the scaffolding of the so-called “silent majority” was erected to sustain and preserve this right-wing, conservative pillar of the country –working classes were bought into this scheme by their share in land and urban rents- and any swerving off the course set by the militarybureaucratic elites were met with the heavy-handed response of the same elites, 1960, 1971, 1980, 1997 the blatant and violent coups or disguised putsches attest to the effectiveness of the response. Yet, coincidentally, the annihilation of the gecekondu by the very growth machine that gave birth to it resulted in two unintended consequences. 273 First, the “silent majority” was irretrievably dispersed or became subservient to similar land-grants, and since the neoliberal turn after 1980, the state could only sporadically feed the thirst for land rents-1989, 1994, 2001, and 2009 were the years of deep recessions. Second, the political alliances of the previous era and the cultural and social patterns of coalition-making were no longer possible in the isolated, high-density, cosmopolitan life instigated by the transformation to apartment dwelling. The effects of the latter will be harder to discern, but without any doubt, will bring forward a radical change to Istanbul and Turkey’s political landscape-of which, a few signs made themselves felt during the mass uprising in the Spring of 2013. We can be assured that it will be followed by further spontaneous and sporadic rebellions of the newly forged urban classes. So, what are the connecting dots that bring all of these together? The underlying reason that triggered the emergence of the gecekondus was twofold: the scarcity of land available in the market in Istanbul and the concentration of population and economic activities in the city. The repercussions of the overwhelming control exercised by the central state over the ownership of land, the peculiar landholding structure inherited from the Ottoman Empire, and jealously guarded privileges of the state over urban space had led to long-run success of redistribution of urban rent. We will discuss Turkish legislation on urban land and property regime briefly. Then, we will move onto the question of the state’s behavior in shaping the specifics of municipal and institutional organizations as the facilitators of land appropriation in the last four decades. 5.6 The Development of Land Tenure in Turkey A particular historically determined characteristic of domain over land played a 274 significant role in the urbanization of Turkey.74 The predominant model of land ownership, as described above, was molded by Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman experiences, all more or less followed a similar blueprint and built successively on top of each world-empire a method for the centralized system of control over land. It is crucial to note that private ownership of land, agricultural or urban, is a relatively novel phenomenon in Turkey. On paper, land had become a full commodity only in 1858, and the private property rights for land was to be extended to foreigners in 1867.75 The full development of the commodification of housing had to wait until 1965, when the “Condominium Ownership Act” was passed by the parliament.76 The “Condominium Ownership Act” itself was in the making for quite a while, yet, several attempts remained fruitless until 23 June, 1965. The dominant relations of private property ownership in land had long been confined since the state appeared to be the unquestionable monopoly owner of especially urban land. The problems brought by the lack of a legal framework for ownership of separate housing units in free from- the land itself had become an issue as early as the 1940s, and it was already sought by Henri Prost in his suggestions to the ministry of Reconstruction 74 In Peasants, Eric R. Wolf pointed out that domain over land was distinctively different in Asian models, and he gave the Ottoman Empire, the Persian Empire, and the Chinese Empire as examples. Wolf, Peasants.Eric R. Wolf, Köylüler, trans. Abdulkerim Sönmez (İmge Kitabevi, 2000). 75 Çaglar Keyder, State and Class in Turkey : A Study in Capitalist Development (London ; New York: Verso, 1987), 43. I Tekeli and S Ilkin, Cumhuriyetin Harci, 3 vols., vol. 3 (Istanbul Bilgi Üniversitesi Yayinlari, 2004). The foreigners’ rights on land is still a matter of hot debate; only a few years ago, the right of non-citizens to buy land was recognized, though this was stipulated on an abstract notion of reciprocity-meaning that, the non-citizen’s home country should permit Turkish citizens’ to buy land. 76 B. Batuman, "Turkish Urban Professionals and the Politics of Housing, 1960-1980 (1)," METU JFA (2006): 61. 275 in Ankara.77 It is interesting to note that the 19th century Ottoman Civil Code, Mecelle78 had statutes that permitted partial ownership of property and land, while the new civil code of the republican regime lacked such regulations. Article 652 of the new civil code, adopted in 1926 as almost a verbatim translation of the Swiss Civil Code, stipulated that “separate floors of a house shall not entail ownership on land,” which effectively prohibited housing units’ sales in the free market without any attachment to the land the unit is built upon.79 Apparently, this brought a series of problems, limiting ownership of flats to partial ownership of land, leading to the treatment of all housing units as extensions of urban land, and severely limiting the formation of a real estate market. Under the conditions of strict limits to free trade and the state ownership of industrial enterprises, in addition to the extensive nationalization program of the republican regime, this did not portray an urgent problem. However, after the end of World War II, with the inescapable emergence of the gecekondus and relative economic growth, the question of ownership in housing came to the fore, in 1948, and an amendment to the Notaries Law was drafted. The amendment offered to provide notaries’ with the right to regulate real estate sales contracts and designated notaries’ as the bookkeepers of transactions of real estates. The amendment did not pass the parliament.80 The burgeoning price of urban land and population pressures on the main cities “Henri Prost’un Kaybolan Raporu: 12 Senelik Şehircilik Mesaisinin Bilânçosu”; Tekeli, Türkiye’de yaşamda ve yazında konut sorununun gelişimi, 84–87. 77 Mecelle was prepared by a commission headed by Cevdet Paşa between 1869 and 1876, came into effect in 1877 before it was replaced by a new civil code –almost a verbatim translation from Swiss Civil Codein 1926. 78 79 Tekeli, Türkiye’de yaşamda ve yazında konut sorununun gelişimi, 34. 80 Ibid., 84; Tekeli, Development of the Istanbul Metropolitan Area. 276 after the 1950’s liberalization of economy once again led to a surge in interest for reformulating a legal framework of ownership in housing units. On January 6, 1954, another amendment, this time in the Law of Land Registry, was brought to the parliament. The amendment included a new option that permitted the common ownership on land, while private domain was recognized. It was designed to divorce flat ownership –as a private easement, right to use, on the housing unit- from the ownership of the land that the property was built on. Unlike the previous amendment offer in 1948, this new amendment gave the regulatory power and responsibility in registration to the Office of the Land Registrar-a much older institution than the Notaries. Yet, the contracts drawn in front of the notaries still held their sway. The amendment lacked relevant stipulation regarding the division of joint property of the flat. Again, the amendment did not pass the vote. Finally, in 1959, the stately jurist Hıfzı Veldet Velidedoğlu headed a commission and who would later head the commission to draft the 1961 constitution- to draft the Flat Ownership Act. Due to the intervening coup of May 27, 1960, the act stalled for another six years. Finally, with further amendments, it passed on June 23, 1965, and came into effect on January 2, 1966. The law was distinctive, since in it, Velidedeoğlu tried to establish each separate unit as subject to separate legal entity. So, for the first time, and quite unlike the Anglo-Saxon examples prevalent back then, the housing unit had become a private property to be sold and bought without any attachment to land.81 Contrary to the moderate expectations, this immediately instigated an explosion in the construction of apartment buildings. Once the apartment itself was severed from the land, it could gain a high versatility as a commodity. 81 Tekeli, Türkiye’de yaşamda ve yazında konut sorununun gelişimi, 85–6. 277 One key unintended consequence of the law was its effect in shaping Turkish cities. In less than two decades, the apartment buildings had become the predominant architectural form, and the residential qualities, the social patterns, class relationships then prevalent were irreversibly transformed. As I will try to show in the next chapter, before the passing of the Flat Ownership Act in 1965, detached, or semi-detached homes with single-ownership on land, formed a predominant part of buildings constructed. Apartment buildings were few and lacked legal basis, sold as a partial ownership of the land on which the building was raised. Gecekondus were a product of this belated development of ownership on urban private property. If, as a conjecture, we would hazard a guess, and say that this law had passed two decades earlier, the gecekondu as we know it, probably would not have existed, and in its stead, the tenements would have played a much larger role akin to the similar experience in industrialization in London, Manchester, or New York. İlhan Tekeli, pointed out that flat ownership regulations and its much awaited legal framework is a product of the construction business known as yapsatçı.82 The relationship of causality is not so clear-cut in my view: it is debatable whether the small scale entrepreneurs predated the legal framework, or they blossomed in the rapid industrialization centered in Istanbul under the watchful tutelage of a state apparatus bent on expanding import-substitution policies. In all likelihood, an appurtenance of construction companies sprang up as state investment in built environment was gradually directed towards the cities. We know that Turkish engineers and architects were 82 Ibid. 278 forerunners of small scale apartment building construction in the 1950s.83 By late 1960s, immigrants from Black Sea region, mostly erstwhile foreman employed with their work gangs as the head of their kinship, and without any doubt, dwellers of the gecekondus, gradually took over the small-scale construction business. The lowering of the political barriers, thanks to the legal framework provided by the state, and the close proximity between the social habitus of the Black Sea constructors to the land owners (since, the first land to be built upon at this stage, from late 1960s, until late 1980s also belonged to other gecekondu dwellers), their activities rapidly flourished and dominated housing provision for the next two decades. Yet, it is no wonder that the word apartment in Turkish, apartman, carries a dual meaning; it denotes both the single unit, sold as a separate commodified entity, and the building itself. Until late 1970s, apartman’s connotation was meant to be a life showered in the luxurious riches of city life, with hot water, separate bathrooms, kitchens with good ventilation, electricity and gas, central heating –though, until the late 1990s, construction guidelines stipulated necessary air vents for stoves in new homes- possibly a doorkeeper with daily services for groceries and newspapers. As a necessary appendage, these apartmans were for people with either their own cars –a rarity up until late 1980s- or with easy access to orderly public transportation. For the rest, the minibuses –that sprang upon as a grassroots efforts to provide easy, cheap, and frequent urban public transportation thanks to the deafness of the municipal authorities- with 35 people, standing up like a tin can of sardines, was the sole choice of necessity to get to work. In the single most successful musical play of the Istanbul Municipal Theatre, Lüküs Hayat (A Luxurious Tanyeli relates how a single architect-builder, İlyas Çokay, transformed Fındıkzade in Fatih from 1950s to 1960s. See,Tanyeli, İstanbul 1900-2000, 129. 83 279 Life), which has played intermittently for more than seven decades since 1933, two working class hacks, before their latest heist, sing merrily the title song of the play, Şişli’de bir apartıman, yoksa eğer halin yaman nikel-kübik mobilyalar duvarda yağlı boyalar84 In these almost Brechtian lyrics, which possibly predate Brecht, likely written by Nazım Hikmet during one of his tenures as a political prisoner, ensconces the immense distance between working class life and the newfangled urban life symbolized by the apartman. On the other hand, the urban way of life and its highly corruptive and exploitative burden on the working classes is skillfully contrasted in Yılmaz Güney’s Sürü (1978). With the hardships endured by the masses who had to toil for much less than their apartman dwelling counter-parts earn through their urban jobs, education, and crony proximity to the power brokers, the pinnacle of the movie’s plot is extrapolated in an apartment in Ankara still under construction. Here, the consciousness of the working masses is to be raised by a young revolutionary. The young revolutionary’s father is a guard of this soon to be finished apartment building; with views of the city, the apartman is something novel for the main characters of the movie. The revolutionary youth explains to the main protagonist, a Kurdish shepherd trying to sell his herd before the Eid while his wife tags alongside him, speechless and in dire need of medical attention, that, people like them had to work for nothing, so that bourgeois can live happily in these flats. 84 The song’s lyrics in full are “A flat in Şişli, If you cannot afford it, such a pity, Nickel-cubist furnitures, Oil paintings hanged on walls, Two automobiles, One cabrio, one not, Chef, butler, and servants, Kitchen’s full, pantry’s as well, Luxurious life, Luxurious life, Take it easy, and enjoy, Nothing’s like a luxurious life” 280 He asks the shepherd - even if you sold all of your herds –which you grazed for the whole year, brought to the city to be fed to the well-to-do- can you afford to buy one of these apartmans? Of course not; it is not about this party, or that party –the Kurdish shepherd sheepishly says that, we’re for the Adalet Party (Justice Party, successor to the Democratic Party, the precursor to today’s Justice and Development Party). It is about class. 5.7 Municipal and Institutional Organization of Istanbul The breaking up of the delicate power balance between the provinces and the center in Turkey did not really take place until the 1980s. As underlined above, the floodgates of the provinces were set loose in the 1950s, yet, critical mass was not reached until the 1980s. The proportion of Istanbul’s population- in general population- doubled from 1950 to 1985, and from 1985 to today, it increased another sixty percent. Almost a fifth of the population lives in Istanbul (See, Table 5.4). If you add the ubiquitous urban sprawl alongside the Kocaeli Gulf, the extraordinary size and scale of this humongous conurbation glaringly emerges: close to a quarter of Turkish population. Either a quick glance in parliamentary representation –in which Istanbul and surrounding provinces are highly underrepresented- or the extraordinary attention paid by the national media on Istanbul mayor’s election would portend the importance the city has gained in the last three decades. 281 Year Population of Istanbul “Greater” Istanbul* Turkey intra muros Proportion of Istanbul Pop. to Turkey Pop. 1927 13,648,270 245,982 806,863 0,059 1940 17,820,950 266,272 991,237 0,056 0,316 1950 20,947,188 349,909 1,166,477 0,056 0,338 1960 27,754,820 433,629 1,882,092 0,067 0,296 1965 31,391,000 482,451 2,293,823 0,073 0,313 1970 35,605,176 554,659 3,019,032 0,085 0,184 1975 40,347,719 627,012 3,904,588 0,097 0,161 1980 44,736,957 567,902 4,741,890 0,106 0,120 1985 50,664,458 590,842 5,842,985 0,115 0,101 1990 56,473,035 545,908 7,309,190 0,129 0,075 2000 67,803,927 459,143 10,018,735 2007 70,586,253 455,498 12,573,836 0,178 0,036 2008 71,517,100 443.955 12,697,164 0,178 0,035 2009 72,561,312 433.796 12,915,158 0,178 0,034 2010 73,722,988 431.147 13,120,596 0,178 0,033 2011 74,724,269 429.351 13,624,240 0,182 0,032 2012 75,627,834 428.857 13,854,740 0,183 0,031 0,148 Proportion of Istanbul intra muros pop. To Greater Istanbul pop. 0,354 0,046 Table 5.4: Istanbul's Population as a rate of Turkish Population85 The co-opting of these newcomers, the migrants, the oft-denigrated denizens, had in essence become a matter of urgency for the extraordinarily centralized Turkish state to reproduce itself and to incorporate the scattered provincial allegiances rooted in ethnic, religious, or, even, tribal identities. The best way was by dint of a municipal expansion; Note that, İnalcık also used a similar data in, Inalcik, “Istanbul,” 1973. The period between 1970 and 2012 are collected from TURKSTAT census data. However, for İnalcık, Greater Istanbul refers to intra muros Istanbul including Beyoğlu, Beşiktaş, Şişli, Kadıköy and Eyüp. From 1970 on, I preferred to assume Greater Istanbul as synonymous to the provincial borders, for the sake of overcoming the difficulties that arise from a distinction between the sketchy definition of urban and rural according to government data. From the mid-2000s onwards, the government accepted metropolitan Istanbul delineated by the provincial borders. 85 282 the more municipal institutions that are built, the better for the migrants to politically, culturally, and economically connect to the urban way of life. Yet, these municipal structures, would not follow the Weberian trajectory-the city councils, the municipal organizations, and a myriad of attached voluntary associations were not for the disenfranchised masses to join in the autonomous urban way of life. The municipal organizations had very limited discretionary powers bestowed on them by law, and their elected officials, the mayors and the councilors were designed to be subordinate to the central state apparatus’ appointed officials-the governors, sub-provincial governors, and even the police officers. Until the 1960s, the mayors were the Ankara appointed governors, which kept the state at an inch away from being a one-party state at all times. The newly established municipal authority was defined by law to be a goal-oriented structure; with few resources, but a gauntlet of citywide responsibilities: from garbage disposal, to sewage collection, from squatter prevention and reforming of the gecekondus, to providing roads, pavements, public transport, energy, and building regulations supervision. This way, the over-politicization of the masses, and the incipient threat from the hegemonic potentials of the socialists were to be short-circuited. In a goal-oriented framework, the primary task of a municipal organization is not to increase public participation in the decision-making processes. Actually, the lesser the participation, the smoother and faster the roads and buildings are built. Defined in this way, and unable to break through its fiscal procrustean bed, the municipal authority can only show its performance by tapping into the land rent. This crony capitalism served the municipal authorities successfully for decades and illustriously constructed a public consensus for the expansion of urban land. The 283 municipal authority became the public bureau of redistribution, rubber-stamping changes in zoning regulations, opening up vast swaths of land –previously belonging to the public treasury and/or Waqfs, but more often than not, appropriated by the gecekondus- bringing utilities and public services to these new areas of development and, in essence, making the cogs of this huge growth machine work. The municipal identity is, thus, remarkably boosterist and comfortably nested in real estate speculation. Yet, the left entered a selfdefeating cycle by entering the game with incompatible expectations and its gross ineptitude in making the growth machine work without any glitches, i.e. for employing a legalese while slowing down the vernacular mechanisms of redistribution. After the 1960 coup, the junta first directed its attention to the gecekondu neighborhoods, foremost among them, Zeytinburnu, as dissent was rising in these impoverished settlements against the overthrow of Menderes and his ensuing hanging by the military administration. To quell the hidden dissent –as Bayat described- not only did the newly appointed governor recognize their rights of ownership on land, he also promised the extension of public services. In a swift succession, the central government attempted to co-opt the newcomers to Istanbul’s urban political framework by establishing peripheral municipalities, each of which was loosely connected to the metropolitan municipality. The newly established municipalities were: Ümraniye(1963), Avcılar (1966), Güngören (1966), Yakacık (1966), Kocasinan (1967), Sefaköy (Safraköy) (1967), Alibeyköy (1967), Hadımköy (1969), Celaliye (1969), Soğanlık (1969), Esenler (1970), Kemerburgaz (1971), Selimpaşa (1971), Yenibosna (1971), Dolayoba (1971), Yayalar (1971), Halkalı (1976), Yeşilbağ (1976). The establishment of a myriad of new 284 municipalities, many of which lack serious infrastructure or official expertise in urban development and planning (and nor did they have the means to hire such expertise), not only transpired in a highly tangled hierarchy of inter-municipal relations vis-a-vis metropolitan municipality, but also freed the hands of surrounding villages in luring capital into land for either industrial development or residential purposes. Thereby, while on the one hand, the "municipal incorporation" of these newly settled and populated areas made it possible for a new form of urban politics and policy-making to emerge, on the other hand, it accelerated the already incipient "urban sprawl" and the spiral of immigration to unprecedented levels in Istanbul.86 However, the military junta of September 1980 did not hesitate to roll back the emergent decentralization of municipal administrations-for better or for worse. One of the very first things the junta undertook, right after sending innocent adolescents to be hanged, and arresting hundreds of thousands for subversive activities against the state, was of course to abolish all civil administrative duties in municipal authorities, ban all municipal councils, depose all elected mayors and replace them with appointed figures. Another self-appointed authority, the supreme executive power of the junta, the National Security Council (which will play a special and almost permanent role in the post-1980 coup politics of Turkey) decreed on December 11, 1980 that all peripheral municipalities around large cities were to be unified into one central municipality. And by the declaration of Commander-in-chief of Istanbul martial law administration, on February 9, 1981, the peripheral municipalities were reorganized and rolled into a single, centralized, For a discussion see, Tekeli, Development of the Istanbul Metropolitan Area, 169–170; but more importantly Tümertekin, İstanbul, insan ve mekân. 86 285 and monolithic Istanbul municipality.87 Apparently, stymieing the municipal institutions was neither an effective means of organization, nor tenable due to the already existing practical problems. The newly elected ANAP (Motherland Party) government of Turgut Özal did not ignore the simple ineffectiveness of the monolithic municipal structure and in January, 1984, re-districted the municipal body into 14 different pieces mostly along the lines of pre-1980 municipalities. This, furthermore, created 14 mayoral positions up for grabs in the next local elections (doubtless, to be taken by the then unopposed ruling party) and meanwhile, dissecting the municipal governance of Istanbul into piecemeal parts created administrative units that were largely irresponsive to each other's needs or overall development of the city. On July 27, 1984, the law no. 3030 on the "Administration of the Metropolitan Municipalities" was issued, and a novel system of two-tiered municipal governance was established.88 A metropolitan municipal authority with its own citywide municipal council and mayor would oversee the powers and practices of district municipalities. The districts would also have their own mayors and municipal councils. Yet, the municipal councils would not but serve as the mayor’s own rubber stamp, due to the scarcely distinguished but highly tricky arrangements in municipal council election system. The Turkish parliamentary elections have an incomparably high threshold for representation, 10 percent (the closest nation-wise, is the Russian threshold, with 7 percent), and the general assumption, as well as European Parliament’s enduring The new peripheral municipalities were: Alibeyköy, Avcılar, Dolayoba, Esenler, Güngören, Halkalı, Kağıthane, Kartal, Kemerburgaz, Kocasinan, Küçük Çekmece, Küçükköy, Küçükyalı, Maltepe, Pendik, Sefaköy, Soğanlık, Tokat(Beykoz), Tuzla, Ümraniye, Yakacık, Yayalar, Yenibosna, and Yeşilbağ. 87 88 Tekeli, Development of the Istanbul Metropolitan Area, 178–180. 286 criticism, points out that this prevents proportional representation and hurts the principle of pluralism in a democratic society-but, of course, to no avail. The 1980 junta installed the threshold in order to promote a two-party system, though they largely failed in that. On the other hand, the municipal elections law, law number 2972 passed on January 18, 1984, contains a similar threshold for representation in municipal council. The seats allocated to each party list is defined by article 23 of the law; stipulating that, any party receiving less than 10 percent of the vote will not be included in the distribution. The parties with more than 10 percent of the votes will receive seats on the basis of their votes minus the 10 percent. Hence, the bigger parties receive more seats, while, the party with 10 percent of the vote –hypothetically- gets only a seat. This system, barring smaller parties from the city councils is just another travesty in the highly crooked Turkish democratic institutions. The consequence is a council that is anything but a democratic organization and fulfills its design by being a rubber stamp following the orders of the mayor –and higher echelons of the party- and turning the councilor’s influence as a bridge to the mayor into real estate speculation. The metropolitan municipalities and their legal framework would present a sometimes lively, often quarrelsome contestation between different political parties. ANAP (Motherland Party) and the SHP (Social-democratic Populist Party) during the late 1980s and early 1990s, the RP (Welfare Party) and the CHP (Republican People's Party) during most of the 1990s and between the AKP and the RPP since 2003. The new municipalities, especially after 1983, served as an adaptive tool for different political organizations. The most well-known is of course, the AKP’s (the ruling Justice and Development Party) and its predecessor political movements’ (the Welfare Party, the RP, 287 after the party was banned by a decree of the constitutional court, the Virtue Party, FP) vetting its candidates to certain positions in power in Ankara. Not only that Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was raised amongst the 1994 tide of an Islamist takeover of municipal governments, but also, a new interface between the provinces and the center was built. It is no coincidence that Erdoğan’s cadre from the Istanbul mayoralty later served important positions in his cabinets, further, officials appointed to Istanbul’s several municipalities served as the seeder for provincial mayors. Istanbul returned the favor to the provinces –whom it owed its current political and cultural structure- by raising and building a network of power holders. And several large scale revisions of the law would bring a more fine tuning of the hierarchy and budgetary distribution between the district municipalities and the metropolitan municipalities. Yet, in the latest general elections, the ruling party JDP, have held the promise of metropolitan municipality status as a lure for some eastern and southeastern cities, especially in cities like Malatya and Ordu. 288 Istanbul Municipal Population Distribution 1965‐2011 100% Zeytinburnu Üsküdar Ümraniye 90% Tuzla… Şişli Şile Sultangazi (2008) Sultanbeyli(k)(1992) Silivri Sarıyer Sancaktepe 80% Pendik 70% Maltepe Küçükçekmece 60% Kartal Kağıthane Kadıköy 50% Güngören(1992) Gaziosmanpaşa (1963) Fatih Eyüp 40% Esenyurt Esenler (1993) Çekmeköy Eminönü Büyükçekmece 30% Çatalca Beylikdüzü Beykoz Beyoğlu Bayrampaşa (1990) Başakşehir Bakırköy 20% Beşiktaş Bahçelievler(1992) 10% Bağcılar (1992) Avcılar(1992) Ataşehir Arnavutköy 2011 2010 2009 Adalar 2008 2007 2000 1990 1985 1980 1975 Figure 5.7: Distribution of Istanbul Municipalities' Population (Source: TURKSTAT census data) 289 1970 0% 1965 In figure 5.7, the role played by the municipal reorganization of population and the dominant expansion of the peripheral municipalities are evident. The expansion of these peripheral areas owed their existence to the highways incrementally built in the last five decades. The state-activated plebeian development of urbanization in Istanbul was pursued by the municipal authorities. Until the 1980s, as Erol Tümertekin underlined, the municipal authorities that were mostly tolerated by the central state mechanisms were the peripheral ones, the ones who were not a part of the metropolitan Istanbul municipal area, for instance, in Ümraniye.89 In the period following Menderes’ execution, the state’s withdrawal in the housing market was more than recuperated by the gecekondu appropriations in the peripheries of Istanbul. For long, a centralized and efficient organization of Istanbul metropolitan administration was not possibly initiated by the political leaders in Ankara, since a leaner and more interventionist metropolitan organization would mean an extra hurdle along the way in Istanbul’s massive creation of land rent. A relatively weak metropolitan authority was surrounded by the nameless legion of local municipalities -many of which were out of the purview of Istanbul’s mayor. The junta of September 12, 1980, decided to abolish many municipalities, appointed an officer as the mayor until the first local elections in 1984 and befitting a soldier’s abilities, actually obsessive-compulsive infatuation, with central and hierarchical organization condoned by the National Security Council, Bakırköy, Üsküdar, and Şişli became giant municipal districts in terms of population and geographical dispersal. One of the first things Turgut Özal did after he was elected in 1983 was to 89 Tümertekin, İstanbul, insan ve mekân. 290 reverse the junta’s decisions on municipal redistricting. Özal was the one who excelled in the goal-oriented municipal urban politics as the neoliberal founding father of Turkey, and he designed a system that strictly followed the power elite’s exclusion of any kind of participatory decision-making processes at any level from local to national scales. Yet, Özal’s party was a mere coalition of different and divergent class, ethnic, and faith-based interests. As soon as Özal left his chair as the party head and landed in the most prestigious position in Turkey, the presidency –he was elected in the parliament as the first non-military president since 1923- his ragtag coalition dispersed rapidly, and for the first time in modern Turkey’s history led to the bitter rivalry of two center right-wing parties for power in the 1990s. Out of this bitter war of positions, which saw an intensifying of the armed struggle between the Turkish armed forces and the Kurdish rebels, and the dirty war on the millions of Kurdish peasants, which intermittently led to the collapse of the Turkish economy, an unspotted political party came along. Necmettin Erbakan’s Welfare Party, once the underdogs, a perennial marginal party, which was only catapulted to power in the 1970s (three times, as the minor coalition partner, in the first Ecevit cabinet in 1974, and later, in two Nationalist Front cabinets of Demirel), had first claimed victory in the local elections of 1994. The metropolitan municipalities of Ankara and Istanbul were won by the Islamists, in addition to almost all sub-provincial municipalities in both cities, and to a remarkable success in central Anatolia and the Black Sea –the classical power base of Turkish nationalism and conservatism. Erbakan and his Islamists were partly modeled after the most successful underground organization of the 20th century, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. 291 Though, the genesis of the movement, named Milli Görüş (National View), did not begin in the backwaters of Anatolia, but amongst the immigrant workers in Germany, who found themselves in a condition where they were devoid of any social norms, any traditional bonds, or community support. Erbakan, a Germany educated PhD in engineering was extremely talented in channeling this feeling of anomie in forging his own social and political movement, which sought a return to the traditional role of religion in people’s lives through evidently modern means. The workers brought the idea of the possibility of a political organization along the lines of a new golden age of Islamism back to Turkey in the 1970s, and in addition to their monetary support in terms of remittances in Deutsche marks that helped many Anatolian enterprises established, expanded, and eventually, faltered, due to lack of oversight. The goal-oriented structure of municipal administrations was tailor-made for Erbakan’s movement. They could tap into their tight-knit, highly organized, hierarchical, small group of supporters as their cannon fodder to do place at strategic levels in the municipal organizations. It did not take very long for them to emerge as the benefactors of their power base: the gecekondus. The mayors, as well as the cannon fodder was very loyal to their leader and were very technical minded, like their leader, since, one of Erbakan’s election promises in the 1970s was a leap forward in heavy industries. The gap in talent was either solved through transfers from the center right, or by harnessing the engineering and planning abilities of the European contractors. Erbakan’s Islamists made no mistake about the fundamental characteristics of the municipal organizations; they came to govern, not to build participatory politics or a democracy from below. They tasked themselves with efficiency, quantity, and if the former two was not apparent 292 enough, with disseminating their achievements through a publicly funded public relations campaign- then unprecedented in scale and reach. The spatial imagination of the Islamists resonated deeply with the Turkish state-space hegemonic doxa, only at the micro level. With the exception of the 1997 putsch, they did not wait for long to exercise their imagination at the macro level. The reproduction of fictitious capital and how urban land rent turned to play the predominant means for the extension of new state-spaces in Istanbul is mainly a matter in the next chapter. Here, the real emphasis should be rather put on the redistributive qualities of the quiet encroachment, and how this seemingly passive, but fundamentally resilient class played a triggering role in such a gigantic undertaking in the appropriation of land. In order to be able to accomplish this, I will try to portray two different –yet, convergent- trajectories of two different gecekondu neighborhoods. First, we will try to understand how that disenfranchised class lived, beginning from Charles Hart’s observations in Zeytinburnu-the first and foremost gecekondu settlement in Istanbul. And, second, how that class who overcame further fault lines embedded in the racial, ethnic, and religious structures of a power- employed political struggle in order to embed itself in the May Day neighborhood during the tumultuous days of 1977, survived decades of oppression. Here, however, the focus will rather be on the longitudinal change, on the diachronic change these two neighborhoods underwent in an asynchronous manner. While Zeytinburnu become the site of the most successful and financially most egalitarian redistributive project, the May Day neighborhood is still prone to obliteration under the watchful eye of the new state-spaces; in our case, the Mass Housing Administration and its often shady deals with private real estate development 293 companies. 5.8 Charles Hart and Zeytinburnu By 1964, around half or more than half of the urban population in Adana, Erzincan, Zonguldak, and Ankara; close to one third of the population in İstanbul, Samsun, Mersin, Bursa, Erzurum, İskenderun, and Antakya lived in gecekondus. The gecekondu became an indelible part of Turkey’s built environment with the rapid industrialization centered on urban areas.90 Interestingly enough, monographic studies from that era are extremely limited, and this evident transformation of a predominantly rural society into an industrializing urban society is documented in a severely limited fashion.91 The two major works of the era, Daniel Lerner’s Passing of Traditional Society –in which he studied Ankara, Balgat’s transformation from being a rural appendage of Ankara and an agricultural community into a peripheral part of the capital and gradual enrichment via industrial employment through the 1950s- and Paul Stirling's Turkish Village are still waiting to be translated into Turkish.92 With the exception of Mübeccel Belik Kıray’s, METU Sociology Department’s founder, pioneering works on two rapidly 90 Tekeli, Türkiye’de yaşamda ve yazında konut sorununun gelişimi, 125. I will discuss the groundbreaking work of Çağlar Keyder and Korkut Boratav in the 1970s and 1980s, which introduced Marxist political economy to the analysis of rural structures below, as a bridge to the urban transformation. For a detailed, insightful, and perhaps critical, summary of mainstream rural sociology in Turkey up to the mid-1970s, see, Ulrich Planck, “Türkiye’de Köy Sosyolojisi,” Erzurum Atatürk Üniversitesi İşletme Dergisi 2, no. 4 (1977). Planck pointed out that even a simply essential question regarding the discipline itself remained unanswered: whether to call the field of inquiry “rural sociology”, or the “sociology of village.” In my view, while the former required a much more structuralist and dynamic analysis, the latter befits the Turkish political stasis that treated villages as the homogeneous source of the Turkic identity. In the centrally dictated curricula of most of the state universities’ sociology departments, the Rural Sociology course is still taught under the name “Sociology of Village.” 91 Daniel Lerner, The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East (Free Press, 1958); Arthur Paul Stirling, Turkish Village (Wiley, 1965). 92 294 industrializing cities conducted in the 1960s, urbanization was largely absent in Turkish social sciences’ intellectual agenda.93 İlhan Tekeli pointed out that until the mid -1960s, twenty years after the emergence of the phenomenon, only three pieces of research were done on the gecekondus in Turkey.94 The first large-scale, longitudinal, and useful study in Istanbul was conducted by Charles William Merton in Zeytinburnu, in the mid1960s.95 Hart was an unusually frank social scientist. His criticisms and comments should have made a lasting impact amidst the theoretically abstract agenda of Turkish social scientists. His frankness should also be seen as an element of goodwill with a salt of extreme amazement to the jargon ridden and sterile inertia of the bureaucratic elites in academia. In 1966, for instance, the parliament asked for his opinion on the gecekondus as a specialist on the issue and as the chairperson of the department of Social Anthropology. His reply, the thinly veiled sarcasm prevalent in the tone of his criticism, Mübeccel Belik Kıray, Ereğli: Ağır Sanayiden Önce Bir Sahil Kasabası (Ankara: T.C. Başbakanlık Devlet Plânlama Teşkilâtı, 1964); Mübeccel Belik Kıray, Örgütleşemeyen Kent: İzmir’de İş Hayatının Yapısı ve Yerleşme Düzeni, Sosyal Bilimler Araştırma Serisi A-1 (Ankara: Türk Sosyal Bilimler Derneği, 1972). 93 For Tekeli, the most important among them was written by Granville H. Sewell as a dissertation thesis in political science from MIT, named, “Türkiye’de Gecekondu Yerleşmeleri: Bir Sosyal Siyasal ve Ekonomik Problem.” The other two are written by another PhD student, İbrahim Öğretmen, at Ankara University Faculty of Political Sciences, and by a rural well-known rural sociologist, İbrahim Yasa, from the same faculty. See, Tekeli, Türkiye’de yaşamda ve yazında konut sorununun gelişimi, 118–122. 94 Hart, Zeytinburnu Gecekondu Bölgesi. Charles W.M. Hart (1905-1976) was an Australian born social anthropologist and sociologist, a naturalized citizen of the U.S. he died there in 1976. He studied with Radcliffe-Brown between the years 1923-1929 at Sydney University, later continued his studied with Malinowski and Seligman at LSE and University of London in from 1930 to 1932. Between 1928 and 1930 he conducted his field research for his dissertation amidst the Tiwi peoples of Australia. In 1932, he moved to Canada as a founding member of faculty of department of Anthropology at Toronto University. Later, he accepted a job offer from Istanbul University to establish a department of Anthropology and to serve as the department chair-the second Anthropology department to be opened after the physical anthropology department at Ankara University, which was established in the 1930s. He continued as the chair of department until his wife’s health problems led to their return to the US in 1969. Ronald Cohen, “Charles William Merton Hart, 1905-1976,” American Anthropologist 79, no. 1 (March 1, 1977): 111–12. 95 295 is still unrivalled given the relations between the state and academia in Turkey. He wrote in his report to the parliament that “this problem, which can be discerned by anyone with a mediocre IQ, has turned into an irresolvable issue due to the lawmakers’ confusion regarding two different aspects of the problem.” 96 The problem Hart referred to was a fairly simple one: How can we differentiate between the old gecekondu settlements where people have already settled for decades, and the new squatters, or the ones which will be squatted very soon under the circumstances of population explosion in Istanbul? He argued that, the lawmakers, the drafters of the law, and the technocrats in Ankara had probably no idea what a gecekondu district looked like or what the differences were between Zeytinburnu –with a history of 30 years’- and Çağlayan, a relatively new and rapidly prospering area, and, Yıldız Tabya, where appropriation of land had just begun. By evaluating all the gecekondus under an umbrella formula, the lawmakers not only hurt the established neighborhoods like Zeytinburnu, but they also willingly voted for a law which had no practical use, or chance of implementation in the face of actual reality of squatting and population growth. His study shed an invaluable light with its empirical depth and meticulous collection of data unmatched in its access to every possible level of gecekondu life in Zeytinburnu that contributed greatly to a sociological understanding of the urban phenomenon. His team conducted surveys with all 9800 households in Zeytinburnu, reaching out to the complete population of 120,000 at the time.97 Hart, Zeytinburnu Gecekondu Bölgesi, 116. Unfortunately, I could not access his letter to the parliment, yet, the letter is dated 7 July, 1966. 96 97 Kemal Karpat’s Gecekondu is also of immense importance, conducted as almost complementary to Hart’s research as underlined above. Yet, Karpat was actually seeking a clue to the break up of the past order, not signs of further developments, as his later research confirmed his interest. See, Karpat, The Gecekondu : Rural Migration and Urbanization. Furthermore, thanks to his privileged position as the 296 Even from the outset, Hart faced a strange lack of data on urban settlements in Turkey. Any state institution had more or less a pre-conceived idea about the gecekondus, but they had no hard data on their convictions. Yet, an apparent interest in the housing problem was ascendant among the progressive circles by early 1960s. On September 7, 1964, Hart attended a seminar on housing, organized by TEKSİF –one of the most important unions organized under the biggest Turkish trade union confederation, TÜRKİŞ. Tarhan Erdem, a familiar name to the Turkish audience was the organizer of the seminar on behalf of the union.98 At this conjuncture, once an important contingent of Turkish intellectuals paid needed attention to the housing question, Hart voiced utter criticism. The data the governmental institutions collected about the issue was either deeply lacking, or not well kept. 99 He uttered his frank observation on the issue: Although, nobody has concrete and reliable figures and knowledge about the people who live in gecekondus in Istanbul, almost everybody has plenty of estimates, notions, and pre-conceived conclusions on them.100 Here, Hart’s criticism of the Gecekondu Law is meaningful and implicates the main characteristics of Turkish governmentality. Plans and legislation were drawn at the table, not using empirical data, and in essence had nothing to do with reality. The verifiable knowledge, the falsifiable truth, as the fundamental pillar of any legislation – departmental chair, Hart commanded more resources to conduct research unprecedented in its reach and longitude. 98 Erdem later served as the general secretary of RPP for a short interregnum after the party’s crushing defeat in 1999. He runs a social research company and regularly writes a column for the liberal left-wing newspaper, Radikal. In 1963, he was also a representative of TEKSİF at the 1. Housing Panel organized at Istanbul Technical University. 99 Tekeli, Türkiye’de yaşamda ve yazında konut sorununun gelişimi, 114–123. 100 Ibid., 123. 297 or, any scientific and modern undertaking- was missing.101 For that reason, the Kazlıçeşme plans made in 1957 had nothing to do with the actual reality on the ground. The grid plans suggested by the planning professionals, blocks of developments which had no grain of relevance in themselves to the actual development of the neighborhood, were merely vicious approximations drawn somewhere in Ankara to be exercised in Zeytinburnu. Hart was not sarcastic, but rather plain spoken when he argued that “what the Turkish architects and planners made of urban planning was nothing more than rectangles orderly drawn on a blank piece of paper.”102 A similar situation could be observed in the persons of Hart’s undergraduate and graduate students. His students came from Istanbul’s well-to-do neighborhoods, and none had set foot in a gecekondu before. Actually, some of his students declared that their time at the places of particular ill-fame was not well-received by their families, when asked about their research in the gecekondus.103 Social scientists had a certain distance between their work, their habitus, daily lives, and the lived and practical spaces of the working classes, just like the planners and architects. As soon as Hart’s research began, that actual distance showed itself. In 1962, the wounds of Menderes’ execution were still fresh in the gecekondu district –he was venerated by the residents as a great leader- so people showed hostility and well deserved suspicion towards authorities on the research team. Hart decided to rent a gecekondu and moved a part of his research team into that house for a full-time stay. Henceforth, they succeeded in breaking the barrier between the researchers 101 Hart, Zeytinburnu Gecekondu Bölgesi, 50. 102 Ibid., 107–8. 103 Ibid., iii. 298 and the people of the area. 104 The research was conducted from July 1962 to February 1963, first funded by the Istanbul Chamber of Commerce, and then, after their funding was cut, supported by the Ministry of Planning and Building. They were also supported, at least nominally by the planning department of the Istanbul metropolitan municipality, headed by Turgut Cansever. From the outset they faced a methodological problem: what should be the sample, and how would that sampling be selected? The already tense political atmosphere contributed to their problems in the neighborhood, but the households fiercely protested, and were deeply suspicious of the selection of their neighbors. Why didn’t the researchers ask them questions? Were they not deemed as worthy as the next house? How could they not stop by their place? Typical questions any self-respecting sociologist from Turkey would hear were continuously directed at them. Hart decided that it was a helpless situation, as there was no way to explain the mechanisms of sampling for a survey to the whole sub-province. So he went with the ballistic option and decided to carry the questionnaire to every household in Zeytinburnu. A highly impractical choice for a social scientist, burdensome and tiring indeed, nevertheless he let us have a preciously precise study of the early 1960s gecekondus.105 The most crucial finding of the research was a reiteration of an already known fact -that the immigrants were not interested at all in returning back to their villages. The question of if they would be interested in going back to their villages met with an 104 Ibid. 105 Ibid., 1–2. 299 overwhelmingly negative response.106 Against years of oppression, extortion, hardships, in a dire situation where some of the houses were demolished 13 times and rebuilt 14 times, and contrary to the urban middle classes expectations for their return, they unequivocally declared their intention to stay. They not only had no interest in going back to their villages, but also they denied hypothetical choices for moving out of their self-made homes -90 per cent declared that they were not willing to leave their gecekondus.107 Five decades after Hart’s study, I can attest to the correctness of his survey, as the Zeytinburnu population has perhaps quadrupled in the period, but the core stayed the same. The earlier immigrants grew roots here, their sons and daughters continued their lives in the neighborhood, and scarcely moved out of the area. They reaped what their mother and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers had sown in bitter, endless, worrisome struggle against the state and municipal institutions. They made themselves a new home away from home in this part of Istanbul. Furthermore, the situation of the gecekondus, at the time of the study was far from being certain. In Gültepe, a relatively newer gecekondu settlement in Şişli, people had already received their title deeds from the government, and although they were much poorer than Zeytinburnu, the prevailing mood was much more optimistic and their attachment to their land and to their district was manifestly full of confidence for the future.108 Yet, the people of Zeytinburnu had a burning desire to better their 106 Ibid., 63. 107 Ibid., 44. In Gültepe, on the other side of the Golden Horn, situated near the E-5 highway (then constructed as the main road connecting Istanbul to the European highway system), was one of the earliest gecekondu neighborhoods to fully receive land titles. Zeytinburnu had to wait another decade, until the 1970s to completely receive titles to their land. Hart draws a stark distinction between Gültepe and Zeytinburnu, while Gültepe was built recently, he argued, the prevailing mood in the district is much more optimistic 108 300 neighborhood, but they had to live in tin shacks due to their fear of demolition, and rarely spent any money on their homes and gardens. Meanwhile, even though close to half of the houses were already marked in the cadastral maps and granted temporary land titles, the state still planned large-scale demolitions. Worse still, the planner and architects had not paid attention to how those people lived, and had drawn their sketches far from Zeytinburnu. One of the founders of this gigantic gecekondu town told Hart, “we found this big city and we’re proud of it, but nobody thanked us for this.”109 I have talked to people whose grandmothers and grandfathers lived in small shacks, afraid to build more, and even if they had spare land to build another house for their kin, they rented it for fear of demolition, or worse, expropriation. They told me the stories of how their grandmothers slept on bare earth, just to hang onto their tiny piece of land, to save it from being retaken by the authorities. Today, Zeytinburnu is still alive and one of the burgeoning inner city areas of the city thanks to such pioneers. And the informal network of social and economic relations built by them still continues to function. Hart saw that Zeytinburnu was an integral part of Istanbul’s industrial growth, something that the state sanctioned academia never found the heart to utter, and the socialist intellectuals found themselves imprisoned for saying the obvious: “If [tomorrow] you move the Zeytinburnu people out of this area and demolish the gecekondus, factories in Kazlıçeşme, Zeytinburnu, Bakırköy, Osmaniye would find no one to work.”110 The work was no pure exploitation by the factory owners though, in the compared to Zeytinburnu, then, a gecekondu settlement of two decades. 109 Hart, Zeytinburnu Gecekondu Bölgesi, 28–9. 110 Ibid., 67. 301 first half of the 1960s, Hart showed that the real income of a gecekondu household increased twofold.111 It is true that the Zeytinburnu folk had not welcomed May 27, 1960, raised vocal objections to the overthrowing of a popularly elected government, and a few years ago, attacked Ismet Inonu in Topkapı and beat up his retinue. Yet, in a few years, due to the unprecedented economic growth and thanks to redistributive policies developed by the junta and following the RPP governments, impoverished peripheral neighborhoods unwillingly bought into the new governing power elite’s rule. A half-way consensus was built,-they would not rise up against the new balance of power, and in return their homes would not be demolished. Hence, a silent pact was signed into by the working classes. The carrot in the form of property ownership has helped pacify the working classes, bought them into the governing consensus, kept the otherwise objectionable practices in the working place under a tight lid, solidified a right-wing coalition that earned the underlying bureaucratic-military elite’s approval at all times. Such coalition tactics worked until the breaking up of the pact by a deep turmoil in the ruling elite fractions in 2010. The peasants moved into the city and carved themselves a new home there, and along the way, determined the fate of the country. Another important finding of Hart’s research concerned women’s entry into the work force. Against all odds, 16 per cent of all married women (almost half of all women over 18, and between a quarter and a half of all females in the 13-to-18 age range depending on income levels) worked in Zeytinburnu. Similarly, the gender roles in the labor force did not fit the facile descriptions –where, depending on the researcher’s political standing, either men stayed at home and spent time at the local coffee house and “Average monthly income in Zeytinburnu is three times the amount found in Denizli and Tarsus villages, more than the amount in Polatlı villages, and exactly four times of Erzurum villages.” Ibid., 63. 111 302 women worked as servants, or women were stuck in the vicious cycle of unpaid domestic labor while men earned money as blue collar workers. Unemployment in the neighborhood was below 10 per cent, less than the nationwide unemployment levels, and men actively sought work in the market place. What Hart could not foresee was the political and cultural trajectory of the gecekondus. Even though he did not suggest explicitly, the underlying arguments of his research proposed a gradual liberalization of the gecekondu society and an invincible formation of a liberal middle class out of those people he studied. He thought that in the near future the gender division of labor and the barriers that kept women as secondary citizens would be overcome: A young woman who lives in Zeytinburnu today is an urbanite. She wears high heels and short skirts, imitates Beyoğlu fashion, follows [the other] urbanites in her behaviors and tastes. If she graduates from middle or high school she would look for a job in a bank or at an office in the city; or else, she would work as a salesperson in Aksaray or Beyoğlu retail store; if she cannot complete high school, she would seek for a “good and regular job in a “good and regular factory.” In both cases, even if she marries, when possible, she would keep on working not for money, but for the satisfaction of work…From the perspective of women this is an aspect of Turkey’s industrialization and modernization and in our opinion this is a healthy and good aspect.112 Yes, a middle class was born out of the gecekondu settlements, but they were nowhere near what Hart suggested, definitely not liberal, and they were not even socially moderately conservative and economically left-wing. A crass chauvinism, a heartbreakingly unequal gender division of labor, a boringly dull nationalism pervasively took over the gecekondu districts after the 1980 coup. Karpat, for instance, thought and showed that a left-wing tendency was imminent in the gecekondu districts. His research 112 Ibid., 80. 303 in Sarıyer, Baltalimanı, and today’s Rumelihisarüstü showed that 15 per cent of the poor squatters voted for the Labor Party of Turkey (the first socialist party to be represented in the parliament), and his surveys indicated that the leader of the Labor Party, Mehmet Ali Aybar, came in the fourth place, after Inönü, Demirel, and Sunay (the first, one of the two founding fathers of the republic, the second the leader of the center right, and the third, the then president), beyond, Ecevit, Menderes, Çetin Altan, and Alpaslan Türkeş. Someone who had gone through such survey data in the 1970s would have suggested that in ten years’ time the Labor Party be a formidable force of parliamentary opposition, if not a minor partner in government.113 Political and street level violence, the 1971 coup, bad and unwise choices made by the socialists themselves, and surreptitiously reoccurring ruptures in the political system contributed to the disappearance of the parliamentary socialism, while the extreme nationalist Türkeş and Islamist Erbakan laid the foundations of Turkey for the next four decades. Hart recognized the urban characteristics of Zeytinburnu in the 1960s, unfortunately the endless bickering, theoretically ambivalent, empirically weak basis of Turkish social sciences still sought the peasants, the villagers, the varoş in the city. Hart was right, but what he could not foresee were an intricately related series of processes: the onslaught of premature deindustrialization, merciless devaluation of labor under flexible accumulation, the disorganization of the working classes’ unionization, the breaking up of the organized political parties, a whole new array of neoliberal mechanisms of dispossession that was sown on January 25, 1980, and the inescapable allure of urban land rent. 113 Karpat, Türkiyede Toplumsal Dönüsüm, 309–330. 304 5.9 Squatters in the Time of Cholera: Impending Epidemics and the End of Turkey’s Belle Époque Another crucial observation of Hart’s study concerns the potable water provision and the wastewater disposal system in Zeytinburnu. According to his team’s survey, more than a quarter of the toilets were used commonly between adjacent houses. The main method for the building of the toilets and the control of the waste water was, for a couple of adjacent lots to dig a common hole. In the 1960s, only a single district in Zeytinburnu had a functioning sewage system. The rest used cesspits as their primary wastewater collection methods. Even houses with built-in toilets had employed these simple –and highly unsanitary- cesspits. The cesspits were mostly the responsibility of the gecekondu dwellers. The accumulated wastewater was collected by municipality trucks equipped with waste-water pumps. Three quarters of the households used these municipality collecting trucks to empty their cesspits, but this was done for a fee. The rest of the houses, close to a quarter of them, and mostly the poorest ones, either covered the cesspit with soil and dug a new hole for a new cesspool, or removed the waste-water themselves, or did nothing at all with the waste.114 Drinking water was primarily carried from the fountains, the adjacent neighborhood, Kazlıçeşme, is named after an Ottoman-era public fountain-the fountain had, and until recently, a stone relief of a goose. The most well-known amongst several fountains was the Valide fountain, which was closed down in 1964 due to contamination.115 The municipal authorities built several public fountains in the 1960s, 114 Hart, Zeytinburnu Gecekondu Bölgesi, 52. 115 Ibid., 53. 305 which provided potable water for up to 80 percent of the households in some districts of Zeytinburnu.116 Yet, as my interviewees pointed out, a prominent trend from the late 1940s onwards, was gecekondu dwellers digging their own water-wells. Some, with easy access to their wells had gone for selling their excess water for a small amount in tin cans, while one enterprising family had even built a sizable water tower and distributed water to other houses via pipes for a monthly fee of 10 liras.117 The risk was evident. In the absence of a sewage system, the smallest leak from any one of the cesspools –considering the fact that these were used by more than a family, each with around ten persons, approximating 30 to 40 users for each cesspoolwould have contaminated both the water from the public fountains and the private water wells very easily. When Hart did his research in the mid-1960s, the condition of the waterworks and sewage system was glaring. It took a few years for the real toll to make itself felt in Istanbul. On October 15, 1970, after months of news about cholera epidemics in neighboring countries, newspapers reported that an epidemic “illness” passed through water, euphemistically named “gastro enterite” but not cholera, had killed three persons.118 The epidemic did not begin exactly in Zeytinburnu, but very nearby, 5 miles north of Zeytinburnu, in Sağmalcılar. Sağmalcılar was a gecekondu district built around its namesake prison-which also happens to be the prison in the setting of Billy Hayes’ brutal ordeal-named later which came to fame with the blockbuster movie The Midnight 116 Ibid., 54. 117 Ibid. 118 Vasfiye Özkoçak, “Hasta Sayısı 150’yi Aşıyor,” Milliyet, October 15, 1970. 306 Express. Sağmalcılar was a decade newer and in a much worse economic and material shape than Zeytinburnu, and mostly comprised of immigrants from Yugoslavia. The next day, the newspapers started to grasp the extent and severity of the epidemic, and while the Minister of Health avowedly dismissed the possibility that it was cholera, the headlines glaringly announced the outbreak of cholera.119 The reporters entered the gecekondu district for the first time with the minister’s entourage, and they witnessed the primary schools without adequate water sources, or a sewage system. The toilets of the school were reeking, because the sewage was not connected to the main pipes laid in front of the school building.120 Yet, two days later, on October 18, the first reports from the Hospital for Tropical Diseases in Bakırköy showed the brutal impact of the disease. The doctors and hospital staff were grossly inadequate for the task, and many perhaps, hundreds were left to their own devices for survival. Infants, adolescents, young women, and pregnant women were especially vulnerable.121 While the administration never denied prescribing the disease as cholera for fear of international quarantine, rather came up with another ingenious idea to label it with the particular strand of bacterium that caused it, as the El Tor cholera, and the whole city was dreadfully shaken by this insurmountable and invisible disease. The health ministry’s official explanation put the death toll at 27, and announced 715 hospitalized due to the illness, but the Milliyet reported 41 deaths, and thousands hospitalized on the third day of the epidemic according to its own sources.122 The final official tally was 50 deaths and 1163 hospitalized due to 119 “Kolera Şüphesi Belirdi,” Milliyet, October 16, 1970. 120 Vasfiye Özkoçak, “Sağlık Bakanı’yla Beraber Sağmalcılar’ı Teftiş Ettik,” Milliyet, October 16, 1970. 121 Özdemir Gürsoy, “Tek Bir Ses Vardı: Ölüyoruz, Ölüyoruz!,” Milliyet, October 18, 1970. 122 “Bakan: Salgında Duraklama Var,” Milliyet, October 18, 1970. 307 illness. However, it is very likely that this figure was largely an understatement of the real effect of the epidemic. The disease continued unabated for at least another ten days after its initial outbreak. On October 26, 1970, the legendary journalist and the editor-in-chief of the Milliyet daily, published an interview with one lucky survivor. The survivor, Muharrem Özden, a master glazier from Sağmalcılar, explained in the interview that seventeen people –five siblings, three of them married, and their children- lived in their gecekondu of seven rooms. Three of these siblings got sick by cholera and hospitalized. The glazier detailed how they had drunk the water, knowing full well that probably it was not potable, and how the municipality failed in installing sewage pipes for months at that time which led to the overflowing of the cesspools-his account was confirmed by previous newspaper reporting. A rather striking issue in the interview was İpekçi’s insistent suggestion that perhaps Özden’s hometown, in Erzincan, a small village by the Euphrates River, may have suited him and his family better. Özden single-handedly refused such a suggestion, and he gave examples of how they could not get any medical attention in their village even if they had money, that they lacked electricity and basic retail facilities like butchers, groceries, and lastly, of course, mentioned how they made more money in Istanbul and how he could afford meat any given day, while he could eat only two or three times per year in his hometown. So, when İpekçi pointedly insinuated the question that it might have been better to live in his village again, Özden halfheartedly said, “yes, perhaps I could have gone back to my village, provided that I earned well.”123 The epidemics did not stop the run from the rural idyllic, neither swerved the 123 Abdi İpekçi, “Her Hafta Bir Sohbet: Kolera’yı Nasıl Atlattım,” Milliyet, October 26, 1970. 308 intelligentsia’s deeply held belief in their exact place –back at their villages- nor sent back the already rooted millions. The public reaction to the epidemic was swift, frenzied as usual in Turkey, and overly cautious; drinking water was boiled for months and it later led to the first bottled water distribution services to be established in the city. For the well-off, drinking and cooking water was bought from suppliers in five-gallon glass jugs –the most famous amongst these bottled water suppliers was from a village called Taşdelen next to Alemdağ, then an idyllic rural outpost on the northeast of the city, now a primary urban sprawl area, named Çekmeköy. The impending feeling of invisible death meant the closure of the 1960s belle époque with unprecedented economic growth and an expansion of the welfare provided by rapid urbanization and industrialization. The epidemic also pronounced the first public blunder of Süleyman Demirel’s government, elected a second time with %47 of the votes just a year before, Demirel was at the height of his power when cholera struck. His role as the successor to Menderes and the leader of center-right was brandished with his two-overwhelming majorities in 1965 and 1969 elections (his 1965 win with %53 is still unsurpassed, the Republican People’s Party, still headed by Ismet İnönü was still a distinct second, with %28 and %26 of the vote tally respectively). Five months later, on March 12, 1971, Demirel was overthrown by a right-wing army junta led by the chief-of-staff of the Armed Forces. Presumably to fend off another junta from taking over power-the Madanoğlu junta, led by General Cemal Madanoğlu, this one was a coalition of left-wing, Kemalist intellectuals and younger officers of the army. His cabinet was replaced by a cabinet of professionals hand-picked by generals, and this socalled technocratic cabinet ran the country under martial law until the general elections in 309 1973, arrested thousands of socialists, tortured writers, journalists, university professors, and intellectuals in special interrogation cells, hanged three young revolutionaries, Deniz Gezmiş, Hüseyin İnan, and Yusuf Aslan, whose most serious crime was bank robbery, and summarily executed tens of young socialists in the Anatolian countryside. The 1970s opened with an epidemic and its fever burnt the whole country for the next decade in street fights and daily acts of political violence. Within this overall picture and as a consequence of left-wing politics’ popular outreach, the cholera epidemic of the 1970 have helped gecekondu areas change their political allegiances from right wing parties to newly active left-wing parties and organizations that were now beginning to engage with a new and militant form of grassroots politics. After the 1960s, the middle class left the historic peninsula en masse. Laleli, Aksaray, Kocamustafapaşa, and Çapa were the hardest hit from the middle class flight. The three boulevards opened up after the greatest devastation Istanbul reckoned were soon ghost highways. They saw activity only during the daytime in the areas where Istanbul University’s main campus, hospitals and the Istanbul police headquarters are located, but at night, the humdrum of the crowds petered out.124 5.10 The Rise and Fall of Gecekondus: The not-so-quiet Encroachment of the May Day Neighborhood One of the most studied, symbolically important gecekondu settlements of the 1970s was built as a working class squat on the Asian side of Istanbul near the highway For the migration of the middles classes from Laleli, see Çağlar Keyder, “A Tale of Two Neighborhoods,” Istanbul Between the Global and the Local, 1999, 173–86. 124 310 that connected Istanbul to Ankara, in the location known as Kapanağılı.125 Kapanağılı was partly an old pig farm –owned by non-Muslims, but apparently run by Muslims- and the northern part of the area was dotted with stone quarries, again owned by Greeks. An overwhelming amount of the land in Kapanağılı belonged to a Greek, named Gornik, who resided in Karaköy, Bankalar Street. However, the anti-Greek policies of successive governments, the September 6-7, 1955 pogrom in Istanbul, and Inönü government’s large-scale deportation of Istanbul Greeks in the early 1960s –as a reaction to the simmering Cyprus issue- on flimsy legal basis led to a depopulation of Istanbul’s Greek population. The depopulation, forced immigration policies, and Turkification of the city and perhaps deliberately ended up in a massive transfer of land and urban private property. It is extensively written how Istanbul Greeks –and other minorities- had to sell their lands and buildings for trinkets before they left the country. Similarly, lands and farms in Kapanağılı were seamlessly transferred to the workers in those stone quarries and farms, and especially the supervising foremen of the enterprises, the Turkish people, benefitted from this forced migration.126 125 Aslan, 1 Mayıs Mahallesi 1980 Öncesi Toplumsal Mücadeleler ve Kent, 95. 126 Ibid., 95–6. 311 Figure 5.8: Ataşehir Map127 Similar to Kapanağılı, a large stretch of land from the E-5 highway to the connecting arteries of the TEM motorway, thousands of acres of land, were known in the vicinity as Karaman Farm until the early 1980s. This vast land was still used as grazing area for the sheep flocks as late as 1980s, and the owners of the land, the Tahralı family – a family claimed to come from Karaman in central Anatolia, hence the farm’s namewere running a dairy farm at that time. The Tahralı family began selling land piecemeal. First the land was sold to building cooperatives, to the TESK (Cooperative of Craftsmen and Artisans of Turkey) which built one of the earliest “modern” styled gated apartment development –called, Bağ-Kur (an abbreviation of social security system for the selfemployed, the so-called, craftsmen and artisans) and a mile to the north, the Esin blocks were their making. Later in the mid-1980s, a huge apartment complex of upwards to 2000 units- was erected by a pioneering private sector developer, Soyak, designed by the famous architect Behruz Çinici, and this completed the thorough settlement of this area 127 Source: Istanbul Ataşehir Municipality, www.atasehir.bel.tr 312 by the nascent middle class. The farm area was extensive to today’s Ataşehir subprovince. There exists no reliable records, but, this vast land, Karaman Farm, might be connected to the massive expropriation of Greeks during this period. Urbanization in Istanbul, inasmuch as a story of redistribution instigated by the growth machine of gecekondus, was similarly a product of the expropriation of non-Muslims’ private property either in the form of taking control of urban land and key architectural buildings from their lands by heavy taxation, or by mere coercion. The Gecekondu Law of 1966 permitted a key intervention and opened up a new entrepreneurial venue in urban development efforts: trade unions, chambers of commerce, and basically any voluntary association were encouraged to organize around building cooperatives and they were granted public land, low interest credits from the state banks, and further, some exceptions on taxation. Additionally, land grants to municipalities as gecekondu prevention areas and the Planning and Building Ministry’s budgetary allocations helped a novel phenomenon appear in Istanbul, for the first time, the state initiated social housing for the disadvantaged sections of society in the 1960s. Building cooperatives played a crucial role for the development efforts and greatly helped state employees and organized workers to own a house throughout the 1980s and ‘90s. The foremen and contractors raised and earned a place in construction business and as the building cooperatives later gave way to large-scale private developers in the 2000s, they played a big role as the newfangled and ambitious businessmen of a new era. Unfortunately, the building cooperatives, a brain child of Bülent Ecevit and his RPP, could not even supply a significant portion of the housing necessary to stem the growth of the gecekondus event during the sporadic rule of RPP in the 1970s and instead, helped 313 middle classes gain a foothold in the already chaotic urban land markets by sheer force of numbers. In the absence of credit in urban development, the cooperatives served the purpose of small-scale housing loans banks, though, more often than not, they took years to complete, involved graft, and most of these cooperatives ended up bankrupt, particularly during the crisis prone years of 1990s. The varied and highly experimental state-space building endeavor makes itself visible in the 2- mile radius around the May Day neighborhood in a multi-layered cross-section of class relations. Soon after the passing of the Gecekondu Law, an expansive swath of public land by the E-5 highway that extended to the south of present Ümraniye was allocated as the Ümraniye area gecekondu prevention zone. Here in one part of the allocated land, the Planning and Building Ministry commenced construction of social housing. Aside from a few examples –in the 1930s the first housing complex of the republic, named Saracoğlu Houses were built in Ankara as state and army employees accommodation, later in the 1950s, in Levent and Ataköy the Menderes government tried to provide housing, but that only fed into the middle class aspirations for western style “modern” urban living, the land grant and limited housing provided to the Balkan immigrants in the 1950s, and the building of a grand complex of housing and leisure facilities for the military officers and state officials (the logements as a direct borrow-word from French)- the state was mainly impervious to the housing question. In essence, the state was interested in creating housing supply and urban development for its subservient class fraction –the militarybureaucratic complex- and partly in the middle class housing, which already had economic and material means to own their homes. 128 The sole example of social housing in a significant scale was the Saracoğlu district in Ankara, slated to be a 3000 unit comple. The land appropriation began in 1928, but no construction activity took place until 128 314 In 1968, an area consisting of today’s Esatpaşa, Örnek, parts of Fetih, Aşık Veysel, and Mustafa Kemal mahalles, 2100 decares of land were appropriated by the state. 1200 decares of this land were transferred to the Istanbul metropolitan municipality, while 900 decares were given to the then still rural municipality of Ümraniye. On this land, a social housing complex with 200 units was built by the Planning and Building Ministry in today’s Esatpaşa, and further land was granted to the cooperatives which built 680 apartments. By 1977, the state had completed 880 homes in almost a decade, but, in the land surrounding the state-built social housing, on the gecekondu prevention site and on the conjoining land of quarries and farms, already more than 4500 gecekondus were built. What the state did was too little, too late, once again.129 The first gecekondus in Kapanağılı were built by the instigation of certain groups who had connections among the immigrant community and who allegedly had influence amidst the decision-makers of the time. In the 1970s, the earliest founders of the gecekondu communities were adept traders in influence and established their own protection rackets to sustain their power over land distribution. Organized crime had been an integral part of the land grab from the beginning, and they were called the land mafia by the early 1980s in the mainstream newspapers. The oldest residents of the mahalle thought that this land mafia and these rentiers were the ones who first saw an opportunity for gain here. Yet, organized crime could not easily parcel out land and distribute it to buyers, because the neighborhood stood next to one of the main garbage 1944. The Paul Bonatz designed housing complex for the bureaucratic and military elite was completed in 1946, though on a much smaller scale, 424 units were finished by that time. See, Tekeli, Türkiye’de yaşamda ve yazında konut sorununun gelişimi, 40. 129 Faik Akın and Abdullah Öğülmüş, “1 Mayıs Mahallesi: Nedir Ne Değildir? I,” Milliyet, May 1, 1978. 315 disposal areas in Istanbul’s Asian side. Compared to the other, adjacent areas –for instance, Yeni Sahra a few miles east of the Kapanağılı- the garbage made the area unsavory, at least, in the beginning.130 The growing power of organized crime and its pioneering role in commodifying urban land in return for both protection rackets –they claimed they were protecting the mahalle from demolition by bribing persons of power, or by threatening the individual gecekondu owners to abide by their power- reached a certain pivotal moment in 1977 in Kapanağılı. The area saw considerable movement in 1976, and was ripe for organized crime’s intervention and its function as speculators on urban land. Farms with loosely documented titles of ownership, stone quarries with unknown landlords, a wide area in between designated as a gecekondu prevention zone by the state, and on top of all, a municipal administration with plenty of land but few authority over that land –Ümraniye was no more than a village entity at the time- further underlined the vast economic possibilities that waited its speculators in the area. Moreover, the working class population had already settled in nearby areas like Fikirtepe and their growing numbers and relative proximity to the urban centers like Üsküdar and Kadıköy added to the attraction. The area was open for the taking and whoever first claimed it would have to preserve its claim by a carefully balanced mix of physical force, extortion, bribery, and friends in the higher-up places. Şükrü Aslan, who wrote a brilliant monograph on the establishment of the gecekondu neighborhood here, related that he found a chance to meet a couple who moved into the area in the 1960s. The couple told him that when they arrived the area 130 Aslan, 1 Mayıs Mahallesi 1980 Öncesi Toplumsal Mücadeleler ve Kent, 99–100. 316 was no different than the countryside, with few and far between country houses, and plenty of grazing land for the sheep. By the 1970s the flood gates were wide open, but the gecekondu dwellers knew that demolition was not far away and they had no means to stand against the municipal authorities. A group of people offered the Kapanağılı residents their help: they would obtain necessary permits for building and thwart attempts of demolition, telling them that they had connections in higher places. But, those in higher places were not easy to persuade, and the ones in the gendarmerie (the rural police) and municipalities were rather greedy, so they asked payments from the residents. They said that the money was for presents, for taking the people of influence out to dinner at luxury restaurants, and, also, for bribery. One day, it was money to be collected for buying dinner for gendarmerie officers, the next day it was for a present. After a point, the residents began to ponder if the money collected from them, which they had no idea of how it was being spent, was actually paid straight into a protection racket. Some even claimed that they saw some members of this group enjoying their time in the night clubs by themselves. They felt cheated. The people of the mahalle decided to elect their own representatives by public vote. This new representative committee would decide the further development of the mahalle, determine the new direction of their neighborhood’s expansion, solve problems regarding the borders between gecekondus –a crucial task, since no parcel was cadastrally drawn, it was a permanent source of conflict between neighbors- decide communal squat of new public land, provide suitable land for newcomers, rent empty lots to increase the community coffers, and prevent speculation over their appropriated land. They established a true community organization that would protect residents’ interest in the city. In the summer months of 1977, the committee was 317 founded as a consequence of a participatory meeting where all had a say. The committee membership was mostly made up of young socialists from the neighborhood, but a few people known to be representatives of the organized crime group were also elected. The first real democratic local self-government experience came into existence in this way. Alas, the brevity of the experience was no match for its wider social repercussions that would resonate deeply in the next four decades. The mass appropriation of mainly public land was spearheaded by a series of Maoist socialist organizations: Halkın Yolu (People’s Path), Halkın Birliği (People’s Unity), Halkın Kurtuluşu (People’s Salvation) –a family of socialist organization, they were offshoots of internal divisions of an earlier organization, but they were in alliance with each other, and collectively known as the Halkın Sülalesi (People’s Family) colloquially among other socialists- and Partizan led the efforts. The Maoists of the time, during my interviews also related how this mass appropriation and participatory grassroots democracy experiment were a making of their own –they, kind of, jealously wanted to guard their important contribution to urban socialist struggle. Though, apparently, Maoism and urban appropriation were not theoretically compatible –their organizing principle pivoted on a revolutionary movement that sprang from the countryside and then moved into the urban areas. However, Aslan underlined that this large-scale experiment in land appropriation and distribution to those in need could only be facilitated through consensus building politics.131 Similarly for instance, at around the same time, Fatsa people elected the socialist tailor, Fikri Sönmez (the tailor Fikri) as an independent mayor. Tailor Fikri, built 131 Ibid., 120–5. 318 a popular committee, ended fierce violent struggles between right-wing and left-wing citizens of Fatsa, instigated collective work for public roads, waterworks, and organized a theatre, musical workshop in less than a year.132 Both experiences in power –for the first time in Turkey’s history of socialism and only limited to local authorities- entailed opening up conversation with hitherto hostile sections of society, a cold calculation of opportunities, a rallying of different social strata, and albeit conducted perfunctorily, a certain mode of public relations-which meant, reaching out to non-socialists of Istanbul and Turkey. The people’s committee, as an instance of consensus building, discussed whether they might name their neighborhood after one of the political leaders of the time (Ecevit or Demirel names were on the table). Yet, the socialists set in motion their popular influence amidst the general population, and against the moderate members of the opposition’s vehement opposition, the decision was made in August, 1977 to name the district May Day mahalle as a nod to the memory of 37 people died during the shooting and stampede on May Day in 1977.133 Meanwhile, the active members of the people’s committee were acutely aware that an intervening operation by the state forces and a wave of demolition was in the making. One influential member, who also served as the chair of the committee, told Aslan that their resolve for resistance was actually inspired by their northern neighbors in the Esatpaşa mahalle who stood against the court-ordered demolition of their mosquewhich was built on private land.134 However, the May Day neighborhood’s growing fame In comparison, Fatsa’s participatory democracy experience was led by Dev-Yol (Revolutionary Path), which was neither Maoist, nor Stalinist/Sovietic and they were better equipped in the cities and among younger educated sections of urban society. 132 133 Aslan, 1 Mayıs Mahallesi 1980 Öncesi Toplumsal Mücadeleler ve Kent, 120–5. 134 Ibid., 128. 319 among the socialist and left-wing circles and their demonization by the right-wing attracted the ire of government, and the brutal force, blatant coercion employed during the demolition was unrivalled. On the early morning of September 2, 1977, the operation for demolition started with hundreds of gendarmes and policemen. Even though the residents had been on the look-out for months and had a system of precautions in place, the result was devastating: nine were shot to death, between 138 and 300 were arrested, tens of gecekondus were torn down. The violent response meted out to the innocent gecekondu residents made the headlines, where just four months before, 37 were killed during the May Day demonstrations, and once again, the state institutions, unable to find –or unearth- those responsible, had killed a further nine in a cold-blooded operation. The Minister of Interior, Korkut Özal (elder brother of Turgut Özal) –responsible for the police force- made statements in the newspapers to the effect that the operation was nothing more than a routine public safety event.135 The neighborhood took a particularly important role in the newspapers, the spiraling of street level political violence was on the verge of becoming out of control, and the events in the May Day neighborhood fuelled further animosity toward the right-wing governments of the time. After the massacre of September 2, the May Day neighborhood gained symbolic importance within the socialist and left-wing circles and saw an increasing support from all around Turkey. This spatial experiment in self-government that was raised on socialist principles of equality and fraternity was closely watched by other socialist movements and treated as a test in socialist talents to actually govern and reproduce daily lives of the Faik Akın and Abdullah Öğülmüş, “1 Mayıs Mahallesi: Nedir Ne Değildir? II,” Milliyet, May 2, 1978; Faik Akın and Abdullah Öğülmüş, “1 Mayıs Mahallesi: Nedir Ne Değildir? III,” Milliyet, May 3, 1978. 135 320 working class, while setting up mechanisms for redistribution. Young revolutionary college students would stop by the neighborhood in the evenings, took part in urban planning, built new gecekondus, drew cadastral maps for distribution of land, helped the people’s committee functions to continue –since, many of its members were either still under arrest, or in the run from the government forces- although, they were barred from owning or staying in any of the gecekondus.136 The breaking point, however, was not the September massacre. In a short period of time the neighborhood overcame the damage done by the massacre, and with help from outside socialist organizations rebuilt the demolished houses and found a way to sustain the working of the committee. In March 1978, another act of violence shook the neighborhood deeply. On March 18, 1978, five bodies were found in the vacant stone quarries. Four of the dead were factory workers at Otosan –then, three miles to the west of the neighborhood on the E-5 highway- and the fifth was a construction worker. All of them were from the same family, from Giresun’s sub-province, Görele. First, the newspapers could not figure out the reasons of their death, and in the daily dead count of the period their number just added up to the already hundreds of those who died during the street level political violence. Soon, it was learned that all five lived in the gecekondu district of nearby Yenisahra, and they also owned gecekondus in the May Day neighborhood. Previously, they were seen coming to the May Day, and an altercation took place between the five and the residents of May Day because they did not want to give up their parcels to the people’s committee. All five were known as belonging to the Faik Akın and Abdullah Öğülmüş, “1 Mayıs Mahallesi: Nedir Ne Değildir? IV,” Milliyet, May 4, 1978; Aslan, 1 Mayıs Mahallesi 1980 Öncesi Toplumsal Mücadeleler ve Kent, 130–154. 136 321 nationalist organization of “Ülkü Ocakları.”137 Hürriyet daily wrote that the five died under heavy torture, and other right-wing newspapers joined the fray trumpeting that the May Day mahalle was the locus of uncontrolled “anarchy,” where revolutionary courts were set up to convict people with execution, and state institutions were vehemently called to duty to end this “state within the state”- to get rid of this parallel state.138 Their calls did not remain unheeded, and on March 21, 1978, 1000 policemen, 250 gendarmes, 75 police and gendarmerie cars, 11 armored vehicles entered the May Day neighborhood, searched 3000 gecekondus, and arrested 80 persons. The leading members of the committee fled and moved underground to continue their activities until the September 12, 1980 coup. The committee lost its steering role in the community. In the ensuing period, although the revolutionary spirit and intent of the committee tried to be kept alive, the murders and the pressures put on the community by the state institutions led to lukewarm responses from the residents. The people’s committee was replaced by a committee of the elders. The RPP, meanwhile turned its attention to the mahalle, the metropolitan municipality (headed by a mayor from the RPP), laid water pipes in the area and, for the first time, the RPP’s Kadıköy District chair paid a visit to the May Day neighborhood.139 A gendarmerie post was established in the spring months of 1978 in the center of the mahalle which ultimately sealed the integration of the neighborhood to the wider system in the eyes of the central state 137 Hearth of the Ideals, a literal translation, was a youth organization with paramilitary tendencies modelled after the Turkish Hearth and worked as a street-level extension of the Nationalist Action Party (MHP). The organization still exists, though no longer harboring paramilitary aspirations. See, Tanıl Bora and Kemal Can, Devlet, ocak, dergâh: 12 Eylül’den 1990’lara ülkücü hareket (İletişim Yayınları, 1991). 138 Aslan, 1 Mayıs Mahallesi 1980 Öncesi Toplumsal Mücadeleler ve Kent, 149–150. 139 Ibid., 159–161. 322 authorities. Soon, this integration was completed by first the opening up of a mahalle cooperative, then, the incorporation of primary schools, and finally, with the building of a health center.140 After the 1980 coup, a gendarmerie major who commanded and governed the area under martial law, decided to erase the name of May Day from history, and renamed the place as Mustafa Kemal mahalle. 141 As a consequence, the neighborhood became a legally recognized mahalle complete with a military appointed muhtar –normally, a selected position similar to a county executive- and the incorporation to the state-space mold was finalized. This incorporation reproduced a perennial dilemma that surrounded socialist and left-wing politics in Turkey: to what extent does the person and symbolism attached to his personality cult resonate with the left? The military did not hesitate in assigning the name Mustafa Kemal to this neighborhood called May Day, and many socialists of the 1970s, ‘80s, and ‘90s showed a similar lack of restraint when they joined the ranks of socialists. Kemalism provided a safe harbor in the exceedingly complicated relations between the state and working classes, sheltered the Alevi minority from the Sunni majority, and pretended to be the main locus of progressive politics in Turkey. The May Day neighborhood, was a representation of such state-space nexus, it stood no chance as a socialist mahalle but it was at least permitted to be a part of the system-it can be contained and tolerated. A similar fate awaited all non-Kurdish intellectuals in the 20th 140 Ibid., 162. “Come here, old man” the Major said, “where do you hail from?” I replied, “May Day neighborhood.” He said, “May Day’s dead. From now on, you live in the Mustafa Kemal district.” Ibid., 186. Later in 2009, Mustafa Kemal district was divided into two mahalles, and the newly formed district was named Aşık Veysel. Both Aşık Veysel and Mustafa Kemal are systemically tolerated and encouraged toponymy, names found suitable by the dominantly Sunni and right-wing authorities. It is similar to naming schools in the impoverished inner-city neighborhoods after Martin Luther King, Jr. in the USA. 141 323 and 21st centuries in Turkey, as long as they had to survive in the state delineated and sanctioned borders of permissible politics, they had to renounce internationalism of socialism and hang onto a loosely defined Kemalist progressivism. The electoral history of the May Day neighborhood in the last two decades starkly posits the situation, it is either Kemalism, or nothing for the erstwhile socialists and genuine progressives. Sema Erder, in a study she conducted in the late 1980s and early ‘90s, gave a vivid example of how the May Day neighborhood (newly minted as Mustafa Kemal) was integrated into the system. She found out that 90 percent of homes in the district were owner-occupied and the remaining 10 per cent were rental households. A preliminary land deed was distributed by the early 1990s, though, actual land titles were printed and handed only in 2009-and that, for a hefty sum of money. At the time of Erder’s research, the neighborhood’s population was 19 thousand, and only 2 per cent of this population was employed where they lived. The occupations of the residents were counted as unskilled laborer, street-peddler, and domestic servant. At that time, there was 1 secondary school, 1 high school, 1 post office, 2 mosques, 7 restaurants, 2 doctors, and 2 real estate agencies, and no banks. Erder’s information source was the muhtar, and he told her that immigrants from Sivas made up the majority in the neighborhood.142 The most interesting part of Erder’s research was her extended interviews and observations with the mayor and council members of Ümraniye. She did not disclose the mayor’s name in her book, nor the other council members’ names, but we know that Şinasi Öktem was the newly elected mayor of Ümraniye at the time. Öktem was a DevYol (Revolutionary Path) member before the 1980 coup and actively partook in the 142 Erder, Istanbul’a bir kentkondu Ümraniye, 42–129. 324 establishment of the May Day neighborhood. After the coup, he entered business life as a real estate developer and contractor and was elected as mayor of Ümraniye in the landslide local election victory of the Social Democratic Populist Party143 at the very young age of 33 –for a gerontocratic society like Turkey, his age was exceptionally young.144 As previously explained, the Turkish local administration imposed the municipal council as a mere appendage to the mayor’s power, an executive board handpicked by the mayor himself. Erder’s conversations with Öktem’s council members and advisors –who happened to be his friends from the days of the May Day neighborhoodconfirm that as well. Erder’s data on council members additionally provided a rare glimpse into class characteristics in Ümraniye, 62.5 per cent of the council members (20 out of 39) were real estate developers or contractors.145 That undeniably pointed out the overwhelming role played by real estate speculation and redistribution of urban land rent in politics. Furthermore, her survey showed that a generation before, among the parents of those council members, only one had been involved in construction, and almost a third of them (ten members) had parents who were farmers.146 Apparently, the massive appropriation of public land helped many figures enter local politics. But the May Day neighborhood’s political influence was not merely limited to Ümraniye’s city council, as the mayor and his friends had far more outreach than one would expect. SHP, a successor to the RPP, since the latter was banned after the coup, was active until the reunification with RPP in 1995. 143 144 Erder, Istanbul’a bir kentkondu Ümraniye, 146–159. In Turkish, the Arabic borrow-word müteahhit is used to denote both a real estate developer and a building contractor. The root of the Arabic term, also a borrow-word in Turkish, is taahhüt, contract. However, müteahhit does not only indicate those who build on contract, but also, and especially, selfemployed developers. 145 146 Erder, Istanbul’a bir kentkondu Ümraniye, 42–129. 325 Two years into his term, Şinasi Öktem decided to switch his party affiliation and left the SHP with a clique led by Deniz Baykal –the perennial contender for the leadership of the RPP. Deniz Baykal and his team resuscitated the moribund RPP, Öktem was one of the first to join the reestablished party and his early devotion to Baykal was not left unnoticed. Today, the May Day neighborhood residents still talk about the alleged corruption of his tenure and how it led to the explosion in real estate speculation in the mahalle with the mushrooming apartment buildings all around. Early in his tenure, during a visit to a wedding, an armed assault was directed at him, and his bodyguard took the bullet for the mayor.147 Even then, some questions were raised about his shady deals. After he left the SHP he got into an open quarrel with the Istanbul metropolitan mayor, Nurettin Sözen. Blamed Sözen openly through newspaper interviews for his lack of leadership abilities –although, they were both elected from the same party and represented similar political views. Later, allegations surfaced concerning an extremely valuable land deal in Ümraniye. The land, which belonged to the metropolitan municipality, was allegedly transferred by Öktem to a local cooperative through forged signatures.148 The fatal blow to Öktem’s mayoral career came on April 28, 1993. Due to an explosion caused by a buildup of methane gas underneath the Hekimbaşı landfill, 37 people died. The landfill belonged to the Istanbul metropolitan municipality but not directly under Öktem’s purview, however, newspapers wrote that he was allegedly responsible for parceling the adjacent empty lots to the landfill and selling it to poor immigrants. The deaths were among the people who lived in those newly built “Ümraniye Belediye Başkanı Ölümden Döndü: Üstüne Kapandı, Başkanı Kurtardı,” Milliyet, June 24, 1990. 147 148 Nilüfer Kas, “Öktem’in ‘Sözen Öfkesi,’” Milliyet, March 14, 1994. 326 gecekondus. He entered the 1994 elections from his new party, the newly re-established RPP and got only 5 per cent of the votes-he had been elected with a staggering 39 per cent five years previous. The other left-wing parties, the SHP received 20 per cent, and the DSP 10 per cent of the votes. The overall left-wing votes were more than what Welfare Party got at 33 per cent-however, the Islamists won the mayoralty of not only Ümraniye, but most of the metropolitan municipalities in Turkey. A new period began. The Islamists who beat Öktem still rule municipalities, and although they did not only build a successful local administration, they also went on to become the ruling party in Turkey, in 1997 – briefly- and in 2002 which lasts up until today. Between 1994 and 2003 Öktem was one of the right-hand men of Baykal, and his unswerving loyalty was awarded with the appointment as the chair of the RPP’s Istanbul Provincial organization. He was elected as a member of parliament from Istanbul in 2007, like his sister, Güldal Okuducu. During their time, the single-party hegemony of the AKP was gradually bolstered in the lack of a viable and vibrant opposition. The deficient democracy was further injured by Baykal’s steadfast support for the military, and his skilfully crafted coup-mongering for the alleged threats on secularism, while any meaningful democratic voice was suppressed in the RPP. As Öktem and his family became an integral part of the RPP’s rightward shift, the May Day neighborhood continued in overwhelmingly voting for the party. The hegemonic hold the RPP constructed in the aftermath of the 1978 murders, and operations in the May Day neighborhood went on unchallenged, and while different brands of socialist grassroots organizations and Kurdish liberation movements flourished in the area, none other than the RPP showed a significant electoral success. 327 5.11 From the Objective to the Subjective: May Day Neighborhood and Residual experiences of an urban sojourner In the spring of 2010, under beautiful sunshine, I walked towards the May Day neighborhood while pondering silently about the immutable twin problems of the impossibility of writing on Istanbul and the fleeting reality of urban space. I told myself, the problem is not in bringing together the empirical reality,-reality as perceived fact is ubiquitous and fertile, open to sociological imagination, conversant with a plethora of discussions from all corners –and, unlike two decades earlier, urban issues slowly gained traction, and so, the problem is not in finding people with comparable interests, and, definitely not in finding receptive ears, the urban question is once again fashionable. The problem is in juxtaposing the urban totality onto the ephemeral minutiae of everyday life, of walking the tight rope between the particular and the universal, weaving the intricate threads that connect empirical fact and theory, introducing the concrete reality to the abstract fantasy. And, also, the problem is in paying the due respect to this ethereal aleph, Istanbul. The more I traversed Istanbul, the more my path bifurcated along the labyrinthine streets and corners, faces and sounds of this once beautiful, now breath-takingly indescribable city, the more I found myself in awe. On the other hand, I tried to keep my chin up, guard my distance to my object of analysis, I am in the ken of the all-toocommon habit of treating one’s object of study as unprecedentedly unique, one-of-a-kind, irreplaceably integrated to an orrery of sociological artifices. Somewhere amidst my grey 328 brain cells, simple diagrams are heaped on top of each other. Levi-Strauss plays a huge role there, I sat next to him, in the midst of an Amazonian village, we looked at the hutshow does the lineage play a function to give form to human mental image of the surrounding space? How do we interact with the built environment? Why is this half of the village different than the other half? Why is there an invisible border between where I just laid my foot, and not there, a step before? The differences made the whole. The undifferentiated does not make the whole, inasmuch as the function and delineations stay the same, the totality is not a true totality, it is rather a lump, lifeless mass, devoid of vitality, dormant but not dead, heralding a future awakening, an incipient antagonism. This is a constellation of contradictions, I think, neither dormant, nor lethargic, the sea that separates us is not livid, the inequality that meshed our lives into each other is not morbid. The sun, the soil, the streets, the cars, the buses; they are not the same, yet, in their difference they share a commonality in this strange city of alephs. This is what the sociologist sought for, they investigated the particular in the multiplicity, and even if they tried to do otherwise, if they tried to ascertain the multiplicity in the singularity, not much would have changed. Here emerges Benjamin’s unmatched talent in discerning things from other things, his adamant effort to unearth the beauty of repetition, the particularity of likeness, the singularity of the multitude. It is neither advisable, nor facile to wander the streets –however grotesque and rundown they are- for the simple reason of walking the streets, the nomadic mind, the impervious consciousness, the spatial connoisseur, the one who sought the truth in its endless turn of Janus-faces, and who, settled for the multitude of those faces, is perhaps, if not adorable, but venerable. The unbreakable shell of social and urban phenomena cannot be broken by dint of theoretical instruments, but, 329 may give way to the somnambulant travails of a flâneur. Walking for the sake of walking, not for a manifest reason, but for delivering the reasoning to the patient formulations of space as it is.149 The streets of the May Day neighborhood are no different from an ordinary provincial city’s well-to-do central business district. The same sideways, same signs, same coffee houses, same barber shops, bus stops, different faces. The same cornucopia of buildings, here a balcony full of freshly washed laundry waiting to get dry, and there, the walls painted green, right next to the newly painted glow of white side-walls of a well-kept gecekondu, the health center was unmistakably painted in what I call the state pink, the standard color of all schools, state universities, courts, barracks, kindergartens, basically anything that is public. It is the most unlucky of all colors in the color spectrum, the red and yellow were taken by the socialists until very recently –and, hence, forbidden by the state- green was the Islamists’ color of choice –ditto, banned- white and blue were a no-go, since they meant the Greek flag, purple was hard to come by, orange was childish, and so the state came up with an ingenuous solution, red –the color of the Turkish flag- adulterated by white –the secondary color of the flag- which produced a peculiar pink; not exactly pink, to flag it as queer, but pinkish enough to be politically innocent. Benjamin put it quiet succinctly, and left no room for further refinement, nor any ascertainment, regarding the career of a flâneur: “It is the gaze of the flâneur, whose way of life conceals behind a beneficent mirage the anxiety of the future inhabitants of our metropolises. The flâneur seeks refuge in the crowd. The crowd is the veil through which the familiar city is transformed for the flâneur into phantasmagoria. This phantasmagoria, in which the city now appears now as a landscape, now as a room, seems later to have transpired the décor of department stores, which thus put flânerie to work for profit. In any case, department stores are the last precincts of flânerie.” W. Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Belknap Press, 1999), 21. Throughout my convocations for various lives of Istanbul, and perhaps, more often than not, frustrated grappling with Istanbulite modernity, I had to invoke this hapless characteristic of the flâneur. 149 330 Further down the road, steel lighting fixtures clutter already crowded sidewayswhich were unusually high above the pavement level and uncomfortably narrow to permit a leisurely walk along the main thoroughfare adorned with shops: the local liquor store, the ladies’ hairdresser, barbershop, grocery store, a small electronics dealer which also sells pre-paid mobile cards, and the sin qua non of any mahalle, the furniture and white goods store which sells on credit but to recuperate the costs at, at least, 10 per cent more expensive than the competition, and apparently, this store is no match for the one up the street in Örnek district, so it will not take long for the store to go out of business. Fifty feet away, at the intersection of the main street and a smaller street that takes you up to Esatpaşa, a small children’s park has been made, the grass already died away, brownish, the children’s equipment is apparently newly installed, but the park is not more than a thousand square feet, so there is hardly any place for the kids. The park benches serve as a breathing spot for the elders who take their kids for an afternoon stroll, or for those who are out grocery shopping in the Örnek district –the chain stores have not yet arrived in the May Day neighborhood. There are low-rise gecekondu houses, two, or three floors at most, hidden inside gardens, and it is impossible to get a peak since the gardens are surrounded by high walls. The gardens that the bourgeoisie would spend their easily earned millions on are often a second thought here. Some do tend their gardens though, growing tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers; a decade ago, it was still possible to be awakened by the cock’s crow, a predominant way for the poor to obtain their daily protein for cheap, but it is no longer possible to hear them anywhere in the city. Without any exception, all gardens have at least a tree planted, perhaps a reminder of where they came from, a souvenir from a 331 vacation in their village, or, a heralding sign of their first born, or, maybe as simple as to have an apple tree. While the main street is full of gargantuan, monolithic, unpainted, or simply plastered reinforced concrete buildings, one building had something akin to a shopping mall inside, called a pasaj in Turkish, the inspiration was from the French arcades of the 1950s on, but very few shops inside are occupied. On the upper floors of the main street buildings, there are a few offices, but they are mostly residential. Remarkably, the planning regulations had apparently not extended to this part of town, so some buildings are three floors tall, others are five, a familiar cacophony of structures prevail here. The buildings around, both the residential ones and shops, seem to me once well maintained but left to a thinly disguised decay in the last few years, as if everybody’s waiting for the developers to buy their land and raise an apartment building there –getting affluent in the process. The unlikely twin of the May Day neighborhood, its opposite soul, its doppelganger, the Örnek neighborhood, has already undergone a similar phase of urban transformation. The familiar gecekondu face of the Örnek mahalle is gradually being replaced by the ubiquitous vernacular of the yapsatçıs. Homes, small brick buildings with gardens, are rapidly being replaced by at least four stories- high, reinforced concrete buildings. All look alike, fashionably painted in new pastel colors –colors impossible to produce a decade ago, though still, interestingly, akin to the state pink I mentioned above, though, somewhere between brown, dark yellow, and brownish red are the predominant colors. A new balcony style is unexceptionally recognizable in all such buildings: floor height windows ornate with aluminum balustrades, called French balcony-since, they 332 looked like the Parisian vernacular houses. They are no real balconies. Turkish women’s cure-all were the balconies, their sole desire in terms of architectural form, they for long served as drying platforms for the laundry, storage units for the excess furniture, refrigerator for storing rice, grains, pickles, etc., and more recently , a smoking pod for men. Apparently, the French balcony provides plenty of light, but, on the other hand, means a certain extra chore in cleaning, the windows are large, nonpermissive, and even dangerous. Aside from the French balcony, they are adorned with neat inventions in façade design. The introduction of ready-made plaster, which also provided insulation, provided a panacea for design. Any form can be given to the building –as long as it does not concern structural elements, or the already crumpled layout of the building- you would like neo-classical touches on the building with Doric columns, no problem, they can be installed without any headache, what about that baroque inspired arches we saw yesterday at a friend’s place, again, you name it, they’d build it, as long as you pay. On the streets of Örnek, the ragtag shops are gone, the Black Sea pita house has been replaced by an eight-floor apartment building, the stationer who desperately waited for the school kids to sell stuff for trinkets has been demolished and a grocery chain store is now operating on the first floor of an apartment building, the cock no longer crows, the hearths that burnt coal were replaced by new imported boilers, the coffee house on the corner where people gathered together to catch the soccer games has been replaced with a café and restaurant, and I assume, people now watch games at home. The middle class has taken over the area. The beauty and difficulty of the May Day neighborhood lies in the effort to get to know the traces of what remained from Aslan’s, newspaper reports’, and old faces 333 accounts. Few marks are legible, the streets are in order, the homes are nothing like what social scientists lamentably told time and again in the extensive gecekondu literature.150 There are no broken windows, no houses without curtains. And actually, as any other place in Turkey, curtains are elaborately embroidered to both protect the insiders from the gaze of the wanderers on the streets and to prove that the homeowner is rich. While one is relatively free to roam the main street and her movements are barely registered by the flotsam and jetsam of everyday life, a walk in the back streets immediately attract undue attention. If it is a weekday, small kids follow you around, tailing you as if you are a disturbing nuisance, or a potential troublemaker, and old women direct their gazes on you, from behind the garden walls. And if on a weekend you stroll in the streets, not only the kids but all of the people living around will follow your steps with subtle, but undisguised interest. It is a good idea to keep your strolls limited to the main street, or wander in the weekdays. On the streets of Örnek, amidst the apartment buildings, there are no eyes on the streets, and four or five-floor apartment buildings are no match for the opportunities provided by the gecekondus for social surveillance. Gecekondus on the other hand, have been completely integrated to the system, their water is metered, the gas and power is metered as well, and they have broadband internet connection. Since 2010, 3G mobile connections have become plentiful, and people began switching to smartphones –the sole little comfort workers in Turkey could afford for themselves. The streets are clean and although not grid-shaped, the layout Tahire Erman wrote how in the last five decades, four different generations of social scientists followed contrasting frameworks in their studies of the gecekondu phenomenon and how they conceptualized the subjectivity of the migrants. See, Tahire Erman, “The Politics of Squatter (gecekondu) Studies in Turkey: The Changing Representations of Rural Migrants in the Academic Discourse,” Urban Studies 38, no. 7 (2001): 983–1002. 150 334 helps you navigate the steep hills the neighborhood was built atop. Here and there, very few empty lots remain- kids used to turn these lots into impromptu soccer field a while ago, but now, they cannot enter the empty lots-as they are enclosed by barbed wire. The kids play on the streets, or, during the weekends, jump over the nearby high school’s walls to use the asphalt basketball field there. Only recently, Ataşehir municipality built an extensive park, though it is far away from the homes-down by the valley’s base, in the dividing line between the much more affluent Ataşehir and the May Day neighborhood. The park was opened with much fanfare. The RPP’s leader attended the ceremonies, and the park was named after Deniz Gezmiş, the socialist who was executed as a traitor in 1972 by the junta. Gecekondus now do not look like anything as described by Hart or successive generations of social scientists. They are transitory, waiting for the arrival of developers with deep pockets and good connections in higher places. I remember vividly the day I first visited a gecekondu neighborhood. I was a kid, and as a son of a family whose ancestors were among the first to immigrate from their Black Sea villages to Istanbul and Ankara, a sizable part of my relatives lived in the gecekondus. My extended family was very clearly divided into two geographical, political, and class camps. One camp, the earliest immigrants to Istanbul and Ankara, in the 1930s and ‘40s, had the chance to be educated in the republican primary schools and continued their education and graduated from high schools –the highest level of education possible, given the limited places in a handful of colleges in Turkey. They were the proper citizens of the Kemalist republic, where women did not veil their heads and some worked as white collar professionals, and they lived in apartments, had telephones –a rare luxury until the deregulation of telecommunications in the 1990s-, went to their 335 summer houses, and especially stayed away from visiting their villages during holidays, they overwhelmingly voted the RPP, believed that religion was a highly private matter, something to be ashamed of rather than publicly displayed, they placed a particular emphasis on education as the only path towards upwards social mobility, and they praised the state as the almighty apparatus established and sustained by the RPP and the army, and one’s civic responsibility is to keep your head down and obey orders unquestioningly-especially, if these orders came from the state or the army. At a certain moment of my sociological readings –or, meanderings- a rupture made itself apparent in all its gravity. Turkish sociology was intent on keeping its vow of silence regarding the question of state, but plenty of socialist novelists and poets wrote about that rupture. Orhan Kemal, Yaşar Kemal, Kemal Tahir, and last, but definitely not least, Nazım Hikmet extensively described this class division, for the “Great Humanity,”151 things were not so great. The lives of the other part of our extended family, the ones who either came later in the 1960s and ‘70s –since, our grandparents made a vicious decision to leave some of their kids behind in the village as the guards of family lands or who could not go further than primary school - were starkly different. They worked as blue collars at the factories, or, waited tables at restaurants, they owned an auto repair shop and even in the family enterprise those were the ones who worked as delivery boys, not as the bosses. They lived in the gecekondus, the streets were unpaved, the buses did not run to where they lived, and it took a whole day from the city center to pay them an annual visit during the Eid. Their women were stay-at-home mothers – whose hands were hardened and rough from all the cleaning they did themselves. They Great Humanity, (Büyük İnsanlık) is Nazım Hikmet’s symbolism, his ironic euphemism for the working class. See, Nazim Hikmet, Human Landscapes from My Country (Persea Books, Incorporated, 2008). 151 336 wore veils, they prayed ostentatiously in the living room, or even if they were the visitors, we had to show them a quiet bedroom for their prayers. They ate their dinners all together in their gardens, and they voted for the right-wing. That’s why the two sides never got along when it came to politics, and huge fights erupted- brothers and sisters swore and cursed at each other. After the 1980 coup, everyone chose to evade politics, the snitches could be anywhere, and politics was a relic of a bygone era. I remember Zeytinburnu in the early 1980s, a vast stretch of gecekondus, and the coal that burnt in the stoves would hurt your throat, but otherwise, it had wide green scenery, every home had an expansive garden, all the fruit trees were heavy with the remainders of kids’ looting in late autumn. The sky was accessible from everywhere, actually, it was so close, and one would not have imagined a better place to live. Now, I can discern that the gecekondus had produced a second nature for themselves much closer than the real thing-and they evidently surpassed the stunted imaginations of republican planners or architects. The May Day neighborhood reinvigorated those memories, but only as amorphous traces, as a fata morgana where one can barely recognize the shapes, but not the whole scene. Gecekondus and apartments were not the same kind, neither sourced, nor shaped, not even related by the same everyday practices. Not only do the spatial configuration of the housing units differ remarkably, but the overall relations between the streets and the homes are even nowhere near comparable. The streets do not follow a particular logic other than topographical and economic necessities. If you are not familiar with the area, it is highly unlikely for one to find a home she just left. Yet, topographical limits on building –albeit ended up in labyrinthine streets and frequent dead-ends, which 337 is so often praised as new urbanism in the last two decades- do not limit one’s overall navigation, since following the elevation would naturally lead one to the center of the mahalle. That center, more often than not, is either built around a mosque, or a cemevi – where the Alevi faith’s congregation takes place. The May Day neighborhood’s street layout is no different than other gecekondu districts. Perhaps, streets numbered 3042, 3043, and 3044 are parallels, but the 3047th street cuts through those streets in addition to the 3046th street. Some streets are numbered, a few are named. Some odd numbered streets are crossed by even numbered streets and some even numbered streets intersect other even numbered streets. Practically, street numbers are of no use in finding your way in the area. And no one from the May Day neighborhood in her sane mind would use those numbers as addresses. The addresses are descriptive, rather than numeral; the first left across the grocery store, pass the old gendarmerie station, after the cemevi, behind the primary school, walk 100 meters down to the health center, would be much more familiar and useful descriptions. Furthermore, the streets of the May Day neighborhood were drawn by the help of college students, and represent a moderately orderly separation. In any other gecekondu neighborhood, where land is steeper, it would be much harder to find your way. The mind-boggling question is, of course, why would the streets be numbered as such? It is possibly the making of a municipal planner, who had not bothered to visit the area and rather decided to haphazardly name the streets. Worse, every new cadastral activity, every new squatter amnesty, every reorganization of the municipal borders would mean a redrawing of the street maps, giving out new numbers, drawing new streets, and altogether changing the door numbers of the gecekondus. Gecekondu neighborhoods are a 338 moveable feast, befitting its name, the form and function, the labels and numbers, constantly change; the faces remain the same. Spatial configuration within the gecekondus could not be farther away from the use of internal space prevalent in the Turkish middle class apartments. Turkish middle class apartment living has been elaborately studied and much is written on the issue. 152 Turkish architectural and vernacular internal design and widely applied principles of spatial circulation was heavily impressed by 19th century French architecture, and attempted a clear-cut separation of functional areas within the home. The three-plus-one became the shorthand of architectural design sought by the reputably upwardly mobile middle classes. Three bedrooms, and a living room-a French-style salon, seldom used by the ordinary members of the household, it is in essence a visitor admission hall with framed portraits from the family history, crystalware, and impeccably protected furniture - it has been appropriated as a delineation of everyday life in Turkish middle class existence, complete with one and a half bathrooms, one, frequently the larger one, with the European toilet seat, and a half bathroom with an a la Turca toilet –the residual traditionalism, or a nicety to the elders and more traditionalistic guests. The hallway played the centerpiece in this organization, with an ostentatious entrance hall, and a luxurious wooden coat hanger and shoe-stand (remember, even middle class people do not enter homes with their shoes on), an ideal home could be within the reach of anyone.153 The internal spatial circulation of the gecekondu was profoundly different than S. Ayata, “The New Middle Class and the Joys of Suburbia,” in Fragments of Culture: The Everyday of Modern Turkey, 2002, 25–42; Sencer Ayata, “Kentsel Orta Sınıf Ailelerde Statü Yarı\csması ve Salon Kullanımı,” Toplum ve Bilim 42 (1988); Öncü, “The Myth of the ‘Ideal Home’Travels Across Cultural Borders to Istanbul.” 152 For an insightful analysis of space, function, form and their interplay with power, see, Markus, Buildings and Power. Markus, uses Hillier and Hanson’s novel method to gauge the social significance of 153 339 an apartment and closely followed what Eldem, Cansever, and Kuban described in their detailed accounts of the “hayat” house. Depending on the weather and climate, all the functional circulation within the home was concentrated around an enclosed garden, or balcony. If the garden was enclosed, or the balcony was not within the reach of the dwellers, a big table and an umbrella could serve the purpose during the summer and spring seasons, for the rest, the room which was easiest to warm and closes to the kitchen –the warmest part of the house- would suffice. Contrary to the dysfunctional and rarely used spaces prevalent in the middle class apartments, every inch of a gecekondu was functional. The living room of the gecekondu was where people really lived, not an element of conspicuous consumption to show off to the others. Yet, the centrality of the living room in gecekondu, helped build a tighter-knit web of control between different elements of the family. Kids studied there, some slept in the living room, females of the household did the chores there, prepared meals in the living room, and the males came to steam off there as well. Before the coming of the television sets as the ultimate commander of attention and instigator of social interaction, the living room was the hub of social control and domestic surveillance. Before televisions dominated the working class life, gecekondus produced a field filled with daily experiences, everyday symbolisms, cultural representations, and a social reproduction of spatial practices. 154 physical space, by dint of a relational matrix; a similar approach would be both imaginative and extremely fruitful in the Turkish context, while providing key arguments for how the market mechanisms interact with the state intervention in the production of space. See, Bill Hillier and Julienne Hanson, The Social Logic of Space (Bell & Bain, 1993). 154 Here, it is evident that the referential frame points to French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu's distinction between the habitus and field. I will not go into the details this distinction, nor its theoretical connotations, However, the spatial underpinnings of Bourdieu’s thought had been scarcely investigated. Under the overwhelming influence of Henri Lefebvre's thoughts on space, perhaps a more thoroughly sociological 340 Some of this was the remainder of their peasant life, the superstitions, the irreplaceable belief in magic, in saintly figures, in evil eyes, a loosely defined gender division of labor, a patriarchal distribution of power, a vital belief in authoritarian personality, and a proclivity to follow charismatic leaders. Yet, a great deal was made in the city: morality as a highly flexible notion and harnessing this ambiguous notion as a repression towards sexuality, an accentuated anti-intellectualism, pragmatism at all levels of life, individualism, isolationism within the nuclear family, commodification of everyday life, a deeply harbored dislike and distaste toward the rich, while the conspicuous consumption itself has turned into a spectacle of, and for, consumption, resilience in the face of increasing work hours and excruciating commute –which reached more than two hours in contemporary Istanbul- and a steadfast belief in might makes right. These, and many others, were all formed in the tiny confines of the gecekondus and pervasively permeated the language of everyday life defined by the Turkish ideology. The gecekondu homes, on the other hand, reintroduced the self-building methods, and rendered everyone their own architects and designers. Istanbul had been familiar with self-built housing until the early twentieth century, though after the collapse of the empire, and before the appearance of the squatter houses it was missing as an element of the built environment.155 Vernacular forms of the gecekondu were scantly studied, and it is now on the verge of extinction. But the assemblage of different materials –bricks of all forms and sizes, plexiglass roofs and separators, different sizes and patterns of wood, tin, perception is often overlooked. See, Bourdieu, Distinction; Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice. (Esquisse D’une Théorie de La Pratique). Transl. by Richard Nice. (Repr.) (Cambridge University Press, 1977). 155 Tanyeli, İstanbul 1900-2000, 130. 341 iron, and glass; the enclosed patios, extensive balconies with obsessively guarded views, hastily laid home-made concrete in the staircases and gardens, the walls had all been a part of the gradual and slow construction, and the playful use of colors were defining formal qualities of a grassroots building culture. Not a few of those very gecekondus were made by the builders of many grand buildings in Istanbul. The middle class apartment was mostly free from its dwellers interventions, mostly shaped by the early yapsatçı contractors, and largely a reformulation of the same sketches –possibly, by a newly graduated architect- they were soulless, monolithic, dull monolithic boxes of grey reinforced concrete. The middle class figured out the importance underlying in the designer’s contribution, and began paying hefty sums for a dwelling that had the “signatures” of a very few architects in Turkey. Only now we can talk of an emerging market for the architect’s design, though, unlike the self-built houses of the gecekondus, as I will try to explain in the next chapter, the creative dialogue is not between the architect and the client, nor between the architect and his object of creation, but between the designer and the developer. The developers pick what sells –oblivious to the actual desires of the nascent middle class- and their briefs are not design guidelines for the architects, rather, perceived to be mere dictates of the customer. We will discuss that in the next chapter. Whatever were the merits and shortcomings of the gecekondus, they are on the wane. As I sat across the room with the muhtars of two districts of the erstwhile May Day neighborhood, joined by a handful of elders from the earliest days of the settlement – themselves, blue collar workers- we talk about how to make the mahalles a better place. In 2009, due to an increasing population, the May Day neighborhood was divided into 342 two: Mustafa Kemal and Aşık Veysel. Soon, the districts were made part of a newly subprovince, a product of gerrymandering: Ataşehir. The eastern part of Ataşehir is made up of erstwhile gecekondus, but of a more conservative nature. The center of Ataşehir is the new Eldorado, the promised land for the upwardly mobile, high rises are sold with mind blowing price tags –asking prices of new condos began around 5000 liras per square meter (or, roughly per 10 square feet) in 2011 and the apartments were specifically targeted to the white collars, since Ataşehir was announced to be the Wall Street of Istanbul in 2008. The white collars were thought to be predominantly pro-RPP, proopposition, but the results of the 2009 local elections showed that the new middle classes distributed their votes almost evenly between the governing party and the opposition. On the western part, split from the soon-to-be Wall Street of Istanbul by a deep valley lays the May Day neighborhood. The elders and muhtars are willing to bring some change to their constituencies –since, for decades they were seen as a mere nuisance in their old sub-province. Ümraniye, run by the Islamists in the last two decades, hardly paid any attention to the area. Yet, things have changed, and they are hopeful in getting the attention of the municipal officials now, since, the RPP owed its success in the 2009 elections in Ataşehir almost solely to the overwhelming support they received from the May Day neighborhood. If the May Day neighborhood switched their allegiance, or, even the vote distribution resembled central Ataşehir, then their plurality would be definitely at stake. So, the prevalent perception in the room is that it’s been almost a year since the elections and it is nice to finally be receiving the land titles; but the main street is in tatters, there are no real parks around, and worse, the cemevi is in dire straits. They could always ask 343 the youth of the neighborhood, but the problem is that they are overwhelmingly socialist, and once they get into motion, and the demonstrations and protests would definitely attract the attention of readily waiting authorities to suppress any social movements-and, in the process, the local shopkeepers would pay the price with broken shop windows, lost customers, harassment of police officers, etc. They have decided to ask for a relatively simple, but symbolically laden gesture of goodwill from the mayor: to change the name of the main street. The main street is called 3001st street, meaningless, hard to pronounce, and an affront to common sense. They decided to petition for renaming the main street for the memory of Deniz Gezmiş, the executed leader of People’s Liberation Army of Turkey, the iconic youth leader of the 1960s. We first went to the RPP’s Ataşehir offices. They previously tried to arrange a meeting with the Ataşehir RPP organization’s chair, but somehow that plan failed to materialize, either they did not pick up the line, or refrained from setting up an appointment. Then they decided to pay a visit with the muhtars, the thinking, I assume, was that they would eschew seeing the elders and notables of the neighborhood, but muhtars were the foundation of their electoral base there, so, they stood a better chance to petition their request. The party offices were unlike any other I’ve seen before –though, my previous knowledge was mostly limited to small fringe socialist parties’ offices. To be precise, the party office reminded me strongly of the real estate developers’ offices I have visited frequently during the last six months, glamorously decorated, ostentatious displays of wealth –perhaps, perceived to be synonymous with taste- were all around, a life-size painting of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk stood in the center of chair’s office. Brass light fixtures, stationary on his desk, the impeccably ironed black suit he wore melded 344 into the rest of the room, another portrait was by his side –an enlarged photograph of the party leader at the time, Deniz Baykal- and the leader resolutely fixated his gaze on us. We introduced ourselves, the chairperson seemed anxious, as if he had a meeting to catch, he was in his early 50s, receding hairline, bony cheeks, and dark, piercing eyes which avoided any contact. After the usual niceties and the customary teas were served, the group told him why they were paying him a visit. He was not especially fond of the idea, but did not reject it outright, and told us to see the mayor. The group, naturally, requested an appointment from the mayor –possibly, he played the role of the gatekeeper to the municipality. He seemed eager to do that, called a few people –and received a one too many calls about irrelevant business. The mayor was too busy, the council was giving him a headache, all the things to be done, and he was unable to reach the mayor in person. Well, we visited the party’s office, had our tea, time to take back our petition, and go home. The situation was strange, and the chairperson basically did nothing, while he seemed to convince us all that he had done a great favor for us. What was the favor? Basically, he told the group to go and see the mayor themselves. They did exactly that. The very few municipal offices I’ve been to were mere appendages to the already inanely boring and slow moving bureaucratic offices of the state in Ankara. You would barely see a soul in the halls to even ask for so-and-so’s office’s direction, let alone, getting your work done. Stale, airless, dark, and before the ban, thick ether of ages of smoking lungs pervaded the atmosphere in those buildings-I used to think. The Ataşehir municipality was completely different, perhaps, the structure is a testament to the goaloriented local administration’s qualities. The great entrance hall is exactly a replica of a modern institution, not the parliament, not the police station –thankfully-, not even the 345 party office. This was a bank. If I went there blindfolded, and left in the middle of the entrance hall, and told to open my eyes, I would be certainly convinced that this was just another bank office. Here are the tellers, this is the queuing machine which printed out numbers to let you know your place in the line, these, over here, are the customer representatives, whom you have to talk to for anything more than depositing or withdrawing your money, over there is the public washrooms –articulately hidden behind the desks to preclude customers’ frequenting them- the raw white light, the dominant yellow color, the cheap industrial furnishings, which were tried to be made cozier by the pinewood patterned counters. Our party stopped by the reception desk, but the receptionist had no idea where the general manager –ahem, mayor- was. Maybe they should have made a better decision to call his secretary’s office first to try to fix an appointment with his chief-of-staff. I thought, I was naïve, of course, they are nothing more than a bank nowadays, they facilitate the movement of capital into the grave, they are the ceremoniously venerated undertakers of capital, and they help millions of people to bury their hard-earned cash in an unprecedented rush for housing. They have to sink capital into the built environment, and local governments are but the ones who dig the graves, who made the dead presentable with an eloquent make-up. Palin’s supporters in the 2008 American elections had that shrill slogan, “Drill, baby, drill!” The Turkish local governments do not utter that so explicitly, but behind closed doors, as they pass through the tellers’ counters in every bank-like hall of municipal offices, it is silently repeated, “Build, baby, build!” Empty handed, bored, visibly shaken, but afraid of breaking the communal spirit of a democratic quest for the citizens’ rights and hence, quiet, we returned back to the 346 small office in the neighborhood. Possibly, the older muhtar –one of the earliest settlers, he clung onto the pre-1980s language of referring the community as a revolutionary onewas aware of how things would have transpired. The younger female muhtar possibly did not expect to be treated as such. They were not dealt the greatest hand at that moment, and with the elections four years in the future, no mayor would pose as the great benefactor of the mahalle and seek for a muhtar’s approval. The tables will turn in four years-that was for sure. Yet, nobody was really interested in talking about the petition any longer. Was it a pipe dream? We tried to come up with explanations, perhaps the subprovince municipal council had no authority on the renaming of the streets, and it fell under the metropolitan council’s purview; though, later I found out that a street in Esenyurt, on the European side of the city, was renamed in 2009 as Deniz Gezmiş streetapparently, near a Recep Tayyip Erdoğan Park -the ongoing geographical kulturkampf of the nation was ironic. I left the office to walk with the older muhtar, stopped by his small pre-cast office next to the small park on the intersection. He told me about the history of the neighborhood, in details that his mind permitted, and talked about his anxieties regarding the youngsters. After an hour or so, I returned back to the small office, where the elders had remained. The conversation was not about politics, but about the rising towers nearby. They said the apartments there sold for hundreds of billions (they were still using the old lira), and they tried to imagine how much money the people who bought those apartments made. The most affluent among the four people in the room –not counting myself- was a blue collar worker retiree who has his gecekondu nearby. The owner of the office, an old Maoist, was once a successful and rich lawyer who had his office in 347 Kadıköy, who had health problems, and issues with alcohol abuse. He lost everything he had had, his wife abandoned him, and he moved back to the May Day neighborhood. He had an old gecekondu in the neighboring Esatpaşa. Nobody in the room wanted to utter the inescapable fact, but they waited for a contractor with deep pockets and reliable business practices to sign their land development. Of course, they would not settle for anything less than a fifty-fifty contract, half of the newly-built apartments would belong to the contractor and the other half to the landowner. I suggested if the skyrocketing prices of the tower apartments would induce them to sign such a deal. They did not hesitate to speak the truth, yes, they would sign, as long as the developer was someone trustworthy, they would not think for a moment. They explained that they toiled their whole lives for the trinkets they received as pension. They had to consider their future, as old age would not be so kind to them, and they wanted to live in a well-heated apartment, collect rents, and grant one or two of the apartments to their grown-up kids, to at least contribute their earnings. They were right. The real talent underlying capitalist accumulation is its ability to turn its sworn enemies into unwilling companions. In doing so, the trajectory is not one of coercion, not even the sticks or carrots conundrum comes into play here. Remember, in 1984, the protagonist succeeded in actually seeing the four fingers, after torturous examinations. Capitalism does not torture, it produces desire as the ultimate machinery that provided the continuous reproduction of the system. Desire is what makes the built environment. It is human, all too human. 348 5.12 The Distance that Brings Us Closer: Differences, Similarity, and Simultaneous Histories In this chapter, I covered the development of the gecekondus in Istanbul on the basis of two cases: Zeytinburnu and the May Day neighborhood. The reason for my first choice is quite apparent: because it was the first permanent gecekondu settlement in Istanbul. It is true that before Zeytinburnu, some squatters settled on the slopes of the valley from Şişli to Haliç and Mecidiyeköyü. But, none were as populated, as residentially well-built, and as tightly-knit and organized a community as Zeytinburnu. The previous squat settlements were made up of scattered shacks, a few there, a few here, built as comparatively small, silent homes for the poor and the newly immigrated people. These homes were prone to the whimsical decisions of the government; they were razed, and their residents would settle somewhere else. In the late 1930s, and early 1940s, even the area surrounding the old seat of power, Abdulhamid II’s Yıldız Palace, was subject to such a low density squatter settlement. Zeytinburnu, on the other hand, was the first enduring gecekondu community. Its residents were resilient, their homes were razed and rebuilt several times. Furthermore, Zeytinburnu gecekondus were organized around formal neighborhood associations as early as the 1950s. Zeytinburnu remained as the most expansive, most populous, and organizationally active –but politically silentgecekondu areas of Istanbul until the 1980s. The May Day neighborhood, however, began under completely different conditions and developed as a gecekondu community in a harsh, extremely politically 349 charged environment of insurmountable tensions. But it was not the last district settled by the immigrants from Anatolia. For instance, the area once known by the name Yıldız Tabya –unrelated to the Yıldız Palace- on the western part of European Istanbul came to be recognized as a fully-fledged Alevi gecekondu settlement in the 1980s, though the squatter settlements began decades before the formation of present Gazi mahalle. Yet, when I began to write this dissertation, a brilliantly informative work on the Gazi mahalle was published: a collection of Jean-François Perouse’s a decade’s long work on Istanbul.156 Similarly, Çayan, Gülsuyu/Gülensu, Sarıgazi, or even Okmeydanı were formed as gecekondu neighborhoods approximately a decade after the May Day neighborhood. These neighborhoods were as politicized as the May Day neighborhood, if not more, from the beginning. There were three reasons for my decision to focus on the May Day neighborhood. First, it was sufficiently researched in the beginning, so that I would be able to compare and contrast previous studies with my current findings. Like many other gecekondu neighborhoods in Istanbul –but, unlike the Gazi, Çayan, Gülsuyu/Gülensu neighborhoods- it was on the cusp of the private developers’ takeover. So, this was possibly one of the last windows of opportunity for research here. The second reason is related to geography. Zeytinburnu already provided plenty of hints about European Istanbul’s geographical development. I needed some clues about Asian Istanbul’s paths of growth. The third reason concerns the nature of field research. These neighborhoods necessitated a deep understanding of socialist political movements in Turkey, and with few exceptions, all of the alternative gecekondu areas were strongholds of a certain socialist faction. Bringing into the discussion the long, painful, and almost 156 Pérouse, Istanbul’la Yüzleşme Denemeleri. 350 apocryphal struggles of Turkish socialism would have been unjust to both the socialists and the gecekondu dwellers. The ongoing struggle of Alevism and socialism in the Turkish cities portends a fruitful agenda for my future studies. After choosing these two areas as the emblematic sites of gecekondu growth in Istanbul, it is important to underline the divergences and similarities between Zeytinburnu and the May Day neighborhoods. There are four main headings where these two neighborhoods significantly differed: ethnic and religious networks, the territorial extension, scales of political involvement and politicization, and finally, the divergent trajectories of place. The most characteristic difference between the two gecekondu settlements is the role played by religion. The distance between Alevism and Sunni Islam is not only determining a legion of other behaviors, patterns of cultural exchange, and dispersal of ethnicity –which can be claimed as the final form of exclusion, since both Alevis and Sunnis are no longer differentiated on the basis of faith, but it has rather become a part of their respective ethnic qualities, but also definitive of how urban space is made. My discussion of the May Day district and how it is positioned amidst the sea of other Sunni dominated neighborhoods points out this variegated relationship with the urban built environment. However, a certain pitfall overwhelmingly looms in a treatment of religious and ethnic networks as the decisive elements of a community. This pitfall is the risk of perceiving Sunnis and Alevites as inherently homogeneous communities. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Both the Sunni and Alevi communities are internally heterogeneous communities. Even though the two communities behave as if they are 351 made up of ethnically different elements and build their own identities on a scaffolding that is erected on a pre-supposed principle of exclusion, the stories within tell otherwise. For instance, even if Zeytinburnu is predominantly Sunni, this Sunni identity is divided between two irreconcilable identities: Kurds and Black Sea immigrants. The Kurds moved into Zeytinburnu around three decades after the Black Sea and Balkan immigrants established the gecekondu community in the late 1940s. The fault lines here do not lie in the Sunni identity’s hypothetical antagonism against the secularist or Alevite political orientations, but in uneasy relations with the Kurds. Furthermore, the Kurds do not belong to the sect to which the majority of Sunni Turks belong, but they follow Shafiism. In a similar vein, the Alevis of the May Day neighborhood have to learn ways to get along with Sunni gecekondu dwellers who moved to the outskirts of their mahalle. Immigrants from Tokat, Amasya, Sivas –provincial areas that lie in the intersection between Anatolia proper and the Black Sea regions- have moved into the neighborhood in significant numbers since the early 1980s. What is striking though is the fact that the latecomers have adapted to the majority political tendency in these communities. The Sunni settlers of the May Day district have coopted a predominantly secular world view, while the Kurds of Zeytinburnu readily compromised with the right-wing, conservative outlook of the earlier Black Sea Sunni settlers. In Zeytinburnu and the May Day neighborhood, two different contexts have converged along a peculiarly similar development. The second difference between the two gecekondu settlements is related to the territorial distribution. From the outset, Zeytinburnu had its apparent borders. Zeytinburnu has always been a district bordered on the south by the city walls, on the 352 west by the E-5 –or, previously, London highway (yes, interestingly enough, an older generation knew that piece of road as Turkey’s connection to London), and on the northern perimeter by the fledgling industrial establishments. On the other hand, the May Day neighborhood was a territorial utopia. As a socialist undertaking it was already limited by the mosques and the Sunni settlements to its west. Yet, it was intent on expanding towards the north. Even today, some earlier founders of the May Day neighborhood own some land in that area –now, of course, scattered by the building of the highway connections. Also, Zeytinburnu’s territory is today completely coopted to the gargantuan urban sprawl. The highway’s role as Istanbul’s European hub of transport, its proximity to both the industrial and commercial centers of the city and shopping malls, rendered Zeytinburnu a thoroughly transformed, but integrally connected part of the city. Nobody can talk of Zeytinburnu as a gecekondu district any longer. But, the May Day neighborhood is still hanging onto its old gecekondu heritage. The predominant forms of building, the street patterns, its relative distance from the city center by public transportation –the district is only 5 miles away from Kadıköy, though, depending on the time of travel, it takes a good part of an hour to get there- the disconnect between the nearby commercial establishments and the area all attest to the territorial seclusion of the May Day neighborhood. And it’s for the better. The urban development in Zeytinburnu showed that as soon as the developers enter a gecekondu district a wholesale transformation of a community’s urban culture is inevitable. In other words, Zeytinburnu has succeeded in turning into a characterless void that replicates the main formula of the Turkish developers: build higher, build bigger. The fate of the May Day neighborhood is 353 now on one hand, totally contingent on the whims of the state actors of real estate development, and on the other hand, depends on the wills of the residents, whether they are interested in upward social mobility provided by property ownership. The third difference -the divergent interplay between the scale and the attainment of political goals- between Zeytinburnu and the May Day neighborhood is deeply intertwined with the processes described by Asef Bayat as the political movements of dispossessed and poor masses in the city. Zeytinburnu has achieved its prominent role in Istanbul’s local politics due to its long lasting support for the governing right wing parties since the 1950s. By the mid-1990s, Zeytinburnu’s support for the right wing local politics turned it into a powerhouse of national politics. On the other hand, the May Day neighborhood was active in both local and national politics from its inception. As the momentum of the socialist politics turned into a grassroots organizing impetus for RPP’s brand of leftism, the gecekondu neighborhood had a brief, but deep influence in the late 1980s, and succeeded in helping one of its earliest activists get elected as the mayor of the much bigger Ümraniye sub-province. Yet, these home brewed politicians neither returned to the May Day neighborhood, nor showed any interest in local politics therethey were shooting for the bigger scene. Still, in contemporary Turkey, although one of the losses during the Gezi uprisings was from the May Day neighborhood, Mehmet Ayvalıtaş, a relative of one RPP deputy, the district has limited reach and ability to affect national scale changes in Turkish politics. This indicates a paradoxical situation in the Turkish political system: demands, rights, and freedoms rising out of a wide array of societal needs –from minibus fares to the right to shelter, from unionization drives to minimum wage limits- are hardly ever 354 fulfilled as long as they remain politicized. Politicization of demands are more often than not, perceived as threats against the hegemonic state power and duly repressed. Yet, social and economic demands that do not follow a politicized path, but rather channel their energies toward achieving their goals through clientelistic and informal religious and ethnic networks frequently become successful: gecekondu amnesties, unionization of pro-state workers, job security, freedom of belief, and most prominently, women’s right to attend college with their headscarves are a few examples of such goals successfully attained by means of non-politicized struggles. The fourth difference between two cases is actually a corollary of the second and third –territorial and scale-wise- differences since Zeytinburnu is located in the midst of Istanbul, but also successful in transforming its connection by tapping into its own population. Largely, the transformation of Zeytinburnu from a gecekondu settlement to a full-scale urban sprawl in the form of apartment buildings was undertaken by local developers. Similar to many other gecekondu settlements’ transformation into high density apartment- living neighborhoods, Zeytinburnu’s local characteristics have hardly changed. The buildings were taller, the streets were crowded –but, still labyrinthine- the greenery that surrounded the gecekondus were gone, but the coffee houses, the mosques, the Friday Prayer communities stayed largely intact. However, it is questionable if a similar wave of development in the May Day neighborhood would follow a similar trajectory. Already a great deal of development activities done in the area is the responsibility of outside yapsatçıs and its relatively low price levels and proximity to the new subway lines recently completed have made the area highly attractive for a growing white collar population. This might entail the end of the May Day neighborhood. And 355 worse, if the plans of the large-scale private developers concerning the neighborhood come to fruition any time soon, that would translate into a complete annihilation of the place. In other words, a certain locality is in an advantaged position as long as it suppresses its localized aspirations –changes in the mahalle’s power structures, more control to the residents, democratic grassroots organizations, and any kind of autochthonous demands. If such suppression is successful and is sufficiently articulated to the national level politics, and if it mirrors the tone, the gestures, the behaviors of the grand-scale, a locality then would reap particular benefits granted by the benevolence of the state. This is the condition of the state-space nexus in Turkey. Although neoliberal overtures in the last three decades definitely changed the outward appearance of the statespaces –i.e. heavily monetizing the relationship, and later, financializing by sheer dint of rush to the real estate market- the inner workings remained the same. To the extent that one urban neighborhood refrains from accentuating the local demands, in return, it would be heavily rewarded for its subservience. This is a paradoxical process, since the development of local identities means the denial of such identities. I argue that the exit from this impasse, from this paradoxical situation is possible only through a change in the class-based dynamics. The right-wing politics in Turkey have always depended on its immaculate talent in dissimulating the everyday behaviors, traits, beliefs, and characteristics of the large swath of Sunni working classes. A few insightful analysts of the situation in the early 1970s called this a reversal of the selfprofessed roles: the right is objectively oriented toward the left and the working classes, 356 and the left is essentially right-wing in its class position.157 That was definitely an insightful, yet an inherently deficient statement laden with gross overlook of comparative political contexts. It is true that the leftist politics was concentrated around the colleges, higher education circles, cosmopolitan, and secular urban centers in the 1960s. And without any exception the left-wing movements have had deep troubles when they tried to tap into the vast reserves of working classes. The rightwing politicians have been mesmerizing in their peculiar narratives of the Horatio Alger story for all. The leftists were severely criticized for their failure to speak the same language with the working classes. The only section that left-wing politics found a readily available interest was among the Alevis. Although muted for a long time, the Alevi community in Turkey presented a sympathetic pool of supporters for left-wing politics and especially after the 1970s, many leaders, organizers, and martyrs of the left were also Alevis. The left in Turkey re-established itself after the 1960s re-orientation in the RPP as a coalition of the secular, college educated, middle class urban citizens and Alevis. This created a long running problem in Turkish politics: an ethnicized dispersal between the two voting blocs, one Sunni, one Alevi or secular held sway as the determining feature of the peculiar Turkish case –the moderate middle was lacking, since the former was roughly twice the size of the latter. In an ironic way, the right-wing government of JDP instigated a crucial change in this balance of power. In the last decade, more than 120 colleges –both public and private- were opened in every province of the country, already established universities’ student quotas were at least doubled, and 157 İdris Küçükömer, Batılılaşma ve Düzenin Yabancılaşması (İstanbul: Profil, 2012). 357 from around 9% of cohort in 1995, today, 36% of the age group enters the higher education system.158 Each year, 500,000 students begin college education. It’s been written and researched for a long time that higher education plays a great role in an individual’s social mobility. Higher education is generally accepted as the great equalizer in the post-war welfare regimes of the West. Yet, higher education and meritocracy, as the inventor of the term pointed out, have worked to the detriment of the disadvantaged minorities, and acted as an illusionary remedy in the last three decades.159 Whatever the critics claimed perhaps could be true in the Western case. But in Turkey, higher education played a tremendous role in churning out secularized, republican, modern, and affluent middle classes. The problem until very recently was its extremely small-scale. I can give three examples to solidify the import of higher education in the building of a Western-style middle class. The first example directly concerns my own family. The story begins in the late 1930s and early 1940s, when my grandmother immigrated to Istanbul at the age of 7. Her father ran several businesses in that decade, first a bar in Trabzon, complete with Russian émigré women as servers which went bankrupt, and later a working class pub in Istanbul, and finally a restaurant where no alcohol was served. Each went bankrupt one after another, with tidy sums of debts. In the early 1940s, during TURKSTAT education statistics: TURKSTAT, “Eğitim İstatistikleri,” Eğitim İstatistikleri, accessed April 20, 2014, http://www.tuik.gov.tr/PreTablo.do?alt_id=1018. See, especially figures on http://www.tuik.gov.tr/PreIstatistikTablo.do?istab_id=135. 158 Since Michael Young invented the term “meritocracy” in the 1950s, it has been much abused and a disproportionate onus was attached to the role of education in overcoming social inequality in the advanced industrialized Western countries. The mainstream abuse of the term reached such heights –that even considered educational attainment as synonymous to innate intelligence- that the original inventor had to deny the intellectual baggage of the term. See, Michael Dunlop Young, The Rise of the Meritocracy (Transaction Publishers, 1994); Asa Briggs, Michael Young: Social Entrepreneur (Palgrave, 2001). 159 358 the Second World War years, he found a job as a translator to a German –more likely, Polish-German- engineer at the IG Farben’s factory. My great grandfather was born and raised in Imperial Russia and was fluent in Russian. His families owned and operated several bakeries in Russia until the October Revolution nationalized their properties. My grandmother, born and raised in a small Black Sea village, did not see her father until the age of 7 when they moved to Istanbul to bring back the whole family together. In the late 1930s, when she began school, my grandmother spoke with a heavy Black Sea accent: a source of ridicule among her classmates. First, she fixed her accent and adapted to Istanbul Turkish. Then, she showed such a remarkable talent in her classroom that her teacher –one of the earliest female teachers, a true Kemalist- was impressed by her intelligence. Yet, her being a girl, and her father being a not-so-devout Muslim (since, selling alcohol is strictly forbidden in Islam), but still a patriarch, meant that she would not continue her studies beyond the age of 11. My grandmother and her teacher organized a way for her to enter central examinations for state schools. She won a top place with full scholarship and boarding at a prestigious high school of the time. She graduated from high school with success –and, against further pressure from her fatherwon a place at one of the four universities in Turkey and studied chemistry at Istanbul University for a year. However, the situation was not to her liking. Unlike her high school years, she had to live with her parents in Zeytinburnu, cook for them, prepare the table, clean the dishes, wash the laundry, and walk all the unpaved roads of a gecekondu neighborhood and get to the campus, where everyone seemed to come from another planet. She failed one of her courses in her first year. Being an ambitious star student, she would not accept failure, dropped out of college and found a job as a bank clerk. She left 359 Zeytinburnu after she got married and never returned. She worked as a manager of a state bank in Şişli for 23 years and retired in 1980. She is 84 today. Around once or twice each year, she travels to Zeytinburnu from across the Asian side of Istanbul. The distress in her face is clearly visible. She always hated Zeytinburnu. Her brother, five years older than my grandmother, did not really go to school. He learned how to fix cars and stood by his father, and after his father’s early passing, his mother. He owned and operated a mechanic shop for decades. He never left Zeytinburnu and protected the family’s assets there. At the May Day neighborhood, the lawyer, whose office I visited a couple of times to listen to people’s stories, seems nervous. He is waiting for his son to arrive. I knew that he was not married at the moment. He told me before that he got divorced from his wife long ago. Once I met his son, I understood that there is a tangible distance between the two-not one of emotional distance, but perhaps a cultural one. The lawyer exudes an air of provincialism, like the other college educated professionals of his generation. His son is a white collar employee. He arrived with his personal car. Talking to him, I see the generational separation I went through as well –being middle class, being an urbanite. The conversation comes to the May Day neighborhood and how hard it used to be when he was growing up to get to the neighborhood from Kadıköy. “The Mustafa Kemal minibuses” he says, “were hard to find, and once you found one, it would be a filled to the brim.” Nowadays, he only stops by to visit his father perhaps, not more than once a month. At another instance, I talk to a college student from the May Day neighborhood. He was brought up in the May Day neighborhood as the son of working class parents. He 360 told me he lost his father when he was an adolescent. His mother has taken care of his upbringing. He is full of adorable respect for his mother and told how she raised five kids. He is the youngest. The more he talks, the more I am impressed by his mother’s accomplishments as a single mother. His parents found a gecekondu before he was born. Incidentally, his mother’s story finds a striking parallel in my mind. The way he talks of his mother reminds me of my grandmother’s mother, how they waited day and night against the demolition crews sent by the municipality. The way he describes his childhood in the May Day neighborhood sounds familiar. It is familiar to anyone who was born before the insuperable urban sprawl and the evisceration the Turkish cities went through after all the greenery was razed, all empty lots were allocated to housing development, highway expansion, or building of the shopping malls. He said that he was quite a naughty kid back then, getting bruises all over, and spending most of his time outside. After primary school, his mother moved to Kadıköy, Moda, and he continued his schooling at a high school in Kadıköy. I asked him if he has visited the May Day neighborhood recently. He said that he visited the neighborhood with his mother a few months ago. How was it, how do you feel about it? I followed up with my previous questioning. He said that it felt strange, that her mother still has many friends over there. What about your childhood friends? He said: “They’re the same. Just as I left them.” Most of them did not continue their education. They mostly spend time in the neighborhood, most of them unemployed, out-of-work, or looking for a part-time job. He makes a joke that they still sit at the park, drink coke and have sunflower seeds –the favorite and cheapest pastime snack in Turkey. I asked him how he succeeded in getting into college. He told me that his mother decided to send him 361 to a primary school in Göztepe, not the school in the May Day neighborhood. “Actually,” he said, “it was a friend of my mother’s who first came up with the idea. She sent her kid –a year my senior- to that school.” Back then, the address-based population registry was not in effect. And, it took some bribing for parents to persuade a public school’s headmaster to get their child enrolled there. Today, due to the restrictions on the addressbased population registry, unless registering to a private school, parents cannot enroll their kids at schools other than where they are registered. His mother was inspired by that friend, and, along with few other children in the neighborhood, he was one of the first to go to a school in a more affluent area. The school was miles away. I asked him how he got to the school. He said, “Either by bus, or by the school service. But, once we missed the buses, we had to walk all the way to school and home, on our own.” He was eight years old at the time. Apparently, it worked. Aside from his friends with whom he made those trips to the school in Göztepe, he is the only college student among his childhood friends. Without any doubt, that wise decision by his mother will pay off handsomely as he graduates and enters Istanbul’s burgeoning white-collar population. 5.13 Bridging the Theoretical Gap: From Rural Societies to the Urban Areas, Transformation of the Petty Commodity Producers As the 1960s and ‘70s heated discussions, valiant theoretical polemics, and piercing debates on the structure of Turkey’s social classes were waged in Turkish socialist circles –these were not only limited to the academia- the socialist and left-wing movements’ actual political direction, revolutionary agenda, and particular grassroots 362 capabilities were determined interminably. The burning question was whether the Turkish context contained any particular diversions from the Western context, and if so, how it would transpire in a political-economy rooted in Turkish social relations of production. The pivotal problem was the diagnosis of the predominant mode of production in Turkey as either feudal, or as Asiatic, or, still, a formation that oscillated in-between these two polar opposites. If the predominant mode of production in Turkey was feudal, then a bourgeois revolution was in the offing –to carry on the forward movement of history, or, of course, Kemalism, might have been that bourgeois revolution itself, and relatively progressive compared to the other options on the table. The debates led to a rift in Turkish socialist circles, an incision that is still not stitched, and instead has grown in time which gave birth to two inimitable camps. In one camp, the reasoning of argument claimed that large landowning in Turkish history was rooted in feudalism –or, at least, something akin to either proto-feudalism, or different articulations of feudalism- and the keys to an understanding of the rural question in Turkey laid in the internal transitions in class structure (i.e., how the feudal landlords turned into parasitic merchant-capitalists, or as the Latin American Marxist concepts found wider use, comprador bourgeoisie) , and external integration to the world-system and imperialist domination. In the 1960s, this diagnosis was leased a new, but limited, life through political consciousness raising activities in eastern and southeastern Turkey, and brought to the fore, the “Eastern Question,” which could only be posed in its appropriate name in the 1990s as the “Kurdish Question.”160 The Kurdish question was Though, the main reason for banning the only legal socialist party in Turkey, the Labor Party, was its organization of “Eastern Rallies” in the Kurdish majority regions, the constitutional court saw that as sufficient reason for banning the party as a threat against the unity of the republic after the 1971 coup. 160 363 kept under a tight lid by the central state, through carefully constructed coalitions with the local landowners and constant repression of the Kurdish population until the 2000s. Yet, the feudalism argument failed in explaining the centralized concentration of power in Ankara, or the almost uninterrupted holding of power by a small, military-bureaucratic elite since, at least, the onset of the Tanzimat reforms. How could a feudalistic social formation rally around a limited, elect few who came to organize a tightly connected state machinery in a brutal manner? And, how could this relatively small number of people who organized as a power elite control the destiny of the bourgeoisie so effectively? And, perhaps most importantly, an aristocracy, a landowning class which exercised its economic monopoly over land by means of adept political persuasion and puppetry behind the scenes, was completely missing from the picture. In its stead, the idea of state, with an extensive list of apparatuses coercive and otherwise, seemingly mediated all forms of social contradictions and was legitimately perceived by several class strata as the great arbiter. In the mid-1960s, Maurice Godelier undertook an extensive re-evaluation of Marxian theories of the mode of production. His attempt was especially crucial for making sense of the African liberation movements, as well as the new socialist regimes established in Cuba and China. Godelier argued that the Asiatic Mode of Production, as envisioned by Marx and Engels, contained deeply flawed assumptions regarding social transformations towards capitalism and was problematic in its entirety due to its treatment of eastern societies as fixed, unchanging formations. Thus, Godelier suggested an alternative that went beyond a framework where the state’s ownership of property was not the mere gauge of determining the characteristics of a particular mode of production 364 and gave a due weight to military and bureaucratic classes’ subordination of social totality. His claim was that the most striking examples of such a peculiar mode of production did not primarily arise in Asia, but instead in Europe and Africa-he and his colleagues later came up with the concept African mode of production.161 Based on his research in different historical and geographical contexts, Godelier determined four overarching themes in his attempt to re-evaluate the Asiatic mode of production. First, the Asiatic mode of production should be seen not as a completed, mature, unchanging social stasis, but rather as a transitory stage between the movement from a classless society to a class society. The Asiatic mode of production carries within its own confines the kernel of an incipient class. Second, Marx’s argument of “oriental despotism” should be revisited, and corrected, through the study of a ruling class that appropriates the surplus product of peasants’ labor, who has absolute control over forces of production and organization of labor and relations of production –either through control over hydraulic resources, as Wittfogel almost obsessively put forth, or by other means. Third, this particular mode of production should not be treated as a static, stable social system, free from internal contradictions, and scrutinized with an eye for the dynamic social forces prevalent within the system that might lead to a consciousness regarding the evolution of internal contradictions. Fourth, as a consequence of the third theme, the proponents of a hegemonic unilinear historical and social presumption that accepted the path followed by the West as the one and only possibility should be shorn aside and replaced with a new paradigmatic awareness that puts forward for further 161 Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, “Research on an African Mode of Production,” in Relations of Production, ed. David Seddon (New York: Frank Cass & Co Ltd, 1978), 261–88. 365 studies a recognition of social particularities of each society and investigates how these particulars evolved under different historical, political, cultural, and social contexts.162 Godelier’s theoretical discussions found reception amid the Turkish intellectuals, and especially Çağlar Keyder and Korkut Boratav’s research on the rural structures of production in Anatolian villages reflected a certain problematization of the Asiatic mode of production debates under a Turkish circumstance. On the other hand, a Turkish novelist’s highly dilettantist conceptualization of the history of the Ottoman Empire and transition to capitalist modernity was ascendant among the nationalist, right-wing circles. Kemal Tahir, a pupil and erstwhile close friend of Nazım Hikmet, argued that the Ottoman social system closely resonated the Asiatic mode of production. But unlike the commonplace picture of brutal coercion and suppression of dissent painted by the term “oriental despotism,” Kemal Tahir, and his followers, claimed that the empire was benevolent towards the masses of peasants and showed excessive tolerance toward nonMuslim faiths. The state had already a quiet unshakable role as a foundation in the Turkish intellectuals’ ideological upbringing, yet, Kemal Tahir added onto that foundation another layer of apologism and nostalgia in a rosy account: a classless, nondiscriminating, free, and egalitarian society under the watchful eye of a father-like state. Keyder, on the other hand, pointed out the dangers of excessive idealization of a given social formation and the reductionist treatment of social relations as static, unchanging entities. Even though the Ottoman conquest of Anatolia brought an abrupt end to the feudal tendencies of local powers, landholding structure had always been fragmented and this prevented a large-scale land-owning class to consistently emerge as a M. Godelier, “The Concept of the’Asiatic Mode of Production’and Marxist Models of Social Evolution,” Relations of Production: Marxist Approaches to Economic Anthropology, 1978, 209–57. 162 366 social force at least since the Roman time.163 On the residues of the empire left to Turkey, especially in the Black Sea, central and in the western Anatolia regions, the only remaining large landownership patterns were broken up by the peripheral incorporation to the modern world-system.164 According to Keyder’s research in four villages in separate parts of Anatolia –one, Kurdish, and three Turkish villages- in the 1970s and ‘80s, rural social relations of production were predominantly based upon independent small peasantry and owed its continuation to petty commodity production, with one crucial exception. In the Kurdish village, literally all peasants were share-croppers and they owned no land, while in other three villages, land ownership was, more or less, distributed evenly throughout the community-neither large ownership, nor any landless peasants were observed.165 Boratav, in his book Tarımsal Yapılar ve Kapitalizm (Rural Structures and Capitalism), agreed with Keyder, and added that the independence of small peasants and their petty commodity producing characteristics do not preclude them from being exploited. Peasants are exploited not at the moment of production, but at the precise moment of selling their produce on the markets, they are exploited by the market forces. To prove his point, Boratav referred to five pieces of research done during the 1970s and provided summaries of several contextual data from these -delineating rent, wages, interest, and commercial profit in the total agricultural gross revenues. He compared different cases of exploitation rates, according to the product: grain cultivation, fruits and vegetables, cash 163 Keyder, “Small Peasant Ownership in Turkey,” 57–8. 164 Ibid. 165 Ibid., 105–6. 367 crops. His finding was, that in grain cultivation, relatively oriented towards selfsufficiency, the rate of exploitation was lower than in market oriented crops, like fruits and vegetables, and especially cash crops, like tobacco and cotton.166 Thirty years after Keyder and Boratav’s studies, their findings still continue to be invaluable, and their import is invariably confirmed during my research in Anatolian villages. Their studies also shed light on the population movement from the rural areas to the urban areas. We know that Turkish inclusion to the modern world-system did not exactly follow the same path as Britain’s 19th century massive dispossession of peasants, large scale enclosure of the commons, planned scarcity and famines that cyclically instigated waves of immigration to the industrial centers and led to the constant devaluation of labor, nor, is China’s last three decades comparable, where a heavily regulated central state particularly kept agricultural prices and remunerations under heavy pressure to provide cheap labor to the gargantuan urban manufacturing sector, and hence created a dual society: millions of impoverished peasants who would take any job in the city just to break free from the vicious cycle of poverty that prevailed in the countryside. In Turkey, we know that a comparable dispossession did not take place, apart from the Kurdish regions. This also explains the relatively low number of immigrants from more affluent regions with agriculture geared toward market consumption, i.e., Western Anatolia and northern Marmara –especially, the Marmara basin provinces, the ones closest to Istanbul, like Bursa, Balıkesir, Çanakkale have a strikingly low proportion in Istanbul’s population. Yet, the ones from farther away, the people who either were landless due to geographical factors, mostly Blacks Sea immigrants, and its adjacent 166 Boratav, Tarımsal yapılar ve kapitalizm, 53–7. 368 mountainous areas and central Anatolian peasants with limited access to irrigation, or to the ethnically motivated campaigns of forced migration and the mass burning of land during the 1990s in the Kurdish areas. Here, the Kurdish and Turkish trajectories differed significantly, and unfortunately, I could not dwell further on this difference. Around 37 million people have joined Turkey’s urban population since 1980, while the rural population has scarcely changed in the last three decades. The urban population has tripled in this duration. For the Turkish peasants, the neo-liberal reforms in agriculture, the extensive – even zealous- use of fertilizers and pesticides, agricultural production’s increasing integration to industrial processing, and the easy access to tractors and agricultural machinery rendered a great number of peasants surplus labor; thousands of village schools were closed in the Western, northern and northeastern, and central area of Anatolia. Hundreds of villages have turned into pensioners’ resorts. Other than the Kurdish areas, no rural community in Turkey has shown any increase in population in the last decade, and many provincial regions are rapidly losing population, or are noticeably aging. The question that really concerns us here is the continuity of the petty commodity production. The Turkish peasants have not vanished into thin air, they were not forcibly integrated to the industrial growth of the urban centers, and they willingly partook in this great transformation of the last five decades. They became urban citizens. If Keyder and Boratav were right about the independent nature of small peasantry, and if petty commodity production required a fragmented and relatively equal distribution of private property, then, their essential characteristics would have continued in the cities. The current statistical evidence on the structure of employment and enterprise 369 attest to the endurance of petty commodity production in the cities. 55 percent of employment in Turkey is in enterprises with less than 20 employees, while only 31 per cent of workers are employed in enterprises with more than 100 employees. The wellworn argument of Turkish mainstream economists implicates that the real problem underlying the underdevelopment of Turkey’s economy is the lack of capital and the ubiquitous existence of small and medium scale enterprises-the KOBİs.167 Scratching the surface of those arguments reveals the fact that KOBI is just another name for the pervasively flexible sub-contracting system, and that sub-contracting system flourished in all spheres of urban relations of production. The construction industry has already gained a notoriety due to its precariousness and brutal sub-contracting system; from the janitors in the college campuses to secretarial functions of all state institutions, from the hospitals non-medical staff to non-teaching (or, non-part-time teaching) employees of the public and private schools, from the telecommunication providers to internet service providers, from banking to accounting, from taxi cabs to grocery stores, from public transportation to the simplest industrial manufacturing, sub-contracting is seldom documented but mercilessly cancerous social phenomenon in contemporary Turkey. The essential teaching of Turkish capital accumulation, especially from the bourgeois point of view, is that “small is beautiful.” Table 5.5 portrays the extent of the small scale enterprises in the context of Istanbul’s employment structure. The table shows the abundance of small-scale enterprises, their distribution according to economic sectors, how they led to a striking KOBI is the abbreviation of small and medium sized firms, it is defined as enterprises with less than 250 employees, and they present the backbone of Turkish economy, the state has an extensive KOBI support bureaucracy, and banks pay special attention to them and advertise their special credits constantly, yet, after all this attention, they are not particularly productive, nor successful exporters of goods. 167 370 imbalance in wages’ levels, and how they contributed to an unjust distribution of income. Under the ‘other services’ heading, all sorts of shopkeepers, barbers, hairdressers, dry cleaners, etc. are continuing a precarious existence-or they found a reliable way to skirt paying their taxes. The more the mom and pop shops there are around the corner, the less they earn, and therefore, the less they are paid; it is no big secret that, even the compulsory minimum wage laws are routinely evaded by the employers in these enterprises, and employees are paid as per oral agreements. Retailers –the neighborhood electronics and mobile shops, furniture stores, appliances stores- and public ground transportation –minibuses, privately owned buses, smaller buses, and taxi cabs- are serious sources of employment and in their isolation, atomized structures. One-man run characteristics, they are particularly talented in protecting themselves from the taxmen, as well as, the social security system. Furthermore, the wages to revenues ratio tell us in which sectors a conjectural propensity exists for the middle classes: the accountants, research and development activities, education (except, public personnel), health and social services, computing and related activities are the chief among these. Unfortunately, banks and public institutions are exempt from reporting their employment payrolls. In sectors where labor-intensive activities are predominant, and a relatively unskilled workforce is needed, the wages are low in terms of firm revenue, while, in capitalintensive sectors where high-skilled workers are required, wages are apparently higher. 371 Share of Overall Employment according to Enterprise Size, Turkey‐2008 4% 5% 1‐19 20‐49 7% 50‐99 6% 100‐249 9% 6% 250‐499 55% 500‐999 8% 1000‐4999 5000+ Figure 5.9: Share of overall employment according to the enterprise size in Turkey168 168 Source: TURKSTAT Annual Statistics on Employment in Industrial and Services Sectors. 372 2008 Turkey Istanbul Mining and quarrying* Manufacturing Electricity, gas and water supply* Construction Sale, maintenance and repair of motor vehicles and motorcycles; retail sale of automotive fuel Wholesale trade and commission trade, except of motor vehicles and motorcycles Retail trade, except of motor vehicles and motorcycles; repair of personal and household goods Hotels and restaurants Land transport; transport via pipelines Water transport Air transport Supporting and auxiliary transport activities; activities of travel agencies Post and telecommunications Real estate activities Renting of machinery and equipment without operator and of personal and household goods Computer and related activities Research and development Other business activities (accounting, law offices, architectural offices, call centers, advertising) Education Health and social work Sewage and refuse disposal, sanitation and similar activities Recreational, cultural and sporting activities(radio and TV, motion picture, news agencies, sporting activities) 2 732 541 647 028 541 113 477 10 087 751 3 139 463 6 403 939 013 4 5 12 8 Average Wages per employee (TL) 100 282 441 020 9 941 38 907 709 824 12 393 77 110 152 12 043 12 303 835 267 13 103 91 27 947 15 598 195 576 171 7 541 924 996 1 841 509 654 34 743 9 949 086 593 9 416 31 595 923 014 5 6 35 47 27 497 107 609 4 1 026 369 572 9 538 3 64 93 425 401 888 4 5 619 817 933 13 984 258 336 418 683 2 141 164 522 41 680 439 148 174 630 3 4 3 278 896 068 1 400 553 186 7 466 8 020 5 16 166 148 66 382 1 555 53 156 613 17 702 15 554 2 11 293 1 250 367 840 522 537 152 870 562 956 7 984 16 562 859 555 29 519 6 628 860 352 55 970 9 180 186 499 8 8 9 40 43 165 11 185 70 587 6 1 025 349 549 14 526 12 715 553 702 8 165 2 124 6 562 25 908 19 684 12 3 822 668 536 199 930 113 31 753 12 506 893 971 10 157 1 556 482 676 7 13 79 49 661 3 772 6 50 769 956 13 460 8 12 2 441 29 480 12 722 045 842 24 493 2 872 567 889 25 405 16 178 11 5 918 228 33 248 37 312 38 804 3 001 13 100 309 440 57 783 69 299 8 19 5 4 195 072 322 1 217 364 385 1 115 068 989 13 557 29 209 083 146 21 068 3 147 786 477 16 091 4 429 925 385 14 39 25 458 191 89 172 19 497 113 236 556 146 12 133 1 063 816 298 22 481 10 090 29 272 3 405 459 642 13 851 3 977 612 847 10 77 Number of Number of Number of Wages and persons employees local units salaries (TL) employed per unit 373 Wages as a Wages as a percentage percentage of of Revenues investment 1 766 486 418 815 6 99 682 407 887 570 109 6 860 251 196 9 77 161 458 100 535 8 121 Revenues (TL) 34 647 550 255 69 568 140 794 8 707 834 261 661 004 431 15 840 913 Other service activities (washing and drycleaning, hairdressing and other beauty treatment, physical well-being) 21 701 36 525 2 95 982 490 2 628 598 210 755 Table 5.5: Employment Structure according to the type of Economic Activity in Istanbul169 16 107 We know that Istanbul is the richest city in Turkey and perennially posed as the poster child of Turkish economic development. The city is also home to the all the Turkish billionaires, but it owes its weight in the economic and political balances in Turkey to being the backbone of the Turkish middle class. The question is then, where does the middle class come from? Keyder, in his book State and Classes in Turkey, drew a parallel between the criollo led Bolivarian revolution in Latin America and the CUP takeover after 1908 in Turkey. And he asked whether what took place in the Turkish case can be seen as a “middle class” revolution. For two reasons, his answer to the question was negative: first, the Latin American “middle class” were large land owners who were also preoccupied in industrial manufacturing. In contrast, the Young Turks’ power base was neither in large land-owning class, nor in industrialists, but small scale producers of the time - shopkeepers and small independent peasants who were not particularly fond of capitalistic development. Second, the lone social force comparatively deserved to be addressed as the “middle class” were the Christian urban dwellers of the Ottoman empire, the only socially active class after the military-bureaucratic elite, and yet, they persistently refrained from entering the political fray, rightfully avoided competing with the state elites, and kept their attention on ethnic and religious fissures, which transpired in the gradual erosion of an imminent “middle class” voice in politics. 170 In the end, “the 169 Source: TURKSTAT Annual Statistics on Employment in Industrial and Services Sectors. 170 Keyder, State and Class in Turkey : A Study in Capitalist Development, 77. 374 peculiar status of the bureaucracy as a ruling class, which implied the absence of a landowning commercial oligarchy, prevented Ottoman social development from embarking upon any of the more familiar trajectories.”171 Keyder’s argument precisely pinned down the class landscape that arose after the CUP intervention and its post-CUP Kemalist repercussions, which in itself was a product of the Ottoman Empire’s slow integration to the world-system and sudden disintegration as a social formation. Before Keyder, Şerif Mardin laid out the impending precipice that troubled the Ottoman Empire, as well as the Republican Turkey. In his seminal analysis of center-periphery relations in Turkish society, Mardin pointed out the absence of mediatory mechanisms in Ottoman society. Unlike the gradual evolution of Western political institution –which developed as a result of a historical series of contradictions between the landed and landless classes, between the church and the state, state-makers and centrifugal forces of localities- Ottoman society was built on a single antagonism, the power struggle between the center and the periphery. The center-periphery power struggle has gone through several phases and in the absence of mediating forces has turned into a simple stark reality: center’s direct control over the periphery, a naked exertion of power by the bureaucratic elites over the peasant masses. A mere exit in this coercive impasse is the rise of a new social actor: the middle class.172 Here however, a defining feature of analyses incumbent on center-periphery duality emerges: projecting the middle class as a natural extension of bourgeoisie. In truth, the middle class and bourgeoisie are different things, not only do they differ in 171 Ibid. 172 Mardin, “Center-Periphery Relations.” 375 nature, but their social interests also do not match, nor do their historical evolution follow the same trajectory. Mardin, reduced the historical characteristics of the middle class to that of bourgeoisie and tried to draw a parallel between the European bourgeoisie and the incipient Turkish middle class. Nevertheless, he correctly pointed out that in the absence of transitory structures between the center and the periphery, the task that befell on the newfangled middle class was to mediate this relationship. The problem was that the only social class fragment poised to take over this mediation role, the mere candidate for the moderating position, was the bureaucrats, the Westernized elites, and the integral component of the center. And even if we discount the fact that as part of the center, the bureaucrats had barely any incentives, or moderating influence over the periphery, the ebb and flow of their ascribed privileges, their state-sanctioned hierarchical role and fluctuations in their total accumulated wealth prevented this unique class from emerging as a mediatory social actor.173 The Turkish system of economic and political power distribution fervently stood loyal to its mold in the Asiatic mode of production: the center instituted a chokehold on the top of the pyramid, while the rest of the society equally shared their disenfranchisement and became willing partners in the excruciatingly slow redistribution of social resources. Gecekondus, in my view, were just another representation of legitimacy built in such an unequal distribution of power. Social scientists of Turkey waited eagerly for the much heralded arrival of a middle class, a social actor who would balance the crooked political system, release the clot in the veins of capital accumulation, and help raise the country’s peripheral standing in the world-system. The middle class was either altogether erased from the face of the Ibid. See also Mardin’s further discussions on Turkish modernization, Mardin, “Ideology and Religion in the Turkish Revolution”; Mardin, Türk Modernleşmesi. 173 376 country, as happened in the first half of the 20th century, or the fixed income bureaucratic class was sacrificed with the neoliberal political economic decisions of the post-1980 Turkey whence the state decided to resign from its role as a monopoly capitalist and a guardian of the newfangled urban elites. Once again, with invisibly taken steps, through quiet encroachment of the ordinary that took at least five decades, a new candidate appeared for the role. The gecekondus, the peripheries amidst the center, the erstwhile working classes, the educated masses, the small producers, emerged as the next middle class. This “new” middle class did not make itself on the basis of its role in the relations of production, but dwelled upon its appropriation of urban public resources, which proved to be formidably rich investments in the burgeoning market of urban land rent. In the next chapter, we examine how the urban space appropriated by the gecekondus turned into a peculiar springboard for the rising middle classes, and how the different modalities in the production of space approached their object. There, I will describe this new space and explain how the buildings for the middle class built the middle class itself. 377 6 Building the Middle Class, Buildings for the Middle Class: The State-Corporate Alliance and the Great Housing Rush of the 2000s On a late winter day in 2010, I entered a big, grey, concrete building, around downtown Istanbul, up on the hill of Beşiktaş, by Darphane. It was a sunny day outside, yet the breezing northern wind still touched one’s spine like the deft but blind accordionist’s hands -as Istanbul’s winter cold is famous for its piercing vindictiveness, especially in March. The entrance hallway befitted the respectability of the firm; marble, speckless floors, high ceilings with modern, 1960s style chandeliers, geometrical design, few, but aptly selected paintings that adorned the walls, if this was the 1980s –as most of the design seemingly dated to- the company was shouting in capital letters that the firm – or at least, the ones who owned the firm- had the style, social and cultural capital, and high-taste. Unfortunately, for the 2000s, it was seriously out of fashion, and apparently after two decades of inertia, the owners of the firm decided to begin renovating their headquarters. In any case, it is remarkable that as one of the top ten players in Istanbul’s real estate development game, they had the most stately headquarters, since, almost overwhelmingly, the real estate developers invested all their flashy and ostentatious designs in project sales offices, to impress the potential buyers, while their headquarters are scarcely manned, and resembled contractors’ shabbily built containers. Yet, in the last half decade, with the enormous growth in the development sector, that was bound to change as well. And, they followed the footsteps of their flashiest and friendliest partners in marketing housing as commodity, and pretended to look more like the advertising agencies, than the builders they once were, but no longer. In this scheme of things, I played the role of a bespectacled geek –who happened 378 to have taught in the US and was working for his PhD in Istanbul- and as a participant observant, my prime responsibility was either nodding my head as a positive response to whatever was being suggested, or, if things seem uncontrollably moving towards a deadend, coming up with erudite suggestions, which were improbably realistic, but nevertheless petrified my so-called status as an intellectual authority. One of the perks of occupying such a position of authority, albeit intellectuals’ perennial habitual denigration in general in Turkish society, aside from the free meals, was a free pass to ask the untouchable, unimaginable questions to the CEOs or other, similar top echelons of corporate management. With a few exceptions, the routine visit to a corporate headquarters requires handing your state-issued ID at the reception desk. In return, you would receive either a visitor’s badge, or more often than not, an RFID-chip loaded card that is presumed to keep their secrets from the prying eyes of the visitors. Yet, on that winter day, once again, the entry gates did not read my badge, the turnpikes were mum as the lights turned red, I was more than pestered with the detailed security precautions, and knowing the extent of the inner workings of a construction company, I blankly looked around the entry hall in the hope that someone could help me pass through the gates of this mighty corporation. In essence, basically nothing of interest can be found in any room in this building - this is not a bank, not even an insurance agency, nor a municipal planning and zoning office, and the slightly interesting and particularly illegal deals are never kept in the books, the payments are recorded either very secretly, or completely ingrained in the minds of the few trusted staff. The secret is not in security; I would later understand that not even a penny is kept in the vaults, nor some blueprints for future development projects, but what 379 is kept inside so skillfully is the aura of invincibility, a Hollywood-produced image of professionalism that is sold to the client, to the prospective buyer of houses, or prospective seller of land, that they were in safe hands, that they were better protected here than in the banks, the state institutions, or even in the army’s hands. However, the electronic turnpikes at the gates had this pesky habit of breaking down, or becoming blind to the RFID-chips, so, it was the security guard’s regular duty to use his card to let us in. Once before, I had been to the third-floor of this building, decorated with pinewood panels of a yellowish brown and unceremoniously completed with 1980s dull office furniture, and a stale smell surrounded the meeting room due to lack of air –air-conditioners are not one of the most favorite conveniences in today’s Turkish business world and an involuntarily suffered nemesis of the white-collar- though, with impeccable views of the neighborhood and possibly as far as the Bosphorus (since, that view was not shared with ordinary visitors, but served as a precious piece of the bosses’ domain). Contrary to my expectations, we headed down stairs to a small meeting room with some views of the neighborhood which at least provided a well-deserved leeway from the pretentious mannerisms of the corporate bigwigs and their pompous advisors. This time, though, the meeting was important –I, somehow, missed the clues to the gravity of the situation- and the main conference room in the basement –which was newly decorated with college campus style seating, exquisite lighting and audio-visual systems and hardwood-paneling, isolated from the humdrum of office business and apparently attempted to serve as a paean to the academic and technical eloquence of the corporation. The hallways were dark and the janitors had just left the conference room. With scarcely any food on the tables, nor any tea served –other than the first ones for the 380 sheer sake of courtesy- we should have been better prepared for the coming onslaught. Right before I entered the conference hall –I smoked a few cigarettes outside to dumb down my nerves while waiting for the bigwigs to arrive - I was informed that the second-in-command, one of the Chiefs, would attend the meeting, as well as my friendcum-boss’ real employer, a top-five advertising agency’s CEO, Creative Director, Strategy executives, and essentially everyone from the top brass of both companies would be present as well. Once again, I tried to keep my cool. First the advertising people came in. We had got there before everyone, since, my boss tried to spin a few interviews I had conducted with residents of a gated community development as a possible business opportunity, and the advertisers pinned their hopes on the success of this plan to divert attention from the slow sales of that project. There, I had learned rule number one for the real estate market; if a developer keeps on funneling millions of liras for one single project –and, especially with the tagline that “few apartments are left, so hurry up and earn your place among the lucky few”- it means that the project is a flop, bombed in the marketplace. The more successful a real estate development is, the less its visibility on the newspaper pagers. A short, stout woman in dark business suits entered the room followed by three to five men- her retinue mostly made up of men, aged in their 30s, well-shaven, dark blue suits, cheap looking ties, they were either engineers, salesmen, or accountants –though, the last one was unlikely if they did not plan to pay on the spot. Later, I learned that they were the engineering corps of the company who were granted the unholy titles of “business development specialists or executives.” The lady had been educated at a foreign university, a graduate of a top-level college in Turkey as well, and she was one of 381 the very few top-level executives in the real estate development and construction business. She was markedly different than the women I had met before in the business – the only career option for women in this sector was in public relations and marketing, either as pretty and beautiful, physically attractive in general opinion as the “faces” of the brands or as managers of connections, or simply as young and hopelessly stuck saleswomen. In contrast, this woman exuded pride and almost a sensible disgust for the motley crew that surrounded her, and the few times I had seen her, she had not once smiled. The advertising people, on the other hand, were the exact opposite of her and her team: the only suit- wearing person was their strategy manager. She was a veteran of the advertising business, had built and sold at least a few research companies before, and now worked at her leisure and as a token sign of trust in her boss. She started her career as an employee in one of the most important state-economic-enterprises, and slowly, but surely climbed the ladders of success; an exceptional talent, a rare breed in this world of horizontal mobility, where moving upwards is almost always reserved for the “lucky few.” The advertising boss himself was another example of such stellar ascent –his, upward mobility was one of a kind, and that explained his seeking of continuous attention, as he was once a prodigy, a wunderkind, a talented creative mind. His ads helped governments collapse, new coalitions rebuild, and they stretched a wide acreage of all brands of Turkish politics from the Islamist to intransigent Kemalists. He created brands from scratch, scratched brands that hung onto the pinnacle of their markets, and seemingly, they were on good terms with the admen, though, unaccustomed to the rituals of business, I had a tendency to miss key behavioral signs of unease and well-disguised disrespect. 382 Yet, in a matter of two hours –a lengthy meeting- the client –the real estate development company- tore our proposal and presentation into shreds, as they broke the advertising agency’s each and every intentional gesture to salvage its failed campaign into pieces. As I will describe later throughout the chapter, the failure helped me delve into the almost one-dimensional corporate mindset: quantity over quality. In other words, building and selling more in less time and effectively diminishing the costs for the sake of higher prices meant the desired results for the company. Urban space, the architecture, the geographical practice of living, these were mere afterthoughts. I figured out that the corporate developers, the builders sanctioned by the establishment, were not only reproducing an utterly quantified capitalistic logic, but were also building an image of themselves. The buildings for the middle class, piecemeal built that very middle class. The middle class was both the target audience and the setting for that ideal home, the class itself, and its cultural and ideological appurtenances were rather a ruse for building an abstract object of desire. The stern corporate bigwigs not only came up with the commodified parcelization of urban space in the form of housing and shopping malls, but in the course of their business, they produced the idea of the middle class. The middle class, as foregrounded by those highly speculative developers, was an abstract notion; nevertheless, it was as factual as the next social thing. Right before my eyes, the stars had aligned, they revealed the unfathomable secret of the production of space in the 21st century Istanbul. It was neither interesting, nor secretive, nor particularly enjoyable, nor full of well-founded, eager practitioners of the space. They tried to unearth a simple question; the advertisers, the market researchers, 383 and the developers grappled with the twin issues of whom to sell their products and where and when to reach the potential buyers. This is indeed the seminal question of capitalism, to connect the superficially separate worlds of production and consumption, to close the gap, to complete the circuits of capital accumulation, sufficient information must be uncovered to help the reproduction of capitalism. What went missing in that meeting room was the state, the deus ex machina of the built environment, the Turkish Goliath that shaped, formed, made and remade Istanbul in her different lives. The state – in any one of its institutional representations- was glaringly absent in discussions on new housing construction, marketing, sales, and design. Any ordinary commodity is subject to the whimsical distribution of information determined by the level of transparency prevalent in a given market, and guarded heavily from any hypothetical interference by the state, or other public institutions, aside from consumer concerns, –at least, prima facie, the predominant economic doxa (in both Keynesian and Austrian variants) stipulated that as a desirable status quo and permitted government intervention at the last instance. Yet, while circulation of money-commodity, and money-as-commodity (i.e. finance capital) is devoid of state intervention, investment in a built environment is bound to government interference.1 In commodification of urban land, the state is the real invisible hand –though, more often than not, its role is ably disguised- it controls the sunken-capital in the built environment, helps the financialization of the fictitious commodity in its different forms –either as mortgage backed securities, or as collateral for further debt. David Harvey attempted to explain the crisis-prone characteristics of investment in the built environemnt through his analysis of the uneven geographical development of capitalism and inter-imperialist rivalries, see, Harvey, The Limits to Capital, 424–445. 1 384 I did not have to wait for long for the state’s incursion in the real estate business in Istanbul, and, perhaps only lamented the conservative scale of my previous estimates regarding the extent of inherent relations between the political party in power and a myriad of figures famed to be the flagships of construction and development activities in Istanbul. On December 17, 2013, the Turkish public was struck by yet another wave of arrests and televised scenes from a series of police operations. In the last seven years, with the incessant operations against the deep state and its alleged collaborators in the army, navy, air forces, police, media, and academic establishment which later included the allegedly coup-scheming generals, one could have hazarded that the public opinion would become immune to such scenes. Yet, this time the subject party of the alleged crimes were completely different, the tables were turned, and the police and prosecutors ordered extensive operations against the party in power. The sons of three cabinet ministers, the director of a state bank, the mayor of Fatih province, a multi-billionaire Iranian businessman–who happened to be the young and celebrated husband of a pop star- and two real estate developers with well documented ties to the governing party, were arrested on charges of bribery, corruption, gold smuggling, influencing zoning regulations, and structurally risking the Marmaray tunnels. The Fatih mayor and the developers were claimed to be plotting a handover of large public land in the old city center, and the developers were said to be in collusion with the Urban Development and Environment Minister’s son – and, ultimately the minister himself- to gain zoning and building permits for their extravagant projects that included the building of residential skyscrapers, hotels, and shopping malls. For the first time in its 12 years in power, the governing party faced such 385 an imminent threat against its chokehold on controlling hegemony.2 After a tense week, the ministers resigned from the cabinet –one, the minister of Urban Development and Environment, Erdoğan Bayraktar –the close confidante of PM Erdoğan since his days as Istanbul mayor in the mid-1990s who admitted he had cried for his leader on live TV- refused to hand in his resignation, declared on national TV that if he was guilty of any crimes, the same would hold true for PM Erdoğan, and he should resign as well. Although he was sacked by the PM, he later retracted his statement, and reiterated his unswerving loyalty to Erdoğan. In addition to the three ministers’ resignations, PM Erdoğan announced a cabinet reshuffle, replacing almost half of the cabinet with his close circle of advisors and thereby making it known that the upcoming local elections would turn into a matter of survival for him and his political creed. Erdogan vociferously directed his attention to the so-called “parallel state” a neologism targeted against a Sunni Muslim social organization headed by a preacher, Fethullah Gülen, who continues to live in a secluded ranch in rural Pennsylvania. By December 25, rumors heavily circulated behind closed doors –and, some of which found their way to internet journalism –since, mainstream newspapers and TV stations are heavily censored, or practice self-censoring- indicating that the next largescale operation against corruption would be instigated by the arrest of Bilal Erdoğan, the PM’s son. That operation was abruptly ended even before the start- the files were taken from the prosecutors and those prosecutors were then transferred to provincial positions. In a few days, wiretap recordings from both cases’ files were made public via YouTube 2 Tim Arango and Sebnem Arsu, “Graft Inquiry Intensifies Turkish Political Rivalry,” The New York Times, December 17, 2013, sec. World / Europe, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/18/world/europe/graft-inquiryintensifies-turkish-political-rivalry.html. 386 and Twitter, and millions watched online, and listened to the alleged wiretaps. The accused were set free in less than three months. Meanwhile, thousands of police were transferred from critical positions to either provinces, or to positions of irrelevance –traffic, police schools, oversight duties, basically, to passive roles. A hastilydrafted law directly subordinated the justices and prosecutors, and made their transfers, appointments, promotions and demotions, and workloads subject to the approval of Minister of Justice. To prevent the leaks from the cases brought against the PM and the three ministers’ sons from reaching a further audience through the internet, an unprecedented law of internet censorship was passed rapidly through the parliament and approved by the president. The law stipulated that access to any web page could be limited by the arcane censorship and wiretapping institution – the Telekomünikasyon İletişim Başkanlığı (Directorate of Telecommunications and Communications) - without any court order and within four hours of the publishing on the website. After the directorate effectively censored the web content, they would receive relevant court orders, and only after that could the affected party apply for the removal of the ban on their content. This draconian law has its counter-parts only in the authoritarian or totalitarian regimes of North Korea, the People’s Republic of China, Cuba, and Saudi Arabia. As of March 2014, the iron curtain on the internet did not yet fall, but, with hardly any doubt, ingenious censorship methods will be applied after the local elections on March 30, 2014.3 The state, apparently, jealously and secretively grasped Istanbul’s urban land, 3 A week took to prove my premonition true;the government pulled the plug on twitter on March 20. See, Sebnem Arsu and Dan Bilefsky, “In Turkey, Twitter Roars After Effort to Block It,” The New York Times, March 21, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/22/world/europe/turks-seek-to-challenge-twitterban.html. 387 gripping it so tightly that scarcely any area of import in the city remained untouched by the revelations exposed in the alleged wiretaps. Ağaoğlu’s intricate exchange with the PM’s son, the permits he received from the metropolitan municipality, his reluctant handing over of a large swath of land in Ataşehir to the PM’s sons’ waqf, and that waqf’s pecuniary interests on land granted by the Fatih, Üsküdar, and metropolitan municipalities, Zorlu towers’ huge stepping over the borders of planning and building regulations in Zincirlikuyu –which, even the minister of urban development was allegedly in shock, though powerless- gross expropriation of public land and its subsequent lease to a myriad of government connected waqfs for material gains or for use as dormitories for college students, rampant graft that involved almost all the main actors of real estate development in Istanbul, and last, but not least, an alleged demand by the government from the biggest, and richest, state contractors of Turkey, that almost approached levels of extortion, to buy a media conglomerate –complete with two newspapers with a combined circulation of 450 thousand, and a network channel, one of the most watched, and a cable news network- for the amount of USD 600 million to prevent it from falling into the hands of the international media conglomerates –likes of Murdoch and Time Warner- or, turning it into a relatively independent media corporation that permits it to voice criticism of the government. The state contractors subject to that demand were supposed to pay USD 100 million each into a shared pool, where a consortium was supposed to buy the media conglomerate. The media company, which was sold to Çalık Holdings in 2007 for USD 500 million, where PM’s son-in-law had worked as CEO until very recently, is said to have lost enormous sums of money, hindering the repayment of credit allegedly received from the publicly owned state banks 388 –allegedly, the credit line was specifically opened for that purchase. The question of concern here, is not how such corruption, such byzantine intrigues, such unprecedented graft could be kept from public scrutiny for so long, nor why it took a rivalry between those who held the reins of state mechanisms in their hands for an unraveling to take place –definitely, not a good sign for the condition of Turkish democracy, nor the capitalist classes’ overwhelming influence on the inner workings of the state, or Islamism’s articulation to capitalist circuits of accumulation. What is really interesting here is, once again in Istanbul’s history, speculation over urban land had prevailed over all fractional interests of the ruling classes and dominated every stage of capitalist accumulation, while, all that exists in this seemingly heavenly city is subject to the wretched perishing forces of creative destruction that donned the guise of equitable redistribution. In part, the unfettered power of the real estate developers owed their success to the publicly shared euphoria surrounding the rampant urban sprawl, and PM Erdoğan was not too far off the mark when he said that, Zeytinburnu apartments are now worth at least double, after the completion of the Marmaray tunnel –his argument found wild applause and wide approval among the Zeytinburnu populace, at least the propertyowners. What happened after 2002 was an integral extension of the gecekondu building processes, that quiet encroachment of the ordinary, that mass appropriation of public land had to return back to where it hypothetically belonged – the circuits of capitalist accumulation. Yet, a discerning eye can call the difference between grassroots boosterism and state-led entrepreneurial wholesale transformation of Istanbul; the mechanisms that made a vapid real estate speculation a ubiquitous phenomenon, a Goliath to the landless, 389 dispossessed, renting masses of Istanbul, deserves an interest on the actors of production of concrete space. In this chapter, I will first examine the divergent scales of the production of concrete space, from the small-producers of housing, the yapsatçı, to the state contractors and their labyrinthine relationships with the state. In the making of new state-spaces of Istanbul, they played an immense role together. Here, using a sample of 250 thousand housing units built in the last two and a half decades, and statistics concerning Istanbul’s growth of construction of housing units, I tried to capture the discussions that were raised in that meeting room of the mentioned developer’s headquarters. In this chapter, I will focus on how the construction industry and the massive commodification of urban land made the middle class a solid reality of Turkish social, political, economic, and cultural relations in Istanbul. The underlying question here is the nascent shape of urban political-economy, the trends of housing construction, the cycles of boom and bust, and the mechanisms of capital accumulation in tandem with the state’s centralizing control over space. In such a discussion, I will also explain how that space, rather, the representations of space concretely imagined by the advertisers, marketing agents, architects, and mainstream journalists, reproduced the middle class as a reflection of its aspirations. 6.1 The Actors: Proponents of the Political-economy of Production of Space in Istanbul In this social formation, Istanbul, three main historico-geographical actors, products of divergent layers of interrelations between social classes, capital formations, 390 labor processes, scales, and state capabilities, carried the onus of shaping the urban form. These three main actors have traditionally been operational in the housing market of Turkey and their activities varied according to the degrees of intensity of the predominant regime of accumulation: the state, private capital, and small-scale self-employed contractors. These three actors have not functioned as mutually exclusive economic entities, yet, they have had tangible attributes in the particular mode of labor control, articulation to the wider economic system, in terms of backward and forward linkages in the production of housing, and most importantly, in their particular methods of access to urban land slated for development. In other words, they differed in terms of scale, but not in terms of either capitalist accumulation, or labor controls. Their access to the acreage of land was substantially different, their power in commodifying land have wildly oscillated between mega-level developments (five thousand homes at one single stroke of pen was not an unknown feat of the Turkish government incursion in Istanbul in the last two decades) and modest, four-floor, 10 to 20 unit apartment buildings erected on 200 sq. meters of gecekondu land. The state has worked in tandem with the big private capital. The newfangled Turkish nation-state has long been analyzed simultaneously as an extension of the centralized imperial bureaucratic class which has undertaken the task of forging an exclusively Turkish bourgeoisie. One of the more prominent ways of the transfer of wealth was through the construction industry. Both the Republican People’s Party and the Democratic Party governments had witnessed rampant speculation about the way a class of crony entrepreneurs were fed by dint of construction projects, as well as extensive middle-class oriented housing programs that began during Özal’s neoliberal structural 391 adjustment era.4 The question is of course, how had a neoliberal structural adjustment that instigated wide and powerful dispossession of the working classes in the 1980s led to the state’s resurfacing interest in urban land? Would not state incursion in urban space entail a return to the national developmentalist logic of a previous political-economic hegemony? Isn’t the increasing public share in housing development a sure sign that the state finally took its space-making role seriously? My answer to these questions will be in the negative. The Turkish state does not act as an arbitrator of different class interests –as liberal state theorists propounded- nor is a committee of capitalists, as Marx argued. It behaves as a class itself, fervently looking after its own interests, treating the rest of the social actors as its tributaries, acting through granting closely guarded material and positional resources to its handpicked allies, hence reproducing itself as an enduring political and economic coalition. It is a strange mix between neoliberalism and statism. In 1969, Lefebvre suggested that under the circumstances of contemporary capitalism two main mechanisms of control are exerted over space: neoliberalism and neo-dirigisme. Neoliberalism “maximizes the amount allowed to private enterprise,…to developers and bankers” and neo-dirigisme “promotes the intervention of specialists and technocrats and state capitalism” with a certain consideration in planning. Yet, these two are not mutually exclusive processes. On one hand, neoliberalism promotes a role for the “public sector” and despite manifest discourse of the state’s non-intervention, seeks for There are a few but brilliant accounts of early republican construction industry, see: Tekeli and Ilkin, Cumhuriyetin Harci. The oldest and most important –until a decade and half ago- Turkish construction firm’s, named STFA, founders and leading engineers also wrote their memoirs that depicted the transformation of the business in the last six decades, see especially: Firuzan Baytop, Şantiyecilik Diye Bir Şey! (Istanbul: Yapı Endüstri Merkezi Yayınları, 2005). 4 392 particular government services. On the other hand, “[n]eo-dirigisme cautiously encroaches on the ‘private sector’.”5 Furthermore, possible coalitions always endure the explicit tension between the two, and are strategically located at points of collisions in order to permit the safe passage through mediated forms of collusion. Thus it is not uncommon to recognize a “tendency toward centralized planning or even socialization in agriculture, liberalism in housing (limited) planning in industry, circumspect control of the movement of capital,” and even large-scale nationalization of banking systems. Yet “[t]he global level accommodates the most general, and therefore the most abstract, although essential, relations, such as capital markets and the politics of space.”6 Similarly, the Turkish state attempts to continuously accommodate these two seemingly divergent, but intrinsically related phases, it is both neoliberal and neodirigiste. By means of its almost unquestionable monopolization of urban land, the state can command the flux of housing production, the shaping of built environment and through its carefully crafted market mechanisms, wherein state institutions effectively privatized large swaths of land in secretive land deals with private developers. The expansion of the built environment is in essence a multi-layered, processual extension of state capabilities in Istanbul’s urban geography. The hints of such an extension of statespace is laid bare by the transformation from gecekondus and yapsatçı to the state’s deliberate coalition with the private developers that led to TOKI-KIPTAS-Emlak Konut to emerge as the ultimate actor in production of residential spaces in the real estate 5 Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution, 78–9. 6 Ibid. 393 market. An overwhelming proportion of state interference in housing construction is oriented towards private developers and housing for the middle classes, and social housing is either an afterthought, or a mechanism to remove impoverished masses from the inner urban areas and resettle them in the peripheries. As a matter of fact, this was indeed what the capitalists had in mind when they entered into an unwilling coalition with the state. In one of my interviews with the top executives of the real estate development business, I had the chance to directly question what they had in mind when they began developing land. The executive belonged to a once mighty corporation from central Anatolia. The 2001 crisis struck them hard and their bank collapsed, for which the treasury came to the account holders’ help, while, taking over vast wealth under direct state control. After almost a decade -we talked in 2010- the corporation had barely recovered from its losses, but, luckily, they still had enormous amounts of land in the peripheries of Istanbul. They had a modest office in one of the oldest office towers in the downtown area of Beyoğlu-again, with an impeccable view. I tried to learn what kind of cooperation they had had in mind when the state entered the housing market with its behemoth organization called TOKI. The executive’s answer was pretty straight-forward - he said, TOKI should not construct buildings and as a state institution, it should rather be distant from the market mechanisms. But, what about urban land, I followed up with another question, - here and everywhere in Turkey, but specifically in Istanbul, where urban land is scarcely in private hands, and any land that is not yet developed is public land. He said, TOKI should better provide private developers with land and the rest assured, there will be plenty of affordable housing available. I did not object to his reasoning. 394 Apparently, the massive privatizations of the last two decades –during which time any publicly owned economic enterprise, including such diverse sectors as telecommunications, steel-making, utilities, chemicals, oil refineries were sold to the highest bidder- took its toll and ingrained in the minds of capitalists that they deserve getting their fair share from the common wealth. Though, the state was not so forgiving or equidistant to each fraction of the capitalist class and had other plans. If it is unavoidable to break up the commons and sell them for trinkets in the competitive global markets, if urban land is to be commodified through entrepreneurial municipalities thanks to a global wave of neoliberal dispossession, then, the Turkish state was still alive and kicking to coordinate a capitalist rentier class of its own making, of its own ilk. First, we have to foreground the trajectory of urban development and real estate speculation in Istanbul. 6.2 Production of Housing in Istanbul: Agents, Actors, and Re-ordering of the State-spaces Forty or fifty years ago, Anatolian shores from Haydarpaşa to Pendik, or from Moda to Bostancı, was not in high demand. For instance, in Moda, there were the villas that belonged to the British colony’s commercial families, in Bostancı, Hügnen’s –the director general of the Anatolian railroads- mansions stood. Along the [railroad] tracks, Hamidian pashas of the Privy Council, rich retired pashas, higher echelon state officials’ mansions were recognizable.7 Real estate speculation is no alien to Istanbul’s long and arduous history, as I have described in the preceding chapters. But, a common belief prevailed that until the 1950s, 7 Şanda, “Şehre Doğru,” 180. 395 during the golden age of Kemalist republicanism, real estate speculation was non-existent in Istanbul. On the contrary, the early republican elites were not impervious to the sirenlike call of earning handsome amounts of money through rent. When Hüseyin Avni Şanda wrote during the World War II years, he complained vociferously against the rampant land speculation in Istanbul –and compared to the fin-de-siècle, he noticed that huge tracts of land, especially alongside the course of the Anatolian railroad, had been rapidly developed. He added that the administration of the Anatolian railroad tried to ramp up population on this route to make its suburban lines profitable. In order to do that, the administration distributed passes to the residents of the adjacent neighborhoods and carried construction material for cheap, nevertheless, Şanda argued, the area –today’s high density inner city districts Moda, Göztepe, Bostancı, Maltepe, Kartal, and Pendik coastline- remained exclusive domain of rentiers and high-level officials, who did not have to commute daily.8 He also pointed out a familiar reason underlying heated real estate speculation, that during the war years, the only profitable business was export and import and these commercial activities were being tightly controlled by the few chosen by republican power elite. The elite saw that the end of the war would lead to an enormous devaluation of the lira with the cease of lucrative commerce between sides at war and, as accumulation of wealth in foreign currency was banned by law, they invested heavily in land. Şanda explained that a boom in demand led to the land prices to inflate tenfold in the small strip of coastal land from Caddebostan to Küçükyalı extending to Maltepe and Kartal, all on the Asian side. The rampant speculation continued in its feckless inflation 8 Ibid. 396 of urban land values, and Zincirlikuyu and Mecidiyeköyü on the European side were filled to the brim at the time of Şanda’s writing, and he presciently argued that soon, the vast empty land between Mecidiyeköyü and Büyükdere (today’s central business district which includes the skyscrapers of Maslak) would be soon looted by the very same speculators. He asked pointedly “Where would this expansion end? What form will tomorrow’s Istanbul take?”9 So, real estate speculation was not a novelty by the time of Menderes’ Haussmannesque re-ordering of space in Istanbul. A comparatively novel phenomenon arrived belatedly in Turkey with the saturation of the population in emerging industrial urban centers from the 1950s onward. Four main reasons triggered an insurmountable and uncontrollable growth in Turkish urban areas in the latter part of the 20th century: massive flows of rural population to the cities, an ineffective financial sector that failed terribly providing credit for housing, the expansion of grassroots politics as a redistributive apparatus, and rampant inflation that arrested any savings and funneled those into urban land.10 Between 1950 and 1965 the public sector’s contribution to the housing supply in the urban areas would not be more than 30.000 units, and at that level, it is even lower than the supply provided by means of cooperative building societies. Tekeli estimated that, duly built and officially registered housing supply would total no more than 3 percent of total housing supply.11 Ayşe Öncü wrote in the 1980s that the constant flux of immigrants in the previous 9 Ibid., 181. 10 Öncü, “The Politics of the Urban Land Market in Turkey: 1950–1980,” 40–44. 11 Tekeli, Türkiye’de yaşamda ve yazında konut sorununun gelişimi, 97. 397 two decades that exceeded an annual population growth of two hundred thousand, came to the bottle-neck of land available in Istanbul. The previous two decades saw the squatters appropriate land in peripheral Istanbul and effectively consume any zone pertinent for further development. The latecomers, especially the immigrants from eastern Turkey, the Kurdish immigrants, were left with no choice but to pay exorbitant sums to buy land from the already existing networks of gecekondu land usurpers –the land mafia, as I mentioned in the previous chapter.12 She aptly pointed out that the scarcity of land would lead to new ethnic geographical divisions. This was exactly what transpired with the clear-cut segregation of mahalles between Kurds and Turks, between Black Sea people and the rest, between the Alevis and Sunnis. Yet, she also argued that the “absolute scarcity of centrally located land” –which was due to the heavy build-up of high-rise apartment buildings from the 1950 on- would ultimately lead to the drop in construction. She foresaw a decline in demand, a glut in the already contested supply of housing in urban areas. The ubiquitous one-man construction firms would be the first ones to be affected by this glut in the urban land market in Istanbul. The crisis of the 1970s was more than a temporary slump. It was rather an indicator of the coming recession and stagnation in urban property markets. These smallscale producers of housing would be the potential losers, since land prices and financial costs would obviously increase and many would end up bankrupt.13 However, this did not happen, and contrary to her suggestion, the housing construction skyrocketed by the end of the 1980s, reaching unprecedented levels. Why would that be? Did she exaggerate the 12 Öncü, “The Politics of the Urban Land Market in Turkey: 1950–1980,” 59. 13 Ibid. 398 glut in urban land markets? Were the one-man firms more resilient than her analysis had suggested? Did these small-scale constructors command a larger pool of financial resources? Firstly, Ayşe Öncü’s analysis was correct to the full extent of data available. According to the reports of the Ministry of Environment and Forestry, even by the early 2000s, 69% of the land in the province of Istanbul was publicly owned, and of this, 49% was forest land.14 Of that public land, it would not be a far-fetched estimate that a third was squatted by the gecekondus and only in the last three years, an amnesty had been passed through the parliament by AKP that recognized ownership rights of the squatters. Even now, the amnesty is not an unequivocal success and only a limited amount is collected from the squatters of public and forest land as fees for amnesty. Öncü’s estimates for the size and scale of available urban land for development were quite moderate given the fact that the state actively partook in expanding the limits of urban development. Each bridge built, each highway paved, each coastal parkway opened, each highway intersection assumed to fix the unbearable traffic, each and every solution purported for the panacea of rush hour jam, brought alongside a massive appropriation of public land facilitated by the state and municipal intervention to accelerate the redistribution of imagined commodity of urban rent. Öncü’s estimates were quite conservative compared to the greed and public approval of expansionist urban boosterism championed by the state policies. If Öncü was conservative, indubitably, the early 14 N. Musaoglu et al., “Istanbul Anadolu Yakası 2B Alanlarının Uydu Görüntüleri Ile Analizi,” in TMMOB Harita ve Kadastro Mühendisleri Odası 10. Türkiye Harita Bilimsel ve Teknik Kurultayı (Ankara, 2005), 10. 399 urbanist of the 1940s, Şanda would have been left speechless faced with the throes of unhindered urban development in Istanbul. The rhythm of Istanbul’s expansion took place in unprecedented beats of growth that added several cities of its own size in each decade. The irrelevance of the historic city’s core, the intra-muros Istanbul, its reduction to a mere open-air park for the fifteen million tourists each year, its social, political, and cultural decay attests to this ineradicable growth. The city is no longer interested in its erstwhile core and has grown multiple times over the kernel that breathed life to herself. The kernel is but a relic of the past, a cherished but uninteresting past for the conservatives, nationalists, and Islamists alike, and a blasphemy for the few Istanbulites who had the luxury to recognize the everyday life which once existed in that part of the city. Yet, the historic Istanbul is now an afterthought. None could have foretold that in the last two decades alone, between 1992 and 2013, the built environment for housing in Istanbul has expanded 378 sq. kilometers, or 146 sq. miles (See, Figure 6.2). This is the amount of area that received permission for construction of new homes. That means, an area as large as Philadelphia's (or almost Denver's, or Detroit's) whole urban land area is added to Istanbul as a concrete monument to the inexorable urban sprawl. The sprawl was not merely horizontal, what Öncü termed as high-rise apartment buildings would have been dwarfed by the extent –and height- of new skyscrapers built since 1992 in Istanbul. For a time, the tallest building in Europe was in Istanbul before the Shard was erected in London. Still, the Sapphire in Maslak, a 238- meter steel and glass tower, is the seventh tallest building in the whole of Europe, inclusive of Russia. 400 Housing Construction Permits 1992‐2013 Actors of Production 180000 160000 140000 120000 100000 80000 60000 40000 20000 0 Total Government Institutions included in the General Budget (TOKI) Government Institutions with special budgets Municipalities (KIPTAS) Public Economic Enterprises Private enterprises Building cooperatives Enterprises with majority ownership by state and public enterprises Figure 6.1: Actors of new home building: Housing construction permits according to the type of builders in Istanbul, 1992-2013 15 The glut in the urban land market has only begun to hit the developers in the last Source, TURKSTAT construction permit reports: TURKSTAT, “Yapı İzin İstatistikleri,” Yapı İzin İstatistikleri, accessed March 20, 2014, http://tuikapp.tuik.gov.tr/Yapi_Izin_App/giris.zul. 15 401 decade, and a top-level executive of one of the biggest developers on the Asian side told me in 2010 that they would re-focus their strategy in skyscrapers from then on. Steel and reinforced concrete and the limits of modern engineering were no match for their ambitious plans, I have been to the 63rd floor of a reinforced concrete skyscraper in Şişli –with, of course, exquisite views of both the Bosphorus and the Golden Horn. The executive of that skyscraper rightfully bragged about how they had reached the upper limits of reinforced concrete design and engineering with 67 floors they erected on an ancient river basin. In the last two decades, this construction activity was enough to build 1,163 One World Trade center skyscrapers, or 1,222 Burj Khalifas. Ayşe Öncü’s second estimate concerns the financial management and capital procurement of the one-man companies, the characteristics of small-scale builders’ production processes and the extent they could tap into untouched reserves of the middle class savings. The small-scale builders, the yapsatçıs, provided a supply of new homes in Istanbul, overwhelmingly in the period between 1966 and 2002, less dominantly but still a commanding portion since 2002. She possibly overlooked the fact that the yapsatçı, the small-scale builder, developed his housing projects in either complete absence of relations to financial services, or merely by facilitating simple banking services – checking accounts, deposits for the payments of raw material, security deposits for bidding in public contracts, transfers for permits, etc. Until the mid-2000s, housing industry, at least a predominant part of it controlled by the yapsatçıs, had been devoid of any real, tangible, material connections to the banking system. The credit system for homes did not come into full effect until 2005, before then, banks just functioned as intermediaries between the builders and the wholesalers of cement, timber, steel, paint, 402 etc. Even then, the check –which, until 2011, was sacrosanct in Turkish financial and legal system. Hence, bank checks played a tremendous role in Turkish criminal system as well, and any unpaid check meant a prison sentence of 100 liras per day for each check that bounced. Still, bank checks were secondary to more informal methods of financial transactions: word of mouth, handshakes, signed bill of payments, and if all came to naught, extortion by mafia was a preferred and reliable method for securing the money lent. Under inflationary pressures, many opted for mafia extortion than face inexorable interest rates demanded by the banks, or the merciless justice served by the state –which took an inane amount of time to be delivered and was unmistakably severe in its punishment. That’s why the small-scale builders, the yapsatçıs, survived two economic crises and one deep recession (respectively, in 1994, 2001, and 2009), when consumer demand plummeted, banks collapsed due to an unexpected devaluation of the currency, and the exports oriented growth strategy came to a screeching halt. At those moments when inflation became an uncontrollable social force, it led to a gradual and hidden redistribution of wealth from the fixed-income middle and working classes to the coffers of rentier capitalists, to financiers of the debt-ridden crooked state, the period between the post-1980 neoliberal encroachment to the gloriously manifest implosion of the whole tributary state system in 2001, home ownership served as a sure way of keeping one’s savings as an alternative to the bank deposits-though, with unsustainably high and speculatively irresponsible levels of interest, paid banks were at an advantaged position. However, the prevailing logic that corroborated demand for home ownership was the fact that banks were prone to crises, and may very well collapse-the consciousness of this fact which contributed greatly to the housing boom 403 since 2002. Two short, but painful waves of bank runs helped deeply ingrain in the Turkish public opinion that banks were no safe bets, and not immune to tumultuous periods of political economy. The first wave of bank run happened in the mid-1980s, during the most ostentatious get-rich-quick frenzy of Özal’s neoliberal reforms. One-man banks, aptly called “banker” in Turkish, accepted deposits from the public, promising exorbitant returns on the savings. Some bankers simply embezzled money and fled abroad, leaving behind thousands of disgruntled and broke people; some invested in real estate and an array of other presumably high-return areas, all of which collapsed and left the bankers with an onerous burden. In the absence of regulatory banking institutions, the lucky few received back their deposits, only years later, after hyper-inflation reduced them to mere banknotes. The first wave was a typical shock therapy on the hitherto protected, highly regulated, parochial Turkish financial markets. Even the state guarantee on bank deposits, came into effect after the bankers’ debacle of mid-1980s, would not be sufficient to safely guard the savings of the middle class. This lesson was learnt by the public through the pain and tumult of the 2001 financial crisis. In theory, it was legally possible to receive your deposit –since the bank deposits were guaranteed by the state- but it might take years in the excruciatingly slow Turkish bankruptcy courts. Then, one would still require the assistance of a reliable attorney and some connections at higher-up places. In the worst case, it was made known after the 2001 crisis that some banks did not keep deposits on their books, did not file them with the relevant regulatory institutions, and basically embezzled money. In other cases, the deposits were made in off-shore accounts, with the promise of extraordinarily high-interest on those customers’ savings. 404 Apparently, as the owners of those accounts were informed after the collapse of the banking system, the off-shore accounts were not under the purview of Turkish banking regulations, hence, their money was not recoverable.16 Depositing your money in the Turkish banks was a shaky business, and, in any case, an important proportion of Turkish people were inimical to the interest-bearing banking system due to the Islamic teachings –the scriptures stipulated that receiving interest payment is akin to waging war against god. They kept their savings predominantly in gold: as jewelry, coins pressed by the Turkish treasury which circulated as the primary method of gift-giving in marriages, circumcisions, births, etc. Yet, keeping one’s savings in gold is always precarious, because not only have the global gold prices fluctuated wildly in the last three decades, but also the obvious problem of keeping it safe presents a great risk. Investment in real estate, on the other hand, is comparatively safer than both banks and gold. As soon as you receive your title, you would have your peace of mind. Even in the occasional case of the developer going bankrupt, the title given in the beginning of the project entitles one to a share of land. The land cannot disappear, and all it takes is finding a new contractor to finish the building. The lousiness of the developer’s construction materials, the lack of proper engineering, and the control of safety The financial crisis of 2001 began in 1999 with the government takeover of 7 banks which were unable to withstand an emergent bank run, in December 1999. After more than a year, it became apparent that Turkish financial system was exclusively built upon the bank’s lucrative lending of high-interest deposits to the treasury. As soon as the treasury stopped borrowing in exorbitant interest rates –it was evident that such high rates were unsustainable, since the state coffers were no longer able to finance the internal debts without either heavily borrowing from the world markets, or by printing off banknotes, which would indubitably lead to hyperinflation. Between 1999 and 2003, 22 banks were nationalized and USD 47 billion were spent to re-capitalize those banks. Some were merged into bigger banks and re-privatized, for others the huge costs of re-capitalization meant, their previous owners were under obligation to the state. As recent as 2013, Cukurova Group’s media group and industrial truck assembly plants were nationalized due to debts from the mismanagament of Pamukbank. Imar Bank, which belonged to Uzan family, was the most notorious example of mismanagement, greed, and crony capitalism. Some deposit holders have never received their state-guaranteed money back, since, their accounts were not recorded in the bank’s books. 16 405 procedures would not pose a significant problem, as long as you hung onto your title, that home belongs to you: you can fix the insides of the apartment later, you can pay extra to another contractor to strengthen the building against the impending earthquake, you can rent it or sell it as soon as the prices go up. A home is proven to be an unshakable investment, the returns are almost certainly above the inflation rate in Turkey, and in Istanbul, the immense speculative rush helped prices to double on inflation, surpassing the bank deposits and gold –before the most recent trough, gold however, reached epic highs due to the global recession of 2007-9- and foreign currency became the most lucrative form of savings. The price indices announced by the Central Bank are rather conservative, in my view, and especially the inner city neighborhoods saw irrationally immense increases in prices. At least a few of my informants bragged about their deft investments in the real estate market. A typical apartment -100 sq. meters, two or three bedrooms, on a higher up floor - that was bought for around 180.000 liras in 2009 in central middle class neighborhoods like, Kadıköy, Cihangir, Şişli, was worth in late 2013, after almost five years, triple the amount. They felt vindicated and immeasurably rewarded for the reason that their investment in real estate paid off handsomely. The interest rates did not exceed 10% between 2009 and 2014, gold skyrocketed and went belly up, foreign currency and the stock market –three quarters of which was owned by foreign funds until late 2013, and not really a source of Turkish savings- could not even come close to the roughly 40% annual interest paid on urban rent. Today, it is a commonly held belief shared by developers, contractors, municipal authorities, builders, and the general public that investment in real estate will always pay 406 back in Istanbul. The rise in prices is the not sole aim here, rents also climb steadily in the central locations, while hundreds of thousands homes built in the last decade on the peripheries of Istanbul spell a housing oversupply which translates into a fall in rent levels. In both cases, investment in real estate means that with the ongoing, insuperable increase in Istanbul’s population, an apartment would not go empty for long, renters are everywhere, wherever that house is built, and there will be someone willing to move in. However, this brought together a vast discrepancy between home prices and rents: today, a new home which sells for more than 600.000 liras, can barely fetch 18,000 liras in annual rent, and it takes more than 25 years to recoup the cost of new home buys. In some extreme cases, the rent levels and home prices are completely out of sync, so that a million liras could buy a house with 12,000 liras in rent.17 The divergence between these two price levels can indicate two things. Either the buyers, who continue to pay hefty sums on the interest of the credit they borrowed –of upwards to 15 percent- harbor a certain belief in the fact that rent increase, as well as housing prices, will double the inflation rate of the last decade, 6 to 7 per cent, or they are blindingly betting on a real estate bubble. Thanks to the Great Recession of 2007-2009, we now know to what extent the bubble can expand and the scale of the ensuing burst, how it meant the creative destruction of the built environment for the urban space, while The only reliable source for rent and new home purchases is online realtors, like sahibinden.com –the Turkish equivalent of ebay- and hurriyetemlak.com.tr –the most selling daily’s real estate website. The problem is that they only recently began collecting and releasing to the public wider data on housing prices and rent leveles, and their data is not reliable either. The statistics of house prices provided by Turkstat is notoriously unreliable, ditto, The Central Bank’s housing price indices. During collecting data for the sample of housing projects since 1990s, I used all available sources, sahibinden.com, hurriyetemlak.com.tr, and a specific website, emlakkulisi.com –a real estate website oriented towards new home buyers and sectoral specialists alike- in addition to the web sites of real estate developers. My estimates are heuristic and unfortunately, are approximations based upon my observations in the sector. 17 407 millions of consumers from Florida to Detroit, from Ireland to Spain, suffered for the unpaid mortgages while witnessing the annihilation of their sole savings in the form of housing. To enable an understanding of the scale of the real estate bubble, scrutinize the main actors of speculation, the patterns of the real estate developers’ economic behavior, the geographic distribution of their activities, their effect on the dispossession of the working classes, their relationship with the state and local institutions –remember, the state was, is, and will be the ultimate decision-maker when it comes to urban development in Turkey. Before that, however, Istanbul’s social structure, how classes are shaped geographically in this both ancient and novel city, how they act upon their spatial setting, and what they make of this unprecedented wave of speculative commodification of urban land must be understood. I previously discussed the innovative responses of the gecekondus, how these squatter settlements reflected upon and acted on the absence of state agents with a massive appropriation of public resources. Yet, I will show how the gecekondus paved the way for successive waves of speculation on urban land rent in Istanbul and how a peculiar spatial actor, the yapsatçı, was born out of the gecekondus. 408 Housing in Istanbul by Construction Area 1992‐ 2013 35000000 300 30000000 250 25000000 200 20000000 150 15000000 100 10000000 50 5000000 0 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 0 Average Construction per House Total Construction in Sq. Meters Figure 6.2: Housing Construction in Istanbul by Area18 6.3 Social and Economic Trends in the Making of Space: Istanbul and Turkey I have a question that still reverberates in my mind -the question is related to the picture of Turkey’s class structure we discussed at the end of the previous chapter. A hypothetical question: how would that rural structure transform into the everyday realities of an urban and industrialized way of life in the latter part of the 20th century, if its basic qualities of small-scale economic activities and relative egalitarianism stayed the same. I have underlined the fact that the middle class in Turkey, as inherited from its Ottoman past, largely consisted of a privileged class fraction, the askerî class, the militarybureaucratic elites –parallel to the decimation and forced population exchanges of Christian peoples. The petty commodity producers of the countryside mostly presented an 18 The per house square meter amounts here indicate the gross construction area that includes stairwells, balconies, parking lots, elevator shafts, and other necessary building elements. For a list of individual home size in Istanbul in the last decade, see Figure 6.16. All data is compiled from TURKSTAT construction and residential permits reports, see, TURKSTAT, “Yapı İzin İstatistikleri.” 409 undifferentiated mass of peasants and were not subject to massive exploitation as experienced by the peasants in feudal Europe’s early modern history. What kind of position would that wide swath of small rural producers take if they moved into the cities by their own volition? Unlike the European and American cases, where a tremendous amount of people lived in absolute poverty most of the time before the end of World War II, where relatively small number of bourgeois lived in luxury, employed millions of household labor as a capitalist form of slavery, what is supposed to be witnessed in the cities, given the lack of a social safety net provided by the state, be an equal sharing of wealth in the bottom and an absolute absence of the middle class that would serve as a cushion for the bourgeoisie’s greed and their rampant and undeserved accumulation of wealth. Or else, as the U.S. presented in the post-war era, we might be able to recognize in the Turkish context a powerful middle class, where almost everyone claimed to be a part of it, while an extremely limited fraction of the bourgeoisie controlled the expanded reproduction of capital. The figure below shows that, inasmuch as any qualitative research of any length would attest to, eighty per cent of Istanbul’s population, the poorest eighth decile, has an interestingly level distribution of income. Among this particularly egalitarian distribution of income, the seventh decile has earned a little more than four times the poorest decile in 2006, and in 2012 the income gap between the poorest ten per cent and the third richest ten per cent was closed to somewhat a little less than four times. The Gini index in Turkey, the authoritative indicator of wealth discrepancy, was horridly high in 1994. With a .49 index, it was worse than almost all notoriously unequal countries of Latin America and the United States. In the mid-2000s, the Gini index fluctuated somewhere 410 between .37 and .40, thereby a grossly unjust distribution of income had turned into a merely quite unjust distribution of income. Yet, even with the amelioration between incomes of the lower percentiles and the richest decile, the picture portrayed rather resembles contexts where racism is an indelible feature of social structures, like in the US, and some Latin American countries, or in newly established capitalist economies where wealth was hijacked by a few robber barons who built themselves an oligopolic top-heavy system of power, as in the case of former Soviet republics. In the Turkish context, however, the difference between the poorest first eight deciles is barely recognizable, the gradation in income is very moderately increasing and under daily observations, it would be almost impossible to distinguish between these groups. Their consumption habits would be strikingly similar, they would be expected to live side by side, they would watch similar TV shows, support very similar social and cultural views –incumbent upon, of course, on their religious and ethnic backgroundsspeak more or less the same language that defined the Turkish ideology. Each decile receives only one per cent more of the overall income than the decile below, up to the ninth decile. The ninth decile shows a significant diversion from the trend beneath. The richest ten percent is, on the other hand, not only remarkably wealthier than the rest, but also its fortunes do not follow the trajectory of the lower 90 percent of the population. The lower 80 percent is not only very similar in terms of its share of income, and the income distribution is also very homogeneous within these groups, where the median income is more or less the same as the average. However, in the richest ten percent median income is twenty percent less than the average income, indicating that the richest five percent control an immense wealth. Everyone is equal in Istanbul, but some are more 411 equal, especially the richest five percent. Discounting the richest ten percent, Istanbul’s income distribution, according to my very rough calculations, shows a Gini index of 27, very much alike the social democratic countries of Western Europe. However, economic inequality in Turkey is not as blatantly evident as in other developing countries –in South Africa, Gini index is at a record level with 63, while in Brazil and Chile, the figure stands in the mid-50s, while, Mexico, Peru, and Argentina hover around the mid-40s.19 On the other hand, in Turkey the Gini index has stubbornly stuck in the higher 30s and lower 40s for the last two decades. The relative fall in income inequality in the first decade of JDP rule seems to give way to a return to an increased gap between the richest segments of the population and the rest. Unfortunately, TURKSTAT quit reporting income distribution on the basis of deciles after 2012. This was understandable though, since in 2012, the richest decile’s income is 11 times the lowest decile’s income.20 Instead of deciles, TURKSTAT began reporting quintiles, which is meaningless given the import of income differences and the undifferentiated grouping between the lowest 80 percent.21 In the last seven years, an easily observable, quite tangible improvement is evident in household incomes. The very well circulating public opinion that everyone got rich during AKP’s tenure is not exactly The Gini index indicates that a point of 100 means perfect inequality, and 0 as perfect equality. See, The World Bank, “GINI Index,” The World Bank Databank, accessed April 25, 2014, http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.POV.GINI?order=wbapi_data_value_2009+wbapi_data_value+wba pi_data_value-first&sort=desc. 19 TURKSTAT, Gelir ve Yaşam Koşulları Araştırması 2012 (Income and Living Conditions Survey 2012), 4143 (Ankara: TURKSTAT, 2013), 8. 20 I found income distribution data from the year 2012 on TURKSTAT’s web page using Google Search, and it was announced as a pre-statistical report, but apparently never found its way to the final publication of the household consumption and income report in 2012. See, http://www.tuik.gov.tr/ PreIstatistikTablo.do?istab_id=1386 21 412 far from the truth, and it is not pure election rhetoric, yet it is only partially true. Between 2002 and 2007, everyone, at least in Istanbul, received their fair share of developing economic conditions, the shameful chasm between the rich and poor started to close, all sectors of society benefitted from the growth instigated by a bolstered emphasis on export oriented development strategies. But since 2008, the richest ten percent have continued its upward trend, while the rest have slowed down tangibly. In 2007, the richest decile earned almost eight times the poorest decile on average, while the gap rapidly expanded in the last five years, the richest ten percent’s income is now more than ten times the poorest ten percent. The last half of the decade is a testament to the unhindered development of the richest ten percent. The rich get richer, while the rest is stuck at the same pace of protracted waiting for the trickle-down effect. Turkish exports have not shown significant increases since the global recession of 2009, while at the same time, imports have skyrocketed, thanks to which, record levels of trade imbalances and current account deficits have become commonplace. This situation directly contributed to the rising levels of household indebtedness, due to the ubiquitous credit cards and easy consumer credits provided by the banks –which, by the way, owe the money they sell to Turkish consumers to the global financial markets. For the last two years, the Central Bank has used a plethora of tools –increasing its reserves by making it compulsory for banks to deposit their reserve amounts as foreign currency, increasing compulsory bank reserves several times, applying different frames of interest rates to the banking sector –varying between 5% to 7.5%- to finally limiting credit card installment durations through regulations established by the banking regulator. Yet, still, in the last three years credit rose around 30 percent each year, severely limiting the savings levels. 413 What is not known is how the fortunes of the richest decile increased so rapidly in the last half of the decade. Here the picture can only be completely understood with the rampant real estate speculation in Istanbul and the ongoing process of investment in the built environment. Turkey is rapidly approaching what David Harvey described in his “third cut” in crises theory. At this level emerges the most expansive, deeply spatial, paradigmshifting, regionally proliferating form of crisis rooted in capital accumulation in the built environment.22 Real estate has become the determining aspect of fictitious capital under Turkish circumstances and capital accumulation that is sunk in urban land has grown exorbitantly in the last decade. Without sufficiently understanding the extent and impacts of capitalist speculation in Istanbul’s built environment, its geographical premises and political-economy, it will not be possible to gauge the scale of the real estate bubble. “The ‘first-cut’ theory of crisis...dealt with the underlying source of capitalism’s internal contradictions. The ‘second-cut’ theory examined temporal dynamics as these are shaped and mediated through financial and monetary arrangements. The ‘third-cut’ theory...has to integrate the geography of uneven development into the theory of crisis.” Harvey, The Limits to Capital, 425; See, also, Harvey, “The Urban Process under Capitalism: A Framework for Analysis.” 22 414 120000 100% 90% 100000 80% 70% 80000 60% 60000 50% 40% 40000 30% 20% 20000 10% 0 0% 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 Figure 6.3: Income Distribution in Istanbul, 2006-201323 The commodification of housing in Istanbul, financialization of land and real estate markets, and their emergence as a predominant investment and savings instrument is conventionally thought to be a result of the post-1980 neoliberal turn instigated by the military junta and the Özal government. However, the real impetus that helped engender a housing market as an extension of money-capital first arose in the latter part of the 1960s. In the previous chapter, I explained how gecekondus emerged in the late 1940s and 1950s as a response to the lack of housing and urban land suitable for development, and I also underlined the possible debate surrounding ownership of property until the passing of the Condominium Ownership Act of 1965. With the passing of the act, the The bars represent share of income according to each 10% of population. The lines represent the trend of each decile’s average household income. Source: TURKSTAT household income surveys. TURKSTAT, “Gelir Dağılımı ve Yaşam Koşulları İstatistikleri,” Gelir Dağılımı ve Yaşam Koşulları İstatistikleri, accessed March 20, 2014, http://www.tuik.gov.tr/PreTablo.do?alt_id=1011. See, http://www.tuik.gov.tr/PreIstatistikTablo.do?istab_id=1386 23 415 Share of each Decile Annual Household Income in TurkIsh Lıra Annual Household Income and Share of Income in Istanbul in Deciles 2006‐2012 construction of new homes –which was tepid up to that point- had rapidly grown. In 1969, it reached a new height with construction permits issued for 40 thousand housing units in Istanbul. I would like to take a detour here, and point out a common problem faced by almost every social scientist who studies the housing question in Turkey. Municipal authorities in Turkey, issue two types of permits related to new home construction –at least, in theory, the law stipulates that each new home has to obtain two permits. Again, in the spirit of the law, these permits help municipal authorities control the basic features of housing, apply rules and regulations concerning construction, planning, access to public resources, and basic qualities of housing. The first permit issued is the construction permit, without which nothing can be built, not even a single nail be driven in; it is the legal authorization given by the state to a developer, contractor, or cooperative to begin construction. It is issued by the municipalities after lengthy and tiresome processes, involving a great deal of red tape, connections at higher-up places, cajoling, and bribery. To receive the permit one has to submit architectural and engineering blueprints in addition to the electric and insulation sketches, all of which must abide by the zoning regulations and building code. Also, the contractor should pay important sums of money as fees to the municipality and if he or she seeks revision in the municipal zoning plans, a further application is necessary to increase the construction area, which involves bringing the revised plans to the city council vote. It is no secret that construction permit issuance is the most lucrative position in any municipality and localities with highly active new home construction is for long assumed to be cash cows for the political bosses. As long as everyone involved receives their fair share and higher 416 echelons take their cut of the transaction, the system works as a shadow market of influence trading. The second permit issued for new home building is the residential permit that approves the finished construction of a residential housing unit. It is also issued by the same municipal authorities, and is only given after construction ends and homes are made ready for moving in. The process for obtaining the residential permit is even more complicated than the construction permit and each municipality can come up with extra requirements for insulation, weather-proofing, parking, greenery, elevators, etc. According to the books, without the residential permit a building is not fit for living, hence, power, water, sewage, gas, and telephone connections should not be made by the utility companies, the municipality should not serve the building, not assign addresses, and the land registry offices should not issue separate titles for apartments without residential permits-they would rather receive, a land title proportional to their share in the total construction area. Yet, all of these are stipulations on paper, and in practice, one can connect power, water, sewage, gas, telephone - the municipal authorities create no trouble, nor do the utilities bother with cutting the unpermitted homes off the grid. Only recently, power utilities began charging extra, generally 10%, for electricity used by homes without residential permits. Again, banks are not allowed to lend money for homes without residential permits, but, more often than not, they find a way to sidestep the issue. An overwhelming proportion of homes built in Turkey in the last five decades currently do not have residential permits. The only exception that construction permits issued match residential permits is during the military rule between 1980 and 1983. 417 Apparently, the officers appointed as mayors and municipal administrators showed their strict discipline in matters related to real estate. Other than that, only one third of the homes constructed in the last five decades received residential permits. Yet, municipal authorities have kept on serving apartment buildings without residential permits, as they served the gecekondu areas-please note that the gecekondus are developments that did not even obtain construction permits. These apartments can serve as collateral in financial transactions and it was only in the last decade that mortgage institutions were precluded from lending for the buying of homes without residential permits. Even then, the number of residential permits only began to catch up to the construction permits after the 2005 mortgage law was passed in the parliament, and when PM Erdogan asked his municipalities to be stricter in following the regulations for residential permits. That’s why in this chapter, I count on construction permits as the reliable data, and not the residential permits. For any building, once ground is broken for the foundations, it will be completed in one way or another in the end –a construction permit is not something cheaply obtained; while millions could, and did, live in apartment buildings without any residential permits. 418 Construction and Residential Permits Turkey 1970‐1991 600000 Housıng unıts 500000 400000 300000 200000 100000 0 Construction Permit Residential Permit Figure 6.4: Construction and Residential Permits in Turkey 1970-199124 Construction Permits 1991 1990 1989 1988 1987 1986 1985 1984 1983 1982 1981 1980 1979 1975 1974 1973 1972 1971 1970 1969 1968 1967 90000 80000 70000 60000 50000 40000 30000 20000 10000 0 1966 Housıng unıts Construction and Residential Permits in Istanbul 1966‐1975 and 1979‐1991 Residential Permits Figure 6.5: Construction and Residential Permits in Istanbul 1966-199125 Source: TURKSTAT Construction and Residential Permits Annual Reports.TURKSTAT, “Yapı İzin İstatistikleri.” Reports are not available online before the year 1991 and they are only available in either TURKSTAT office libraries or in some public university libraries. 24 25 Source: TURKSTAT Construction and Residential Permits Annual Reports. 419 Construction and Residential Permits in Istanbul 1992‐ 2013 180000 160000 140000 120000 100000 80000 60000 40000 20000 0 Construction Permits Residential Permit Figure 6.6: Construction and Residential Permits in Istanbul, 1992-201326 6.4 The Yapsatçı as a Bridgehead of Real Estate Development While an overwhelming proportion of immigrants from the countryside found gecekondus as the most accessible point of access to the urban environment, they have gradually assimilated into the urban economy, straddling ahead of their erstwhile underprivileged, and to an extent outcast, position of mere working hands. A crucial factor, inasmuch as the growing industrial sector with significant increases in wage levels provided by a successful unionization of the workers, albeit limited to the core and engendering a workers’ aristocracy, was the opportunities of land ownership provided by the politically motivated amnesties for squatters.27 Thence arose a special class of builders: the yapsatçı. Literally an abbreviated form of make-and-sell, the word denotes the entrepreneurs who build and sell, the 26 Source: TURKSTAT, “Yapı İzin İstatistikleri.” E. Guloksuz, "Negotiation of Property Rights in Urban Land in Istanbul," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 26, no. 3 (2002). 27 420 yapsatçı was a new class of urban entrepreneurs, who-akin to Miller’s salesman, lived on his ability to pursue land and that was appropriated by either the gecekondu dwellers or a single family.28 Almost immediately a racially motivated stereotype was constructed around the notion of the yapsatçı: the Lazi contractor. I have underlined above, that the first immigrants were from the Black Sea region, and even today, people with a family background in the wider Black Sea area make up around a third of Istanbul’s overall population. Although this stereotype has undergone different variations, the Lazi (or Karadenizli, peoples of the Black Sea coast) developer has been widely portrayed as cunning, self-centered, ignorant -of both ways of proper (read, modern) construction techniques and urban etiquette- manipulative, and brutish in his relations with the construction workers. Yet, similar to the characteristics of the construction industry in Western countries, where a significant amount of economic activity and an overwhelming proportion of employment is undertaken by small-scale contractors, the Lazi contractorand his Kurdish colleagues- had controlled a major stake in housing output. However, by the early 2000s droves of yapsatçı projects were failing, bankruptcies were ubiquitous; and the familiar scene of three to four story apartment buildings in the traditionally middle class neighborhoods of Istanbul has receded, or silently been removed to the outskirts of the city.29 See also, Orhan Esen and Stephan Lanz, Self Service City: Istanbul, Metrozones, 4 (Berlin: B-Books, 2005). 28 29 This trend is not a particular characteristic of the Turkish construction industry, a similar onslaught of small-scale housing builders took place in Britain with the onset of neoliberalism in the early 1980s. See, John Burnett, A Social History of Housing, 1815-1985, 2nd ed. (London ; New York: Methuen, 1986), 326-27. Burnett noted that “the general trend in British industry towards fewer, larger firms” has not been reproduced by the building industry, even though the state’s role was paramount in providing housingcouncil housing in the British case. The trend since the 1980s is unsavory in the Western context: the statecapital coalition has rolled back from its entrenched position of union-backed control of the labor market by dint of deregulation in the last three decades. This helped usher in a period of growth in employment and 421 There are three main reasons that need emphasis to understand the meteoric rise and demise of the yapsatçı. First, the withering of the developmentalist state’s effects on the housing market and the political and economic parameters that beset the efficient turnover of small-scale self-employed contractors require further elucidation. It was a losing bet against scale, so, the yapsatçı had to cut corners to get rich –and he had done that by using sub-standard building materials, and, more importantly, by rapaciously limiting an increase in wage levels. He had been an adept in ruthlessly suffocating the working class he had tapped into. Second, the entrance of the private ‘big’ capital, hand in hand with the state intervention, either through revenue-share housing developments, or through the direct sales of public land, in the upper and upper middle class rungs of the housing market has affected a landslide in the direction of the profits. Third, the deficiencies inherent to-as much as the novelties underlying- the production processes employed by the yapsatçı requires a deft eye in order to be able to draw similarities and contrasts between what had ensued in the small-scale contractors’ activities in the production of living space. It is an oft-repeated saying in Turkish that no rhetoric is without lies and no wealth is made without sins. The yapsatçı, the small-scale contractor, earns very little, from the outset, half of all land belongs to the landowners, if not more. Marx, in the third volume of Capital, cited from a speculative builder’s testimony to a parliamentary committee on banking, named Edward Capps, he bluntly explained the trick of his trade: I think a man who wishes to rise in the world can hardly expect to rise by real estate speculation, these two, however, eventually triggered a segmentation of the labor market –a dual structure with unionized workers as against precarious, almost informal, self-employed, mostly immigrant, and unskilled workers, in addition to the mortgage-led boom and bust of housing sector. See also, Gerhard Bosch and Peter Philips, eds., Building Chaos: An International Comparison of Deregulation in the Construction Industry, Routledge Research Studies in Business Organization (London: Routledge,2003). 422 following out a fair trade…it is necessary for him to add speculative building to it, and that must be done not on a small scale; …for the builder makes very little profit out of the buildings themselves; he makes the principal part of the profit out of the improved ground-rents.30 Marx pointed out that “in cities that are experiencing rapid growth, particularly where building is carried on factory-style, as in London, it is ground-rent and not the houses themselves that forms the real basic object of speculative building.”31 The highly speculative and fictitious nature of ground-rent actually harbors a quality strikingly resembling a Ponzi scheme. In any development area, the first to enter the market would be the ordinary, small-scale yapsatçı. He would act as a bridgehead that breaks potential dissent in the neighborhood against urban development, sets the ground-rent levels for the succeeding waves of development projects, and establishes local connections –he might even be one of the locals. Unlike the Ponzi scheme, the early venture is not guaranteed to have the highest returns, since the ground-rent in this case is paid not in inflation-adjusted installments, but as a lump-sum payment: the price of a housing unit. The real benefit falls to the latecomers, this is an inverse pyramid scheme, the ones who enter later, reap the most. The street layout, the urban patterns, the commercial areas, public parks, and utilities become gradually emergent as construction activity permeates through the yapsatçıs piecemeal work. Soon, their territory expands, more and more landowners show interest in signing a contract with the contractor. Due to his perennial need for capital, the yapsatçı, more often than not, does not become a landlord himself. His business is structured around a rapid turnover of capital 30 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 3 (Penguin Classics, 1993), 909. 31 Ibid. 423 and a minimal amount of outright capital advances. He does not pay the landowner once the deal is struck, but promises that as soon as construction permits and land share titles are issued, the landowner would be able to sell his own apartments, or, the yapsatçı can sell landowner’s apartments for a commission, using his own devices. In that sense, he does not only build, but also he acts as a realtor: finding interested buyers, arranging payment methods, charging fees. The real factors of cost in the yapsatçıs’ business model are threefold: the acquisition of construction permit, the procurement of building materials, and labor. And among the three the first one is the most onerous, since it involves a significant amount of drudgery, political and social connections, and payments in cash. It is an arduous task though, preliminary and revised architectural sketches for the building must be obtained, and they should be approved by the local Architecture’s Chamber –at least, until the last year this was the case, when the Erdogan government decided to deprive his political enemies from this much- prized source of income and transferred architectural approval authority to his Ministry of Urbanism and Planning. Normal procedure is employing a newly graduated architect for this job. His main task would be to revise the measures at hand to the already existing design sketches. Increasingly, in the last decade, college students, or new graduates of the architecture school are employed for 3-D rendering of those sketches to provide a visual representation of the building, as a marketing tool. Then, civil engineer-drawn sketches and plans for load-bearing columns and walls must receive approval following a similar process to the architectural sketches –the two, engineering and design plans, would be later merged into one large file, which provided a crucial income opportunity for printers, since, municipal offices –nor the Architectures’ 424 Chambers- accepted electronic formats. Finally, to be able to receive a residential permit, the yapsatçı must prove to the authorities that he does not owe any back taxes, any obligations for the workers’ social security pays –which used to be his responsibility, until sub-contracting became the norm of doing business. Frequently, the yapsatçı would owe money to the state, either in expectation of usual tax amnesties, or, basically bent on declaring his personal company bankrupt, to establish another one, under a different name. So, it is no wonder that residential permits are usually skipped by the contractors, as soon as the building is completed, and it becomes the new owners’ problem and the yapsatçı moves onto his next building. The second factor, the building materials, can be bought on credit, and since unpaid checks and bonds are no longer punishable by prison sentences, nobody’s really using such means of financial securities, but rather prefer bank drafts, or bank issued credit cards. As one yapsatçı becomes known for his work, he receives informal credit from his suppliers; and perhaps, cement, sand, paint, wooden scaffolding for pouring the concrete, further wood for scaffolding for painting, steel rebar, and door and window frames can be bought on such verbal agreements based on trust. Yet, the most important wholesale cost item, concrete –the bread and butter of construction business- cannot be bought on long-term credit, since concrete is industrially produced, distributed, and sold on spot in a tightly controlled cement and concrete market ruled by three, or four companies. Only large scale construction projects can afford to establish their own concrete plants, pumps, and necessary technical equipment. For the rest, the solution is to buy concrete straight from the corporates, paying for the concrete pumps, and the premixed concrete itself-though, with Turkey being one of the prime producers of concrete 425 and cement, prices are lower compared to the developed world. Before ready-made concrete and concrete pumps, the yapsatçı was supposed to buy construction grade sand, pebble, and cement, and mix them at the construction site. More often than not, the ingredients would be far off the construction standards, and the consistency and quality of the concrete was poor. The third factor, labor, is the one where the yapsatçı has the highest level of control. As I mentioned in the last chapter, the first yapsatçıs were the engineers and architects of the 1960s, who quit that line of work in the face of stiff competition from less-educated rivals. These rivals were erstwhile employees of those engineers and architects, the foremen and master masons who climbed up the ladders of hierarchy as soon as they gained necessary know-how to construct an apartment building. While the engineers and architects themselves moved on to large scale projects, receiving contracts from the nascent building co-operatives, or becoming sub-contractors in the state-led housing developments and infrastructure projects, the humbler blue-collar worker excelled in small-scale construction. The yapsatçı as a self-made man had many advantages compared to his better educated competition. First, he could command a large army of workforce through either his expanded family, or hometown network. Second, the willing apprentices scarcely made any scenes at work, and blood was certainly thicker than money, or the need for workplace organization of labor. The pay included lodging –almost always, the construction site itself, depending upon the situation, it meant either a shack, or, after the first floor is finished, a hastily arranged room with bare necessities. Much later, containers served as an accommodation for the workers before the completion of the first 426 floor. Third, he could speak the language of the gecekondus, sign better deals, which meant that he could get better apartments as his share of the deal –since, lower levels, and apartments with scarcely any sunlight were neither desirable, nor saleable on the market. Finally, he had the extraordinary ability to keep his household expenditure under control. The sales of homes has never followed a straight-forward path which meant long months of unpaid bills, disgruntled workers, and an unhappy household. He had the uncanny talents to defer payment of the bills, struck a deal with the workers –by at least paying their “cigarette moneys”- and, keeping his own household necessities to the bare minimum, and in those moments, he was no different from his own workers. What differentiated the yapsatçı were the trademarks of his profession, a shiny and expensive suit, possibly a golden watch, or at least, an imitation of a pricy watch, a well-decorated office –to impress the buyers- and finally, but most importantly, an imported car, preferably a Mercedes-Benz, that shouts out his name as a money-making builder. The car also played its significant role as a source of credit, as noone would have thought twice about lending money to a guy in a Mercedes-Benz, and if things were going downhill for a moment, he could sell his car easily to obtain cheap cash, without using expensive and burdensome bank credit. As Figure 6.7 shows, the first wave of the housing boom began in Istanbul at the end of the 1960s and lasted until 1980 at full steam. Contrary to the commonplace notion that the street-level armed violence of the late 1970s brought all economic activities to an abrupt halt, the building of new homes did not immediately slow down. 1977 saw a peak in construction of new homes, with almost 48 thousand units built in Istanbul, and that level was not surpassed for a decade until 1986. In 1978, a gradual drop was observable, 427 it continued in 1979, but the real collapse took place in 1981, in the first full year the military junta run the city, and construction permits granted fell to a record low of 13 thousand units, to the levels last seen in the mid-1950s. The second part of the 1970s saw for the first time the introduction of large-scale apartment building activities in the inner city neighborhoods. An immense, devouring development wave was led by the small-scale, one-man building corporations, the yapsatçıs rapidly expanded their territory into the old quarters of Istanbul: Beşiktaş, Fulya, Şişli, Mecidiyeköy, and Beyoğlu’s eastern and the more affluent neighborhoods were already subject to building in the latter part of the 1950s, but the mid-1970s witnessed the disappearance of the last remaining gecekondus and wooden mansions alike, the last standing houses were often burnt in a night to open way for more development. Across the Golden Horn, Aksaray, Çapa, and Kocamustafapaşa in the subprovince of Fatih, the historic core of Istanbul was rapidly transformed from its centuriesold street and architectural patterns, where wooden row houses were the norm, and was replaced by six to eight- floor reinforced concrete apartment buildings. On the Asian side, a thin strip that stretched east to west between Bağdat Avenue and its northern parallel, Minibus Avenue, was the most heated loci of development. Fin-de-siècle wooden mansions, Ottoman bureaucratic elites’ leisure homes, and expropriated non-Muslim houses were torn down and high-rises were erected in their stead.32 The architecture of the period was strictly functional, in a developer’s sense, of course, and function meant the construction of the most area possible, where the building Tanyeli, İstanbul 1900-2000; Tanyeli, Rüya, İnşa, İtiraz; Kuban, İstanbul, Bir Kent Tarihi; Tekeli, Development of the Istanbul Metropolitan Area; Giz, Bir zamanlar Kadıköy. 32 428 code was a relic of the past, permits were easily obtainable, architecture was an afterthought, and the production of the highest number of homes in the shortest time possible was the mantra. The end product was unsightly, the face of the city was blemished by the ghastly rectangular high-rises dotted with large, cast-iron balustraded balconies. Grey, pale yellow, pastel green, pale pink were the favorite color of those developers, and possibly, it was a result of landowners and contractors mutual agreement on price and frivolous color choices. This was the time of Lazi contractors, who were stereotypically caricatured in popular culture as money-mongering, greedy, lazy, dictating bosses with an impeccably ridiculous Black Sea accent-which, of course, had no relevance to the ancient languages, dialects, and accents prevalently spoken in the Black Sea region. In the utter absence of the state, the yapsatçıs, as the first truly private real estate speculators, ordered the city space through the incessant uniformity of rectangular apartment buildings. 429 Housing Construction Permits in Istanbul 1954‐2013 180.000 160.000 140.000 120.000 100.000 80.000 60.000 40.000 20.000 1954 1956 1958 1960 1962 1964 1966 1968 1970 1972 1974 1976 1978 1980 1982 1984 1986 1988 1990 1992 1994 1996 1998 2000 2002 2004 2006 2008 2010 2012 0 Units Figure 6.7: Housing Construction Permits in Istanbul33 Another important fact the trends in housing supply indicate here is that by the mid-1970s, after three decades of population surge, finally, enough homes were being constructed. The annual average population growth between 1975 and 1980 was 160 thousand in Istanbul –which surpassed the 200 thousand threshold only after 1980. Given the fact that a typical Istanbulite household at the time was home to more than 4 people on average –still, significantly less than the rural areas, and presumably, most of the population increase owed itself to the migrants- 40 thousand new homes built per annum would be more than enough for the city. Yet, even in this case, gecekondus continued to disperse on public land and right at the same time where private development reached its apex, new squatter neighborhoods like The May Day neighborhood were established. Years 1954-1966 are derived from Tekeli, Development of the Istanbul Metropolitan Area. The rest is derived from TURKSTAT annual statistics of construction and residential permits reports. 33 430 This can be partly explained by the pent-up demand for housing since the 1930s. There were 303 thousand housing units according to the building census of 1960.34 Between 1965 and 1980, 430 thousand new homes were built: even without the gecekondus, another city was added in a mere fifteen years. But, how come both went on their unhindered expansion, both the apartment buildings and gecekondus succeeded to expand horizontally, how come housing supply did not fall once a massive appropriation of public land went underway. That phenomenon possibly owes its existence to the fact that apartments and gecekondus as two distinct spatial forms, two separate housing patterns. Up to a certain point, the gecekondu dwellers showed no interest in moving to the apartment buildings, and we can be fairly certain that the other way was out of the question from the onset. Apartments and gecekondus were themselves concatenations of two different class practices that found their expression in the concrete space of Istanbul. However, this situation changed in the late 1980s. DİE, 20 Şehirde 1960 Mesken Şartları Anketi Örnekleme Sonuçları, 428 (Ankara: Devlet İstatistik Enstitüsü, 1962). 34 431 Annual Average Population Growth in Istanbul 600.000 500.000 400.000 300.000 200.000 100.000 0 19271935194019451950195519601965197019751980198519902000200720082009201020112012 Figure 6.8: Annual Average Population Growth in Istanbul35 After the 1980 Coup, the first housing boom in Istanbul came to an abrupt end. We cannot be sure if it was the burst of the real estate bubble or the total seizure of the Turkish political system by the military that led to the collapse of construction. But, we know that even after the first democratic elections, construction activities did not return immediately to the peak it had reached before the coup. The Özal government, however, triggered a new wave of growth in the built environment for housing by means of TOKI (a newly established state institution, controlled by the prime minister’s office) and Emlak Bank (a state owned bank established for financing real estate property developments). Facilitating TOKI and Emlak Bank as his tools for intervening in the housing market and as a legal authority for opening up large swaths of land for development –remember, Menderes was indicted for his development efforts in the 1950s and unsurprisingly, any state intervention in the built environment required a wellgrounded legislative basis since then. 35 Source: TURKSTAT Census Data. 432 Further development efforts were undertaken by the co-operatives and the ease of obtaining public land as state sanctioned co-operatives helped engender an expansion of housing development on that front as well. Özal’s brand new developments, Anatepe (later, after Özal’s Anap fell from power, renamed as Ataşehir) and Bahçeşehir were built on public land and heralded a new language of real estate speculation based upon the then new promise of Western-style “satellite cities.” Two striking aspects of this second real estate boom are worth noting. First, one is the new mode of the state-led development in Anatepe and Bahçeşehir, as well as other large-scale housing projects built in Ankara. Previously, the state entered as the provider of social housing and laid claim on the whole development. In some cases, especially for the logements, subsidized housing for state employees, the state did the construction job itself and did not subcontract the process. This was especially the case with the military base developments and for long, the military employed thousands of engineers and architects as college graduate conscripts who designed and oversaw the construction of extensive military facilities using the unpaid labor of uneducated conscripts. In the late 1970s, under Ecevit, the state social security agency even established its own development corporation, which contributed heavily to the construction of the then one of the greatest industrial investments in Turkey, the Iskenderun Steel Mill. Özal, changed this system and sub-contracted development to a plethora of construction companies. The agreement between the state and the contractors involved not cash payments, but a share of the housing units built. It was a frequent source of criticism in the late 1980s that Özal sub-contracted Anatepe for a mere 20 to 30 percent of housing units built to Selim Edes, the owner of ESKA, one of the great contractors at the time. Still, Emlak Bank remained 433 the intermediary institution that provided credit for the sale of homes and, presumably, all financial transactions between the sub-contractor and the state went through that bank. Later, Emlak Bank became the hub of scandals surrounding the ANAP government and led to their downfall in the 1991 elections. The second important aspect of this second real estate boom in Istanbul was the reinvigorated zeal of the yapsatçı. They found extensive support from the government and the municipal authorities –Özal was famous for his dictum that “my state officials know how to get the business done” implying bribery as an efficient way to smoothen out the working of the bureaucratic system according to his critics. Bolstered by this tacit support, the yapsatçıs began moving into the gecekondu neighborhoods, as the land was plenty, prices were still low, building codes were not properly applied, and this helped gecekondu dwellers to own apartments and meant their transformation from working class to urban rentiers. A series of gecekondu amnesties for appropriated public land – each timed precisely before the local elections to boost support- helped the squatters receive their titles, which rapidly led to further development. Both right-wing, conservative parties like Motherland Party and WP (Welfare Party, the precursor to the present JDP), and left-wing, social democratic parties like SPP and RPP used this method to solidify their popular support among the gecekondu dwellers. As the land for development became extremely scarce in the inner city neighborhoods –unless, new planning permissions for higher buildings were passed at the time- gecekondus became the next frontier for thousands of small-scale developers. On the other hand, hitherto untouched areas –a mix of forest, public and agricultural land- opened for further development in newly established sub-provincial municipalities in Avcılar, Beylikdüzü, 434 Esenyurt, Ümraniye, and Başakşehir. The second land grab, the vastly successful real estate development in this era reached its apogee with the Islamists’ taking over of local governments. In 1994, Recep Tayyip Erdogan was elected mayor of Istanbul in a three-way race, with a miniscule plurality of votes. The leader of his party, Necmettin Erbakan, started a new housing development project on the European side, where pristine public land existed. Başakşehir –taking its meaning from the ear of the grain, the symbol of Felicity Party- was a gigantic real estate development mainly constructed by the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality’s development corporation, KIPTAS. Later, Başakşehir was incorporated as a municipality and has become an important suburban neighborhood. Similar to Erbakan’s Başakşehir, another Islamist group, Ihlas Holding, an off-shoot of the Iskenderpaşa congregation, began building Bizimkent in between Avcılar and Beylikdüzü. This was one of the most expansive housing developments solely undertaken by private capital and it greatly contributed to the real estate boom that took place on the E-5 highway. Still, the yapsatçı was the prime market maker at the time with his candid versatility in signing deals, and his unprecedented pace in building and selling. The yapsatçıs’ move to the peripheries brought with it a rampant speculative encroachment on the gecekondus. Zeytinburnu was one of the first to be developed into apartment buildings in the 1980s. The classical gecekondu urban pattern rapidly faded into five, six, seven floor high-rise apartment buildings, wherein dead ends, narrow streets, meandering pathways stayed the same and took a labyrinthine well-shape wedged between the high-rise concrete giants. The north and south of the route E-5 highway followed on both the European and Asian sides could not avoid a similar fate to 435 Zeytinburnu. Topkapı, Merter, Ataköy, Bahçelievler, Esenler, Güngören, and Yenibosna on the European side, and Ümraniye, Üsküdar, Kozyatağı, Yenisahra, Bostancı, Dudullu, Kayışdağı, Maltepe, Uğur Mumcu, Kartal, Pendik, and Sultanbeyli had turned into vast fields of rectangular concrete. For the first time in its long history, the city was fragmented into many suburbs which barely touched upon each other –aside from the highway that connected them, and a multi-zonal center of competing central business districts emerged at that time, thanks to the high concentrations of population housed in high-rises. The decade between the late 1980s and 1990s was also the first time that class division changed its geographical and spatial characteristics. Public opinion at the time still dwelled upon a clear-cut separation between the gecekondu and apartment living as a spatial representation of the chasm between traditional and modern, religious and secular, rural and urban. The single-channel public broadcasters’ Sunday night comedy series, Bizimkiler, played on this difference where the story of a multi-family apartment building was told. The only person who had a fleeting resemblance to a gecekondu dweller in the show –who married a girl from the gecekondus- was the shrewd but unrefined doorkeeper of the building. Even though public opinion almost exclusively centered on a middle class imagination and a succession of social science research focused on the presumed alienation, threats of cosmopolitanism, and the withering of traditional social bonds wrought on the urban apartment dwellers, the gecekondus were rapidly moving into the apartments in the same decade. Apartment living had a manifest advantage over the gecekondu,-heating was no longer a hassle, hot water was always on, and the sewage system was in better order. 436 Gone were the stoves and coal or wood carrying to the stoves. Apartments had a much better insulation system compared to the gecekondus. Yet, apartment living severely limited the liberties taken for granted in the gardens of the gecekondu. Especially, the 1980s construction material and equipment created a profound source of disturbance in the apartment buildings, and crying babies, unruly kids, loud music- listening teenagers, arguing spouses were often pictured vignettes of that era’s cultural discontent. Apartment living, however, led to an unusual nuclear-family oriented reconfiguration of Istanbulite families. Women gradually left the job market to take care of the kids –Hart’s estimate, as underlined in the previous chapter, never came to fruition- with the coming of TV broadcasts and the dying off of Turkish cinema screens, public interaction meant indoor interaction. The living room became the sole scene of socialization. The only access to the outside were the ubiquitous balconies, and gained such dogma status that any housing development built without large balconies meant suicide for the yapsatçı. In addition to that, balconies served as a useful tool on the side of the yapsatçı to circumvent construction area limits cited in the building code. The balcony as an architectural form became the new vernacular of the Turkish house. It was an opening to the outside world, and during the hot and humid summer months it spelled respite for the residents. For women, the unpaid domestic workers of whom less than one fourth actively worked, the balcony was a site of work: the laundries were dried there, the rice, bulgur, lentil, beans, etc. sent from their hometowns were kept there during the cooler months. It served as a store room for the vacuum cleaner, for the rags and cleaner fluids, and during the warmer months of spring and summer, it became the dining room –at least, before the proliferation of satellite TV. After the 2000s, with the import of cheap 437 Russian gas, the costly central heating systems were uninstalled and balconies were turned into heating compartments of the home. Soon, first the aluminum, then the polypropylene frames became widely available and cheap to install. For many balconies this was the end of the road, and they were enclosed for either expanding the living room, or to keep the inside free from the dust of the surrounding street traffic, or to keep out the noise, or just to protect and expand the storage room. Of course, no one applied for construction permits to enclose their balconies. 6.5 A Transitory Parenthesis: Co-operatives as Middle Class Building Initiatives Construction by Building Cooperatives in Istanbul 1992‐2013 25000 30,0% 20000 25,0% 20,0% 15000 15,0% 10000 10,0% Percentage of Total Permits 2013 2012 2011 2010 2009 2008 2007 2006 2005 2004 2003 2002 2001 2000 1999 1998 1997 1996 1995 0,0% 1994 0 1993 5,0% 1992 5000 Number of Housing Units Figure 6.9: Construction by Building Cooperatives in Istanbul36 Co-operatives first appeared as an alternative to the capitalist economic growth models in the late 1960s as Bülent Ecevit’s brainchild.37 Ecevit was the son of an upper 36 TURKSTAT Construction and Residential Permits Annual Reports. 37 Sinan Ciddi, Kemalism in Turkish Politics: The Republican People’s Party, Secularism and Nationalism 438 class family, his background was very much akin to a Turkish aristocracy and he was brought to the party by İsmet İnönü in the 1960s to revive a Westernized reformist branch of the static and stale RPP. And as an American Robert College graduate, who spent years as a journalist in Britain, Ecevit promised to instigate innovative, Western inspired policies in his parties ruling circles. The primary task of the co-operatives legislation, which was passed in 1969, was to increase the scale of land cultivated by the peasants in the countryside –the Turkish landholding pattern was very fragmented- in order to raise agricultural production and productivity. The effect of co-operatives on rural structure was very limited and remained constricted to a few, but highly lucrative cash crops-hazelnuts, olives, sunflowers, etc. Although Ecevit’s initial inspiration came from Scandinavian social democracy, what transpired in the end was no different than local building societies in the US. In an inflationary economic environment, where banks only functioned as creditors to large corporations, co-operatives gained a crucial role as the financial structures for urban development. By the late 1980s, almost every state institution’s employees, public economic enterprises, state and private banks’ pension funds, school teachers, academicians, policemen and policewomen, military officers, non-commissioned officers, artisans, grocery store owners, taxi cab owners had established their own urban development co-operatives; sometimes more than one was founded. The members of the co-operatives put their limited savings in the hands of the co-operatives in the hopes of owning a piece of the increasingly heated real estate pie in Istanbul and other urban centers of Turkey. (Routledge, 2009), 41. 439 First, the members convened and elected administrators for the co-operative, these figures would be the same as the instigators of the scheme in the first place. Next, the administrators would bring their proposals for acquiring land to the co-operative’s executive board. Then, the initial savings would be calculated and allocated for a negotiation with the landowners. After the negotiation and contract signing, the cooperative administrators begin signing in more membership, while making sure that the members keep paying their dues. The hardest part comes with the persuasion for a project. The project can change, it can be a gated community made up of villas, a highrise in which everyone will have their first homes, a seaside summer resort complex where the colleagues at work would spend the rest of their lives during retirement side by side, or merely a lucrative investment in real estate. As soon as the shape of that project becomes clear and enough money is collected in the coffers of the co-operative, the second hardest phase comes: striking a deal with a contractor. In the absence of large-scale construction work and limited private development opportunities where yapsatçıs were the market leaders, contracting work for the co-operatives laid the basis for many future fortunes, not the least, one of Istanbul’s biggest private developer today, Teknik Yapı, comes from a similar background and entered the business as a co-operative contractor in the Uğur Mumcu neighborhood of Asian Istanbul. Of course, signing the deal with a contractor is not devoid of its own problems. On the part of the contractor, timely payments for the job done needed solid assurance. A mutual consent on the price increases was absolutely necessary in the inflationary atmosphere of the 1980s. On the part of the co-operative management, they had to rely on 440 the contractor’s building quality, his reliability in finishing the business on time and not asking for much in return. Many contractors had gone broke due to the disagreements on prices and they left the job, which meant the whole process for selecting a contractor would begin anew with a myriad of pressure from the co-operative membership. More often than not, the smooth working of things depended on the close relationship between the management and the contractor, though that brought an irrepressible curiosity on the part of the membership concerning whether their representatives actually sold them out. Cronyism was an unavoidable consequence of those close relations, many friendships were broken at the workplace due to those gossips, a cold and hostile environment prevailed until the finished homes were delivered to the members-even then, not a few members would harbor long-running grudge against the managers for the reasons of the quality of homes, the place of their apartment-it was decided by lottery. Yet, sociable, business-minded state officials found an extra source of income as managers of cooperatives and the most successful ones, were literally called kooperatifçi, who adopted co-operative management as their primary job. The heyday of the co-operatives began in the 1980s and lasted until late 1990s, at one point, providing close to a quarter of Istanbul’s new home construction. In the early 2000s, as the real estate bubble burst, co-operatives entered a dormant phase. From 2003 on, the state first entered the real estate market as a giant private developer and opened up large tracts of land for new housing construction, and then passed legislation that deregulated mortgages, letting the banks take a much bigger slice in providing credit to new home buyers. When the mortgage law was passed in the parliament in 2005, for the first time in Turkish history home buyers found a better 441 alternative than the co-operatives. The banks provided credit in long-terms (relatively, the longest term mortgage lending is 10 years in Turkey) at low rates. This was the last nail in the coffin of co-operatives. Instead of blindly putting your trust in co-operatives run by some acquaintances from the work –or, worse, on an acquaintance’s acquaintance- and submitting your life savings in a housing development for long periods of time, most of the middle class fixed-income earners found mortgages acquired from banks much more reliable and predictable. For the contractors, co-operatives were nothing more than another intermediate between their products and the customers. They could gather an array of banks for their developments, get paid in cold cash immediately as their apartments were sold. They could build more homes, better ones at that, and sell more of those, in much less time and had to deal with much less bureaucracy. I have listened to many stories of co-operative developments gone sour, I can easily estimate that a typical co-operative housing development took somewhere between five to ten years from the beginning of construction to the end-not counting the time passed before the acquisition of the urban land. Today, there is no such thing as a cash strapped developer, as long as the homes find buyers, he will be paid. From start to finish, it takes around a construction year – from breaking the ground in early March to closing off the roof in November- for a small developer to finish an apartment building with up to 30 units with much less hassle. 6.6 The Little Apocalypse of 1999 and the Collapse of the Yapsatçıs Although the co-operatives offered a comparatively cheaper alternative to the yapsatçıs in the real estate market, the dominant role of those small-scale builders were not really hurt by their wide success in the 1980s and 1990s. However, from the mid442 1990s on, the low quality of construction, the sub-standard material used in buildings, the brusque and crudely uniform designs of homes, raised question marks about the work of the Lazi yapsatçı. These one-man construction companies survived the 1994 crisis relatively unscathed, largely due to their disconnect from export markets –cement and steel. The two most important cost elements of their work was produced in Turkey and sold in a price-regulated market, while steel production was monopolized by state economic enterprises. Yet, the Marmara Earthquake in 1999 has blown an irreparable damage to their reputations. Hundreds of buildings constructed and sold by small-scale developers collapsed in two consecutive earthquakes, thousands died beneath the rubble of houses that imploded like house of cards. In an arch that traversed the Avcılar district in Istanbul, Kocaeli, Yalova, and Sakarya millions of people woke up trembling in shock of the uncontrollable movement of the floors beneath their feet, at 3:07 on August 17. The minor quakes that followed it continued for months, and on the evening of November 12, struck Düzce. In total, 18 thousand lives were lost. The ineptitude of the government, its insensitivity to the extent of the mayhem, its inefficient and terribly late help efforts led to an introspective scrutiny on the part of the public regarding the capabilities of the state. The first ones to arrive at the disaster scene were civilian, selforganized, volunteer search and rescue teams. They received accolades and were deservedly venerated as selfless heroes. In the aftermath of the disaster, Turkish social sciences paid a prolonged attention to the reasons of the state’s ineptitude; the only answer they could come up with was the immature, undeveloped state of the Turkish civil society. Fortunately, this euphemistic and highly myopic interest in Turkish civil society and its corollary enthusiasm regarding the non-governmental organizations did not last 443 long and left barely visible traces. The yapsatçı was seen as the main culprit of the unprecedented scale of destruction. With their corrupt methods, they were alleged to steal from building materials, skirted building codes and heavily bribed their way into building cheaply in a small amount of time. Veli Göçer, a yapsatçı who built and sold hundreds of summer houses in Yalova, turned into public enemy number one after his developments completely collapsed and hundreds died there. The earthquake did not merely hit private developments, public hospitals, schools, administrative offices, and even the then almighty and most reliable of all Turkish institutions, the Turkish Armed Forces’ –which staged an intervention and forced PM Erbakan to resign just two years before- the Naval Headquarters in Gölcük collapsed and many navy men were lost. At the time, due to understandable reasons, the armed forces were not subject to criticism. The yapsatçıs and their cronies in the local authorities had to shoulder the onus of blame in public view. The lengthy processes of justice, however, found only Veli Göçer as culpable for manslaughter. The rest of the actors of rampant and uncontrolled development were never brought to the court. Göçer served a sentence of 7.5 years. The immediate effect of the earthquake in Istanbul’s real estate market meant the burst of the bubble. Especially the middle class lost its confidence in their homes. The real estate sales collapsed in a matter of months, hundreds of developments with thousands of units waiting to be sold stopped at their tracks, and these sites turned into ghost towns. Today, in 2014, it is easy to forget how the real estate bubble burst in the early 2000s, but back then, in Beylikdüzü, Küçükçekmece, Avcılar, and Ataşehir, one could see nothing but endless tracts of construction sites, with cranes sitting as haunting 444 signs of ambition and greed. It is scarcely studied so far in Turkish social sciences whether the collapse of the housing market after 1999 had any effect on the 2001 financial crisis. The overwhelming feeling of loss, collapse, doom, and catastrophe reached millenarian levels by the end of 2001. The construction industry was thought to be a goner in the long run. Employment in the construction industry entered a protracted phase of recession. Scores of engineers, architects, and accountants and hundreds of foremen, skilled laborer left the country for job offers in the former Soviet bloc or in the Middle East. The burgeoning economic development in those areas of the world, some of which were recovering from the equally devastating impact of the 1997 Asian Crisis, helped Turkish construction companies gain a foothold in the global industry. These Turkish companies still remain in the top levels of global construction businesses; some of which, like ENKA, is a behemoth in Russia and a seldom referenced behind-thescenes actor of Russia’s showcase development of Sochi for the 2014 Winter Olympics. The worst blow was felt by the hundreds of thousands of unskilled construction workers. In my estimate, at least half of Istanbul’s 400 thousand construction workers were out of work for a long while, at least until 2005, and with their families, they faced conditions of absolute poverty, and even hunger. 6.7 The Return of Austerity and the Beginnings of State instigated Private Developments The construction permits issued for housing in 2002 hit rock bottom, with the exception of the time under the military junta and the coup, the number of new homes built was less than the amount in the mid-1960s. Prices in the real estate market followed 445 the stock market and other financial instruments and collapsed. Middle class Istanbulites began pondering the possibilities of leaving the city for good, since an impending earthquake would spell the death of hundreds of thousands more in the ragged and unruly apartment developments in Istanbul. For the first time in Turkish history, the white collar class bore the brunt of the economic crisis, and wide-scale layoffs at established corporations of the city contributed heavily to an asphyxiating sense of instability. At that tumultuous moment, social scientists vocally expressed their fearsome predictions, as the economy had gone through recession two years in a row, as the nonfarm unemployment reached the upper teens, where almost half the youth population were unemployed, as everyday scenes of stampedes for the measly food aid for the poor became a staple of the news, they thought an impending social explosion was at the doorstep. The first spark came in 1999, immediately after the government’s signing of IMF loan agreements when the Minister of Education Hikmet Uluğbay, one of Ecevit’s most valued ministers with a portfolio, who initially served as the Minister of the Treasury, attempted suicide when he shot himself in the mouth. The second spark came from the police forces in 2001, the uniformed police officers staged a demonstration in Ankara calling for an immediate raise in their wages. But the most memorable protest came from a shopkeeper, who threw his cash register at Prime Minister Ecevit as he entered the PM offices in Ankara. Once the most inert segments of society took to the streets; it became evident that the political vitality of the government was at stake. The government appointed Kemal Derviş as the Minister of Economy –who was not even living in Turkey before his appointment and was a World Bank official for a long time in the US. Derviş’s neoliberal austerity programs further stymied the working people, as 446 prices went up, a series of publicly owned enterprises were put up for sale. The coalition partners had neither the will, nor the wherewithal to continue ruling. They called for an early election, a fateful decision that fundamentally altered the political, cultural, and social balance of the country. The early elections were held on November 3, 2002. It was a political bloodbath. The parliamentary majority party, and the bigger partner of the coalition, DLP (Democratic Left Party) and Bülent Ecevit, lost almost all of its support in the ballot, with the biggest swing in history, 22 percent, and fell to 1.5 percent. The nationalist right-wing party, the coalition partner, NMP (Nationalist Movement Party), fell below the election threshold, like other right-wing parties, TPP (True Path Party), and Motherland Party. Only two parties passed the representation threshold of 10 percent, JDP (Justice and Development Party, its Turkish initials AKP) and RPP. JDP gained more than two thirds of the seats with 34 percent of the electoral support, its parliamentary representation was enough to change the constitution on its own. RPP gained 20 percent of the votes and solidly established itself as the only unopposed center-left party. Unfortunately, RPP’s unrivalled position did not help the party usher in increasing its votes but rather led to its realignment towards the right in a bid to attract the voters of the collapsed center-right. Failing in that, the party became the mouthpiece of hard-core secularist military and bureaucracy, which, undoubtedly contributed to its stagnant share of the electorate. 447 Housing Construction and Prices in Turkey 1969‐2013 140.000 900.000 800.000 120.000 700.000 100.000 500.000 80.000 400.000 60.000 Average Prıce Housıng Unıts 600.000 300.000 40.000 200.000 20.000 100.000 0 1968 1970 1972 1974 1976 1978 1980 1982 1984 1986 1988 1990 1992 1994 1996 1998 2000 2002 2004 2006 2008 2010 2012 0 Average Unit Price (2014 adj. Prices TL) Total Housing Permits Figure 6.10: Housing Construction and Inflation Adjusted Unit Prices in Turkey38 6.8 The Third Real Estate Boom in Istanbul and Corporate Take-over: JDP, TOKI, and Enlarged Capitalist Accumulation Once it came to power as the stalwart of Turkish re-orientation toward Europe and as the fierce defenders of democratization and transparency, JDP earned fervent accolades from the global financial watchdogs due to its loyalty to the austerity program initiated by Kemal Derviş after the 2001 crisis. Between 2002 and 2007, the Turkish economy went through its highest growth period in history and the burgeoning stock market and still high interest rate treasury bonds attracted an uninterrupted flow of Source: TURKSTAT Construction and Residential Permits Annual Reports (1968-1991) and TURKSTAT, “Yapı İzin İstatistikleri.” 38 448 foreign capital. The US dollar hit record lows in the face of such flow of capital. Cheap credit became the norm and this fuelled a boom in consumer spending. In the nine years since the passage of the Mortgage Act, mortgage based credit reached almost half of all disposable household income in Turkey. JDP and its leader, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, initiated a vast housing development program and announced in 2003 that in the next ten years the governmentled TOKI (Housing and Urban Development Administration) would build 500 thousand housing units in Turkey; they surpassed that number. This massive urban development had a tremendous effect on built environment all across Turkey, and especially in Istanbul. TOKI, Emlak Konut (the rump of what is left from Özal years’ debacle was turned into a publicly owned real estate development company under TOKI’s management), and KIPTAS (the Erbakan initiated Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality development corporation) together built more than 160 thousand new homes in Istanbul. Since 2002, 1.36 million construction permits for new homes were issued.39 Given the fact that the 2000 Building Census reported 3.4 million housing units in Istanbul, the new development frenzy, this unrivalled gargantuan expansion of concrete buildings and concrete spaces meant Istanbul’s built environment has grown 40 percent in the last decade and half.40 39 Ibid.. DİE, Building Census 2000, 2471 (Ankara: Devlet İstatistik Enstitüsü, 2001). It might be argued that 3.4 million units included gecekondus and these gecekondus torn down to open way for new apartment buildings. However, for each gecekondu torn down, at least 20 new homes were built in the period. So, their numbers are largely insignificant now. 40 449 Public Construction of Housing in Istanbul 1992‐2013 25000 25,0% 20000 20,0% 15000 15,0% 10000 10,0% 5000 5,0% 0 0,0% Share of Public Construction Number of Units Figure 6.11: Public Construction of Housing in Istanbul41 In this process, to prevent his predecessors’ –Menderes and Özal- unhappy dalliances with the built environment reoccurring, Erdogan created an extensive legal shield through several laws passed by the parliament. The necessary legislative framework was installed bit by bit in the last decade. As a consequence, TOKI is currently not subject to the Public Tenders Law, not subject to the only public fiscal watchdog, Sayıştay’s (the Court of Accounts) annual checks on the institutions’ books, not subject to the eminent domain laws, and can expropriate any land it deems fit, can decide any building as unfit for residence and tear it down. Since 2011, TOKI has also been tasked with constructing public buildings, hospitals, schools, campuses, etc. basically anything the government wants built is TOKI’s responsibility. The institution has replaced one of the oldest Turkish republican governmental institutions, the Ministry 41 Compiled from TURKSTAT Construction and Residential Permits Annual Reports. 450 of Planning and Construction. The state intervention in urban space surpassed its earlier, much more timid, efforts in bolstering private development, and was no longer limited to the bureaucraticmilitary classes. Since 2002, in Istanbul, the state’s share of housing units built has occasionally reached one fifth of the total construction efforts, especially in the years 2009 and 2010 when the global financial crisis finally hit Turkey and set off a recession. Whenever the private sector development showed weakness, the state picked up the slack and pumped more money into further development. The political rhetoric surrounding this vast development, and in some inner city neighborhoods, re-development, effort was based on social equality, expanding the riches of the few select elites to the dispossessed masses, and providing housing for the people with low income who were unfortunate, disadvantaged, and unable to tap onto the benefits jealously guarded by the “White Turks.” Erdogan successfully employed TOKI and his housing development schemes as the high point of his government’s achievements and as his unmatched propensity and attention for the betterment of the condition of working classes. In the JDP government’s electoral marketing campaigns TOKI was the solution to poverty and inequality. Their zeal for development was no match for the inert, inept, and corrupt left-wing governments of the previous era, and the Gezi riots, protests against the third Bosphorus Bridge, the call for Northern Istanbul forests’ preservation were all representative of left-wing adversity in the face of further development. The question is, in essence, whether TOKI really meant a successful redistribution of wealth as it replaced the gecekondus. The fact of the matter is that only a limited 451 fraction of TOKI, or other public institutions, provided affordable housing to the lower classes, The pre-conceived notions of JDP’s urban development reflected an unrivalled housing program that made people homeowners in large numbers. The conventional wisdom necessitated that of the more than hundred thousand new homes built, a predominant amount should have been owned by the propertyless masses as a long-run program of state redistribution. And, pundits –both pro and con- said that JDP’s greatest achievement was in its making millions of renters homeowners both in Istanbul and in the rest of Turkey. The reality on the ground is not so rosy though. In Istanbul, only a third of TOKI’s projects are directed towards lower middle classes, and only two of them were actually specifically built for the economically disadvantaged people. TOKI, KIPTAS, and Emlak Konut, are not public housing and urban development administrations in the strict sense of the term; the way they function closely resembles private developers. They run after real estate speculation, and they seek a gradual increase of land rents on the territory they control, they purposefully push some developments on hold, while setting others in motion with higher bidders, they deliberately spin some projects as high-rent generating projects, while limiting their already limited social housing developments to the fringes of the city. TOKI Housing Developments in Istanbul 2002‐2014 Place Housing Units Halkalı 28071 Kayabaşı 19920 Ispartakule 11261 Tuzla 10223 Ataşehir 10164 452 Gaziosmanpaşa Bahçeşehir Ayazma Maslak Sultangazi Çatalca Pendik Çekmeköy Bakırköy Esenler Başakşehir Ataköy Silivri İkitelli Kozyatağı Mimar Sinan Sulukule Davutpaşa Ümraniye Seyrantepe Küçükçekmece Taşdelen Başıbüyük Şile Üsküdar Ortaköy Kağıthane Fenerbahçe Grand Total 5739 4170 4085 4000 3123 2756 2180 2095 1721 1198 1037 950 820 812 800 666 577 499 440 400 372 354 300 296 208 72 70 10 119389 Table 6.1: TOKI housing development in Istanbul districts42 TOKI’s urban development projects can be categorized under three main headings: social housing, private development, and urban renewal. Even though TOKI cryptically categorizes its development projects under eight different headings – infrastructure and social developments, housing for the poor (at least for one project this Source: TOKI, “Toplu Konut İdaresi Istanbul Projeler,” Toplu Konut Idaresi, January 3, 2014, www.toki.gov.tr. 42 453 is the exact wording on its website), lower-income housing, administration projects (denotes developments under TOKI’s own brand), Emlak Konut projects, urban renewal projects, developments initiated for capital growth, and revenue share developments. In my view, it is more precise and explanatory to downscale these eight into three main headings. The definition of social housing is debatable, especially in the absence of rentcontrols, subsidized housing, council housing, LHMs, etc. In the Turkish housing market, we have to devise our own method to define what social housing is. First, social housing should be sold at lower prices, somewhat subsidized by the state inclusion. Second, there should be no intermediaries between the public authorities and the buyers, so, any project sold by other companies, advertised on their web sites, on the newspapers, TVs, and radios shall be counted out, since that would mean extra costs. Third, as a consequence of the previous reason, it shall be contracted to relatively unknown companies. For instance, Ağaoğlu would never enter a deal concerning a social housing construction with TOKI, but smaller companies, who are more specialized in construction and less attuned to marketing and advertising would definitely be interested in bidding for the tender offer. Fourth, of course, social housing should be sold on long-term credit with low interest rates. On the basis of these four aspects, I have grouped together Istanbul’s TOKI developments into two parts initially: social housing and private development. However, I believe urban renewal also deserves a grouping of its own, since the aims of its building is significantly different than the other two. I will not go into the details of a burgeoning urban renewal literature. Unfortunately, gentrification had found a too easily admitted 454 role amidst the wider Turkish literati and the rest of critical urban thought was relegated as mere nuisance. Life in Başakşehir, Kayabaşı, Tuzla, Ispartakule, even in Beylikdüzü is still not a matter of interest for the well-heeled Turkish academic, while his usual habitus in Cihangir, Beyoğlu, Kadıköy, Fener, and Balat has grown an out-of-proportional shade over his work. That is quite reminiscent of Turkish filmmakers. The films themselves try to make sense of everything that has existed under the sun in two hours, while the whole story takes place in Cihangir –the Istanbulite Village. The not so surprising finding here is the share social housing took in TOKI activities. Applying those four points quite liberally, I found that only a third of TOKI housing construction in Istanbul could be counted as social housing. These developments are reasonably priced for lower middle class and middle class families and are sold on long-term, low interest credit. The truly social housing, counterpart to the US projects, or British council houses, or French HLMs, can only be found in four cases, in Ikitelli, Tuzla, and Şile, all of which consist of 1640 homes, less than 1.5 percent of the total. In these developments, the prices are not only subsidized by the state to an extent –or, maybe, given the condition of buildings, possibly constructed with sub-standard materialand the interest rates are the lowest. The only pre-requisite for eligibility to such social housing is that the immediate family members should own no other property. But, generally, these developments receive huge demand and are sold out on the first day of the announcement. The same is true for other TOKI developments, since the administration is thought to be both lenient when it comes to the payments, and its prices are always lower than the market. Another apparent feature of social housing is its peripheral locations; none are built near the planned development zones, none are even 455 near the outskirts of the city center, and they are all sold on the promise that one day subway will begin service to their neighborhoods. Tuzla, Kayabaşı, Halkalı, and Ispartakule are the only areas where TOKI constructed social housing, while other, much more valuable regions –like Bahçeşehir, Kağıthane, Sarıyer, and Seyrantepe- remained the domain of much more expensive development projects TOKI entered conjointly with the big name actors of Istanbul’s real estate market (See Figure 6.12). TOKI Contractors in Istanbul Ağaoğlu 10% Ege Yapı & Artcon & Emlak Pazarlama 3% Avrupa Konutları 9% Soyak 4% Kuzu 6% Others 56% Mesa & Kantur‐ Akdaş 2% TEKNİK YAPI 4% Varyap (Teknik Yapı) 3% Emlak Pazarlama & Fideltus & Öztaş İnş. 3% Figure 6.12: Public (TOKI) Housing Development Contractors in Istanbul43 The second category TOKI deals in real estate market is urban renewal. Urban renewal is already a well-traversed –almost worn-out- subject of speculation in Turkish social sciences and urbanism in Istanbul, especially recently. However, its most publicized urban renewal project in Sulukule for instance, is but a mere asterisk in the gargantuan development effort. With 577 homes built, it was not a desirable development Source: TOKI, “Toplu Konut İdaresi Istanbul Projeler,” Toplu Konut Idaresi, January 3, 2014, www.toki.gov.tr. 43 456 for the agency itself –due to the bad press it attracted- nor did it fetch the inflated price estimation once the development was finished. In other contexts, in Ayazma, in Halkalı, urban renewal served as a “perimeter clean-up” demolishing gecekondus surrounding its most recent, glitzy developments constructed in tandem with the corporate developers. It is an attempt in spatially ordering unruly, unsightly classes, yet, its extent is merely cosmetic, and does not surpass 5 percent of TOKI activities in Istanbul. Distribution of TOKI Development Projects Urban Renewal 5% Private Development 62% Social Housing 33% Private Development Social Housing Urban Renewal Figure 6.13: Distribution of TOKI housing developments according to the type of development44 The third category in the list of TOKI activities in Istanbul is private development. This can be thought of as Emlak Konut, revenue share or capital growth project. These projects involve an established real estate developer, a marketable location, an unusual, or at least flashy architecture, catchy names, extensive marketing budgets, continuous and very expensive media campaigns, advertising agencies and more often than not, an adjoining shopping mall complex, a classy spa within the housing complex, a well-heeled Source TOKI, “Toplu Konut İdaresi Istanbul Projeler,” Toplu Konut Idaresi, January 3, 2014, www.toki.gov.tr. 44 457 investment in the security of the gated community. Although unbeknownst to most of the social scientists, media and vocal pundits, TOKI’s primary engagement in Istanbul’s built environment is in building gated communities, not social housing. The evident reason for TOKI’s role as the primary developer at the higher-end of real estate market is that Istanbul’s higher prices help the state to earn enough for constructing affordable homes in the rest of the country. However, if that were true, why build more of TOKI’s upmarket developments in Istanbul, 80 thousand houses, more than two thirds, and less social housing, 40 thousand of those? Do more people in Istanbul own their homes compared to the rest of the country? And, has all that development activity in essence led to a burgeoning middle class, who dwell in gated communities, enjoy the plentiful life provided by the expanding credit and rushing foreign investment in Turkey? Ye House ar holds Owneroccupied % of Total Ren % of ted Total Employer owned % of Total Nonowner Nonrent 10291 13099 68,3% 67,3% 3604 23,9% 4637 23,8% 310 299 2,1% 1,5% 730 1.420 4,8% 7,3% 1,1% 0,9% 131 260 5,1% 7,0% % of Total Other/Un known 0,9% Turkey ‘00 15070 ‘11 19454 0,0% Istanbul ‘00 2551 1477 57,9% 893 35,0% 28 2238 60,6% 1163 31,5% 33 ‘11 3694 Table 6.2: Home ownership in Turkey and Istanbul, 2000-201145 0,9% 0,0% Compared to the picture of home ownership in Turkey as a whole, fewer people owned their homes in Istanbul as a proportion of the population. Sixty-eight percent of the Turkish population lived in owner-occupied homes in 2000, while in Istanbul that Source: Census data, sections on home ownership and population and housing, see, TURKSTAT, “Genel Nüfus Sayımları.” 45 458 figure was almost 58 percent, ten points below the country average. Remember, a country which dwelled on its past as petty commodity producing peasants would be thought to own their homes, and Turkey in general is a homeowner country. Yet, the situation is not so bright in Istanbul. Moreover, in the last decade, with more than 1.3 million homes constructed in Istanbul, home ownership has only slightly changed. More than one third of households in Istanbul were living in rented homes in 2000, eleven years later, in 2011, only one in ten renters had the opportunity to move into homes either they, or their parents owned. Slightly less than one third of Istanbulites live in rented homes. Home ownership has increased by only 2.8 percent of families. There is a problem here, a profound problem. The reasons can be numerous. The households could be counted wrongly, but the typical Turkish family structure, a nuclear family with two kids being the norm, where extended families are not out of ordinary, belies that assumption. A total of 3.7 million households is meaningful, given the population distribution and the overall employment structure of the city. Yet, as I explained above, today there is somewhere between 4.6 and 4.8 million housing units in Istanbul. An abundance of homes prevails, though not in the center of the city. Altogether, this means that between 800 thousand to 1 million homes are in oversupply. What about the surplus apartments, who lives there? Are they empty, waiting for the squatters? Are there more people in the city the census does not count? And, most important of all, why do we have so much new home construction going on in Istanbul? First, possibly, of the 500 thousand university students in the city, at least half are from out of town, and again, at least around 100 thousand students –who are not obliged 459 to register for the census where they study- live in their own apartments in the outskirts of the city. However, this only makes up a fraction of the surplus apartments. Another possibility is the highly invisible, fluctuating, but significant existence of a transient population in Istanbul. It is not uncommon to hear stories from home owners that there are people who live six months there and three months there, skipping the rent, hopping from one apartment to another. On the other hand, the possibility of a moveable working class who actually lives in another city and works in Istanbul is also plausible. Unfortunately, there is no reliable way of counting those people; TURKSTAT only provides employment data on the basis of the firm’s hometown. On the other hand, there is something rotten in the state of statistics, perhaps, in the state of real estate bubble. The Building Census of 2000 gave the number of housing units in Istanbul as 3.4 million, while the same year’s census shows less than 2.6 million households.46 The oversupply can simply be a glitch in the census, if Istanbul’s population was consistently underrepresented between 2000 and 2011, then the close to a million apartments would make sense. Yet, election data in Istanbul would have revealed that problem if not in 2000, but definitely in the last decade during the most heated electoral discussions of the country. It is highly unlikely that Istanbul’s population is significantly more than what is announced by the census. In the face of real estate bubbles, I believe, a sustained investment in apartments made the oversupply in housing an important part of Istanbul’s urban fabric. The bubble is not purely the making of the JDP’s years in power, but it is rather a continuation of what took place in the 1990s. Real estate has once again replaced financial instruments 46 DİE, Building Census 2000. 460 completely, bank deposits only imperceptibly increase –in 2012 bank deposits totaled 285 billion liras, and Turkey is notorious for the lopsided class ownership of bank deposits.47 My assumption is that this oversupply of apartments has actually functioned as a bank for the richest ten percent: the 2000 figures show that the decade before that witnessed the construction of more than 600 thousand new homes, and most of that expansion in the real estate market played the role of a reliable, safe, dependable medium of savings, until the bubble burst in 2001. The same is true for the last 12 years, and the amount that is put into new home sales is more or less the same as the deposits in interest bearing accounts. The only crucial difference is that today, Turkish households owe 10 percent of their disposable income for mortgages on average in 2012, while their savings was 7.3 percent of their income in 2010.48 Then, if there is an oversupply, it would not be unusual to see lots of empty apartments, waiting for renters, with realtors’ signs hanging on their windows. This is exactly the case when one wanders outside of the city. The average home price does not go down significantly –even in the remotest districts of Istanbul, the real estate market found its minimum- yet, the rents begin diving as one moves outside, the occupied streets become fewer, more signs are hung on the windows, the spookier it gets when the darkness falls, the quieter it is in these remote communities with high-rises. Unfortunately, aside from anecdotal evidence, I do not have proof that there are more than half a million vacant apartments in the city. The ease of finding an apartment on the outskirts of the city, where TOKI has been highly active and the abundance of apartment 47 TCMB, Finansal İstikrar Raporu, 14 (Ankara: Türkiye Cumhuriyet Merkez Bankası, 2012), 31. 48 Ibid., 26–35. 461 for rent signs are the sole evidence at this point. The actors of the real estate market are not really masters of keeping secrets, but the number of unsold homes, the inventory they keep, is perhaps their best hid secret. After going through the ups and downs of real estate speculation in Istanbul in the last five decades, I will explore the relationship between the state and space in the next part. How did real estate developers become the right-hand men of the people in power, and why do the existence of developers and contractors persevere, while the names change as fast as the ruling parties ebb and flow? These are the questions to consider now, while also juxtaposing the development of these two forces on Istanbul’s urban geography. 6.9 The State-Corporate Alliance and the Fate of State Contractors: Meteoric Rises and Stellar Falls For the purpose of coming up with an understanding of private urban development and its agents in the last two decades, I brought together a sample of significant housing projects completed in Istanbul by important private developers. In this sample, I geocoded 98 different developers’ 270 developments and more than 250 thousand homes built by those developers. I used both anecdotal data I compiled during my conversations with the specialists from the sector, in addition to the developers’ own websites. Of the 98 developers, only 10 companies’ histories can stretch back to the period between 1990 and 2001. Table 6.3 shows that those oldest developers were either only slightly bigger than the yapsatçı in terms of the scale of their activities, or they were involved few projects with important sizes. The market was made by the yapsatçı, I already 462 emphasized that fact, but more importantly, the typical developer of the period was either an extension of the state, or else, a co-operative itself. Also, it is crucial to note that the co-operative was nothing more than an organization of state employees. In this sample, a few important aspects of production of concrete space became apparent. First, the developers of Istanbul have replicated the territorial behavior of the yapsatçı. Ağaoğlu, for instance, was a developer of the Asian side; it did not cross the Bosphorus until it grew considerably in late 2009. The same is true for other big name developers, Dumankaya consistently stayed close to the E-5 highway, Varyap never veered away from the Ataşehir vicinity, Avrupa Konutları was almost always on the European side of the city, and never wandered far from the TEM highway, Ihlas was one of the big ten, but its developments were located on the outskirts of the city, and never really reached the price tag their competitors demanded. There are a few exceptions to the rule though. Soyak, the oldest of big developers, crossed the Bosphorus several times, never hesitated in entering the riskiest businesses, but not handsomely paid as it was in the early 1990s. Its specialty was on the eastern part of the Bosphorus. Sinpaş is a rare breed; again, one of the oldest developers, sold huge amounts of apartments on both sides of the Bosphorus. The second aspect is of determining import in understanding Istanbul’s built environment and the state-space nexus. Once I began noting down the developments, entering them in the tiny cells of a spreadsheet, I figured out that what I saw as commodities sold on the market were in essence products of agreements struck between the state and the real estate capitalists. Of the 250 thousand housing units constructed, more than 70 thousand were built as a result of TOKI and private sector cooperation, not 463 including the almost 20 thousand homes built by Emlak Bank between 1990 and 2001. Of the 120 thousand homes built by TOKI since 2002, 70 thousand were the making of private developers. It was no wonder that some of the biggest names in the private real estate development sector were also the biggest names of TOKI contractors and/or cooperators list. For instance, Ağaoğlu topped the list as the biggest real estate developers of the last 12 years, as well as Avrupa Konutları –they owed almost all their activity to TOKI and Erdogan’s government. There are a few exceptions to this rule though. Yeşil İnşaat for instance, is third in the list with a colossal development of 14 thousand homes. Yeşil was in the shoemaking business, one of the biggest suppliers of the Turkish army. They possibly bought the land in the 1980s, when land was cheap in that part of the city and when they were awash with money from lucrative army contracts. Today, they are a giant real estate developer in Beylikdüzü, but they are no longer a significant shoe manufacturer. Apparently their investment in land has paid handsomely in return. The third point in this analysis of urban development initiated by the private sector is the fact that only the state led developers, like Ağaoğlu and Avrupa Konutları, had the chance to concentrate large numbers of units in a comparatively limited number of projects. Ağaoğlu was fortunate enough to begin construction of a residential complex with 4000 units complete with shopping malls and office facilities thanks to its close relations with the state intervention in assigning that public land and facilitating the serious revisions in planning and zoning rules through its hefty influence in the local government. Otherwise, the rule is that any private developer would move in phases. The farther from the state intervention a development corporation is, the more likely it divides 464 the land signed for construction. For instance, Dumankaya built five different developments on the same strip of land, while Sinpaş typically divides the land it owns into different parts, successive phases and distributes its risks in time to avoid what I termed as the “curse of the developer.” That is related to the fourth prominent aspect of private real estate development industry in Istanbul: the predominant financial relations of doing business. The curse of the Turkish developer is his inability to procure financing for the duration of the construction process. Banks have traditionally stayed away from housing developments, understandably, not to carry the burden of unfinished homes on its balance sheets. So, a developer needs customers with deep pockets who can buy even before the first phase of construction –laying the foundation- is completed, a group who has absolute trust in their investment choice. GYOs (Gayrimenkul Yatırım Ortaklığı, Real Estate Investment Funds) were established in the last decade to ease funding opportunities for new developments. In the end, even if you sold enough homes to finish the foundation, you would still need to find buyers to complete the rest of the construction. The GYOs are still seriously under-capitalized and are rather treated as a fund that runs unsold inventory of the developers, presumably, to gain some tax advantages. The developer cannot get financing for any homes on its ledgers unless until they are 80 percent finished –and, in practical terms of construction, there is no difference between an 80 percent finished home and completely finished home. Yet, the developers increasingly depended on their ties to the financial institutions to tap onto some lending privileges. Again, in the last decade, the Turkish banks have turned into huge real estate agencies, with hundreds of developments showcased on their web sites, as preferred 465 partnerships. Even then, the developer has to recognize that a tangible slice of its profits are already taken by the banks. To control more of the profits from home sales, the developers started to provide their own in-house financing, or, in the case of smaller development corporations, began looking for partnership opportunities with Islamic, the so-called, non-interest banking institutions. The latter are still out of mainstream financing structures, and, unlike what the name suggests, they charge the same interestrate as the competition, though, euphemistically that rate is called, “the share of profit.” Big 10 Private Real Estate Developers 2002‐2014 Developer Housing Units Average Price per m2 No of Projects Ağaoğlu 22047 4560 15 Avrupa Konutları Artaş 17150 4768 11 Yeşil İnşaat 14000 2000 1 Dumankaya 12428 2873 24 Teknik Yapı 10608 4604 6 Eston 10097 3400 5 Soyak 10029 3671 7 Sinpaş 8287 4179 14 İhlas İnşaat 7722 1750 2 Varyap 5424 8250 4 Total Big 10 117792 4006 89 Grand Total 219094 4729 249 Table 6.3: Big 10 Real Estate Developers of Istanbul Survived Real Estate Developers in Istanbul 1990‐2001 Developer Number of Units Average Price per m2 No of Projects Emlak Bankası 17497 2833 İhlas İnşaat 6175 1000 Sinpaş 2359 2625 Soyak 1800 2000 Osmanlı Bank Cooperative 1358 1500 Acar İnşaat 937 8000 Dumankaya 888 1167 Garanti Koza 768 3500 466 3 2 4 1 1 1 3 1 Ağaoğlu Eston Tepe İnşaat Tuzla Cooperative Metiş Grand Total 598 420 401 150 96 33447 3000 2500 10000 4000 20000 3762 1 1 1 1 1 21 Table 6.4: Survivors of 2001 Economic Crisis The sixth factor in my evaluation of private (or, actually, semi-private, given the weight of state development and land allocation in their business) real estate sector in Istanbul, is the geographical and price dispersal of active firms. In the last 25 years, six places in Istanbul appeared as areas of convergence of construction activities: on the Asian side, the area between E-5 and the TEM highway, wherein the May Day neighborhood lies to the West of the most important hub of development activity in Ataşehir; Tuzla around the area that connects the two highways, and the strip by the newly built Şile highway to the north of the TEM highway. On the European side, west of Büyükdere Avenue in Şişli, the 20 mile long but thin strip of area adjacent to the TEM from Kağıthane to Bahçeşehir, and the 5 mile by 5 mile area between Bahçeşehir and Beylikdüzü coast pivotal on the E-5 highway. In addition to these high-density housing developments, much more expensive, small-scale gated community building activity took place in Beykoz, on the Asian side, and in Sarıyer, between Zekeriyaköy and Kumköy on the Black Sea shore. Şişli and Kadıköy were the scenes where very expensive developments in extremely vast scales took place; with some earlier exceptions, they were all built as skyscrapers, or very high-rise towers in dense settlements. The competition was ruthless and only a handful of corporates signed revenue share contracts with the state for those 467 areas. But once they succeeded in signing contracts, they were in an excellent position to reap the benefits, since as location is the king in real estate, they could charge exorbitant prices that started from 4 thousand liras and climbed as high as 15 thousand liras per square meter. On the European side however, aside from the area bordering Bahçeşehir – immediately to the east of Alkent 2000 on the map 8.1- the scale of development was even much more inflated than the other examples, while prices were at least half of what others asked in more central areas. Esenyurt, in that sense, is especially notorious, since the largest projects in terms of number of homes built were announced there, though the municipality later withdrew its planning revisions, rendering a whole array of projects unprofitable and leading to at least a few bankruptcies there. The northernmost part of the European side is the place where the most expensive houses are built, and it is getting increasingly hard to find any suitable land to build upon there. Of course, the pricing of real estate there, in Zekeriyaköy for instance, is a bit perplexing, since the area is far away from both of the main highways, sequestered in the far end of the forests, and its location is the most distant one from the historic Istanbul. It is partly the deliberate choice of Istanbul’s bourgeoisie; they built Zekeriyaköy as an exclusive country estate during the 1990s, as the brainchild of one young developer Esat Edin. Edin’s development company went bust during the 2001 crisis, and he later died in a tragic camping accident with two of his kids. The residents of the gated community decided to put their own money to buy large tracts of surrounding land to preclude the possibility of some “unwanted” elements buying land there and starting unsightly 468 developments. Turkish bourgeoisie is extraordinarily inept as a class, clumsy in its political volition, and owes these to its exceptional lack of basic education in liberal arts, and therefore, had consistently attempted to geographically isolate itself from other classes in ostentatious ways. Yet, they failed again, terribly indeed. Not only the ascent Islamic-conservative bourgeoisie bought land in the neighboring areas in Kemerburgaz and built its own gated community there, the government they controlled started the construction of the third Bosphorus Bridge that traverses the pristine forests to the north of Zekeriyaköy. In a decade or so, the old establishment’s dreams of an idyllic suburban life would vanish into dust and traffic jams would become the least of the problems in Zekeriyaköy. Aside from Acarkent, in both Sarıyer and Beykoz –which were constructed by Acar family, in a protracted legal struggle with the ministry of Forestry due to the zoning regulations- few upper class residential complexes are known by the name of their developers. The most famous of these, Sedadkent in Sarıyer, for instance, were built in the late 1980s by Metiş –a rather successful construction company in infrastructure projects, one of the most well-known state-contractors back then- and the complex was one of the last works of Sedad Hakkı Eldem, hence the name, Sedad City.49 In our present day, that gated community still stands as one of the least recognized achievements of Turkish architecture, since no other piece of architecture has become so enmeshed with its creator in Istanbul before, perhaps, with the ultimate exception of Sinan. 49 Tanyeli, Sedad Hakkı Eldem. 469 Figure 6.14: Unit Heat Map of Corporate Housing Development Figure 6.15: Price Heat Map of Corporate Housing Development The eighth factor in understanding those real estate developers is their novel –and, supposedly innovative- approach to marketing, design, and advertisement –Yeşil’s residential complex is called Innovia, possibly, another sign of their newfound interest in 470 innovation. The names are basically representations of highly imaginative upper scale aspirations. One development in Acıbadem, built by Taşyapı, is called, Almond Hill – almond is the name of the place in Turkish. The supposed hills are everywhere, while none of the geographical hills in Istanbul could actually match up the height of those skyscrapers. In the last five years, with the government avowedly moving to the right, the English development names were replaced by Turkish ones, the pinnacle of which was, of course, Maslak 1453 by Ağaoğlu –an exaggerated reference to Istanbul’s taking over by Mehmed II in 1453. In essence, those developers are barely more than one-man companies of the previous yapsatçıs. Even though they build vast developments, they do not employ more than a few experienced engineers, one or two newly graduated architects, a small number of accountants, and the higher echelons of the organization is made up of financiers with good connections to either the banks or the government, or both. As a rule, they do not employ any blue-collar workers. None of the workers at the construction site are actually on the payroll of those development corporations. Basically, those developers are akin to a bubble boy, with a huge head, but a small body. The old timers tell the stories of the great infrastructure projects, the housing complexes built by the once almighty state-contractors. As they were directly controlled as contractors by the state, they had not employed sub-contractors. All the workers at a construction site were in the payroll of one company –one MESA engineer told me how they fired all of their employees after they tried to get unionized at the workplace. They were construction companies, their employment structure consisted of engineers, architects, and blue-collar workers. ENKA and STFA, the most important of those old 471 construction companies, which later created many offshoots, were first and foremost known according to their technical acumen. Showing off was out of the question, advertisement was only for the corporate benefit, not for the sales. The teams were made up of engineers, not of salespersons. The new generation of developers, although still called construction companies – müteahhit- colloquially, are only involved in construction in name. Construction activity is actually run by sub-contractors. No worker who toils for Ağaoğlu towers is paid straight out of Ağaoğlu’s payroll, and it is very unlikely they see any Ağaoğlu engineers, other than a handful control engineers –who are sub-contractors themselves as wellduring their tenure at the construction site. Instead of construction, these developers are primarily involved in building an image. The image of a successful, rich, trustworthy, quick, glittering, and innovative company is worth much more than the image of a reliable engineering and construction company; they have learned their lesson well from the likes of Donald Trump. There are no longer important meetings between engineers, since they are mostly replaced by keeping a tab on the sub-contractors’ progress at the construction sites. The crucial task at hand is solved in meetings between salespersons, marketers, public relations people, and advertisement agencies. And at the highest level of the corporate structure, the decisive meetings take place behind closed doors between the local and central state authorities and the bosses. I sat across the table with a public relations specialist and one of the bosses of the Asian side’s biggest developers. The boss seemed bored, as if citing from a ready-made speech previously by his public relations specialist that they value elements of design, 472 characteristics of architecture, and innovation. He boasts of green structures his company built. It was apparent that “green” was not a commanding principle, but a discursive element; architecture was an opening towards fetching higher price on the markets, their projects were not located on the most favorable lots, so, they opted for raising prices by borrowing heavily from American and European playbook of developers. I asked him if their insistence on design, on architectural values, and green development created any additional costs. He was straightforward in saying that out of the project’s total budget, ten percent was spent for such extra cost factors. I followed up on that answer, and asked further, if their prices reveal that extra cost, and he nodded, of course, he said, our target audience is an elite group. He also said that the company would no longer seek smallscale projects, or any housing complexes, but rather professionalize in skyscrapers – which are presumably much more profitable. I checked the price tags on condos, lofts, and apartments in their promotional flyers, and, without any doubt, the extra costs incurred for going green have been more than recouped on that price point. The names of their developments follow the same architectural logic, though it would be hasty to argue that a developer’s mindset found its expression in those names. Modernist designs, on the other hand, are much less favored by Istanbul developers; in that sense, they took a risk with their skyscrapers. The norm among the Istanbul’s highrises is keeping the balconies intact, not paying attention to the glass and steel architecture of 20th century modernism, but instead employing faux stonemasonry façades with some out-of-place classical references. The windows are large, balconies as well –one of the novelties is using all frame windows, with aluminum balustrades outside, called the French balcony. It is the most replicated spatial form from the most 473 extensive development projects to low-brow, peripheral yapsat apartment buildings. Stucco is favored; it is cheap, easily applied, and can be given any shape. The mixture, however, is strange, somewhere in between 1960s modernism and Stalinist architecture of the 1950s. The “new” middle class is the professed target audience for all these developers, the professionals, urban people –the term “urban” in Turkey does not carry the racially tinged condescending connotation it has in the USA. The developers are trying to understand this new middle class, the urban Istanbulites, They do not aim to attract the interests of the migrant, transient populations. The trials can be interesting, the development corporation started airing a new ad on TV, where a futuristic skyscraper concierge –from the not yet finished development- speaks in a robotic voice and heralds the coming of a new age for the professionals: they should not worry about their meetings, they can use the offices in the skyscraper as theirs –possibly, in return for a basic fee- they should not worry about their homes, they will be insured, cleaned, well-kept by the concierge, they even provide a free locksmith service. Nothing is futuristic in their offerings, and a lot is straight out of the 19th century. The more I see their advertisement spots on TV, more I worry about the condition of this self-proclaimed green developer. And, a robotic speaking secretary is no real help if you are living in a building with hundreds of other neighbors. In my view, contrary to the vocal support architectural design receives from the developers, their enthusiasm in bringing modern architecture is less than persuasive. As I discussed above, architectural discourse is extremely limited to the fringes of bourgeois tastes in Istanbul. The real estate developers have not actually contributed to a significant change in the situation. TOKI wholeheartedly embraced yapsatçı rectangular 474 architecture, with larger balconies perhaps, in a massive scale to hasten construction processes, to build more in less time –the end result resembles more and more the Khrushchev era pre-cast concrete blocks built during the 1960s. Only in the last few years, with a reinvigorated public interest in the evisceration of city centers TOKI admitted its guilt, though has not yet pointed out a direction to solve the problems prevalent in its stale, dull, monotonous, and monolithic architecture. Adding insult to injury was the decrease in the average size of apartments built, meaning that more are squeezed into less space, and studio and 1-bedroom apartments are increasingly becoming the norm in the peripheries of Istanbul. Average House Size in Istanbul 2002‐2013 20000000 140 120 15000000 100 80 10000000 60 40 5000000 20 0 0 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 Average House Size Construction directly related to houses Figure 6.16: Average Size of New Homes Built in Istanbul: 2002-201350 On the other hand, private real estate developers have only worked with a handful big-name architects, stifling competition and actual innovation in the organization of urban space. These architects –actually, architectural design offices- have turned into 50 TURKSTAT, “Yapı İzin İstatistikleri.” 475 brands themselves, and their names have become a part of the development costs. Han Tümertekin, Murat Tabanlıoğlu –whose father was an influential modernist architect, Hayati Tabanlıoğlu, who designed the Ataturk Cultural Center in Taksim- Emre Arolat, Adnan Kazmaoğlu, and a recently deceased Japanese architect Tatsuya Yamamoto –he later took Turkish citizenship. The Turkish architects are commissioned in the highest rate developments, and a typical project with a price tag of 2 thousand to 4 thousand liras per sq. meter is usually designed by in-house architecture departments of the development companies. However, once the prices reach the level of 10 thousand liras, the Turkish brand name architects find themselves in a tight spot, since their offerings for their services would now be in the same league –in terms of cost- with global giants of architectural design: Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM), Norman Foster, and Zaha Hadid have come to Turkey in the last decade for commissions for designing new developments, and, in Hadid’s case, for extensive re-development designs in Kartal. Yet, whatever those global brands have designed had to go through the drafting boards at the offices of well-established, but lesser known, second-tier architectural offices to implement and fulfill the Turkish and Istanbul building and zoning code’s requirements. Architecture is still a big question mark for both the buyers of new homes –or, investors- and developers themselves. It might be a matter of allodoxia as Bourdieu pointed out,51 that the middle class individuals developed a sense of spatial design as they did in other ritualistic fields of life –irrepressible desire for faster, sexier cars, a newfangled interest in internal decoration that is triggered by IKEA catalogues, designer fashion, haute couture, haute cuisine, proliferation of easily consumable art- which owed 51 Bourdieu, Distinction. 476 its genealogy to a stunted, a particularly accentuated interpretation of bourgeois tastes and identities. Meanwhile, the historical origin of the bourgeoisie in Turkey is crucial. From the outset, the ruling class functioned as an extension of the state apparatus, nestled safely inside the mechanisms of centralized, concentrated power, whereas the spatial characteristics and urban traces of the erstwhile bourgeoisie of the Ottoman Empire, a cosmopolitan, non-Muslim class were deliberately erased from the face of Istanbul. The bourgeoisie of the Ottoman Empire was a product of the ethnic division of labor prevalent in its own social order, and under those circumstances, urban aesthetics, and a certain sense of refinement was inherently an element of such ethnic distinctions. It is no wonder that as the other ethnicities were forcibly removed from the streets of Istanbul, spaces of the others, openings for the incipient middle class’ sense of entitlement and refinement have been obliterated as well. 6.10 The State-Space Conundrum So far, I discussed the demand side of the housing equilibrium, since scrutinizing the economic, social, cultural, and political behavior of the middle class in Istanbul is easier to ascertain. On the supply side, however much one spends time in the upper management meetings, is much more opaque, fleeting, and problematic. Moreover, the inclusion of the state into the equilibrium creates all sorts of analytical problems. Yet, the state has apparently made its interest in Istanbul’s built environment manifest: social housing for the poor at the peripheries of the city, but first, and foremost, boosterism for the rampant real estate speculation that permits the transfer of resources of the middle class in the form of urban rents to a newfangled private corporate development, and possibly their partners in the higher places of the state mechanism. 477 The burning question is why the once powerful industrial and financial capitalists have turned into real estate developers in a manner closely following the often ridiculed Lazi yapsatçıs. Zorlu, Akkök, İş Bank, Özdilek, Doğramacı, Tahincioğlu, Ülker, and Boydak, the complete roll-call of Turkish industrial and financial capitalism did not blink a moment when they entered the business of making profit out of urban land rent. The answer lies in the processes of capitalist accumulation and the particular internal contradictions of those processes that were borne out of the state’s central role. Why would an individual capitalist choose an obviously problematic method of accumulation –amidst all other options open to his will and his capabilities as an agent of exploitation, why not, commodity-capital, merchant-capital, money-capital? Why would one choose the longest, most precarious, riskiest, and opaque method that carries no real significance other than tapping into the hardly accumulated surplus value of the tangible relations of concrete production? Why would one sink his capital in land, in the passive, unmoving, inert, and withering form of urban rent? Besides the apparent answer in the short-run irrationality of decision-makers, I believe the answer needs an explanation in the intricate ways of how the state made the capitalist an agent of production of space. I foregrounded that explanation through Istanbul’s different lives and by positing the state-space nexus as a crucial determinant of those eventful histories. Henri Lefebvre gave an answer that resonated forcefully in the 1970s Marxist ascendance in critical thought. He bluntly explicated the proponents of what he termed as the state mode of production, and how the state-led growth and neoliberalism went hand in hand in concentrating the concentration of capital, people, value, and power in the concrete production of space in the city. Inasmuch as the state mode of production 478 dominated capitalist relations of power, the city supplanted the factory as the site of production of surplus value. And, although neoliberalism has turned into a dogma, an alter-ego, a pervasive enemy, and cited as the ultimate culprit of all that went wrong the post-Reagan era, it is still quite far from a true elucidation as an object of analysis, let alone its intricate and intertwining relations with the state.52 In Turkey, political power has always had its great builders on its side. It is not that easy to turn an industrial, or financial, capitalist into an obedient, ardent, and dedicated supporter of power –in one way or another, a capitalist’s individual interests as a class would always trump his personal political persuasion. The bourgeoisie did not emerge in a day, and it is extraordinarily talented, subtle, and calculating when it comes to its own survival. Not every reigning ruler can build his own industrial and financial capitalists; the modern world-system is extremely complicated to permit that to happen in a day. Yet, in theory and practice, a developer is no different than a yapsatçı. Yapsatçı and the great builder are one and the same –they differ in scale, but nothing else. Each reigning political and military power in Turkey found its own builder, the 1980 junta and Özal’s relations with Selim Edes and the famed Kurdish state contractors, the Ceylan family; Demirel and Bayındır Holding, and STFA; Erbakan and Ihlas Holdings and Başakşehir; and, finally, in the last decade, Erdogan, and new, powerful, and numerous developers of Istanbul. Erdogan and JDP’s greatest success was in his ability to cloak the harm his For some recent analysis of neoliberalism, see Lefebvre, Brenner, and Elden, State, Space, World. Brenner and others, employ one key term, the “rascal concept,” as coined by Neil Smith in his early criticism of postmodernism in the 1980s. Brenner and others claim that neoliberalism is one such “rascal concept.” Also, see, N. Brenner, J. Peck, and N. Theodore, “Variegated Neoliberalization: Geographies, Modalities, Pathways,” Global Networks: A Journal of Transnational Affairs 10, no. 2 (2010): 184. 52 479 policies did on the small proprietors, on the erstwhile gecekondu owners, on the beneficiaries of the previous great redistribution of urban resources, on his staunch supporters. 53 Make no mistake, this is the new middle class. It is not the fanfare surrounding the white-collars of the FIRE industry in Istanbul that fuels the seemingly undying fervor of real estate speculation, nor the old guard of the republic, the militarybureaucratic elites and their cronies in the established industrial-financial capital, but a seriously underestimated class, who were called by right-wing politicians the silent majority –in an apparent allusion to American republican politics. They are no longer silent, they are no longer the docile gecekondu dwellers, but they have earned their place in this newly minted consumer society, and in this system, the foundations of their economic power is in the built environment and their newfound role as urban rentiers. Even the most upscale of the developments are frequented by lots of people who plan on selling a few apartments here and there –i.e. now central, once peripheral gecekondu zones of Istanbul- and moving into better, upwardly mobile, glitzy, safe, and secure developments. Erdoğan’s government has achieved this twofold feat: while they helped capital concentrate more and more in every nook and cranny of productive activities –not, the least of all, is of course construction and development- the redistribution of urban The least researched, but most obvious and readily observable consequence of his policies is groceries. The grocery retailers died off as an urban phenomenon in the last decade, the once ubiquituous small vendors, bakkal, was replaced by the BIM discount stores. Droves of BIM discount stores were opened in middle class and lower class districts alike. BIM, the discount store modeled after ALDI, commands a revenue of TL 12 billion at 4000 locations employs 24 thousand people and works with an impressive net profit margin of 3.5 percent. In fifteen years, the corporation became the biggest retailer in Turkey from scratch. See, “BIM 2013 Faaliyet Raporu,” BIM Magazacilik, March 27, 2014, http://www.bim.com.tr/Uploads/dosyalar/BIMAS%20Faaliyet%20Raporu%202013.pdf. A101, on the other hand, is an enterprise supported by Fethullah Gulen’s religious community and since its founding in 2008 is rapidly catching up with the market leader. 53 480 resources –that is, land- that took place previously, and the relatively egalitarian ownership of property patterns have fed unto a shared illusion of getting richer. This is extremely similar to what happened in the core economies of the world-system before the 2008-9 crisis. Homes turned into the life savings of the wide swaths of middle class, making it possible for the homeowners to continue spending on the basis of presumed increase of real estate prices. The cruel fact was that homes had turned into fictitious capital, unfettered from its geographical limitations and circulating in the global financial markets as an element of increasingly speculation-laden, grossly jargonized, and technically specialized circuits of capital. And once the party was over and the masks that kept the illusion awake dropped, it was not the finance-capital who bore the brunt of the debacle, but the enthusiastic middle class, millions of whom lost their homes and life savings to foreclosures. The illusion, the ability to invoke desire, the unhindered passion for owning property is a talent in itself. As the Erdogan government slowly but surely undermined the material bases of the urban small property owners and small producers, a plethora of actors connected to the corporate real estate development world turned the process into an enjoyable spectacle. On any given Sunday, if you hop onto your car and have some time to kill, you can have a great tour of urban developments on Istanbul’s main arteries. The Sunday supplements of the newspapers would be awash with full-page ads. The sales offices would be full with people and if you hit there earlier, you could have your brunch for free while being a willing participant of the walk-in tours of the mock apartments. Mock-ups have nothing to do with the finished apartment you will buy, of course, it is just a new level in bolstering the illusion. I have been to lavishly decorated apartments 481 where the developers hired five famous designers to produce five different mock-ups, each in different, and completely unrelated, styles. Though if you probe enough, you would be informed that these upscale apartments are sold as barebones –no kitchen or bathroom cabinets, no finished paint job, not even the floors are installed. Yet, for an extra fee, the developer was proud to tell, they can decorate your apartment in any of the styles you would like. In this immense housing rush, reminiscing other periods of irascible spikes in demand and prices, not only was the middle class mesmerized by this brilliant illusion, but also the capitalists, real estate developers, financiers, bankers, and industrialists alike, have harbored an irreducible optimism for the sustained growth of the bubble. That’s why any conversation with those capitalists irredeemably smacks of the 1980s brilliant Oliver Stone film, “Wall Street” and its insubordinately rogue evil genius, Gordon Gekko’s legendary motto: “Greed is good.” The reference to Gordon Gekko is not merely about the whole situation. Turkish developers themselves uncannily started to look like that paramount figure selling inflated dreams. I noticed that after a while in my meetings with the real estate business’ most influential figures, it was a matter of style, a style they built upon the imagination of homes they sell, that dwelt upon the cultural iconism they tried to engage in. The sharp looking, handsome, talker, and confident aura they tried to pompously present is met in personal appearance with the pricy brand-name suits, expensive watches, offices with exquisite views, and furnishings that followed the most fashionable trends that can be observed on the pages of global magazines. During a conversation with one of those sharp-looking developers, a princeling in 482 his father’s construction empire, lit up his cigarette –the indoor ban was already in effect, but, apparently, it would not show its effect on the bosses. He offered his own pack; I lit one from my pack of cigarettes. Things turned into a slightly masculine tone, where the women from the public relations departments –one, from the company, the other one from a news magazine, which is actually only a notch above a public relations departments in Turkey- stood silent, while us, two smokers, entered an interesting conversation. Their corporation was growing at a rapid pace, they signed onto the biggest and most valuable development deal with TOKI, their architectural design is both ambitious and unprecedented in Istanbul, and the initial sales were apparently a success. I asked him, what’s next –that’s a boring question, I admit, but, in Istanbul, that question means land, and they were already building on the last remaining vacant lot on the Asian side. He took a puff from his cigarette, things started to eerily resonate with the film, I thought, and showed me the neighborhood across his office. There, he said, our next development will be there. I looked at that direction. And felt myself in the shoes of the character played by Charlie Sheen, Gekko, was trying to put an end to his father’s company and lay off hundreds of workers. Here, this guy in the fashionable black suit was telling me that they would raze the May Day neighborhood and construct their lifeless blobs of skyscrapers. I objected and asked him whether he knew what he was pointing at. He said, of course, I know. Then, how you will persuade thousands of people living there to sell their lands to you, I added. His response summed up everything I explained in this chapter: It’s not us, it is TOKI who will enter there. They will follow TOKI, and employ the might and power of the state as they re-developed one of the most important and one of a handful of remaining gecekondu districts in Istanbul. He took 483 another puff and killed his cigarette. 6.11 The Instances: Representations of Space and the Manufacturing of Desire in Built Environment It is apparent that the middle and upper classes hoard homes as their financial assets. The prices skyrocketed, developers got bigger and bigger, while the state’s role as the arbiter of land acquisition was solidified. Construction activity in Istanbul in the last decade alone is enough to build mid-sized metropolitan cities in the US from scratch. According to the US census bureau, at the peak of the American housing boom, construction permits for 2.15 million housing units were issued in 2005. In the last three years alone, municipalities in Turkey issued construction permits for 2.24 million housing units. The same figure for 2012 is, in the New York metropolitan census area, 27 thousand, in the Houston metropolitan area, 43 thousand, in the Washington DC metro area, 22 thousand, and in Los Angeles, it is 17 thousand housing units. In Istanbul, construction permits were issued for 131 thousand units in 2010, 147 thousand units in 2011, 159 thousand units in 2012, and 153 thousand units in 2013.54 In the face of such rampant real estate speculation, a new form of semi-financial bubble arose, quite similar to the gold rush of the 19th century, an incipient housing rush emerged in Turkey. I explained the main proponents of the expansion of building activities in Istanbul and geographical delineations of this new form of political economic redistribution efforts instigated by the state. I would like to end this chapter with two inherently related instances, the first one is related to how an individual from the middle M. C. D. US Census Bureau, “US Census Bureau Building Permits Survey,” accessed April 5, 2014, http://www.census.gov/construction/bps/uspermits.html. 54 484 class imagines life in those new housing complexes, and, the second one concerns the way corporations analyze that very person. The first instance begins during one of my peregrinations at Topkapı, I got off the metrobus, and slowly walked toward the industrial complexes to the west of the E-5 highway. I arranged an appointment with a guy who showed some interest in buying a home at the complex I mentioned in the beginning of this chapter. The Topkapı industrial blocks were constructed in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s as attempts in moving light industries from out of the city center to the peripheries –and, in two decades, that periphery has become the new center, at least, part of that center. In these reinforced concrete blocks –which followed too closely the architectural fashion of brutalism in the 1970s- are a plethora of small-scale industrial manufacturers, and increasingly, industrial distributors and wholesalers located. Machinery parts, plastic wholesalers, printers, electrics and electronics wholesalers and few manufacturers, car mechanics, auto parts stores, hundreds of petty-commodity producers are alive and kicking in these ghastly, grim, and grandiose concrete blocks. On the second floor, among the printers’ section of the industrial complex, I entered a shop, where a stocky guy in his 30s with pitch black hair sat down behind a stately desk. The place does not look like a shop floor at all. I asked him the purpose of the store, the sign in the front says matbaa (printer), but, there is nothing like a printing machine around. He pointed the curtain and said, our printing machine is there, we do not print in large sizes, so we do not need much space. Then, across his desk, he showed a cabinet full of small stuff, coasters, napkins, serviettes, menus, small shampoo bottles. He said “We work for the hotels.” He gave me one coaster, you can keep it he said. I asked 485 him, in the full knowledge that there would be no real answer, how much he made. Enough, he responded, we do not need anybody. He was neither rich, nor poor, nor trying to make ends meet, nor particularly well-off, a typical member of the small-scale producing class, who can afford to pay one million liras for a villa in a gated community. He planned to sell his apartment in Bakırköy –inherited from his parents- to finance at least a part of the new house. The rest will be paid in cash. I asked him the reason for his move from the European side to the Asian side. Apparently, it was not his decision. He was a Bakırköy boy, born and raised there. Though he was on the verge of marriage, and his wife showed great interest in those glitzy housing developments, gated communities, and villas with beautiful gardens. It is not in his interest, given the fact that he works six days a week. Yet, what his soon-to-bewife decides was important for him. He wanted to be on good terms with his wife, wanted his wife to feel safe and secure. The unpaid domestic labor of women is paid in the form of housing, in men’s minds. This was not the first time I heard those lines that he should not worry about his wife and kids when he went away for business. Young and old, bosses and newly minted white-collars, comfortably bourgeois or on the first steps of the upward mobility ladder, all men referred to their wives as the decision makers. The new gated communities, the image of safety sold as a part of that package, has found an interested party, even though the streets of Istanbul are not particularly dangerous, let alone subject to such inflated logic of crime and justice.55 The middle class is still A burgeoning literature on the rise of gated communities in Istanbul is available: A. B Candan, “Emerging Spaces of Neoliberalism: A Gated Town and a Public Housing Project in İstanbul,” New Perspectives on Turkey 39 (2008): 5–46; F. Yirmibeşoğlu and N. A Yönet, “Gated Communities in Istanbul: Security and Fear of Crime,” n.d.; S. Genis, “Producing Elite Localities: The Rise of Gated Communities in Istanbul,” Urban Studies 44, no. 4 (2007): 771–98; L. Berköz, “İstanbul’da Korunaklı TekAile Konutları: Konut Kalitesi ve Kullanıcı Memnuniyetinin Belirlenmesi,” İTÜ Dergisi A 7, no. 1 (2009). The discourse of crime and safety as an element of gated communities have been widely researched and 55 486 searching for ways to define its own identity, trying to claim its own spatial being, and seeking a part of everyday life where it can rightfully appropriate its making. The developers extensively play on this idea of the safety and security of women, on the pristine imagination of a perfect family –built, sustained, and protected by men, where women play the role of homemaker. The second instance comes from an interview I conducted with a bank manager. I had the chance to visit him at his office. He was a senior level branch manager at a private bank’s busy branch on the E-5 highway, around Bostancı. His branch is located at what is an essentially a strip mall of banks, all very busy, frequented by not only the middle class, relatively affluent residents of nearby Bostancı, but also, by the owners and workers at the nearby industrial complex for small-scale production. The mechanics, spare parts distributors, electronic wholesalers, some textile manufactories, and textile and garment wholesalers of Istanbul’s Asian side are concentrated around that strip mall. He is forty years old, married with a child. His wife is also a white-collar employee, working at one of the wholesalers. It looked like he had been recently promoted to his position –a tier just below the branch executive. He was given a cubicle of his own on the second floor of the bank, away from the prying eyes of the bank customers. They live in Kartal. They bought their home a few years ago from a local yapsatçı. He told me he really liked where they live, near the parks at the Kartal shoreline. The house has three bedrooms and a living room, is newly built, and resistant to earthquakes. The apartment was bought with the money he inherited from his grandfather’s land in Büyük Çekmece, Istanbul. written on, see, Setha M. Low, Behind the Gates (Routledge, 2003). 487 He grew up in Büyük Çekmece. His family is one of the émigrés from the Dersim province who moved to Mersin and later immigrated to Istanbul. Normally, Dersim people, who are both Kurdish and Alevi, a rare breed among both Alevis and the Kurds, would not feel comfortable with strangers, and more often than not, they keep their origins a secret, rather giving the name of the place they immigrated from Dersim as their hometown. Once he mentioned his interest in learning how to play bağlama –a historical Anatolian folk music instrument- I asked plainly if he was an Alevi. Carrying the physical signs of a left-wing academic –long-hair, an earring, an Istanbulite accent- he trusted me answering in the positive. And, given the fact that he was educated not at a university in Istanbul, but in Konya –the epicenter of Turkish Islamism- tells me that he is adept in finding his way among a sea of Turkish, Sunni people. He told me how in Büyük Çekmece his childhood passed freely roaming the streets, surrounded by orchards, tomato fields, and the sea. He said that he grew up in his grandfather’s apartment building in Büyük Çekmece. During the interview, I thought he was talking about a gecekondu, later, when I checked the recording I realized that was not the case. Apartment buildings in Büyük Çekmece were not more than a handful in the 1970s. It was possibly a multi-story gecekondu, though his white-collar, bank manager status did not permit him to tell it so. The rest of our interview completed the perfect middle class picture he had drawn. They just recently bought a summer house in Bodrum, on the Aegean Shore, using some credit, and some of their savings. Now, their home in Kartal was no longer enough for the couple. He told me that “I am adamant that I will learn to play bağlama, I have to.” Then, he said, “I want a place for myself, my own hi-fi music system.” A manpad, within a 488 family home. That’s why they started looking for a detached, or, a semi-detached home, a villa with a garden of its own closer to the TEM highway. Basically, what they were looking for was a suburban home. Why, I asked. He gave me the canned response –which I had received so many times before: “We’d like to feel the earth, to step on our own soil.” The canned response included a self-referential future they planned for their child, where he would be safe and under the purview of his mother at all times at that garden. Where would you get the financing for a new place? Will you sell your current apartment? He told me that a land his father owns in Büyük Çekmece, 18 decares, will be sold soon. It will be a small fortune, I thought, and he knew it will be. He said he is not interested in selling any of his real estate, since the future was in property. What about the credit rates, I retorted, since you know banking? At the time of my interview, credit rates were around 20 to 25 per cent per annum. He frankly answered: “the interest rates today do not make sense, perhaps, a maximum duration of 5 years is meaningful, but, beyond that, it does not make sense due to the exorbitant interest rates.” We shake hands, I told him best of luck with the new investment, and left the bank. I was greeted by a thunderstorm of the worst kind outside. While trying to find a cab ride, I thought how strange it was in this city that the bankers do not buy the credit they sell, the advertisers do not buy the homes they advertise, the construction workers do not live in the apartments they build, and the architects do not dwell in the places they design. The third instance takes place at an appliance store, in Bostancı’s center. The store is owned by a husband and wife, both in their late 30s, early 40s. The location of the store is pretty good. At the intersection of the Minibus Avenue and the street to the shoreline, this place used to be one of the prime affluent neighborhoods in Asian Istanbul. Yet, in 489 our conversation, the husband told me that their sales were barely enough for the rent – which was 6000 liras in 2010. He said that he tried to earn extra by playing the stock market and buying and selling cars. Both of them grew up in the area where their store is, in the erstwhile middle class suburb between Bostancı and Suadiye –a thin strip of high rise apartments built during the real estate boom of the late 1970s and again, during the second boom of the early 1990s. The woman went to a private university. The man talks about it as if it was indicative of the class difference between the two. He said “Her father paid 10 thousand dollars a year for her education at a private college.” He adds in a puzzled tone, “It’s not really much money today...Though, still.” He paused. Later on he added that he graduated from a state university, got his degree as an accountant. “I” he hesitantly says, “got my diploma framed, hung it on my store’s wall...But I sell fridges. I don’t know what good that diploma is, hanging on the wall.” A couple of years ago they moved from Bostancı to the west, Ataşehir –where the new middle class high rise apartment buildings stand across the May Day neighborhood. I am curious about how they chose their home. Their answer was much more detailed and cognizant than I would have imagined: Teknik Yapı constructed our building, under TOKI’s control, and, yes, it is something like a high rise, kind of, but, the construction is trustworthy. They are all evident, everything’s relatively out there, enabling us within our social conditions. We are actually in a search [of a new home]. We are looking for a place down to the earth, low rise, less crowded. But, you know, unfortunately, we can’t find that place in these metropolises in any case. I question their reason for moving from Bostancı –an extremely central location, close to both their workplace and other downtown amenities in Asian Istanbul- to 490 Ataşehir, a suburban area with few facilities. They begin speaking together. In a few seconds, the woman takes the lead; at the beginning of the interview, the husband responded to the questions. She said that there are cars all around, and worse than that, “cars, kidnappings, everything” creeps around. They have an eight year old daughter. They say that the gated community’s pools is perfect for their child. She is not vulnerable in a suburban environment: she goes to a private school, the school bus takes her to the school every weekday and the mother does not work during the weekends. Thanks to the abundance of sun and poolside enjoyments they say that they decided to sell their summer house in Silivri –a northwestern sub-province in Istanbul. I ask them the differences between Ataşehir and Bostancı. As an appliance salesman he makes it quite simple for me: Here, [in Bostancı], you can’t find someone who is young, newly married, or with kids. In our gated community [in Ataşehir] 70% of automobiles are rental cars, all of them are white-collar, all, all own something some place, most would be paying for their mortgages. What about Ataşehir, I keep on with my questions. They are apparently developing some kind of rapport with me; the earlier distrust is dispelled. Why not Maltepe, Küçükyalı, Üsküdar, or Ümraniye? They say they moved into Ataşehir to be away from the religious types. They are very averse to religious people, and use the word sıkmabaş to describe religious women. Their downstairs neighbor is such a sıkmabaş, they both nod, that she takes everybody’s pictures in their gated community, follows everyone, and her husband has an habit of knowing everything about everyone. After a point –actually, at the exact moment when they claimed these neighbors of theirs followed everyone- I started to see exquisite conspiracy theory believers. This conspiracy is of course extending to appliance retailing. While the couple I am talking to are selling 491 an appliance a day, the Islamists, they argue, sell dozens a day –all due to their conspiratorial solidarity. I played the role of devil’s advocate, and asked, what if they move into Ataşehir one day? Will you move out of your gated community? He bluntly stated his answer: Look, they are not coming this side, the thing is, that they do not come. As husband and wife we are really into this, you know where they move into, you know the Ikea, you know the Kiptaş sign over there. They go there. They don’t come to Ataşehir. At the end of the interview, the man tells me that he was suspicious in the beginning, that he wondered whether I was “one of Tayyip’s men.” I told him, no. I try not to judge. I just try to understand people. The fourth scene took place in several forms, not once, but replicated at different times and places. The developers are in a constant search to recognize their target audience. They routinely bring together advertisement agencies, creatives, social scientists, retired professors, newspaper columnists, marketers, public relations gurus, etc. In one such meeting, sides are sitting across the aisles. On two different sides of the table, we come face to face. The developer was planning to enter another metropolitan city, Ankara, and tried to dig deeper in his strategy to locate the development. A retired professor, who writes weekly columns about how to cook better breads in Hurriyet daily, argued that their development can only be used as second homes for the rich, since the project site is far away from the city center. What he said was purely inane, he still thought that Ankara was the city he grew up half century ago, but the developers bought his argument. He is the authority. The developer had another problem, a more profound problem than positioning 492 his sales strategy. In one of their projects, half of the apartments remained unsold after a series of ads run on the TVs and newspapers. They hired a well-known architect, but what he designed, and the urge to build more on less land, made the end-result look like an apartment building of two duplexes. The lower duplexes were sold all right, they had their own gardens, even swimming pools. The duplexes on the third and fourth floors however, remained stuck in their roster. They decided not to work with that architect any longer. The advertisement agency was furious against not only the architect, but the location itself –the development was in the middle of an industrial zone. Somehow, the issue came to the price –normally, price would be only an afterthought, and not really the domain of the advertisers, or marketing consultants. I asked the management the range of income of their target customers. The answer is in the vicinity of 8 thousand liras. The apartments were priced between 700 thousand and 1.2 million liras, and they expected their prospective buyers to pay half of their income as bank credit. And their estimated household income of 96 thousand liras per annum meant that in 2009, not even the richest 10 percent could be fully in their league. They intended only the top 2 percent, perhaps, I said. The young management executive, in his dark blue suit and not matching red tie, responded, 8,000 Turkish Liras is not our estimate for household income, it is the per person income. Well, I retorted, then, we are talking about not more than one percent of Istanbul. They quickly got angry with me; management never likes to be questioned in front of outsiders, especially by academics in front of their bosses. Later, I tried to make sense of what happened there. They had been in the business for a long time; they would not be making up numbers. The problem is in what we look 493 at. I, as a sociologist, looked at the figures of income, they, on the other hand, actually refer to wealth. Compared to my time in the aforementioned gated community, I can say that none of the people I’ve met there were of the 1 percent. But, there was no question that they made 8 thousand liras per month –not even mentioning 16 thousand liras. They basically sold what they had in the central locations to move into these new suburbs, or else they used the rents they receive from one or two apartments they inherited from their parents to finance their payments. None would have afforded those prices on the basis of their wages. The developers were right in pointing out their organic knowledge of the issue, they know how capital circulates, but rightly, they do not care about the exact form that money takes. As long as that money finds its way in the coffers of the corporation there would be no problem. All sorts of information is in plentiful supply, income distribution, prices based on location, prices of competitors, bank credits, consumption habits, several market researches, tailor-made surveys for particular projects, etc. Yet, all of them are myopically related to a single goal: sales. That is the reason for their great ignorance once the topic is architecture, they really do not know anything about consumer choices. They know that women like large kitchens and at least balconies as large as that; they have learned from the yapsatçıs that French balconies are beautiful, they practically figured out that the more sunlight there is, the better the apartment. But, they have not paid any attention to the design in general. They harness the marketing language in every discussion they enter as the ultimate authority: A plus –the name of the uppermost socioeconomic status category- would like that, no, this would sell in A and B, but A plus would hate that, we can catch C, but A and B would certainly detest that image –unless 494 you live in their world, it is pure gibberish. But, still, even in their world, what they made of the people and their own business is pure gibberish as well. Capitalists are powerful though. They do not only own the system –they are the ones who built the system in the first place- they know how to affect things, how to produce concrete urban spaces, how to manufacture desire, how to employ millions of people’s savings as an extension of their fictitious capital accumulation, how to make workers construct for a pittance of the profits they make. However, they will never be able to ascertain the most basic knowledge regarding the system: their consciousness will always be an economic consciousness, and in this economic blindness, they will never be able to find what they seek-possibly, that’s what made accumulation for accumulation’s sake the determining element of the capitalist mode of production. Lukacs wrote long ago that the bourgeoisie was victim of a very simple dialectical relation, as long as bourgeois consciousness remained confined to economy, they would never be able to overcome the cyclical destruction wrought by the internal logic of capitalism.56 Here, a further question is worth pondering: would not capitalists seek the help of another class, or class fraction, to expand their sterile, one-dimensional consciousness? Middle class enters the equation at that exact moment. Neither capitalist, nor proletariat, the middle class lacks the economic basis, but in return, is endowed with a consciousness. The middle class, following Lukacs, can be said to stand as the only class that lacked corporeal substance, while its existence is incumbent on mere consciousness. That’s how they can partake in the production of space. Both symbolically and concretely, urban space is crafted for the middle class. Istanbul is no exception to that. 56 Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics (MIT Press, 1971), 64. 495 Engels was right when he wrote that bourgeoisie’s fix for the housing question of the working class was moving them from one place to another in the city. Bourgeoisie made the working class an aliquot part of the urban problem as the masses struggled to survive in the slums, in the gecekondus, in cholera ridden nightmares, in rented apartments waiting to be ripened as new re-developments or as part of urban gentrification, and at countless tales of urban exclusion. Yet, today, it is not only the working class that has to move from place to place. As the owner of the printing shop I referred above thought, like many other people tried to decide to which development is better for investing their money, or if their homes are worth enough to buy an apartment at a new high-rise complex, if the rent they collected next year would be sufficient enough to buy another home for his marriage age children, the middle class is constantly in motion in Istanbul. Property owning classes in Istanbul play an interesting game where everyone else watches how they build higher and higher towers, how they sell more and more apartments, how the prices still go up and above. This is the beginning of the end of Istanbul’s latest reincarnation, a city of concrete where the middle class consumes space as easily as it is produced. The middle class in Istanbul is running after a fata morgana, and once the music and visions stop, the fall will not be as enjoyable as the preceding run, though it is still uncertain when that fall will take place. One thing is certain though, the concrete space produced during the belle époque is here to stay for the coming decades. This is the Istanbul of future and it only gets worse from here. 496 7 Conclusion This dissertation began as I sought a simple answer to a simple question: why are homes built in such huge numbers in Istanbul? Besides the obvious answer of providing shelter, population increase, or mere greed for more real estate speculation, things got gradually complicated. First, I tried to pin down Istanbul at some constant timeframe. Istanbul did not fit that frame. Without 19th century Ottoman modernization experiences, the rubble and nostalgia of the Kemalist Istanbul did not make sense, without the development boom in the 1970s, the whole blame fell on Özal’s shoulders –not to mean that he was blameless- in the 2001 burst of the real estate market. I think Marx, Lefebvre, and Harvey taught me well that no social phenomenon exists in a vacuum, and if one is interested in unraveling the underlying dialectics within social relations, then the task ahead would be to pose the question as a totality –not, as a totalization, not as a means of sacrificing the details for the sake of safe, easy to understand inferences. But, totality meant a highly dynamic, richly laced set of multifarious social relations rooted in time and space. The urban question in Istanbul is still a perplexing question. The state is of paramount importance. I have discussed extensively on how the relations between the state and Istanbul have mutually shaped each other. It is not a one-way relationship. That’s also why state-space is an important term; it could have been space-state we are discussing here, although, the connotations would be much more different, I suppose. The perplexing nature of the question begins to make itself felt once the survival of the state power becomes apparent. I told myself several times during both my research and writing processes that this city was made to be a center of power, it needs other cities, other 497 countries, other peoples to survive. And, we have seen what happens once that lifeblood withers as the events of the 19th century incorporation of the Ottoman Empire to the world-system and its aftermath showed. The crucial observation of this dissertation was the role played by the migrant workers in Istanbul –if the first fifteen centuries of the city’s history was not hectic enough, the last seventy five years had without any doubt added onto the frenzied pace of change in Istanbul. This was a tragic reversal of Istanbul’s fortunes: once, the city tapped onto the toils of the millions of peasants, invisibly controlled their lives, expropriated their surplus product, and paid in terms of state coercion and limited, capricious protection. Now, in the last seventy five years, the peasants left their land, came to the city, and ironically, claimed their share of the enormous wealth this city concentrated within its borders. Of course the wealth was no longer there, so they settled with a much less valuable –at the time- but more robust form of wealth: land. The city was the setting of a grand social experiment. How would that great land grab mold a new city, I thought I would have asked if I was a social scientist in the 1940s. Amazement, a mesmerized state of stupor, and a visceral reaction to the perceived incivility of the migrants permeated in the mindset of Turkish state’s decision makers, power elite, and intellectuals. As late as in the 1990s, I vividly remember the still favorable fix for the population increase in Istanbul: issuance of visas for residence and work in the city. Now, it means something else, perhaps they never intended to issue visas, regiment migrant populations, but the power elite announced their lack of a grasp of capitalist mode of production. If the labor is not free, at least conceptually, then capital would not be free either. 498 Yet, the permanence of state power, its incessant incursions in Istanbul’s urban development, its willful coalition making capabilities with rent-seeking capitalists, its peculiar modes of production of concrete space, told me that the shots are called by the state. The contemporary state is not the same state as the Kemalist state, it is not the same as the Ottoman state machinations, that’s for sure, though, a certain kernel of governmentality kept on succeeding replicating itself, transferred from generation to generation, as it entered and left voids –historical ruptures- its basic tenets stayed the same. This is a tributary state, organized around a charismatic authority, preferably, but, in the lack of such charisma, professing the true faith –Sunni Islam, and/or Turkishnesswould suffice, and even in the absence authority, or at the times of interregnum, the system is continuously reproduced by a military-bureaucratic class. The militarybureaucratic class has fortunately never reached the rationalistic, scientific excellence witnessed in other comparable situations in post-Meiji Japan, Bismarckian Prussia, or even Stalinist Soviet Union, and in times of relative prosperity, that class failed in unifying its particularistic interests. Even at the exact moment of the first gecekondus’ building in Zeytinburnu, the first rush to public land, one segment of the bureaucratic institution turned a blind eye to the developments, while another segment vowed to get rid of those settlements at its first convenience. The nature of Istanbul’s making of its own space was fundamentally political, though, not exactly in the way I interpret. It was not a war of positions between the state and the civil society. As the migrant working classes quietly encroached on public resources, they used all connections, networks, openings, possibilities, and money they could gather to protect their grounds. Inönü or Menderes, Demirel or Ecevit, the 499 names, party programs, promises, even the most determining elements of Turkish history –ethnicity and faith- did not play prominent roles at that point. The acquired land had to be protected at all costs. Istanbul’s political prominence was in its ability to provide land to the dispossessed masses. In seven decades, the city has become the beacon of hope that spelled the words, give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, send me your homeless. They were not sent, they came by their own volition. As the consolidation of urban land in Istanbul was completed, yet another tumultuous phase of production of concrete space began. The gecekondus rapidly gave way to the concrete apartment blocks, first in the city center, then in the peripheries, until every square meter of the city turned into a seamless sea of reinforced concrete. The gecekondus were no longer the spaces of the subaltern, carefully hidden, faceless, bodiless, voiceless, and disenfranchised masses. They became the active participants of public discourse, enthusiastic followers of political processes, producers of cultural commodities. Yet, they were still not within the bounds of Turkish social science, and they could not become proper Istanbulites themselves. The gecekondus and their owners turned into a significant part of the middle class. The redistributive project paid handsomely; they did not only own their own homes, but they became instigators of further real estate development. They found their long deserved role as the determinants of political economy of urban rentier classes. In three cycles of real estate boom, 1965-1980, 1986-1999, and the most recent one that began in 2003, the built environment was once again transformed, the city has greatly expanded, and housing became both a commodity and a sound opportunity of investment –at least, in commonsensical terms. The rich got richer in the last decade of the latest real estate 500 boom, while the lowest 80 percent’s incomes rose perceptibly, but not significantly. The age old question about the limits of Istanbul’s growth is once again in wide circulation. It had been speculated in the 19th century, written about extensively in the 1940s, turned into a lurking specter in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, authoritatively declared in the 90s that the end has arrived for Istanbul. Yet, none came to actual realization. The city still grows, in a suffocating way, yes, but nevertheless, continues its expansion. And the middle class enthusiastically partakes in this seemingly endless cornucopia of urban development. There is no question that the American Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing, which began in 2008 and continued with the historic low interest rates in the last six years, helped bring an unprecedented amount of capital to Turkey. The real estate sector in Istanbul sucked the excess capital as a suckling infant and devoured money as it built more and more, sank capital into taller and taller buildings. Ali Babacan, the deputy Prime Minister with an economy portfolio, spoke at a meeting that the luxury consumption and luxurious spending in real estate are not good signs for the future of the country when low levels of industrial investment are present. He also pointed out the enormous trade deficits Turkish economy suffered through in the last couple of years. He not only rang alarm bells for receptive ears, Babacan also said that monopolistic activities in the real estate markets are causing disruptions in the Turkish economy. His public speech is the first time a high level JDP figure openly criticized the blatant real estate speculation currently going on in Turkey.1 1 AA, “Babacan: Üretmeden, Krediyle Lüks Alışveriş Türkiye’yi Çıkmaza Sokabilir,” Hürriyet, accessed July 23, 2014, http://www.hurriyet.com.tr/ekonomi/26871256.asp. 501 The question, of course, is whether this is a sustainable method of growth. Can capitalist accumulation in Turkey continue with rates of building new homes apace with the American construction industry?2 The tremendous amounts of capital sunk into urban land has never been a reproducible method of capital accumulation wherever the capitalist mode of production prevailed. The population increase is only viable to a certain extent; foreign capital can be kept pumped into the Turkish banks for only a given time, ordinary citizens will only buy into the idea of never-ending real estate expansion only for a given period. Then, what happens next? It is not a matter of this dissertation to come up with conjectures on what comes next. The real task of this dissertation is related to the question why? I began with an exploratory question, and aim to finish with an explanatory answer to that question. In Istanbul, the hegemonic power elites found a groundbreaking formula to bring forward a wholesome change all over the country. They think that formula is powerful enough to save the country from its self-imposed, or Western dictated, underdevelopment. The leading members of the current power elite explained this publicly, they reiterated time and again their unswerving belief that the more homes built, the richer people would get. The totality of state-space relations are incumbent upon this assumption. The practical implications of such political economic decisions are evident in every nook and cranny of the system. This is the third state-space modality I tried to explain. Part of the problem is the underlying political mentality and ideological The Turkish and American new home constructions are more or less equal in the last five years, since the collapse of the mortgage market. Even after the resurgence of new home building in the U.S. the latest figures suggest that around 800 thousand new homes are being built, which is the same with Turkey’s homebuilding. Neil Irwin, “A Drop in Housing Starts,” The New York Times, July 17, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/18/upshot/housing-starts-fell-in-june-heres-why-thats-bad-news.html. Keep also in mind that Turkey’s population is less than one fourth of the U.S. population, and its GDP per capita is less than one fourth of the U.S. GDP per capita. 2 502 underpinnings of such policy-making decisions. This is only partly an issue of the object of analysis in this dissertation. What I described here was how in the concrete case of Istanbul, such rationality found its basis amidst urban, albeit until recently, dispossessed, and disenfranchised classes. The Kemalists who defined themselves as urban, modern, and positivist –although they had conscious and unconscious issues with all these terms- have released the grabs of power in the last decade. The Kemalist power elite defined themselves as urban; the problem was that they denied anyone else the same definition: they were the only urbanites in this country. The Kemalist power elite has largely been replaced by the Islamist power elites in the last decade. They have one advantage over the Kemalists: they never defined themselves primarily as an urban movement, so they never felt the need to acquire the seal of approval from an urban viewpoint. They easily won the hearts of the dispossessed and disenfranchised masses in Istanbul’s erstwhile gecekondus. What they accomplished was a Sisyphean feat; they have not only rendered the gecekondus as the springboard of their political achievements, but they also have grown with those gecekondus. They did it with rampant real estate speculation, with the labor and toils of the yapsatçıs, through the redistributive power of the state, of the state development corporations, TOKI and KIPTAS. The problem is dialectical. What made them extraordinarily successful and powerful once –which exceeded the wildest estimatesnow carries the risk of taking their accomplishments down. Perhaps Marx was right. Perhaps capital is an irresolvable, utterly resilient creature: a mole. Even sinking it deep beneath the surface, burying it underneath, sending it to the land of Hades is not enough. It finds a way to haunt the living creatures. 503 Bob Jessop and others pointed out that under the circumstances of capitalist relations of production, the key to theorizing the space and state nexus involves four levels: territory, place, scale, and networks.3 In this dissertation, these four levels made themselves felt in three different modalities of state spaces. In the fourth chapter, the dissolution of a world empire and the pangs of incorporation to a world-economy emerged with its particular modality. Territorial breaking up of the empire surfaced in Istanbul as the old, intra-muros Istanbul gradually faded away and gave way to the northern expansion of the city towards Pera and today’s Beşiktaş. The place making of the time involved rebuilding and replicating European capitals in smaller scales, with an arabesque accent, as the new imperial palaces showed. The scale of that particular modality is the most problematic part, since Istanbul as the capital of a world-empire had its own peculiar scalar characteristics, wherein, a vast hinterland, and a nodal concentration of surplus produce made the city up to that point. Finally, the networks of the world-empire were rapidly replaced by new attempts in establishing an enlightened military-bureaucratic class obedient to the Ottoman center. These four levels played out in Istanbul. I tried to depict the interplay between these four levels throughout this treatise by way of three different historical modalities. (See, Figures, 7.1, 7.2., and 7.3) 3 Jessop, Brenner, and Jones, “Theorizing Sociospatial Relations.” 504 Territory Place State Spaces of the Bosphorus' Western Shores Pera, Galata, Beşiktaş Extending old bourgeois Neighborhoods Pera as a Western Commercial Colony Networks Scale Mahalle‐qua‐the‐State Big landowners and merchant capitalists Ethnic and faith‐based distribution of power and resources Non‐mediated transfer of power Figure 7.1: State-space Modality I The second modality of state-space owes its emergence to the closely guarded privileges of the military-bureaucratic class; this time, however, under a novel disguise: Kemalism. The territorial aspect has depended on the dispossession of non-Turkified minorities, the wiping away of their traces on the newly established country’s territory, and most important of them all, in re-territorializing Istanbul’s urban land. Pera became Beyoğlu, Tatavla turned into Kurtuluş, etc. The peasants were willful partners in this new territorial expansion of the state-space, as long as they subscribed to the predominant ideological apparatuses of the state, their massive appropriation of space was overlooked, or implicitly encouraged. Thence, the gecekondus arose. The place making was nationalistic in appearance, but under the surface, it was pragmatically organized: the May Day neighborhood attests to that fact. It could have been named Ecevit neighborhood, or even, after Süleyman Demirel. On the other hand, places of the 505 republican identity permeated, bolstered, and strengthened the military-bureaucratic elite’s claim on power and their imagined historiography. The scalar needs of this second state-space modality was subordinated by a national developmentalist industrialization drive. The more the merrier was the motto, the city went beyond its historical borders, remade itself in the image of an insuperable growth machine. The networks have been well scrutinized: clientelism, ethnically and religiously motivated hometown connections did not only survive intact, but they found a new lease on political, cultural, and social influence by dint of local level redistribution of urban resources in the hands of the state. Territory Place Outside The Walls Zeytinburnu, the May Day Neighborhood, Bomonti, Kuştepe, etc. Around the Industrial Establishments The Periphery Dispossession (and re‐possession) of Non‐Muslim Owned Inner‐City Land Public Lands Extending and Re‐inventing old bourgeois Neighborhoods Scale Networks Gecekondu & Mahalle Migrant networks of ethnic & religious hometown connections Individual Self‐Help Building (Gecekondus) Emergence of Yapsatçıs (Entrepreneuralism) Power elite's military‐bureaucratic network Figure 7.2: State-space Modality II The third state-space modality is still emergent. Its final shape, future possibilities, probable contradictions, and survival strategies are yet only incipient. This new modality of state-space nexus is incumbent upon the second, national developmentalist mode, though, under the asphyxiating weight of worldwide seizure of neoliberal policies. Its territorial ambitions are manifestly global. However, Istanbul is not yet a global city, and 506 possibly, will never be one. It has tapped onto a huge financial valuation of hitherto untouched lands, primarily, erstwhile gecekondu settlements, secondarily, inner-city neighborhoods with the heavy presence of public ownership of land. The place produced by this novel mode of state-spaces is heavily indebted to an ethos of middle classhowever, none can be sure of whether that ethos is significantly different than the petty commodity producers’ highly peculiar work ethics, aesthetics, and political consciousness. The scale this new Istanbul heralds is very similar to its territorial ambitions –deterritorializing in essence for the sake of an unswerving faith in the powerful growth machines of fictitious capital sunk in land. Hence, the apartment buildings –hundreds of thousands of them- dot the face of the city. Nothing is modest, the sky is the limit. However, no single capitalistic form of accumulation, not even the petrodollars (or, actually, the petro-liras and gold) of the Gulf countries can sustain this limitless expansion. Finally, and without any doubt, in a very interesting manner, the networks that gave birth to this new mode of state-space in Istanbul are no different than the previous mode: it is still the ethnically and religiously motivated hometown connections, Sunni and Turkified identities, and proximity to the actual power that determines the asymptotes of state and space making. If anything, under this new mode, the networks of the erstwhile migrants, current proud Istanbulites, are augmented. The most recent ruptures in this conservative, right-wing, Islamist coalition can be a sign of the upcoming transformations in this network, though such networks are built in a long time, and their gravitas can only be measured under extreme duress. 507 Place Territory Ataşehir, Kemerburgaz, Bahçeşehir Highways Gated Communities Satellite Cities Gentrification of old bourgeois Neighborhoods Reclaiming the public land Apartmentalization of Gecekondus Networks Scale Party in power International and national A new Power elite Finance‐capital circuits "White Turks" Financialization of Housing The "New" Middle Class Figure 7.3: State-space Modality III Istanbul is an honorable exception, since it is the sole city on earth that had the chance to make and re-make a state-to be precise, at least three states in succession. In other words, in Istanbul’s case, the making of space, the concrete and abstract production of space, is synonymous with the processes and techniques of state-making. Without the state, the longue durée of early modern and modern gradations and processual cycles of state-making, it is not possible to delve into the spatial aspects of this city. It is apt to recall how Neil Brenner delineated state projects and state effects. He said, inasmuch as theoretical practice is concretely actualized through knowledge effects, the plethora of state projects have produced their own state effects. 4 The visible and disguised procedures, interventions, retreats, and gradual encroachment of the gecekondus, yapsatçıs, state contractors, and private developers have been all but carriers 4 Brenner, New State Spaces : Urban Governance and the Rescaling of Statehood, 85. 508 of such state projects. In whatever form they have taken, they were the key surface phenomena of the state’s activities in space. Still, this is no one-way street. Winston Churchill was surprisingly accurate in yet another one of his aphorisms: we make buildings, and in return, buildings make us who we are. The same is true for the state. In making the spaces of production and reproduction of social relations in Istanbul, the Turkish state has in turn succumbed to its own dialectical loophole: gecekondus were a brilliant and unprecedented redistribution of wealth, though the irreverent plebeian land grab had unmistakably reshaped the political sphere and made local governments mere replicas of the national, centralized, and monolithic power located in Ankara. It is not my task to speculate, nor is my reason for penning this dissertation to raise estimates about further growth potentials. I began writing this dissertation as a distant admirer of Istanbul. After traversing her streets, witnessing the rich texture of her history and her alternate realities, I am impressed by her unbent insistence for being herself at all costs. Istanbul is an aleph, though the Aleph of all alephs. For the writers of these sentences, she is unmatched in beauty, unrivalled in her persistence, unequalled in the radiance of power. As I approached the concrete and abstract of Istanbul, they become more alike, as production of space has turned into an imaginative and endless progress in breaking the bondages imposed by the representations of space, my object of analysis escapes to the thirdspace. And I am not afraid to think of imputing a subjective consciousness to my unit of analysis. Istanbul alone could have endured so much for so long, and indeed she did. Istanbul withstood. 509 Glossary Abdulhamid II: (1842-1918) The Ottoman Sultan who reigned between 1876 and 1909. Responsible for the abolition of the1876 Constitution and the parliament, he ruled as an enlightened despot. His political and cultural influence still looms large in contemporary Turkish politics. Adnan Menderes: (1899-1961) The first democratically elected Prime Minister of Turkey, he governed as the leader of the Democrat Party between 1950 and 1960. He was overthrown in the May 27 1960 Coup d’état and was sentenced to death along with 14 other members of his ruling party and the President of the Republic, Celal Bayar. Only Menderes and two other cabinet ministers were executed by hanging on September 17, 1961. He is the founding figure of contemporary right-wing politics. Ağaoğlu A private development corporation owned and operated by Development Co.: Ali Ağaoğlu. The actual name of the company is Akdeniz Construction Company, though the developer is known publicly by the last name of its owner. The firm is the biggest recipient of TOKI public tenders for development in Istanbul. Founded in the early 1990s as a small-scale one-man building company, it has expanded rapidly in the last decade and a 510 half, currently acting as the biggest private developer in Istanbul. Aleph: A metaphorical symbol first employed by the Argentine author, Jorge Luis Borges, in his short story, “The Aleph,” first published in 1945. Later, the story was published in a collection of Borges’ short stories in 1949, named “The Aleph and Other Stories.” The first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, aleph, as well as alif in the Arabic alphabet –also, etymologically related to the alpha- denotes a spatial mechanism that brings together all the spaces of the universe. The concept was introduced to urban thought by Edward Soja’s work in the early 1980s, and closely represents Henri Lefebvre’s ideas on the production of space. Alevism: A belief and faith system based on the teachings and life of Ali, the cousin and son-in-law of prophet Muhammad. Although mainstream scholars of Islam show a tendency to evaluate Alevism as a minor branch of Shiite Islam, the role played by the Sufi sects in Alevite religious practices and the tremendous import attached to Ali raises issues regarding the Islamic character of the belief. The Alevites have been historically a minority faith in Turkey and Syria. The rituals 511 and beliefs of Syrian and Anatolian Alevis differ significantly. In addition to a sizable Turkish Alevi population in Anatolia, a minority of Kurds in Turkey –especially from the Dersim province- profess Alevism. Alevis have been routinely persecuted for their rituals, practices, and belief. More than a quarter of Turkey’s population is thought to be followers of Alevism, though no official data exist. Apartman A Turkish term –borrowed from French- used for both expressing a reinforced concrete apartment building and a singular flat as property. Arabesk music: A popular music form that brought together Turkish classical music, Turkish folk music and tonal and artistic elements of Western and Arabic influences, especially Egyptian figures like Umm Khultum. First popularized in the early 1970s, Arabesk music was treated as a corrupt and debased form of art by the establishment. Performers were banned from public radios and TV until the late 1980s. Askerî class: The Ottoman bureaucratic class that was composed of three sections: military, religious, and administrative. 512 Bülent Ecevit: (1925-2006) The leader of RPP from 1972 to 1980. Under his leadership, RPP reached historic electoral successes, and he served as Prime Minister in three different coalition governments in those years. After the 1980 coup, he was banned from politics which lasted until 1987. Afterwards, he did not assume the leadership of RPP, but instead, established his own party, DSP, Democratic Left Party. He led two more coalition governments from 1999 to 2002, only to see his party vanish in the electorate due to the 2001 economic crisis. Cemevi: A house of worship for Alevis, which can be translated literally as the house of congregation. CUP: Committee of Union and Progress. The political and paramilitary organization of the Young Turks, the party was the main organization that triggered the 1908 Revolution against Abdulhamid II. CUP was a member of a powersharing agreement between different sides between 1908 and 1913. After 1913 coup d’état, they ruled as a single-party state until the defeat in the First World War and the armistice in 1918 and eventual collapse and dissolution of the Empire. Divanyolu: The main artery in the historic Istanbul peninsula centered in 513 the midst of the old walled city. The road replaced the Roman Mese during Ottoman times. DP: Democrat Party. Founded in 1946 by opposition figures within the then single-party Republican People’s Party. DP won the general election in 1950 and was in power until the May 27, 1960 coup. The party is accepted as the progenitor of succeeding right-wing parties in the ensuing decades. Emlak Konut: A public housing development corporation established in 1953 under the auspices of its namesake bank –Emlak Bank. Until the late 1990s, the corporation acted as the only state enterprise active in housing development. After the 2001 Banking Crisis, the bank ceased its operations, and in 2002 the development corporation became a real estate investment corporation under the control of TOKI. Erdoğan Bayraktar: The chairperson and CEO of TOKI from 2002 to 2011. In 2011 he was elected a member of parliament from his hometown, Trabzon, and appointed in the third Erdoğan cabinet as the minister of Environment and Urban Development-a position specifically established for Bayraktar. After the illegally recorded police wiretaps were made public, 514 he resigned from his position on December 25, 2013. Felicity Party: Saadet Partisi, in Turkish. The second successor party established in 2001 by Necmettin Erbakan’s followers after the Constitutional Court’s ban on the Welfare Party and Virtue Party. The party was the main Islamist political organization until the founding of the Justice and Development Party in 2002. Currently, it is a fringe party with a more pronounced Islamism, with an electoral share of 5 percent. Gecekondu: A Turkish term first employed by the newspapers that literally means ‘dropped-in-a-night’ to denote the squatter settlements at least since the 1940s. By the mid-1960s, the term was also appropriated and used in legal texts, most importantly in the public housing alleviation and land re-distribution programs and amnesties passed in the parliament. Gezi Park Uprisings: A nationwide series of demonstrations and protests against the proposed demolition of Gezi Park in downtown Istanbul and its replacement with a shopping mall modeled after a 19th century Ottoman military barracks. In 79 provinces of the country, 2.5 million people –according to government reports- 515 joined in those protests that began on May 31, 2013 and lasted until June 15, 2013. Harem: In Islamic terminology, harem expresses the forbidden and the sacred. In a Turkish context, this came to represent the privacy of family, especially the female members of that family and the residential space of that family. Imaret: A collection of charitable works conjoined to the Waqfs, imarets included public hospitals, soup kitchens, religious philanthropic establishments, poor houses, etc. JDP: Justice and Development Party. Initials in Turkish are AKP, however, the party leadership vehemently opposes such public use, and instead encourages the use of AK (White) Parti. This self-described conservative party was established as a consequence of a leadership struggle in the Virtue Party in 2002. Led by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, it has been in power since 2002, has won 8 elections in the last twelve years, and is the main right-wing party. JP: Justice Party, AP, in Turkish, is the successor party to Adnan Menderes’ Democrat Party. Established after the 1960 coup as 516 one of the two offshoots of the Menderes Democrats, the party rose to prominence under the leadership of Süleyman Demirel, who won a landslide victory with 54% in the 1965 elections. Demirel and his Justice Party had to resign after the March 12, 1971 coup. Throughout the 1970s, JP ruled as part of a coalition with NMP and Erbakan’s Islamists. In 1980, JP was banned with the other political parties by the military junta. KIPTAŞ: In Turkish, abbreviation for Konut (Housing), Imar (Building), Plan (planning) industries, it is the semi-private housing development arm of the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality. Mahalle: From the classical Ottoman period, ‘mahalle’ refers to an urban settlement built around a wakf-imaret complex, composed of low rise wooden semi-detached houses, smallscale shop-owners, and a mosque with a local congregation. The term still endures in contemporary Istanbul, albeit in a rapidly changing fashion, and points to a nostalgic tightly-knit community. Mese: The urban backbone of Roman and Byzantine Constantinople, 517 it traversed the main political, religious, and cultural centers of the city and connected to wider commercial routes along the Balkans. The Mese was mostly replaced by Ottoman Divanyolu from the sixteenth century onward. Motherland Party: A political party founded by Turgut Özal in 1983. The party attempted to bring conservative, nationalist, and liberal tendencies together and hung onto the right-wing inheritance from Adnan Menderes on. It entered the elections as the only party not condoned –or, founded- by the military junta and surprised many by earning the majority in the parliament. Under Özal’s leadership, the party was responsible for the liberalization of the economy and financial markets. After Özal’s passing in 1993, the party entered several coalition governments as a junior party, only to be crushed in the 2002 general elections. In the last decade, several attempts were undertaken to re-establish the party, however, they failed to receive significant electoral presence. NMP: Nationalist Movement Party, Milliyetçi Hareket Partisi, in Turkish, is a right-wing party established by Alparslan Türkeş –a member of the May 27, 1960 junta- in 1969. The party was active in the 1970s as an extreme right-wing and anti- 518 communist organization with a paramilitary wing (the Ülkü Ocağı). The party was a prominent actor in street level clashes with leftist and socialist organizations. After the 1980 coup, several members were executed by hanging for their roles in violent actions. Electorally receiving around 5% of the votes, the party shed its street level activities in the 1990s, and after the passing away of Türkeş, under the leadership of Devlet Bahçeli, got more than 20% of the votes in the 1999 elections and became an equal partner in the coalition government between 1999 and 2002. Currently, the party has the third biggest parliamentary representation and received more than 13% of the votes in the most recent elections. Necmettin Erbakan: (1926-2011) He was the founding figure of Turkish Islamism, the leader of various successive parties established in this vein, was an engineer by training, and one of the most influential politicians in the post-1980 coup era. He contributed to galvanize a diverse array of Islamist movements in the late 1960s and early 1970s behind his own brand of political movement, named Milli Görüş (National View). His movement first took part in Ecevit’s first cabinet in 1973-4 as a minor coalition member and later, throughout the 70s, Erbakan supported Demirel’s Milli Cephe (National 519 Front) coalition governments. In the 1994 local elections, the party became a major actor in politics, garnering more than 20% of the votes and electing mayors in Istanbul and Ankara. Later, in the 1995 elections, his party, the Welfare Party, received more than 21% of the votes and became the leading party. Until 1996, due to military pressure no other political party was willing to be coalition partners with Erbakan. In 1996 he became Prime Minister in a coalition government with the True Path Party. On February 28, 1997, the military issued an ultimatum which ultimately led to the downfall of his government. Erbakan was banned from politics and his party was closed down by the decision of the constitutional court. Pir Sultan Abdal: An Alevi poet and a mystic figure who is thought to have lived in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. He was one of the leading voices against the Sunni majority and Ottoman state apparatus that dwelt upon this Sunni belief system. In the latter part of the twentieth century his poems found ready acceptance and widespread influence among leftist and socialist organizations. Recep Tayyip (b. 1954) The current Prime Minister and the leader of JDP. 520 Erdoğan: He was educated as an economist and was one of the earliest supporters of Erbakan’s Islamist movement in the late 1970s. During the Islamists’ ascent to power, he ran for MP from Istanbul in 1991 but lost. In 1994, with the Islamists’ electoral surge, he was elected the mayor of Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality. In 1998, as a consequence of the February 28, 1997 military ultimatum, he was tried and sentenced to 10 months’ imprisonment for incitement to religious hatred. He served 4 months in 1999, and had to resign his mayoral position. In 2001, he left Erbakan’s movement to establish a new conservative party, JDP. Next year, in 2002, his newly founded party won a landslide victory in the elections. But only after necessary changes were made to the election laws was he elected to the parliament and took over the Prime Ministerial position in 2003. RPP: The Republican People’s Party, Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi in Turkish, was founded by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and the military leadership of the Turkish War of Independence in 1923. From 1923 to 1946, RPP ruled the country as a singleparty regime, with nominal, non-representative elections. Its official ideology was Kemalism and the six principles of Kemalism (republicanism, nationalism, secularism, populism, 521 etatism, and revolutionism) were amended to the party program which were also the official state policy. Ismet Inonu led the party after Atatürk’s death in 1938 until 1972. After 1946, the political regime was liberalized and in 1950, the single-party rule ended. In the late 1960s, under the influence of a young general secretary of the party, Bülent Ecevit, the hitherto anti-communist, right-wing party shifted its position and announced itself as a center-of-left political party. Ecevit replaced Inonu as the leader of the party in 1972 and carried the party to historic shares of the electorate by means of his left-wing populism. The party was banned by the 1980 military junta, alongside other political parties. After its reestablishment and subsequent mergers with other left-wing parties, it is currently the main opposition party in Turkey, with a quarter of the electoral support. Today, the party is the main left-wing party in opposition. Sedad Hakkı Eldem: (1908-1988) One of the most prominent and prolific architects of Turkey in the twentieth century, Eldem was educated in France, England, and Germany. Upon his return to Turkey in 1934, he took up a tenure track position as a professor of architecture in the Academy of Fine Arts in Istanbul. Until his retirement, he held a determining sway with his teaching at 522 the Academy and shaped contemporary Turkish architecture. He received the Agha Khan Architectural Prize in 1986 for his design of the Zeyrek Social Security Services’ Complex. Selatin Mosque: The mosques that were built under commission of the Ottoman Sultans. The classical Ottoman mosques in Istanbul’s historic peninsula are prime examples of these majestic buildings, although, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, smaller and Western inspired styles were employed. SPP In Turkish, Sosyaldemokrat Halkçı Parti, in English, SocialDemocratic Populist Party, was the main successor party to RPP after the September 12, 1980 Coup closed down all legal parties. The SPP showed a remarkable success in the 1989 local elections and was the junior partner in the governing coalition after the 1991 general elections. In 1995, the party merged with the newly re-established RPP and took its name. Süleyman Demirel: (b. 1924) The eighth president of the Republic. He served as prime minister seven times between 1965 and 1993, had to relinquish power twice-in 1971 and 1980- due to military interventions. With an education in engineering, and a brief spell in the USA, his career started at DSI (Devlet Su Isleri, 523 State Waterworks and Irrigation Administration) and was a handpicked poster boy of the Menderes government in the 1950s. For almost five decades, he was the leader of rightwing politics in Turkey before he supported the military intervention of February 28, 1997. He served as the President of the Republic from 1993 to 2000. Tanzimat: Literally meaning reformation, it was a period of Western influenced re-organization of state institutions and reformation of social, political, and cultural structures that began in 1839, with the declaration of the Gülhane Edict and ended with Abdulhamid II’s enthronement in 1876. As the most important attempt in modernizing the Ottoman social structures, the period had deep effects in contemporary Turkey. Both the CUP and Kemalist RPP had had their intellectual roots in the Tanzimat era reforms. TEKSIF: One of the oldest trade unions of Turkey, the trade union of textiles and garments workers, Türkiye Tekstil, Örme ve Giyim İşçileri Sendikası, was first established in the 1940s. After 1960, it became part of the TURK-İŞ the biggest confederation of trade unions in Turkey. 524 TOKI: Toplu Konut Idaresi in Turkish, literally, Mass Housing Administration, is a state institution with special law and budgetary allocations established in 1984 under the Özal government. Akin to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, TOKI was first oriented towards providing financing for affordable housing. In the 1990s, this role was subdued in the financial turmoil the country went through. After JDP came to power in 2002, TOKI was reorganized and given new legal powers and budgetary means to build housing developments, to allocate public land for public and private development, to buy and sell real estate that belonged to the public, and later, to undertake any public construction project without due processes related to public bidding competitions. True Path Party: The successor party to Süleyman Demirel’s Justice Party – banned by the 1980 junta. The party was established in 1983 and due to Demirel’s political ban led by his proxies. After the ban on Demirel’s political activities was removed in the1987 referendum, he took over leadership. In the 1991 elections, the party came first in the elections and Demirel, for the seventh time, became PM of a coalition government with SPP. In 1993, Demirel became president. The party, under the 525 leadership of Tansu Çiller –the first woman PM in Turkeyestablished a coalition government with Islamist Erbakan’s Welfare Party, which ended in a military intervention in 1997. In the elections of 2002, the party failed to pass the representation threshold and later dissolved itself. Turgut Cansever: (1921-2009) He was a prominent architect and an architectural critique who earned well-deserved accolades for being the earliest and most fervent Islamist in architectural circles. Educated at the Academy of Fine Arts in Istanbul as a student of Sedad Hakkı Eldem, Cansever first came under the spotlight during his tenure as the chief of Istanbul’s urban planning after the May 27, 1960 coup. Although his tenure was brief, his designs for the Beyazıt Square came to fruition at this time. He received the Agha Khan Architectural Prize for his work in Bodrum. In the last two decades, his writings on the relationship between Ottoman-Islamic culture and urbanism have attracted attention and a widespread following. Turgut Özal: (1927-1993) He was the first democratically elected Prime Minister of the post-1980 coup period and elected the eighth President of the Republic. Before the coup, Özal was a highranking bureaucrat with good connections (his brother was the 526 Minister of Interior during the 1970s right-wing coalitions). The coup government installed him as the deputy Prime Minister. He liberalized financial and labor markets, instigated a whole new series of neoliberal reforms by the single-party rule of his newly established party, the Motherland Party, between 1983 and 1989. After 1989, as President of the Republic, he actively promoted the first Gulf War and Turkey’s inclusion in the American-led invasion. Özal died of a heart attack and today, his death is still rumored among the right-wing circles as the act of the deep state. TURK-IŞ: Confederation of Turkish Trade Unions, is the largest organization of labor unions in Turkey. The confederation was established in 1952 under close supervision of the state institutions. It is the only trade union that survived the 1980 coup intact and today claims a membership of 1.5 million. Varoş: A derogatory term employed to express squatter settlements especially in the outer and impoverished regions of metropolitan cities. Possibly coined in the mid-1990s, the term replaced the relatively value-neutral gecekondu in newspaper and TV reports and gradually seeped into 527 academic discourse. The closest relevant term is in Hungarian and it means an urban district or neighborhood. Virtue Party: The successor party to the Welfare Party and Necmettin Erbakan’s Islamist branch of politics. Established in 1998 after the constitutional court banned the Welfare Party from politics. Later, in 2001, the Virtue Party was also banned by the court. The founders of JDP split from the Virtue Party due to disagreements with the Erbakan appointed leadership. Wakf: A religious endowment ruled and controlled by the laws of Islamic sharia. The religious endowments in the Ottoman classical context were the main economic actors of economic accumulation of wealth. Although in theory established as charitable organizations, they acted as state approved forms of property and money holding and rent-collecting institutions. Welfare Party: An Islamist party founded by Necmettin Erbakan. The party was founded in 1983 and dissolved after the constitutional court’s ban on the political activities of the party and its members in 1998. Yapsat: Literally meaning, build-and-sell, it was coined in the late 528 1970s and early 1980s to describe the small-scale building activities in urban areas. The term applies to the one-man construction companies who finance their own developments mainly through selling unfinished apartments in the market. 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