STREAMS 8
Urban Sociology/cities
Urbanization in a southern context: the transformation
of the urban periphery in the case of a gecekondu
(squatter) neighborhood in ankara, Turkey
Tahire Erman
6th ESA CONFERENCE
Murcia, September 2003
Stream 8: Urban Sociology
Session 2
TITLE
URBANIZATION IN A SOUTHERN CONTEXT: THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE
URBAN PERIPHERY IN THE CASE OF A GECEKONDU (SQUATTER)
NEIGHBORHOOD IN ANKARA, TURKEY
Author:
Tahire Erman, Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, Bilkent University,
Ankara
Tel: (90) 312 290 2218, Fax:: (90) 312 290 2742, E-mail: [email protected]
At present Turkey, with its urban population of 65 percent, remains as the least urbanized of
Southern Europe, despite its rapid urbanization process since the 1950s. This paper
investigates the urbanization experience of Turkey by focusing on the transformation of space
in the urban periphery in the context of a squatter (gecekondu in Turkish) neighborhood in
Ankara, the capital city of Turkey. It draws upon the data collected between July 2000 and
July 2003, during which frequent visits were paid to the neighborhood, observing and
participating in the daily lives of residents and in their activities on special occasions.
Furthermore, in-depth interviews with 110 persons were conducted that asked about different
aspects of their lives, such as their migration, residential and job histories, and their feelings
and thoughts about their neighborhood. The oral history of the neighborhood was compiled
through in-depth interviews with the major figures of the neighborhood as well as with
ordinary residents who witnessed the past developments. This paper elaborates on the past,
present and future of this neighborhood by placing it into the socio-economic and political
contexts of those times.
(i) The Formation of the Neighborhood in the Urban Periphery: the 1970s
The first houses in this area, which is located in the East of Ankara, were built in the early
1970s on public land. Some men had already divided the land that belonged to the State into
plots to sell to individual families in the 'informal housing market,' and rural-to-urban
migrants, who wanted to have a house of their own to survive in the city, were willing to pay
some money to these 'informal brokers' for the land, on which they would build their
gecekondus, i.e., the houses that remain outside the formal housing market because of being
built on land that did not belong to the owner, thus having illegal status. The area was remote
from the city center, and it was isolated and out of sight. Still people were very cautious about
any potential demolition by city officials since they were aware of the fact that building
houses on land that belonged to the state or someone else was against the law. Thus, they
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usually built one-room houses, one corner of which would be spared as the kitchen, and the
toilet would be outside. They would do the construction during the night in order to escape
potential spotting. They knew that, if they managed to complete the house and start living in
it, its demolition would not be easy. And they believed that during election times, in the
clientalistic relations that dominated politics, they might even receive title deeds to their
gecekondus. Yet, a 'politics of uncertainty' still prevailed, making it difficult for gecekondu
people to decide how much they should spend on their houses since the house might be
demolished or it might be legalized by an amnesty.
One advantage Turkey had in relation to other countries in the capitalist semiperiphery was the large amount of land which the Turkish Republic (established in 1923)
inherited from the Ottoman Empire. In the Ottoman Empire most of the land belonged to the
Sultan (the miri land), and peasants were given the right of enjoying the use and advantages of
the Sultan's property on condition that they did not harm or waste it (usurfruct rights), paying
some portion of the yields to the Sultan. When the Empire collapsed and the Turkish
Republic was established in its place, this land was passed to the new State. The Turkish
State, interestingly, was reluctant to commodify it, to transform it into private property.
Instead, it continued to keep it in its ownership despite its inefficiency to control it. As
Keyder (2000) states, this served the state's political interests; when the state retained the
privilege of selective allocation of land to those who supported it, it provided the advantage of
patronage.
This notion of usurfruct rights, i.e., people can be treated as acting owners of state
property when they use it without harming it, which prevailed among peasants in the moral
economy of 'pre-capitalist' societies, when combined with the very inefficient supply of
affordable housing by the State, created a situation in which rural-to-urban migrants began to
build their houses on the land that did not belong to them, mostly on public ('treasury') land.
The 1950s were the years that witnessed mass migration from villages to big cities as the
result of the mechanization of agriculture to integrate society into the capitalist world as a
provider of agricultural yields. In these years gecekondus mushroomed in the peripheries of
big cities; they were shanties built mostly on public land by the prospect owner and his family
members, using second-hand building materials. Over the years, this 'self-help housing'
during the initial stage of gecekondu formation was replaced by its commercialization in the
informal housing market, in which the peripheral land was divided into plots and sold to
people by the 'gecekondu mafia.'
Thus, in the case of the neighborhood in this study, the first settlers had to pay money
to those men who had already prepared the plots to sell. Still they lacked official titles to their
land.
Once settled in the area by building their gecekondus, it was up to them to transform
the once-uninhabited area into an established neighborhood with basic services and facilities.
And those were hard times: there was no running water, they had to fetch water from the
brook down the valley; there were no roads, they had to walk many miles, in mud during the
winter, to reach their houses; there was no electricity, they had to sit in the dark at night,
sometimes using candles to lit. It did not take long for them to become aware of their power
in politics: their large numbers brought them a significant bargaining power vis-a-vis
politicians, who were after their votes. They would promise to vote for a party if the party
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promised them to legalize their houses and bring such services as roads, electricity and
running water to the neighborhood.
In the case of this neighborhood, this transformation of the peripheral uninhabited land
into an established residential area took place in the politicized environment of the 1970s,
which was polarized as the extreme Right ('ultra-nationalists') and the extreme Left
('revolutionaries'). A group of leftist people (150 families who migrated from the same two
villages) wanted to move to this neighborhood to "create their own community" when they
could not build their houses in the adjacent district, which was known as the 'Castle of the
Left'; that district was already filled up with gecekondu houses, and there was no enough spare
land to build a community. However, when this group found out that the land on which they
would build their own community was the pasture of the near-by village, they gave up this
project, saying that, as leftists, they would not take away land from villagers. Yet, the muhtar
(head official of the village) sold the village pasture, and several of these families ended up
buying the land. They became the leaders in the establishment of this neighborhood. They
got the support of their comrades in the district of the 'Castle of the Left,' who helped digging
channels for sewage and water, building roads, and the like. The residents supported them
because they were very helpful. Additionally, most of the residents were Alevis, that is, they
belonged to the heteredox Islamic sect and hence they were a sectarian minority in society,
who suffered centuries-long discrimination and oppression, making them prone to resist to
authorities. As the outcome, a 'culture of resistance' was formed in the neighborhood. Local
women were very active in protests. For example, they went out to the streets to prevent the
entering of the trucks that were carrying garbage to the City's Garbage dumping site, which
was inside this neighborhood. Today a woman, who participated in those protest activities,
says, "We did this not for the left-right issue, but for our children. We wanted to create a safe
and clean environment for them." The leftist leaders developed a plan of the site, locating on
it where the houses, the roads, the electric posts would be. They applied to the Electric
Company with this map through a friend of theirs, and they got electricity to the
neighborhood.
In their attempts to bring services to their neighborhood, the leftist local leaders met
continuous opposition and problems. They had to negotiate with state authorities. For
example, the Governor said that he would have a school built there if the neighborhood was
cleaned off leftist slogans written on walls. Also it was not easy to mobilize local people to
participate in digging channels, building roads, and the like, or to donate money for a common
cause (e.g. buying bricks for the school building); they had to be convinced that their efforts
would pay. Furthermore, towards the end of the 1970s, in its polarized and politicized
atmosphere when the street-fightings between the radical Left and the ultra-nationalist Right
escalated, ultra-nationalist groups began to attack the neighborhood. As a resident, who
witnessed those times, states, "Fascists would come with shotguns in their hands, and what we
could do was either to confront them if we were armed, or retreat into our houses, turning off
the light and waiting in fear. We started waiting in turns at nights in order to prevent them
from entering our neighborhood."
The last years of the 1970s were marked by the violent clashes between the extreme
Left and the extreme Right, not only in this neighborhood but also in the wider society. This
was ended by the September 12, 1980 military intervention.
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The Establishment of the Neighborhood in the Urban Periphery: the 1980s and 1990s
Following the military intervention, there were many arrests in the neighborhood. The
military coup dissolved itself in 1983, and elections took place in the same year. When the
Özal government, which was pro-liberal, came to power, several gecekondu laws were passed
in 1984 and 1985. These laws pardoned the gecekondus built until then, and further they
allowed the construction of buildings of up to four-storeys on gecekondu land. In this way, it
was attempted both to integrate the informal gecekondu housing into the formal housing
market, commodifying it, and to integrate its 'problematic residents' into the system by
offering them huge rents from the gecekondu land. This benefited our neighborhood: many
residents obtained titles to their land by paying for it over an extended time period. However,
there are complaints about this practice: gecekondu owners say that they had to pay twice for
the same land, first to the so-called gecekondu brokers/ the gecekondu mafia, and then to the
Municipality.
Other changes also occurred in the neighborhood following the military intervention.
One such change was the construction of a mosque in this Alevi neighborhood where there
was only a small Sunni population (Sunnis in this neighborhood are religiously and politically
conservative. The women in these families are covered). Since Alevis tend to object to
attending mosques in their historical heritage, the construction of this mosque was interpreted
by the Alevi residents as an open challenge to them by their Sunni counterparts. An Alevi
man, one of the leaders of the 1970s, says, "We thought no one could build a mosque in our
neighborhood since it was a liberated area, it was our own neighborhood. But the first thing
that happened here after the military intervened was building this mosque." In brief, the leftist
and Alevi presence in the neighborhood weakened, and the residents became diversified along
political views and religious sects. The Sunnification policies of the State in the 1980s, which
regarded religion (Sunni Islam) as the binding force of society and as a guard against the
threat of communism, made Sunni Islam's presence visible both in this neighborhood and in
the larger society.
In the following years, the neighborhood grew bigger. New houses that lacked title
deeds were built, additions were made to the already existing houses, and second storeys were
added. They were rented out. Thus, the neighborhood population became heterogeneous,
such as owners and tenants, and those who owned title deeds and those who did not.
As the neighborhood grew bigger and extended over a larger area, it was
administratively divided into five in 1989. The first elected head of this neighborhood, which
carries today the original name of the neighborhood before its division, was a woman, who
was known for her 'manly behavior' and courage. She challenged the gecekondu mafia,
namely three or four men who were still active in invading land and selling it to newcomers.
She would walk in the streets, carrying a revolver at her belt, and she would direct people ('the
destitute'/ garibans) to certain plots and would make them built their gecekondus there in her
protection. At nights she would walk by herself in the streets, checking what was going on.
She was also the one who brought further infrastructure, and made built and asphalted
new roads increasingly needed as the neighborhood grew in size and population. She would
sit on a tractor and show the driver where the new roads would be built. She served as the
muhtar for two consecutive terms. She lost the third term to a man basically for two reasons:
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First, she was tempted to keep some plots for her own use, which some residents resented and
used against her; and secondly, she took a stand against the 'Urban Transformation Project' of
the neighborhood, which meant taking a stand against the Municipality in power and the
political party that supported it.
As the neighborhood became more established and more diversified, the 'culture of
collective resistance' tended to disappear. Additionally, the relationship of the muhtar with
the established authorities changed, the confrontational attitude of the 1970s being replaced by
negotiating efforts and subtle forms of resistance in the 2000s. The muhtar believes that it is
self-destructive to confront and contradict the state openly, especially the Municipality, to
which he is obliged to receive services to the neighborhood. Today the Mayor of the District
is from the Islamist Party, whereas the muhtar is a strong supporter of a social democratic/
leftist party. Despite this contrast in their political views, the muhtar is careful not to confront
the Mayor. As he says, he has his own 'human relations' that he mobilizes to achieve his
goals. Through his networks, he was able to lay pipes for sewage in the recently growing
distant part of the neighborhood. He was also able to increase the electric voltage in the
neighborhood, as well as to build a park (he succeeded to call it after the leftist Alevi poet
who passed away recently, despite the discontent of the Mayor) and a local library.
In brief, it took over two decades for this neighborhood to become a low-density
neighborhood (one- or two-storey houses, many in gardens) with mixed land tenure (some
residents have title deeds and others lack them) that receives basic city services and is
connected to the city center in quite satisfactory terms [there are frequent buses and dolmuţ
(shared taxi) services; it is 10 kilometers from the city center, Kızılay, and it takes 15-20
minutes to arrive there]. The story of the neighborhood is not over yet. Today its future is
contested, on which the following section elaborates.
The Future of the Neighborhood: The 'Urban Transformation Project' in the 2000s
Today many of the houses built before 1985, the year when the last gecekondu amnesty was
passed, have title deeds, however those built afterwards lack them. Thus, some of the houses
have their legal basis, whereas others do not. This constitutes a major fault line among the
residents. Those who have title deeds want to have their gecekondus replaced by multi-story
apartment buildings since this means much rent to be gained on their gecekondu land. Some
want it for economic gains while preserving their reservations on the style of life that the
apartment environment would bring, while others embrace the conveniences and privacy
apartment living generates. The commercialization of a gecekondu area is done usually
through 'one-man firms' (Oncu, 1988) (müteahhits) in Turkey, who buy the gecekondu land in
return for several apartments in the building to replace the gecekondu. Another option, which
is quite recent, is through 'Urban Transformation Projects,' which are coordinated by the
Municipality and which transform the neighborhoods as a whole into housing complexes well
served with services and facilities. The present muhtar supports the Project; he asserts that it
is not the people's fate to live in gecekondus, that they deserve the right to obtain advanced
facilities, especially regarding health and education, and that they should adapt to urban
culture and way of life. He says that the Project consists of 8-storey apartment buildings,
along with a big commercial center, sports facilities, a running track, three kindergardens, five
schools, and one health center. He is against the other way of gecekondu transformation
since, he thinks, replacing gecekondus by apartment buildings one by one without total
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planning would only end up with an environment of 'high-rise gecekondus' without adequate
facilities, especially one that lacks green areas. On the other hand, those who want the
apartmentization of the neighborhood via 'one-man firms' say that it is more practical and
quicker. They are suspicious of the Project, and think that it may never take place in their life
time. They are also concerned that the new environment created by the Project would not be
suitable for them to fit in, both financially and culturally. A few residents, who played a vital
role in creating a sense of community and political resistance in the neighborhood in the
1970s, believe that the sense of (Alevi) community, how limited it might be today, would
totally disappear if such a project is put into action.
Those who do not have title deeds to their land are in a much difficult position. They
live in a psychology of uncertainty. They do not know whether they will be displaced because
of the Project, or they will be provided with some housing in the Project for which they would
pay over an extended period of time. Rumors spread easily in the neighborhood on this
subject. And there are also tenants, who are vulnerable in any transformation of the
neighborhood.
In brief, the future of the neighborhood, i.e., how it will be transformed into an
apartment district and become integrated into the formal housing market, is not clear today.
Gecekondu owners want 'their share' from the housing rent. They think that it is the only way
available to them to escape economic hardship and to improve their socio-economic positions.
Yet this puts tenants and those without title deeds in a very disadvantaged position. What the
future will bring is yet to be seen.
Concluding Remarks
When we look at the factors that played a role in the transformation of the urban periphery
from unoccupied, unserviced land first into gecekondu neighborhoods, and then into districts
of apartment buildings, we can identify several factors. Some of these factors are common in
other countries in the capitalist semi-periphery, such as limited industrialization and limited
state budget. Most of the budget is allocated to rapid industrialization to catch up with
industrialized societies, ending up with very limited money to be spent on social needs, such
as housing. In Turkish society, the housing market has been left almost entirely to market
forces, remaining outside state's intervention, hence one-man firms, who can build apartment
buildings with limited capital [See Öncu (1988) for detailed information], have dominated the
formal housing market, while gecekondus have created a significant informal housing market.
Close relative networks acted as a source of unpaid labor for the construction of gecekondus,
while the unpaid labor of residents put into the collective construction of infrastructure, which
is known as imece in rural areas, enabled the construction of roads, water and sewage
channels, school buildings, and the like. The significant role of leaders in mobilizing
gecekondu residents is evident in the Turkish case. Some attempts have been made to change
the conditions that prevail in the land and housing market during the liberalization of Turkey
in the post-1980s, increasing its attraction for the private sector. For example, the National
Housing and Investment Administration was established in 1984 to provide cheap credits to
mass housing projects to be carried out by the private sector, predominantly by big
construction firms. Today the new government is planning to sell the treasury land to those
who have houses built on it without legal permission. This means formalizing the informal
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housing sector. Yet, the housing sector is still not efficiently regulated; the treasury land is
seen by the government as a means of revenue for the deficient state budget.
Another characteristics shared by the societies in the capitalist semi-periphery is their
experience of urbanization without adequate industrialization, which was the experience of
the capitalist West in the 19th century. Thus, when peasants poured into cities, looking for
jobs, many could not be absorbed into the formal job market, which was underdeveloped. As
a result, they created their own job market, as well as their housing market, that was not
regulated by the state, which may be summarized as 'informalization.'
Again similar to many societies in the capitalist semi-periphery, political clientalism
has opened the door to this type of spatial transformation in the periphery of big cities. When
rural migrants exchange their votes for their squatter houses, politicians tend to be engaged in
populist politics, promising to legalize and improve squatter areas during election times.
When we talk about the differences between the Turkish experience of urban
transformation and other societies in the semi-periphery, as mentioned earlier, the abundance
of state land in the Turkish context emerges as a significant factor that has provided leverage
to the state in adopting a permissive attitude towards gecekondu formation. This has enabled
gecekondu owners to improve the conditions of their houses over the years.
In the 2000s, which is characterized by neo-liberal policies which advocate
privatization and commodification, the major question becomes as follows: Under what
dynamics and in what ways will the gecekondu formation be transformed into commodities in
the formal housing market? Under the pressure by the private sector to give up populism, will
the government leave the urban periphery to the interests of the big capital, or will it play a
role in it by developing some creative projects which may form partnerships of various actors,
such as firms, the Municipality and gecekondu residents? In the Turkish context, the answer
seems to be the first one more than the second one. If so, what might be the social outcomes
of this type of transformation? How would the urban poor satisfy their need of shelter?
Would it lead to violence and uprising in the urban periphery? These questions call for an
urgent answer today.
References
Keyder, Ç. (2000) Liberalization from above and the future of the informal sector: land,
shelter, and informality in the periphery. In F.Tabak and M.A.Crichlow (eds),
Informalization: Process and Structure (pp. 119-132). Baltimore and London: The Johns
Hopkins University Press.
Öncü, A. (1988) The politics of the urban land market in Turkey: 1950-1980. International
Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 12(1), 38-63.
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