Kasaba R. The Cambridge History of Turkey: Volume 4, Turkey in the Modern World

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A brief history of modern Istanbul

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Nationalising the imperial capital

The history of modern Istanbul, like the history of modern Turkey, begins with

the end of the First World War and the demise of the Ottoman Empire. The city

that became Istanbul was, famously, established as an imperial capital – the new

Rome that would take over the functions of the seat of empire from the decrepit

old Rome. Thegeographyof the seas and continents surrounding the city made

ita natural focus,whichin the longuedur

ee wouldassert itself as the centre ofnet-

works whose nature and relative weight changed in time, but whose topogra-

phies exhibited continuity. Over the thousand years of its Byzantine incarnation

the city’s fortunes waxed and waned, until it was reduced to a dependency

of Genoa after the ravages imposed by the Latins during the Fourth Cru-

sade (1204–61). The Ottoman dynasty revived Istanbul’s centrality to the larger

Eurasian region and helped resuscitate its economy, not only as a trading

post, but also as a centre of what we would today call cultural industries –

education, books, the higher arts and exclusive items of consumption for the

wealthy. The city’s size soon came to dwarf any competitor in the entire Mid-

dle East and the Balkans; its imperial riches and the consumption capacity of

its inhabitants made it into the largest marketplace in that region.

While the transition from Byzantine to Ottoman centrality was relatively

natural and smooth, the status of the city grew somewhat anomalous as Europe

gradually came to be dominated by capitalist nation-states. Here was the seat

of an old agrarian empire, with many ethnicities living under heterogeneous

legal norms. Its economy was swayed by political decree; its merchants and

bankers enjoyed none of the freedoms and predictability that their European

1 Stefan Yerasimos,

Istanbul:

Imparatorluklar bas¸kenti (Istanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayınları,

2000); John Freely, Istanbul: The Imperial City (New York: Penguin Putnam, 2002); Mustafa

Cezar, Osmanlı bas¸kenti

Istanbul (Istanbul: Erol Kerim Aksoy Vakfı, 2002). More accessible

is Phillip Mansel, Constantinople: City of the World’s Desire (London: St Martin’s, 1998).

504

A brief history of modern Istanbul

counterparts gradually obtained. It fascinated Europeans both because of this

difference and because it gave them a taste of the world beyond Europe –

a realm of heterogeneity and confusion where mores mixed, and no single

language reigned. Accordingly, the salient question of the second half of the

nineteenth century was whether the empire could make the transition to mod-

ern statehood without losing its imperial diversity.

Imperial modernisation, of

course, had its contradictions: the more it succeeded in imposing a uniform set

of rules, the greater was the risk of social polarisation among different ethnic

groups. Checked by the differentiated regulation of the traditional empire, the

relative standing of different ethnic groups could be maintained within safe

bounds. If rules had to be uniform, and the market was given free rein, unequal

development would follow, and economic and social inequalities eventually

give way to political demands and independence movements.

It was unclear whether the European powers sincerely wished the success of

Ottoman modernisation that they fervently advocated, or whether their coun-

sel was meant to serve only to postpone the inevitable imperialist struggle over

the estate. Whatever the motivations, the Western impact had wide-ranging

consequences for Istanbul. Along with the experience of modern economic

growth, political, legal and institutional changes transformed the city into

a reﬂection of the colonial model. The penetration of the Western powers

became palpable with their embassies, which paraded Western architectural

styles, while imperatives of trade and technology helped create the docks and

the warehouses. In the 1850s, especially after the Crimean War, a new popula-

tion of foreigners and locals alike started to live in the style of the burghers of

European cities, with boulevards, trams, shops and apartment buildings; the

bureaucrats of Istanbul responded by thinking about reforming and planning

the city.

Unequal accommodations to economic transformation, along with greater

presenceof foreignpowers, werereﬂectedin newpopulation balances.Istanbul

acquired a new demographic proﬁle in which the non-Muslim population

2 Stanford J. Shaw and Ezel Kural Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey,

vol. II: Reform, Revolution, and Republic: The Rise of Modern Turkey, 1808–1975 (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1977). Also Eric Jan Z

urcher, Turkey: A Modern History

(London: I. B. Tauris, 1994; repr. 2004).

3 See Kemal H. Karpat, An Inquiry into the Social Foundations of Nationalism in the Ottoman

State: From Millets to Nations, from Estates to Social Classes (Princeton: Center for Interna-

tional Studies, 1973), for the transition of ethnic conﬂict to nationalist movements.

4 Murat G

ul and Richard Lamb, ‘Mapping, Regularizing and Modernizing Ottoman

Istanbul: Aspects of the Genesis of the 1839 Development Policy’, Urban History 31, 3

(2004); Zeynep C¸ elik, The Remaking of Istanbul: Portrait of an Ottoman City in the Nineteenth

Century (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1986).

505

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began to dominate. On the eve of the Balkan Wars, foreigners accounted for

15 per cent of an estimated population of close to a million, while Greeks

comprised 30 per cent, and Armenians and Jews another 15 per cent.

With the

inﬂux of refugees during and after the wars, the balance tipped in favour of

Muslims. Population movements during the Great War were complex: some

Christians ﬂed the empire; some arrived in Istanbul from Anatolian cities and

took refuge there. Muslim inhabitants left the city for smaller towns where

food would be more readily accessible, but there were also waves of refugees

from far corners of the empire. The universal conscription instituted in 1909 led

to the departure of some Christians before and during the war. The massacres

of 1915 mostly took place in the eastern half of Anatolia and generally spared

the Armenian inhabitants of the capital. With the revolution in Russia, there

was a mass inﬂux of ‘white’ Russians, ﬂeeing the Bolsheviks across the Black

Sea. This new element in the population swelled to substantial size under the

allied occupation of the city following the Ottoman surrender. But Istanbul was

mostly a way station: most refugees left once the war was over. The population

that had surpassed the one-million mark during the war had shrunk to 700,000

in 1927.

In addition to all the foreigners, almost half of the Christians had also

departed; now two-thirds of the population were Muslim.

During the late imperial period, the city had been clearly divided: Muslims

predominated in the old city inside the walls, and foreigners and the newly

wealthy Christian families moved to Pera, on the other side of the Golden

Horn, to neighbourhoods that had been settled by the Genoese during Byzan-

tine times. While the foreign population expanded, as it did in all port cities

during the late nineteenth century, the city had also acquired a new central-

ity for Muslims in terms of its cultural and political status. Turks and other

Muslim nationalities from the Russian empire, as well as Albanians, Bosniaks,

Arabs and other peoples from far corners of the empire came to the capital

city to attend its schools and to engage in cultural and political life. There

were reformers, revolutionaries, modernists, nationalists, Marxists, members

of various religious orders, mystics and dilettantes, in truly cosmopolitan diver-

sity, making the city their home. Coinciding with the beginnings of the great

5 Population ﬁgures relying on Ottoman censuses are found in Kemal H. Karpat, Ottoman

Population, 1830–1914: Demographic and Social Characteristics (Madison: University of

Wisconsin Press, 1985).

6 T. C .

Istatistik Umum M

url

u, 1930

Istatistik yıllı

gı (Ankara: T. C.

Istatistik Umum

url

u, 1930), p. 64. Muslims were 448,000 out of a total of 690,000. On the exchange

of populations with Greece, see Kemal Arı, B

uk m

ubadele (Istanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yurt

Yayınları, 1995); also Ren

ee Hirschon (ed.), Crossing the Aegean: The consequences of the 1923

Greek-Turkish population exchange (Oxford: Berghahn, 2003).

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A brief history of modern Istanbul

questioning of matters of culture and civilisation, of modernisation and native

values, this was the period when the spatial construction of the city came

to parallel the social divide. There is an established genre in Turkish litera-

ture and cinema that maps the neighbourhoods of the city onto the attitudes

and emotional charges of the separation between the Westernisers and the

defenders of cultural authenticity.

When the nationalists, following the expulsion of the Greek army from

Anatolia and the departure of the last British forces, entered Istanbul in Octo-

ber 1922, they put an end to the cultural debate. From then on, nationalism was

to provide the accepted narrative, attempting to reconcile cultural nativism

with Westernising zeal, while keeping Islam out of the picture. In the Turkish

version, and especially under the inﬂuence of inter-war authoritarian regimes,

nationalism took on a strongly statist and relatively ethnic colouring, which

dictated that the Europe-oriented remnants of the Ottoman Christian bour-

geoisie had to be excised from the body national in order for the nation-state

to begin anew on a healthy basis.

It was only grudgingly that the new gov-

ernment accepted, as stipulated in the Exchange of Populations annex of the

Lausanne treaty, that the Greeks who could prove their residence in Istanbul

be allowed to remain in the country. The nationalists resented not only the

cosmopolitan empire, which had naively entertained the dream of surviving in

the modern world with its diversity intact, but also the imperialist engineers,

some of whom continued to harbour international fantasies in the immedi-

ate post-war period. As a prelude to that other stalled project, the League of

Nations, the British and French occupation authorities who ruled Istanbul for

three years had brieﬂy entertained the notion of turning it into an international

city housing the future ofﬁces of a world government.

This, of course, was

a ﬂattering conceit, and a more conﬁdent state might even have capitalised

on it; but Turkey was too hurt, too green and too humiliated – even with

the victory of the nationalists. The nationalist regime was afraid and anxious,

7 The classical novel is Peyami Safa’s Fatih-Harbiye, referring to two neighbourhoods on

either side of the divide. As to ﬁlms, there are several from the 1960s and the 1970s that

treat love affairs between rich, spoiled, but eventually repentant youngwomen who dance

to Western music, and proud and handsome men from the poorer, traditional, and later

gecekondu neighbourhoods. See Mehmet

Ozt

urk, ‘T

urk sinemasında gecekondular’, Euro-

pean Journal of Turkish Studies, thematic issue 1 (2004), www.Tejts.org/document94.html.

8 C¸a

glar Keyder, ‘The Consequences of “the Exchange of Populations” for Turkey’, in

Hirschon (ed.), Crossing the Aegean.

9 For the occupation period, see Nur Bilge Criss, Istanbul under Allied Occupation, 1918–1923

(Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1999); also Clarence Richard Johnson (ed.), Constantinople Today or the

Pathﬁnder Survey of Constantinople – A Study in Oriental Social Life (New York: Macmillan,

1922).

507

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inclined to close itself off to the outside and suspicious of citizens who might

harbour relations with the external world. The war and the partitioning of the

empire meant that Istanbul would no longer play its former metropolitan role

towards the territories in the Balkans, or in the Middle East: Palestine, Syria

and Iraq. The Ottoman sultan, who had also served as a symbolic caliph for

the world’s Muslims (especially when anti-colonial sentiments began to stir

towards the end of the period), was no longer sovereign. With the abolition of

the caliphate, Istanbul ceased to hold any particular interest for the Muslims

of the world; Islamic intellectuals would no longer look at the city as a site of

cultural and political pilgrimage.

From 1923 until the end of the Second World War, Istanbul survived in

relative obscurity, a provincial backwater in a preoccupied world where popu-

lations turned inward. The nationalist animus of the Ankara regime, however,

softened in time. Mustafa Kemal visited the city after an undeclared boycott

of ﬁve years. As a sign of the eroding asabiyya of the new capital in the steppes,

Ankara bureaucrats and the business circles of the old capital discovered mutu-

ally beneﬁcial accommodations. The years of the Great Depression brought a

series of bankruptcies and widespread poverty, unallayed by the agrarian pop-

ulism of the Ankara government. Although Turkey remained unaligned, the

war period was even more trying: there were shortages, mass conscription of

the young and a general decline in welfare. Politicians reacted by reanimating

the ethnic and religious adversity that had seemed to have ended with the

foundation of the Republic. They instituted a wartime ‘wealth levy’ expressly

designed to bankrupt the non-Muslim businessmen of Istanbul.

This tactic

was effective: after the end of the war, many Christian and Jewish business-

men left the country when they found the opportunity to do so. Istanbul was

launched on its national developmentalist script with an almost clean slate in

1945.

The high Republican period of 1923–50 had imposed on Istanbul the nation-

alist project of the Ankara elites. The most important dimension of this impo-

sition was the translation of anti-colonial sentiments to the ethnic puriﬁca-

tion (unmixing of the peoples of the old multi-ethnic empire) that accom-

panied the establishment of the new Republic. The political orientation of

the Republic in terms of its ethnic regulation paralleled the gradual cleansing

of ‘non-nationals’ from the city. Institutional mechanisms, such as restric-

tions on property ownership of church endowments, and strict regulations

imposed on Greek and Armenian schools, helped achieve this task. Greeks

10 Ayhan Aktar, Varlık vergisi ve T

urkles¸tirme politikaları (Istanbul:

Iletis¸im, 2000).

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A brief history of modern Istanbul

and Armenians had acquired the legal status of minorities in the 1923 Treaty

of Lausanne, according them protection; but, in many ways, the legal regime

became a constriction that forced them out of the country. In addition to the

compulsory exchange of populations and the punitive wartime tax targeting

non-Muslims, a pogrom organised by the government in 1955, known as the 6–

7 September Events, led to the destruction of commercial property belonging

to Christians;

a decree in 1963 required all Greeks who had Greek citizenship

to leave the city within a few weeks.

The undeclared policy of driving out

the non-Muslim population continued in subsequent decades. The Republican

state’s nationalism was ambiguous in deﬁning the constituent coordinates of

nationhood: it mostly veered toward an ethnic deﬁnition rather than a con-

stitutional one, and when ideological bolstering was required, religion could

function as a deﬁning element despite the state’s avowed secularism. The

number of Christians declined from about 450,000 in 1914 to 240,000 in 1927.

As Turkish censuses have not recorded ethnic or religious background since

1965, there are no reliable ﬁgures on the current scale of minority populations.

The estimates suggest that by the 1980s the Greek population had dwindled

to between 2,000 and 3,000, the Armenians to 50,000 and the Jews to 25,000.

Istanbul came to reﬂect the ethnic balances of Turkey as a whole, where the

population is more than 99 per cent Muslim.

During the ﬁrst two decades of the Republic, the demographic losses and

the shifts in population deprived the city of a large number of its merchants,

businessmen, artisans and shopkeepers. The subsequent move of the seat of

government to anundistinguished market townin the Anatolian steppesmeant

that the larger portion of the new Republic’s physical and cultural investment

wouldbe made in Ankara, to the detriment of Istanbul.The headquarters of the

national radio network was established in the new capital; and the semi-ofﬁcial

print media were also moved there (although the bulk of the newspaper circu-

lation and other nationally diffused printed matter still originated in Istanbul).

A national opera company, symphony, state ballet and theatre were founded:

Istanbul was left to wallow in more plebeian entertainment. Ankara was being

constructed as the showcase of the new Republic and Istanbul was left to stag-

nate. The founders of the Republic in the new and culturally uncontaminated

11 Dilek G

uven, 6–7 Eyl

ul olayları (Istanbul:

Iletis¸im, 2006).

12 H

ulya Demir and Rıdvan Akar,

Istanbul’un son s

urg

unleri (Istanbul:

Iletis¸im, 2002); also A.

Alexandris, The Greek Minority of Istanbul and Greek–Turkish Relations, 1918–1974(Athens:

Centre for Asia Minor Studies, 1983).

13 This ﬁgure is misleading; it counts all who are not Christian or Jewish as Muslim. There

are different sects within Islam, some too heterodox to consider themselves fully Muslim,

and of course there are non-believers.

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capital were hostile to Istanbul’s potential autonomy, and suspicious of impe-

rial remnants. There were no elected posts of urban government: Istanbul’s

highest ofﬁcial was the governor, appointed directly by the prime minister.

Primacy in national development

The story of Istanbul from the end of the Second World War is one of a

Third World primate city that served as the portal to the economic growth

of the country as a whole, nourishing a new bourgeoisie and transforming

peasants into workers. Shortages during the war and black market proﬁts had

created a new group of wealthy provincials, who arrived in Istanbul seeking

the good life and social status. Many among them constituted the nucleus

of Istanbul’s ﬁnancial and industrial bourgeoisie. They were the vanguard of

a migration that continued for half a century, although in time immigrants

were drawn from the poorer segments of the rural population, and they sought

employmentrather than civilstatus. Their penetration of the complacent social

life of a city proud of its past glamour signalled an irreversible momentum of

nationalisation of the metropolis.

The new business groups effortlessly melded with old money, signalling the

transformation of an enclave economy to something more autochthonous

with deeper penetration of its hinterland. Istanbul’s share of the country’s

production and income increased. In the imperial imagination of past years,

the city had never been rivalled. It was easily more than four times the size

of its nearest competitors (Salonica, Izmir) even during the port-city boom

resulting from the commercial development of the nineteenth century.

Now,

in the heyday of national development, both producers and consumers accu-

mulated within its gravitation and issued an invitation to the migrants seeking

to participate in the quest, causing a seemingly unstoppable aggrandisement –

from a population of 1.1 million in 1950,to2.8 million in 1970, and 6.5 million

in 1990. While about 5 per cent of Turkey’s total population lived in Istanbul

in 1950, this proportion rose to 14 per cent in 2000.

Under developmentalist

policies, the city became the privileged location of a new generation of large-

scale, private manufacturing enterprises, protected from world competition

14 On local government see M. N. Danielson and R. Keles¸, The Politics of Rapid Urbanization:

Government and Growth in Modern Turkey (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1985); and Metin

Heper, Local Government in Turkey: Governing Greater Istanbul (London: Routledge, 1989).

15 C¸a

glar Keyder, Ey

Ozveren and Donald Quataert (eds.),Port-cities intheEastern Mediter-

ranean, special issue of Review (Winter 1993).

16 Devlet

Istatistik Enstit

Istatistik yıllı

gı (Ankara, various years).

510

A brief history of modern Istanbul

and encouraged through ﬁnancial incentives. Thus, in the 1970s more than half

of all private manufacturing employment in Turkey was located in Istanbul.

This growth was due to large import-substituting industrial establishments,

but also to a higher number of labour-intensive, small-scale manufacturing and

commercial enterprises in and around the city core. Needless to say, the biggest

concentration of middle-class demand for the products of import-substituting

industry was also located in the city. This unchallenged primacy continued

along the same dimensions until the 1980s, when macro-economic changes

(structural adjustment policies) provided new opportunity for provincial cen-

tres to develop export industries.

Throughout these decades of rapid economic expansion and chaotic

growth, Istanbul’s progressively deteriorating physical infrastructure and

declining ﬁnancial resources failed to generate action on the part of national

governments in Ankara. In the national political arena, the overriding theme

wasthe incorporationof the peasantry into electoral politics,mainlyvia provid-

ing various subsidies to urban immigrants. While such subsidies accelerated

rural transformation, one of the consequences was rapid urbanisation and

the growth of shantytowns – especially in Istanbul. In fact, most of the new

housing was illegal. In some cases the squatter dwellings (gecekondu) were con-

structed on public land or on land belonging to private owners, in others their

construction violated zoning regulations or was carried out without regard

to municipal ordinances, without the proper inspection and permits, and dis-

regarding the engineering, sanitary, aesthetic or habitation norms set by the

authorities. What is clear is that Istanbul’s growth from 1 million to almost

10 million during the second half of the twentieth century was primarily due

to the expansion of ‘illegal’ housing.

Before the 1950s, there was no pressure to acquire the public or empty land

surrounding the inhabited urban area. Urban population between the 1920s

and 1945 remained stable and, in most cities, below the pre-First World War

totals. It was quite common in Istanbul during that period to ﬁnd large areas of

garden plots or dairy farms interspersed within the urban fabric. Most of this

urban agriculture was located on abandoned plots, land belonging to departed

Christians, or now defunct vakıfs where property had reverted to public

17 S

uleyman

Ozmucur, ‘Istanbul ili gelir tahminleri, 1950–74’, BU Ekonomi Dergisi 4–5 (1976).

18 Peter Suzuki, ‘Peasants without Plows: Some Anatolians in Istanbul’, Rural Sociology 31

(December 1966); Kemal H. Karpat, The Gecekondu: Rural Migration and Urbanization

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976); Sema Erder, Istanbul’a bir kent kondu:

Umraniye (Istanbul:

Iletis¸im, 1996); Tahire Erman, ‘Becoming “urban” or Remaining

“Rural”: The Views of Turkish Rural-to-Urban Migrants on the “Integration” Question’,

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 30, 4 (1998).

511

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ownership. In fact, compared to the within-the-walls density of pre-modern

European cities, Istanbul had always presented a picture of non-compactness,

a sparseness–afactupon which many a traveller remarked. When the city’s

population began to increase, it was the empty spaces within the inhabited

city that were ﬁrst ﬁlled with illegal squatter housing. The potential supply

of this inner-city land, however, was far too little to satisfy the needs of the

vast wave of migrants that began to arrive in the city after the end of the

war. Moreover, building houses that were too much in the public eye was not

always desirable for squatters. Hence, the natural space for expansion became

the immediate perimeter of the settled area: land that was primarily public,

i.e. de facto ownerless, took priority. Fields outside the urban area, zoned for

agriculture or left for grazing, constituted the next category.

The picture that emerged when immigrants started settling in the city was

a jigsaw pattern of established private property, abandoned non-Muslim hold-

ings, vakıf land without claimants, former agricultural holdings and, above all,

various kinds of publicly owned land, translated to a similarly unpredictable

intertwining of zoned and gecekondu settlements, resulting in a surprising

juxtaposition of villas and expensive blocks of ﬂats with shacks, even in the

wealthiest neighbourhoods of the city. The principal factor permitting this

development was the inability – or the unwillingness – of the state either to

provide housing to the immigrants or to institute a regime of enforceable

private property. Public authorities simply yielded to inertia, a strategy which

contributed to the chaotic development of the city and to the emergence of

the legal–illegal dichotomy. ‘Illegal’ settlement occurred in places where squat-

ters encountered the least resistance. Accordingly, the pattern of settlements

has resulted in one of the most dispersed and low-density habitations in the

world. The Istanbul metropolitan area now extends almost 100 kilometres on

an east–west axis paralleling the shores of the Marmara Sea, in a band whose

width varies between 10 and 20 kilometres.

The high proportion of ‘illegal’ housing shows that ofﬁcial recognition was

not easily granted. Except in the old city or middle-class neighbourhoods exist-

ing within ‘modern’ property regulations, the issue of whether a construction

was actually ﬁnished was always open to question. Following political sig-

nals, usually on the eve of an election, hurried construction activity would

often add new ﬂoors to existing buildings. Municipal services usually arrived

soon after a neighbourhood evolved. There were very few cases of ongoing

ofﬁcial vigilance against illegal construction: all sides were aware that once a

neighbourhood or even a single house was inhabited, the likelihood that the

authorities would tear it down decreased drastically. With the addition of new

512

A brief history of modern Istanbul

ﬂoors as circumstances permitted, the life cycle of a squatter neighbourhood

was such that, after a few elections, it could become an area of multiple-storey

apartment buildings. In the periphery of the city, shantytowns of such apart-

ment buildings have evolved as quasi-autonomous settlements where they

provide employment and supply most of the middle-range functions and ser-

vices expected of second- or third-order nodes in an urban hierarchy. In fact,

it would not be too inaccurate to think of Istanbul as a conglomerate of such

gecekondu districts with limited organic unity.

Along with population increase, economic transformation brought about

by national development, and a greater exposure to post-war consumption

norms, the ‘legal’, zoned, urban area also expanded, responding to middle-

class demand. This was a trend that consolidated social differentiation where

the movement was from heterogeneous neighbourhoods in the old city to

newly created, more homogeneous neighbourhoods reﬂecting a spatial divi-

sion consonant with an increasingly complex economy. As Istanbul quickly

became the growth pole of a relatively successful process of national develop-

ment based on import-substituting industrialisation, incomes increased, con-

sumption patterns changed and the growing middle class began to purchase

consumer durables widely. These processes led to a new pattern of demand

for housing. Larger kitchens and bathrooms, constructed with the products

of a booming construction materials industry churning out ceramic goods,

tiles, and chromed ﬁxtures, began to set the standard, requiring blocks of ﬂats,

preferably in newly emerging ‘middle-class’ neighbourhoods.

The evolution of middle-class neighbourhoods was speciﬁc in terms of

urban geography. Parcellisation of gardens belonging to old Ottoman summer

houses occurred mostly along the Marmara shore, and dominantly on the

Asian side, while cooperatives developing public land operated predominantly

in the highlands of the European side. These centres of gravity of middle-class

habitation emerged as the counterweight to gecekondu development within

the urban ecology of Istanbul. The old city neighbourhoods, which were left

behind when those who could afford ﬂats in the new developments moved

19 U

gur Tanyeli, Istanbul 1900–2000: konutu ve modernles¸meyi metropolden okumak (Istanbul:

Akın Nalca Yayını, 2004); C¸a

glar Keyder, ‘The housing market from informal to global’,

in C¸ . Keyder (ed.), Istanbul between the Global and the Local (Boulder: Rowman &

Littleﬁeld, 1999). A crucial factor in the middle-class construction boom was a new

law permitting independent ownership of apartments (condominium) in a residential

building. Until then, ownership of ﬂats had existed on a cooperative basis, with individ-

uals holding shares in the land on which the building was constructed. With the new

legal situation, the growing middle classes became full owners of their homes. During

the 1960s, ownership of a newly built ﬂat (rather than a house in the suburbs) became

the middle-class aspiration.

513