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

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out, turned into less desirable areas, providing housing to the old, downwardly

mobile urban population. Even the highest-rentareas near Beyo

glu succumbed

to this process of declassement until they returned as desirable spaces through

gentriﬁcation in the 1990s.

The residential development that changed the face of the city meant that

the vast majority of the housing stock in Istanbul is the product of recent

decades, with specimens of nineteenth-century urbanism being conﬁned to a

few districts. This wave also signalled an enormous potential for accumula-

tion where urban rent, the increasing value of real estate, gave something to

everyone who participated in the rush. The old inhabitants of Istanbul gained

from their earlier access to opportunities: the minority who owned detached

houses with gardens had apartment buildings constructed on the land where

they could sell the ﬂats; others had links to surrounding rural areas where land

could be subdivided into building lots and sold to new inhabitants. The new

immigrants to the city beneﬁted, in proportion to the time of their arrival,

from having settled in relatively more central districts. Especially after the

authorities relented in the 1980s, and permitted formalisation of titles mak-

ing it possible to convert the original shanties to relatively sturdy apartment

buildings, the gains accruing to the original owners were substantial.

All this construction activity allowed for economic opportunity in various

ﬁelds. New immigrants without education or skills often found their ﬁrst,

informal, employment in construction sites, especially when there was some

relationship such as distant kinship or a shared province or region of origin

with the small-scale contractors who organised the construction. Thus, Istan-

bul’s population explosion and construction boom, as in all rapidly growing

cities, became a huge machine for integrating the new inhabitants through

job creation, and for permitting the old inhabitants to access some of the new

wealth that was being generated through the growing demand and higher

prices for better located real estate. This pattern implausibly survived through

many decades, validating the old adage that ‘Istanbul’s streets are paved with

gold’. Only after the 1980s, under the impact of the discipline imposed by

globalisation, did the exigencies of the capitalist market put an end to the

perpetual ﬂow of value to everyone involved, and the continuous possibility

of integrating the new immigrants.

Istanbul was a fairly typical Third World sprawl in 1980. The old city

retained most of its glory and the older neighbourhoods some of their charm,

but the overwhelming impression was one of dilapidation and crowdedness.

20 Melih Pınarcıo

glu and O

guz

Is¸ık, N

obetles¸e yoksulluk (Istanbul:

Iletis¸im, 2005).

514

A brief history of modern Istanbul

Environmental degradation in the industrial periphery of the city

was

matched by the lack of urban amenities in the shantytowns; a constant activ-

ity of construction produced the ever-present mud and dust that plagued the

streets, and there was an unavoidable gloom of air pollution emanating from

old cars and cheap coal. But the city attracted investment and immigrants,

and served as the premier engine of growth for the country. Its bustle was real

even if it could not be maintained in the face of market liberalism. Further-

more, it became the principal transmission mechanism for the urbanisation

and ‘modernisation’ of the peasantry. At any given time no more than one-

third of its employment was in the formal sector; but most households held

one person who was formally employed and could therefore guarantee some

stable income and access to social services. There was a widely shared belief

that informal employment was temporary, that eventually all (male) heads of

household would attain formal status. Istanbul was responsible for the absorp-

tion of a quarter of the new urban population in Turkey during the period

from 1960 to 1980.

Under the impact of globalisation

The most recent phase in the city’s history can best be narrated through

the construct of globalisation. This is not necessarily to argue that Istanbul

has become a ‘global city’, but that its transformation has been inescapably

dominated by accelerated dynamics characteristic of the ﬂows and networks

deﬁning the new world.

These are economic networks that create urban

spaces to accommodate the logic of capital, and cultural networks that seem

to dictate tastes, dispositions, claims to status and, more mundanely, con-

sumption habits. In all ﬁelds governing social conduct, there are transformed

structured hierarchies aligning according to the dictates of global vocabu-

lary. The upheavals are traceable in the separate but combined ﬁelds of the art

world, culinary practices and academia, as well as in professions and the media.

The new orderings are consolidated through distinctions carefully produced

in residential choice and material consumption.

The new global networks penetrate urban life and restructure the econ-

omy, introducing new types of employment and levels of income for some

that are commensurate with the wealthier areas of the world. As in other

21 The best treatment of the subject is Latife Tekin’s novel, Berji Kristin: Tales from the

Garbage Hills (New York: Marion Boyars, 1992).

22 For an early diagnosis see C¸a

glar Keyder and Ays¸e

Onc

u, ‘Globalization of a Third-World

Metropolis: Istanbul in the 1980s’, Review (Summer 1994).

515

c¸a

glar keyder

globalising cities of the Third World, Istanbul has experienced the shock of

rapid integration into transnational networks and markets and witnessed the

emergence of new social groups since the 1980s.

A thin social layer of a new

bourgeois and professional class has adopted the lifestyle and consumption

habits of their transnational counterparts.Globalised lifestyles,shoppingmalls,

gated communities and gentriﬁed neighbourhoods that replicate similar ones

in other globalising cities are stock features of the literature on the new city.

Istanbul was already the centre of high-level services oriented to the national

economy during the period when it served as the primate city. Trade and

ﬁnance were centred in the city, as were the small communications and media

sectors catering to the country as a whole. The latter sectors included pub-

lishing and cinema. Television had only started to broadcast in the mid-1970s,

and consisted of three public channels based in Ankara. During the 1980s there

was an explosion of media: with de facto deregulation following some years of

‘pirate’ broadcasting, the number of television channels reached twenty. The

number has subsequently climbed to perhaps twice that, and many produc-

tion companies have developed. A similar trend can be observed with radio

stations, which also exploded in numbers following deregulation. The music

industry owes its rapid growth to the proliferation of cassettes, again in the

1980s, and has now matured and entered into partnerships with global media

giants.

The growth spurt in publishing came later, with the increase in con-

sumption of magazines and books towards the end of the century. Cinema,

which had entered a period of stagnation following its exuberant activity dur-

ing the 1970s, has revived most successfully, again in the late 1990s. Turkey

now has the highest proportion in Europe of local ﬁlm revenues in the box

ofﬁce. In addition to capturing national audiences, Turkish ﬁlms have also

become perennial favourites in world festivals. As incomes increased, so did

the proportion of employment in culture industries and advertising, and Istan-

bul naturally monopolised these sectors, providing the entire country with

23 Istanbul’s mayor in the 1980s, Bedrettin Dalan, was a bold public entrepreneur who

launched an urban renewal campaign dislocating thousands of ‘old economy’ shops and

workshops and opening swaths of Golden Horn, Bosporus and Marmara waterfront to

parks and footpaths. His tenure marked the beginning of what has become a consistent

theme in urban government: the need to boost Istanbul as a global city attracting

business and tourists. See Oktay Ekinci, Istanbul’u sarsan on yıl: 1983–1 993 (Istanbul:

Anahtar Kitaplar, 1994).

24 N. Tokatlı and Y. Boyacı, ‘The Changing Morphology of Commercial Activity in Istan-

bul’, Cities 16, 3 (1999); Ays¸e

Onc

u, ‘The myth of the “Ideal Home” travels across cultural

borders to Istanbul’, in Ays¸e

Onc

u and Petra Weyland (eds.), Space, Culture and Power:

New Identities in Globalizing Cities (London: Zed Books, 1997).

25 Martin Stokes, ‘Sounding out: the culture industries and the globalization of Istanbul’,

in Keyder (ed.), Istanbul.

516

A brief history of modern Istanbul

its vision, narrative and taste. Newspapers, magazines and ‘reality’ program-

ming on television disseminate the liaisons and concerns of its celebrities to

the entire country.

Tourism is another sector that has expanded rapidly during the most recent

period. Visitors to Turkey often spend a day or two in the city and move on to

the Mediterranean coast; the real potential for Istanbul and the higher value

added is in conference tourism. This potential ﬁrst came to attention during the

UN Habitat meeting of 1996; the city has since steadily improved its position,

with convention halls, ﬁve-star hotels, restaurants and other venues multiply-

ing. Nonetheless, boutiques, caf

es, upscale eateries – the usual accoutrements

of the city as a consumption artefact – represent only a small fraction of the

city’s employment base.

The tourism sector could be expected to constitute

a substantial source of employment, but this is a project that remains to be

realised – possibly in the near future.

Globalisation of Istanbul did not proceed at a sufﬁcient pace to provide

momentum for highly remunerated professional employment in global sec-

tors, such as ﬁnance and business services. Despite the inﬂow of foreign capital

in the new millennium, the city has not emerged as a regional centre. The

predominant orientation of its business service sectors is still the national

market, which limits the scope of employment generation in the city. Most

of the new jobs that are supposed to substitute for the loss of employment in

manufacturing are in personal services. Yet, without a sufﬁcient weight of the

population (high-income professionals) whose consumption pattern would

justify the expansion of such personal services, this rubric remains limited in

scope. In fact, in the new service sectors in Istanbul, notably the new shop-

ping centres, large retail complexes and tourism-related hotels, restaurants

and shops, a new feature is the employment of young women. These are

mostly secondary-school graduates, and their entry into the labour force is

a novel phenomenon signalling the major shift in employment opportunities

from manufacturing to services, from male to female, from brawn to cultural

capital, and from local to global.

At the other extreme are inhabitants of the city who no longer have the possi-

bility of successfully incorporating themselves into the transforming structures

26 Asu Aksoy, K

ureselles¸me ve Istanbul’da istihdam (Istanbul: Friedrich Ebert Vakfı, 1996).

27 Over 42 per cent of the labour force in Istanbul is still in industry, accounting for 28 per

cent of Turkey’s industrial labour: see Turkiye

Istatistik Kurumu, T

urkiye istatistik yıllı

gı

(Ankara: T

IK, 2006), p. 163. This ﬁgure may be misleading, however, since it is based on

a total labour-force ﬁgure of 3.5 million which implies that only one out of three persons

is working or seeking employment. It is likely that the number of jobs in the motley

category of services is underestimated.

517

c¸a

glar keyder

of employment produced by processes of globalisation. The outward signs of

income and consumption polarisation, results of difﬁculties in incorporation,

are difﬁcult to ignore. Poverty has become visible during the last decade, as

have obscene displays of wealth. Practices more often associated with Latin

American levels of income inequality, such as scavenging in garbage bins,

the cartonero phenomenon of collecting salvageables in wealthier neighbour-

hoods, begging, and street children in busy intersections attacking SUVs with

squeegees, have become more common. In certain neighbourhoods at night,

it looks as if the largest category of employment is valet parking and body-

guards. Istanbul has lost its relatively homogeneous character and assumed

one more commonly associated with extreme disparities of income, wealth

and power.

These disparities parallel similar developments in other globalising cities

around the world. The situation in Istanbul was exacerbated by the migrations

of the 1990s, which predominantly originated in the war-torn areas of east-

ern and south-eastern Anatolia.

This movement was primarily due to forced

migration of the mostly Kurdish population, and the newcomers enjoyed none

of the built-in mechanisms for alleviating the problems of integration that had

been characteristic of the migration experience of the previous period: with

the end of the era of successful developmentalism, the mechanisms of incor-

poration had begun to fail. Changes in the labour market and employment

opportunities resulted both from the national trend in the relative decline

of the formal sector and from the deindustrialisation of Istanbul’s economy.

Import-substituting industries of the developmentalist era gave way to less

structured patterns of employment, and the formal sector began to lose its

relative weight.

A parallel development was the gradual privatisation and commodiﬁcation

of land under the impact of a demand generated through the transformation

of the urban economy, partly through globalisation and in part as a function of

more entrenched market relations. After almost half a century of accommo-

dation, during which populism protected the new immigrants and public land

was ambiguously transformed into private property, land has ﬁnally become a

28 C¸a

glar Keyder, ‘Globalization and Social Exclusion in Istanbul’, International Journal of

Urban and Regional Research 29, 1 (March 2005).

29 Dilek Kurban, Deniz Y

ukseker, Ays¸e Bet

ul C¸ elik, Turgay

Unalan and A. Tamer Aker,

‘Zorunlu G

oc¸’ ile y

uzles¸mek: T

urkiye’de yerinden edilme sonrası vatandas¸lı

gın ins¸ası (Istanbul:

TESEV, 2006).

30 See Jenny White, Money Makes us Relatives: Women’s Labor in Urban Turkey (Austin:

University of Texas Press, 1994); Ays¸e Bu

gra and C¸a

glar Keyder, New Poverty and the

Changing Welfare Regime of Turkey (Ankara: UNDP, 2003).

518

A brief history of modern Istanbul

jealously guarded commodity. The consequences are evident: the possibility of

land occupation and informal housing construction no longer exists. As most

of the immigration since the 1990s has been of a forced nature – the result of

being driven out or running away from the war – most of these migrants have

no place to go back to. Their villages of origin have been razed to the ground

or have ceased to exist as economic units. More importantly, ‘social capital’,

ordinarily available to new immigrants, is likely to be limited in the absence

of a more continuous pattern of chain migration. The new immigrants have

to enter the city as tenants, and often into the least desirable, the cheapest and

the meanest dwelling units.

Of all the non-formal dimensions of social welfare, the most effective during

the entire developmentalist era had been the implicit policy permitting land

occupation and construction of informal housing for the new immigrants.

With the disappearance of such a crucial element of social integration at

economic, political and cultural levels, there is now a real possibility that

an ossiﬁed underclass may develop. Without the grounding accorded by a

socially constituted neighbourhood, the new immigrants cannot count on

the information, the mutuality and generalised reciprocity enjoyed during

the earlier era of urbanisation. There is, of course, a mismatch between the

kind of employment created in a globalising city and the skills and cultural

capital of these new immigrants. Under these circumstances, socio-economic

integration through wage employment seems a more remote possibility for

the new immigrants than it was for earlier settlers.

Added to these material constraints is the political shift away from pop-

ulism and towards the acceptance of the market as the arbiter of allocation –

a new social and legal imaginary that has been internalised by politicians and

residents alike.

Hitherto seen as poor people without resources to ﬁnd ade-

quate shelter, the migrants are now regarded as invaders of public property

and beneﬁciaries of unfair privilege. National and local politicians are both

less willing and less able to engage in a clientelistic exchange with them. The

authorities’ newfound concerns for the environment may be mentioned in

this context to illustrate the sea change. There have been several cases where

the mayor and other ofﬁcials have condemned illegal housing that conﬂicts

31 Ays¸e Bu

gra and C¸a

glar Keyder, ‘Turkey’s Welfare Regime in Transformation’, Journal of

European Social Policy (August 2006).

32 Ziya

Onis¸, State and Market: The Political Economy of Turkey in Comparative Perspective

(Istanbul: Bo

gazic¸i University Press, 1998); Nes¸e Balkan and Sungur Savran (eds.), The

Ravages of Neo-Liberalism: Economy, Society, and Gender in Turkey (Huntington, NY: Nova

Science Press, 2002).

519

c¸a

glar keyder

with environmental concerns, such as shanties built on creek beds. Already in

the 1990s, the occupation of new lands had practically stopped. The principal

dynamic was instead the conversion of shanty houses to multi-storey apart-

ment buildings. The change was due, however, not to greater vigilance of the

legislature or the judiciary, but to the reluctance of the local power holders

to aid and abet in the illegal settlement of newcomers. Crucially, there was a

change of mood among the locally elected mayors, who no longer based their

political fortunes on the number of votes the new settlers would provide. The

situation in the new millennium reﬂects a more thought-out and concerted

strategy, implemented in all of Istanbul, which arguably is an extension of an

attitudinal change at the level of national policy. It seeks to re-regulate land

that was already ceded to the squatters; it attempts to create a ‘lawful’ city out

of the chaotic string of villages whose agglomeration Istanbul has become.

New legislation (Kentsel D

us¸

um – Urban Transformation – enacted in 2005)

gives extraordinary powers to municipalities to clear illegal construction and

forcibly move their inhabitants to designated neighbourhoods. The Istanbul

municipality has announced its plans to demolish 85,000 gecekondus and move

their inhabitants to mass housing.

The new attitude is partly the result of a growing demand for land more

typical of a consolidated urban economy than of a rapidly growing Third

World agglomeration. Istanbul’s global links increase the need for the kind

of land use that reﬂects its location on some of these intensifying networks.

This trend should also be interpreted as part of the new optimism for EU

accession, which creates incentives to engage in future-oriented projects and

attempts to upgrade the city for positioning various components of the urban

fabric – infrastructure, educational institutions, tourist sites and, most crucially,

the legal framework – to better accommodate the expected intensiﬁcation of

relations with Europe and the world. The other source of this development

is the new urban coalition, which would like to consolidate the city around

their image of gentility – a gentriﬁcation not only of chosen neighbourhoods,

but also of the urban space as a whole, effected through its arteries, public

arenas, and buildings. The city looked more ﬁnished at the end of the century,

with proper pavements, street lights and well-tended green spaces. There was

a general upgrading of buildings and shops, new caf

es and restaurants, and an

apparent desire to paint buildings, which was a radical change from the drab,

unﬁnished fac¸ades of the previous period.

The change in the attitudes of the urban establishment is widespread: the

city government, real estate concerns, the bourgeoisie in its manifold mani-

festations, and the top echelons of the civil society, including the media and

520

A brief history of modern Istanbul

the city-boosting foundations funded by businessmen, share it.

During the

initial period, in the 1950s and 1960s, this elite regarded the newcomers not

so much with suspicion as with disdain. Even as they gradually became the

majority and elected their own candidates to political ofﬁce, the shantytown-

dwelling migrants still treated the city anomalously as a temporary abode,

in a more or less accepted permanent metic status. During this period, the

migrant population succeeded in taking over urban government, resulting in

a succession of populist mayors who saw the city as an ever-expanding arrival

hall with attendant business opportunities. Urban growth coalitions in Istan-

bul have been committed to the image of the global city as an ideal and a

project, with policies aimed at making Istanbul a gentriﬁed city pleasing to

the tourist gaze. This transformation, in fact, started in the 1980s, but was

halted under weak governments and populist mayors. It was not until the

1990s that urban entrepreneurship, civic pride and the attitude that the city

was a resource that had to be protected became more prevalent, with business

associations, international agencies and the central government subscribing to

the agenda. The coalition members have invested in tourism (conferences, fes-

tivals and exhibits), services oriented to the global market (hospitals, upscale

shopping centres) and expensive real estate, both as new construction and

gentriﬁed neighbourhoods. One consequence has been the acceleration of de-

industrialisation or, more accurately, the expulsion of factory production to

new centres developed outside Istanbul. There is, however, thriving workshop-

and home-based manufacturing activity in the poor and peripheral neighbour-

hoods, which beneﬁt from proximity to retail and export hubs, but are distant

enough from the middle-class centre to still enjoy a relatively low cost of living.

This polarity is visible in space as well, with most of the city centre becoming

primarily middle class, expensive and marginalising, while the peripheries look

no different from Anatolian small towns. For the moment the objectives of

urban upgrading cannot reach these outer circles, and it is unlikely that the

economy will receive sufﬁcient economic boost in its global orientation to

capture the excluded geographies.

Urbanisation dynamics and population prospects have deﬁnitely changed

for the city. While the growth rate of Turkey’s population has declined overall,

to slightly higher than 1 per cent, de-ruralisation will continue for several more

decades. But it is not likely that Istanbul will remain the most favoured des-

tination. In addition to the relatively inhospitable environment for migrants,

33 Sibel Yardımcı, K

ureselles¸en

Istanbul’da bienal. Kentsel de

gis¸im ve festivalizm (Istanbul:

Iletis¸im Yayınları, 2005).

521

c¸a

glar keyder

the cost of living in the city is easily double or higher than that in small towns

in the provinces. A number of cities are developing as regional centres, and

these medium-sized towns with populations of around a million are the most

rapidly growing settlements. Some of the more recent migrants may return

to their regions, even if not to their villages. They might not have come to

Istanbul in the ﬁrst place had it not been for the forced and hasty movement out

of war zones. There is also a new outﬂow of retired people moving to coastal

areas where the climate and the prices are more manageable, in addition to a

movement of entrepreneurs attracted by the tourist trade in coastal areas of

the south. As a result, the growth of Istanbul’s population has slowed down.

These trends signify a future that is closer to the European model, with the

city centre as the tourist showcase, full of restaurants, caf

es and entertainment

venues, which share the space with upscale residential neighbourhoods. There

are sections of the urban geography, just outside the central areas, that have

evolved as the site of ofﬁce towers, where modern business services and cul-

ture industries, along with urban malls housing shops catering to the middle

class are located (Levent, Maslak). Circumscribing the centre are the old and

new peripheral neighbourhoods, ranging in income and prestige more or less

in correlation with the time of establishment.

The largest city in Europe?

Turkey’s unresolved bid for membership in the EU has of course affected

Istanbul’s fortunes as well. The current trends in Europe point to an acceler-

ated movement, especially of young people, to all the ‘fun’ spots within the

Union. There is also a growing demand, from a somewhat older set, for sec-

ond homes in fashionable cities. Istanbul has entered the sights of such mobile

cosmopolitans: there is a growing population of students, summer travellers,

young entrepreneurs opening caf

es or making ﬁlms, and an older population

investing in the newly gentrifying neighbourhoods such as Cihangir, T

unel,

Arnavutk

oy and Kuzguncuk. The number of expatriates increases, while real-

tors wait in anticipation. At the same time, there are visible signs of a cos-

mopolitisation from below, with the arrival of illegal immigrants and refugees

from the less developed lands of Asia and Africa. Despite the difﬁculty involved

in becoming an EU country, immigrants think of Istanbul as a way station from

which to launch a bid for entry into a richer country. Finally, there is an increas-

ing population of immigrants, especially women, from the former Soviet-bloc

countries of Moldova, Romania, Bulgaria, Georgia, Armenia and the Ukraine,

who come to the city as tourists and overstay as workers. They are employed in

522

A brief history of modern Istanbul

the so-called suitcase trade as shop assistants because they know the languages

spoken by the buyers who come to Istanbul to shop for garments to resell in

the former Eastern Bloc countries. There is also a sizeable market for the

now-unemployed teachers and nurses of former socialist regimes (of Eastern

Europe as well as Central Asia) as domestic workers taking care of children and

the elderly in middle-class households. As can be imagined, the numbers of

such workers in shops, nannies, maids and caretakers (perhaps a hundred thou-

sand illegal and much fewer legal foreign nationals), while attracting media

attention, really constitute a very small percentage of the total population,

which exceeds 10 million. All these ﬂows have, however, made Istanbul into a

pole of attraction and increasingly created areas that resemble the trendy ‘old

city’ neighbourhoods of European cities.

If the European vocation succeeds, Istanbul will have completed a full cycle

in its passage, reborn as part of a new empire, anchoring the eastern end

of the Union. In the era of global ﬂows, its economic vitality is a promise

that transcends its role as engine of growth for the country; it presages an

independence and autonomy waiting to be harnessed into larger networks.

523