Orhan Esen
Learning from İstanbul
The city of İstanbul: Material production and production of the discourse

Apartman: The genesis of the small-scale capitalist yapsat system in a middle-class context
The migration into İstanbul after the end of World War II was not limited to people fleeing rural poverty. The rural middle class mobilized too, thereby boosting the demand for living space in the big city. The massive production of the so-called apartman, the multi-storey building with owner-occupied apartments, diminished the city's prevailing architectural heritage of single family houses to the point of near-extinction. It also lead to a drastic re-compaction of the already built-up city centre. At the same time, the small capital-financed apartman enabled the political parties from the middle class to defend and slightly enhance their position during the turbulent decades of rapid urbanization. The protagonist in this development is a so-called yapsatçi (2) and the magic formula is called "plots for free". The apartman production created free plots on already built-up land. Whilst the gecekondu estates achieved this through occupation, the new variant was facilitated by a Mediterranean-style contractual arrangement: kat karşılıği inşaat, "building service for storeys". (3) The owner of a single-family house appears only as property owner, and his house as an urban by-product. The owner then contributes the value of his property to the newly created joint-venture with the yapsatçi, but does not receive any cash. In return, he does not have to finance the building work. All the yapsatçi has to do is contribute his inexpensive building competence. He, too, is exempt from an advance-financing obligation. Both parties share the apartments to be built. The construction site is financed in instalments by the buyers of the yapsatçi. The system works on the grounds that the total building costs are lower than the proceeds from the sale of the apartments the yapsatçi is entitled to, which often leaves a small profit margin - provided that the influx and need for housing of the affluent middle class continues. The buyers profit from the favourable sales rates of the freehold apartments, even more so as the land prices have been spirited away from the calculation and the workers commuting between gecekondu and province do not make a big financial difference. By working the construction site, these workers now have a chance to gain a foothold in the city. While the land owner has lost a certain quality of life (house and garden in the city centre), he now owns several self-contained apartments (albeit of minor quality) which he may use for himself, or leave to family, rent out or resell.

This marked the beginning of the socio-economic career of the small businessman yapsatçi as major agent, who "made" or "sold" İstanbul, thus leaving a stronger mark on the built-up environment and the interpersonal relations than anybody else did. As a societal type he used his very limited resources and his know-how, without any provision of outside capital, to increase the building density of an entire city, thereby helping the middle class to maintain and consolidate its economic standing at these times of massive urbanization. From another point of view, he exterminated İstanbul's entire heritage of civil architecture within the space of one generation. He transformed the city beyond recognition.

This model transformed the greatest parts of the inner-city districts of Şişli, Beşiktaş, Fatih and Kadiköy and some parts of quarters like Beyoğlu, Eminönü and Üsküdar as well as the Bosporus districts Sariyer and Beykoz. The most important, and maybe the only, intervention of the public planners during this period (1950-80) was the thorough, car-oriented restructuring of said space.

Post-gecekondu: Gecekondus as small-scale capitalist enterprises
As the both yapsat system of the middle classes and the garden towns of the new workers came upon natural, geographic boundaries by the end of the seventies, they were facing a decisive crisis. There was no public land left for occupation, nor inner-city property for joint ventures with the yapsatçis. But immigration continued regardless, and the high demand for cheap housing persisted. The credit for recognizing the "huge potential" inherent in the intersection of the two systems goes to the neoliberal head of state Turgut Özal and his "legendary" mayor Dalan, who translated it into "straightforward political action". When in 1983 the neoliberal Mother Country Party (ANAP) won the first free election after the 1980 coup, the potential of the yapsat model was adopted and used for the gecekondus. This marked the beginning of an urban re-compaction which was to be far more extensive than that of the middle-class districts. Here, too, the available locational advantages were fully exploited and consolidated.

While the gecekondu amnesties of the fifties, sixties and seventies had been put forward for humane reasons, the protagonists now shamelessly came up with free-enterprise arguments. Under the ANAP government, an entire nation is re-trained to become speculators, stock exchange observers and brokers, and the gecekondu people - tired of the political turbulence of the past thirty years - voluntarily adopt the new course. This is a time of using money to make money. According to Özal, the legalized gecekondu estates are vintage seed capital. Moreover, the country is in the midst of a tough inflation - to keep afloat, people have to invest their capital to good account. Turkey is declared "Little America" and the gecekondu is beginning to look like a Wild West scenery.

The gecekondu people, now active in district committees and offices, are busy with the drafting of land use schemes for their own settlements: More often than not, they use so-called revision plans to retrospectively lend an aura of legality to buildings that have long since been furnished with additional storeys. Whenever possible, careers are made in several parties at a time. The news about the arrival of the era of the "end of all ideologies" has been fast to spread. People are free to switch between left-wing, liberal, Islamic or nationalist factions in the district councils, convincing themselves that this is all about the distribution of the return-to-land within clientele networks, while the true practice of local politics and ideology planning remains fairly unaffected. When the neo-liberal mayor Dalan is voted out of office in a spectacular show, his policy is adopted without change by his successors, social democrat Sözen and Islamist Erdogan. This was whitewashed with a bit of social pathos seventies-style, which definitely lacked credibility since the post-gecekondu represented a reality totally different from the original version, and social urban policy in the nineties was surely due to be redefined from scratch.

Even so, in many districts things were working out the way Özal had planned. Internal investments changed the appearance of the gecekondu areas fundamentally. If it were not for the few archetypal gecekondus half-sunk into the earth on the lots of the old, founding-era street grid, anybody looking with unknowing eyes at today's Zeytinburnu at the periphery of the old town would find it hard to imagine that this "middle class district" once used to be a gecekondu. By looking at the street pattern alone, the unwitting visitor to İstanbul is no longer able to tell apart the old districts settled before 1950 from the newer ones which were developed by way of the gecekondus at a later time (<.> Özüekren).

<< previous page

-3-

next page >>