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Index Self Service City: İstanbul | Imprint |
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Orhan Esen |
The wheel turns full circle. Old middle class
and post-gecekondu As compared to today the living conditions before
1980, in the times of the so-called "anarchy" - the excuse
for the 1980 military intervention - and of massive urban growth,
were certainly tantamount to an "idyllic equilibrium and harmony".
This situation continued until the coup d'état and the introduction
of aggressive money-making as "highest human ideal and virtue"
under Özal. Twenty years later parts of the old middle class,
especially the wage-dependent "white collars", the educated
classes, are faced with the fact that they have lost out to the
new social climbers, and find it difficult to cope with this situation.
The concept of learning from the post-1950 city is now being replaced
by new mindsets, such as suppression and denial of urban images
and facts, production of often pseudo-historical urban phantasms
and legends. The impotence people feel in the face of the new upper
classes manifests itself in a mixture of contempt and fear of contact.
But there is a different attitude towards the new middle classes
in the post-gecekondu: The concept of varoş reflects the anxieties of the old, "cultivated" middle class. It is the definite linguistic inscription of the rift between the two parties (which is basically the result of economic competition for urban land), i.e., the old middle class and the new gecekondu middle class, which have continuously drifted apart since 1980. The varoş is now a perfect culprit for anything the middle class is worried about: deficient quality in buildings and the associated earthquake risks, colonization of water reserves, pollution, infrastructural shortcomings, rural machismo and discrimination of women, the mafia. Never before have the intra-urban boundary lines been so clear-cut: On the one hand, the apartman milieu, outwardly politically correct and cosmopolitan, always voting left-national, often impoverished; on the other, the post-gecekondu milieu, seeking to safeguard its economic status, where people increasingly like to see themselves as İstanbuler and always vote right-wing (with Islamic, liberal, and conservative undertones) or Kurdish-leftist (e.g., Gazi) parties. These two antagonists aggressively strive for a dominance of their respective cultural code of conduct in public space. The rift between the two urban milieus is evident in symbolic debates, revolving for instance around the headscarf or barbecuing in public spaces. On the other hand, the term varoş through its uncritical adoption by the old middle class, the main target group of the press, has become a populist weapon of exclusion. It diverts the educated citizens' attention from the true war arena. The aggressive activities and projects of the new big players - especially in the ecologically sensitive north, the water protection zones and the rural environs - is in sharp competition to those of the "mafia-style" post-gecekondu milieu. In the wake of an ideological re-orientation affecting all milieus and strata, the "distorted urbanization" discourse in the nineties has met surprisingly broad acceptance, and even underwent the strange transformation into becoming a part of the official rhetoric. For the time being, this language - which has its ideological roots in the western-elitist thinking of the early modern "North İstanbuler", containing class-specific traits and being consistent with the dual reality of the time - has come to an end as the classes it belonged to deceased. In the classical gecekondu era the above attitude had weakened and was confined to rather isolated, right-wing intellectual circles (<.> Köksal). But its intellectual renaissance sprang from the milieu of left-wing orientated architects, no less, following the example of "socialist town planning" (<.> Gümüş). It became actual mainstream in the nineties when the post-gecekondu was in full bloom, whilst the left-wing national policy associated itself with the cooperative movement and was able to present a "clean" alternative of regulated urbanization which was acceptable to the middle classes. Thus, the concept of "distorted urbanisation" was accepted as a target value in the bureaucratic discourse although this kind of language, among other things, highlights the deficits of official functionaries. And finally, it was passed on by professionals of the building sector interested in jobs with the big building companies to the industry, which found it convenient to use. The final destination was its adoption by the media, which introduced the new non-place, the varoş and its inhabitants, the maganda (<.> Öncü). After all, all this might sell as a leftist invention! _______________________________________ * Many thanks to Stephan Lanz, Cihan Arın and Natascha Haghighian for their comments on the manuscript and Kim Hörbe for her editorial work.
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