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Index Self Service City: İstanbul | Imprint |
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Stephan Lanz
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The city as village Kuzguncuk, on the other hand, is one of those inner-city areas imbued with the myth of multicultural Istanbul. Situated directly on the Asian side of the Bosporus, Spanish Jews settled here as early as the 15th century, followed by Armenians, Greeks and only much later by Turks. The quarter, in which synagogues and Orthodox churches are neighbours and a mosque and an Armenian church share the same piece of property as twin buildings, counted as a cosmopolitan paradise that lasted for centuries - until, in the wake of the pogroms in the 1950s, the non-Muslim population left the city. Kuzguncuk fell into oblivion, the gigantic growth and the modernist redevelopment of Istanbul hardly had an effect on its substance: In the 1980s, a number of artists discovered Kuzguncuk as a historical idyll, as one of the few places bearing witness to the cosmopolitan Istanbul believed destroyed. Since then, this district reminiscent of a tranquil small town with ten thousand inhabitants that can be reached in fifteen minutes from the city centre via the Bosporus ferry has attracted numerous artists, intellectuals and Western immigrants, who for the most part bought and refurbished historical building volumes. Today the quarter accommodates architects' offices, advertising agencies, galleries, Western-style metropolitan cafés, and a daily soap. With Kuzguncuk and Gazimahallesi, then, the symbols of two Istanbuls contrast each other, the revived cosmopolitan metropolis, as it were, and the often-hated informal city of immigration. How does the access to the city differ in both quarters? In 1988, at 22, Hasan moved with his parents to Alibeyköy, a gecekondu next to Gazi, not because of the "enticements of the city" but because they were discriminated against as Alevits in their hometown of Erzurum. Relatives lived in Alibeyköy, and there was "collective work with my family". Thirty years ago his uncle had been one of the founders of the gecekondu and had meanwhile established an economic existence. Hasan's wife, whom he met there, is also from Erzurum, but had already arrived in Istanbul as a child. The couple belonging to a radical left-wing political group decided to move to Gazi because many Alevits and their political friends lived there. They purchased an empty gecekondu from a real-estate agent and refurbished it: "We didn't even intend to purchase a house of our own, that was not part of our life plan but was a forced upon us by Turkey. As a tenant, you have no rights here. A house we own is our only economic security", they explain. As a member of a "people's council" founded four years ago in Gazi, Hasan is committed to improving the infrastructure and taking action against the threat of resettlement, which the city council has refrained from due to the strongly politicized residents. "The gecekondus are illegal, but at the same time, the city collects taxes from them: In Alibeyköy, people can go to the district administration and pay 2000 euros for a permit to build a storey. Yet it is not legal. The money is given to the district administration as a gift, so to speak". Even though he worked as a meter-reader for the municipal utility company until recently, he illegally taps the excessively priced electricity. He simultaneously allowed himself to be bribed by companies also illegally using electricity via manipulated readers. He justifies both with the argument that "the electricity illegally used by such companies corresponds with that of one hundred gecekondus. I earn about 170 euros a month, of which I spend 100 on driving to work. The utility company and the state know that the employees are bribed, because the wage is not high enough to live from". He recently became unemployed and is now trying to immigrate with his family to Berlin, where his younger brother already lives as a student and has a family. Hande, in contrast, grew up in middle-class Istanbul, went to a German school and later to Berlin to study. Back in Istanbul with her German husband, both are self-employed, she looked for a place to live with her nuclear family and met friends who had in the meantime moved to Kuzguncuk, a district they were hardly aware of before. She was attracted to the small-town tranquillity, the historical built volumes and the image of a polyglot location. They bought and refurbished an empty, historical residential building. Its conversion was only possible on account of "connections to the district administration" and the bribing of officials. Due to the ongoing gentrification the property prices had already risen sharply since the mid-1990s: "With this money we could have afforded a villa in a much nobler quarter, but we like it here. People know each other, neighbours say hello and look after the children, and the atmosphere is very special. The local artists, in particular, contribute to this". The wild urban development passed by Kuzguncuk without destroying what was old: "It's a bit like in a village". She can let her children play in the street here without apprehensions. "Everybody helps each other": She says there's a neighbourly community of mutual respect. However, contacts between the intellectuals and the old inhabitants and immigrants from the Black Sea seem to be limited to employing them as domestics and being served by them in shops. Her husband interjects that one lives here only in a scene, like one is familiar with from Berlin: "It's a bit like [the Berlin district of] Prenzlauer Berg, [...] it's in tune with our lifestyle". "You have to be a bit alternative", Hande adds, "to like it. We know enough people who turn up their noses because of the dirty streets when walking through the quarter". But she sends her children to a private school located elsewhere. She says that the public schools in Kuzguncuk have very few resources at their disposal and that the many children of the more or less uneducated residents of the neighbouring gecekondu who attend the school pose a threat to the quality of education. Particularly for these middle-class milieus, who find the streets of Kuzguncuk too dirty, a further form of neighbourly community-building has offered itself since the 1990s: suburbia and especially the gated community. Commercial management firms restrict access to these settlements built according to the American model. They are fenced in and guarded and lay out a comprehensive set of rules stipulating the way in which the houses are to be used. At the same time, they frequently provide hotel-like service packages and community-building leisure-time offers: "We sell lives and not houses", is the way a high-ranking manager of Kemer Country formulated this in the interview. It is one of the most luxurious settlements located in the northern outskirts of the city, with 3,000 inhabitants, its own reservoir, a golf-and-country club, as well as restaurants and shops. While such upper-class communities with their candy-coloured villas and a spatial structure organized in dead ends and street loops aesthetically resemble Californian suburbs, the so-called sites, as gated settlements of flats for the middle classes, are more reminiscent of South American gated communities. In terms of their degree of illegality, both hardly differ from the gecekondus. Often located beyond the city administration's sphere of responsibility, a village community or, in case of appropriate connections, the national Ministry of Construction assists in annulling Istanbul's municipal planning in order to illegally develop areas that are dedicated to the preservation of ground water or forests. For example, a highway leading to Kemer Country was approved by the ministry and co-financed by the developer, although it was not included in Istanbul's master plan which designates this area as a preservation zone. At the same time, the developer illegally sold forest property, which it had only leased, to private parties. Ayshe Öncü (1997) describes how with the emergence of colour TV and its series set in American suburbia the suburban residential building entered into the collective desire production of the Istanbul middle classes. However, just as important as the new longing for this Western ideological construction of the "ideal home" were nostalgic stories of Istanbul, which one remembered from one's youth as being "green" and "clean", where one could go fishing and picnic on the shore of the Bosporus. The middle classes interpreted the hybrid styles of music, language and fashion that started to spread in the 1980s as "pseudo-urbanity" and as a "soiling" of their modern Western lifestyle and they reacted to this with the search for "purity" and a "clean social environment": "The urban masses also include politically reviled characters such as the Islamist woman wearing a 'turban' and the extreme nationalist with his long unkempt moustache" (Ayata 2002: 28). According to Öncü, the familiar mixture of social and cultural spaces in Istanbul was perceived as "culturally polluted" by the middle classes and led them to seek commodified forms of a homogenous community. The desired distinction from the provincial, vulgar and uncivilized city crowd that supposedly does not know how to behave in public space (Öncü 1997: 67ff) is regarded as the central impetus for joining a commercially organized community of equals defined by practices of consumption. But since recently some gated communities in Istanbul
also address Islamic politicians and businesspeople, for example,
Hilal, half-moon in English, a newly constructed site for about
500 inhabitants in the Asian part of the city. "Our philosophy
is serenity", says Hilal's manager. The main difference to
other sites is a common room of worship and separate opening hours
of the indoor swimming pool for men and women. "Serenity",
huzur in Turkish, has a more ideological than physical meaning
in this context. It refers to inner peace and cleanliness which,
according to Islamic politics, is attained through faith, or, as
the marketing of Hilal intends in this case, through the purchase
of a part of the site. The Western and Islamic oriented middle classes
seem to share this desire for homogeneity, "cleanliness"
and isolation for which the concept of the gated community stands.
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