| Main Index |  |
|
 |
Index Self Service City: İstanbul | Imprint |
|
Stephan Lanz
|
Villages in the city First of all, the various forms of community reveal strong similarities. Their respective relations to urban space, to urban society and the local state appear to be largely instrumental. Urban space is conquered in an insular way, according to one's interests and the resources at one's disposal: While gecekondu and suburbia usually have in common forms of production that breach the regulations, with similar, problematic consequences for the environment, the gentrifying, bourgeois taking possession of places like Kuzguncuk produces effects of social displacement for people who don't own property. In all cases corruption is used or regulations are violated if this serve one's own interests. In their search for community, though, the motives and processes differ: The immigrants in the gecekondus follow ethnic, family or religious relationships to satisfy their fundamental needs for work, social security and cultural self-determination: It is important that these social nets function not only symbolically but also materially - this is all the more the case the less receptive or willing the urban outside is. The opposite is true of the commodified community: Models such as Kemer Country do claim to revive the lost Istanbul and advertise with citations of traditional architecture and community ethics. But at the core this community aims at effectively delimiting itself from the urban outside which is deemed threatening or unpleasant. Internal relations only play a subordinate role here. The purely symbolic community is established along the lines of social status which is essentially determined by money, but also worldview, taste and education. The "Kuzguncuk" model is even more striking: A multicultural and polyglot ethics prevails here. But at the same time, the local community quickly turns out to be a myth when it comes to harsh realities. If the issue is the future of one's children, they are withdrawn from the much-praised multiculturalism in favour of social homogeneity and sent to private schools - a phenomenon also heatedly debated in Berlin, where post-alternative milieus leave multicultural Kreuzberg when their children are to be sent to schools in which the majority of the pupils have a migrant background. An old fisherman who emigrated from the coast of the Black Sea contrasts the community vision of the "intellectuals" accordingly: "In earlier time", he says, "people used to sit together in the evenings. Since the intellectuals moved here that is no longer the case; today everybody is on their own". The community is established via a common lifestyle and in a small scene independent of any immediate necessity. The cosmopolitan aspect appears in a more culinary variant here: The much-longed-for ideal is a peaceful and colourful village, a bit like a hippie commune. With their myth shattered, the milieus of supposedly urban citizens turn out to closely resemble a village culture in terms of how the attempt is made to organize a "home". A female American living in Kuzguncuk describes the differences of the inhabitants to the neighbouring gecekondu as follows: "There are huge differences in income, at least by a factor of ten. But our ways of life are quite similar. Okay, they don't have as many computers [...] and don't travel twice a year to the United States, but on the other hand they feel sorry for me because I work full-time and have no mother, grandmother or aunt who cooks my meals like they have when they come home." In the end, all persons interviewed sought for security in their immediate vicinity which they believed could be found among like-minded people. This knowledge also belongs to the standard repertoire of urban studies: Since 1925, when Robert Park drew the conclusion from his research work in Chicago that ethnically and culturally homogenous areas are the very precondition for conflict-free urban coexistence, the question of segregation has been one of the most controversial themes. From a politically normative perspective, the living together of immigrants and social sub-milieus has usually been problematized as a threat to urban culture, while homogenous colonies of affluent inhabitants have hardly been taken into account. However, it proves to be the case in Istanbul, as in other cities, that immigrants either keep to themselves out of existential necessity so as to support each other in precarious situations, or are excluded from large parts of the city and forced to live in certain quarters. Wealthy citizens, in turn, follow a desire for distinction, peacefulness and dissociation that in the radicalized model of the gated community draws up impermeable borders inside the city. The "secret war waged from the gecekondus", then, turns out to be a battle over the still denied acknowledgement of urban citizenship, foremost conveyed by the right allowing one to occupy a place and receive the necessary infrastructures. In their methods of breaching regulations, the inhabitants can always count on the double standards of the Kemalist elites: They profited from the low public costs of this urbanization just as naturally as they today despise and exclude the gecekondu residents who are getting too close to them and demanding equal rights. From today's point of view, the milieus that turn out to be the most anti-urban are the ones that occupy their privileged refuges in the last forests and drinking water reservoirs, employing the same irregular methods of the gecekondu from which they loathingly dissociate themselves. _________________________________ Literature ______________________ Notes
|
