This individual is a guest contributor. MEI is not able to assist with contact requests.
Annika Marlen Hinze is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Fordham University in New York. She is also affiliated with Fordham University’s Urban Studies Program. Prior to her arrival at Fordham University, she was a Visiting Assistant Professor at Washington & Lee University in Lexington, VA. Hinze obtained her Ph.D. at the University of Illinois at Chicago, with a concentration in comparative urban politics. Her first book, Turkish Berlin, on integration policy and self-perceptions of second generation Turkish immigrant women in two local neighborhoods, was published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2013. Her research interests revolve around immigration and identity in urban settings, and, more recently, large-scale urban development projects and their implications for (local) democracy. Her cities of special expertise are Berlin, Chicago, Istanbul, New York, and Vancouver.
Sold Overnight: Istanbul’s Gecekondu Housing and the Challenge of Ownership
Contrary to neoliberalist conceptualizations of the role of the state (or its absence) in urban development, in the case of Istanbul, the state’s absence, or at the very least its silent laissez-faire attitude, actually produced an opening for poor, rural migrants to create their own (informal) housing in and around the city. With the increasing desirability of urban land to domestic and international developers, however, it was precisely the advent of state regulation that led to the increasing displacement of Istanbul’s gecekondu residents.
