Sold Overnight: Istanbul’s Gecekondu Housing and the Challenge of Ownership

This essay series examines the roles that community-based organizations (CBOs) have played as active participants in the process of "governing" megacities whether in service delivery, risk mitigation, or the creation of livelihood and other opportunities. More ...
 

Scholars of neoliberalism have long argued that the recent increase in involvement of private actors in urban governance and development has reduced the state from a regulator to an agent of market forces.[1] This is in line with the general view of globalization scholars, who see a general trend of market deregulation and increasingly powerless nation-states pitted against global market forces.[2] In these scenarios, state institutions are often perceived as the “good” forces, pitted against “evil” private actors attempting to exploit the working class and the marginalized.

However, many conceptualizations of neoliberalism in the face of globalization fail to properly break down the essence of “private” and “state” actors, as well as their quite complicated interactions in urban development decision-making. After briefly reviewing the literature on neoliberalism and urban development, this essay will introduce the case of gececondu neighborhoods in Istanbul, which are claimed by the state for urban redevelopment, and the historical process of gecekondu development in the city. In reviewing the history, as well as the current state of urban renewal in Turkey, it will attempt to unpack the “state” and its role in housing, urban development, and market regulation, and determine its true role in the process. 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.

Neoliberalism theory and the role of the state

The term “neoliberalism” is employed widely in recent urban scholarship on gentrification and the impact of globalization and market forces on urban life. Scholars such as Harvey[3] and Ong[4] have argued that neoliberalism basically refers to a withdrawal of state institutions from certain areas of regulation, primarily from the market, but also from other realms of public life. According to Smith, policy approaches to the city, under the impact of globalization, have changed dramatically: neoliberal urbanism has replaced liberal urban policy at the national level. Smith argues:

From Reagan to Thatcher, and, later, Kohl, the provisions of that liberal urban policy were systematically disempowered or dismantled at the national scale, and public policy constraints on gentrification were replaced by subsidized private-market transformations of the urban built environment.[5]

In a more recent article on neoliberalism and urban restructuring, Peck, Theodore, and Brenner[6] refine their vision of the impact of neoliberalism. They argue that, unlike the Thatcherite and Reaganite “rollback neoliberalisms” of the 1980s, the “new center” of the 1990s, defined by left of center fiscal conservatives, such as Tony Blair, Bill Clinton, and Gerhard Schröder, created a new form of neoliberalism, which is politically mediated, and thus hybrid.[7] This new “rollout neoliberalism,” in their view, has a “parasitical relationship” with other state and social institutions, in that it exists through them, instead of against them.[8]

Swyngedouw et al[9] similarly describe this new form of neoliberalism. Within the context of large-scale urban development projects, they are more specific about neoliberalism’s impacts on the city: through what they call “New Urban Policy,” they describe governmental institutions as being more than just facilitators for private actors taking on urban development. Instead, they argue, while state institutions still remain in charge of development, they actively seek out and delegate (projects?) to private actors in the process. So, in other words, the recent increase in private actors in urban infrastructure development is not, as previously conceived by neoliberalism scholars, due to a rollback of government functions, but rather due to a fundamental change in the relationship between private and state actors. While these more nuanced models of neoliberalism seem to be more applicable to recent developments in North America and Western Europe, they may have limited applicability outside of the Western context.

Gecekondular in Istanbul

Gecekondu housing is symbolic for the wave of urbanization that swept over Turkey, and specifically over Istanbul during the second half of the 20^th century. Urbanization, or more specifically rural-urban migration, was the consequence of a period of intense industrialization the country underwent in the years after World War II. Istanbul’s earliest gecekondu developments date back to 1946. During those years, Istanbul’s population grew dramatically in proportion to that of the rest of the country. In 1955, the city’s population accounted for just over five percent of the country’s population, while in 2000, it had grown to account for more than 14 percent of Turkey’s total population.[10] Istanbul’s growth is still rather explosive: According to Turkey’s State Institute of Statistics,[11] the city’s estimated total population grew by roughly 1.5 million between 2009 and 2014 to just over 14 million.

The city’s gecekondu settlements represented a way to accommodate the large streams of blue-collar migrants who descended upon the city in search of low-skill industrial jobs. Their settlements were informal, which is to say more or less illegal: the literal idea behind the term gecekondu (“landed” or “settled by night”) implies that land settled overnight without interference could be retained by those who had settled it, even if the land was never officially acquired and no deed existed to indicate ownership. Gecekondu settlements were, for the most part, tolerated by governmental institutions, because they introduced a quick and cheap way to accommodate workforces the industrializing city was in desperate need of. In addition, as Keyder[12] notes, the Ottoman tradition of public land, in which most land was considered public, and ownership rights were defined against (and not by) the state, “never made a full transition to a modern order.”[13] Therefore, according to Keyder, property relations remained unresolved in many cases.

Land “amnesties,” which “legalized” such informal gecekondu housing, however, were implemented by the Turkish government in 1949, 1953, 1963, 1966, 1976, 1983, 1984, and 1986. Balaban[14] notes that these amnesties led to the commodification of urban land and, ultimately, served as a tool for social upward mobility for more established gecekondu dwellers who became the landlords of new arrivals.

The increased speed of urbanization, and the economic shift from import-substitution to an economic liberalization program, which was designed to open the Turkish market to the world and cut public expenditures, led to a changed approach in the state’s gecekondu policy. As noted by Saraçoğlu and Demirtaş-Milz, this transition “marks the intensification in and a further consolidation of the rule of property relations and commodity fetishism in social life.” [15] After its general election victory in 2002, the Justice and Development Party (AKP) started to aggressively plan and implement Urban Transformation Projects (UTPs). Kuyucu and Ünsal note that:

These large renewal programs are the primary mechanisms by which a capitalist logic is imposed on urban land and housing markets, especially in incompletely commodified informal housing areas and ‘rundown’ inner city neighborhoods. [16]

They further note that state actors play into the hands of private actors, such as developers and financial institutions, by actively intervening in and radically redefining the relationship between residents and urban space.

Urban Transformation Projects, it has been argued, are particularly attractive in gecekondu zones, because the land can be redeveloped (and “aesthetically sanitized”) at a comparatively low price by involving private developers and re-annexing land, whose ownership status was never completely resolved in legal terms.[17] Therefore, the incomplete commodification of land in Turkey, where land was acquired by rural migrants through squatting, and deeds were partially distributed through land amnesties, had a dual effect. On the one hand, the post-war gecekondu movement opened the door for private land ownership and land commodification.[18] On the other hand, land ownership was incomplete and often remained informal,[19] allowing the state to reclaim and redistribute it after urban land values soared and new sites for development were needed.

Land, development, and property rights in Istanbul—implications for neoliberalism

Kuyucu and Ünsal[20] note that after the 2001 economic crash, the governing AKP implemented a series of reforms, which would allow the state to re-acquire gecekondu land and use it for urban transformation projects. While the incomplete ownership transformations had left a number of gecekondu dwellers with unresolved land ownership status, allowing the state to reclaim such land, the land amnesties of the 1940s to 1980s had established land ownership for a considerable number of gecekondu dwellers.

Municipality Law No. 5393, which was passed in 2005, gave wide-ranging authority for the designation of urban renewal areas to local municipalities.[21] Municipalities can cite relatively broad reasons, such as protecting “the historical and cultural texture of the city,” or the protection from natural disaster, as justifications for the implementation of renewal projects.[22] Considering that the entire city of Istanbul is located on the North Anatolian Fault Line, triggering frequent earthquakes, the law allows for some flexibility on the part of political decision-makers under the rubric of “protecting against natural disaster.” While Law No. 5393 required municipalities to obtain the permission of the City Council for declaring any area a renewal area, this is no longer necessary: in 2010, Law No. 5998 amended Law No. 5393, allowing local municipalities to implement renewal projects of various nature (such as the creation of housing, industrial sites, business and technology centers, recreation areas, public service points, the renewal of decrepit sites, and for the purposes of protecting historic sites against natural disasters).[23]