Democracia, participación y Desarrollo Local

Within the context provided above, what concerned the majority of the upper class and some middle class participants was the smooth and urgent

implementation of the projects in gecekondu areas. Yet, despite the alliance between the state actors and the affluent residents living in gated

communities, the simultaneous promises of inclusion made to the obedient

gecekondu dwellers through state-led gentrification generated anxiety among the affluent residents. Their residential choices of based on imagined shared class similarities revealed their concerns and disappointment driven by the inclusion of ‘the non-modern other’.

In the gated communities, there seemed to be a latent agreement about keeping one’s distance. Nilgun was a woman living in Upper Dikmen area in a recently constructed gated community. She compared the previous apartment she lived with that recent one and said:

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There we could call our neighbour at night for him to take us to the hospital. Here, there are no such neighbour relations, no such warmth but relatively more distant relations… But I have good neighbours here, too. We are not close though, there is distance. But on the other hand nobody disturbs each other here with their noise or anything. There is a civilised life here because

you are together with the people who somehow had the same views of life. (25.07.2015) (Emphasis added)

Aynur echoed Nilgun saying that:

But I sense such feeling of security in the gated community that I live now… In the former apartment, I mean, there are all kinds of people. Here, for instance, in this gated community, everybody has a shared view in terms of security, life standards, etc. (02.07.2015)

The alleged homogeneity of values served as a compensation for the close and co-operative neighbour relations that were experienced in the previous decades. Despite having spent their childhood in different cities and

neighbourhoods, regardless of the class, age, gender differences, almost all of the residents of gated apartments I interviewed told me stories about past trust-based, close neighbour relations as the people living in the same

apartment building were like an extended family and the boundaries between public and private space were blurred. In contrast, their current home had now become a ‘highly-protected castle of individuals, which made you hesitate even to knock on the people’s doors for fear of disturbing them’ in the words of Ela, who lived in a 13-storey gated apartment. Nevertheless, only Habibe and Kenan, who were both over 60, were frustrated by the loss of close neighbour relations.

Their demands for isolation and homogeneity conformed to the imaginary ideals of the ‘ideal neighbourhood’ that was promoted through gentrification. Gated, gentrified places offer a more orderly relation to the space as opposed to the flexibility of the gecekondu neighbourhood in terms of the possibility of uses of space. Most of the people who lived in the gentrified part had not ever used the walk ways, parks or cafes in the valley. The orderly parks and ornamental pools rather offered a visually appealing background for the low- income young couples, who were getting engaged and/or married and looking for a cheap place to take photos before the ceremony. Two residents of the gentrified area told me that when they needed to go even a short distance, like the market or the opposite block to visit their friends who lived there, they used their cars as they felt lazy to walk. Their sense of belonging was limited to

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their home and their friends’ network in different places rather than the neighbourhood in which they lived. Not surprisingly, when I asked them whether they felt attached to where they lived, most of them responded saying that they loved their home.

This was also manifested in the photos of the things they liked that they sent me. These were usually of their garden or landscapes of the valley taken from their balcony. What many of the participants liked very much about living in the valley was the spaciousness and the view of the sky and the valley. As many said, living in the city centre and isolated from the things associated with inner city namely the density of construction, noise, traffic jam at the same time was the best thing about living in the valley. Berkay said that what he liked very much about his house was that it was ‘extremely central and at the same time completely isolated from the outside world’. The photo Ceylan21 _{sent me}

(Figure 30) represented this with the view of the spacious valley, as a result of which she did not have to see another building when she opened her windows. As an example of the things she liked about living in the valley, Nagehan sent me a photo of the view taken from her balcony. Her photo also demonstrated the spacious landscape with ornament pools, walking paths, grasses and high- rise apartment buildings (Figure 31).

21 _{Ceylan was a forty one year old resident in one of the high-rise apartment buildings that were} constructed for the resettlement of the former gecekondu dwellers in the valley.

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Figure 30: Photo sent by Ceylan (40) who lived in a high-rise apartment, in which the former gecekondu dwellers were resettled in Dikmen Valley.

Deniz also preferred sending me photos from the garden of the gated community where she lived (Figure 32), which mirrored her demands of isolation referred to in the beginning of the chapter. The photo demonstrated fancy apartment buildings surrounding an empty basketball ground. The photos reflected a more individualised way of relating to the city space. The photos were visually appealing in terms of order — the design of buildings, trees and parks and ostentation — yet they lacked the story of the people living in, using and appropriating those places.

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Figure 31: A photo sent by Nagehan (46), from her balcony.

Figure 32: A photo sent by Deniz (36) who lived in a gated community in Dikmen district, close to Dikmen Valley.

Michel de Certeau (1984) refers to the ‘territorialisation’ and ‘appropriation’ of space through every day ritualised use of space arguing that the repeated use of urban space formed the basis of a sense of belonging. For de Certeau,

attachments to place are built on the basis of accumulated knowledge, memory and intimate corporal experiences, and these are gained mainly walking through urban space. These often high-rise gated apartments within well-

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organised and maintained gardens and parks in the valley impose a more distant relationship with space as the photos revealed.

In contrast to the middle and upper class participants, the gecekondu dwellers I interviewed — including those who had moved to apartment buildings years ago — had a very strong sense of attachment and also ownership to their home and neighbourhood as they had appropriated these places through repeatedly using them for their needs. What was perceived as ‘hell’ by Berkay meant for the gecekondu residents the place where they have spent their adulthood, raised their children, and built close neighbour relations and collectively overcame the challenges of adjusting to the city. The older adults told me the stories of moving to an unknown city, occupying the land with the help of their relatives or fellowmen, purchasing the construction materials with debt or scavenging materials from demolished houses in the first and second phases of the valley, and constructing the gecekondu houses in one night. Thus, they had a concrete sense of belonging to the space and made strong claims to it

although they did not have legal (thus legitimate) documents proving

ownership. In their eyes, what made them rights-holders on these spaces was the time and labour spent transforming a vacant land into a home.

In line with the neoliberal logic of reproducing the urban space for the more affluent users, the demolition of gecekondu neighbourhoods was promoted as an unavoidable condition for modernising the cities. The participants living in the gecekondu neighbourhood were conscious that the times were changing as the city changed in such a way that was less welcoming for them and their cultural practices. Just like the young adult, Ibo, in chapter 5, every day they witnessed the construction of progressively higher-rise and more luxurious residential and commercial buildings around their neighbourhood. That way, they became subjected to the symbolic violence of gentrification, as it

legitimised the inegalitarian social relations through reproducing the city for the more affluent user. What the valley people were trying to figure out was ’why now?’ after all those years of tolerance. Mustafa was an adult in his fifties, who had struggled actively against the implementation of the gentrification project. He explained the changes in urban policy and the duplicity of the state towards them, which created resentment. He said if the state did not tolerate them, they would never be able to construct gecekondu neighbourhoods:

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We did not come here (the city), but you encouraged us to come! You

tolerated us when we constructed these houses and then collected taxes and bills of electricity and water. In the election times, you treated us as citizens, you took my vote. Now, how come all of a sudden, I have become an illegal occupier after inhabiting here for 25 years! (01.09.2015)

Osman (29), who was a construction company owner and an owner-occupant in the most prestigious apartments in the valley, explained the reason saying that ‘if this man built his gecekondu house in another place, not here, and the value of that land had not increased over time, would we call him an illegal occupier in that case?’. He also explicitly stated that the reason why the state promoted purchasing newly constructed homes to the low-income groups was to increase the profits offered to construction companies involved. He then added that the main question we should deal with was why these people moved to the cities from their villages as the cities were no longer able to satisfy the needs of so many people. Thus, despite the fact that he

acknowledged the underlying motivations of rent-maximisation in the

devaluation and criminalisation of the gecekondu people, what concerned him like Ela and Serra was not redistributive questions but prevention of rural- urban migration. The shared emphasis on ‘sending them back’ revealed that in the eyes of these upper class residents the gecekondu settlers, who were either pitied or hated, were not qualified as people who can properly live in the city.