Poor but Proud Istanbul Neighborhood Faces Gentrification

Article published in the New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/05/world/middleeast/05iht-m05-turkey-tarlabasi.html?src=rechp&pagewanted=all

By JESSICA BOURQUE

Published: July 4, 2012

“This is a good thing,” he said on a recent afternoon. “Everything here is in bad shape. No one here is washing or painting. They don’t know how to take care of the historical architecture of these buildings.”

“Here” is Tarlabasi, a low-income and primarily Kurdish neighborhood that also serves as a sanctuary for Turkey <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/turkey/index.html?inline=nyt-geo> ’s marginalized populations. In the heart of Istanbul, less than a five-minute walk from the Istiklal Caddesi shopping hub, Tarlabasi’s faded facades are in sharp contrast with Istiklal’s glitzy boutiques. The only thing separating Tarlabasi from the more affluent Beyoglu neighborhood is the six-lane Tarlabasi Boulevard, which has a police station equipped with a tank. 

Tarlabasi’s central location means it could become prime revenue-generating real estate, which is partly why Beyoglu Municipality officials and the Housing Development Administration of Istanbul, known by its Turkish acronym TOKI, declared it an urban renewal area in 2006.Six years later, after court battles over property rights, the project is moving forward. The renewal area encompasses a 20,000-square-meter, or 4.9-acre, section of Tarlabasi that includes 210 historic Ottoman-era buildings; demolition has been under way for a few months. 

At stake is Tarlabasi’s diverse culture. Migrant workers have a long history of living in Tarlabasi, dating from the early 1900s when Greek, Jewish and Armenian craftsmen lived in the area. But those groups were driven out by the wealth tax of 1942, which impoverished many non-Muslim workers, and in 1955 by riots that again focused on non-Muslims. Left vacant after the riots, many houses in Tarlabasi were taken over by workers who migrated from eastern Turkey to find work in Istanbul.

On its Web site, TOKI says the renewal process includes relocating residents to new housing complexes, “identifying the illegally settled households to be evicted” and clearing the land so it can be “regenerated through urban renewal projects.” These projects could include shopping malls, upscale housing units and urban recreational areas. The Beyoglu mayor, Ahmet Misbah Demircan, has said he wants the new Tarlabasi to rival the Champs-Élysées in Paris. 

While Mr. Yesildas, the furniture seller, calls the process a makeover, others see the transformation of Tarlabasi as a negative form of gentrification.The architect Huseyin Kaptan, director of the Istanbul Metropolitan Planning and Urban Design Center, said that TOKI’s renewal plan lacked foresight because it allowed the land to be developed by wealthy real estate investors who had no vested interest in preserving the culture of the area. 

“Unfortunately, this is very aggressive and very wrong,” he said during a recent interview. “To keep the social structure safe, you need to involve the people. Contractors get to build some modern thing — could be a shopping mall, could be a high-rise — but they have no regard for the people living there.” He added: “I call this kind of operation they’re doing, ‘killing them while kissing them.”’

Today, the area is home to a host of low-income laborers scraping by on the monthly minimum wage of 886.50 lire, or $493, or less, working jobs as unlicensed garbage collectors or serving as house cleaners for the better-off.Remziye Civak, 34, who keeps house for the owner of a publishing company, has lived in Tarlabasi for 18 years. Her immaculate two-room apartment also shelters her husband and their three children. “We are lucky,” she said. “We own our home, but many people are renting.” A place the size of her home rents for about 400 lire a month.

The sense of community is strong in Tarlabasi, Mrs. Civak said, and she would miss that if she had to move to a new housing complex in the suburbs. “My neighbors and I, we are like a big family,” she said. “If anyone is sick, I know I can call on my neighbor to come help. We are very close.”But she is nervous about the intensifying drug problems where she lives. “What really worries me is the drug use. It’s called pills. I don’t exactly what they are, but there is a lot of it going on,” she said, “I worry about my kids, because they are young and I think, ‘What if they get involved?”’ 

Yasar Adanali, an urban scholar, consultant and activist, said that, sadly, residents were not a priority for project planners.“Many kinds of informal, illegal migrants are living and seeking refuge in areas like Tarlabasi. Why? Because for them, it’s easier to find employment opportunities around Istiklal,” Mr. Adanali said during a recent interview.“This transformation plan doesn’t pay any attention to these social realities. Why not create social programs to help these people? Instead, they just take Tarlabasi as a problem zone, a cancer area that you need to erase from the map and rebuild for a completely new clientele,” one willing to spend money to become part of the economic boom in Istanbul and Turkey. 

“The city itself has become so deliciously profitable that you can make these kinds of real estate projects without actually involving the inhabitants of the area,” he said. “The real motive in these plans is the desire to make a profit.”It is also part of Turks’ desire to showcase Istanbul as a global city, “competing with global city-wannabes and global city-alreadys like London, New York or Dubai,” Mr. Adanali said. 

For now, local and expatriate students and artists attracted by this global metropolis are finding reasonable rents in Tarlabasi. Mitch Burmeister, an American university-entrance tutor, rented his first apartment there.

“I knew that it didn’t have the best reputation,” he said, “but I couldn’t pass up the rent. If you think of a city like Chicago, it would be like renting a dirt cheap apartment right off of Michigan Avenue.”

The notion that deep-pocketed foreigners are willing to live there only adds to the motivation for city officials to capitalize on the area, rebranding what was a zone of prostitution and drugs as a safe place to live.

The “new Tarlabasi” is advertised on a large billboard that hides demolished buildings from drivers along Tarlabasi Boulevard. The billboard depicts mostly light-skinned women wearing business clothes and strolling past a mall, an image far from the current reality there. 

While TOKI insists that Tarlabasi will maintain its historical architectural touches, Mr. Adanali fears the transformation will only create a facade to hide a sterile space. “It is a kind of ‘Disneyfication’ in the sense that it’s taking the area’s heritage and making it flashy,” he said, “like a Disney theme park. Everything becomes shallow.”Not all the houses in Tarlabasi are being “regenerated,” but some residents are still nervous about their future. Mrs. Civak said that while her house was not now included in the renewal plan, she could not be certain it would stay that way. “They’ve not told us much about what’s happening,” she said. 

Mr. Yesildas also conceded that he knew little about the project aside from what he had seen on the news. Still, he remains confident that the government’s plan will benefit Tarlabasi.“This area wasn’t meant to be permanent. It was supposed to change,” he said. “It has so many problems that need to be fixed. It should be clean and taken care of.”