Article published in the New York Times
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.”
