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The cities are in transition. Minorities or communities have a specific identity that has ethnic, religious or econThe cities are in transition. Minorities or communities have a specific identity that has ethnic, religious or economical roots. This is a situated identity, which is combined with the relation of the co-existence of urban space. The neighborhood, where I happen to live, is an area of the city near the main cosmopolitan cultural centers of Taksim and Galata; its residents are mostly Gypsies, Arabs from Anatolia, and Kurds. Tophane represents the “Other” in the urban conscious of Istanbulians; it is uncanny and insecure, a place to which urban clichés and misconceptions of danger are attached. For me this district is very safe, but for the people who choose to live in “gated communities”, Tophane is the place, as an urban myth that justifies the alienation in the city.

We do define our relation through those urban myths and when we transform our relations, distances to the "Other" into an architectural environment that reinforces our social taboos, violence and urban segregation, we do cut our urban consciousness that connects to our collective identity in public space. In The Architectural Uncanny, Anthony Vidler1 discusses the connection between “urban memory” and the city: “In the traditional city, antique, medieval or Renaissance, urban memory was easy enough to define; it was that image of the city that enabled the citizen to identify with its past and present as a political, cultural and social entity; it was neither the ‘reality’ of the city nor a purely imaginary ‘u u uuuutopia’ … the city might be recognized as ‘home’, as something not foreign, and as constituting a moral and protected environment for actual daily life”; he also offers a questionable definition of the uncanny in global cities. As a result of ethnic and social diversity and segregation in modern cities, it is difficult to create a collective urban memory with which citizens can identify. Therefore, uncanny conditions and obscure identifications with place lead to urban discourses based on fear and the need for safety and security. Urban ghettos, peripheries of city centers, gated communities, and other urban areas whose inhabitants have diverse cultural, economical and social backgrounds are permeated with those discourses even if they are not based on real facts. Racism and homophobia often result.

Over the last couple of centuries, the terms “city” and “metropolis” have represented the utopia of cosmopolitanism: diversified communities and the right to participate in public space. In recent decades, however, we have witnessed the failure of urban utopias and the notion of the elite modern citizen. The phenomenon of gated communities in Istanbul has disrupted urban texture and lifestyles in this growing city. In the past ten years, some suburban areas have developed on city margins. These are distinct from the gecekondu areas of the 1960s–1980s, occupied by Anatolian immigrants on the outskirts of the city. The gecekondu (“slum” or “shanty”) arose through illegal construction and occupation. After 1995, however, gated communities on the margins of Istanbul have been occupied by upper–middle-class residents.
In simplest terms, gated communities are privatized housing settlements for citizens who seek a safer and higher standard of living than the one afforded by the inner city. “This new social class”, explain Aliye Ahu Gülümser and Tüzin Baycan Levent,2 “pushed developers of large-scale real estate investments to produce gated projects which offer a better life standard, quality of life and a way to diminish the daily life’s stress.” Land speculation and the development and privatization of public land were enabled by economic neoliberalism and mass housing legislation.

Terms such as public space, privatization, urban community, security, identity, and citizenship accrue new meanings within the context of gated communities. Belonging to a city doesn’t make sense anymore, but belonging to a community – one marked by shared lifestyles, property ownership, and a sense of belonging – does. This is the new, conflicted definition of citizenship in the contemporary global city. On one hand, the global city comprises several cross-cultural and ethnic communities; on the other, the right to participate in the public sphere and share urban space is at odds with a definition of citizenship based on the form of nation-state.
Since the 1990s, many of Istanbul’s eastern and western peripheries have been privatized by local investors. Most of these were joint ventures with American architects offices; designs and models were often imported from the U.S., and advertisements for them were often in English. They promise a better lifestyle, in contrast to Istanbul’s dystopias: earthquakes, pollution, and traffic. Sinpas Central Life promises wellness, with a fitness club and no traffic. Agaoglu My Town offers nature, security, less traffic.

Here communities are being redefined by the lifestyle of the habitants in the gated communities but on the other hand, the “Other” is again defined by those communities' eyes. Several lifestyles in the city (outside/inside the wall) point out several practices of local modernities in the shared time/space. Analyzing the links between security, segregation, and citizenship reveals how urban discourses are produced and consumed. In the new global city, the notion of citizenship is based on legal rights, on “... norms, practices, meanings and identities”.3 How do gated communities relate to these discussions, especially in terms of spatial organization and civil rights? Bülent Diken4 compares gated communities to refugee camps arguing that they form a desirable inside/outside the city dichotomy where contemporary gated communities are panoptic sites in which inhabitants forsake some rights for security in order to live in the comfort of “being under control”. Yet, this judgment on the security of the camp versus that of the gated communities becomes problematic. The relationships among the community of the “other” groups (poor, refugees, ethnic groups) supercede many normalities and public rules, creating their own network of security without establishing physical boundaries. As it is in Tophane. We witness here opposed communities (Gated Community or Tophane as an urban periphery) which negotiate the public space and their rights on citizenship in different ways.

Another negotiation of space takes place in the Sulukule district in the historical peninsula of Istanbul, where most Gypsy communities have settled since the Ottoman Empire. They are now faced with displacement. The conservative local municipality that easily adapted the reforms of neo-liberal urban planning which generally are based on non-participatory, upside-down design decisions and actions of urbanicide, decides the strategy of displacement. In the case of Sulukule, the condition of citizenship or the right of sharing the urban space, living in the city is under negotiation of placement/displacement. It is maybe the first time that the state ideology, space production and neo-liberal economical strategies have overlapped so clearly in one city in its history. In Istanbul, our movements and everyday lives are being determined by upside-down strategies of the neo-liberal logics of economy which aim at the re-scaling of urban spaces; this cannot only be observed as a physical but also a new ideological happening that goes along with, or reproduces the state discourse through spatial production. So, an interesting question is how did it happen that the state discourse of modernization became a legitimizing tool not only for the attachment of the functions of spaces into the global capitalist chain, but also for the re-production of the recent state ideology of Ottoman-Islam identity5 discourse?

How do global strategies of neo-liberal economy associate with this local discourse in capitalizing not only the space but also the social relations that re-scale the urban space? While explaining the shift between the neo-liberalism of the 20th and the 21st century,6 Neil Smith talks about a new form of neo-liberalism in which “not the national power but the state power is organized and exercised at different geographical scale”.7 So, how can we apply Smith’s definition of “global” neo-liberalism to the spaces of Istanbul? We know that the 1980 coup d’état in Turkey led to support from the European Monetary Fund, which positioned the country in the chain of global economy. From the 1980s onwards, municipalities received specific financial support (along with the changes in policy) from the government for the reconstruction of urban spaces. Within this context, Local Economic Development (LED) refers to a joint venture between municipalities, local developers and global capital initiators who determine and have a say over large urban transformations, or gentrification projects. Transforming the land from state property to private property; legitimizing gecekondu areas and connecting them into the capitalist production of urban spaces,8 or expanding the city with “enclaves/gated communities” all became possible by the manipulation of related urban and economic policies.

In a manner of continuity, the 2000s have witnessed the emergence of large-scale urban transformation projects under the titles of “urban renovation/urban development” which legitimize “demolition” and ‘reconstruction’ via abstract discourses of urban fear, ecology, cultural heritage and natural disasters (i.e. earthquakes). In 2005, with the Urban Transformation and Renewal policy 5366, which allows for the full authorization of municipalities for urban renovation/development, the legitimization of the recent projects of urban transformation speeded up. Sulukule, the district where most of Istanbul’s Gypsy community has settled since the Ottoman Era, is now facing the force of the displacement of its inhabitants. With policy 5366, it was decided that the settlement in the district would be demolished on 13th December 2006 by the state authorities. As a result, a number of architects and participants from different fields initiated the interdisciplinary platform Sulukule Platform which received the support of various NGOs and universities and launched public activities to defend the district and its people.9

The platform also collaborated with the lawyers of the Istanbul Chamber of Architects to prevent the activation of the policy by taking the case to the higher court of ministry. As a result, the policy is being prevented and is on hold. In the past few months the public events and support has been so strong that the municipality has accepted to negotiate with the platform and its initiators. On the 17th May, a mutual protocol was signed between parties who have been involved, or interested in the case including universities, municipalities, NGOs and the fellow initiators. Collaboration and organization at a neighborhood level is possible, especially in the initiation of temporary events and the use of local networks, which do not only help the settlements to participate, but also actors from different fields. The presence of those platforms that are initiated by individuals (not by institutions) can re-identify the relation between the ideology and space. In that case, a soft activism at local neighborhood level is realizable as Negri calls it.10 There must be some possibilities for using the spatial practices from locality and being able to create actions through these doesn’t correspond and respond to the reality that has been created by ideologies and neo-liberal economical strategies.

Notes
1. Vidler, Anthony, The Architectural Uncanny, The MIT Press, Cambridge (MA) 1992.
2. Gülümser, Aliye Ahu, Levent, Tüzin Baycan, “Through the Sky: Vertical Gated Developments in Istanbul”, UIA 12th World Congress of Architecture, Istanbul 2005.
3. Isin, Engin F., “Democracy, Citizenship and the City”, in Isin, E.F. (ed.), Democracy, Citizenship and the Global City, Routledge, London-New York 2000.
4. Diken, Bülent, “From Refugee Camps to Gated Communities: Biopolitics and the End of the City”, Citizenship Studies, vol. 8, no. 1, March 2004, pp. 83-106.
5. Flavored with the nostalgia of Ottoman-Turk identity that tries support ultra-nationalist and conservative, Islamic background ideology,
6. Smith, Neil, New Globalism, New Urbanism: Gentrification as Global Urban Strategy, Antipode, vol. 34, no. 3, 2002, p. 429.
7. Idem, p. 429. 18th-century liberalism, John Locke and Adam Smith. “Private property is the foundation of this [individual] self-interest, and free market exchange is its ideal vehicle.”
8. Further info in Güvenç, Murat and Isik, Oguz, “A Metropolis at the Crossroads: The Changing Social Geography of Istanbul under the Impact of Globalization”, in Marcuse, P. and Van Kempen, R. (eds.), Of States and Cities, Partitioning of Urban Space, Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 212, chapter 10 (“The newcomers were in most cases deprived of the means to build a multi-storey structure for themselves, since the practice of users building their squatter houses was already a thing of the past.”).
9. Interview with Asli Kiyak Ingin by Pelin Tan: www.arkitera.com/soylesi_68_asli-kiyak-ingin.html, http://40gun40gece-sulukule.blogspot.com/.
10. Negri Toni, Petcou, Constantin, Petrescu, Doina and Querrien, Anne, “What makes a biopolitical space? A discussion with Toni Negri”, Multitudes, no. 31, 2008.

omical roots. This is a situated identity, which is combined with the relation of the co-existence of urban space. The neighborhood, where I happen to live, is an area of the city near the main cosmopolitan cultural centers of Taksim and Galata; its residents are mostly Gypsies, Arabs from Anatolia, and Kurds. Tophane represents the “Other” in the urban conscious of Istanbulians; it is uncanny and insecure, a place to which urban clichés and misconceptions of danger are attached. For me this district is very safe, but for the people who choose to live in “gated communities”, Tophane is the place, as an urban myth that justifies the alienation in the city.
We do define our relation through those urban myths and when we transform our relations, distances to the "Other" into an architectural environment that reinforces our social taboos, violence and urban segregation, we do cut our urban consciousness that connects to our collective identity in public space. In The Architectural Uncanny, Anthony Vidler1 discusses the connection between “urban memory” and the city: “In the traditional city, antique, medieval or Renaissance, urban memory was easy enough to define; it was that image of the city that enabled the citizen to identify with its past and present as a political, cultural and social entity; it was neither the ‘reality’ of the city nor a purely imaginary ‘u u uuuutopia’ … the city might be recognized as ‘home’, as something not foreign, and as constituting a moral and protected environment for actual daily life”; he also offers a questionable definition of the uncanny in global cities. As a result of ethnic and social diversity and segregation in modern cities, it is difficult to create a collective urban memory with which citizens can identify. Therefore, uncanny conditions and obscure identifications with place lead to urban discourses based on fear and the need for safety and security. Urban ghettos, peripheries of city centers, gated communities, and other urban areas whose inhabitants have diverse cultural, economical and social backgrounds are permeated with those discourses even if they are not based on real facts. Racism and homophobia often result.
Over the last couple of centuries, the terms “city” and “metropolis” have represented the utopia of cosmopolitanism: diversified communities and the right to participate in public space. In recent decades, however, we have witnessed the failure of urban utopias and the notion of the elite modern citizen. The phenomenon of gated communities in Istanbul has disrupted urban texture and lifestyles in this growing city. In the past ten years, some suburban areas have developed on city margins. These are distinct from the gecekondu areas of the 1960s–1980s, occupied by Anatolian immigrants on the outskirts of the city. The gecekondu (“slum” or “shanty”) arose through illegal construction and occupation. After 1995, however, gated communities on the margins of Istanbul have been occupied by upper–middle-class residents.
In simplest terms, gated communities are privatized housing settlements for citizens who seek a safer and higher standard of living than the one afforded by the inner city. “This new social class”, explain Aliye Ahu Gülümser and Tüzin Baycan Levent,2 “pushed developers of large-scale real estate investments to produce gated projects which offer a better life standard, quality of life and a way to diminish the daily life’s stress.” Land speculation and the development and privatization of public land were enabled by economic neoliberalism and mass housing legislation.
Terms such as public space, privatization, urban community, security, identity, and citizenship accrue new meanings within the context of gated communities. Belonging to a city doesn’t make sense anymore, but belonging to a community – one marked by shared lifestyles, property ownership, and a sense of belonging – does. This is the new, conflicted definition of citizenship in the contemporary global city. On one hand, the global city comprises several cross-cultural and ethnic communities; on the other, the right to participate in the public sphere and share urban space is at odds with a definition of citizenship based on the form of nation-state.
Since the 1990s, many of Istanbul’s eastern and western peripheries have been privatized by local investors. Most of these were joint ventures with American architects offices; designs and models were often imported from the U.S., and advertisements for them were often in English. They promise a better lifestyle, in contrast to Istanbul’s dystopias: earthquakes, pollution, and traffic. Sinpas Central Life promises wellness, with a fitness club and no traffic. Agaoglu My Town offers nature, security, less traffic.
Here communities are being redefined by the lifestyle of the habitants in the gated communities but on the other hand, the “Other” is again defined by those communities' eyes. Several lifestyles in the city (outside/inside the wall) point out several practices of local modernities in the shared time/space. Analyzing the links between security, segregation, and citizenship reveals how urban discourses are produced and consumed. In the new global city, the notion of citizenship is based on legal rights, on “... norms, practices, meanings and identities”.3 How do gated communities relate to these discussions, especially in terms of spatial organization and civil rights? Bülent Diken4 compares gated communities to refugee camps arguing that they form a desirable inside/outside the city dichotomy where contemporary gated communities are panoptic sites in which inhabitants forsake some rights for security in order to live in the comfort of “being under control”. Yet, this judgment on the security of the camp versus that of the gated communities becomes problematic. The relationships among the community of the “other” groups (poor, refugees, ethnic groups) supercede many normalities and public rules, creating their own network of security without establishing physical boundaries. As it is in Tophane. We witness here opposed communities (Gated Community or Tophane as an urban periphery) which negotiate the public space and their rights on citizenship in different ways.
Another negotiation of space takes place in the Sulukule district in the historical peninsula of Istanbul, where most Gypsy communities have settled since the Ottoman Empire. They are now faced with displacement. The conservative local municipality that easily adapted the reforms of neo-liberal urban planning which generally are based on non-participatory, upside-down design decisions and actions of urbanicide, decides the strategy of displacement. In the case of Sulukule, the condition of citizenship or the right of sharing the urban space, living in the city is under negotiation of placement/displacement. It is maybe the first time that the state ideology, space production and neo-liberal economical strategies have overlapped so clearly in one city in its history. In Istanbul, our movements and everyday lives are being determined by upside-down strategies of the neo-liberal logics of economy which aim at the re-scaling of urban spaces; this cannot only be observed as a physical but also a new ideological happening that goes along with, or reproduces the state discourse through spatial production. So, an interesting question is how did it happen that the state discourse of modernization became a legitimizing tool not only for the attachment of the functions of spaces into the global capitalist chain, but also for the re-production of the recent state ideology of Ottoman-Islam identity5 discourse? How do global strategies of neo-liberal economy associate with this local discourse in capitalizing not only the space but also the social relations that re-scale the urban space? While explaining the shift between the neo-liberalism of the 20th and the 21st century,6 Neil Smith talks about a new form of neo-liberalism in which “not the national power but the state power is organized and exercised at different geographical scale”.7 So, how can we apply Smith’s definition of “global” neo-liberalism to the spaces of Istanbul? We know that the 1980 coup d’état in Turkey led to support from the European Monetary Fund, which positioned the country in the chain of global economy. From the 1980s onwards, municipalities received specific financial support (along with the changes in policy) from the government for the reconstruction of urban spaces. Within this context, Local Economic Development (LED) refers to a joint venture between municipalities, local developers and global capital initiators who determine and have a say over large urban transformations, or gentrification projects. Transforming the land from state property to private property; legitimizing gecekondu areas and connecting them into the capitalist production of urban spaces,8 or expanding the city with “enclaves/gated communities” all became possible by the manipulation of related urban and economic policies. In a manner of continuity, the 2000s have witnessed the emergence of large-scale urban transformation projects under the titles of “urban renovation/urban development” which legitimize “demolition” and ‘reconstruction’ via abstract discourses of urban fear, ecology, cultural heritage and natural disasters (i.e. earthquakes). In 2005, with the Urban Transformation and Renewal policy 5366, which allows for the full authorization of municipalities for urban renovation/development, the legitimization of the recent projects of urban transformation speeded up. Sulukule, the district where most of Istanbul’s Gypsy community has settled since the Ottoman Era, is now facing the force of the displacement of its inhabitants. With policy 5366, it was decided that the settlement in the district would be demolished on 13th December 2006 by the state authorities. As a result, a number of architects and participants from different fields initiated the interdisciplinary platform Sulukule Platform which received the support of various NGOs and universities and launched public activities to defend the district and its people.9 The platform also collaborated with the lawyers of the Istanbul Chamber of Architects to prevent the activation of the policy by taking the case to the higher court of ministry. As a result, the policy is being prevented and is on hold. In the past few months the public events and support has been so strong that the municipality has accepted to negotiate with the platform and its initiators. On the 17th May, a mutual protocol was signed between parties who have been involved, or interested in the case including universities, municipalities, NGOs and the fellow initiators. Collaboration and organization at a neighborhood level is possible, especially in the initiation of temporary events and the use of local networks, which do not only help the settlements to participate, but also actors from different fields. The presence of those platforms that are initiated by individuals (not by institutions) can re-identify the relation between the ideology and space. In that case, a soft activism at local neighborhood level is realizable as Negri calls it.10 There must be some possibilities for using the spatial practices from locality and being able to create actions through these doesn’t correspond and respond to the reality that has been created by ideologies and neo-liberal economical strategies.