Last of the Tarlabaşı pics

The toning is from the different chromogenic black and white films I was using, which I think works better for some photos than for others.

The first other photographer I met in the neighborhood was Ali Öz, a well known photojournalist I'd met two years ago but he didn't remember. He'd been working on Tarlabaşı for the past year he told me, and I'd come too late. Everything was finished now; in the winter it had been like a war zone.

Later that same day I was talking to a guy who was getting ready to move back to his hometown of Bingöl in the east when a tall blonde German tourist with a big camera walked up. It's the narcissism of small differences I suppose--or maybe his presence was a reminder to me that I don't blend in as local as I'd like to think when in a certain Lawrence of Arabia frame of mind--but after talking briefly I couldn't wait to be rid of him and said I had to get back to work. He started shadowing me, though, which made me uncomfortable enough that I left the neighborhood for a lunch break.

Then, one of my last days in town turned out to be a regular paparazzi fest. Ali showed up together with a female Russian photographer in flip-flops that I warned her were a bad idea with all the broken glass and her guide, who identified himself as a taxi driver who did a bit of this stuff on the side. Here's his Facebook page, which you "subscribe" to instead of just friending him. Last a Turkish woman with another big DSLR (far right below) who said she was a filmmaker--wish I'd gotten her contact info--walked up. Some of the young guys loafing around on the corner borrow a passing demolition workman's tools to mug for photos.

A few from the Sunday open air market in Tarlabaşı and the flea market (louse market it Turkish) down at the bottom of the hill--I'm not sure the name of that neighborhood or if it's still considered Tarlabaşı.

Cell phone batteries at the flea market

All of the half-dozen Africans living in the neighborhood (including Mahomet, below) were Senegalese with the exception of one Nigerian guy who worked at a hotel nearby. Most had been here for a few years and spoke good Turkish. The Senegalese seem to have cornered the knock-off watch market in Istanbul.

collecting empty tea cups from sellers at the open-air pazar

The one evening I went out taking photos--and it wasn't very late, maybe 8-9pm--was the only time I felt unsafe in the area, despite warnings from Turkish friends not to set foot in the area at any time of day. During the day very few people were hostile after I explained I was a student and about my project, even if they didn't want their own photo taken (one exception being a large woman who really didn't want me photographing this dog).

But after sunset it seemed that everyone suddenly became hostile and suspicious. I thought I was gong to get beat up. One guy saw me taking a photo from afar and started towards me yelling Are you a maniac? at the top of his lungs.

The woman on the far right asked me and then the man on the left in the center and right photos for a cigarette and then for money. He ignored her and I pestered her with questions about her residence and what she thought of the renewal project, of which he had no idea.

The older man on the left of the below photo was from Van (everyone in the cafe was Kurdish except one token Arab, "our Arab" he told me) and spoke a bit of Persian. He had already had to vacate his home of twenty-something years and moved into a far off part of the city, but still came here because everyone he knew was in this neighborhood.

Below, the guy was laughingly accusing my friend from Van of stealing windows and doors from vacated buildings, a charge my friend didn't deny. Might have been a good picture if I hadn't set my backpack up on the table.

Another case of someone being unhappy with me was a man at this cafe who I guess lost his vocal cords to cancer because he spoke with a little microphone he held to his throat. I couldn't understand anything he said but he first protested and then after I took the below photo in his general direction jumped up in a rage. I told him, honestly, that I hadn't taken his photo and he was just a background blur and the others came to my defense, the cafe owner sitting the man back in his chair telling him to calm down. I finished my tea and left, starting to apologize and again promise that I hadn't taken his photo on my way out but he dismissed me with an unfriendly gesture.

The guy above had just arrived in Istanbul four days earlier. He and his family were migrant workers from Rize on the Black Sea coast, and he didn't want to talk about where they were staying in Istanbul.

Family members of the brothers who led me up to the roof of an abandoned building a few days earlier. The younger woman is holding photo prints I brought them. I spent my last afternoon in the neighborhood delivering photos as I'd promised, in some cases as a quid pro quo for taking them.

These guys below at a cafe were the most helpful: they knew most of the people pictured and took my prints to give to them (hopefully).

The photo lab (Kristal Fotoğraf in Sirkeci, which I recommend as professional and usually on time) used a fancy drum scanner on the last batch of film after I pointed out that their normal scanner had what looked like a long hair in it creating a white line on the images, and it gave me crazy color shifts with the Kodak 400CN film, with pink highlight and green shadows as below. The Ilford film again held up much better.

Kurdistan interrupted. The guy on the right below thought the project was a great idea and looked forward to the place being cleaned out. He said, a former commando who had done special ops in the east and in northern Iraq and knew how these people (Kurds) thought. They were just ignorant and it was no good trying to educate them and they wouldn't take care of their own streets or homes so why not replace them with people who would? A third guy was standing with them when I first walked up but as the very loquacious former commando rambled on he huffed and shook his head and then walked across the street to drink his tea on a doorstep opposite us. When the former commando laughed and told him to come back, what was the matter? he replied without a hint of humor, I don't like what you're saying; I don't like you.

Later the former commando showed me how his neighbors threw trash into the little alleyways that he owned on either sides of his shop. Women would throw their used pads down there, and he had to pick them up. And I wondered why he wanted the place to be torn down and rebuilt?

The fact that nobody had set his workplace on fire was itself evidence to me against claims of militant PKK types dominating this neighborhood.

Addendum:

With help from a friend I've come up with the explanation that this graffito below is a reference to Bülent Ersoy, a transgender singer whose version of the song "Dert Çekmeye Gidiyorum" (I'm going off the suffer) is the most popular one on Youtube (dunno if she wrote it or not) and who's apparently raised big controversy being publicly critical of military operations in northern Iraq. I guess the themes of transsexuality and govt operations against Kurds are apropos of the neighborhood... 

my two kuruş

First, a circumcision block party:

I was loath to use Hipstamatic out of photographic snobbery but it really does make everything look cooler. I almost wish I had shot the whole Tarlabaşı project on my phone. Here’s one shot with my film camera:

Boys are usually dressed up in little prince outfits complete with white cape, scepter, and flumed mitre, but in this case they went with a more trendi look.

Anyway, on to what I think should have been done instead of buying out owners, kicking out renters, and demolishing wholesale. DISCLAIMER: I’m approaching this as a complete amateur with no backgroun in urban sociology or planning, so what I write might be either stating or overlooking the obvious to people who have given these matters more thought.

Quite simply, I think property owners should receive subsidies to fix up whatever could be fixed, required to themselves demolish uninhabitable buildings and given money to do so. If it were individual owners who themselves lived in the area doing the renewal, you would never see what you see now: buildings forcibly vacated with their facades ripped off but then left to rot for six months or more now, with looters stealing anything of value—windows, doors, wires, etc.—and fires occasionally lit by who know who. 

Buildings facing the main boulevard with their facades ripped off are now used to dump garbage and as latrines. Below, a man peeing in one of them:

There are now police stationed on vacated streets after dark.

And of course if it were a bunch of individual small-time property owner restoring and then reaping the benefits instead of getting bought out for a trifle by a contractor will make an enormous amount of money, the distribution of profits would be much fairer. And they would most likely hire small businesses they knew from their own social networks to do the actual restoration work, again distributing wealth more equally than the system of contractors and subcontractors skimming off the top and paying workers minimum wage.

In that way Tarlabaşı could become the next Cihangir, an area once dilapidated but now something like the Greenwich Village of Istanbul, or another Kasımpaşa, the neighborhood to Tarlabaşı’s southwest that was known for being tough when Prime Minister Erdoğan was growing up there but is now a nice middle-income area where children still play in the streets and neighbors know each other.

One I took in Cihangir back in 2007:

And Kasımpaşa, though you can't tell much from afar:

Admittedly I have little idea how Cihangir actually turned into what it was, beyond what I was told by two Turkish girlfriends of American expats at an expat bar (with a Nat Geo Wild episode on giant monitor lizards on the flat screen in the background distracting me from the conversation). They said that there was indeed not any grand project in the neighborhood, just a bunch of property owners realizing the potential of their location and investing in renovations.

Some property owners I talked with two years ago told me that for years they had been seeking permission from the municipality to do restorations on their own, but hadn’t gotten it, they suspected because the municipality wanted Tarlabaşı looking as decrepit as possible to justify exercising eminent domain to auction the land off to a private contactor (in this case Berat Albayrak, the prime minister’s son-in-law) to the demolish blocks en masse. Others had gotten permission, and a few buildings outside of the demolition zone had scaffoldings up with owners doing renovations in anticipation of increasing property value when the renewal project is complete–perhaps a positive effect of the project.

Yet when I have run my ideas by Istanbulites, I’ve without fail been greeted with incredulity. Why would the politicians do that? A grand project provides much greater opportunity for them to line their pockets. 

A big part of what gives Istanbul its character is that it doesn’t look like it was built according to some rational design—instead you see civilizations and ideologies layered on top of each other and side by side in the architecture. But in places like Tarlabaşı and Sulukale they are building regimented block housing “reminiscent” of late Ottoman styles, tearing down actual authentic late Ottoman buildings for self-consciously “authentic” developments. See the Tarlabaşı Yenileniyor image gallery.

Since I was last in Istanbul a big new shopping center has opened. I don’t have the architectural vocabulary to describe it properly, but it looks like it has been built to match tourists’ notions of Istanbul as a “bridge between East and West,” complete with loopy gold script on the front sign meant to be reminiscent of Ottoman script, rather than anything else that actually exists in the city.

Although if I step back from all this I guess in a few decades these buildings will be yet another weird and interesting relic--mixed in with those built to demonstrate imperial grandeur or to make Turkey look like Europe because Europe was modern and if it looked the same as Europe so would Turkey—of an era when city planners were trying to recreate authenticity, as much as anything as means of generating consent for demolishing actual history.

Intended for an internal audience rather than tourists but also gross is this:

Folktale hero/buffoon Nasreddin Hoca is usually depicted riding backwards on a donkey, but here on the façade of the state TV children’s channel’s headquarters they’ve dressed him up in white fur-lined red as a poor man’s Santa Claus, an authentic Turkish Santa instead of just his own thing.

My penultimate evening in Istanbul I watched an amazing film called Ekümenopolis about the transformation of Istanbul, which made many of the above points better than I have. It was a bit simplistic in its Marxist boiling down of everything to class struggle, but nonetheless is great/shocking in showing the cozy relationship between the TOKİ housing administration and contractors, how Istanbul became a congested driving city, and how those evicted have subsequently gotten screwed out of their promised public housing (e.g. by demanding they put down a 15,000 lira deposit before moving into their subsidized housing, where most families had only one working breadwinner getting paid 600-800 lira a month). The film ends on an unsatisfying “just say no” note of protesters organizing to resist. I suppose my recommendation for change is also unsatisfactory as far as addressing the systemic issues (hence friends’ incredulity at my naïveté) but instead of calling for bottom-up popular resistance I’m advocating top-down tweaks: policymakers should just do a better job thinking things through before giving into grand schemes and think more about helping the little guy. Eh.

Mumbai by comparison

I was surprised as I talked to people in Tarlabaşı by how little information most of them had about the project. Neither the municipality nor the contractor had provided even those living right across the street from blocks being demolished with any information about what was happening or what the timeline was. There were no community meetings organized, whether by those opposed to the project or by those implementing it.
I was in Mumbai this past winter tagging along with some sociologists doing research on slum redevelopment projects there, and the differences in civil society between Turkey and India are incredible. The following is an excerpt from a mass email I sent out while in India:
(for some reason the font is coming out either too big or two small no matter what I do)

One thing that's struck me is how diverse the slums of Mumbai are socioeconomically. They're not just full of lumpenproletariat types. We've met lots of middle-class and especially upwardly mobile professions and entrepreneurs who grew up poor but are now doing pretty well for themselves (one guy was an artist who does story boarding for Bollywood films), but still can't afford to get a place elsewhere yet because of Mumbai's crazy inflated housing market (see below). Plenty of civil servants, policemen and teachers also live in slums. Alongside them are more working class people and also lumpen layabouts. But even they aren't "the poor" in the sense of being a disorganized mass of marginalized people the way the families sleeping on the side of the road and along railroad track seem to be (though maybe a closer look would show that the latter are organized communities in interaction with others and not just the efflux of society--at any rate slum dwellers seem to have it much better off than the homeless). The slums seem like some of the most neighborly places I've been in the city (as in everyone knows everyone), I think in part because neighbors are in constant interaction because they have to collaborate on receiving utilities, keeping shared toilets clean(ish), etc. Some residents get their water and electricity legally, and others reach informal agreements with them to siphon off some of their water/electricity. (According to Naresh there's a big advantage to being one of those who get the utility bill because you can turn a neat profit overcharging your neighbors for your water/electricity. What isn't clear to me is how some are eligible and others ineligible for receiving utilities legally, or who if anyone has legal deed to the land they're living on--I thought what makes a slum a slum is that it was built up without regulation or land ownership)

The slum redevelopment issue is connected to a housing shortage throughout the city. There's strict rent control so those whose families have been in Bombay from before it became an economic boom town pay almost nothing for big places in the most desirable parts of town, while private developers scramble to build on new plots of land where they can rent or sell at incredibly high market prices (inflated because nobody wants to give up their rent controlled apartments or are holding out on selling the houses that they own because they expect prices to continue to rise). So the most attractive places to build are slums, where residents can (the developers hope) be enticed by the promise of affordable high-rise housing with access to the facilities that are lacking in the slums (esp sanitation) that will exist on the same plot of land side by side with luxury apartments (since building vertically means space for many more people on the same area of land).

In some cases the slums include fishing villages that got swallowed up as the city expanded, but the land of which is owned by the fishermen through 999 year leases signed with the British or Portuguese that are still honored. Apparently they tend to drive a harder bargain because they're all from the same village and more unified than slum residents who might know each other as neighbors but are very different from one in terms of ethnicity, class, etc even as they are thrown together into a housing coop.

The way it works is that residents of the slum have to form cooperative associations to reach a deal with the developers that includes a buyout of the land and the provision of housing for the residents on the same plot of land. So in theory this sounds great: on land that previously held only low-storied houses not built up to code two sets of high-rises would be build--one as low-rent housing for the slum residents, and one as fancy residences to be sold at market price. 

To prove oneself a legal resident eligible for housing (and membership in the coop?), one has to (in the case of the Dhavari project) produce utility bills or a voting registration card showing one's address as in the slum dating back to 1994. When I commented that 17 years seems like a long time to hold on to a utility bill, Naresh said that most people do in fact hold on to their bills, in part generally across India because things are so bureaucratic that one has to hold on to all one's documents and records, and in part because they knew that as slum residents they would one day be forced to prove their squatter's rights (though it seems a stretch that residents would have in 94 predicted a redevelopment project a decade and a half down the road). Still, that excludes (unless they were registered to vote from the slum, and I didn't get a clear sense of what proportion of people are) those who have been stealing electricity/water or striking up deals with their neighbors and so don't have any utility bills in their name.

So again, the coops tend to represent specific and more middle-class interests within the slums, since the middle-class residents are (I'm guessing) the one's more likely to be officially paying for their utilities.

One issue is that one-stories houses can double as store-fronts for the fruit vendors and petty artisans who make some of the slums seem so economically bustling when walking through. If a fruit vendor is moved to the 10th floor of a high-rise, his cost of living just went way up because he'll have to rent a place or pay off police to allow him to hawk on the street without getting shut down. This of course isn't a problem for the professionals commuting to jobs in other parts of the city, who are the ones who head both of the housing coops that we met with.

For my two cents, though, it seems like high rises wouldn't be a bad solution (there are only so many ways to efficiently pack 12 million+ people into a geographically pretty small city where jobs are concentrated on a peninsula that takes inhibitively long to commute to from the outskirts) if only there were more accountability and the developers were forced to follow through on their promises. 

When asked how redevelopment project could be better implemented, the last group the sociologists talked to (in Gholibar) all agreed that it would be better if the government were doing it, surprising given all the complaints of corruption and that fact that the existence of these slums lacking proper sanitation and utilities was a result of the failure of the government to guide the growth of the city.

The coop members said they'd talked with residents of other slums that had been redeveloped and the common refrain that once they got approval and rights to build on the land, private developers cut corners and did nothing to maintain the low-rent housing, focusing only on the huge profit-generating luxury apartments.

The Gholibar residents were filing suit against their private developer for fraud--something to do with him fabricating documents to show that a whole bunch of people were living in the slum who actually weren't in order to tip the balance within the housing coop association so that the deal he was proposing would get the required 70% approval from slum residents for the government to grant him the property to bulldoze and then build on.

I can't remember exactly how Naresh translated this (I'll break out Hindi dictionary later), but the first sentence is something like "We will not leave!" There's the same graffiti and fist--the latter a symbol of a broader populist movement that has supported the Gholibar residents with a hunger strike, among other things, whose name a can't remember--all over the neighborhood.