In Tarlabaşı

Since last I was here demolitions have begun and lots of people have moved out of the neighborhood--some of them, I'm told, returning to their homelands in eastern Turkey and others moving into housing in neighborhoods like Hacı Osman way up on the northern outskirts of the city (and so a long commute away from the jobs in the service sector in Beyoğlu that many residents held). There are noticeably fewer people hanging out in the streets than I saw on previous trips.

A large area alongside the boulevard that separates Tarlabaşı from the more affluent section of Beyoğlu has been fenced off, with the view from the boulevard blocked by huge billboards showing light-skinned business-casual types walking down manicured streets in the Tarlabaşı that will be. Two other zones are slated for razing and rebuilding, one downhill to the north and the other in the adjacent area on the east side of the buildings currently being demolished. The residents in the area to the east say they've been told it will take about five years before it's their turn and they have to move away.

I'm not sure what exactly the logic was behind the placement of the aluminum fence, as there are several blocks of hollowed out buildings that I'm told have been that way for about six months that are outside of the fenced area and in some cases which have had their front facades demolished on the ground level. Anything of value--doors, windows, wires--has been looted from those vacated buildings. The photo above was taken from the street that separates the blocks to be demolished (right) from those that at least for the time being will be left alone (left). A woman living in the building on the left said she'd probably have to move out soon anyway because the renewal project would drive up the rent.

I've changed my approach from shooting first and asking permission later to chatting with people first and then asking if I can take their picture. This has backfired completely, because once people tell me what they really think of the renewal project they're for the most part less willing to be photographed. So thus far people have mostly appeared in my photos just as extras for the cityscapes, or in boring family portraits taken on request. I'm going to bring prints of some of those portraits back in a couple days, which will hopefully earn me more of an in to take more interesting people pictures. 

The sign on the door says "THERE ARE JUNK COLLECTORS IN THIS BUILDING."

I talked to this particular junk collector, Ali, for a good long while. He's from Denizli but has lived in Istanbul for 15 years. In his job he saw and talked to everyone he said, and he knew what was really going on. He had collected more materials than I could imagine on the subject of the renewal project and had realized that all this talk of the buildings being dangerous in the case of earthquake was nonsense and just a pretext to line pockets at the expense of historical buildings, many of which had already survived several earthquakes and were much better built with iron frames than new buildings in other areas with frames of cheap cement. 

Also, there is, he told, a maze of tunnels under Istanbul from the Byzantine and Ottoman periods that the state--the Deep State--wants to get access to for its own devious reasons, which he wouldn't elaborate on. I gave him my card and he promised to send me the link to his website.

Ali said even in these hollowed out buildings he was collected junk from, a few residents who'd lived there all their lives were still holding out, refusing to move. I don't have a good photo of this but I saw on a few gutted blocks an apartment or two on an upper floor that looked like it was still being maintained, with glass in the windows, house plants on the balcony, etc.

The next guy I talked to after Ali, the shopkeeper on the right here (the edges of all the frames seem to have been cropped when the negatives were scanned; I remember being sure not to cut off the guy's feet when framing this one), liked that the project was cleaning up the neighborhood and cleaning out the riff raff, and made exactly the argument Ali had dismissed that the old buildings would be likely collapse if there were another earthquake. There was an enormously destructive earthquake near Istanbul killed about 17,000 people in 1999, and last October hundreds of people died and thousands were left homeless by an earthquake in Van on Turkey's eastern border, since which time there's been growing concern about the next earthquake that will hit Istanbul--apparently there's a big one about once per century.

"İSTANBUL IS VERY PRETTY" There's a lot of more sophisticated graffiti to be found these days, including a huge Charlie Chaplin stencil and a message translating roughly as "HAVEN'T YOU TAKEN ENOUGH PHOTOS?" Previously it was mostly just scrawled crayon-looking writing of "X loves Y" or "Kürdistan"/"APO biji" (long live PKK leader Abullah Öcalan).
One guy said he'd take me up to his roof to take photos for 100 lira. The guy who later had his brother take me up to the roof of an abandoned building (far below) said he'd recently led a group of Japanese tourists up there, and it was perfect for photos in the early evening when all the city lights were coming on.

enough with the damn cats

This teenager's older brother (below), who had tattooed the name of his niece (I forget which of those two girls) into his arm in prison, was the one who had guided the Japanese tourists. When I asked him what he thought of the redevelopment project, the teenager (I learned but forgot both their names) told me that the neighborhood was great back when it was mostly Gypsies/Roma, but then all the terrorist Kurds had flooded in and since then the neighborhood's fate had been sealed, so it was just as well that they were tearing these buildings down.

The top-floor apartment on the bottom left of the above photo was the family's previous home. It was damaged in a fire from--the teenager said--a carelessly disposed of cigarette, with two fatalities. The big building in the background is if I remember correctly an Armenian school that was recently restored (independently of the Tarlabaşı Yenileniyor project). 

My story--not an outright lie--has been that I'm Iranian but study in the US, which usually abbreviates the inquiries about why I don't look American and am I Muslim and what I think of Barack Obama (one woman who I didn't photograph told me how she'd been following the rumors of him being a Muslim with great interest and had been very disappointed to learn they were false). When I told the older brother above that I was Iranian, he grinned, There's a lot of Afghan there right? Afghan is easy to find? Puzzled but figuring maybe his family was from Afghanistan originally I said that yes, there are a lot of Afghan immigrants in Iran. No no, he said, Afghan: opium, weed. Apparently Afghan is slang around here for drugs in general.

For the most part people have been very friendly and willing to talk, the main exception being the two grumpy old men running a parking garage that still operates on the middle of a block that's being torn down. When I started asking about their business they immediately turned the tables to interrogate me. What was my interest in the project? One demanded. Was I getting paid for my photographs. No, I said, I'm a student of sociology and I'm interested in helping people understand how cities change and the politics involved. So I was doing the project so they would give me a doctorate? Well no, I wasn't getting academic credit, I started to explain, but he interrupted me to restate his question: I must be profiteering off this either in financial form or by getting academic credentials, so which was it? Before I could reply he changed tacks, asking me why I lived in America if I was Iranian? I must not like Khomeini, right? So I wasn't really Iranian, was I? This was going nowhere so I bid them good day and moved along.


I'm going to go to Sulukale today, a neighborhood that used to be full of Gypsy musicians and criminals (depending who you ask) but is now a prime example of top-down coercive urban redevelopment trampling roughshod over local residents' and historical preservationists' concerns.