Arrival City by Doug Saunders

Author:Doug Saunders
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780307379658
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-03-22T10:00:00+00:00

THE ARRIVAL CITY TRANSFORMED

When he stepped out of his cell in 1986 and hitched a ride back to his house, Sabri at first felt certain that he had taken a wrong turn or perhaps entered the inner city rather than the rural-migrant outskirts. “It didn’t look anything like it had when I’d left—it had become a completely different place,” he remembers. The streets were narrower, the buildings much bigger and painted in bright colors, a mad bustle of commerce on the sidewalks. Cars were everywhere. The soothing regularity of gecekondu rooftops was gone, with many of them replaced by taller buildings.

Over the next several days, as he reacquainted himself with his wife and his sons and received a warm welcome from his old neighbors, he realized that far more than the neighborhood’s name and appearance had changed. Its people, its politics, its attitude, its standing in Istanbul, its role in Turkey, all had been turned upside down. While he’d been in prison, Turkey’s arrival cities had undergone a transformation unlike any in the world.

The military dictatorship had ended on an unpromising note in 1983, when the head of the military had called elections after introducing a highly restrictive constitution. Most well-known leaders had been banned from politics, and many parties had been outlawed. The election was won by Turgut Özal, an economic manager who had participated in the military government, and his newly formed Motherland Party. There was no reason to believe that Özal would be anything other than a military-loyal bureaucrat. Throughout the 1980s, though, he remade Turkey in dramatic ways, opening its economy to international trade and investment, modernizing its monetary system, replacing the disastrous import-substitution economic plan with a system based on export-driven growth, and building modern infrastructure and government institutions. But nothing was quite as revolutionary, or quite as subtle and inconspicuous, as his solution to the problem of angry, rootless squatter communities on the urban outskirts.

Soon after taking office, Özal introduced Law 2805, an amnesty law for gecekondu squatters. This one was different from the amnesties of the 1960s and ’70s, though. Rather than just turning the squatters into accepted taxpayers, it granted them formal ownership of their makeshift houses and title deeds to the land under them. Millions of precarious and uneasy “overnight arrivals” who had been at war with the city were transformed, almost literally overnight, into property owners with a stake in the economy.

Changing the self-built houses into parcels of real estate had a rapid effect. The constant flow of arrivals from the Anatolian villages—which was to become a deluge in the 1980s—guaranteed that land values would increase. With this simple act, the gecekondu houses were turned from a threat to the state into an instrument of state welfare, and in fact into a rudimentary substitute for a welfare state. As one Turkish writer noted, “Gecekondu houses became the most important social security object for at least two generations of families who have no access to state social security instruments.”13

Özal recognized that

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