Connectistanbul made an experience tour for a group of traffic and urban planners from Sweden that makes a study visit to a different country each year. The challenge for me was how to show the different traffic conditions without being stuck in traffic itself. The Swedish group specifically asked me -as a foreigner living in Istanbul- to give a tour connecting their interest to my personal experiences and life in Istanbul. Because I live in the district of Sariyer we explored the Nothern part of the city together. I got help preparing the tour from my neighbor Merve who has a double mayor in sociology and political science from Bosphorus University.

The tour started with a walk in the monumental, quiet and green Zincirlikuyu graveyard where information was given on the rise of prices of the graves and then followed a dialogue about how these price developments were a sign of the urban development in the area. Next we stopped at Kanyon, a post-modern shopping mall in Levent which caters to the same higher classes as the graveyard. We shortly walked around.
This experience contrasted sharply with the next visit to the nearby ‘gecekondu’ (which means houses build in one night) which are illegal settlements usually set up by immigrants from the Turkish countryside. Gecekondu residents do not see themselves as victims, they have made a new identity combining parts of their previous village culture with city culture, much like Turkish village immigrants from the 60’s and 70’s have forged a new identity in Europe. For instance the small vegetable gardens in the area testify to the inhabitant’s village origins.
Some group members asked about the satellite dishes they had seen. “why do people in Turkey have satellite dishes if they can receive the national TV channels without them?” I replied that these enabled people to watch the local television stations from the region where they or their parents were born.
The Swedish group was surprised that the upper-middle classes sold their free standing houses in Istanbul to live in apartments, whereas in Sweden the ideal is to move from apartments to a free standing house. The shape of the apartments and the working conditions of gecekondu inhabitants triggered the question “what was the influence of communism?” Traditionally the boss in Turkish businesses is a kind of father figure and mostly small businesses are indeed family businesses. Communism didn’t work in Turkey the way it worked in other parts of the world, because when people work in a family business work efforts are not seen as exploitation.
“Why are all these expensive cars here?” someone asked me while we were driving trough Resit Pasa gecekondu. We were taking this route in order to avoid the traffic on the main Maslak road and so did the owners of those expensive cars. Do you see those billboards over there advertising expensive goods? I asked, why do you think those have been put up in this poor neighborhood? Suddenly people started to see what was going on, an antique shop on the road indicated that travelers along this road were more bourgeois than the inhabitants of the neighborhood itself. “What about those lines of tables over there, on the sidewalk?” Those are used once a week for the local street market. “How does the municipality collect the taxes for the roads?” “Why are there no sidewalks in this street?” “How can you see that one area is already legalized and other ones are not?” When we looked at the gated community in which I live, group members remarked that this ‘gated community’ had low fences, rather like a low garden fence. Strictly speaking these are cooperative building projects usually set up by groups from a certain profession. While the older cooperative sité’s were set up focusing on professions, later sité’s tend to focus more on differences in lifestyle.
One of the newer gated communities in my neighborhood has a high wall and security. The main gate is next to a gecekondu and the gate-keeper is also from a gecekondu. One person from Sweden remarked it seemed paradoxical that someone employs a security guard coming from the same environment as that the walls and security are designed to keep out. There was some discussion going on in the group about whether security is only about keeping people out, or also about social positioning, status, job creation etc.
The Bosphorus view that the residents of the gecekondu in Armutlu have, is something other people in other parts pay thousands of dollars for when they rent or buy a flat. The sunny weather and clear sky made is possible for us to see the furthest parts of Istanbul from that point. After the tour we had tea and sweets in on the terrace of a social building for police personnel on the Bosphorus shore “It is nice that these facilities exist for civil servants” before we boarded the boat that took us back to Taksim.