Assembling gentrification in Istanbul: The Cihangir neighbourhood of Beyoğlu

Abstract

Chinese

This paper aims to contribute to the gentrification literature through the potentials of assemblage thinking. We focus on gentrification in Istanbul, which represents the characteristics of both the Global South and North, and use assemblages to link together gentrification and the temporal scales of Istanbul’s urbanisation as well as geographical scales of gentrification around the world. Approaching gentrification as a continual process of transformation and emergence, we intend to illuminate how assemblages of gentrification in a historical inner-city neighbourhood, Cihangir, can be produced and reproduced in the trajectory of this neighbourhood. In so doing, we reveal and explore the role of the state in seemingly market-led gentrification and draw attention to the generative potentiality in the local resistance to the recent state-led gentrification of Cihangir.

Keywords

Community displacement/gentrification local government neighbourhood theory

Introduction

Gentrification, a phenomenon that cities worldwide have experienced and are experiencing (Lees et al., 2016), has been regarded in a global context as the new urban strategy – what Smith (2002) called ‘gentrification generalized’. Atkinson and Bridge (2005) undertook a comprehensive overview of gentrification with numerous case studies from around the world and discussed it as the new urban colonialism. However, gentrification scholars who have previously attempted to outline a global view by studying gentrification predominantly in Anglo-American cities have begun to challenge this framing of the global spread of gentrification. Harris (2008) was one of the first authors to argue a need to learn from previously peripheral cities, such as Mumbai, India. Lees (2012) reported the need to adopt an alternative approach to explore whether gentrification had travelled from the Global North to South. Ghertner (2014) criticised the diffusionist logic. Shin et al. (2016) encouraged a more open-minded approach to understand gentrification as constitutive of diverse urban processes at work rather than simply to confirm its expansion. Lees et al. (2016) went one step further and used the term ‘planetary gentrification’ to challenge centre–periphery binary thinking.

The great diversity of urbanisation processes and multiplicity of urban outcomes around the world have led scholars to search for new understandings and concepts about cities and to build theory in different contexts. Assemblage thinking, which emphasises the heterogeneous, multi-local and processual nature of urban infrastructures and metabolisms – socio-technical and socio-natural systems – and most recently urban policies (Farias, 2017), is on the rise. McFarlane (2011a) suggested assembling people, resources and knowledges within a horizontal field and unlearning the existing conceptualisations, ideologies and practices to grapple with ways of knowing the city across the Global North–South divide. Such an approach, however, has been criticised for highlighting contextual differences but failing to provide a ‘context of context’ (Brenner et al., 2011; Wachsmuth et al., 2011) and for requiring that we unlearn knowledge, such as the expansion of urban capitalism and issues of power and inequality, that we have already acquired from Western academic environments (López-Morales, 2015; Peck, 2015). Indeed, assemblage thinking is a matter not of throwing away what we have already learned but of refusing to impose ready-made explanations, instead allowing the potentials for theoretical conversations across different urban contexts. Further, assemblages support critical urban thinking by emphasising thick descriptions, such as ‘how urban inequalities are produced through different temporalities (e.g., the temporalities of policy, capital accumulation and everyday cultural practice)’ (McFarlane, 2011b: 210).

In urban studies, the notion of assemblage has generally been welcomed (City, 2014: special feature 1; Farber, 2014; McGuirk et al., 2016; Ureta, 2014). By emphasising the exploration of heterogeneous arrangements of natural, technical and social entities, assemblage thinking allows us to move away from a notion of the city as ‘a resultant formation to a notion of the city as processes of doing, practices, and events produced through different temporalisations and contingencies’ (McFarlane, 2011b: 206) and ‘from city as a whole to city as a multiplicity’ (Farias, 2011: 369). From this perspective, we approach gentrification as an open concept, regarding it as assemblage of processes without assuming pre-defined propositions (Lagendijk et al., 2014). Gentrification, thus, is not just the expected result for a neighbourhood of a governmental policy of urban renewal, the attractiveness of an image of life and atmosphere created by gentrifiers, or the product of real estate investors (de Haan et al., 2013). Rather, it is a becoming together of multiplicity. Accordingly, this paper aims to illuminate how assemblages of gentrification in Istanbul and its historic inner-city neighbourhood, Cihangir, can be produced and reproduced in their trajectories. First, we highlight the opportunities of thinking of gentrification in terms of assemblages; then, we provide a brief overview of Istanbul’s gentrification and urban generalities in relation to its history. Finally, we focus on gentrification and local specificities in Cihangir to explore the potentialities in linking critical urban thinking.

Thinking of gentrification in terms of assemblages

Deleuze and Guattari (1987) introduced the French term ‘agencement’, which has been translated as ‘assemblage’, literally ‘putting together’, ‘arranging’, ‘laying out’ or ‘fitting’ (Wise, 2005). The critical point ‘is making all the components of a non-homogenous set converge, making them [come] together’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). This approach enables us to explain the holding together of heterogeneous things without their ceasing to be heterogeneous nature (Allen, 2011). Relatedly, cities can be seen as assemblages of people, networks, and organisations as well as of a variety of infrastructural components that all somehow work together to produce a functioning city (DeLanda, 2006: 4). To rethink gentrification in light of this theoretical influence, we first ask how urban generalities, such as migration, rapid urbanisation, economic restructuring and neoliberalism, are contributing to gentrification in Istanbul. In Turkey, the term ‘gentrification’ has not been commonly used. Urban transformation, redevelopment or renewal are more frequently utilised concepts. Therefore, by paying attention to varied conceptualisations of gentrification, we use assemblages to link together gentrification and the temporal scales of Istanbul’s urbanisation as well as places and cities around the world in a non-hierarchical way. Like its geographical location, Istanbul resembles both West and East; in addition, it has been characterised generally by the less-developed attributes of the Global South but also has certain modern, developed aspects of the Global North. Therefore, a focus on Istanbul means assembling both North and South or cutting across the divide and thinking of interactions and collisions on different geographical scales.

Second, we ask how gentrification is being achieved in Cihangir, where the process began in the early 1990s and has been intensified and transformed since the 2000s. Assemblage thinking invites us to see gentrification ‘not as composed of stable and well-bounded entities, but as a continual transformation and emergence’ (Ureta, 2014: 232). In fact, gentrification is an indeterminate and unpredictable process, always moving between stabilised and unfixed and between actual and possible (McFarlane, 2011b). This fluidity does not mean randomness but stresses the process of ‘agencing’ (Bogue, 2007: 145), in which the constituent components interact and transform themselves and each other, thereby closing off or freeing up potentialities and creating and unmaking territories. Therefore, we deliberately use the term ‘gentrification’ to demonstrate the continued transformations and emergences in Cihangir’s process. The neighbourhood is a prominent example of gentrification and therefore comparatively represents a longer history of gentrification literature. This approach enables us to combine the empirical studies of Cihangir and follow the territorialisation and de-territorialisation processes in the trajectory of the neighbourhood. We trace the gentrification assemblages of Cihangir to unveil ‘the actual practices, processes, socio-material orderings, reproducing asymmetries [territorialising] in the distribution of resources, of power and of agency capacities, opening up Blackboxed arrangements’ (Farias, 2011: 370). By doing so, we aim to reveal and explore the role of the state in seemingly market-led gentrification and draw attention to the generative potentiality in the local resistance to the recent state-led gentrification.

Third, we discussed the gentrification processes of Arnhem, Istanbul and Vienna in a JPI Urban Europe project with our partners. Assemblage thinking provides us with a research approach that frames an understanding of gentrification in different contexts, more in an exploratory than in a comparative way. Present-day Cihangir, falling somewhere between the soft gentrification of cities such as Arnhem and Vienna and the brutal – neoliberal or authoritarian – gentrification of Istanbul, is consistent with a project that aims to examine ‘geographies of gentrification’ (Lagendijk et al., 2014). The assemblage-inspired project proposes starting from empirical analyses and details. We first collected documents that range from development plans to academic articles and newspapers to online posts. Then, we defined the semi-structured qualitative data collection methods. Ten fieldwork protocols for interview forms, observation technique in public places, participation in local events, methods of reporting and analysis were structured for various actors of interest. A pilot study was conducted in Cihangir, and a balanced mix in sample sizes was targeted. Within this scope, fieldwork was conducted from 2014 to 2016. In addition, we participated in deep, rich discussions of the research and fieldwork with our project partners during the consortium meetings and Skype meetings that occurred every three months from 2013 to 2017.¹

Assembling the gentrification of Istanbul

Istanbul, which served as the imperial capital during the Ottoman Empire, symbolises Turkey. The republic, founded in 1923 based on European models, was designed to overcome the Ottoman past and the failure of the empire by the creation of a secular, unitary, modern nation-state. The city is currently the economic, cultural and historic centre of Turkey, and its 14.8 million inhabitants account for 18.5% of the country’s total population. Istanbul’s urban landscape was transformed by processes of emigration and immigration. The departure of non-Muslims owing to a series of events after the foundation of the nation-state and related to the political aspects of the Second World War turned the cosmopolitan capital into a more homogeneous centre and changed its socio-spatial structure. Geopolitics in the region, similarly, affected the residential geography of Israeli cities (Gonen, 2015). Istanbul’s radical transformation began through rural immigration in the 1950s and 1960s. Squatters, emerged as a solution to the urban housing problem, invaded the outskirts of the city.² Physical reconstruction, with large-scale demolition to create a modern system of roads and parcel-scale demolition to replace mansions with mid-rise, mixed-use apartment blocks, characterised the inner areas inhabited by middle-income groups (Tekeli, 1994). The depopulation and abandonment of the central city did not occur in Istanbul, as it did in South Korea; Ha (2015) mentioned inner-city living during the 1960s and 1970s in South Korean cities and the slum clearance programme that relocated low-income families to peripheral areas.

The growth and expansion of Istanbul continued as with the development of central business districts and higher-density inner quarters as well as suburban residential areas. A series of amnesties granted to squatters from the 1970s to the 1990s enabled the conversion of centrally located squats into apartment blocks with additional development rights. A demolish-and-reconstruct process by which small-scale developers acquired land from landowners in exchange for new apartments and capital from the sale of the remaining units characterised Istanbul’s urban development for many decades. Classic gentrification as described by Ruth Glass (1964) did not exist; however, this reinvestment process induced socio-economic changes into the built environment. Changes associated with the process included the emergence of expectations for future investments and informal relations between landowners and investors, political clientelism for redevelopment rights and the resulting rise in land and property prices, and the displacement of residents and transfers of property from the original owners to brokers. The term ‘gentrification’ for the trajectory of Istanbul’s urban development has not been used since the early 1980s. Until processes that resembled many aspects of Anglo-American examples were observed in historic inner-city neighbourhoods, e.g. Kuzguncuk and Arnavutköy near the Bosporus (Ergun, 2004; Islam, 2005; Mills, 2006; Uzun, 2001), the term was generally absent in public and academic circles, as in East Asia (Shin, 2016).

In Istanbul, classic gentrification was experienced through the relationship with historic conservation. The neighbourhoods whose aesthetic and local features are better preserved and whose locations are more advantageous became subject to gentrification in the 1980s and 1990s. The latenineteenth- and early twentieth-century buildings that were home to non-Muslim minorities until the 1940s and 1950s and then housed rural migrants recently became home to gentrifiers. Therefore, the dynamics of the process were related to reinvestment in the city centre after changes in modes of production and industrial decentralisation (Can, 2013; Sam, 2010; Sen 2011; Uysal, 2008) but were more closely related to the devaluation of the inner city after the departure of the non-Muslim residents and the subsequent revaluation due to the inflow of middle-income groups (Islam and Sakızlıoğlu, 2015). In general, these processes occurred spontaneously and were stimulated by market forces. State involvement was not dominant or apparent in the earlier processes. When inner-city investment was prospective, the state subtly encouraged gentrification, or at least not blocking the market-led process. As being one of the actors in gentrification the state has not been totally absent from the processes in Istanbul. Besides, its role or its direct role in gentrification has gradually increased. Governmental urban policies, designating Beyoğlu as an historic conservation zone, and initiating ‘Beautiful Beyoğlu’ urban renewal project, triggered gentrification in the Cihangir, Galata and Asmalımescit neighbourhoods in the early 1990s, as shown in Figure 1. In the historic Fener and Balat neighbourhoods, a UNESCO rehabilitation project, launched in cooperation with the Fatih Municipality and the EU was replaced by a public–private partnership renewal project after the enactment of Law 5366 that resulted in gentrification in the 2000s.

Figure 1

Gentrification in Istanbul and Cihangir neighbourhood, Beyoğlu.

Istanbul has undergone dramatic structural transformations as it has followed a new path throughout the 2000s. Not only high-rent historic inner-city areas but also economically disinvested squatter areas and geographically peripheral areas have been targeted for capital reinvestment, with or without the displacement of the existing inhabitants. Certainly, it is not easy to identify and label all urban processes as gentrification. Outside the Global North, gentrification is perceived as a process associated with both inner-city intensification and suburban expansion. Some examples, such as suburban gentrification in London’s Docklands (Butler, 2007), even exist in the Global North. Gentrification has been not only extended by encapsulating new forms beyond the inner city but also transformed by a variety or complexity of driving forces behind the process. For example, gentrification in Karachi was initiated by the large-scale coastal development projects of Dubai- and Malaysia-based real estate companies (Hasan, 2015), while the transformation of the central city in Taipei into neighbourhoods for super-rich and elite professionals occurred through the direct intervention of the state (Huang, 2015). This multiplicity of forms and cases around the world shows that gentrification is always produced from and within specific contexts, whether it is labelled ‘gentrification’ or something else.

Present-day Istanbul has been shaped by a highly authoritarian form of neoliberalism. The Justice and Development Party (AKP), the ruling party since 2002, committed to an urban governance model that was structured through several legal and institutional regulations; the transfer of power and authority to central government institutions, i.e. Mass Housing Authority (TOKI);³ and public–private partnerships as well as many state-financed projects. In addition, massive public investments in urban infrastructure, such as newly built highways, bridges and airports; commercial and tourism centres; and mass housing projects on public land with utility services provided, have attracted speculators and large-scale investors to these reconstructed or newly built areas and their surroundings. To emphasise the active and proactive roles of government, ‘urban transformation’, ‘redevelopment’ or ‘renewal’ is sometimes prefixed by ‘state-led’ in academic writing. In the gentrification literature, the state-led component was identified even in the first wave of Hackworth and Smith’s (2001) systematic gentrification process, which comprised three waves from the 1950s to the early 2000s. The interventionist governments in their third wave and the state-sponsored initiatives in the additional wave of Lees et al. (2008) showed how the state shaped gentrification in different periods of neoliberalism.

A substantial body of research has examined the recent relations between the state and neoliberal urbanism in the Turkish context and the mushrooming of urban renewal projects that range from commercial and cultural centres for historic inner-city and port tourism complexes and shopping malls along the Bosporus waterfront to luxury upper-income residences and gated communities in the squatter neighbourhoods of Istanbul (see International Planning Studies, 2011: special issue 1). The term ‘gentrification’ has been used to reveal the socio-economic consequences that follow the physical-environmental changes created by these projects (Güzey, 2016; Islam and Sakızlıoğlu, 2015). This experience of Istanbul resonates with the recent debates in the gentrification literature, which increasingly terms such projects ‘state-led’, ‘third-wave’ or ‘new-build’ (see Davidson and Lees, 2010; Hackworth and Smith, 2001). The process in Istanbul is not very different from the slash-and-build gentrification of cities such as Shanghai or Seoul (Shin, 2016; Shin and Kim, 2016) or the predatory state-led gentrification that López-Morales (2011, 2015) identified in Santiago de Chile. Lees (2017) even emphasised the similarities of large gentrified areas of public housing in the cities of the Global North, such as London, Chicago and New York, to the large-scale urban renewal projects occurring elsewhere in the world.

Assembling the gentrification of Cihangir

Cihangir, located on the slope of the Bosporus and in a central location of Beyoğlu, has certain site-specific advantages that have caused it to experience gentrification. These advantages include its panoramic view of the Historic Peninsula and its proximity, within walking distance, to Istiklal Avenue, where commercial, cultural and entertainment activities occur; Taksim Square, where public transportation lines connect; and universities. In addition, the relatively wider streets of Cihangir have made this inner-city area more accessible to cars (Islam, 2005), a feature that is preferred by middle-income residents. The historic buildings, consisting of late-Ottoman art-nouveau and art-deco apartments with high ceilings and large rooms and early-Republican apartments inspired by the same style, increase the attractiveness of the neighbourhood (Uzun, 2001). In 1993, an artist couple, both lecturers at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, chose to live in Cihangir because of its close proximity to their workplace; they renovated a building while preserving the original features of the apartment block and used the basement and ground floor as their art studio (interview, 1 March 2014, Havyar Street). Other academicians from the same university moved in during the same period. Therefore, it can be said that the neighbourhood attracted academicians’ interest first. Its gentrification started in the early 1990s and diffused, especially after the mid-1990s.

In this classic first-wave, pioneer or sweat-equity gentrification process in Cihangir (Ergün, 2004; Lees et al., 2016), there was categorically no direct state intervention. However, an urban process indicates a network of generally non-directional, disparate groups of actors that generate agency (Hillier, 2011). This network implicates power relations, knowledges and subjectivities described as ‘a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions’ in Foucault’s conceptualisation (1980: 194–195). Thus, the state is invariably one of the actors in gentrification. Through either passive, muddled interventions or more active coordinated ones, it is involved in the process. Nevertheless, discourses can be soft, and nuances can be subtle. Without explicitly naming a ‘gentrification policy’, governments in the Global North commonly utilise more neutral labels (e.g. urban regeneration, urban renewal, or urban renaissance), soft discourses (e.g. mixed communities, social cohesion, or urban sustainability) or economically positive terms such as creative city (Lees et al., 2016). For example, in Arnhem, a series of new policies titled ‘Klarendal kom op!’ (… come on!) was defined to make a neighbourhood more liveable by establishing a fashion quarter. This new, subtle form of gentrification was instituted in response to successful resistance to rather brutal gentrification plans in the 1970s and the so-called ‘drug riots’ of 1989 (de Haan and Franz, 2017). In the next section, we focus on three gentrification assemblages – the ‘Beautiful Beyoğlu’ urban renewal project, the Cihangir Neighbourhood Association (NA), and the Beyoğlu Conservation Plans – to unfold the sets of claims; particular discourses of the state, its partners and other actors; and generation of knowledge related to the identifications and subjectifications of Cihangir’s gentrification.

‘Beautiful Beyoğlu’ urban renewal project: De-territorialisation for gentrification

Beginning in the second half of the 1960s, slummification penetrated into Cihangir. The shift of the central business district to newly developed areas caused Beyoğlu to experience a phase of degradation and devaluation. In addition, middle-income residents preferred to live in the newly developed suburban areas. because of these changes, Beyoğlu incrementally lost its attractiveness and popularity. The remaining non-Muslims of Cihangir sold or rented their apartments and moved to other residential districts of Istanbul (interview, 1 July 2014, Turnacıbaşı Street; cafe owner, resident for 54 years⁴). The apartments were amply inhabited by recent migrants and members of displaced ethnic groups, the LGBT community, and other marginal groups who worked in the entertainment sector, while Istiklal Avenue and its surroundings became overrun with bars, nightclubs and brothels that were accompanied by illegal activities and crime. In the 1970s and early 1980s, the population of transgender people was concentrated in Cihangir, and prostitution continued in brothels on streets such as Ulker, Pürtelaş and Sormagir.⁵ The neighbourhood was a place where ‘othered’ people could live. The more Cihangir became stigmatised, the more othering dominated the neighbourhood, not only in daily life but also in governmental urban policies.

‘Beautiful Beyoğlu’, which aimed to change the slum Beyoğlu into a commercial and tourist centre, was a long-awaited urban renewal project initiated by the centre-right Motherland Party (ANAP) in 1984. Aiming to globalise Istanbul and sanitise the image of the city to gain international acceptance and recognition (Keyder, 1999; Keyder and Oncü, 1993), the metropolitan mayor, Dalan, undertook a series of initiatives. The opening of the current Tarlabaşı Boulevard, which parallels Istiklal Avenue, was the first and most publicised part of the project; however, it was achieved by the demolition of blocks of late-Ottoman buildings. The regulation of traffic from Taksim Square through new areas was followed by the pedestrianisation of Istiklal Avenue and the reinstallation of nostalgic tram lines. The restoration and de-functionalisation of many historic buildings constituted the final stage of the urban renewal project. Contradictorily, the historic buildings targeted for redevelopment were described as representing architectural heritage, while the ones located on Tarlabaşı Boulevard were demolished.

The project was legitimised as economising the symbolic capital that represented the past, that is, the Ottoman, European and Eastern cultures, and its relics. Beyoğlu in the 19th century was home to many Europeans and Ottoman non-Muslims and housed many embassies, international schools, banks and financial institutions as well as entertainment venues. Therefore, a public discourse arose over tensions between the conservation of the district for its architectural value and the potential for tourism through the demolition of the old and creation of a modern city. For most people, Beyoğlu represented a unique architectural heritage and the synthesis of Western modernity and Ottoman traditionalism, while for some, it symbolised a foreign heritage, reflecting the alliance of 19th-century European capitalists with Ottoman non-Muslims (Bartu, 1999). For others, Beyoğlu was merely one of the most popular red-light districts of the city and should be cleaned up. The mayor emphasised the need to ease traffic flow and cleanse the district of prostitutes and drug-smuggling activities. In contrast to the discourse on making Beyoğlu as elegant as it had been in the 19th century, the campaign focused on getting rid of the unwanted remains of the past as well as the othered inhabitants.

Cihangir was not subjected to reinvestment until 1996 when transgender people were forcibly displaced as a result of ‘a cleansing operation’. The concentration of the transgender group was broken up by police raids. The chief of the Beyoğlu police department, who was known to be a nationalist and was nicknamed ‘Süleyman the Hose’, organised round-ups from many houses in Ulker Street. An Istanbul LGBT activist, Demet Demir, and her friend, Women’s Gate STD prevention centre activist Şevval Kılıç, narrated the operation.

Demet: The Hose [so called because he used hoses to beat transgender people] started to break doors on his third day. It had not even been two months, and everyone ran from the street. Ten houses were left out of 30. After six months, there was just my home left there.

Şevval: I had left my grandmother’s home and moved into Demet’s house on Ulker Street. … One day, I came from outside and went upstairs; I saw that only the door was standing. They could not break the steel door, so they demolished the walls around it. I stayed in the police station with 20 people that night. The Hose was a nightmare for Beyoğlu. Many trans have a phobia about police sirens because of him (Turan, 2011).

The collaboration with the police of property owners, residents as well as pioneers, played a role in the de-territorialisation of the neighbourhood. The discourse of nationalism was used against the displaced residents. Pamuk (1999) provided an example of how nationalism was intertwined with a sort of othering faced by the marginal groups of Cihangir.

First, the residents of the neighbourhood took a decision among themselves that ‘those who were against the transvestites would hang the Turkish flag in their windows’. Thus, the street was decked with Turkish flags from end to end. For the residents, these flags meant ‘I don’t want the transvestites’. However, after midnight, the flags were actually beginning to signify quite different meanings. (cited in Sasanlar, 2006).

One property owner doubled the rents of the apartments, and when the residents did not agree to pay, she posted a sign that said, ‘Prostitution is over on this street’ (Turan, 2011). The words of one resident summarised that time.

Transvestites moved from the neighbourhood after clashes. At that period, even if you reported them to the police, you could get no response. All had gone before the police came. With the help of a real estate agent, one of them was forced to leave. They had to move from Ulker Street; however, the image of Cihangir was damaged. (interview, 15 May 2015, Firuzağa Street; haberdashery owner, resident for 54 years)

The groups that had been living on Ulker, Pürtelaş and Sormagir (renamed Başkurt, symbolising nationalism) Streets were scattered throughout the city by the end of the 1990s, while gentrifiers started to replace their apartments (interview, 14 May 2015, Simşirci Street; real estate agent, resident for 53 years). We observe the territorialisation for gentrification, understood as the ‘process that defines or sharpens the spatial boundary of actual territory’ (DeLanda, 2006: 13). This example also illustrates how territorialisation is directly related to a certain de-territorialisation, or displacement and dispossession of others, which produces inequalities. The government strategy of stigmatisation, based on territory, class or sexuality, to some extent paved the way for gentrification in Cihangir. First, the area was declared lawless, making it easier for the municipality ‘to justify special measures, deviating from both law and custom, which can have the effect – if not the intention – of destabilising and further marginalising their occupants’ (Wacquant, 2007: 69). Then, the collaboration formed. As explained by Smith (1979), territorialisation and disinvestment policies over a prolonged period increased the expectation of future investments and encouraged all partners in need of urban redevelopment to reinforce the necessity of reinvestment. As emphasised by Sakızlıoğlu and Uitermark (2014) for the cases of Istanbul and Amsterdam, the promoters of gentrification first exhausted residents by making them wait in anxiety for a prolonged period and then placed intense pressure on them to force them to accept the project, regulatory decision, law, institution, or administrative measures – or even to leave.

Cihangir NA: Territorialisation by gentrifiers

In the 1994 municipal elections, the Islamist Welfare Party (RP) won the majority of seats in the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality and many of its districts, including Beyoğlu. The municipality introduced specific policies and practices for religion and cultural life that increased the tension between Islamic and secular groups. The use of Islamic symbols and the maintenance of Islamic customs in public spaces were perceived as threats to the secular republican model (Karaman, 2013). The Cihangir NA was established in 1995 in response to one of these practices. When municipal workers began to paint the paving stones of Cihangir Park green (the colour of Islam), a resident spilled a bucket of green paint on the street; then, a small group of pioneers and old residents who lived around the park decided to form an organisation to negotiate with the municipality about planning decisions and projects related to their neighbourhood. One of the founding members stated:

We founded the association with three lawyers and a few architects. First, we visited the mayor [of Beyoğlu Municipality] and told him that we would like to develop a project for Cihangir Park. At that time, Cihangir Park was in a mess; there were bums and drug users. The mayor accepted our project. The municipality supplied materials and a work force. We organised a charity party with residents. We collected 2 million TL in donations. The park was redesigned by our architect members. It became a nice park. Mr Erdoğan [the current president, who served as mayor of the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality under the RP and then as prime minister under the AKP] also came to the opening. The mayor delivered a speech at the opening, and we all enjoyed our Turkish coffee in the office of the NA’s chairman. (interview, 12 September 2014/15 May 2015, Sıraselviler Street; economist, resident for 51 years)

The Cihangir NA prompted the preservation discourse, entwined with artistic and ideological forms based on a sense of history, aesthetic features and authentic community. Many beautification and refurbishing activities to improve the living environment were organised, and collaboration with the municipality on some rehabilitation projects continued. Many appeals were submitted to the local conservation council for the registration of historic buildings and a guarantee of their conservation status. All of these activities changed the image of the stigmatised neighbourhood. The process was summarised by an executive member.

The founders had worked actively with the municipality, even if they had no experience. In 1999, when Mr. Topbaş [the current mayor of the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality, who served as mayor of Beyoğlu Municipality] was elected, we successfully completed many projects together. There was a traffic jam in those years in Cihangir. A traffic plan was prepared and submitted to the municipality. Some streets became one-way roads. Planting works were also completed. Oba Street was chosen as a model street. All trees, streetlights, and paving stones were renewed in collaboration with the municipality. We were meeting with the mayor once in a month and having breakfast together. But now, the collaboration was ended. In fact, speeches about the NA totally changed. Now, we are accused of making money out of such beautification projects. (interview, 11 September 2014/13 May 2015, Büyükada/Akarsu Street; painter, resident for 21 years)

These government policies, from the ‘Beautiful Beyoğlu’ project to the designation of the district as a conservation zone in 1993 and the activities and projects undertaken in collaboration with the Cihangir NA, might appear small scale or fragmented but are all the more important in showing the ‘hidden hand’ of the state behind the 1990s gentrification of Cihangir. They also reveal the claims of gentrification and how these claims materialise. The state generated and expressed power through subjectifying others (e.g. by a stigmatisation strategy), organisation (urban renewal projects, regulations for conservation zones, and planning decisions), technical knowledge (traffic flow maps and socio-demographic or economic figures) and discourses (accessibility, a cleansed future, a secure environment, the conservation of historic heritage). In addition, what cohere materials, places and practices into an urban assemblage are residents’ subjective beliefs, emotions, memories, suspicions or imaginations (Mills, 2014), from the Turkish flag to green paint and from Ulker Street to Turkish coffee.⁶

Beyoğlu Conservation Plans: Re-territorialisation for re-gentrification and Beyoğlu NAs Platform:De-territorialisation practices

Urban renewal projects, centring on Beyoğlu, have proliferated under the successive governments of the AKP, particularly over the past decade. Their scope and applicability have been broadened by specific laws. For example, Law 5366 for the Tarlabaşı Project bypassed the conservation zoning regulations that restricted reconstruction and sought property owners’ permission, and the privatisation law for the Galata Port Tourism Commerce Complex Project, to ease the transfer of public land and enterprises, was a key materialisation of territoriality, power and authority. The more urban renewal projects have encircled Cihangir, the more new cafes, restaurants, shops or hotels have opened in the residential neighbourhood, leading the NA to become more active in the preservation of its historic identity and local characteristics. The shift in the roles of the pioneers and gentrifiers from displacing to being displaced has interfered with their preservation ideology. As actors retain their autonomy and can be ‘detached and plugged into’ different assemblages in which their interactions are different and their knowable properties can be repurposed to bring out different and unpredictable ‘capacities’ (McFarlane, 2011a: 653), the Cihangir NA has decreased its relations with the municipality while joining together with various civil society organisations and forming the Beyoğlu NAs Platform with two other NAs of Beyoğlu, Ayaspaşa and Galata.

The Beyoğlu Conservation Plans were prepared by the district municipality, and the master plans were approved by the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality in 2010.⁷ The Cihangir NA had published the drafts of the implementation plans in its monthly magazine and informed the local public before the Beyoğlu Municipality officially approved and announced them, which put the collaboration with the municipality at risk. The public speaker of the platform articulated:

Mr Erdoğmuş [the former chairman of the NA] was threatened due to the press. Why was he threatened? Conservation plans should be transparent. The Beyoğlu NAs Platform was created not to leave the Cihangir NA alone. Other NAs of residential neighbourhoods, such as the Bedrettin NA, but also organisations such as the Beyoğlu Entertainment Places Association joined with us. We expressed our reservations to the municipality. But the municipality wants to make Beyoğlu a place where people do not prefer to live. The municipality is doing its utmost to reduce the quality of life. (interview, 13 May 2015/25 December 2015, Bol Ahenk/Sıraselviler Street; engineer, resident for 24 years)

On the one hand, a majority of the residents collaborated with the NA and presented their objection petitions to the municipality regarding the plans by which ‘green’ and open spaces as well as their privately owned courtyards became subject to redevelopment and residential apartments were targeted by small and large investors for commercial use (Yetiskul et al., 2016). On the other hand, the urban renewal projects of Beyoğlu were designated as specific project areas of specific laws in the conservation plans. The vague planning decision that violates the integrity principle of conservation zoning was emphasised by members of other NAs (interview, 12 May 2015/14 May 2015, Gümüşsuyu/Galata).

The chairman of the Cihangir NA criticised the municipality for being closed to communication during the decision-making process.

First, we came together with the platform and held a demonstration at the Roma Garden [a community garden and one of the remaining green areas of the neighbourhood]. Then, we occupied the municipality and presented almost 900 objection petitions. Following that, we held meetings at the municipality. Professional chambers and many civil groups and organisations of Alevis [the largest religious minority of Turkey] also filed petitions to support us. In total, the number reached 6400. However, the plans came into force with a few minor revisions. (interview, 2 July 2014, NA office; medical doctor, resident for 20 years)

Ultimately, the supporters of the Beyoğlu NAs Platform decided to seek a legal remedy. A technical report regarding the planning decisions that ruined the historic identity and local character of the neighbourhood was prepared by academicians and professionals and submitted to the court with a lawsuit petition. The report noted:

The Beyoğlu Conservation Plans change the residential status of the neighbourhood while authorizing commercial and tourism activities in historic buildings that must be conserved and used solely for cultural activities according to Law 2863. … It leads to ‘touristification’. This type of tourism is not preferred even by the tourists of Istanbul. The reason that tourists show more interest in Beyoğlu than the Historic Peninsula is that it lives as a residential area. (Beyoğlu NAs Platform, 2011)

The administrative court, by consensus, decided the lawsuit and cancelled the master and implementation plans in 2013. Later, the state council ruled against the decision and requested a renewal of the court investigation and assignment of new experts. In the meantime, the lawyer on behalf of the Beyoğlu NAs Platform proclaimed the manifesto that repeated the plaintiffs’ demands for the preservation of ‘green’ spaces and the continuation of their open-to-the-public status and the use of historic buildings only for cultural purposes (Cihangir NA Facebook page). A definitive judgement cancelled the plans in 2017. After this ultimate decision of the court, a celebration was organised at the Roma Garden, and the local residents were invited by a famous refrain, ‘Bağa gel, bostana gel’ (Come to the vineyard, come to the garden) on the web page of the Roma Garden. The note, posted on the web page about the conservation plans, says:

We know of plans when they are about to be implemented. We should say no to urbanism, lack of democracy, interrupting political subjectivities, regarding humans and non-humans as ‘subjects’ instead of as ‘objects [entities]’, obstructing participation, including violence, producing asymmetries [territories]. In this authoritarian regime, there is no possibility of civil society actively participating in the process. (Roma Bostanı, 2017)

The Beyoğlu Conservation Plans show the relations, organisations and encounters between governments, private capital, NAs, gentrifiers, academicians, professionals and others. In addition, the plans show the flows of information actualised in materialities such as Law 5366; a magazine article; a technical report; a Facebook post and demonstration; and discourses such as the preservation of ‘green’ public space, residential status, etc. Gentrification in Cihangir since the 2000s has become prominently state-led through the urban renewal projects of Beyoğlu; specific laws and land-use regulations; and eventually, the Beyoğlu Conservation Plans. A territoriality, produced through the work of powerful actors, can be dispersed or realigned through contestation, shifting power relations or new contexts (McFarlane, 2011b). The Beyoğlu NAs Platform exemplifies how an alliance of multiple groups reveals unpredictable organisations and mobilises their untapped capacities while de-territorialising the re-territorialisation of Cihangir for new rounds of gentrification. Or it is better to say that the assemblage for the cancellation of Beyoğlu Conservation Plans exists but do not exist too long and existence is constantly reaffirmed. This relational power can enhance or dissolve and territory can include other assemblages or exclude some. In the processual gentrification of Cihangir the capacity of the assemblages will (de/re)territorialise in different times and spaces. The state’s social and political; investors’ economic as well as residents’ interest on Cihangir will continue to collide, generating new relations, collaborations, games, knowledges, desires, actions, and practices. This means more state-led gentrification efforts along with more local responses and resistance while the intensification and transformation of gentrification goes on.

Conclusions

This paper aims to contribute to the gentrification literature through the potentials of assemblage thinking and to explore gentrification in Istanbul and Cihangir in three ways. First, searching for new lines of analysis for gentrification requires committed efforts to increase the number of studies with different gentrification cases located in urban multiplicities worldwide. In addition, ongoing theoretical conversations on the divide of Global North and South and the binary division between transnational models of gentrification and endogenously emerging gentrification direct us to look at gentrification differently. In this regard, assemblage thinking generatively and critically offers a rethinking of urban processes. Assembling Istanbul’s gentrification processes brings together urban generalities, places and cities, and Global North and South, which are commonly conceptualised as belonging to incommensurable levels of actuality. This approach regards gentrification as a process that can be continually produced on different temporal and geographical scales, no matter how small or how singular it is or how slow its pace. Given that cities are emerging with their own multiplicities and capacities or trajectories, Istanbul indicates the distinctive nature of gentrification by its specificities, such as the Ottoman non-Muslims and Islamic symbols. At the same time, it is similar to urban renewal projects in cities elsewhere.

Second, the assemblage analysis suggests openness to the possibilities of reassembling and emphasising instances of policy presence instead of simply consenting to the convergence of the West and the homogeneity of outcomes. Therefore, we follow the territorialisation and de-territorialisation processes in the gentrification of Cihangir to explore the production of urban politics and experience in the neighbourhood context. Approaching gentrification from within, widening the scope of actors and exploring diverse practices, we investigate questions about power relations with attention to how the state participates in gentrification; how residents or gentrifiers make meaning of gentrification; and what role residents’ experiences and imaginations play in the processes of displacement, dispossession or resistance. Such an approach shows how assemblage thinking exposes power relations and destabilises the usual descriptions of Cihangir’s gentrification. There is no single central governing power in an assemblage, nor an equally distributed power. Rather, there is power acting as a field of forces or as plurality in transformation (McFarlane, 2009).

Third, assemblage thinking offers some orientation for critical urban analysis. Thick descriptions and place-based analyses help us understand the urban processes that drive capitalist accumulation and inequality in and through specific urban areas. Following gentrification in Cihangir, we aim to capture the local and specific spatiality of neoliberalism in connection with general discourses and wider patterns in Istanbul, which was conceptualised as ‘variegated neoliberalism’ by Brenner et al. (2010). By deploying assemblage thinking, we trace the role of the capitalist state and its policy elements of power, knowledge and subjectivity. The state sets the stage for gentrification in Cihangir. It sometimes stealthily approaches and collaborates with residents and gentrifiers but at other times follows more visible (and forceful) strategies, such as legalising projects, drafting development plans and promulgating laws and regulations. Gentrification, however, takes shape in a process that brings different actors together through networks, power plays and discourses. Various local actors also invent social and material elements in ways that disrupt, invert or redirect policies. The Cihangir NA and Beyoğlu NAs Platform represent the capacity of local actors in the creation of new connections, generation of new encounters and disruption of the usual patterns. Similarly, the uprising in 2013 for Taksim Gezi Park, one of Beyoğlu’s few remaining green areas at Taksim Square, gathered spaces of potentiality and generated new ideas, encounters and collectives for an improved urban commons.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The field research of this paper is based on a JPI Urban Europe project, ‘Practices and policies for neighborhood improvement: Towards “Gentrification 2.0”’, funded by TUBITAK (113 K026). Cihangir is one of four cases evaluated across Europe.

Notes

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