Arrival City_ How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World - Doug Saunders [100]
In 2007, it first became apparent that these two middle classes, who still seemed barely aware of one another, had begun to unite their interests. For the first time, a significant proportion of Turkey’s old middle class voted for Erdoğan’s AK Party. A number of Turks recognized this result as a watershed, as a harmonization of the arrival-city values with the nation’s values. The political writer Zafer Senocak saw it as a pivotal event in which “the social climbers from the provinces have taken their place at the table. Perhaps they don’t even want to elbow the others aside.”27
Meanwhile, the packed little buses keep arriving at Harem. The emigration from the Anatolian villages has slowed, but still perhaps 250,000 new people a year arrive in Istanbul, a growth rate that some consider unsustainable. At the very edges of Istanbul, you can still see the geometric, frostlike patterns of gecekondu rooftops spreading. The land is much harder to find, limited essentially to the forests and water reserves in the north and to the purchase of private farmlands (at a steep cost) on the European side. Some have declared this the end of the gecekondu era. “Unlike its precursor,” the writer Orhan Esen believes, its neo-gecekondu variant “does not represent a collective settling at an industrial center offering employment, but impoverished families who have found their individual stopgap solution at a remote location without any urban context or foreseeable future benefits … A place of the losers.”28
It is tempting to declare that the arrival-city adventure has reached its end, to decide that the destitution in this latest wave of squatter settlements does indeed make them “a place of the losers.” The city of Istanbul seems to believe this and has launched a large-scale slum-clearance project intended, in theory, to replace all “crooked buildings” with high-rises. But it is useful to note that these “losers” on the far edge of town are not choosing to move back to the poverty and oppression of their villages and are not seeing their lives get any worse. It is equally useful to remember that this, “a place of the losers,” was exactly what people were saying in 1976. Those losers ended up changing the Middle East.
* Alevis, who make up between a fifth and a quarter of the Turkish population, are historically Shiite Muslims (the majority of Turks have Sunni backgrounds). Persecuted by the Ottoman Empire, they moved to the most remote and agriculturally marginal Anatolian villages and thus were among the first to migrate.
† In 1966, the Turkish government passed Law No. 775, which legalized all existing squatter settlements (but did not give title deed to the land) and required the owners of squatted land to transfer ownership to the municipalities. This law was updated periodically to regularize new settlements and remains in force today.
7
WHEN THE MARGINS EXPLODE
Emamzadeh ‘Isa, Tehran
The metropolis of Tehran cascades from the snowy heights of the Alborz mountains into the salt flats of the Dasht-e Kavir desert, its houses transforming along the way from steel and glass, to stone and wood, to sand and mud. If you follow the city to its southern limit, then past it, through several kilometers of crude-industrial hell and out into the desert’s fringe, you’ll find a perimeter buzzing with furtive activity, with home construction and arrival and return, with vehicles bearing the license plates of faraway provinces, with secretive new settlements emerging from the sand.
This is the place where the 1979 Islamic revolution found its body of support and its motivating cause. And now it is here, on the even more distant fringes, where the new Iranian generation is pulling itself up from the earth, attempting to