Arrival City_ How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World - Doug Saunders [85]
In theory, the land was there for the taking. In practice, settling it would be a difficult and deadly operation, one that would combine military tactics with criminal affiliations and violent revolutionary confrontations. By the time the 1970s had ended, this nocturnal home-building mission had turned Sabri into a very different sort of man and Turkey into a very different sort of country.
THE ARRIVAL CITY AS A MARGINAL MENACE
Just before dusk one evening in February of 1977, a team of men arrived on the edge of the valley in tractors, carrying basic hand tools. As darkness fell, they sunk their spades into the dry, tough soil and began to dig trenches for the foundations of houses. Just before dawn, dirt was raked over the surface, so that daytime passersby and police might not notice what had occurred. The next night, the team arrived with large red bricks that had been made from mud in a nearby facility. Overnight, they assembled walls, building without mortar, plastered the outer walls with mud, inserted basic doors and windows and covered the roof with corrugated metal sheets. The team would leave, sleep through the day, and prepare to help others build their houses, as families moved into the new structures. Literally overnight, as the name gecekondu suggests, a community was born.
The mass seizure of unused urban land became an international phenomenon in the 1970s, as poor countries wrestled with a stagnating global economy and unsustainable levels of debt, abandoning notions of state-funded housing reform and leaving their rural migrants to fend for themselves. In Ecuador and Colombia, these acts became known as invasiones, were organized with military efficiency, and developed into a politically potent movement.
Sabri and his friends, having heard about some of these tactics, decided that the helter-skelter Istanbul land grabs of previous years wouldn’t give them lasting homes. The old gecekondu methods had become risky: The government and the police, fearing that millions more citizens every year would be demanding water and sewage lines, had become far more vigilant, demolishing settlements as soon as they began. At the same time, the building of squatter housing had become an underground business. “By the time we arrived, there was a gecekondu mob-mafia,” Sabri told me. “The communities would have to make regular payments, and in return the mob claimed they would negotiate with officials and stop the gecekondus from being demolished. They’d spend the money having nice dinners with guys from the ministry. These guys were violent—they had ripped off other gecekondu communities and gambled the money they had collected.”
To counter the mob and the government, Sabri and his colleagues began organizing regular meetings to plan the construction of their neighborhood. There was an election, and “people’s committees” were formed. Sabri was elected to head one committee. They were determined to build their neighborhood in a more deliberate and organized way than their gecekondu predecessors. They planned street layouts and even space for small parks, unheard-of features in the chaotic world of Turkish squatter towns. The meetings attracted students and political activists from the far left, who volunteered their planning skills and lent this community a revolutionary air. Sabri found both his ideology and his voice at these meetings, losing his peasant’s reticence and making heated speeches, eased with the glimmers of self-effacing wit that temper his speech, and people began to listen to him.4 It was a dangerous pursuit. By 1977, the gecekondu had become less peaceful places, as a second generation grew up without their parents’ job prospects and with few ties to the culture of the central city. In response, the government had become hostile toward gecekondu communities, which struck them as hotbeds of anti-government activity and which were often populated