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In the fight for space in the city, the main weapon of the rural émigré is physical presence. The undeniable reality of thousands of families living on the peripheral land in sturdy, self-built houses had often been enough for Turkish governments to allow communities to stay and sometimes even to receive utilities. In the 1960s and ’70s, amnesty laws had turned thousands of self-built squatter communities into legitimate, tax-paying, and vote-delivering neighborhoods and their tens of millions of citizens into full participants in the economy (but not resolving the question of who owned the land).† Sabri and his neighbors, like millions of others who poured into Istanbul in the late 1970s, hoped that they would turn into recognized citizens.

Over several nights of sweaty work that month, 300 houses were built in their corner of the valley. By the end of 1977, another 3,000 houses had been added, populated with poverty-fleeing and fortune-seeking émigrés from across central and eastern Turkey. The meetings became crowded and complicated. The poorest and most deprived villagers from their region, the committee decided, would be the first to get houses. They would conduct research to make sure the families were really in need and not just searching for housing bargains.

The neighborhood had grown to the point that it needed a name. On May Day in 1977, an annual labor gathering in Istanbul’s Taksim Square, attended by 150,000 people and infiltrated by feuding parties of the far left, turned violent. The police opened fire, panic erupted, and, by the end of the day, an estimated 39 people had been shot or trampled to death. The deaths galvanized Turkish society, especially among Alevis and Kurds, who felt increasingly targeted by a government that was promoting a rigid Turkish identity. At a meeting days later, the villagers voted, with Sabri’s support, to call their community 1 Mayis Mahallesi, or “May 1 Neighborhood.” With this name, their community became a provocation.

THE ARRIVAL CITY IN DIRECT CONFRONTATION WITH THE OLD CITY

By this point, the gecekondu had become a source of panic among government officials and secular urbanites. Urban planners in central Istanbul were watching their carefully made housing plans, their greenbelts and infrastructure strategies, collapse under the weight of hundreds of thousands of villagers a year flooding into the fields on the edge of town. The character of Istanbul’s population was changing: Formerly a largely secular and uni-ethnic place, its majority in the outskirts now contained millions of Alevis, Kurds, and observant Sunnis whose women covered their heads; their politics, on the far left or right, were equally alien. Worst of all were their communities, chaotic ad hoc messes piled onto Istanbul’s elegant if threadbare boulevards. One planner wrote of Istanbul: “As the political control of cities with an urban squatter problem passes from the presently established urban society into the hands of the emergent urban squatter society, who have little or no heritage of city-dwelling, and who at present have no training in or administrative knowledge of city maintenance, it can be expected that essential services will diminish until they finally break down and collapse.”5

Yet if someone had visited this valley from one of the arrival cities of China, India, or South America, it would have seemed luxurious. Neat, brick-walled structures that eventually had stone floors, gecekondu houses averaged between 600 and 1,000 square feet. They usually had courtyards and small gardens. Though considered ugly and unsanitary by mainstream Turkish architects and urban planners at the time (and the hygiene levels certainly were lacking), these rugged, haphazard houses later came to be praised for their tight-knit beauty and their intrinsically earthquake-proof design: “Typical gecekondu settlements are composed of one- or two-story houses with gardens or courtyards,” one admirer wrote 30 years later. “There is an irregular settlement pattern