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In the weeks after he went into hiding, the violence rose to an extreme pitch. Dozens of similar incidents inflamed the gecekondus and sometimes spilled into central Istanbul and Ankara. One day in December 1978, a confrontation in the southern Anatolian town of Ksahramanmaraş (which had been home to many of the settlers in the May 1 neighborhood) between left-leaning Alevis and militants from the fascist Grey Wolves turned violent, killing over 100 people. Days later, tanks rumbled into the streets of Istanbul’s outskirts, strict curfews were applied, and soldiers roamed the cities with rifles ready. The government had declared martial law across Turkey’s most populous provinces.

Yet even this did little to curb the violence. In the period after martial law was imposed, it was reported that an average of 16 people a day were being killed by guns and bombs in Turkey’s cities.9 In the view of a Turkish military that had increasingly lost faith in the country’s elected leaders, the chaos was entirely the fault of the arrivals living in the gecekondu: “It is these neighborhoods,” The New York Times reported from Istanbul, “that have become recruiting centers and battlegrounds for the terrorist bands that have brought Turkey to the edge of anarchy.” According to army claims, by 1980 the gecekondu had become home to 20,000 active extremists on the right and the left.10

On 12 September 1980, that violence abruptly ended. The Turkish military, declaring the country’s secular state gravely threatened, seized control in a long-threatened coup d’état, the third since 1960. About 100 MPs and political leaders were imprisoned or placed under house arrest, including both the prime minister and the opposition leader. Generals took over ministries, and officers took direct control of neighborhoods. Opposition politics, radical or otherwise, were illegal, and enforcement was strict and summary. As many as 250,000 people would be imprisoned, and many of them tortured.11 Migration from villages to cities was abruptly halted. All citizens would now have to carry documents stating where they lived, similar to the hukou certificates used in China. The slogans on the gecekondu walls were ordered painted over, and the neighborhoods, residents say, became eerily quiet.

The problem of the lawless frontier of the gecekondu was solved in a quick and expeditious manner, which would end up having a surprising and ironic effect on Turkey’s future power structure. It was simply declared, shortly after the coup, that all neighborhoods would now have to be legal. Officers were ordered to call up three representatives from each neighborhood. Those representatives were ordered to gather in a crowded meeting room in central Istanbul one day, each neighborhood assigned to a desk bearing its name. A senior officer strode across the room, surveying this new and unfamiliar cartography, when he spotted the offensive words “May 1.” He stopped at the desk, turned to the three representatives—Sabri’s former comrades—and ordered them to take down their neighborhood’s sign immediately and change the offending name to “Mustafa Kemal,” after the father of Turkey’s secular revolution.12

Sabri was running out of places to hide. The army, in a drive to “Turkify” the population, was driving Kurds and Alevis out of their villages throughout eastern and southern Turkey. After he’d been at large for three years, the military caught up with Sabri in southeastern Turkey in 1981. The trial was swift. He was found guilty of three offences, including “being a member of a political group.” He would spend the next five years in prison, facing beatings and complete isolation from his family and the suburb he had launched.

THE ARRIVAL CITY TRANSFORMED

When he stepped out of his cell in 1986 and hitched a ride back to his house, Sabri at first felt certain that he had taken a wrong turn or perhaps entered the inner city rather than the rural-migrant outskirts. “It didn’t look anything like it had when