Arrival City_ How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World - Doug Saunders [91]
The end of the military junta, and the possibility of their becoming actual urban homeowners, motivated millions of peasants to consider leaving their villages. Istanbul saw at least half a million new citizens arrive every year between 1984 and the end of the 1990s. Turkey’s governments, eager to win the confidence of new voters in the outskirts, acted quickly to turn these new arrivals into homeowners, extending the amnesty law in 1984 and 1986 to include the latest gecekondu arrivals.
By end of the 1980s, almost 80 percent of gecekondu-dwellers in Turkey had either title deeds on their properties or government certificates that would eventually entitle them to formal legal ownership of their houses.16 And this was a huge number of people. By 1989, the gecekondu neighborhoods made up two-thirds of Istanbul’s urban space. Sabri’s neighborhood, which had been the remotest edge of town when he fled the police, was now virtually part of the center. To see it on a map today, Mustafa Kemal seems to be about three-quarters of the way into the center of Istanbul, with a dense spray of rooftops extending far in every direction, from the Marmara Sea to the Black Sea.
Turkey had become a nation of arrival cities. In its three biggest cities alone, the gecekondu stock was estimated at two million units, housing a population of at least 10.2 million people. By 1986, half of all Turks lived in cities, up from 20 percent in 1950, making Turkey probably the first major developing country to cross this boundary.
This shift took Istanbul’s established residents entirely by shock, and they didn’t know quite what to make of it. “The unexpected New Istanbul, which emerged within the space of one generation, caught the locals by surprise,” one more sympathetic member of that group wrote. “In an attempt to overcome one’s own speechlessness, the term ‘uniqueness’ came to explain it all: A catastrophe of such a scale has happened only to us.”17 This wasn’t quite historically correct, of course: The “catastrophe” of Istanbul’s sudden explosion was strikingly similar to the transformations that overtook the cities of Europe and North America in the nineteenth century. But it would become a political catastrophe for the Istanbul elite, who were suddenly outnumbered by a new, arriviste middle class whose women often wore headscarves and who were already adopting their own, seemingly alien forms of political power.
For Sabri, it was a catastrophe of a different sort. The years of military control, and the sudden inclusion in urban society, had succeeded in depoliticizing much of his neighborhood. In the words of one observer, “the Alevi identity replaced the leftist one.”18 Land ownership had allowed many squatters to sell their houses, for good profits, to outsiders. The Mustafa Kemal neighborhood now had 50,000 citizens, many of whom had no memory of its years as a center of rebel activity. Persecuted minorities were joined by thousands of poor members of Turkey’s Sunni majority. Sabri realized, with some bitterness, that Özal had been right—that his comrades (not to mention his own family) had become comfortably middle-class citizens carefully guarding their property values. “The reforms,” Sabri tells me, “turned us all into property owners, and it changed the way we think—we all started to think the way that owners think. In the end, we created a petit-bourgeois culture.”
But then he breaks into a smile. “I don’t regret it—we have no regrets,” he says, with good reason. In 1989, when the neighborhood’s borough was able to vote in municipal elections for the first time, those neighbors elected him leader of Mustafa Kemal, under the banner of a left-wing party, with 75 percent of the vote. During his terms in office, he was to oversee another overnight change, one that