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the good schools, transit networks, and social services that allow villagers to turn their children into full-fledged urbanites. Without a significant government role, this laissez-faire development has made the neighborhood a distinctly uncomfortable place for those on the lower rungs. Kemal and his tea-drinking customers say it’s abundantly clear that home ownership alone isn’t creating decent public facilities and that the failure of government to produce these things has led to an uneasy political situation. Kemal, who, like most people here, knows Sabri Koçyigit and his legendary reputation, explained to me why he has turned his back on such heroes. “Their radical political groups should get a grip on and think twice,” he says. “It is the ordinary people who get stuck in the middle.”

When he first came here in 1993, Kemal says, those rebels had got ownership of their houses, and the wide streets were becoming narrow streets. Private land had created prosperity but also selfishness: People expanded their properties to the maximum extent of their title deeds, building over sidewalks, parks, semi-public squares. There was a reluctance to sacrifice land, or raise funds, for parks or better schools. There is no municipal tax system, so the presence of the state is a matter of political largesse, which hasn’t been forthcoming here. One scholar observed how the combination of private ownership with an absent government changed the appearance of the Istanbul arrival city: “[T]he spatial characteristics of the gecekondu settlements, with low-rise houses and surrounding gardens, is lost. The newly emerged environment is poor in its open, public and semi-public spaces.”21

For Kemal, this was a betrayal of the neighborhood’s values. “All the ideals of building cultural centers, public libraries, parks, they all were destroyed. Now it’s all a heap of concrete. Those days rent was cheap. But people acquired the taste of money and became degenerate. They have forgotten the fact that they were poor once.”

THE ARRIVAL CITY FINDS ITS OWN POLITICS

Contrary to the fears of the military authorities, the founding politics of the May 1 neighborhood never became the politics of Turkey, or even a plausible opposition. The pinnacle of left-wing success was achieved in 1989—the election that brought Sabri his moment of power—when a social-democratic party swept Istanbul. But that was the left of an old, disappearing Istanbul: Its policies were aimed at those voters who had real jobs with real companies, not the gecekondu residents, whose lives tended to take place almost entirely off the books. It was not until the crisis years of the 1990s that a political party arrived that was born and nurtured in the arrival cities, which promised the sort of aid and support that mere property ownership hadn’t delivered. It was even called the Welfare Party.

The party’s mayoral candidate, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, was in many respects the quintessential gecekondu citizen. He was not technically from the fringes, having been born and raised in Kasimpaşa, a poor quarter near the Bosporus (poorer, in fact, than most gecekondu neighborhoods are today). But his life was that of the arrival. His family had migrated to Istanbul from Rize, in the far northeast of Turkey; they had developed the culture of arrival, religious and veiled; he spent his youth selling simit bread on the streets, scrambling to make an urban living.

His electoral victory in 1994 was decisive and, to almost everyone in central Istanbul, deeply alarming. Support for his Welfare Party had come from mysterious places far outside the city’s old borders. And he was not what urban Turks considered an acceptable politician: He was openly religious; his wife wore a scarf over her head. It was conventional then, as it is among some today, to call him an Islamist.

By 1994, the established population of Istanbul had ceased to have any electoral influence: they had been swamped. In that election, the gecekondu neighborhoods contributed 60.4 percent of votes cast—the first time they’d outnumbered the