Arrival City_ How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World - Doug Saunders [99]
Companies like Sinpas are here to cater to them. Sinpas has become a force in the old gecekondu settlements, stealthily buying up large blocks of self-built houses, negotiating development rights with local officials, and demolishing those blocks to build middle-class enclaves. The firm’s glossy color catalogue, with the English title Sinpas Love Story, showcases these urban islands, whose names are all English: Aqua City, Istanbul Palace, London Palace, and the delightfully titled Avant Garden. Half a dozen major firms are building similar settlements.
They are appealing to a market of Turks who are members of a new, globalized middle class, whose lives have more in common with the middle classes of Europe or North America than with the old Turkish state-led middle class. The growth of the arrival city, and the increase in its real-estate values, has created an exodus of this class into the outskirts. “In the last two decades,” one Turkish study concluded at the end of the 1990s, “middle and higher income groups have taken a growing interest in peripheral land. They no longer feel safe and comfortable in central urban areas. Increased private car ownership and the building of expressways have also helped to shift middle class housing preferences.”26
On the fourth floor of one of these buildings lives Şeyda Gurer, 30, and her husband, Ahmet Uzun, 34. They are both mid-level employees of the Turkish branches of multinational pharmaceutical firms: Ahmet is with Novartis, in sales; Şeyda is with Pfizer, in marketing. When I visited, she was in the midst of a six-month leave to care for their three-month-old baby, Yigit. They bought their two-bedroom apartment in 2004 for $172,000, after saving for almost four years to make a $74,000 down payment. As an investment, it had been wise. By the end of 2006, similar-sized apartments in their building were selling for $262,000. As a life experience, it had been the shock of discovering the existence of the outskirts.
“Two years ago, I had never heard of this part of the city,” says Şeyda. “I was born in Istanbul and had never heard of anything so far outside—I thought the city ended before you got this far out.” Their apartment has the universal look of the deracinated second-generation upstart: new furniture, clean hardwood floors, a clumsy surround-sound TV system, a few tasteful photos on the wall, and a lot of blank white space. Şeyda says that their biggest reasons for moving out of the historic city, aside from their inability to afford an apartment that was up to their standards, were crime and parking. “This is the outskirts, and it takes us away from all that,” she says. “It’s very nice living here because you have 24-hour security. And ample car parking—plus you have your own social facilities. It takes one hour to get to the city center, so we can go there for shopping.”
I ask them what they think of their new neighborhood, with its colorful history and its mysterious back streets. Have they tried any of the better-known eateries? Have the area’s famous furniture shops attracted them? Şeyda and Ahmet tell me that they, like most of their neighbors, have never set foot in the gecekondu neighborhood. They leave the parking garage in their cars, drive through a few of its streets, and head downtown. In the year and a half they have lived here, they have never walked the streets that adjoin their own compound. “We actually don’t know the neighborhood,” says Şeyda. “We just know this place.”
While the wall between the globalized middle class of multinational employees in places like Sinpas Central Life and the poorer, entrepreneurial middle class of the gecekondu settlements seems almost impermeable—both physically and culturally—the similarities between these two groups have become increasingly apparent. They share a disinterest in the old nationalist politics of Kemalism, whose endless disputes over the