Book Review: Beyond the Resources of Poverty: Gecekondu Living in the Turkish Capital

SEBNEM EROGLU, Beyond the Resources of Poverty: Gecekondu Living in the Turkish Capital. (Burlington: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2011). Pp. 296. $114.95 cloth.REVIEWED BY UMUT DUYAR-KIENAST, Urban Planner and Independent Researcher, Berlin, Germany, e-mail: umut_duyar@web.deIn this book Sebnem Eroglu presents a comprehensive new concept for studying ways of tackling poverty in gecekondu-squatter housing areas-on a household level. She employs a unique approach that combines objective and subjective perspectives on poverty and clearly illustrates the topic with three case studies from the Turkish capital, Ankara.The book is based on short-term, longitudinal research carried out from April to October 2002 in Ankara. Eroglu applies a wide range of methods, including qualitative and quantitative data analysis, to understand how poor households cope with their situation and why some are more successful than others in reducing their deprivation.The book is structured in eleven chapters. After establishing the theoretical framework and describing her research method, setting and respondents, Eroglu discusses the results of her fieldwork under four topics. These cover "income generation and diversification," "income allocation," "investment and insurance" and "consumption. " Later she evaluates the deprivation levels during October interviews in comparison to those in April of the same year. The next three chapters are dedicated to portraits of three families experiencing various levels of poverty. The book concludes with a review of the theoretical background, an overview of the main research findings and a discussion of policy implications.Eroglu's definition of poverty expands the existing literature by introducing multiple perspectives on deprivation. Despite growing poverty and income inequality in Turkey since the 1980s and the country's experience of several economic crises through the first decade of the twenty-first century, there has been relatively little literature on poverty. Most gecekondu research has focused on issues of urbanization, urban integration, etc. Only recently has some attention been directed to the survival and coping strategies of the urban poor, and Eroglu argues that such studies describing the needs of the labor market, social networks and consumption have neither attended to behavioral areas associated with poverty nor offered a comprehensive framework to explain the relative success or failure of the strategies employed. To address this gap, she introduces a Factor Weighted Index of Deprivation as a tool for the analysis of the impoverishment levels of households by subjective weighting of objective measures. Having been developed and applied in a concrete research setting, the tool has the potential to be applied to other samples.On one hand, Eroglu applies factor analysis to a set of "objective" measures to explore how variables are correlated to each other. On the other hand, at this step, the measures are weighted from the subjective perspectives of interviewees. As a result, she establishes the categories of "basic needs, financial stability and quality of life. " It is remarkable to see how rationally the households value the variables, so that the categories of "basic needs" and "financial stability" come before the category of "quality of life. " It is also interesting that measures such as "health and safety at work" and "work hours" are categorized under "quality of life," not as "basic needs. " This may have its roots in the structural issues of the labor market and social security system in Turkey.Eroglu's distinct contribution to the literature is the classification of "household responses to poverty. " The identification of the four core areas of "income generation," "income allocation," "consumption" and "investment" is very useful for capturing different facets of the attempts by households to reduce their deprivation. The introduction of the concept of the "benefit delivery capacity" of a resource allows Eroglu to have a critical view towards the real relevance of a resource in reducing deprivation. …