Constanze Letsch
Territorial Stigmatisation
To the people of Tarlabaşı

**Constanze Letsch** is a journalist and researcher. She did her doctorate at Europa-Universität Viadrina in Frankfurt/Oder. The cultural anthropologist lived in Turkey for more than eleven years and was the Turkey correspondent for the Guardian and Observer between 2011 and 2016. Since then, she has worked as a reporter for the German Press Agency dpa and as a consultant for Human Rights Watch. Her work focuses on Turkey, public health, and food justice.
Constanze Letsch

# Territorial Stigmatisation

Urban Renewal and Displacement
in a Central Istanbul Neighbourhood

[transcript]
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First published in 2023 by transcript Verlag, Bielefeld

© Constanze Letsch

Cover layout: Maria Arndt, Bielefeld

Cover illustration: Jonathan Lewis

Printed by: Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH, Wetzlar

https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839466889

Print-ISBN 978-3-8376-6688-5

PDF-ISBN 978-3-8394-6688-9

ISSN of series: 2703-0024

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Printed on permanent acid-free text paper.
# Contents

Acknowledgements .................................................................................................................. 9

Introduction ................................................................................................................................. 13

Aims.................................................................................................................................................. 15

Territorial stigmatisation .................................................................................................... 16

Exploiting stigma .................................................................................................................. 19

Managing / responding to territorial stigma .................................................................... 20

Territorial stigmatisation in Turkey .................................................................................. 22

Chapter outline ........................................................................................................................ 24

## Chapter one: Looking for Resistance

in all the Wrong Places ........................................................................................................ 27

Staring at stigma.................................................................................................................. 28

Positionality ........................................................................................................................ 34

Engaged anthropology........................................................................................................ 35

Methods .................................................................................................................................... 37

Politics of representation .................................................................................................... 41

Chapter two: Waking the Poisoned Princess .................................................................... 45

Brief history of a stigmatised neighbourhood .................................................................... 48

(Creating) A place a part........................................................................................................ 52

Branding Beyoğlu, framing Tarlabaşı .................................................................................. 53

Nostalgia .................................................................................................................................... 54

Exploiting the bad reputation of Tarlabaşı........................................................................ 55

Symbolic politics and state-led stigmatisation ................................................................. 57

Place: Stigmatisation of Tarlabaşı as a dilapidated neighbourhood.................................... 58

Image ............................................................................................................................................ 61

People: stigmatisation of Tarlabaşı residents ................................................................. 63

Forced displacement as urban colonialism and erasure ........................................................ 72
<table>
  <tbody>
    <tr>
      <td><strong>Chapter three: Judging Books by Their Covers</strong></td>
      <td>79</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>2008 catalogue: The exhibition</td>
      <td>83</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>2008 catalogue: The material</td>
      <td>84</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>2008 catalogue: The content</td>
      <td>85</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>2008 catalogue: The neighbourhood</td>
      <td>87</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>2008 catalogue: The project</td>
      <td>88</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>2008 catalogue: The stated project objectives and procedures</td>
      <td>89</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>2008 catalogue context: The association</td>
      <td>94</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>2008 catalogue context: Non-resident opposition to the project</td>
      <td>95</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>2008 catalogue context: The red flag</td>
      <td>96</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>2008 catalogue: Socio-economic and political context</td>
      <td>97</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>2011 catalogue: The sales office</td>
      <td>100</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>2011 catalogue: The material</td>
      <td>100</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>2011 catalogue: The content</td>
      <td>101</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>2011 catalogue: The neighbourhood</td>
      <td>102</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>2011 catalogue: The project</td>
      <td>103</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>2011 catalogue: The stated project objectives and procedures</td>
      <td>104</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>2011 catalogue context: The association</td>
      <td>106</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>2011 catalogue: Socio-economic and political context</td>
      <td>107</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td><strong>Chapter four: Experiencing territorial stigma in Tarlabaşı</strong></td>
      <td>109</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>Encountering everyday stigma</td>
      <td>110</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>Ordinary iconic figures</td>
      <td>114</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>Intersecting stigma / everyday discrimination</td>
      <td>115</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>Experiencing stigma while under threat of eviction</td>
      <td>121</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>Evictions as an ethnicised, gendered experience of stigmatisation</td>
      <td>129</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td><strong>Chapter five: Belonging</strong></td>
      <td>139</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>The mahalle</td>
      <td>144</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>A social contract</td>
      <td>147</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>The <i>mahalle</i> as urban ideal/ism</td>
      <td>150</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td><i>Mahalle/lik</i> as belonging</td>
      <td>152</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>The importance of <i>mahalle/lik</i> for Tarlabaşı residents</td>
      <td>153</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>Networks of socio-economic interdependence</td>
      <td>156</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td><strong>Chapter six: Have you heard?</strong></td>
      <td>175</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>The scope and life cycle of a rumour</td>
      <td>180</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>Traffic analysis</td>
      <td>183</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>Interpretative labour</td>
      <td>184</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>Tenants: Between a rock and a hard place</td>
      <td>187</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>Creating opposition</td>
      <td>190</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>Splitting solidarity</td>
      <td>193</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>Rumours of conspiracy</td>
      <td>198</td>
    </tr>
  </tbody>
</table>
<table><tr><td>Chapter seven: In the eye of the beholder</td><td>203</td></tr><tr><td>Impression management in a stigmatised neighbourhood</td><td>204</td></tr><tr><td>Scrubbing off stigma</td><td>210</td></tr><tr><td>Respectability politics in a stigmatised place</td><td>216</td></tr><tr><td>Gendered respectability politics in a stigmatised neighbourhood</td><td>218</td></tr></table>

<table><tr><td>Chapter eight: Giving in to stigma</td><td>225</td></tr><tr><td>Internalisation</td><td>226</td></tr><tr><td>Lateral denigration</td><td>229</td></tr><tr><td>Nostalgia</td><td>237</td></tr><tr><td>Turkness as Whiteness</td><td>241</td></tr></table>

<table><tr><td>Chapter nine: Speaking back</td><td>245</td></tr><tr><td>Dissonance</td><td>248</td></tr><tr><td>Symbolic struggles</td><td>251</td></tr><tr><td>Gossip</td><td>255</td></tr><tr><td>Calling out project stakeholders</td><td>257</td></tr><tr><td>Putting the blame where it belongs</td><td>258</td></tr><tr><td>Graffiti</td><td>263</td></tr><tr><td>A teargas cartridge</td><td>266</td></tr><tr><td>Helal olmasın</td><td>266</td></tr></table>

<table><tr><td>Displaced</td><td>271</td></tr><tr><td>Gone</td><td>275</td></tr></table>

<table><tr><td>References</td><td>281</td></tr></table>
<figure><img src="image_4.png" /></figure>
Acknowledgements

This book came into being due to the unwavering support of a large number of people over a long period of time. I have been very fortunate to enjoy the guidance of two supervisors who provided their intellectual support during the conception, the fieldwork, and the writing of this thesis.

Werner Schiffauer has been generous with his time and unfailingly pulled me out of various theoretical rabbit holes that at times threatened to derail this thesis. His patience with my meandering analysis and various professional distractions throughout the course of this project has been invaluable. His advice helped me improve my academic rigour and my ethnographic voice and has been fundamental for the development of my personal intellectual life. Stephan Lanz has provided enthusiastic support for this thesis. He agreed to take it on without knowing me or my work, and his encouragement to stick with territorial stigmatisation as the framework to look at and analyse displacement and urban renewal helped me to see this project through.

Megan Clark has been an important mentor and wonderful friend who taught me to trust in and centre my ethnographic material, to write courageously and clearly, and not to give in to the urge to hide my analysis behind convoluted phrases and theory. Her detailed knowledge of Turkish history and society were hugely beneficial to my understanding of both, and thanks to both her kindness and her brilliance, this project was finally able to grow wings. Her ability to explain complicated anthropological concepts and apply them to my work shines through every page of this thesis, and it is not an exaggeration to say that without Write Club, this dissertation would have remained on crutches, if it had been written at all.

I was lucky enough to end up in the same city as Bahar Sakızlıoğlu, whose research on Tarlabası has provided crucial insight long before I met her. I benefited greatly from our conversations and joint library writing days, and I could always count on her earnest and excellent criticisms of my work. I could not have finished this thesis without her friendship, her continuous encouragement and support.

Tymen Peverelli, Aylin Kuryel, John Crofoot, Enno Maessen, Kris Ruygrok, Tamara Vojtechovsky, Yiğit Aksakoğlu and Gertjan Hoetjes agreed to read various versions and parts of this book, and I am grateful for their insightful comments, their time, and their generosity. Hanneke van der Heijden has been a supportive friend and a fellow Istan-
bul enthusiast. Her help with the translations of the finer points of Turkish names and idioms made me pay attention to the importance of linguistic detail.

Clara Rivas-Alonso, Elif Ince, Özlem Ünsal and Andrew Gardner generously shared their research and their notes on the Tarlabaşı Renewal Project and urban renewal in Turkey with me. I would also like to thank Jonathan Lewis, who let me use his beautiful photographs for this thesis. TMMOB librarian Selma Hanım helped me sort through mountains of the vast TMMOB archives and hunted down every last document I asked her for. Rıfat Doğan kindly agreed to provide me with access to his detailed newspaper archives on Tarlabaşı, which was of invaluable help. Mücella Yapıcı patiently answered my many questions and showed me that anger can be a great motivator for research. Barış Kaşka and Can Atalay have been generous with their time and knowledge and provided me with legal and court documents that gave me a better understanding of the judicial background of the project. I hope that Mücella, Can, and all the other political prisoners in Turkey will be free by the time this book is published.

This thesis also greatly benefited from the insights and observations of many interlocutors, colleagues, and friends in Istanbul. Special thanks go to Mehmet Konbatı, Koray Kesik and Bingöl Elmas who freely and repeatedly shared their views and personal experiences of Tarlabaşı with me. Emma Sinclair-Webb encouraged me to believe in the importance of my research, and it would be an understatement to say that having been able to work alongside her has been hugely inspiring. Reinhard Baumgarten convinced me that journalism can take on many forms, benefits from many different approaches, and that finishing this thesis would not be a decision against it.

In Amsterdam, where I wrote the bulk of this thesis, I would like to thank the International Institute of Social History and the Amsterdam University Library at the PC Hoofthuis for providing welcoming workspaces and access to crucial parts of the literature. Both have dampened the culture shock and alleviated the grief for having to leave Istanbul. I also wish to thank the many academic colleagues who kindly send me their papers when paywalls proved insurmountable obstacles to the self-funded PhD student.

The Undocumented Migration Project agreed to let us mount the exhibition for the *Hostile Terrain* 94 project in Amsterdam, despite a raging pandemic and the many distractions that a new-born provided. Jason De León's work has been such an important inspiration for me, demonstrating what unleashed-unto-the-world, engaged anthropology can do.

Ian Traynor was an important mentor, colleague and friend who taught me to trust my gut. I benefited greatly from his advice and our many conversations about Turkey and the fallacies of pre-conceived journalistic observation. He showed me that good journalism lives off careful ethnography. I would have loved for him to see this thesis in its final form.

I wish to thank my family and the many friends who rooted for me and this thesis throughout the years, never losing confidence that one day, it *would* get finished. Neske Baerwaldt, your kindness and smarts were so important during the last months of getting through this, alongside finding my footing as a new parent.

Tan and Ada Rosa, you are the loves of my life. Writing this thesis was hard, and it has put you two through a lot; I have no words to express how grateful I am for you both. Tan, thank you for always having my back.
Finally, none of this research and writing would exist if not for the many Tarlabaşı residents who agreed to open their homes to me, and who trusted me with their stories. I am eternally grateful for their generosity and their friendship, their humour, their patience, and their encouragement over the years, and I could never thank them enough. I hope that I managed to convey at least some of their experiences, their struggles, and their pain on these pages.
<figure><img src="image_5.png" /></figure>
Introduction

Barber Halil Usta<fnref n="1" /> loved his shop and entertained very strong and longstanding ties in his neighbourhood. Originally from the city of Kayseri in Central Anatolia, Halil obtained his Usta certificate in 1977, but had worked in the profession since 1969, and always in the central Istanbul neighbourhood of Tarlabaşı. While the gradual decline of the area over the years had led to him losing many of his former customers, a phenomenon that accelerated with the Tarlabaşı renewal project, he preferred to spend most of his time in his small shop in Tree Street. When he was not in his shop he could be found in the Kurdish-owned teahouse down the street, where he indulged his one guilty pleasure: playing cards with his friends from the neighbourhood. However, Halil Usta did not live in Tarlabaşı. He had moved to a *site*<fnref n="2" /> in the middle class neighbourhood in Bostancı, a district on the Asian side of Istanbul where he lived with his wife. While he often lauded his “modern apartment” and the area he lived in as “clean and quiet” and “good for a family to live in”, he admitted that he barely knew any of his neighbours by name, something he did miss in comparison to Tarlabaşı. He was proud that he had put both his children through good schools and university with the help of his shop, and that they both worked in respected white-collar jobs: his daughter at a big international bank and his son as a lawyer.

The Usta had an excellent reputation as a barber and was famed for his “close shaves and smooth hands”. A number of patrons, those who had moved away from the neighbourhood but did not want to miss out on Halil Usta’s grooming and the local gossip, came from other parts of the city to enjoy his services. In short, Halil Usta was both very respected and very well integrated in Tarlabaşı, and yet, or so he told me on several occasions, he had preferred not to disclose the location of his small business at the parent-teacher meetings in the school of his children in Bostancı. He had feared the “bad reputation” that Tarlabaşı generally had amongst Istanbul residents, and the subsequent im-

<footnote n="1">1 In Turkey, the honorific “Usta” [Master] is used for craftsmen and artisans who have reached the highest level of competence and craftsmanship. It is used with the bearer’s first name and used to address a master craftsman as a sign of respect in daily interactions. In the traditional Turkish apprenticeship system, the title is awarded at the discretion of an apprentice’s mentor, who is an Usta himself, and not tied to an independent exam, as is the case for example in Germany. I will refer to all master craftsmen as Usta, as I did in every daily interaction with them during my fieldwork.</footnote>

<footnote n="2">2 A group of apartment buildings often managed like a gated community.</footnote>
pact it might have had on how teachers and fellow students would treat his children. This
worry did not disappear as they went on to university, and later on started their profes-
sional lives. In front of their friends and colleagues, Halil Usta always remained rather
vague, and preferred to say that he had a barber shop in Beyoğlu, the larger adminis-
trative district to which Tarlabaşı also belongs. In the end he simply stated that he was
retired, which was factually true, and did not work anymore at all, a white lie that was
meant to foreclose all further questions.

When the Beyoğlu Municipality officially announced the Tarlabaşı renewal project in 2008, Halil Usta was torn. He believed that the neighbourhood was in dire need of an upgrade, and that the government as he knew it would likely do what was best for inhabitants. He also voiced the opinion that in fact, Tarlabaşı residents had only themselves to blame for the bad state of the area, and, since they were largely squatters anyway, they should not complain about looming evictions. However, as the project progressed, Halil Usta felt increasingly uneasy. Neighbours and friends he had known for decades started to leave, making him feel “like an orphan”. His already lagging business trickled to a halt. His landlord insisted on full rent while locked in a court case over the sales price of his property with project stakeholders. As a tenant, Halil Usta had no right to any compensation despite his progressing income loss. He felt increasingly unseen and unheard. Despite initial promises by the municipality, the project made his life, and that of many of his neighbours, not better, but worse. However, Halil Usta never engaged in any kind of organised resistance against the demolition of his neighbourhood. He did not join the Tarlabaşı Solidarity Association<fnref n="3" /> that had been founded with the aim to help residents. Despite his lack of engagement, Halil Usta regularly challenged the negative narrative and the stigmatising discourse about Tarlabaşı. In conversations, he would underline what he thought was good about his neighbourhood and should be preserved. Halil Usta clearly valued Tarlabaşı, his life and his position there very much – so why did he go to such lengths to obscure this significant aspect of his life, his accomplishments, his social world, from others? What were the consequences Halil Usta was trying to avoid by distancing himself from Tarlabaşı? Why did he feel the need to blame his neighbours, many of whom he had an excellent and deep relationship with, for the bad state of the neighbourhood? And how to explain his ambivalent stance towards the renewal project? The simplest answer is this: Tarlabaşı suffered, and still suffers, from a bad reputation.

In this book I interrogate these questions further. True, Tarlabaşı *does* have a bad reputation, but there are micro-social processes and macro-political dynamics involved that structure the way that neighbourhood reputation sticks to particular residents in particular ways. These processes and dynamics also structure the diversity of tactics meant to manage or negotiate social life in a deeply stigmatised neighbourhood. This place-based stigma also has a profound impact on solidarity ties and trust networks, and therefore impacts the way a community is able – or not – to organise around collective action and resistance. Importantly, the various attempts to challenge the bad reputation of Tarlabaşı

<footnote n="3">3 The "Tarlabaşı Association of Property Owners and Tenants for Progress and Solidarity", founded in 2008. I will expand on the association, further referred to as "Tarlabaşı Association" or "Solidarity Association", in a later chapter of the book.</footnote>
deserve attention, as they can provide insight into how residents tried to oppose the neg-
ative frame the renewal project trapped their neighbourhood in.

Aims

Building on Loïc Wacquant's theory of territorial stigmatisation, I focus on the ques-
tions of how territorial stigmatisation was produced, and how it was exploited by project
stakeholders during the state-led renewal project in the central Istanbul neighbourhood
of Tarlabaşı. However, I do not only explore the manufacture of place-based stigma in the
dominant discourse, by the municipality and the media. I also analyse how residents in a
low-income neighbourhood reacted to this stigmatisation, how they managed and occa-
sionally opposed it through everyday practices. While Wacquant did not dedicate much
of his writing to how territorial stigma might be contested, research has shown that resi-
dents use a variety of strategic responses to appropriate, reject, ignore, or rescript spatial
taints. Furthermore, opposition against stigma can also be found in the way residents ex-
press belonging. Paul Kirkness and Andreas Tijé-Dra point out that “the fact that some
people are capable of feeling place attachments to areas that are deemed to be threaten-
ing by anybody outside the neighbourhood is an important step towards the negation of
the power of stigma” (Kirkness and Tijé-Dra 2017a: 3). This, too, is a phenomenon that I
will explore. I want to assess the scope and methods of territorial stigmatisation in Tar-
labaşı and examine if Wacquant's theoretical understanding of the concept applies in the
context of this central Istanbul neighbourhood. Furthermore, I want to investigate how
territorial stigmatisation impacted residents in the run-up to and during evictions for
the renewal project.

The internalisation of stigma in Tarlabaşı was by no means uniform and did not man-
ifest itself as evenly as Wacquant suggests. While a number of people expressed negative
opinions and ambivalence towards their area of residence, very few thought that it was
all bad. The internalisation was also not consistent: people who would harshly criticise
the neighbourhood and their neighbours one day, defended both on another, depend-
ing on the context and the audience. Furthermore, taking into account recent research
on intersectionality, this work aims to fill a gap in the research on how the experience
of stigma in a low-income neighbourhood in Turkey heavily depended on the socio-de-
mographic and gender identity of residents. People who were part of a strong solidarity
or trust network, such as Kurds, with awareness of and/or connection to longstanding
organised political resistance in Turkey, managed stigma in a different way than those
who could not fall back on the experience of a political struggle. My fieldwork suggests a
more interactionist understanding of stigma than Wacquant applies in his work on ur-
ban marginality, a thought on which I would like to elaborate.

In the context of Tarlabaşı and the renewal project, I understand territorial stigma-
tisation to “include a wide range of subjective experiences, namely, incidents in which
respondents experienced disrespect and their dignity, honor, relative status, or sense
of self was challenged” (Lamont et al. 2016: 6). This was the case when residents were
treated rudely by municipal representatives or employees of the private developer GAP
Inşaat<fnref n="4" />, when crucial information was withheld from them, when they were excluded from decisions that would deeply impact their lives, when they and their neighbours received poor services, when they were the victim of threats or violence— sometimes symbolic, sometimes physical—and when they were stereotyped as criminal, destitute, unducated or dangerous. Stigmatisation in Tarlabaşı was always also an “assault on worth” (ibid.: 7). Imogen Tyler and Tom Slater (2018: 727) show that “stigmatisation is intimately linked with neoliberal governance’, that is with attempts to manage and/or change the behaviour of populations through deliberate stigma strategies which inculcate humiliation and shame” The symbolic stigmatisation that people in Tarlabaşı faced justified and facilitated material marginalisation. During the planning and the execution of the renewal project, stigma became more entrenched. It was an integral part of the promotional material published by the municipality and the developer, a tool to legitimise and disregard residents as well as their concerns and their rights. For residents, reacting and opposing this project meant to an important extent interacting, challenging, managing, and deflecting this stigma. This work fills particular gaps in the literature on territorial stigma by focussing on the impact of spatial stigma not only during the planning phase of a large state-led urban renewal project, but during its execution and the evictions.

## Territorial stigmatisation

What do we mean when we talk about a neighbourhood’s “bad reputation”? In his extensive body of work on urban marginality, Loïc Wacquant describes territorial stigmatisation as the profound stigma that attaches to a geographical location, to a physical place, the proverbial stain on a map often portrayed as the “bad part” of a town, neighbourhood, or any other location generally assumed to be “dangerous”, “dirty”, “sketchy”, or simply “unsavoury” (Wacquant 2007). Wacquant forged the concept of territorial stigmatisation based on a methodological comparison between an American “black ghetto” of Chicago’s South Side with a French working-class banlieue in the Paris periphery (Wacquant 2008). His theoretical framework draws upon the seminal sociological work of Erving Goffman and Pierre Bourdieu, by adding “place” to both Goffman’s three categories of stigma<fnref n="5" /> and to Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic power.<fnref n="6" /> This makes it possible to better dissect and understand how urban marginality affects individuals as well as communities, and how it

<footnote n="4">4 GAP Inşaat is a subsidiary of Çalışk Holding, a company with close ties to the AKP government.</footnote>

<footnote n="5">5 Goffman distinguishes three different ways, all three of them described in relation to what is considered “normal”, in which individuals can become first “discredited”, and then “disqualified” from society: “abominations of the body” (e.g. disability), “blemishes of individual character” (e.g. addiction, homosexuality, unemployment, imprisonment), and “tribal stigma of race, nation and religion” that can be handed down through lineages and taint several generations and family members through symbolic guilt by association. For all three forms of social stigma, Goffman attests “an undesired differentness from what we had anticipated” that results in the stigmatized being ostracised and discriminated against by “those who do not depart negatively from the particular expectations” of society, those that generally have access to political, economic and social capital and power (Goffman 1963: 3–4).</footnote>

<footnote n="6">6 Bourdieu's notion of "symbolic power" is useful in considering the actual social processes through which stigma attaches to social actors. In that sense, symbolic power is the capability to construct</footnote>
is produced and used by those who exercise power against those who submit to it, as well as how and by whom stigma and marginalisation are reproduced and perpetuated. Wacquant identifies a location-related and pervasive form of discrimination he links to a “blemish of place” (Wacquant 2007: 67), a stain attached to “isolated and bounded territories increasingly perceived by both outsiders and insiders as social purgatories, leprous Badlands at the heart of the postindustrial metropolis where only the refuse of society would accept to dwell” (ibid).

The idea of a “topography of disrepute” (Wacquant et al. 2014: 1273). is not a novel concept. Poor, derelict urban areas have attracted writers, researchers, and a both worried and titillated urban elite for more than a century, when, with the onset of industrialisation and rapid urbanisation, the idea of debauched, criminal and destitute slums began to take hold (ibid).<fnref n="7" /> However, Wacquant, Pereira and Slater (2014: 1273–1275) point out that contemporary areas of spatial stigma differ from the description of these earlier slums in at least five ways: Firstly, territorial stigma has become “partially” independent from the stigma of class, ethnicity, “questionable” morality, street crime and degraded housing stock, thus both superseding and transcending negative stereotypes typically used to describe these attributes. This means that the taint associated with a certain neighbourhood has gained enough traction to exert its own real and devastating effects, attaching its own powerful stigma to people associated with it via stereotyping and a negative discourse, independently of and in addition to other types of discrimination. Secondly, the negative image attached to a stigmatised borough of the post-industrial metropolis is no longer only upheld amongst members of the social and cultural elites, but amongst the general populace and residents of the tainted neighbourhood as well. It has become so all-pervasive, that in some cases, stigmatised neighbourhoods have become synonymous with urban hellholes in international marketing and pop culture.<fnref n="8" /> Thirdly, the stigmatised districts of today are being portrayed as places of disorder, chaos, and utter disintegration, whereas the working-class districts of the past were depicted as a “powerful and hierarchized counter-society” (ibid: 1274), where the so-called “criminal underworld” was a highly organised club with a strict pecking order, and where the working class successfully set up organised labour struggles, unions, and stringent political representation. The fourth difference is a “racialisation” of stigmatised districts through selective attention or fictive projection. This often happens via sensationalist reports of crime and violent incidents in the media that frame cultural differences as divergent from, or even hostile to, the dominant national norm and as dangerous, “branding” residents “as outcasts” (ibid: 1274). The mainstream media have regularly described clashes between the police and residents in French banlieues or British boroughs as “race riots” using martial and colonial language (Tyler 2013). More recently, several German media outlets claimed that “failed integration of migrants” and “cultural differences” were to blame for attacks on ambulances and firefighters on New Year’s Eve in Berlin-Neukölln.

<footnote>reality and to turn representations into unassailable social truths, whether or not the prescribed characteristics of that 'truth' correspond with reality (Bourdieu 1991).</footnote>

<footnote n="7">7 See for example Friedrich Engels' The Condition of the Working Class in England, or the works of English writers Charles Dickens, Henry Mayhew, or Arthur Morrison.</footnote>

<footnote n="8">8 Wacquant, Slater and Pereira name The Bronx as one such example.</footnote>
And lastly, the relationship of non-residents with the stigmatised neighbourhoods of to-
day is one of largely negative emotions, of unambiguous revulsion and fear in opposi-
tion to times past, when the cultural and social elite made them "playgrounds for ex-
citement, mysterious sites of social voyeurism, moral transgression, sexual fantasy, and
artistic inspiration (ibid: 1275)." In Victorian London, "slumming" was a popular pastime
of local urban elites who would take tours in destitute neighbourhoods in East London
(Koven 2004). A phenomenon that is difficult to imagine now. This change cultivates and
glorifies a punitive state approach to urban marginality, embodied by a zero-tolerance
attitude, the so-called "broken windows theory" (Wilson and Kelling: 1982) of policing,
corrective reactions, and efforts to "cleanse", "punish", and "restore order" in stigmatised
neighbourhoods (see also Clear 2007; Wacquant 2009b; Beckett and Herbert 2011; Camp
and Heatherton 2016; Müller 2016; Vitale 2017). One memorable example are the words of
French politician and then interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy who, after violent clashes in
the Parisian housing project Quatre Mille, said that he wanted to "clean out the scum" by
using "a high-powered sandblaster" (Wacquant et al. 2014: 6) This change of policy mak-
ers' attitudes towards low-income neighbourhoods ran parallel to the change in attitude
to poverty in general, to the switch from the "war on poverty" to the "war on welfare" (Katz
1989).

Wacquant (2008: 169) argues that territorial stigmatisation is “arguably the single
most protrusive feature of the lived experience of those trapped in these sulphurous
zones.” He describes a symbolic defamation of place reinforced from “below” through
social interactions in daily life and the effects of stigma management, and from “above”
in the form of symbolical power through stigmatising representations in sensationalist
media coverage, in political and public discourse. Such reinforcement makes the socially
and politically constructed blemish permanent and unshakable, whether or not a tainted
area is really dangerous or “spoiled” (Wacquant 2007: 68). In the same way, works of
fiction such as literature, films, TV shows, or online content contribute to a collective
imagination of certain ‘dangerous’ areas and produce a public common-sense “knowl-
edge” about certain neighbourhoods, even if those consuming such works of fiction in
fact know little or nothing about the places that are being depicted. It follows that the
stigma that is being attached to certain neighbourhoods, and sometimes entire cities,
turn these places into “no-go zones” and areas to be derided, avoided, and looked down
upon; also worth noting is the way this transcends the stigmatisers, the stigmatised, and
all individuals who come in contact with an urban place so tainted. Wacquant (2007: 68)
underlines that it does not matter if an area is “in fact dilapidated and dangerous, and
their population composed essentially of poor people, minorities and foreigners” and
that “the prejudicial belief that they are suffices to set off socially noxious consequences.”
Another important finding in Wacquant’s (ibid: 5) research is that territorial stigma,
by extension, also attaches to the people who occupy that space or are in any other way
affiliated with it, such as Halil Usta and his barber shop: a location-based ‘guilt-by-
association’. He argues that residents of such stigmatised places are “tagged with [...] an ‘undesired differentness’ whose ‘discrediting effect is very extensive’”, a fact that Halil
Usta was clearly aware of when he decided to withhold the address of a business he was
otherwise very proud of.
Territorial stigma, therefore, has a profound impact on the people who live in a stigmatised area. The negative individual and personal consequences that flow from such stigma, sometimes subsumed under the insufficient term of “address discrimination”, can include limited access to employment, discrimination in schools and differential treatment by the police, by the court system, and in other public offices, such as welfare services (Sernhede 2011; Mckenzie 2012). A social worker at the *Tarlabaşı Toplum Merkezi* [Tarlabaşı Community Centre] told journalists that residents struggle with prospective employers, for example, whose “faces change when they hear that [applicants] live in Tarlabaşı” (Açıkgöz 2007). The specifics of how territorial stigma is justified in public discourse varies from context to context, and the ‘reasons’ particular neighbourhoods come to be stigmatised are also historical and context-specific. Territorial stigmatisation is not a static quality, but an ongoing process of continuous symbolic defilement in need of constant nourishment, work, and renewal (Horgan 2018).

## Exploiting stigma

While territorial stigma has material effects on the people it attaches to, it is also “put to work” as a tool, to be used judicially and extrajudicially. Powerful actors, such as state representatives (Sakızlıoğlu and Uitermark 2014; Kornberg 2016; Paton et al. 2016; Yardımcı 2020), private businesses (Kudla and Courey 2019), the media (Devereux et al. 2011; Hancock and Mooney 2013; Kearns et al. 2013; Liu and Blomley 2013; Arthurson et al. 2014; Sisson and Maginn 2018; Butler 2020), or think tanks (Hancock and Mooney 2013; Slater 2014, 2018; Sisson 2020) put this tool to use as they reproduce relations of domination and subservience in capitalist societies. In her study of social abjection in neoliberal Great Britain, Imogen Tyler (Tyler 2013: 8) has shown that “stigmatisation [is] a form of governance which legitimizes the reproduction and entrenchment of inequalities and injuries”. This offers profitable business opportunities to a variety of agents, such as eviction agencies, the news media, or social impact bonds (Sisson, 2020: 5). Kirsteen Paton (Paton 2018: 921) writes that stigma functions as a “soft power’ which is integral to governing” and “central to moral and economic class projects”. Therefore, stigma is activated to “shame those who do not or cannot become more productive neoliberal consumer citizens” (ibid: 923). Graham Scambler (2018) even speaks of weaponization of stigma in the neoliberal era.

Alistair Sisson (2020: 5) underlines that territorial stigmatisation has been exploited “to obfuscate the structural causes and conditions of poverty and inequality, making poverty, marginality and deprivation seen and treated as the responsibility of the poor, marginalised, and deprived themselves, or the spaces they are purportedly concentrated within” (see also Dikeç 2002; Kipfer and Petrunia 2009; Slater and Anderson 2012; Hancock and Mooney 2013; Loyd and Bonds 2018, Tyler and Slater 2018). In other words, stigma “veils over a whole host of more fundamental cultural, political and economic questions regarding the distribution of distress in society” (Tyler and Slater 2018: 723). Behind such smoke screens, territorial stigmatisation provides powerful actors, such as the state, with the opportunity to enforce discriminatory housing laws, banking policies and to provide unequal access to public services which in turn propagates the
disenfranchisement of people and the seizure of private property (Wacquant 2008; Loyd and Bonds 2018; Tyler and Slater 2018; Sisson 2020).

A considerable part of the literature focuses on the role of territorial stigmatisation in justifying and legitimising the displacement and dispossession through urban renewal projects, gentrification, and redevelopment, as well as punitive policy measures and urban reforms (Arthurson 2004; Kipfer and Petrunia 2009; Gray and Mooney 2011; Slater and Anderson 2012; Kallin and Slater 2014; Sakızlıoğlu and Uitermark 2014; Schultz Larsen 2014; van Gent et al. 2017; Horgan 2018; Paton 2018; Sisson and Maginn 2018; Slater 2018; Yardımcı 2020; Rivas-Alonso 2021). Portraying a disadvantaged area as “a lost cause”, as “bad”, “criminal”, “rotten” or “derelict”, as “destroyed”, even “dead” is a “consequential categorisation” (Sisson 2020: 5, emphasis in original), as it grants an excellent cover for brutal state policies, such as increased surveillance and policing, or summary evictions and the demolition of an entire neighbourhood (Tyler 2013; Kallin and Slater 2014; Sakızlıoğlu and Uitermark 2014; Sisson 2020). A similarly negative framing of a wealthy urban area or business district, for example as a haven for money laundering or tax evasion, would not result in similar measures (Sisson 2020).

When it comes to poor neighbourhoods such discourse helps authorities and developers to self-portray as rescuers in a time of urgent need (Kallin and Slater 2014). At the same time, it also determines how resistance is shaped from the inside and seen from the outside, since opposition to policies depicted as “helpful” by the authorities is easier to frame as obstructive to positive change.

## Managing / responding to territorial stigma

A large and growing body of literature focusing on territorial stigmatisation has investigated the experiences and behavioural responses of residents who live in tainted areas. Wacquant (2007, 2008) describes how residents of a stigmatised place accept and internalise the stigma associated with their neighbourhood, leading to resignation, feelings of shame, guilt, and self-loathing. Residents use a range of tactics to dissociate themselves from the tainted location, most notably “lateral denigration” and “mutual distancing” (Wacquant 2009a: 116). Some might exit the stigmatised neighbourhood as soon as they are able to. (ibid; Jensen and Christensen, 2012: 75). They might, as Halil Usta did, hide their address, or avoid having relatives and friends from outside their neighbourhood visit their home (Palmer et al. 2004; Warr 2005b; Wacquant 2007). Residents might also accept the stigmatising narratives about their neighbourhood and isolate themselves, retreating into the privacy of their homes (Warr 2005b; Wacquant 2007; Blokland 2008). In order to distance themselves from identity categories perceived to be of low symbolic value, residents might also deflect the stigma away from themselves and onto a “faceless, demonized other” (Wacquant 2007: 68; see also Palmer et al. 2004; Jensen and Christensen 2012; Eksner 2013; Contreras 2017; Cuny 2018; Verdouw and Flanagan 2019; Sisson 2020; Smets and Kusenbach 2020).

There are macro-social consequences to this, too. Territorial stigmatisation erodes solidarity ties and trust networks, therefore compromising the capacity and motivation of a community to organise around collective action. This might result in breaking down
possible organised – and unorganised resistance (Derville 1997; Arthurson 2004; Hol-
loway and Mulherin 2004; Ruggiero 2007; Beach and Sernhede 2011; Duin et al. 2011;
Glasze et al. 2012; Slater and Anderson 2012; Arthurson et al. 2014; Sakızlıoğlu and Uiter-
mark 2014). It is disempowering (Wassenberg, 2004; Warr, 2005a, 2005b). Spatial stigma
can also make non-resident solidarity less likely. Outsiders might shy away from rally-
ing around a stigmatised neighbourhood deemed “unworthy” of any support. For exam-
ple, during my fieldwork I encountered local activists involved in anti-gentrification and
anti-eviction struggles who said that Tarlabaşı was “full of criminals and drug dealers”
who “deserved being cleared out”.

Neighbourhood social cohesion suffers as a consequence of territorial stigmatisa-
sation, especially when the focus of public discussions centres on societal morality
and progress on the one hand, and less overt social engineering and development
programmes on the other, as has been the case for Tarlabaşı. Alistair Sisson (2020: 7)
underlines that territorial stigma “is deployed to legitimate status quo inequalities and
injustices and novel interventions that reproduce, entrench, or intensify them [and] to
manage populations and their behaviour”. Another consequence of this internalisation
relates to how residents of stigmatised neighbourhoods react to experiences of institu-
tionalised discrimination and disenfranchisement that often co-occur with territorial
stigmatisation. “Once a place is publicly labelled as a ‘lawless zone’ or ‘outlaw estate’,
outside the common norm, it is easy for the authorities to justify special measures,
deviating from both law and custom, which can have the effect – if not the intention – of
destabilizing and further marginalizing their occupants, subjecting them to the dictates
of the deregulated labour market, and rendering them invisible or driving them out of a
coveted space” (Wacquant 2007: 69).

Residents that have internalised the stigma associated with their neighbourhood
sometimes view such experiences of inequality as a natural consequence, a rational
reality for them to face simply for living in a ‘bad’ place. “[The] physical disrepair and
institutional dilapidation of the neighbourhood cannot but generate an abiding sense of
social inferiority by communicating to its residents that they are second- or third-class
citizens undeserving of the attention of city officials and of the care of its agencies”
(Wacquant 2010: 217). However, various studies suggest that residents do not always in-
ternalise and submit to the stigma, and that responses exist on a continuum and can vary
greatly. Wacquant has been widely criticised for disregarding the agency of marginalised
communities (Pattillo 2009; Gilbert 2010; Jensen and Christensen 2012; Kirkness 2014;
Geiselhart 2017; Sisson 2020) and the various ways in which residents reject and oppose
stigmatising narratives of their places of residence (Garbin and Millington 2012; Jensen
and Christensen 2012; Kirkness 2014; Kirkness and Tijé-Dra 2017a; Cairns 2018; Nayak
2019; Verdouw and Flanagan 2019; Sisson 2020).<fnref n="9" />

Residents might express ambivalence toward their stigmatised neighbourhood
(Jensen and Christensen 2012; Garbin and Millington 2012; August 2014; Kirkness 2014;
Cairns 2018; Jensen et al. 2021), and a number of studies have shown that residents op-
pose stigma through expressing a deep sense of belonging and community, and through
showing pride in their neighbourhood (Jensen and Christensen 2012; Mckenzie 2012;

<footnote n="9">9 Sisson (2020) points out that a similar argument can be made regarding Goffman.</footnote>
Slater and Anderson 2012; Kirkness 2014; Slater 2017; Cairns 2018). Others have focused on residents' efforts to resist spatial disrepute through symbolic struggles, including image management via community media (Dean and Hastings, 2000; Hastings and Dean, 2003; Hastings, 2004; Wassenberg, 2004; Jacobs et al., 2011) or other forms of counternarratives to the stigmatising frame (Kirkness and Tijé-Dra 2017b; Maestri 2017; Cairns 2018; Cuny 2018; Horgan 2018; Junnilainen 2020). A number of studies demonstrates physical struggles over territorial stigmatisation, such as the use of artwork (Garbin and Millington 2012), the construction of various community facilities (Maestri 2017), solidary squatting movements that foster deep attachment to place and provide new narratives (Maestri 2017; Queirós and Pereira 2018; Sisson 2020). Last but not least, scholars have pointed to the importance of everyday social relations and actions through which dominant practices and representations are being resisted in stigmatised urban areas (Garbin and Millington 2012; Mckenzie 2012; Kirkness 2014; Nayak 2019). Sisson (2020: 14) underlines that “resistance often occurs while people are busy doing other things”. Recently, a number of scholars have also criticised the presentation of territorial stigma as a generalised experience for all residents of a tainted area and called for an intersectional approach to analysing stigma management, drawing attention to the fact that the lived experience of territorial stigma intersects with residents racial, classed or gender identities (Contreras 2017; Cairns 2018; Pinkster et al 2020).

## Territorial stigmatisation in Turkey

A considerable amount of research has been published on territorial stigma, on how it is produced, how it is exploited by powerful agents, and how residents of stigmatised areas manage, internalise, or resist the spatial disrepute. However, most of this literature focuses on stigmatised neighbourhoods in cities in North America and Europe. A relatively small amount of research has explored this issue in cities of the Global South. These studies have focused on the production and consequences of territorial stigmatisation in Brazilian favelas (Caldeira 2000; Araújo and da Costa 2017; Kolling 2019), stigma deflection in an Argentine slum (Auyero 1999), on stigma management and counternarratives to stigma in Bangladesh (Fattah and Walters, 2020), a deconstruction of territorial stigma in Botswana (Geiselhart 2017), place attachment in poor quarters in Shanghai, China (Zhang 2017), and the exploitation of territorial stigma in India (Ghertner 2008, 2010).

In Turkey, recent studies of territorial stigmatisation have explored state-led territorial stigmatisation as a form of governmentality in a restive Ankara neighbourhood (Yardımcı, 2020), and image-making as preparation for state-led urban renewal and gentrification in an Istanbul gecekondu area (Rivas-Alonso, 2021). A notable part of previous research into territorial stigmatisation has focused on the political and societal attitude shift towards gecekondu<fnref n="10" /> areas. This shift coincided with the neoliberalisation

<footnote n="10">10 Originally, gecekondu refers to informal housing built on the peripheries of large cities by rural migrants starting in the 1950s. The term can literally be translated as “landed overnight”. It has since undergone significant reanalysis and critique (Pérouse 2004; Erman 2013).</footnote>
of the country that began in the 1980s and intensified following the Turkish finan-
cial crisis in 2001 and the Justice and Development Party's [Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi
– AKP] rise to power in 2002 (Erman 2001; Esen 2005; Yardımcı 2020; Rivas-Alonso
2021). Gecekondu housing had long been tolerated as a social protection mechanism,
and as what sociologist Tim Dorlach (2019) calls “social policy by other means”. Tahire
Erman (2001: 985) states that initially, during the 1950s and 1960s, gecekondu dwellers
were represented as the “rural Other”, expected to be assimilated “into the modern
urban society”. With the onset of the 1970s, under the influence of Western intellectual
thought and international leftist movements sympathetic to marginalised groups and
the poor, the gecekondu population was seen as “the disadvantaged Other” (ibid: 986).
Following the violent military coup of September 12, 1980, and the installation of a
right-wing government in 1983, Turkey opened up to Western foreign investment and
pursued neoliberal economic policies. From this point onward, gecekondu residents were
increasingly framed as the undesirable urban poor, as having undeservedly enriched
themselves with squatted property, and as culturally inferior and unfit to assimilate
into modern city life (Erman 2001; Lanz 2005). Finally, in the late 1990s, public discourse
became even more punitive, and gecekondu dwellers were framed as “invaders” (Yardımcı,
2020), as dangerously different, “the threatening Other(s)” (Erman 2001: 988–989; Rivas-
Alonso 2021: 99–100). The terms varoş<fnref n="11" /> [slum] and varoşlu [slum dweller] appeared,
initially mostly in the media, to describe disadvantaged and squatter neighbourhoods
in Turkey, and were later adopted into dominant societal discourse (Erman 2001: 996;
Yardımcı 2020: 1523). The focus shifted towards concentrated urban marginality, linked
to moral panics about the “culture of degeneracy” associated with the urban poor and
the neighbourhoods they lived in (Bartu-Candan and Kolloğlu 2008; Gönen and Yonucu
2012; Yardımcı 2020). This discourse became more entrenched with the election victory
of the AKP in 2002. From then on, gecekondu areas and disadvantaged, often dilapidated
inner-city neighbourhoods were increasingly described as an obstacle to making cities
attractive for (predominantly foreign) capital and investment, to which large urban
renewal projects were presented as a remedy (Bartu-Candan and Kolloğlu 2008; Kuyucu
and Ünsal 2010; Ünsal 2013; Sakızlıoğlu 2014b; Demiralp 2016; Ay 2019; Yardımcı 2020;
Rivas-Alonso 2021). These neighbourhoods were central to the AKP's economic strategy
to fully integrate as much urban land as possible into the neoliberal real estate mar-
ket. As a result, informal housing was criminalised, portrayed as “the sole responsible
[agencies] of irregular urbanisation” (Ünsal 2013: 83), and informal neighbourhoods
stigmatised as areas of concentrated crime and terrorism.

Scholars researching territorial stigmatisation have underlined the importance of
the state in activating, (re)producing, perpetuating, and exploiting spatial disrepute in
order to capitalise on land and real estate, and push through contested urban transfor-
mation projects to the detriment of a poor, marginalised population (Kallin and Slater

<footnote n="11">11 Hungarian in origin, the term varos initially referred to neighbourhoods outside the city walls but was later used to describe any neighbourhood on the spatial or symbolic periphery of a city. In Turkish, the word carries strong negative meaning and refers to the unruly, violent, anti-state and criminal underclass (Erman 2001: 996).</footnote>
2014). Öznur Yardımcı, in her study of state-led territorial stigmatisation in Dikmen Valley, an informal settlement on the outskirts of the Turkish capital Ankara, underlines the importance of exploring the state not only as an extension of the capitalist market, but also as an important actor pursuing political interests in framing a certain neighbourhood as “bad” and in need of renewal, thereby reasserting state power and authority. She writes that local and national representatives of the state “…use stigma in urban settings to pathologise political dissidence and enhance the desire to comply with official policies in a way that makes the (housing) rights dependent upon meeting the ‘appropriate’ patterns and norms defined by the state. Consequently, stigmatisation enables the state to legitimise itself as the main authority to define who is worthy of benefit from the prosperity promised by urban transformation, which in turn shrinks citizen power” (Yardımcı 2020: 1526).

The AKP government enacted sweeping reforms in regard to informal housing, and as a result, access to squatter housing declined considerably, as did political and public acceptance of it. In 2004, a Turkish Penal Code reform criminalised the construction of squatter housing and made it punishable by a prison term of up to five years (Republic of Turkey Law 5327, 2004). At the same time, the legal facilitation of new urban renewal projects led to the demolition of existing *gecekondu* settlements (Kuyucu and Ünsal 2010; Dorlach 2019, Yardımcı 2020). These legal and administrative changes in urban policy were accompanied by a stigmatisation campaign against squatting. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, then prime minister of Turkey, made *gecekondu* housing a central topic of his policies. He referred to informal housing areas as “tumours that have surrounded our cities” and claimed that their population “undeservedly occupied the land without the right to live there” (Yardımcı, 2020: 1526). He later called the banning of *gecekondu* construction and squatting a “revolution” (Dorlach, 2019: 279), and demanded that squatter housing should not be tolerated and “mercilessly demolished” (NTV, 2004).

## Chapter outline

Chapter one, “Looking for Resistance in All the Wrong Places”, is concerned with the methodology used for this book. The chapter explores the reasons why my research focus shifted from everyday resistance against the renewal project towards territorial stigmatisation and stigma management in the neighbourhood. Furthermore, the chapter describes the methods used during fieldwork, elaborates on the concept of engaged ethnography, and considers the reasons why I was always more than an outside observer. It also pulls apart difficulties of access and positionality.

Chapter two, “Waking the poisoned princess”, describes the history of the stigmatisation of the neighbourhood. Providing a brief history of Tarlabaşı, this chapter then shows how the municipal district of Beyoğlu, and in extension Tarlabaşı, have been framed and stigmatised in the past, and how that informs the current image of the neighbourhood. This is followed by an empirical analysis of how territorial stigmatisation was driven in contemporary Tarlabaşı and in the dominant discourse. I focus in particular on the state as one of the main actors invested in the urban renewal plans. The chapter will further examine the various ways in which state actors fed, maintained, and exploited the terri-
torial stigma to justify and legitimise the contentious redevelopment. Finally, the chapter will explore how stigma made certain neighbourhood aspects, and certain types of residents who fit certain “problem profiles” hyper-visible, while at the same time erasing actual Tarlabaşı residents from the scene and the narrative.

Chapter three, “Judging Books by Their Covers”, traces a detailed history of the renewal project and the drastic changes it underwent through a close text-object analysis of two different project catalogues published over the course of five years. An analysis of the changes to these promotional materials draws attention to the fact that the renewal project was constantly changing and shifting, both in how it presented itself to residents and outsiders, and in terms of how project agents engaged with Tarlabaşı residents. This happened in ways that were not publicised and involved state agents reneging on promises made very publicly at the beginning of the project. The chapter will also provide an exploration of the immediate context and history of the project, with a careful eye to how the status of the project changed, how a shift in potential investor profiles affected the relationship between project actors and residents, the way that these actors exploited existing stigmatisation, and if, or how, they took potential opposition to the project into account. Such a close text-object analysis will provide an anchor for the historical, economic, and social context in which the renewal project developed over time, as well as for the history of the project itself.

Chapter four, “Experiencing Stigma in Tarlabaşı”, expands on the experiences of Tarlabaşı residents regarding territorial stigma in their neighbourhood, with a focus on how stigma played out during the execution of the renewal project and in the run-up to evictions. The different negative stereotypes connected to place-stigma in Tarlabaşı were not experienced equally by all residents. A more detailed analysis of how different residents perceived and interpreted their marginalisation and discrimination shows that these experiences depended on residents’ social, ethnic and gender identity. This analysis builds on the definition of the “ordinary iconic profiles” discussed in chapter two.

Chapter five, “Belonging”, rebukes Loïc Wacquant’s claim that residents of a stigmatised area will disengage and distance themselves from their neighbourhood, or that they will seek to exit it as soon as they are able. In Tarlabaşı, many residents expressed a profound sense of belonging to their neighbourhood for a wide variety of reasons. With the help of the thick ethnographic description of different nodes in the interlinked neighbourhood structure, this chapter will highlight the workings and the importance of networks of socio-economic interdependence in a “traditional” Turkish neighbourhood, the *mahalle*.

Chapter six, “Have You Heard”, explores different forms and functions of rumour during the run-up to evictions and demolitions, and shows how rumour was linked to territorial stigmatisation in Tarlabaşı. The municipality’s strategy of actively withholding or confusing reliable information had profound legal impacts and material consequences for residents who had to base most of their decisions about how to navigate the project timeline on unverifiable hearsay. Furthermore, this chapter will consider how different experiences of the various communities and interest groups within Tarlabaşı led to different conclusions about the reliability and accuracy of rumours, which in turn put considerable strain on neighbourhood cohesion and solidarity. At the same time, rumours were also a discursive tactic residents used to question and oppose both the nega-
tive narrative framing Tarlabaşı and the renewal project itself. The argument of this chap-
ter is that these rumours, and the massive amount of interpretative labour that went into
their assessment and interpretation, were part of peoples' tactics to cope with the mate-
rial consequences of stigma.

Chapter seven, “In the Eye of the Beholder”, argues that territorial stigma functions as a prefabricated lens that skewers outsider interpretations of residents’ presentations of self and of their physical surroundings toward more negative interpretations. People have to work harder, therefore, to try and rectify negative narratives through various tactics. Rather than as opposition to territorial stigma, these individual attempts at impression management and at successfully performing respectability can be read as individual residents’ tactics to preserve a sense of themselves as good, as decent, and as worthy of respect. The chapter will demonstrate that the urgency of successfully performing respectability is gendered in a particular way, and that the stakes were not the same for all residents.

Chapter eight, “Giving in to Stigma”, examines how the territorial stigma in Tarlabaşı was internalised by residents, and how they attempted to deflect this stigma onto other individuals and marginalised communities, blaming them for the bad reputation of the neighbourhood. The most important question is not if internalisation and lateral denigration happened, but *how* it happened, and why. The chapter explores fissures and fault lines of denigration against the backdrop of a broader political context in Turkey, shows how ethnic Turkish residents weaponised nostalgia as a means of stigma management, and introduces the concept of “Turkness” as a position of structural privilege.

Chapter nine, “Speaking Back”, demonstrates different ways through which Tar-
labaşı residents tried to make themselves seen and heard against this effort to invisibilise
them and their experiences in the run-up to evictions. This chapter will show what verbal
impudence under the threat of eviction looked like, and how such “backtalk” accom-
plished two key things: it gave voice and form to residents’ humiliations, their anger, and
their attempt to circulate a counternarrative to the stigmatising discourse that targeted
their neighbourhood and themselves, but it also opened cracks in the façade of project
stakeholders’ pretence that the stigma was the “objective”, “natural” state of Tarlabaşı,
rather than what it was—a fabricated prejudicial lens that itself required enormous
amounts of work to build, maintain, and renew.
## Chapter one: Looking for Resistance
in all the Wrong Places

This book is based on two and a half years of fieldwork in the central Istanbul neighbourhood of Tarlabaşı, succeeded by follow-up interviews and observations spaced over another three years. For this study, I examined how the residents of a low-income inner-city area managed the intense stigmatisation of their neighbourhood as part of a contentious urban renewal project inaugurated by state actors and executed by a private developer with the legal and logistical support of the authorities. The focus of my research is not on the organised, grassroots resistance of neighbourhood groups and civil society initiatives that have been thoroughly analysed elsewhere (Ünsal and Kuyucu 2010; Ünsal 2013; Sakızlıoğlu 2014a). Instead, and drawing on James Scott's (1985, 1990) concept of hidden transcripts, or ideas concealed in everyday discourse and culture as tactics of resistance, I concentrate on everyday practices of stigma management and contestation employed to counter the discourse used to justify the destruction of solidarity networks and the displacement of hundreds of families from affordable housing in downtown Istanbul (see also Wacquant 2007).

While I have been interested in informal social struggles for a long time, the topic of stigmatisation crept unbidden into my fieldwork. The initial plan had been to merely focus on opposition in the form of unorganised protest and on everyday resistance tactics against the planned evictions. However, it quickly became impossible to ignore the important role of territorial stigmatisation used to the advantage and profit of the state and its project partners. Tropes frequently used by politicians, the media, the developer GAP İnşaat, and other powerful stakeholders often referred explicitly to the neighbourhood as “dirty”, “uncivilised”, “criminal”, and “immoral”. Based on existing stereotypical images of Tarlabaşı, these phrases defined public discourse and how Tarlabaşı was perceived by outsiders. They therefore determined how a mainstream Turkish public judged the idea of a “renewal” of the neighbourhood. However, as Wacquant has noted, such territorial stigmatisation affects not only the public image of a certain place, but also strongly influences how residents see themselves and how they position themselves vis-a-vis their neighbourhood and their neighbours. Territorial stigma can have a detrimental impact
on local solidarity ties and networks, and therefore, as I soon came to realise in my own fieldwork, on attempts of collective and individual resistance.

The concept of stigmatisation also helped to break up the binary discourse of an idealised joint resistance as opposed to the idea of residents as victims of structural oppression and discrimination without any agency of their own. Instead, it overcomes these narratives and leaves room for a perspective that is grounded in action theory and a theory of everyday practices.

## Staring at stigma

When I began to look at (a part of) Tarlabaşı through an ethnographic lens in 2010, the neighbourhood was already familiar to me. As a journalist, I reported on the Tarlabaşı urban renewal project shortly after its announcement in 2008. In early 2009, I moved to the neighbourhood, a few streets over from the designated renewal zone.<fnref n="1" /> This was how the issue of pending urban renewal and the negative discourse surrounding the neighbourhood became part of my daily life before I thought about ethnographic research. The discussions and problems surrounding the many contentious redevelopment plans of Istanbul, a cornerstone of AKP urban and economic policy, had interested me for a long time, and I closely followed and reported on planned renewal projects in other historical neighbourhoods, like the traditional trading district of Mahmutpaşa, where hundreds of artisans and owners of small businesses were threatened by involuntary displacement. The bulldozers never arrived, but the predominantly Romani neighbourhood of Sulukule was demolished and around 3,400 people lost their homes and their livelihoods. In both cases it was marginalised groups and the urban poor who were to make place for “better, more modern, and improved buildings”.

During my first years in Istanbul, I did not research the intense stigmatisation of Tarlabaşı, but I was certainly very aware of it. Even before I moved there, friends and colleagues warned me not to venture across Tarlabaşı Boulevard “into” Tarlabaşı, verbally marking the area in that part of Beyoğlu as a “no-go zone” with well-defined borders. At almost each of my weekly visits to the Sunday vegetable market held in Tarlabaşı I was told to keep a close eye on my bags and hold on to my belongings, and not to take more cash with me than I was planning to spend. From colleagues who lived in or very near Tarlabaşı I heard anecdotes of how they chose to, in one case, accompany their visitors to the nearest bus station on Tarlabaşı Boulevard carrying a large kitchen knife, or, in another, send them home before nightfall. Taxi drivers sometimes refused to drive through Tarlabaşı or warned to lock all the doors from the inside of the car. Comments on the perceived criminality of the neighbourhood were a given. After moving to Tarlabaşı myself,

<footnote n="1">¹ This did not mean that our *mahalle* was not touched by the demolitions. While pressure on rents increased due to the fact that living space was suddenly much scarcer in the entire neighbourhood, some shops, such as a local bakery, had to eventually shut down due to a lack of customers. The project was a frequent topic of conversation amongst Tarlabaşı who lived outside the renewal zone, partly because of the construction noise, the expectation of higher rents or profits, and the fear that crime might increase due to the growing number of ruined houses close by.</footnote>
I often caught myself “managing” the stigma of living in a neighbourhood considered to be dangerous, and unsuitable for a German middle class woman and journalist paid in foreign currency.<fnref n="2" /> Depending on whom I spoke to, I would disclose the fact that I lived in Tarlabaşı, or merely say that I lived “in Beyoğlu”, the greater administrative district that Tarlabaşı belongs to and that also included upscale neighbourhoods such as Cihangir, where many well-earning foreigners have chosen to rent homes.

<figure><img src="image_6.png" /><figcaption>Weekly Tarlabaşı market</figcaption></figure>

Photo by Jonathan Lewis

When I first told my friend Koray that I was going to do fieldwork in my neighbourhood, he handed me a copy of the Turkish novel *Ağır Roman* and told me that this was the book I had to read in order to understand Tarlabaşı.<fnref n="3" /> I did. While the book did add considerable colour to my growing Turkish vocabulary, it did not help me understand Tarlabaşı. However, Koray’s suggestion that I should read it in order to gain insight into the daily life there gave me a clearer idea of what others thought of the neighbourhood, and how the wide success of a work of fiction had contributed to how the stigma of the neighbourhood had been shaped. The Tarlabaşı of *Ağır Roman* is a neighbourhood of brothels,

<footnote n="2">2 The question of how much money one earns and spends on rent is common and not considered rude in Turkey. Since people assumed that I earned quite well by Turkish standards, the idea of living in a neighbourhood like Tarlabaşı was possibly thought of as me being cheap. On the other hand, many fellow Tarlabaşı residents thought it was “stupid” of me to pay the amount of rent I did.</footnote>

<footnote n="3">3 *Ağır Roman*, a novel written by Turkish author Metin Kaçan, caused considerable uproar in the literary community of Turkey when it was first published in 1990. The book is written in harsh slang not easily accessible to a non-native speaker. It is grim, outrageous and violent in ways no other literary accounts of the lives of the urban poor in Istanbul had been until then (see Köksal 2005: 311).</footnote>
petty criminals, and knife-wielding thugs, of foul language, murder, drugs, and rape. The book turned a poor inner-city neighbourhood into a wildly exotic Other, a place stranger than fiction filled with characters one seems to know intimately, even though one has never set foot there. This creates a faux familiarity; the reader feels that they have gained factual insight into a world they, in fact, do not know at all. *Ağır Roman* now haunts the neighbourhood that inspired it. When discussing the concept of territorial stigmatisation and its applicability to the neighbourhood of Tarlabaşı during the PhD colloquium in Berlin, a fellow student familiar with Istanbul and Turkey nodded knowingly at descriptions of my friends' negative reactions to my living there and said: “Of course everyone thinks badly of Tarlabaşı. That's the *Ağır Roman* effect.”

During a visit to the fraud unit of the Istanbul police criminal investigation department in an unrelated matter, a casual conversation with one officer quickly turned towards my work and my living situation. When he learned that I lived in Tarlabaşı, he expressed visible shock and concern. How could, he argued, a sensible woman lack such judgement? Did I not know what kind of neighbourhood Tarlabaşı was? Sensing that his intervention was not sufficient, he then summoned the entire fraud unit. Five officers crowded around me, insisting to give me detailed housing advice for other districts in the city, a session during which the first officer told his colleagues: “She lives in Tarlabaşı, don’t you know a place somewhere else? What about Kadıköy, or maybe Şişli?” When I told him that I did not really consider moving to either district, I was politely informed that, due to the “dangerous” and “unsavoury” nature of my current place of residency, I could not be choosy, and it would be better to live “anywhere else, really”. In the end they gave me the mobile phone numbers of their colleagues who patrolled in Tarlabaşı, with the first officer urging me to make use of them in the case of need (which in his eyes was not a matter of “if”, but of “when”).

However, the alarming accounts about Tarlabaşı did not fit my experience of daily life in the neighbourhood. During my eight years living there (and during the three years before that, when I regularly frequented the neighbourhood to visit friends or the weekly market), I did not encounter the violent crime, the dangerous criminals, and the general unsafety I had heard so much about.<fnref n="4" />

In fact, I felt quite safe walking through my neighbourhood late at night, because contrary to more gentrified areas of Beyoğlu, corner shops [bakkal], small eateries and other businesses were open until well past midnight, and during the warmer months it was quite common for residents to congregate in front of their buildings to drink tea and chat with their neighbours. The vegetable market, described to me as a veritable den of pickpockets and thieves, was a place I loved to frequent, because I was familiar with most of the vendors, and in eleven years I never had any problems with pickpockets except once, when a group of boys unsuccessfully tried to snatch my wallet from me – something that might arguably happen in any place of the city, or most cities, visited by crowds and especially tourists. I knew that many of my neighbours were, in one way or another, involved in the informal or underground economy of the city: recycling, sex

<footnote n="4">4 Once, an apparently drunk man shot a bullet through my living room window late at night, which I only discovered the next morning. The *bakkal* (cornershop owner) at the end of the street had witnessed this happening, and it seemed quite clear that it had been an accident.</footnote>
work, brand piracy, small-scale drug dealing, online scamming or gambling. One neighbour who lived across the street from me was involved in a criminal group [çete] that specialised in pickpocketing, car robbery, housebreaking and mugging. He often engaged me in friendly conversations, invited me for tea, and, since he was a Kurd originally from Diyarbakır, took great interest in my journalistic reporting from the predominantly Kurdish southeast of the country.<fnref n="5" /> I do not mean to minimise the violence and the crime that happened or originated in Tarlabaşı. However, I wish to underline that I never experienced any of the problems I was constantly warned about. When friends got burgled or robbed in Cihangir, or other “more respected” neighbourhoods in Istanbul, their accounts of these events were seldom accompanied by the sighed “well, what did you expect in that neighbourhood” as they would have been if they had happened in Tarlabaşı.

Despite the general discomfort with the neighbourhood in the media, in public discourse and amongst my friends, it took me much longer to recognise the link between the profound stigmatisation of Tarlabaşı, the planned urban renewal project, and the different tactics for challenging it. As an enthusiastic Istanbul resident and someone incensed by the glaring social injustice inherent in much of the rapidly occurring urban changes promoted by state forces and private investors, I was, sometimes unthinkingly and somewhat naively, opposed to all radical change to the city's fabric, which is doubtlessly why I expected resistance to be straight-forward and coherent. My own subjective reading, intimately linked to my political allegiances and sympathies, led me to assume that people threatened with losing their homes, their workplaces, and their social networks due to urban renewal would – of course! – put up visible, and possibly collective, resistance. My commitment to social justice led me to align myself with defiance, and to feel strong sympathy for protest, which obviously coloured the lens through which I initially looked at (and for) resistance tactics in Tarlabaşı. This is also why, in order to gain access to and get to know the renewal zone and its residents, I first sought out the help of a volunteer activist who tried to rally people to fight against the plans of the municipality and GAP Inşaat.

I first met Erdal Aybek when I reported on the Tarlabaşı renewal project in 2008. An urban activist who had cut his teeth in the Berlin squatters' movement in the 1980s, Erdal volunteered in the newly founded Association for Solidarity with Tarlabaşı Property Owners and Renters where he manned an improvised information office on Tarlabaşı Boulevard. In addition to that, he helped assemble and manage a considerable archive of documents on the ongoing project and kept various folders containing copies of all title deeds, publicly available plans and court documents in his office. During his office hours, every afternoon on weekdays, residents and other interested parties, such as researchers, activists and journalists like me, had the opportunity to come and ask for advice and information about the renewal project. Residents' questions generally concerned municipal letters and other correspondence with the authorities, issues related to title deeds and legal procedures, as well as inquiries about the advancements made by

<footnote n="5">5 I am maybe naive/too optimistic in thinking that being a neighbour and someone people talked to in some way protected me. For example, the apartment below mine, frequently rented out to foreigners and wealthier Turkish students, was burgled several times. Maybe I had just been lucky, or the steel door at my apartment had managed to keep burglars out.</footnote>
both the project stakeholders and the lawyers employed by the solidarity association. I spoke to Erdal on several occasions as a journalist and as an ethnographer. When I told him about my research idea on resistance tactics, he offered to introduce me to some of the residents affected by the planned demolitions, assuring me that all of them would express nothing but open disdain and defiance. I had been sure that he was right.

As a Kurd, a former Tarlabaşı resident and someone who was both well-informed and approachable, he was popular and respected, and I had the immediate impression that people trusted him with his task and their queries. Walking through the streets with him it was easy to come into contact with residents. It was also clear that he wanted me to understand the importance and the strength of local neighbourliness and solidarity ties, that, in his eyes, were not negatively impacted by the neighbourhood's ethnic and religious diversity, and the many trans* residents and sex workers living and working there. He showed me an informal trans* brothel close to his office and introduced me to some of the sex workers there. Erdal made sure I noticed that the trans* women<fnref n="6" /> frequented an all-male teahouse next to the brothel because he really wanted to prove to me how harmonically diverse the neighbourhood was. Gesturing towards the many full laundry lines shared by neighbours on opposite sides of the same street, Erdal insisted that these laundry drying lines clearly demonstrated that there was a tight-knit community in Tarlabaşı and proof that the municipality's claim to the contrary was false and wilful misinformation. And indeed, one argument defending the renewal project that I heard several times was that Tarlabaşı was a neighbourhood of people in transit, and therefore there was no community that could be destroyed. Another – quite outlandish – argument, one that I will discuss in detail in a later chapter, was that Tarlabaşı was “empty”.

Erdal was very invested in convincing me that in Tarlabaşı “everyone got along fine”. In his eyes, this tangible harmony was one of the main arguments that the project needed to be stopped and the neighbourhood to be preserved. Similarly, newspaper articles and columns critical of the renewal project described Tarlabaşı as a place where “Turks, Kurds, Christians, Transvestites, Roma and African migrants” lived happily side by side. Some non-resident activists used the argument of the co-existence of the Kurdish, Roma, foreign migrant and the trans* community in Tarlabaşı to appeal to a romantic (and romanticised) idea of neighbourhood unity that had been destroyed almost everywhere else in Istanbul and that would be lost with the evictions. People invested in defending the image of Tarlabaşı against the negative discourse of the municipality also argued that strong neighbourhood ties between diverse groups of people were an important enough reason that the neighbourhood be preserved, and evictions be stopped. Some blamed conflict and violence that did happen along ethnic, religious and gender lines on the interference of the municipality and the developer. One prominent opposition activist and member of the Istanbul Chamber of Architects (TMMOB) argued that transphobia had been non-existent until the start of the project discussions and had been brought to the neighbourhood by the divisive renewal project.

These were views that I easily identified with, and in the beginning, I was smitten by what at first glance looked and felt like a tight neighbourhood community. It was also

<footnote n="6">6 All trans* persons I met in Tarlabaşı self-identified as women. Throughout this book I use the gender that trans* persons who spoke to me self-identified as.</footnote>
one of the main reasons that at the beginning of my ethnographic research, which I had begun in order to understand the underlying dynamics of everyday resistance in a way that my journalistic work could not, I was secretly looking for a political struggle, for joint protest and strong solidarity ties between all affected residents. After all, they were all “in it” together! This is why I expected that their apparent togetherness, their seemingly unproblematic sharing of spaces and laundry lines, would clearly be reflected in their resistance and their defence of the endangered neighbourhood.

Therefore, it came as a (somewhat nasty) surprise when I heard that some Tarlabaşı locals were not only willing to have their houses demolished but were excited to be promised a flat in a “modern” high-rise apartment building at the outer edges of the city in exchange, happy to leave their old homes behind. I was bewildered when I heard residents cheering for the government-led “clean-up” of the neighbourhood. And even more so, I was shocked to witness Tarlabaşı residents berate *each other*, blaming their (variously Kurdish, Roma, trans*, Arab, or black) neighbours for the state of the quarter and its bad reputation, that, in their eyes, had brought urban renewal to Tarlabaşı in the first place.

It came as an even bigger surprise that some of those actively involved in organised resistance denigrated Tarlabaşı and the neighbourhood's inhabitants, such as the president of the Association for Solidarity with Tarlabaşı Property Owners and Renters, a businessman originally from the Black Sea region who owned several buildings but did not live in Tarlabaşı. I met him for the first time in 2009 for a newspaper interview, and several times after that during protests, at the courthouse, or in the association's office on Tarlabaşı Boulevard. He was, most importantly due to his impressive real estate portfolio, invested in demanding higher compensation for property owners, but he had very little love for the neighbourhood itself. He warned me not to walk around Tarlabaşı on my own, because someone might rob, or even kill me. He also told me, somewhat disappointedly, that he would never want to live in Tarlabaşı himself. I wondered why the man who was the public face of organised grassroots resistance against the planned renewal project talked this negatively about the neighbourhood he defended. Did he not, by toeing the state's discursive line, endanger the success of the association's resistance? And if he really disliked Tarlabaşı that much, why had he not opted for an individual court case, but instead chosen to be the spokesperson of the association and therefore the most visible representative for the neighbourhood?

The lack of resistance that I had expected as well as continuously shifting statements and conflicting narratives initially made it difficult for me to anchor my research and come to a conclusion. In fact, I was afraid that I had not found anything of note and that, after years of fieldwork, I was still empty-handed. Failing to find collective, coherent resistance, I was afraid that I had not found any resistance at all. However, while editing hundreds of pages of transcriptions, going through media reports on the project and analysing the state discourse– the press statements, the media interviews, the general comments and marketing material jointly published by the Beyoğlu Municipality and *GAP İnşaat*– the dominant role of stigmatisation became more apparent. More importantly, I noticed how this stigmatisation did not only shape the way that state and investors framed Tarlabaşı, but that it had also seeped into the speech and conduct of targeted residents, which in turn influenced the way they defended their
neighbourhood and each other. Loïc Wacquant (2007: 68) describes how residents of a stigmatised place internalise the stigma associated with their neighbourhood, leading to feelings of shame, guilt, and self-loathing. He distinguishes a range of defence tactics that inhabitants use to dissociate themselves both from the tainted location, and the stigma attached to it, a split from the neighbourhood and their neighbours, a distancing from identity categories perceived to be of low symbolic value that others have defined as “disidentification” (Jensen and Christensen 2012: 75). As discussed earlier, this break-up of trust networks in the neighbourhood makes organised resistance against powerful actors much more difficult. It became clear to me that in order to understand the nuances of local resistance against the urban renewal project I had to refocus on the way that actors invested in its completion framed the neighbourhood, and on how residents positioned themselves vis-a-vis this stigmatising discourse.

## Positionality

When conducting research in a familiar setting, the ethnographer faces the challenge of too little distance between the ethnographic field and one's own experience(s) in it. When researching topics centred around social injustice, as I did in Tarlabaşı, one might be drawn to the argumentation and the point of view of the people one studies, and identify with their cause. As Phillippe Bourgois (1995: 13) has noted in relation to his work on crack dealers in East Harlem, “we become intimately involved with the people we study”. When the research is conducted in a context of struggle for social justice and rights, the ethnographer is presented with the added challenge not to idealise this endeavour. Above I have explained how my own subjective reading influenced what I expected to see, how I assumed resistance to play out, and how my own position determined not only the kind of information that protagonists like Erdal Aybek or the association president gave me, but also what aspects they did not immediately tell me about. My position affected what Tarlabaşı residents disclosed to me, the white middle class woman from Germany researching (and looking for) resistance as part of a doctoral thesis, and the politically interested journalist with a strong interest in human rights and equality. When Erdal Aybek, who had lived in Berlin and been engaged in political activism, praised the diversity in Tarlabaşı and told me how people stood and would stand together against displacement despite their differences, he told this story to me, an eager interlocutor who expressed admiration for his squatter's past and who was keen to find the sort of solidary resistance Erdal was describing to me. He was likely equally aware that I, a Western journalist, had access to publicity and media channels that might further his cause fighting for the neighbourhood. It is likely that he did not disclose his past political activism in Berlin to Tarlabaşı residents he was representing, but rather stress his credentials as a former Tarlabaşı local to them. This is not to imply that what Erdal told me was false, or “less authentic”, than what he told others. However, it is important to remember that there are many narratives that overlap, exist side by side, or even contradict each other. By now it has long been agreed that ethnography is always influenced by the researcher's own position, and that there is not one person that can ever convey one full truth. Ethnographic truths, as James Clifford (1986: 7) reminds us, are based on exclusions and trans-
lations of “the reality of others”. They are “inherently *partial*” (ibid, emphasis in original), a play on words that underlines the fact that all ethnographic texts are both biased and incomplete. They are always “systems, or economies, of truth” (ibid). One’s race, gender, sexuality, and social position influence what kind of information one receives, and what kind of knowledge is produced. Knowledge is always situated, and postmodern anthropology recognises the partiality and interestedness of any researcher’s account of social settings. The observer is always already part of the study. There is no longer “an authentic or comprehensively true image of social and cultural groups, no singular language of protest and revindication, but rather partial, shifting, and clashing representations, each with its own paradoxes and erasures” (Warren 2006: 214).

Furthermore, in a complex neighbourhood such as Tarlabaşı, and no matter how familiar I was with my field, it would be naive to claim that I had “full access” to it. Being close to some members of a community will often preclude the researcher from being accepted by others. That was the case in Tarlabaşı as well. While I tried to cast as wide a net as possible in the beginning, people saw with whom I spoke and whose homes I regularly visited. From that, they were able to draw conclusions about my views and sympathies. Finally, and although the research was driven by what people told me, this thesis is very much a text written by me: it was me who made the final decision if and how these interactions would be quoted here.

## Engaged anthropology

During my fieldwork, I did not only observe, I took sides. I agreed with the many people in the neighbourhood who thought that what was happening was deeply unjust. I agreed that Tarlabaşı should not be demolished, and the people be able to stay if they wanted. From this arises the question of my stance towards my subject, my “neutrality”.

Ethical issues relating to politics, moral responsibility and advocacy have been raised by anthropologists since the early twentieth century (Sanford 2006: 3). The discussion around neutrality vs. advocacy in anthropology is not a recent one either and has been going on for decades (Bourgois 1990; Kirsch 2002b; Sanford and Angel-Ajani 2006; De León 2015; Schiffauer 2015). Drawing on the work of Stuart Kirsch, Victoria Sanford (2006: 4) argues that advocacy for the community one studies is in fact the “logical extension of the commitment to reciprocity that underlies the practice of anthropology”, as the researcher has an obligation to that community. Feminist anthropologist Shannon Speed (2006) defends the importance of explicit activist engagement as part of the research process. She argues that, if the rights of protagonists of ethnographic research are being violated, it would be ethically indefensible to benefit from them through the gaining of information without any commitment to their future wellbeing. Daniel M. Goldstein (2012: 36) goes further and demonstrates that “[a]ctivist anthropology is not only an ethical responsibility for many ethnographers of contemporary society. Instead, it may be the only kind of anthropology possible in the twenty-first century, involving a commitment by its practitioners that is essential if the discipline is to have a future as a viable producer of knowledge about the human experience.”
Werner Schiffauer (2015: 38) argues that the engaged anthropologist practices obser-
vant participation, instead of participant observation. He writes that research is done
in order to develop the project one investigates, and to change its underlying structures.
This means that subjectivity gains more importance than in “classic” ethnography. Texts
that are the result of such engaged anthropological fieldwork put much greater empha-
sis on respect: interlocutors and informants have to be able to recognise their own self-
image, their identity, and their self-perception in the documents that are produced. En-
gaged ethnography calls for “radical understanding”: this means that any employment of
explanatory models that imply the possibility of false consciousness, such as psychoanal-
ysis or Marxism, are ruled out (ibid: 40).

Due to my persona as a researcher and my expressed interest in resistance and the preservation of the neighbourhood, people approached me with questions about the various options open to them, about examples of urban renewal in the German context, and about the legal procedures at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg to which several residents wanted to take their cases. Whenever possible, I passed these questions on to lawyers and other experts or tried to discover where to find relevant information. In the same way, I shared my findings with human rights activists, researchers and journalists whenever it was possible to do so without violating the wishes, privacy, or the safety of residents. I facilitated contacts between activists and the Tarlabaşı community. In four cases I introduced human rights researchers of an international organisation who were preparing detailed reports about trans* rights and the right to housing to people in the neighbourhood. I also helped residents when they did have to move, carried boxes, assisted with cleaning or brought food. I often expressed my dismay about the project and the pending evictions to Tarlabaşı residents and made no secret about my dislike for the urban policies of the AKP municipality. Without any doubt I have repeatedly asked leading questions when speaking to Tarlabaşı residents about their experience of the project and the pending evictions. And finally, I also tried to provide emotional support.

Shannon Speed (2006: 185–186) notes that it might well be impossible to conduct
ethnographic research in some social settings, especially those riddled by conflict and
political polarisation, without demonstrating political commitment. I was careful not to
risk the trust of Tarlabaşı residents by engaging project stakeholders – the project office
was located across from the project zone on Tarlabaşı Boulevard, and it would have been
impossible to enter the building without being seen by residents and shop owners. My
interest was not in the representation of “both sides” of the project, but in understanding
and, within my limited means, assisting a vulnerable community threatened by destruc-
tion. I fully agree that the engaged ethnographer’s position “may mandate engagement
and advocacy on our part, rather than a scholarly, neutral stance. The notions of right and
wrong can be invoked not only in relation to the truth, but also with regard to the cause
of social justice” (Kirsch 2002b: 193).
## Methods

In order to understand the way that the state discourse and stigmatisation influenced and shaped everyday tactics of resistance, I relied on participant-observation ethnographic techniques that are better suited than structured interviews and exclusively quantitative methodologies to observe the daily life of people, especially those on society's margins for whom statistics and random sample neighbourhood surveys cannot provide an accurate picture (Bourgois 1995: 12–13). This method requires the ethnographer to disregard the rules of positivist research to become “intimately involved” with the field and the studied community (ibid: 13).

Ethnography manages to capture the ambivalence of human behaviour, the contradictions, and discontinuities of social actions. In Tarlabaşı, people told me that they did not want to leave, that they would resist evictions, that they wanted to do “all it takes” not to be displaced from their homes, only to cheerfully tell me some weeks later that they had moved into new houses and were very happy there. Intentions to resist were expressed differently amongst different people, depending on political circumstances and context. No quantitative survey, no matter how detailed, would have been able to capture these sentiments.

Clifford Geertz (1973: 27) sees the importance of specific circumstantial ethnographic findings in the way they lend actuality to main concepts of social science. Small facts aim to yield large conclusions. Ethnography and interpretive anthropology, he writes, is located “between setting down the meaning particular social actions have for the actors whose actions they are, and stating, as explicitly as we can manage, what the knowledge thus attained demonstrates about the society in which it is found and, beyond that, about social life as such.” In looking at the ways residents of a poor Istanbul neighbourhood managed and challenged state-led urban renewal and the accompanying effects of territorial stigmatisation, and how both affected their everyday life, I aim to open a wider field of observation into how massive urban changes in neoliberal cities affect the lives of the urban poor and the marginalised. Without falling back onto reductionist theses, I want to try and understand why resistance occurs, or why it does not.

Wanting to get a “thick impression” of how Tarlabaşı residents resisted the stigmatising language and the dominant discourse about their neighbourhood and the renewal project, I aimed to establish long-term relationships based on trust with the people there. Over the course of two and a half years, I spent hundreds of hours in the streets, in workplaces, and in people’s homes. I regularly digitally recorded their life histories, their interactions, and conversations. At the beginning of my fieldwork, I invested a lot of time into “being seen” in the neighbourhood and into becoming more familiar with the people who lived and worked in the Tarlabaşı renewal area, into gaining people’s trust and gaining their permission to follow them around and record their conversations.<fnref n="7" /> It was equally, if not more, crucial that community members knew who I was and what I was doing in Tarlabaşı. At that point, residents had witnessed several “expert committees”

<footnote n="7">7 I used a digital recorder as often as possible, but in many situations, either because they were spontaneous, difficult to record or because people did not allow me to record their voices, I exclusively used field notes and a field diary.</footnote>
wander through the neighbourhood to gather information in the name of the develop-
ing company or the municipality, and I wanted to make sure that nobody suspected me
of being part of such an interest group. Another reason that it took a relatively long time
for me to start my actual fieldwork was the fact that people were wary of journalists, pho-
tographers, and random observers who came to Tarlabaşı looking for (and reproducing)
clichéd representations of inner-urban poverty and crime that further reinforced stereo-
types about the neighbourhood and the different minority communities who lived and
worked there. This initially led to a certain hesitation (and a number of sarcastic com-
ments) regarding my research intentions. Another reason why I limited my fieldwork al-
most entirely to participant observation and unstructured interviews spaced over many
months is that I did not want to impose and add to the stress of pending displacement
by insisting on conversations. It was important that people could decide for themselves
on what level and for how long they wanted to interact with me.

During the first three months of my research, I met several people who either lived
or worked in Tarlabaşı, and who went on to introduce me to other local residents. My
research snowballed from there. While it was relatively easy to make first contact with
shopkeepers, artisans and other small business owners, it was more difficult to meet
women who did not work outside their homes and who, especially during the colder
months, did not spend much time on the street. I owe it to chance encounters, and, most
importantly, to the trust these women decided to extend towards me, that I was allowed
into their homes, daily activities, and conversations.

I do not speak or understand Kurdish, which is why I was not able to have meaningful conversations with older Kurdish women who did not speak Turkish.<fnref n="8" /> This means that I only learned about these women's experiences dealing with stigmatisation and pending displacement through the “filter” of family members who translated for me. I did not always ask for translations during ongoing conversations in Kurdish, since I did not want to impose my curiosity. This means that much of my notes on these situations are confined to descriptions and brief summaries of what was said by Turkish-speaking by-standers.

As a privileged, foreign woman I was granted a certain leeway in entering and spending time in predominantly male spaces, such as most workplaces and the three teahouses [kıraathane] I regularly frequented.<fnref n="9" /> In some cases I was first introduced to these spaces by a male friend or a local gatekeeper, but I was never denied access to places where only men worked and socialised. In the same way I was lucky to be allowed access to trans* spaces in Tarlabaşı because Müge, a trans* sex worker I befriended early in my fieldwork, introduced me to her friend and colleague Gülay and other trans* women in Tarlabaşı.

<footnote n="8">8 By “Kurdish” I refer to Kurmanji Kurdish, which was the predominant language spoken by ethnic Kurds who lived and worked in Tarlabaşı. Kurdish men and women under 40 usually spoke Turkish. When I say “meaningful”, I mean verbal interactions and an exchange of information beyond very basic communication, such as invitations to eat etc.</footnote>

<footnote n="9">9 An important example here is the barbershop where I spent many hours. The barbershop caters uniquely to male customers of all ages, and women do not usually spend time there. In the case of Hakan's teahouse on Bird Street, I was not the only woman spending time there, as it was patronised by Müge, Gülay, and a varying number of their trans* women colleagues.</footnote>
They invited me to their homes and to places they frequented, such as hairdressers catering to a trans* clientele. These hairdressers' shops, many of which line both sides of Tarlabaşı Boulevard, are backstage areas. They are spaces where trans* sex workers did the work to turn themselves into beautiful-enough women marketable to male customers – work that must remain invisible to their intended audience and was therefore a very exclusive, very private insider activity. It was there where I, having been granted a seat off the side, was able to witness candid conversations about sex work and trans* issues in Istanbul.

Over time, I became friends with many people from the community I had set out to study. During the many months spent with Tarlabaşı residents I attended family celebrations and reunions, and took part in engagement parties, weddings, and several iftar dinners, the traditional breaking of the fast during the month of Ramadan. I also interviewed family members and friends from outside the neighbourhood, accompanied homeowners to court dates, to walks and chores in the surrounding Beyoğlu area, or to business-related visits with colleagues and traders in other parts of Istanbul. Whenever possible I was present during evictions or when people moved their homes out of Tarlabaşı. This was not easy to plan. First of all, evictions would not always take place on the dates and times stated in eviction notices, if there had been any. Furthermore, people going through the very stressful event of (threatened or actual) eviction naturally did not think of notifying me while this was happening. In several cases, it was possible to observe people moving out on dates they had set for themselves.

In a handful of cases, I stayed in touch with residents after their relocation and visited them in their new homes. The conversations and interviews I conducted were almost exclusively in Turkish and are presented in this thesis in their translated English form, with some expressions and words left in their original language for effect, or when they provide additional information or meaning. Because people sometimes digress, tell complicated stories out of order, or repeat themselves, I have edited some of the material that I first translated in order to preserve the narrative flow and to avoid repetition. I used these edits carefully and sparingly. The editing of interviews sometimes included combining separate interviews with the same person into one narrative. Sometimes I added missing words or deleted redundant sections from conversations to preserve the narrative flow. (For comments on the editing of ethnographic interviews see Bourgois 1995; De León 2015). In all except a few cases I used pseudonyms, changed some personal details, and camouflaged street addresses to protect people's identities and their personal privacy. This is not easy as some shops can be identified from professions and location alone. The political situation in Turkey has changed massively since the beginning of my fieldwork, and people who initially agreed to appear under their real names might now face consequences for what they told me.

In order to understand the legal underpinnings and the process of the project, I interviewed several outside experts such as lawyers, architects, and members of the Istanbul Chamber of Architects (TMMOB) as well as of the Board of Listed Monuments and Buildings. I also spoke to what could be called 'activist experts', professionals involved in lobbying against the renewal project, many of whom were lawyers, architects, scholars, human rights defenders, and urban planners. Some of them doubled as representatives of civil initiatives which supported other grassroots movements and communities in danger of
eviction (and were later very active during the Gezi protests of 2013). I collected and read
many legal documents such as title deeds, eviction notices, indictments, court protocols,
and expert reports ordered by the courts dealing with the appeals against the project. Re-
viewing these documents was necessary in order to understand the language used by the
authorities to explain and justify the renewal project, and a useful source for the analysis
of the state discourse. Wanting to gain a more complete overview of the neighbourhood's
development, its history, and the way earlier renewal projects were framed by the author-
ities and received by residents, I undertook extensive research of the newspaper and map
archives in the TMMOB library.

During the many months of my fieldwork, I observed numerous public and semi-
public interactions between the corporate lawyers working for the developer *GAP Inşaat*,
the police, public order officers [zabıta] and local residents. I witnessed countless discus-
sions and disputes on the street, as well as a number of evictions. In such situations, I
was careful not to endanger or compromise residents in the eyes of project stakeholders.
I never accompanied residents to negotiation talks with the municipality and *GAP Inşaat*,
for fear that my presence would have a negative impact on residents' already fragile and
often very precarious situations. However, many residents shared accounts of these in-
teractions with me afterwards.

I never spoke directly to municipal or any other state officials, nor did I engage in conversation with employees or subcontractors of *GAP Inşaat*. This was partly due to the fact that my activist-researcher and reporter persona made attempts to contact official sources difficult.<fnref n="10" /> At the same time and as I have stated earlier, my research focus was not on the state's defence of the project, and I was able to analyse the state discourse using text sources that were available to me, such as interviews with state officials in the media or their presentations at press conferences. The marketing material for the renewal project produced in cooperation between the Beyoğlu Municipality and *GAP Inşaat* provided further valuable insight into the official framing of both the renewal project and the neighbourhood itself. I further scoured several newspapers and media outlets for their take on Tarlabaşı in general and the project in particular. An in-depth media analysis was outside my capacity and the scope of this thesis, but I undertook a search of the online archives of seven national newspapers and TV stations for mentions of Tarlabaşı and the Tarlabaşı renewal project between the years 2004 and 2018: *Sabah, Milliyet, Hürriyet, Radikal, CNNTürk, Habertürk and NTV*.<fnref n="11" /> Since the vast majority of the mainstream

<footnote n="10">10 In Turkey, it is not easy for foreign reporters to reach officials for (meaningful) comment. It is just as, if not more so, difficult to reach spokespeople for private companies, especially if they are involved in contentious projects. As the Turkey correspondent for the Guardian, these attempts became even more difficult. Besides that, neither the municipality nor *GAP Inşaat* were happy with me going around the neighbourhood every day to talk to people, and after a while their employees recognised me. I did try to contact both *GAP Inşaat* and the municipality for comments but did not insist when I was rejected – on the one hand because my focus was on residents. On the other hand, I found it very important to not lose the trust of residents by appearing to try too hard to be accepted by their opponents.</footnote>

<footnote n="11">11 During my archival research and due to the ongoing and worsening crackdown on press freedom by the Turkish government at the time and through to the present, several media outlets I had relied on were shut down. In some cases, their online archives were deleted, making previous</footnote>
Turkish media during this period (and through the present) reflected the positions and interests of the ruling AK party, the utility of such sources was in establishing the state's preferred narrative about the project. In order to gather additional background information on the progress of the project and organised resistance, I looked at the media coverage by outlets considered oppositional, such as the online news platform *Bianet*, the leftist daily *Birgün* and the now defunct independent broadcaster *IMC-TV*.

In order to get a broader idea about the range and extent of the stigmatisation of Tarlabaşı in the wider population, I looked at social media entries on Twitter and Facebook, at YouTube videos, entries in popular online forums and dictionaries such as *Ekşisözlük.com* and the comment sections of online content dealing with Tarlabaşı. Again, a complete media and discourse analysis of that material was outside my capacity and the scope of this work, but this overview helped me get a better idea about how people saw and judged Tarlabaşı.

## Politics of representation

As mentioned above, Tarlabaşı and its residents have long suffered from stigmatising and discriminatory representations that framed the neighbourhood as immoral, criminal and dirty. I consequently worried that the descriptions and life stories in this thesis would reinforce this image and further stereotype the urban poor in Istanbul. Many of the municipality's arguments for the urban renewal project centred on these stereotypes, as I aim to show in the following chapters, and I was worried that I might bolster the state discourse. However, ethnographies of marginalised communities face the challenge of aiming to counter moralistic biases toward these groups without sanitising the social misery, the violence, and the discrimination they witness.

The ethnographic method of participant observation requires researchers to be physically present and emphatically engaged with the people they study over a long period of time. This might lead ethnographers to censor unflattering or deviant behaviour as they usually want to portray the culture or the people they chose to observe in a positive light. However, Philippe Bourgois (1995) warns that minimising negative, violent, and destructive aspects of life in poor inner-city districts makes the ethnographer complicitous with oppression.

This is not the only reason that I wanted to present the bigotry, the violence, and the abuse as I witnessed them or as they were narrated to me. Omitting intra-neighbour-

<footnote>coverage of Tarlabaşı inaccessible to me. These include the Gülen-affiliated outlets *Cihan News Agency*, *Zaman*, *Today's Zaman*, *Samanyolu TV*, or the leftist *IMC TV*. The liberal-leftist paper *Radikal* which had extensively covered urban renewal issues in Turkey, halted production and made online searches of their archives very time-consuming and challenging. Media outlets that changed hands and subsequently became more "government-friendly", partly purged their online archives for some content, possibly because it was considered too critical of the ruling AKP, making a complete search of their archives impossible. This was the case for the newspapers *Sabah*, *Hürriyet* and *Milliyet*. Some of the older coverage I was able to access via the TMMOB media archives and the help of journalist Rıfat Doğan who had assembled various news pieces and legal documents pertaining to urban renewal projects in Tarlabaşı over time.</footnote>
hood conflict and suffering would not only result in a false picture of Tarlabaşı, but make it impossible to understand the frequent contradictions, the often puzzling lack of solidarity, and the way people in the community dealt with the stigmatisation in the face of displacement. To illustrate my argument, I would like to give two examples: One was the chicken döner restaurant on Tree Street run by an ethnic Turkish Alevi<fnref n="12" /> couple originally from Sivas. They sold inexpensive chicken döner sandwiches and refreshments and were popular with people working in neighbouring businesses who did not live nearby and with children who passed the restaurant on their way to and from school. I often went to their restaurant for a cup of ayran, a chat, and the occasional sandwich. Across from their eatery was a second-hand furniture shop [eskiçi] run by Maher, a Kurdish man from the province of Siirt who lived in a flat above his shop with his family. On most days the furniture spilled out into the street, with Maher sitting in one of the chairs or couches, conversing with neighbours and passers-by. Whenever I came to visit him, often after or before popping in at the chicken döner restaurant, he would offer me food. I usually suggested getting two sandwiches for both of us, which he regularly declined. His reasons became more explicit as time went by, with him telling me that the food at his neighbours' place was "dirty" and that "one should never eat the food of those people". I first assumed that Maher simply did not get along with owners Seray and Ekin, that he had maybe had some dispute and was therefore not on speaking terms with them. It took me a while to understand that he did not want to eat anything from their restaurant because they were Alevi. His refusal to eat anything they had made or touched was very common bigotry against Alevi people in Turkey. The realisation that Maher, who openly criticised the AKP government, who opposed the project and who presented himself as a supporter of the Kurdish left and social justice, discriminated against his Alevi neighbours came as a shock to me. Not only because I liked Maher, and because I was disappointed to learn about his bigotry, but also because it did not "fit" my initial, wishful, impression of Tarlabaşı as a place where intra-neighbourhood solidarity networks were organised into clearly discernible frontlines of those who were threatened with displacement against those who threatened to displace them, cancelling out all other rifts.

Another such example was the aforementioned small teahouse on Bird Street, located right next to the informal brothel where I met Müge and her trans* colleagues. Our chats, initially only exchanges of small pleasantries on the street, soon became regular meetings in the teahouse, a somewhat crummy hole-in-the-wall run by a Turkish man called Hakan. The teahouse was frequented almost exclusively by male regulars, such as local shopkeepers, artisans, workers, municipal cleaners, and the trans* women from the brothel next door. The sex workers made use of the teahouse to keep warm, to reapply their make-up, to have tea or to play a game of cards with other patrons. There were preciously few places in Istanbul (that I knew of) where trans* women and non-

<footnote n="12">12 Adherents to Alevism follow the mystical Alevi Islamic teachings of Haji Bektash Veli, who is supposed to have taught the teachings of Ali and the Twelve Imams. However, Alevis differ considerably from Shi'a communities in other countries in their practice and interpretation of Islam, as well as from the Sunni Muslim majority in Turkey. Alevis constitute the largest religious minority in Turkey and have been subject to extreme violence and discrimination.</footnote>
trans* residents entertained such friendly ties, let alone played cards together. Hakan's teahouse felt like a noteworthy exception to several rigid social norms.

Several months after I had met Müge for the first time she told me that much of the sociability I witnessed in the teahouse was only an act, a “theatre performance”. She told me that the trans* women had wrested the right to run the brothel on Bird Street from the men using physical violence. Müge recounted how Hakan and several others had blocked the entrance to the brothel and threatened potential customers, which Müge and some of her friends had answered with “a good beating”. This skirmish, in Müge’s words, “turned them all into lambs”. And as time went on, I saw a different side of Hakan who began to let his transphobia show. When he talked to me in his teahouse without Müge or any of her trans* colleagues present, he dropped the affectionate monikers and dismissively referred to them as “these people” [bunlar], or even “faggots” [ibneler]. Again, I was dis-abused of the idea of Tarlabaşı residents sticking together as one “group of victims” in the face of imminent displacement and the injustice of the planned renewal. This led to a worry of how to represent the neighbourhood without stigmatising it further. I had been so convinced that the description of Tarlabaşı as a besieged, but tightly knit community that found strength in its diversity was true. It was the image I had not only been looking for, but also the description that I had until then communicated to outsiders, like fellow journalists or researchers. Just as Erdal had told me, I told others that Tarlabaşı was a place where different people stood together to defend their right to housing. This is why I was conflicted and worried on how to best describe the friction and the discord I saw. Was it better to omit the hostile behaviour of Tarlabaşı residents towards their neigh-bours in order not to present them in a bad light to outsiders? Would these descriptions not hinder, rather than clear up, the topic I had set out to study – resistance?

However, the more I started to focus on stigmatisation and stigma management as resistance, these fault lines could not be overlooked. Just as the state discourse on Tar-labaşı exploited them in order to garner support for the demolitions, resistance and sol-idarity inside the renewal zone hinged on conflict and prejudice. In order to understand how territorial stigmatisation impacted the people in Tarlabaşı, I had to understand the negative dynamics, the bigotry and the many intra-neighbourhood discriminations that shaped the community.
<figure><img src="image_7.png" /></figure>
## Chapter two: Waking the Poisoned Princess

When Canadian journalist and Istanbul resident Nick Ashdown had his mobile phone stolen and his mobile phone locator put the device somewhere in Tarlabaşı, Ashdown took to Twitter to rally the help of fellow Tweeps. “Anyone in tight with this neighbourhood of Tarlabaşı? It’s likely where my stolen phone is,” he wrote, both in English and Turkish. The many replies to his seemingly innocuous question ranged from concern to open mockery. “You still have your kidneys, right? Check them,” one person tweeted, and another: “Even if it was an iPhone 20, nobody would dare to try.” Others reverted to images to get the point across. A photograph of Sylvester Stallone as the movie character Rambo, holding a blazing machine gun, was captioned with: “There is only one man who would dare to go there.” One Tweet, “Even John Wick can’t get his phone from Tarlabaşı”, in reference to a series of action movies featuring a retired killer-to-rent out for revenge, went viral. The thread itself became so popular that several Turkish news websites featured listicle pieces on Ashdown’s Twitter request. It is unclear if the hapless journalist got his phone back.

Why is this social media interaction important? It is unlikely that the Tweet would have gotten as much attention had the mobile phone locator turned up the device in another Istanbul neighbourhood. The Twitter exchanges and online comments show that people think they “know” how dangerous Tarlabaşı is, and the tweets assume this shared knowledge as a given. This is also why the joking comments on the journalist’s request work: the question if anyone can help getting a stolen mobile phone back from Tarlabaşı is ridiculous only because the insiders to the joke “know” about the neighbourhood’s terrible reputation, and those that do not are mocked as clueless.

It is worth pausing to underline the degree to which the stigma attached to Tarlabaşı is pervasive knowledge, and as such, constitutes a social ‘truth’ so public that not only insiders or invested state actors were aware of it. One of the most puzzling experiences in that regard was with a family of Iraqi Christians from the city of Mosul I had befriended and who lived in the nearby neighbourhood of Kurtuluş. They had fled from Iraq to Turkey via the land route in 2010, after living conditions in their hometown had become untenable due to continuous sectarian violence and war. They told me about attacks on their church back at home in Iraq, about abductions and killings in the streets that had become commonplace. One evening I was sitting in their living room with the
(widowed) mother, her three teenage daughters and her one son, then seventeen, a male cousin in his early twenties and two of his friends from church who were about the same age. Communication was not easy, but the teenage children spoke some English, and the rest we filled in with gestures and mimics. The question of where I lived in Istanbul came up, and when I replied "Tarlabaşı", the room fell silent in seeming horror. The mother looked at me and made a cut-throat gesture with one finger, trying to illustrate how dangerous the neighbourhood was known to be even amongst them, refugees from Mosul who had lived in Istanbul for a little bit longer than a year.

The discursive manufacture of Tarlabaşı as a place of marginality makes use of various negative stereotypes that have accumulated and been attributed to the neighbourhood over time, such as sexual deviance, criminality, immorality, abject poverty, un-Turkishness – negative tropes that have all fed heavily into how Tarlabaşı is imagined and represented. It matters little if these representations, such as the described level of dilapidation, crime, or deviance indeed exist, or to what degree (Wacquant 2007: 68). Stereotypical language employed in the media, by politicians, and other powerful actors fuel the stigmatisation process and shape how a place is perceived and talked about on different levels of social discourse. The “hardening of public opinion into consent” (Tyler 2013: 211) builds on the accumulation and repetition of speech during the everyday “conversations between neighbours, discussion at street-corners or in the pub, rumour, gossip, speculation, ‘inside dope’, debate between members of the family at home, expressions of opinions and views at private meetings” (Hall et al. 1978: 129). Imogen Tyler (2013: 211) argues that to today’s definition of “the street” we have to add “the informal technologies of social media such as blogs, wall posts, text messages and tweets” that all contribute to the general agreement on the particular characteristics of a place – its reputation. When hundreds of Twitter users joke to each other about the danger of trying to retrieve a stolen mobile phone from Tarlabaşı, saying that that the victim should be glad not to have lost his kidneys as well and that only an-armed-to-the-teeth comic book Rambo could even contemplate entering the neighbourhood, they contribute to the hardening into common-sense consensus of Tarlabaşı’s bad reputation, therefore feeding and perpetuating the existing stigma. The authorities and the media did not have to invent the image of Tarlabaşı as a criminal no-go zone but could draw on an archive of “known” taints in relation with the inner-city neighbourhood, because Tarlabaşı has long suffered from a bad reputation that, as the anecdote of the friends from Mosul shows, reaches beyond municipal and national borders.

In what follows, I want to focus particularly on the role of state actors in producing the stigma of the district and using it in order to justify the contentious Tarlabaşı project. How is territorial stigma (re)activated in the official narrative surrounding urban renewal? Wacquant (2010: 215) underlines the “role of the state as a stratifying and classifying agency that wields a dominant influence on the social and symbolic order of the city.” It is therefore important to scrutinise public policies, public discourse and various forms of official communication framing the Tarlabaşı renewal project in order to understand how symbolic politics were enacted and used by the local municipality and the state. This helps not only to explain how such a massive urban intervention and the displacement of a large number of people was justified by powerful actors but pro-
vides a better understanding into the way residents managed and countered the imposed stigma, and therefore their tactics of resistance against the urban renewal project itself.

I first want to give a brief overview on the history of Tarlabaşı, as the way the neighbourhood has been stigmatised can only be understood in light of particular political and socio-demographic developments there. I would like to show how stereotypical representations have been used to frame Tarlabaşı as “Other”, and how these stereotypes have helped to build the district’s bad reputation. After analysing the concepts of state-led urban renewal and the importance and role of symbolic politics in such urban projects, I would like to give a brief overview over how territorial stigma was exploited by state actors in Tarlabaşı. Taking into account the historical events that built a bad reputation, this chapter argues that the stigmatisation process links up several place-related and people-related attributes. Firstly, I want to look at the spatial aspect of the stigmatisation: Tarlabaşı came to fall into physical disrepair due to a mixture of urban planning, discriminatory nationalist Turkish state policies, and neglect. Located in the centre of rapidly gentrifying Beyoğlu, Tarlabaşı came increasingly to be seen as a stain on the district, while the surrounding neighbourhood was aggressively branded and marketed as part of neoliberal urban policies of the AKP municipality.

Secondly, I want to analyse the process of stigmatisation related to the composition of the local population, which from the early 1990s onwards saw a gradual shift from Turkish to Kurdish dominance in the neighbourhood due to increased numbers of people forcibly displaced from the predominantly Kurdish southeast of the country. In an aggressively nostalgic discourse, these Kurdish newcomers were actively disparaged by contrasting their supposedly “un-urban” behaviour with the “civility” of the neighbourhood’s former residents, the non-Muslim community of mainly Greeks and Armenians. The fact that the latter had been displaced from Tarlabaşı by discriminatory Turkish state policies was ignored. In the same vein the increased presence and visibility of a trans* community, many members of which worked in the informal sex economy, further bolstered the stigmatisation of the neighbourhood as marginal and deviant.

Thirdly, the dilapidated state of the district, accelerated by structural inequalities and neglect, became associated with a predisposition to certain deviant and criminal practices of its inhabitants. Rationalised as essential to the culture and behaviours of Kurdish migrants, of trans* persons, of migrants from African countries, or of the Romani population and explained against the backdrop of a physically dilapidated neighbourhood – the so-called “broken windows” theory – practices of petty and organised crime provided a final justification for moral panics that reinforced territorial stigma.

Fourth, I want to look at how the official narrative erased current Tarlabaşı residents from the neighbourhood, creating a quasi-colonialist “terra nullius” that could ostensibly be shaped, developed and populated at the will of the developer-colonisers who claimed that demolitions would take place on a quasi tabula rasa.

Taken together, this stigmatising discourse imagined – and created – Tarlabaşı as a place where physical decay, neoliberal refusal, and ethnic and gender identities different from the Turkish (state discourse) mainstream led to the framing of the district as a place that needed to be “cleansed”.

While a growing body of literature on the effects and consequences of territorial stigmatisation has been produced in the past years (Wassenberg 2004; Warr 2005a, 2005b;
Pearce 2012; Wacquant et al. 2014; Contreras 2017; Maestri 2017; Nédélec 2017; Queirós and Pereira 2018), scholars have criticised the lack of research that traces how territorial stigmatisation is produced. Researchers have called for the analysis of the various processes and techniques of labelling, stereotyping and “othering” that accompany the discrimination and loss of status (Link and Phelan 2001; See Hastings 2004; Pearce 2012; Slater 2015). Tom Slater (2015: 3) underlines the importance to deconstruct and scrutinise the “symbolic defamation of particular urban places” in order to understand not only urban poverty and marginality, but also how powerful actors rely upon the production, reproduction, activation and reactivation of stigmatising discourse to frame and corroborate their policies, to the detriment of the urban poor. Michael Keith (2005: 62) asks “to consider carefully both the vocabulary and the lens through which the spatial is made visible”, as [t]he manner in which [certain neighbourhoods] are described consequently becomes central to a debate about their future” (ibid: 56). One question is, therefore, how do politicians, developers, intellectuals, and the media produce stigma, and to what future effect? How much work goes into the stigmatisation of a certain place, and, in the case of Tarlabaşı, how far does stigma reach back in history? The following chapter demonstrates that the stigmatisation process that bolsters the taint of Tarlabaşı today began much earlier and still feeds into the negative image of the district. What was the process through which Beyoğlu, an Istanbul district settled in the 16th century, came to be stigmatised and how does it continue to be? How do earlier forms of stigma feed into the image of the neighbourhood today? In short, how is today’s territorial stigmatisation maintained, reproduced, and reactivated? In this the stigmatisation process for Tarlabaşı – and wider Beyoğlu – is interestingly different from the ethnographic examples that appear in the bulk of scholarly work on territorial stigmatisation and their focus on social housing estates of Western metropolises and on informal settlements in Asia and on the periphery of Latin American cities (Auyero 1999; Atkinson and Jacobs 2010; Devereux et al. 2011; Duin et al. 2011; Gray and Mooney 2011; Jensen and Christensen 2012; Birdsall-Jones 2013; Liu and Blomley 2013; Kallin and Slater 2014; Kirkness 2014; Slater 2015).

## Brief history of a stigmatised neighbourhood

What follows is a historical contextualization of developments in Tarlabaşı and their later stigmatisation, in order to better assess continuity and change regarding the role of stigmatising representations in the perception of the neighbourhood. After all, Tarlabaşı has been closely linked to crime, dilapidation and sexual deviance since at least since the 19th century in the shared local imagination and memory.

In her analysis on the stigmatisation, and general perception, of Las Vegas as a “deviant” city of gambling, sexual promiscuity, and organised crime, Pascale Nédélec (2017: 11) identifies specific, seemingly abnormal historical events and their subsequent representations as the source of place-based stigmatisation, turning one particular occurrence during a particular period in time into a certain location’s essential and inescapable feature: “One historical ‘anecdote’ is gradually transformed into the main commonly known aspect of an urban area, dominating everything else.”
It is indisputable that changing historical, political, and social contexts have to be considered when analysing a deep spatial taint later (re)activated by state actors and the media. Imogen Tyler and Tom Slater (2018: 729), in their work on stigmatisation as a social process shaped by unequal relations of power, underline the importance of embedding processes of stigmatisation into a historical context and urge to analyse stigma *against* the backdrop of that context, an aspect of taint that is often neglected. Wacquant (2008) underlines that “blemishes of place” are not historically de-contextualised. In his analyses of spatially tainted spaces such as the Black American ghetto and the French working-class *banlieue*, he shows that the spatial aspect in these marginalised zones overlaps with people-centred stigmatisation that use long-conceived stereotypes and negative images of social identities.

Tarlabaşı is situated in the centre of the municipal district of Beyoğlu, to the northwest of the main pedestrian thoroughfare of Istiklal Avenue and was the quarter of the lower middle and working classes during the 19th and early 20th centuries, inhabited predominantly by artisans of the Greek, Armenian, and Jewish communities. For decades, Tarlabaşı was the main production centre of wooden furniture and leather goods in the city. However, the district was not only known for fine furniture and handmade shoes. Among the many images associated with Beyoğlu, and therefore Tarlabaşı, one prevalent, and indeed dominant, image is that of infraction and depravity. Historians trace this reputation of Beyoğlu back to the conquest of Istanbul in the 15th century when the area quickly gained notoriety for its excessive nightlife. In the cultural memory of Turkey, Beyoğlu has always been the neighbourhood most associated with a diverse and transgressive entertainment economy.<fnref n="1" /> The proliferation of brothels and the rapid expansion of the sex trade in the central Beyoğlu of the 19th century played a major role in framing Tarlabaşı as a centre of vice and debauchery. While sex for money was on offer elsewhere in the city, efforts by the authorities to police and control sex workers focused almost entirely on this district, which contributed to the image of Beyoğlu as the red-light district of the Ottoman capital (Özbek 2010). In 1884, this perception was “made official” when the authorities issued the first state brothel license to houses on Abanoz Street in Tarlabaşı, outlawing the opening of brothels in any other location in Istanbul.

Following the foundation of the Republic of Turkey in 1923, discriminatory Turkish state policies aimed at forming a Turkified national bourgeoisie led to profound socio-demographic changes in the neighbourhood (Mutluer 2011a: 82). The imposition of the Wealth Tax [varlık vergisi] in 1942, predominantly targeting non-Muslim citizens, the state-orchestrated pogroms against minorities on the sixth and seventh of September 1955 and the deportation of Greeks in relation to the Cyprus crisis in 1964 all but emptied the neighbourhood of its Greek residents. The void created by their displacement was quickly filled by rural migrants from Anatolia in the 1950s and 1960s, who bought,

<footnote n="1">¹ It is important to underline that taverns and coffeehouses flourished all over the city, both due to the fact that non-Muslim settlements (tavern keepers were generally non-Muslims, though their patrons not necessarily) existed elsewhere and because janissaries received an important part of their pay through taxes levelled on such establishments. Eyüp, today a place known for its piety and a main destination for Muslim pilgrims and religious tourism, used to have a reputation as a place of depravity, but this is barely known today.</footnote>
rented, or informally occupied the properties involuntarily vacated by their former owners.

In the early years of accelerating rural-to-urban migration, Tarlabaşı mainly attracted transitory migrants, often single men in search of work or young couples who would move on to other districts as soon as they could afford to. The large number of abandoned buildings made housing cheaply available for newcomers. The neighbourhood's central location facilitated access to the job market in the low-paid service and informal sectors nearby. The first migrants came from the Black Sea and Marmara regions, as well as from Central and East Anatolia (Sakızlıoğlu 2014b: 170). Important demographic and socio-cultural changes brought about by the arrival of large numbers of rural migrants in Istanbul were framed by dominant elites as the city's “ruralisation” (Maessen 2017: 52). This implied that the “peasants”, who had overrun the city to the detriment of the “real Istanbulites”, had replaced an imagined high-brow urban culture by low-brow rural ways of life that were ill adjusted to the way of life in a metropolis (Lanz 2005; Maessen 2017). In the late 1980s and, to a larger extent, in the 1990s, a second wave of Anatolian migrants arrived in Tarlabaşı, with the majority coming from the country's predominantly Kurdish southeast. The political and violent conflict between the Turkish security forces and the armed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) had displaced hundreds of thousands, their villages often burned down completely as part of the scorched earth policy of the Turkish state (Yeğen 1996; Kirişçi 1998; Van Bruinessen 1998; Ayata and Yükseker 2005; Çelik 2005).

<figure><img src="image_8.png" /><figcaption>*Recycling business*</figcaption></figure>

Photo by Jonathan Lewis

People displaced by the rapid, and sometimes violent, gentrification in other parts of Beyoğlu and central Istanbul, such as trans* sex workers and semi-legal recycling work-
ers who collect recyclable materials with a hand-pulled kart and require inner-city stor-
age room, also found their way into Tarlabaşı in those years, as did groups of transitory
migrants and refugees from African countries, as well as from Iraq and later on, Syria.
Relegated to a second-class district largely ignored by the municipal authorities and de-
prived of public services, the status of Tarlabaşı as a refuge for marginalised groups be-
came even more entrenched. Many of the buildings' new inhabitants lacked the financial
means to maintain them, and as Beyoğlu steadily lost its importance as the city's main
business centre, ceding this title to newly built office districts elsewhere, the neighbour-
hood fell increasingly into disrepair.

In 1986, newly elected Istanbul mayor Bedrettin Dalan of the centre-right Motherland Party [Anavatan Partısı – ANAVATAN, formerly ANAP] initiated the widening of the central Tarlabaşı Boulevard into a six-lane inner-city highway, a controversial construction project that resulted in the illegal demolition of more than 360 listed buildings, largely due to the municipal administration's opinion that residential neighbourhoods associated with non-Muslim and non-Turkish minorities were not worthy of preservation (Çelik 1994: 84, Maessen 2017: 55). This massive urban transformation project, likened to the radical urban restructuring of Paris under Baron Haussmann, drew a physical boundary between Tarlabaşı and neighbouring, more affluent parts of Beyoğlu, where state-led urban regeneration and gentrification efforts started to take hold in the 1990s, throwing the difference between the districts on both sides of the boulevard into even sharper relief.

Complex property structures contributed to the deterioration of the housing stock
in Tarlabaşı. Fragmented ownership or unknown titleholders impeded on necessary re-
pair works. Following the designation of parts of Beyoğlu, including all of Tarlabaşı, as
an urban conservation area by the Cultural Heritage Preservation Board in 1993, official
permissions required even for small renovations of listed buildings further complicated
matters (Sakızlıoğlu, 2014a: 167). Owners also often received only a small rental income
from their properties, making them hesitant to undertake improvements on their build-
ings (ibid).

However, another reason for the visible decay was neglect by municipal and state au-
thorities. While Tarlabaşı is connected to the municipal gas, water, and electricity grids,
the infrastructure is old and the maintenance sporadic, leading to frequent malfunctions
and failures. While this is true for other parts of Istanbul, and certainly for other parts
of (gentrified) Beyoğlu, the combination of a general lack of service and the state of the
streets in Tarlabaşı throw such infrastructural failures into starker relief.

In addition to the visibly neglected building stock, Tarlabaşı suffered and suffers
from severe poverty, in part due to the influx of Kurdish migrants forced from their
homes in the 1990s (ibid: 173). More than 60 percent of the neighbourhood's residents
lived below the poverty line, and a further 15 percent were estimated to earn less than
is necessary to feed themselves and their families (ibid: 173–174). Around 90 percent
of residents inside the renewal zone had applied for the so-called “poverty document”
[muhtaçlık, or fakirlik belgesi] in order to be able to receive cash benefits, aid for healthcare
and education, and other social assistance from government bodies (ibid). Access to
gainful employment was difficult, and those that did work held precarious, low-paid
jobs, often at walking distance from their homes (ibid).
(Creating) A place a part

It is difficult to pinpoint the “seemingly abnormal moment” (Nédélec 2017: 11) in history that marked Tarlabaşı as bad, and there is no single event that condemned the neighbourhood to a reputation of infamy. A complete analysis of past media coverage and a more detailed discourse analysis of how the neighbourhood was spoken about is beyond the scope of this research. However, in order to understand how and why powerful actors were able to frame Tarlabaşı as bad, it is useful to have an idea of the repertoire of stigmatisation they were drawing from.

In the media, in policy discourses, in fictional accounts and documentaries, Tarlabaşı has variously been described as “dark” [karanlık], “cursed” [lanetli], “a shame” [rezalet], a “stepchild” [üvey evladı], “Istanbul’s backyard” [Istanbul’un arka yüzü], or “Istanbul’s invisible centre” [Istanbul’un görünmez merkezi], words that depict the neighbourhood as dangerous, as a place apart untethered from the rest of the city and associated with shame, ill-defined fear, a lack of belonging, and void of any value. A major daily newspaper described Tarlabaşı as a neighbourhood “known as one of the most insecure places in Istanbul and [...] inhabited by drug dealers and illegal migrants”, matter-of-factly and without any further context or explanations, as if these descriptors were neutral and sufficient (Hürriyet Daily News 2014). In general, media reports on the neighbourhood focus on crime, sex work, and unsafe housing using scandalising and sensationalist language while omitting all background or possible reasons for structural inequalities. A number of studies have shown that media attention to stigmatised neighbourhoods almost invariably amplify negative stereotypes (Warr 2005a, 2005b; Arthurson et al. 2012).

Paul Kirkness and Andreas Tijé-Dra (2017a: 1) draw attention to the way in which the description of certain urban areas as “no-go zones” delineates discursive and geographical boundaries between those that live in them, and those outside them, with “potent material consequences for those living within designated high-crime neighbourhoods”. The stigma attached to Tarlabaşı created invisible – but internalised – borders that went up around the neighbourhood, discursively untethering it from the rest of Beyoğlu, and city as a whole. Historian Enno Maessen (2017: 58) underlines the importance of imagined and physical spatial borders, such as Tarlabaşı Boulevard, in the construction of the neighbourhood stigma. Sociologist Nil Mutluer (2011b: 74), writing about her fieldwork in Tarlabaşı, ties the border that separated an imagined, dangerous Tarlabaşı from its surroundings to her being asked by friends and colleagues how she dared to “enter” Tarlabaşı. The use of the verb “to enter” [girmek] instead of “to go” [gitmek] is very important, as it expresses the passage from one area into another. She writes: “One does not just go to Tarlabaşı, but rather ‘enters’ it.” Then Beyoğlu mayor Ahmet Misbah Demircan, too, described Tarlabaşı as a place that “you could not enter” (Akşam, 2014).

Stigmatisation also hinges on stereotyped and discriminatory descriptions of marginal groups whose “taint” feeds into the stigma of their neighbourhood. The criminalisation and “othering” of urban outcasts is, as Nir Cohen (2013: 116) points out, “unsurprisingly immanent to the stigmatization process.” The vilified and ostracised crowd commonly associated with Tarlabaşı – the urban poor, the trans* community, the Kurdish migrants, or the Romani residents – have long been depicted as a group of dangerous deviants, perpetrators of crime, and symbols of lawlessness and urban crises
which threaten the moral order. These moral panics are articulated through stereotyped imagery and discriminatory speech, painting these groups as dangerous outsiders, as corrupters, as the undeserving poor, as separatist traitors. This narrative casts Kurdish men as potential “terrorists”, trans* sex workers as “a danger to family values”, “violent”, and “unhinged”, Romani residents as “potential criminals”, and migrants from various African countries as “drug dealers”. These are all ideologically driven essentialisms that conceal structural inequalities, and the complex subjectivities of those that are targeted.

These links between disparaged places, groups of marginalised people, and certain practices perceived as deviant are all socially constructed and products of “discourses of vilification [that] proliferate and agglomerate about them, ‘from below’, in the ordinary interactions of daily life, as well as ‘from above’, in the journalistic, political and bureaucratic (and even scientific) fields” (Wacquant 2007: 67). Territorial stigmatisation is therefore superimposed on already existing taints associated with poverty as well as with ethnic and gender identity – all aspects project stakeholders made use of when they framed the neighbourhood as abject.

## Branding Beyoğlu, framing Tarlabaşı

The start of the more symbolic “fall-out” of Tarlabaşı and the rest of Beyoğlu can roughly be tied to the neoliberal turn following the military coup of September 12, 1980, that had a profound impact on the socio-demographic and economic fabric in Turkish cities. As manufacturing and industry moved out of urban centres to be replaced by finance and services, central and municipal Turkish governments turned to city marketing and urban branding in order to attract more investments and capital and to enhance the image of Turkish cities internationally. In 1982, the government passed the Act on the Promotion of Tourism, which included the declaration of certain urban spaces as “tourism and business centres” and allowed for the bypassing of planning and building regulations in favour of high-rise office buildings and luxury hotels in Istanbul. By 1994, 40 such centres had been designated by the authorities, leading to the rapid transformation – and gentrification – of the inner city (Enlil 2011: 15). In Beyoğlu, these changes led to a gradual makeover that included the displacement of traditional retail businesses by international chains and low-income residents by more affluent gentrifiers. However, Tarlabaşı remained excluded from this development, partly because the construction of Tarlabaşı Boulevard had created a physical boundary. The neighbourhood remained separate from the (re)development of the adjacent districts and continued to offer housing and workspaces for those that were increasingly excluded from other parts of the city centre.

Following the 2004 election of AKP mayor Demircan, an entrepreneur who had cut his teeth in the tourism industry, he embarked on an aggressive urban branding campaign that aimed to turn Beyoğlu into a “trademark district” [*marka ilçe*] (Beyoğlu Gazetesi 2006). He wanted to turn Beyoğlu into a place where “investments were continuously increasing” and that “people competed to be a part of” (Sarı 2007). The neighbourhood was to be associated with the same brand value as a “German car” or a “French perfume” (Temizkan, 2012).
In cooperation with the private sector, his administration created several marketing campaigns centred on public services, such as street cleaning and street lighting. These branding offensives included a line of uniforms for municipal workers that were designed by well-known Turkish fashion designer Cemil İpekçi as part of the effort to establish a new “corporate identity” for the district (Ulueren, 2006). Demircan wanted to re-invent Beyoğlu as a carefully curated “work of art” (Ay, 2005), a neighbourhood of pretty façades and clean streets that would appeal to foreign visitors, potential affluent residents and investors (Ercan, 2005). Any development, any incident, and any situation that stood in the way of tourism growth were to be avoided at any cost (Temizkan, 2012).

## Nostalgia

"There was a time when Beyoğlu smelled of sesame and perfume, now it smells of lahmacun.<fnref n="2" /> During my childhood there was the expression: 'to go out to Beyoğlu.' It was an event to go out to Beyoğlu. Our father had new suits made, got a shave, and we would go to Beyoğlu in our most elegant, well-kept clothes...If Beyoğlu should be returned to its old state one could take precautions such as closing it for traffic and demolitions in Tarlabaşı." - Sadri Alışık, *Turkish actor* (Kaptan, 1994: 40)

State and private market actors employed aggressive nostalgia as part of the effort to market Istanbul and, more specifically, Beyoğlu as a brand. Nostalgic images and the whitewashing of violent historic events were part and parcel of the strategy the Beyoğlu Municipality used to polish the image of the district, and, subsequently, frame Tarlabaşı as a pathological space. Therefore, it is quite useful to briefly examine nostalgia in the Istanbul context.

Following the traumatic military coup of September 12, 1980, the Turkish public started to rediscover Istanbul's – largely imagined – “cosmopolitan” past. By the 1990s the nostalgia of “cosmopolitan” Istanbul in general, and of 19th-century Beyoğlu specifically, had become the topic of numerous literary, scholarly, and cinematic works (Eldhem 2013: 225).<fnref n="3" /> TV shows referencing a nostalgic Golden Age that celebrated strong neighbourly ties between urban dwellers of different religions and different ethnicities became popular (Mills 2010). This nostalgia was instrumentalised by the municipality, real estate owners, developers, and local businesses, who all saw in it an opportunity to re-invent the image of Beyoğlu, a neighbourhood that suffered from a bad reputation due to its transgressive nightlife and a visible deterioration in its housing stock. In order to restore the district to an investment opportunity, it was rebranded as the metropolitan heart of Istanbul that simply needed a clean-up to shine again.

<footnote n="2">2 Lahmacun is a flat piece of dough topped with minced meat, onion, tomato, garlic and other vegetables. In the collective conscience it is often associated with rural migrants and arabesk culture (Öncü 2007).</footnote>

<footnote n="3">3 This development coincides with an emerging minority rights activism spurred by the Kurdish rights movement, leading to an increase in research and publications into topics related to minority history in Turkey (see Mills 2010: 19).</footnote>
Unlike former ANAP Istanbul mayor Bedrettin Dalan, who had dismissed objections against the demolition of listed buildings in Tarlabaşı on the grounds that they were not relevant to Turkish national history, later municipal governments saw the heritage of non-Muslim communities as an important opportunity for urban marketing strategies. The nostalgia of an idealised, imagined Beyoğlu was used to drive urban development and gentrification of the area. Museums, shops, and cultural venues in the area were increasingly renamed “in explicit reference to the district’s former social and topographic nomenclature” (Eldem 2013: 225–226). The main Istiklal Avenue was pedestrianised and furnished with an old-fashioned tramway deliberately reminiscent of 19th-century Pera, and the municipal administration invited international cultural events, such as theatre, classical music, film, and jazz festivals in order to further the area’s image as the centre of a revitalised “cosmopolitan” Istanbul (Enlil 2011: 21). Historian Edhem Eldem (2013) underlines that the non-Muslim population, so emphatically celebrated in as an integral part of this nostalgic image of Istanbul, had by then decreased to a mere one percent of the city’s total population. Reasons for the absence of Greek, Armenian, or Jewish urban communities never featured in the many marketing campaigns that had started to shape the image of Beyoğlu.

## Exploiting the bad reputation of Tarlabaşı

When the municipal authorities introduced their plans to demolish and renew Tarlabaşı, the project was framed as the necessary improvement of an untenable and unliveable situation. When talking about his regeneration plans to the press, mayor Demircan regularly used stigmatising language. He variously described the neighbourhood as “rotten”, as “useless”, and a “lost case” (Anadolu Ajansı, 2015). The discursive manufacture of Tarlabaşı as a place of marginality makes use of various negative stereotypes that have accumulated and been attributed to the neighbourhood over time, such as sexual deviance, criminality, immorality, poverty, un-Turkishness, negative tropes that have all fed heavily into how Tarlabaşı is imagined and represented. The authorities and the media did not have to invent the image of Tarlabaşı as a criminal no-go zone but could draw on an archive of “known” taints in relation with the inner-city neighbourhood.

As the urban renewal in Tarlabaşı plan is a state-led project, the role of state actors deserves attention. Hamish Kallin and Tom Slater (2014), in their work on the state-sponsored urban transformation project in the Edinburgh suburb of Craigmillar, have shown that the state's role in exploiting stigma to justify renewal is highly contradictory, as state discourse and policies first create the taint they then purport to “fix”. In what follows I will examine the different layers of stigma that municipal authorities and the national government reactivated, strengthened and exploited of in order to (re)produce a stigmatised place in need of demolition and renewal. I explore the meaning of state-led urban renewal and state-sanctioned stigmatisation, before proceeding to analyse how the state was not only complicit, but active in stigmatising Tarlabaşı.

Within the extensive scholarship on gentrification, it is generally accepted that different forms of gentrification and large-scale urban transformation are closely related to actions of the state (Hackworth and Smith 2002; Smith 2002; Slater 2004; Uitermark et
al. 2007; Kuyucu and Ünsal 2010; Kallin and Slater 2014; Sakızlıoğlu and Uitermark 2014; Sakızlıoğlu 2014a, 2014b; Paton 2018; Yardımcı 2020; Rivas-Alonso 2021). Local authorities enter into alliances with transnational capital, commodifying land for more affluent users, whereby the state provides the conditions and legal framework that attract, prompt, and enable private market reinvestment. More recently, scholars have insisted that the massive scale of contemporary urban redevelopment, targeting entire neighbourhoods, towns, and villages, require the intervention of municipal and central governments who have the power to expropriate land for development (Paton and Cooper 2016; Aalbers 2019). This suggests a new set of norms and rules for the state and its institutions that are qualitatively different from the “classic”, relatively slow-paced processes of gentrification undertaken by individuals and “pioneer gentrifiers” originally discussed by sociologist Ruth Glass (1964) and others (see Smith 1979; Lees et al. 2008).

In Turkey, the role of the state in urban transformation processes underwent a fundamental change in the early 2000s with the election of the AKP in 2002, and their adoption of neoliberal market capitalism. This neoliberal shift led to a number of strongly market-and profit-oriented urban policy reforms and urban renewal laws that gave municipalities and government institutions sweeping powers over urban transformation, expropriation, re/development, and licensing of urban land.

Whereas earlier forms of state intervention in urban transformation consisted of legalising informal gecekondu settlements, often for electoral gains, the AKP turned to large-scale urban renewal and the demolition of entire neighbourhoods as a potential solution for uncontrolled, rapid urbanisation. Urban transformation and massive urban construction projects became the major reinvestment strategy of the Turkish state (İslam and Sakızlıoğlu 2015). These renewal plans did not only target gecekondu settlements, but also inner-city areas that were to be transformed into neighbourhoods for the middle and upper classes, in line with national and local politicians' aspirations to market Turkish metropolises as competitive “world cities” Ünal 2013).

After winning the national elections and an important number of municipal governments in two years later, the AKP was able to reform urban transformation legislation and implement top-down urban renewal policies via public-private and public-public partnerships (Islam and Sakızlıoğlu 2015: 251). In 2005, Beyoğlu mayor Ahmet Misbah Demircan announced plans to redevelop Tarlabaşı on the orders of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan who, Demircan later told reporters, told him to “get the Tarlabaşı job done” and make urban renewal there a priority (Öztürk, 2012). Backed by the prime minister, a municipal commission immediately drafted a bill aiming to overcome legal obstacles in the way of such a large-scale renewal project in the centre of Istanbul. The law, passed in the same year under the name of “Law on Conservation by Renewal and Use by Revitalisation of Deteriorated Historical and Cultural Immovable Property”, or Law No. 5366 (Republic of Turkey Law 5366, 2005), invested municipal governments with far-reaching powers and rights pertaining to the administration, acquisition, and expropriation of land to be slated for urban renewal, while failing to secure the rights of property owners and tenants.<fnref n="4" /> Law

<footnote n="4">4 The law was criticised by local trade chambers, scholars, lawyers, and activists for violating property rights, housing rights, and existing preservation laws (see Islam and Sakızlıoğlu 2015: 250–251; Atalay 2018; Yapıcı 2018).</footnote>
No. 5366, also known as the “Tarlabaşı Law”, set the framework for subsequent state-led, large-scale urban transformation projects in Turkey by erasing legal barriers of private property and preservation laws and cutting short otherwise lengthy bureaucratic procedures. Furthermore, the law fails to protect residents’ rights and guarantee their access to decision-making processes. As “the only mechanism for participation, [the law] provides for meetings to be held by the local administration with property owners and/or local residents to inform them about the targets and implementation of the projects” (Sakızlıoğlu 2014a: 155).

The role of the Turkish state in framing and undertaking large-scale urban transformation projects such as the one in Tarlabaşı cannot be overstated. To a large extent it was the fact that one single party, the AKP, controlled the central government, different levels of local administrations, as well as various state institutions that made the rapid implementation of neoliberal urban policies possible. Moreover, as Islam and Sakızlıoğlu (2015: 259) point out, in “countries like Turkey, where the authoritarian state’s practices are embedded in the tradition of making politics, the state’s involvement in contemporary urban processes may be more violent and harsh” than in countries with a stronger democratic background. They also note that preparations for the urban renewal project had started even before the contested Renewal Law passed through parliament, suggesting that the Beyoğlu mayor had no doubts that the necessary legislation would be approved by the central government. Reminiscing about the beginnings of the Tarlabaşı project, mayor Demircan said that prime minister Erdoğan, whom he considered an “older brother” and a “role model” since childhood, had assured him of “any necessary support”, including legislations and political weight in Ankara, to “solve the Tarlabaşı problem” (Posta 2007).

## Symbolic politics and state-led stigmatisation

Scholars of various forms of gentrification generally agree that symbolic politics – the struggle over who gets to speak and with what impact – are at the core of how urban transformation processes are framed and experienced by different actors. In recent years, there has been a growing body of literature showing that symbolic politics are an integral part of the struggle over gentrification, displacement and how urban transformation is experienced by local residents (Sakızlıoğlu 2014a; Kallin and Slater 2014; Paton 2014; Safransky 2014; Sakızlıoğlu and Uitermark 2014; Pinkster et al. 2020; Yardımcı 2020; Rivas-Alonso 2021). In their comparative research on the symbolic politics that frame urban renewal projects in Istanbul and Amsterdam, Bahar Sakızlıoğlu and Justus Uitermark (2014: 1370) have found that symbolic politics play a crucial role in the possible success or the failure of resistance against displacement. They underline that this is especially true for “gentrification that is supported legally, logistically, discursively and financially by the state.”

For Pierre Bourdieu (1991: 166), symbolic power is “a power of constructing reality”, the power of “making people see and believe, of confirming or transforming the vision of the world, and thereby, action on the world and thus the world itself” (ibid: 170). The state, and any institution or state representative, Bourdieu writes, hold the “the monopoly of
legitimate symbolic violence", which makes official naming "a symbolic act of imposition which has on its side all the strength of the collective, of the consensus, of common sense" (ibid: 239). Naming and identifying certain attributes, when done by state agents, is performative, lending them the power to create, categorise, and assign certain properties to the social world, in short, to impose "state forms of classification" (Bourdieu et al. 1994: 13). An official description of an area as "problematic" is thus not a "neutral" attribute, but both indictment and verdict. It is "consequential categorisation" (Sisson 2020: 5, emphasis in original). Sakızlıoğlu and Uitermark (2014: 1371) argue that the characterisation of a neighbourhood as "dilapidated", "a problem neighbourhood", "unsafe", or "dangerous", when done by the state, does not only feed into the territorial stigmatisation of the place in question, but creates facts. Therefore, when the state labels a place as "criminal", it does not describe attributes of a certain area, but it "decrees it a crime zone". When a government declares an urban district a "renewal area" by law, it rules that the neighbourhood requires change for the better and that its current state is untenable and needs to be adjusted to dominant – elite – expectations and standards. Resistance to state-decreed urban transformation can in turn be framed as wilful obstruction to benevolent, state-decreed progress and betterment, or indeed criminalised as an infraction of the law.

Around the time of the Tarlabaşı project announcement and immediately afterwards, politicians, municipal officials and other powerful stakeholders reactivated an intense stigma around Tarlabaşı in order to garner support for the renewal plans and to justify administrative measures considered harsh, or even illegal, by many critics. I will take a close look at how these state-led processes of stigmatisation played out, how they were reflected in official discourse, the media, and public opinion. How and in what ways did the state mobilise and use its symbolic power to go ahead with a highly contested urban renewal project that threatened to displace a large number of people from an inner-city neighbourhood in Istanbul? What problematic aspects of Tarlabaşı were targeted, and how? And in what ways were residents affected by the way that the authorities talked – or did not talk – about them? State discourse frames the discussion about an urban renewal project in including certain aspects, such as references to crime, dilapidated housing, or the lack of large-scale capital reinvestment, and ignores others, such as displacement, structural poverty, or the lack of public services. I further want to show how Tarlabaşı, and the neighbourhood's residents were stigmatised not only through what was said about them and the place they inhabited, but also through what was *not* said, creating what I would like to call an “erasure through stigma”.

## Place: Stigmatisation of Tarlabaşı as a dilapidated neighbourhood

"Every Istanbul and Beyoğlu resident who walked past [Tarlabaşı] thought: 'What a shame'. They also said: 'Nothing will ever come of this place, this is a hopeless case'. All of Beyoğlu was blamed for this hopelessness. Nobody went to [Tarlabaşı]. Now we are healing the poisoned princess. Tarlabaşı is a precious princess, but she was poisoned. It is hard work to make her respectable again. But once we have, we will have gained a princess." (Star 2012)
"Around 2004, everyone living in Beyoğlu was wondering what was to become of this Tarlabaşı. It looked much worse back then. There was no lighting, it was like a nightmare, it was dark. Even when going through it by car, the dilapidated buildings on the right would make you shiver." – Ahmet Misbah Demircan (Habertürk 2014)

Tarlabaşı did and does suffer from real structural problems. The visible disrepair and the physical decay of the housing stock are partly due to the relatively high vacancy rate in the district. The news media regularly report on the dangers of dilapidated buildings in the neighbourhood, and houses have collapsed due to decades of neglect. The tactics of "managed dilapidation" and "planned abandonment", including semi-legal and illegal ploys by developers, landlords, and the authorities who are trying to make a neighbourhood look more run-down and force people to leave have been extensively researched in other cities (Metzger 2000, Aalbers 2006). Beyoğlu mayor Ahmet Misbah Demircan justified the invasive renewal project by describing Tarlabaşı as "an area of total dilapidation" (Yeni Şafak 2013) and "a demolition zone" (Yeni Akit 2014). Demircan and other powerful actors invested in the project, including a nominally independent expert committee of academics who prepared a report for court case brought by the Istanbul Chamber of Architects (TMMOB) in an effort to stop the demolitions, referred to Tarlabaşı as "abandoned" and "empty" (Erenman et al. 2008: 7–8). I want to return to the problematic notion of this alleged "emptiness" and discursive erasure at the end of this section.

<figure><img src="image_9.png" /><figcaption>Tarlabaşı 2009</figcaption></figure>

Photo by Jonathan Lewis

Historical and structural reasons for the notable disrepair in the neighbourhood were seldom, if at all, mentioned by stakeholders. Problems were simply "pointed out". The somewhat accusatory silence when it came to reasons insinuated that current residents were to blame for the issues that the renewal project was going to "fix". Demolitions and
renewal were posited as the only possible “rescue plan”, and other possible solutions were never considered.

In the same way, few non-residents were aware that several Tarlabaşı house owners had been fined for renovation works they had undertaken on their buildings, even if these efforts had aimed to repair fundamental and potentially dangerous problems, such as a leaking roof or rusty balcony rails. Since the entire neighbourhood had been declared an urban conservation area in 1993, all repair, renovation and construction work had to be approved by the Cultural Heritage Preservation Board first. Association members complained that this regulation prevented them from putting even one nail into the wall, which of course stood in striking contrast from a project that was going to raze the entire neighbourhood to the ground.<fnref n="5" />

Tarlabaşı residents, most of them tenants, also complained about the unwillingness of homeowners to look after their property, especially if they did not own buildings or apartments themselves. Barber Halil Usta regularly accused the house owners opposite his shop of being “too lazy to apply even a lick of paint” on the façade of their building, therefore adding to the “bad, run-down look” of his street.

The various ways in which the authorities structurally neglected Tarlabaşı only added to the neighbourhood being perceived as a “lost case”. For example, garbage collection was not as reliable as in other parts of Beyoğlu – where AKP mayor Demircan had launched high-profile, branded cleaning campaigns – which made the neighbourhood look uncared for and “dirty”. However, the fact that garbage trucks did not drive through Tarlabaşı as often as they did through neighbouring districts was not known to outsiders.

After the start of evictions in 2011, garbage was not collected anymore at all in several parts of Tarlabaşı, leading to piles of refuse rotting in the streets. The steadily growing heaps of debris began to attract pests and, especially during the warm summer months, emitted a terrible stench. This led to concerns about public health, with residents especially worried about the mosquitoes and the possible harm to their children playing in the streets. Evicted buildings which had been bought by the municipality that was now legally responsible for them, were turned into impromptu garbage dumps. Many residents began to suspect that this was not an oversight, but wilful neglect by the authorities, both in order to force people to leave and to feed into an image of progressive decay that was sure to garner support for the planned “clean-up” of Tarlabaşı. However, the continuous silence on the matter in official narratives and the overwhelming majority of the media shifted the blame for the dirt and the disorder, as in the case of the run-down housing stock, to residents again. This frame certainly helped to keep criticism away from the Beyoğlu Municipality which was in fact responsible for the scheduling and the dispatch of garbage trucks and cleaning teams, as well as for the upkeep of the empty properties now in their care.

<footnote n="5">5 One person I met was fined around 6,000 Turkish Lira for wanting to fix a leaking roof. This rule has not always been consistently applied, and several house owners have undertaken repair and replacement works without having been fined, which likely added to the impression that house owners who did not were to blame for the state of the buildings in the neighbourhood.</footnote>
Neither did the municipality prevent the massive looting of timber, doors, windows, and metal from pipes and stabilising structures from abandoned buildings. Most looters were Tarlabaşı residents from outside the renewal zone who hoped to sell recycled materials such as copper and other metals. Sometimes parting tenants and former house owners took out floors, stairs and railings as well as other wooden materials in order to use it for heating their new homes. Others, as I will explain in more detail in chapter nine, did not want to leave materials they had bought and paid for to the municipality out of principle. But the removal of these materials and structures led to the collapse, or partial collapse, of several buildings – by extreme chance nobody was ever killed or seriously injured – and to a rapid, and very visible, further decay of the neighbourhood. Despite these evident dangers the municipality did not prevent looting for a very long time, partly to discourage squatters to move into abandoned buildings<fnref n="6" />, but it also fed into the useful narrative of Tarlabaşı as a “lost case”, and, as mayor Demircan had called the neighbourhood, “a poisoned princess”. Residents described the appearance of Tarlabaşı after 2011 as a “war zone”.

## Image

"Tarlabaşı, that throughout history has been the 'in' neighbourhood of Beyoğlu, will throw off its current appearance and become a liveable place again." – Ahmet Misbah Demircan (Yapi.com.tr 2015)

After the word of a possible renewal project was out, Tarlabaşı was increasingly framed as a blemish on the meticulously curated map of Beyoğlu and as an obstacle to the successful branding and marketing of the district. It did not fit in. In the eyes of the municipal authorities, the visibly unruly neighbourhood threatened the appeal of the Beyoğlu they envisioned. Worse still, it was *contagious*. On several occasions mayor Demircan warned of infection and death when talking about Tarlabaşı, arguing that “the disease” might get worse and spread to the “healthy parts of Beyoğlu” (Yapi.com.tr 2010) if left unattended. Apparently, the “poisoned princess” was threatening to leak venom all over the Istanbul map. Demircan described Tarlabaşı repeatedly in terms of medical pathology, variously calling the neighbourhood a “bleeding wound” (Boran and Akçığ 2006), “gangrene” (Yapi.com.tr 2010), “braindead” (Öztürk 2012), and the “most illness-riddled place in Beyoğlu” (Tabak 2013). For him, “Tarlabaşı was closer to death than to life” and needed to be saved via “surgery” (Öztürk, 2012): “We had to do something about Tarlabaşı. Because if Beyoğlu is a body, that body was partly in pain, and it would have been impossible to cure this body without relieving that pain” (Solmaz, 2012).

Mixed medical metaphors notwithstanding, the renewal of Tarlabaşı was framed as a way to modernise the neighbourhood, to “civilise” it, to, as anthropologist Daniel Goldstein (2016: 78) puts it, “eradicate the taint of backwardness.” When asked about the need

<footnote n="6">6 In some cases, very poor families, such as refugees from Syria who did not have any other options, still moved into these gutted buildings where they lived under appalling and dangerous conditions, without windows, electricity, or running water.</footnote>
for urban renewal, Demircan maintained that Tarlabaşı, with most of its buildings con-
structed in the late 19th century, was a child of its time, but did not meet “contemporary
requirements”: in his opinion the neighbourhood lacked the necessary street width to
accommodate cars, the buildings stood too close together, and the layout of the flats and
houses was too small to accommodate the needs of the “modern urban dweller”, namely
enough room to fit amenities such as refrigerators, dishwashers and other white goods.
Defending the need for renewal, the municipality maintained that the neighbourhood
lay “abandoned” because residents had been unable to park cars and because the liv-
ing spaces had been too small to allow for a modern urban lifestyle. The neighbourhood
therefore lacked all economic value in its current state (Gebetaş, 2006). Demircan took on
a revanchist tone when he spoke about Tarlabaşı. In his words, it was “an area in the heart
of Istanbul, one of the world’s most beautiful cities, that [had] lost its aesthetic qualities”
(Star 2012) and that needed to be “brought back” to its former glory and “returned to so-
cietal values” – socially conservative, nostalgic and conformist ideas of what an urban
district was supposed to be and to represent (Yeni Şafak 2013).

This aggressive sentimentality, a variation of what Svetlana Boym (2007) calls “restorative nostalgia”, the historically blind and often revanchist attempt to re-create an imagined lost past, was the core narrative of Demircan’s urban branding campaign. In interviews and marketing material, Beyoğlu was portrayed – and sold – as a district of religious tolerance and harmonious ethnic diversity, as a place where “you can see all cultures, all languages, all religions, a geography where people can live their differences freely, without pressure from anyone” (Zorba 2012). However, these slogans did not refer to the multi-ethnic and multi-religious neighbourhood that Tarlabasi actually was. It also did not mirror the idealised idea of the neighbourhood that activists described to defend Tarlabasi. Instead, they advertised an imagined past that specifically excluded current residents who were accused of “polluting” the carefully curated picture that the municipality marketeers tried to promote. This was the weaponization of nostalgia.

Besides whitewashing Turkey's violent past and the forced displacement of the non-Muslim minority populations from Beyoğlu, this narrative ignored the fact that the neighbourhood has always been a place where the lower middle classes and the urban poor lived, and where various “outcasts” have found refuge. Historian Méropi Anastassiadou (2012: 300) writes that the community that formed around the 19th-century Greek-Orthodox Agios Konstantinos and Eleni Church on Kalyoncu Kulluk Street in Tarlabaşı developed into Beyoğlu's poorest and most densely populated parish. Due to the cheap rents, the neighbourhood attracted migrants from various corners of the Ottoman Empire as well as a number of refugees uprooted by the then ongoing upheavals in Thrace. Contemporary witnesses, such as French teacher Bertrand Bareilles (1918: 103–104) who lived in the area of today's Tarlabaşı at the turn of the 20th century, described the district as “dirty” and “chaotic”. He also complained about the many drunks in the street who, he wrote, were attracted to the many bars in the neighbourhood.

In line with this instrumentalization of nostalgia, the marketing campaign for the
Tarlabaşı project embraced an idea of the neighbourhood that lacked history but ap-
pealed to the longing for an imagined *Belle Époque* in Istanbul (Taksim 360 Office n.d.).
One municipality-produced marketing video featured the voiceover of a narrator who
celebrates “old” Tarlabaşı as a “colourful and diverse” place, a district where residents en-
gaged in “warm and heartfelt neighbourly relations”. The narration is illustrated sepia images of middle class-looking young women, as well as buildings and cars that were common in Beyoğlu around the 1950s. “Back then”, the voiceover claims, Tarlabaşı was “peaceful, appealing, and full of life” (Beyoğlu Belediyesi 2013). The implication being that now it is not.

This selective use of history excludes many voices that have contributed to the neigh-
bourhood's past. More importantly, it renders invisible all politics, all issues of tension
and difference, and therefore the painful history of the non-Muslim community. The vi-
olence, the discrimination, and the forced displacement from the city have been written
out of the narrative (Mills 2010). The marketing campaign for the renewal project aims
to tickle sentimentality and turn Beyoğlu history into what Peyton and Dyne (2017: 11)
call “pastiche fantasies about the past”. Citing Fredric Jameson, they argue that “whereas
modernity used history to tie people into the linear past through notions of progress,
civilization and nationalism, the postmodern uses of history are invoked mainly to sell
goods and experiences.” (ibid. 2017: 10).

Such aggressive nostalgia commodifies a polished and romantic past version of Tar-
labaşı that, according to stakeholders, the project aspires to resurrect. The municipality
is framed as the benevolent saviour that will reinstate the glory the neighbourhood is
said to be entitled to. This narrative claims that the project will “right the wrongs” that
“have been done to Tarlabaşı.” This revanchist discourse of a “stolen”, or “lost” neighbour-
hood alleges that the current Tarlabaşı, akin to the negative space in a print, delineates
everything the neighbourhood allegedly never was in “the good old days”, and everything
it should *not* be: poor, Kurdish, trans*. Geographer Neil Smith (1996) uses the term “ur-
ban revanchism” for the elite rationale that defines the urban poor living on potentially
profitable land as “intruders”. Drawing a parallel between the conservative revanchist
movement in late 19th-century France and neoliberal political thought that emerged in
the 1990s, Smith argues that neoliberal urban governance is increasingly directed against
an imagined “enemy”: the people perceived by the dominant elites as having “stolen” the
city from its legitimate owners, namely the middle classes and investors.

The nostalgic narrative put forth by the municipality claimed that Beyoğlu lost its
former status to the (lack of) taste, culture, and mores of the rural newcomers, the trans*
residents and the urban poor that now “occupy” valuable land and real estate in the inner
city.

People: stigmatisation of Tarlabaşı residents

The concentrated presence of such “advanced marginality”, to use Wacquant’s term, sig-
nificantly added to the stigma that surrounded the neighbourhood. This permitted the
municipality to frame the Tarlabaşı renewal project as a “struggle against incivility”, as
a fight against the neighbourhood’s current residents who, according to municipal offi-
cials, knew neither how to dress nor to behave in the city and therefore did not deserve
to live in Tarlabaşı (Sakızlıoğlu and Uitermark 2014: 1374–1375).

This lament of urban elites, the claim that rural Anatolian migrants spoiled the im-
age of “their” modern metropolis, is an overused trope trotted out in urban politics, in
pop culture and around middle and upper class dinner tables. Against the backdrop of
neoliberal urban policies, the authorities frequently used it to justify the displacement of
the urban poor. At the press conference for the presentation of the Tarlabaşı 360 project,
mayor Demircan struck a similarly revanchist tone. He warned of the "fast migration
from various places in our country" to the city centres and the resulting "severe deterio-
ration of our urban culture". Tarlabaşı, the mayor deplored, was "taken from our hands"
(Emlakdream 2014).

This anxious public discourse and such stigmatising narratives of Tarlabaşı as a prob-
lem place were organised around imagined and stereotyped, generic types of residents
that Anouk de Koning and Anick Vollebergh (2019), in their comparative study of two ill-
famed urban areas in Amsterdam and Antwerp, proposed to call "ordinary iconic figures."
These figures, tropes such as the "welfare queen", or "the radicalised Muslim youth", come
to stand for a broader community of actual individuals. They bring together the specific
and the abstract, "but they remain tied to categories of 'ordinary residents', whom they
are taken to represent" (ibid: 393). At the same time these figures are made to stand for a
specific urban locality, staged as the scene of highly mediatised dramas "that are at once
local and national" (ibid: 391).

In the context of Tarlabaşı, ordinary iconic figures are everyday characters that in-
dex or point to a macropolitical or social problem. At the same time, they are icons or
symbols that stand not only for a category of people, but for the physical locality itself.
These everyday iconic figures are what link macrosocial and macropolitical problems or
threats to Tarlabaşı as a place. In that sense, a Kurdish man indexes the armed Kurdistan
Workers' Party [Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê – PKK] and therefore the existence of a threat
to the integrity of the Turkish nation posed by the PKK. The stereotype of the politically
engaged, potentially violent Kurdish man came to be an iconic figure associated with res-
idents of Tarlabaşı and by extension the neighbourhood writ large, making the problem
of armed insurrection in eastern Turkey part of the justification for disenfranchising and
dispossessing all residents of an Istanbul neighbourhood.

Since there are social reasons that certain types of iconic figures come to stand for
certain places, it is worth analysing who the “problem-people profiles” that stand icon-
ically for Tarlabaşı are. As previously noted, Tarlabaşı was commonly portrayed as the
home of a deviant, un- and anti-Turkish lumpenproletariat. As such the neighbourhood
has been the site of anxious public discourses about Turkishness and the integrity of the
Turkish nation. However, the more Tarlabaşı became a physical location of interest (fi-
nancial or otherwise), the more granular the public imagination of Tarlabaşı became.
Three everyday iconic profiles of Problematic Tarlabaşı Residents rose to a privileged kind
of salience and came to stand in for larger marginalised communities. All three profiles
are linked to a perceived threat or problem by their historical and social context. Finally,
it is important to ask for ‘whom’ such imagined figures are a problem. What or whom
exactly is threatened by these stigmatised profiles?

Kurds

According to a survey conducted in 2008 on behalf of the municipality, 54 percent of Tar-
labaşı residents had migrated to the neighbourhood after 1990, and 52 percent had come
from the predominantly Kurdish regions of the country (Kentsel A.Ş. 2008). Kurdish mi-
grants have been especially stigmatised in Turkey, because in addition to the image as
poor “peasants” they were labelled as “criminals” and “terrorists” in nationalist Turkish
state discourse, the media, and popular culture. This taint on Kurdish identities reaches
back to the early years of the Turkish Republic, when the predominantly Kurdish east-
ern and south-eastern regions and their inhabitants were referred to as unruly, disloyal,
uncivilised, and reactionary (Yeğen 1999: 555).

Portrayed as a dangerous “invasion” by nationalist Turkish politicians and commen-
tators, the Kurdish migrations, and the subsequent rapid socio-demographic changes,
have not been well-received amongst the non-Kurdish Istanbul population, mainly due
to the fact that Kurds were routinely stigmatised as potential security risks. Kurdish mi-
gration was seen as tantamount to an “infiltration” of cities by “terrorists”, and as equiva-
lent to growing insecurity (Pérouse 2010: 173). The most salient stereotype that has come
to stand in for Kurdish residents of Tarlabaşı is that of a dubious (often younger) Kurdish
man who sells drugs or is involved in other criminalised activities in order to support the
PKK, or who is a member of the PKK.

The fact that the PKK is involved in drug trafficking and deeply intertwined with
international organised crime was publicly established in the 1990s through Turkish
state propaganda and publicised criminal cases that shed light on criminal networks
that helped to fund the PKK. It has since been part of the public understanding of how
the organisation operates and a solid component of an anxious public discourse about
the criminality of the PKK and their involvement in the international drug trade (Gunter
1998; Marcus 2007; Roth and Sever 2007; Gingeras 2014).

The perceived insecurity is routinely visualised via mediatised police raids on Kurdish
homes in the search of alleged PKK members. Detentions are made public in an equally
sensationalistic manner, while the release from jail of falsely accused suspects, acquit-
tals, or other “false alarms” are rarely reported. In addition to being framed as “danger-
ous”, Kurdish men are described as being “more patriarchal” than other men in Turkey,
as more prone to violence against women and children. So called “honour killings” [töre
cinayetleri] are often treated as a “Kurdish phenomenon”, which further re-produces and
perpetuates the stigmatisation of Kurdish migrants as “uncivilised” (Mutluer 2011a: 95,
139). Stigmatised as “uncultured peasants” who do not know “how to behave” in the city,
they are portrayed as outsiders who do not belong (Öncü 2002; Pérouse 2010; Mutluer
2011a: 24). Tarlabaşı has repeatedly been characterised as a “Kurdish space” by the media
and by local and national politicians, and the neighbourhood is largely perceived as such
both by Kurdish and non-Kurdish residents.

The pro-Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party [Halkların Demokratik Partisi – HDP]<fnref n="7" />
had their Istanbul headquarters in Tarlabaşı, which contributed to the perception of
the neighbourhood as a place of concentrated Kurdishness. The location of the party
office also meant frequent political protests that often led to a large, and militarised,

<footnote n="7">7 The name of the party was changed from Peace and Democracy Party [Barış ve Demokrasi Partisi – BDP] to HDP in 2014. The BDP was founded after a Turkish court banned the previous party, the Democratic Society Party [Demokratik Toplum Partisi- DTP] in 2008 for alleged links to the PKK. All three had their headquarters in the same building on Kalyoncu Kulluk Street in Tarlabaşı.</footnote>