police presence and not seldom to the use of excessive police force. These protests, as well as the ensuing violent clashes between protesters and security forces, were regularly framed as “riots” in the media. This added to the collective non-resident impression that Tarlabaşı was and is a politically dissident area closely linked to anti-Turkish separatism and terrorism.

Erdoğan Bayraktar, then president of the Mass Housing Administration (TOKI)<fnref n="8" /> famously called Tarlabaşı “the nest of terror, drugs and anti-state activity” (BIA Haber Merkezi 2010a). However, and somewhat curiously, project stakeholders made no public allusions to Kurdishness as a problem and reason for necessary renewal. This was possibly avoided in order not to alienate Kurdish AKP voters in the area. Be that as it may, municipality officials and representatives of the developer *GAP İnşaat* employed a discriminating and anti-Kurdish tone behind closed doors. In private sales negotiation meetings with non-Kurdish Tarlabaşı property owners, they appealed to anti-Kurdish sentiment and promised to “rid the neighbourhood of terrorism” as a “service” to non-Kurdish residents. In at least one instance I was made aware of by a Turkish colleague, mayor Demircan told a journalist, off the record, that Tarlabaşı was a “Kurdish republic” and needed to be “cleansed” for that reason. The maintenance and the work that went into framing Tarlabaşı as a dangerously Kurdish space led to a further solidification of the link between people-based and place-based stigma.

## Trans*women / Trans* sex workers

Tarlabaşı has long been associated with the existence of a visible and transgressive sex work economy. The neighbourhood is widely known as the place “where prostitution [*fuhuş*] takes place” or as a place where “prostitutes [*hayat kadınları*] are”. This narrative is built and maintained by sensationalist accounts of lawlessness, immorality, and scandal that have been circulated to such an extent that this “knowledge”, repeated and perpetuated in the media, political speech, and fictional accounts, has become an “unassailable truth” (Hallgrimsdottir et al. 2006: 267). When Istanbul mayor Bedrettin Dalan announced his plans to demolish more than 370 listed buildings to make way for the new Tarlabaşı Boulevard in the late 1980s, he claimed that one important reason for this contentious project was his intention to “clean” the Beyoğlu “swamp” from the “nests of prostitution” that had “spread there” (Süsoy 1987: 5). The spectre of a (sexually) deviant and (morally) decayed Tarlabaşı threatening the “decent” parts of Beyoğlu has more recently been resurrected by a well-known Turkish newspaper columnist who warned his readers that “prostitution and drugs” were creeping up from the ruined neighbourhood to swallow the rest of Beyoğlu, vulnerable to corruption because the renewal project and the entire local economy had stalled (Celal 2016).

The neighbourhood is also known for its relatively large trans* presence: Following subsequent evictions of trans* persons from their homes in other Beyoğlu neighbourhoods, Tarlabaşı evolved into a space that offered them relative safety. Local solidarity

<footnote n="8">8 The Toplu Konut İdaresi Başkanlığı (TOKI), literally the “Mass Housing Development Administration”, is the public housing agency in the country.</footnote>
networks amongst trans* sex workers have formed, leading to more visibility and the in-
creasing association of trans* persons with the neighbourhood in the mainstream dis-
course (Siyah Pembe Üçgen 2012). Tarlabaşı is frequently labelled a trans* space, and
the trans* woman sex worker is another pertinent Tarlabaşı stereotype. Trans* women
who live in Tarlabaşı are assumed to be sex workers whose customers are predominantly
Turkish cishet men. Transgenderism is not a crime under Turkish law. However, it is still
viewed as immoral and “unnatural” behaviour in most of society, and Turkey has failed
to introduce anti-discrimination legislation that includes gender identity, leading to le-
nient sentences for perpetrators of hate crimes against trans* individuals and a general
culture of impunity (Ercan Sahin et al. 2020). What is more, the AKP government has
used legal statutes to control the movement of trans* bodies and punish trans* women
for appearing in public space, but these laws do not criminalise transactional sex with
trans* sex workers, or the men who pay for sex with trans* women (Human Rights Watch
2008a; Amnesty International 2011b).

In Turkey, the sex economy is regulated and legal according to laws that were origi-
nally drawn up in 1930, but sex work is heavily stigmatised and sex workers face marginal-
isation, discrimination, and physical violence. Brothels are allowed to operate under pri-
vate ownership if they are licensed by the state, and sex workers have to apply for a per-
mit to work there.<fnref n="9" /> The laws pertaining to the sex work economy only cover cis women<fnref n="10" />,
which means that trans* sex workers have to work under precarious and dangerous con-
ditions. While de jure illegal, the sex work economy in Tarlabaşı is very visible, and well
established. Trans* sex work makes up a significant part of the sex economy in Istan-
bul but has also long been the focus of national concern and anxiety. Trans* persons and
trans* sex work present a threat to Turkish heteronormative masculinity, and in exten-
sion, to the integrity and the self-image of the modern Turkish nation. It has been well
established that heteronormativity is foundational to the modern nation state (Enloe,
1990; Nagel, 1998). A lot of research and work has been done to critically analyse gendered
nationalism and to deconstruct the language through which nationalism reinforces and
justifies sexual control and repression, and on how nation-building, heteronormative
gender binaries and hegemonic masculinity intersect. Sexuality and sexual behaviour
must be policed and kept under control, as “erotic autonomy signals danger to the het-
erosexual family and the nation [...] and brings with it the potential of undoing the na-
tion entirely” (Alexander 2005: 23). Scholars in Turkey have explored the links between
militarism, nationalism and gender in the making of the modern Turkish nation state
and have shown that Turkish national identity is constructed around the gendered con-
cept of Turkey as a “military-nation”, naturalising a rigid heteronormativity of Turkish
nationalist masculinity (Altinay 2004; Selek 2009).

<footnote n="9">9 Several local AKP governments have stopped issuing permits to sex workers, which means that no new sex workers can be hired. In some cities, such as the capital Ankara and Bursa, state-licensed brothels have been demolished by court order.</footnote>

<footnote n="10">10 The Turkish state defines a cis woman as someone in possession of the state-issued pink ID card. Most trans* and cis male sex workers are in possession of the state-issued blue ID card. Officially defined as “male”, they fall outside the framework of sex work regulations that include licensing, mandatory health checks and social security.</footnote>
The reputation of Tarlabaşı as an area where many trans* sex workers live and work added to the neighbourhood's stigmatisation, and project stakeholders exploited the ordinary iconic figure of the trans* woman sex worker to rally non-trans* residents to their cause. They were not coy about it. In public meetings between municipal officials and Tarlabaşı residents, these officials promised to "get rid of" the local trans* community in order to "restore order and family values" in the neighbourhood. Clearly, they hoped to exploit existing prejudice against trans* persons to overcome local resistance against the renewal project. In another public meeting with the municipality and the developers of the project, residents were told that, should they agree to the renewal, they would be "freed" of the trans* people who had "taken over" the district.

<figure><img src="image_10.png" /><figcaption>*Trans* \* sex worker preparing for work, Saturday night</figcaption></figure>

Photo by Jonathan Lewis

These two ordinary iconic profiles threaten the Turkish nationalist self-imagination of the ideal nation state and the ideal Turkish citizen: Kurds who insist on their Kurdishness challenge the definition of Turkey as an ethnically homogeneous nation. Trans* women, and trans* women sex workers who solicit Turkish cishet men, do not only play into moral panics about a threat to conservative family values, but they defy the imagination of Turkey as a (gendered and heteronormative) military-nation.

## ‘Köylüler’: rural migrants

A third profile, that of the poor rural migrant who is unable, or unwilling, to assimilate to urban life, equally spoils the Turkish self-image as a modern nation state. It is obvious from the revanchist speeches of the mayor and municipal officials that vague notions of the undeserving urban poor polluting valuable real estate in the inner city of Istanbul
were a part of the stigmatising discourse in the run-up to evictions. However, as an ordinary iconic figure this trope is much more difficult to describe and does not fit into any cohesive category. The stereotype of the rural migrant and *gecekondu* dweller, variously assumed to be backwards, illiterate, un-modern, ignorant and unclean – in short, uncivilised – has been used, often as the target of anxious moral panics over a “hostile invasion” and “downfall” of the city, since the 1950s (Erman 1998; Lanz 2005). However, since the AKP rose to and consolidated power, this vilification began to pivot. After all, it was the former marginalisation of rural migrants that provided an important foundational grievance for the AKP and its predecessor, the Welfare Party [*Refah Partisii – RP*], and rural migrants have long provided the electoral base for the AKP. An analysis of this important and interesting shift lies outside the scope of this work. Suffice it to say that this stereo-type influenced the stigmatising narrative about Tarlabaşı but formed a flexible category that differs from the notion of the ordinary iconic figure I describe here.

It is crucial to underline that the stereotypes of problem people I analyse do not just stand for all residents, but instead they are icons for the place itself. De Koning and Vollebergh (2019: 393) argue that “[i]conic figures [...] can be important political techniques, primarily because they allow people to relate in very personal and affective ways to larger national narratives”; in short, these imagined negative stereotypes are given a physical body that can stand in for what is mostly an existential abstract threat for Turkish citizens. As demonstrated further above, the state-sanctioned and state-driven stigmatisation of Tarlabaşı meant to garner public approval for a contentious renewal project. This means that there was economic incentive to forge and reinforce the link between the urban area in question and anxious public discourses about existential threats to the integrity of the Turkish nation and national identity. Ordinary iconic figures embody this link, which is why the stereotypical tropes of (criminal) Kurdish men, trans* women (sex workers) and poor people unable or unwilling to assimilate to what was considered modern urban living were given such prominence in the dominant narrative.

## Criminalising Tarlabaşı

A third parameter of the territorial stigmatisation attached to Tarlabaşı was the perceived high level of crime and criminal activity in the neighbourhood. Closely related to the discursive stigmatisation of migrants, especially those who identified as Kurdish, and to that of trans* sex workers and sex work in general, a perceived high crime rate remained a defining characteristic of the central district, as the anecdote of the stolen mobile phone at the beginning of this chapter has shown. Two types of crime have been associated with Tarlabaşı: firstly, petty crime, such as pickpocketing, burglary, as well as drug use and small-scale drug dealing, and secondly, organised crime that centred on drug trafficking and gambling. Furthermore, the well-known and visible existence of illegal and informal activities such as unregistered sex work, unregistered textile workshops, the production of accessories used in brand piracy, unauthorised recycling, un-registered mussel kitchens, and unregistered street sellers added to an image of clandestineness and lawlessness in the neighbourhood. This image was further strengthened by sensationalist media coverage of police and *zabıta* raids on these locations and professions, and of illegal incidents in the neighbourhood in general. All of this fed into the
"hardening of public opinion into consent" (Hall et al. 1978: 129) that Tarlabaşı was a den of crime and criminals.<fnref n="11" />

Tarlabaşı was one of ten Istanbul neighbourhoods listed as an area with high rates of crime and a high concentration of criminals by the police (Sakızlıoğlu 2014a: 177). Police raids and highly mediatised police operations were therefore relatively frequent. The water cannon and the armoured police vehicles parked in front of the Tarlabaşı police station on the street corner of Kalyoncu Kulluk Street and Tarlabaşı Boulevard fortified the impression that the neighbourhood was criminal and dangerous. Reminiscent of Wilson and Kelling's (1982) "broken window" theory that links rising crime rates to deteriorating physical conditions in a neighbourhood<fnref n="12" />, mayor Demircan alleged that Tarlabaşı was a security threat because of the many empty buildings in the neighbourhood. He claimed that these ruins facilitated crime by harbouring thieves and therefore threatened the safety and wellbeing of the rest of the city (Ercan 2005). Therefore, "cleaning up" Tarlabaşı would bring down the crime rate in the rest of Beyoğlu and Istanbul, because thieves and pickpockets would not be able to hide in abandoned buildings anymore.<fnref n="13" />

Poverty, unemployment, and other structural reasons for people engaging in theft were never mentioned by policy makers. However, the Beyoğlu Municipality did not hesitate to blame the perceived high crime rate in Tarlabaşı for the lack of investment and a stagnating local economy without providing any data or statistics that would factually uphold that claim. Tarlabaşı was presented as the dangerous place people already "knew" it to be, and criminal behaviour framed as an intrinsic characteristic of the neighbourhood. The approach of authorities and developers to focus on certain "problem places" provided the (unspoken) opportunity to focus on "problem people": "This area focus – in the context of policy assumptions that seek economic competitiveness – destructuralises inequality and puts the onus on the individual as agent of failure" (Kallin and Slater 2014: 1361). Hamish Kallin and Tom Slater point out that this approach further allows focusing on very specific forms of deviance and criminal activity – white collar crimes such as tax evasion, fraud, insider trading or money laundering, criminal activity that is arguably fixed in space and located in the financial and business districts of cities as well as in wealthy neighbourhoods and gated communities, do not lead to the demolition of the glass and steel towers or to their stigmatisation as "problem neighbourhoods" (ibid.: 1362). They write: "The more such a policy approach selectively chooses which areas have 'failed', the more distance it takes from any holistic understanding of deprivation. Such

<footnote n="11">11 Criminal Tarlabaşı and its description as a "problem neighbourhood" has turned into a journalistic cliché and is an often-used trope in media accounts that do not centre on crime at all. One article about the planned demolitions in Tarlabaşı described the district as "Istanbul's robber's den" (Kalnoky 2009). A reportage on Syrian refugees calls it "an Istanbul ghetto" (Cox 2016). Even for a simple review of a popular Tarlabaşı restaurant, a foreign journalist makes use of descriptions and vocabulary that conjure up danger and lawlessness (Osterlund 2017).</footnote>

<footnote n="12">12 For criticism of the broken window theory, see for example: Camp and Heatherton 2016; Müller 2016; Vitale 2017.</footnote>

<footnote n="13">13 Demircan also initiated the initiative "Işıl Işıl Beyoğlu" (Bright Beyoğlu), a vast street lighting project that was to prevent petty crimes by "depriving criminals of places to hide". In Tarlabaşı, drug dealers would often smash overhanging streetlamps, and the municipality sometimes took weeks, if not months, to repair them.</footnote>
an approach accepts that there must be something *wrong* with an area of urban marginal-
ity, rather than anything wrong with the system of economic distribution, or political
control. Such areas are then to be 'fixed' by outright demolition and changing the demo-
graphics via large-scale displacement" (ibid.).

This is not to say that Tarlabaşı did not suffer from crime. According to a study undertaken by Ünlü et al. (2000), the overwhelming majority of residents did not perceive Tarlabaşı as safe. Mapping crime in the neighbourhood, the researchers have shown that criminal behaviour in the neighbourhood amounts mainly to crimes such as theft, pickpocketing and burglary, but some more serious crimes, such as murder, assault, and robbery, as well as gun and drug-related crimes, do occasionally occur.

During the eight years that I lived in Tarlabaşı, fellow residents and shopkeepers often warned me about pickpockets, told me to hold on to my bag, my camera, or any other valuables, and not to hang around the streets at night. But as other scholars who have done research in Tarlabaşı have noted, locals also say that criminal activity targets outsiders, and not those who are seen to "belong" (Mutluer 2011a; Sakızlıoğlu 2014a). And indeed, when a group of boys once tried to grab my wallet on the Sunday vegetable market and failed, my outrage and that of the salespeople who heard about the episode from me, was directed at the fact that I was, or felt to be, a local, and not at the fact that he had tried to steal from me. After all, pickpockets were perceived to be an irritating, but integral part of the open-air market workforce.

<figure><img src="image_11.png" /><figcaption>*Abandoned building*</figcaption></figure>

Photo by Jonathan Lewis

What is crucially overlooked in the sensationalist portraits of Tarlabaşı as a den of criminality and vice are the structural inequalities and the stark contrast between the socio-economic and cultural settings and possibilities in Tarlabaşı and much wealthier
neighbouring Beyoğlu neighbourhoods. Local social workers underline that illegal and semi-legal activities are often the only way to generate an income among poor residents, and the only way to gain access to things that “they cannot get with their own resources” (Sakızlıoğlu, 2014a: 177). However, this decontextualised narrative that was based on prejudice and cemented territorial stigma facilitated the framing of Tarlabaşı as a neighbourhood in need of renewal and of residents as undeserving of staying put.

## Forced displacement as urban colonialism and erasure

Following this analysis of the stigmatising narrative that framed Tarlabaşı as pathological, I want to focus on the things that were *not* said, and on what this silence does and implies. I argue that this discursive void amounts to a refusal to recognise a presence and stands in dialectical relation to territorial stigmatisation.

The invisibility of Tarlabaşı came in multiple shapes. Portrayed as a neighbourhood on the margins, a space largely unpoliced where people who wished to stay hidden could vanish, Tarlabaşı granted protective invisibility to those who could not find refuge elsewhere, like communities of trans* sex workers and undocumented migrants. The neighbourhood concealed various informal and illegal businesses from the gaze and the arm of the authorities. However, the invisibility I want to speak of in this following part is not the protective cloak that those on the urban margins are able to wrap themselves in, but the “corrosive social erasure” (Carter 2010: 5) that is imposed on those who are not granted an existence. Donald Martin Carter (ibid.: 6), in his work on the experiences of Senegalese migrants in the European diaspora, describes this erasure as the result of the “flexible employment of power, politics, and social positioning that must be configured as a kind of routine practice capable of being reinstated into the flow of everyday events.” The capacity to render invisible employs a complex strategic set of cultural and social practices that can change with time and context, and it has the power to make entire groups, entire existences, disappear. This erasure is closely related to stigmatisation, as stereotyping a certain set of qualities and individuals pushes them into social margins and can make them disappear. They vanish behind a discursive wall of negative tropes. While they are being talked about as marginal, as outcasts, as problem people, and therefore made hyper-visible in the public debate, they are not themselves granted a voice and their own experiences remain hidden (Carter 2010: 12–13). It also means, as I will show in chapter three, that the residents of Tarlabaşı were invisible to project stakeholders, and that their rights to transparency, reliable information, and legal rights could be disregarded.

This obliteration is the power to make a presence disappear in plain sight. It creates a space of nonexistence that both defines that which is marginal and delineates what is within the boundaries of the acceptable. “This space excludes people, limits rights, restricts services, and erases personhood. The space of nonexistence is largely a space of subjugation” (Coutin 2003: 172). It is both imagined – culturally constructed and referring to an actual physical presence – and real, as the practices that make certain people disappear have material effects on those rendered invisible. (ibid.) Tarlabaşı residents, while physically present, were not taken into consideration when the project was being discussed and marketed, when their displacement was being planned, when resistance
was ignored by the authorities and by a large part of the media. They were also (made to be) entirely absent from all advertisement material of the new Tarlabaşı. This violent erasure of the neighbourhood's residents, their lives and experiences, impacted the way Tarlabaşı was and is perceived not just by project stakeholders, but also by a wider public. It fed into the stigmatising narrative used to justify displacement and large-scale demolition. This means that the relegation to a space of nonexistence has a major impact on the ability to speak and be heard. If one is erased by the state, does one still enjoy its protection? What authority speaks for those citizens that do not exist in its eyes?

<figure><img src="image_12.png" /><figcaption>*Everyday Tarlabaşı*</figcaption></figure>

Photo by Jonathan Lewis

Residents were rendered invisible in different ways. Tarlabaşı was variously portrayed as “abandoned”, as “suffering from years of lacking investments”, and residents’ experiences of pending displacement were not taken into account by the municipality. The entire neighbourhood was frequently framed as an empty wasteland. Beyoğlu mayor Demircan said that the renewal area had been designated according to which streets and parts of Tarlabaşı were the “most dilapidated”, and that the area chosen for the project was “abandoned”, a place where the “density of life was at a minimum”, and that the 278 buildings slated for renewal were “about to collapse” (Yapi.com.tr 2010; Bahar 2010). Speaking in similar absolutes, Demircan also alleged that the area was “a neighbourhood that nobody enters” (Sabah 2014).

Many houses in the designated renewal area did suffer from structural problems, neglect, and needed repair. According to the survey ordered by the municipality, approximately 30 percent of the 1,057 buildings within the project's borders were abandoned (Kentsel A.Ş. 2008). However, around 3,000 people *did* live in the area that the municipality and the property developers described as “empty”. When mayor Demircan advertised
that Tarlabaşı would become “one of the best examples for the mass regeneration of an abandoned city centre” (Istanbul 2012), he omitted the fact that Tarlabaşı had never been abandoned at all, and yet he reiterated the claim that “nobody lived there” (Bahar 2010).

This verbal creation of an empty, uninhabited space, of a supposed *tabula rasa* that needs to be rendered “liveable” and where the authorities and private developers can in- scribe their vision on a neighbourhood is a common strategy used by powerful stake- holders in many parts of the world to justify the displacement of current residents prior to the regeneration of an urban area. Poor neighbourhoods are commonly labelled as “no- go zones” and “abandoned wastelands” in order to make the displacement of those that *do* live, work, and go there seem less violent, and frame their replacement by wealthier, more privileged newcomers as positive and unproblematic, or, if one wants to take the argument of an empty space further, not as replacement at all, but as an initial settle- ment.

This is ominously similar to the white supremacist claim of the colonialist who de- clares that the land he came to occupy was empty, reflected in the idea of *terra nullius*. Several scholars have investigated the links between colonialism and gentrification, pro- viding examples of the dispossession of land, of displacement and erasure, elimination, or assimilation of the Other under the rationale of urban renewal (Smith 1996; Kallin and Slater 2014; Lanz 2015; Peyton and Dyce 2017). In their analyses of white supremacy and settler colonialism, Bonds and Inwood (2015: 7) underline that the permanent occupa- tion of land that underwrites racial capitalism requires “the continued displacement of indigenous and other marginalized peoples who are an impediment to capitalist devel- opment [...].” Neil Smith (1996: xvi), who wrote about the colonial frontier connotations of gentrification in his work on revanchist urban policies, argues that the narrative of the “urban pioneer” that describes stigmatised areas slated for renewal as empty and un- derused “suggests a city [is] not yet socially inhabited; like Native Americans the urban working class is seen as less than social, a part of the physical environment...the fron- tier discourse serves to rationalize and legitimate a process of conquest, whether in the eighteenth or nineteenth-century West, or in the late-twentieth [or twenty-first] century inner city”.

The municipal authorities alleged that a large majority of Tarlabaşı residents held no claim to the neighbourhood because they were “squatters” who had moved into the build- ings because the “real owners”, the non-Muslim community who had originally lived in them, was gone (Güleç 2013). Squatters, so the narrative went, were not entitled to nego- tiations or compensation, and could therefore be overlooked and not taken into consid- eration when the fate of the quarter was discussed. Tenants, who constituted approxi- mately 75 percent of all Tarlabaşı residents, were likewise excluded from talks to the de- velopers and the municipality and were thus made invisible (Cingöz 2008).

Furthermore, when talking about Tarlabaşı, the municipal authorities often spoke in the future tense, as if Tarlabaşı was a place that did not yet exist as a populated urban environment. The goal of the project, its stakeholders proclaimed, was a “Tarlabaşı that you can live in” (Dünya İnşaat 2005), suggesting that the neighbourhood in its current state was untamed urban wilderness, uninhabitable and uninhabited.

Similarly, Tarlabaşı residents rarely featured in mainstream narratives relating to agency and protest. There was an important gap between what was alleged by the munic-
ipal authorities, namely that “everybody is happy with the project and wants it to happen” and the very serious concerns expressed by residents and business owners in Tarlabaşı (Cingöz 2008; Avcı 2008). The municipality repeatedly alleged that they had fairly nego-
tiated with and convinced the legally necessary majority of Tarlabaşı property owners,
and that everyone who could stake a legal claim had been compensated. On one (now
defunct) municipal website that advertised the renewal project, the Beyoğlu administra-
tion alleged under the headline “For everyone, all together” that all project development
had been conducted “openly and transparently”, that they had chosen the way of “mutual
exchange and dialogue”, and that the people who lived, worked, and owned property in
Tarlabaşı had all been consulted in preparation to the renewal project. In the following
chapter I will explore this in more detail. The unwillingness of many residents to leave,
the forced evictions, the court cases, and the conflict with the neighbourhood association
were not mentioned anywhere and had been written out of the municipal narrative. This
incomplete tale was subsequently repeated by pro-government media outlets.

While project plans acknowledged the existence of spaces in the neighbourhood
used for business purposes, the municipality argued that nobody had invested in Tar-
labaşı for years (Istanbul 2012). This allegation ignored the various types of commercial
ventures that did exist, including businesses as diverse as hotels, carpentry workshops,
metal workshops, shoemakers' workshops, restaurants, bakeries, patisseries, butch-
ers, second-hand furniture shops, teahouses [kiraathane], dry cleaners, DIY stores,
upholstery workshops, internet cafés, copy shops, stationery shops, motorcycle repair
shops, hairdressers and wig makers, corner shops [bakkal], ambulant trade karts (green
grocery, household items, pastries, puddings, plastic coating of IDs and other official
cards, knife grinding) as well as a manually-operated carousel for kids and a seasonal
shepherd.

<figure><img src="image_13.png" /><figcaption>Children playing</figcaption></figure>

Photo by Jonathan Lewis
Tarlabaşı also housed a number of informal businesses such as undocumented textile workshops, mussel kitchens, recycling storages, and various businesses of the unregistered sex trade. In the eyes of the municipal authorities, the money and time spent on these ventures did not count as “investments”.

It followed that the majority of these businesses were not deemed valuable enough to reopen in the new Tarlabaşı either. Even if some business owners were offered commercial spaces in return for their property by the developers, they were told that they would not be able to return to their former businesses in these spaces. Gökhan Usta, who owned and ran a bread bakery on Tarlabaşı Boulevard, was not allowed to reopen the bakery in the commercial space he was offered in exchange for his property. The explanation from project stakeholders was that a bakery was too “dirty”, “not modern enough”, and not “in line with the image of the new neighbourhood.” Businesses that were deemed to be illegal, such as sex work, or businesses that required storage room, such as recycling or mobile sales karts, were not offered commercial spaces at all. The reason that project stakeholders ignored the various commercial ventures in Tarlabaşı was that they only considered white-collar, middle class needs and aspirations as being worthy of note. It was the same argument mayor Demircan had used when declaring that Tarlabaşı, with most of its buildings constructed in the 19th century, was a child of its time, but did not meet “contemporary urban requirements” and had been “abandoned” because it did not allow for a “modern urban lifestyle” which in his eyes meant enough street space to park a car (Gebetaş 2006). The many grievances and suggestions brought forth by the neighbourhood’s actual residents, the vast majority of whom did not own a car, were not taken into consideration.

<figure><img src="image_14.png" /><figcaption>Mobile poğaça seller</figcaption></figure>

Photo by Jonathan Lewis
Tarlabaşı residents were also absent from the different marketing materials pub-
lished by the Beyoğlu Municipality and designed to advertise the project to prospective
buyers and investors. The online marketing campaign for the project showed a carefully
curated upper middle class neighbourhood populated by white, middle class café goers,
shoppers, and white-collar businesspeople strolling between historicist façades. These
façades are the only feature that bear a vague resemblance to the old neighbourhood.
I will analyse this remarkable absence of residents from the main project catalogues in
depth in the following chapter.

This erasure, the authorities' tireless effort to un-remind and un-remember, was later extended to the name of the district itself: When the developers went to promote the renewal project at a real estate fair in Dubai in the fall of 2016, they changed its name from “Tarlabaşı 360” under which it had previously been marketed, to the more neutral “Taksim 360”. This attempt to erase the geographical location – and the stigma connected to it – from the brand (Alagöz 2016) did, however, not “stick”, and the local media still regularly use the old name for the project.

The symbolic erasure of the neighbourhood's residents took an absurd turn when
the Third Beyoğlu Administrative Court dispatched an independent expert committee to
Tarlabaşı on October 28, 2009. The court required their expert opinion for a case opened
in April 2008 by the Istanbul Chamber of Architects (TMMOB) against the Turkish Min-
istry of Culture and Tourism and the Beyoğlu Municipality in an attempt to put a stop
to project. The online website *Bianet* reported that the members of the committee went
to Tarlabaşı to find out “if anyone lived in the renewal area” (Çakır 2009). Local resi-
dents later described that the committee members had walked around the neighbour-
hood without talking to anybody, silently comparing the developer’s construction plans
to the buildings on the ground: “They come for an inspection, but they don’t talk to us,
nor do they look at our homes. They pretend they are looking [at the neighbourhood].
And then they say that nobody lives here. But we live here! Is there a bigger lie than this?”
The final expert report submitted to the court alleged that the original residents had left
their homes and that the designated urban renewal area looked “abandoned” due to the
physical appearance of the remaining buildings. The report also made a number of state-
ments about the motivations and concerns of local residents for which the authors would
have had to speak with them, which in all likelihood had not happened.<fnref n="14" />

This strategy of wilful erasure feeds into the stigmatisation narratives employed by
the municipality and the developer in order to justify their plans to demolish Tarlabaşı
and evict the neighbourhood's current residents. Characterising Tarlabaşı as an empty,
abandoned, and currently uninhabitable wasteland stigmatised residents as not worth
being considered. The argument could be made that they were stigmatised both for, and
as being invisible. This narrative served to facilitate the appropriation of space and, there-
fore, the displacement of residents and the demolition of their homes and workspaces.
As Sara Safransky (2014: 2) has pointed out in her analysis on the links between colonial-
ist discourses and the green redevelopment of Detroit, the portrayal of an urban area as a

<footnote n="14">14 A more detailed assessment of the report is outside the scope of this thesis. However, Can Atalay, the lawyer who represented TMMOB in the case, called the expert report "a terrible disgrace" and accused its authors of lack of independence.</footnote>
vacant plot awaiting resettlement does not only constitute discursive displacement of its inhabitants, but also involves “the dispossession of people and life ways”, as “under settler colonialism, only certain forms of labor and settlement are recognized and legitimated.”

This chapter has shown that different periods in Istanbul history provided different backdrops against which Tarlabaşı was framed as Other: as a neighbourhood of non-Muslim residents in the Ottoman capital, a stigma that evolved into that of non-Turkishness in the midst of the nascent Turkish nation, to later on become associated with conflicts stemming from massive rural migration, including political struggles of incoming Kurds during the 1990s and finally, following neoliberal urban policies and the gentrification of adjacent districts, to be predominantly described as “bad”, “criminal” and in need of “renewal”. Overall, the reputation of Beyoğlu as a place of vice and “debauchery”, embodied by the many bars, music halls and the visibility of prostitution, also informed the perception of Tarlabaşı over time, and it gained in notoriety through the displacement of “unwanted” and “disrespectable” locales and inhabitants, such as trans* sex workers, from other Beyoğlu areas to the neighbourhood. The specifics of how the Tarlabaşı stigma was justified in public discourse varied from context to context, and the ‘reasons’ the neighbourhood came to be stigmatised were (and are) also historical and context specific. The bad reputation of the neighbourhood has never been a static quality. Rather, the stigmatisation has always been an ongoing process of continuous symbolic defilement, and needed constant nourishment, reproduction, and maintenance. As one of the main actors invested in the renewal plans in Tarlabaşı, the state played a crucial role in feeding and exploiting this stigma. Material defilement, such as the wilful neglect of the building stock, the local infrastructure, and the lack provision of state and municipal services were also part of the continuous work that went into the stigmatisation, especially once the renewal project had been decided and, in the face of opposition and criticism, needed to be legitimised. However, neighbourhood stigma in Tarlabaşı was not only attached to place. Stigmatising narratives and anxious public discourses of the neighbourhood as a problematic area were also centred around imagined and stereotyped, generic types of residents, such as Kurds and trans* women sex workers. Another significant aspect of the neighbourhood’s stigmatisation is that it made people who fit these iconic problem profiles hyper-visible, while at the same time erasing Tarlabaşı residents from view. These different layers and stigmas did not simply pile up on top of each other. Instead, they shifted, intersected, and transcended each other, generating resentment and revanchist policies that depended on different social, political, and historical contexts.<fnref n="15" />

<footnote n="15">15 It also does not mean that other parts of Beyoğlu shrugged off all taints once gentrified, and in many ways its image as being insubordinate, immoral and in need of disciplining was reactivated at different stages, such as via the ban on outdoor seating in restaurants and bars in 2011, or during and after the Gezi uprising in 2013.</footnote>
Chapter three: Judging Books by Their Covers

Cemile, a Turkish woman in her sixties, first heard rumours about the planned renewal project in Tarlabaşı when she was about to have her spacious six-bedroom apartment in Tree Street repainted. This happened roughly a year after the municipality had convened a meeting with property owners and tenants to suggest a World Bank-supported renovation programme that would allow everyone to improve their own properties with the support of micro-credits. While most residents were enthusiastic about the idea, nothing came of it.<fnref n="1" /> However, to property owners like Cemile this public proposition signalled that the municipality had not forgotten about Tarlabaşı and wanted to support the rehabilitation of the neighbourhood. Furthermore, the municipality's initiative suggested a possible relaxation of restrictions on small-scale renovations put in place when Tarlabaşı had been declared a conservation area. It certainly did not indicate that the municipality was planning to raze a large part of the neighbourhood to the ground.

Like most people in Tarlabaşı, Cemile agreed that the local housing stock needed repair. The ceiling of her living room started to shed stucco and cave in after her upstairs neighbour had dropped an old iron stove on the floor. Cemile decided that the entire flat, one of six in a beautiful, but crumbling 19th-century Levantine building, could do with some plastering and a lick of paint. It was an expensive undertaking and would cost her 15,000 TL for the painter alone. In order to pay for the renovations, she wanted to sell some of the gold armbands her daughter-in-law, who at the time still lived with her and her husband Ramazan, had been given at her wedding. In order to make sure that she did not waste such a large amount of money, she and her downstairs neighbour Esma, a 35-year-old Kurdish widow, went to the municipal information office [Beyaz Masa, literally: White Table] to inquire about the rumours of a municipality-led renewal project and pending demolitions. Cemile was told to proceed with her renovation:

<footnote n="1">1 In 2008, the Tarlabaşı Association wrote about residents' initial reaction to the suggestion: "We believed in this possibility full-heartedly, thinking that it took our troubles on board. At least, we had developed faith that decades' long problems we suffered due to municipal regulations, conservation norms and obstacles posed by other public institutions would come to an end with the renovation of our properties. It was on these grounds that we gave support to the project since it would turn our buildings into livable places" (Ünsal 2013: 130).</footnote>
There was a fat lawyer at the *Beyaz Masa*. I said that we had heard that there would be demolitions, the people in the neighbourhood are saying something like that. I said that I was planning to paint my apartment and that I wanted to know. But he said that no, there were no such plans. Fatih Bey<fnref n="2" /> was there, too. They both said that there were no such plans in Tarlabaşı.

With this information from the *Beyaz Masa* in hand, Cemile decided to renovate the apartment. In addition to the sale of the jewellery, she and Ramazan took out a loan to have their living and bedrooms fitted with new PVC windows and a new balcony door (all of which cost another 15,000 TL), and the painters set to work. Four rooms in, the rumours about a renewal project became loud and disconcerting enough for Cemile to return to the municipality. This time, the “fat lawyer” replied to her question about demolitions in the affirmative. Cemile said that she almost fainted when she heard this.

They brought me water, I felt so ill. I said to them: But you told me that there won't be any demolitions! The fat lawyer and Fatih Bey were both there, and they both denied ever having said that. I swear they had said that there wouldn't be demolitions the first time I asked. But I had nothing in my hands to prove that, not about what they said then, not for any of it. I told them that I went to have my house renovated, and that I came to ask and that they said there would be no demolitions. The fat lawyer told me that he never said that.

A few months later the Beyoğlu Municipality publicly announced the Tarlabaşı renewal project. By then the municipal authorities had hired a subcontractor and declared the entire area an urban renewal zone under a recently enacted law that allowed the local authorities to expropriate homeowners that did not agree to sell their title deeds to the construction company. For months, Fatih Bey called Ramazan, whose name was the only one on the title deed, to try and convince him to sell the house. The deputy mayor never once called Cemile, but he treated her husband with politeness bordering on reverence. He invited him to have tea in the office, constantly asking him to “have a chat”. Fatih Bey played the role of the “good cop”, whereas the representatives and lawyers of developer *GAP İnşaat* exerted increasing pressure on Ramazan to sell, threatening him with a loss of profit on his prospective sale, and even expropriation. It worked. One day in April 2010 her husband came back home from yet another meeting with Fatih Bey and a couple of *GAP İnşaat* lawyers, and told her that he had signed over the house. Cemile was incensed. How could he have done something so consequential without asking her first? Ramazan told her that they had intimidated him, and that he felt “relieved” that it was “finally over”. To Cemile’s horror, it was not only their apartment that was gone. Ramazan also had, without having understood or even read the contract he signed, agreed to a deal that put the elderly couple 62,000 TL in debt. Their 135 m<fnref n="2" /> apartment had been appraised at 83,000 TL, whereas the value 52 m<fnref n="2" /> studio flat the *GAP İnşaat* lawyers had offered in exchange stood at 145,000 TL. Cemile could not believe it. Ramazan claimed that nobody had told

<footnote n="2">2 Fatih Bey was a Beyoğlu Municipality deputy mayor, and in charge of project management and resident relations on the municipality's side during the sales and pre-eviction phase. I never met him, but I often heard his name in conversations. The address means literally “Mr. Fatih” – in Turkish, the formal address “Bey” is used with the first name, and not the last.</footnote>
him what the contract entailed, and that the lawyers had threatened and yelled at him to sign the papers they had put on the desk. Cemile was beside herself and blamed her husband for ruining them. But later she argued that it had been dishonest of Fatih Bey to offer, or at least support, such a deal to her husband. “He knows we live off [Ramazan’s] little pension. He knows us quite well. He knows our life. He knows that we won’t be able to pay such a large debt.” This “negotiation” had happened before I met Cemile and her husband, but it was very clear that the deputy mayor had been a person that she felt was at least marginally responsible to make sure that their rights were being respected. After all, for months he had assured them of the municipality’s good faith and promised that nobody would be victimised by the project. Even after Ramazan had signed over the title deed, Fatih Bey positioned himself as the person they could come to for any concerns they might have. He told them that they could approach him with all questions about the ongoing legal and administrative procedures, and that he would make sure to keep them informed. This, too, turned out to be untrue. After Ramazan and Cemile were threatened with immediate eviction in July 2011, she told me:

> Fatih Bey had told us to bring him all the letters and documents that [GAP İnşaat] sent us. He said: anything that arrives at your house. So we brought all these papers to him and never kept any of them, and we never got anything from him either, no proof, nothing. He told me: ‘Anne<fnref n="3" />, don’t worry. Don’t worry about anything. He said: don’t be sad, don’t worry, you will not have to leave before we start demolishing and not before the bulldozers come. Nobody can make you leave before that.’ And now look at what happened.

She felt that her trust in Fatih Bey and the municipality had been betrayed. She and Ramazan struggled to find a new – temporary – apartment, even though they had been searching for weeks. It was important to both of them to stay in the neighbourhood they had spent their entire married life in, where both of them had close relationships with neighbours and shopkeepers. Cemile knew that Fatih Bey lived in the rather expensive Beyoğlu neighbourhood of Cihangir, and she was furious that he – as a representative of the municipality – demanded of them to find a rental apartment for 400 TL a month, when, she fumed, he “should have known that there are no houses here for this amount of money”. And yet this was the monthly rental aid that project agents had agreed to give to property owners who were waiting to move into their new units. This amount, optimistic even in the best of times, did not consider that rents in Tarlabaşı had quickly increased between 2008, when the renewal project was officially announced, and 2011, when evictions began. The ongoing and rapid gentrification of nearby areas (Ergun 2004; Ünsal 2013; Yetiskul and Demirel 2018), but also the project itself put a lot of pressure on local rents, since many tenants and property owners who had to move out of their Tarlabaşı homes sought to stay in the area. Furthermore, being kicked out of her old home with such sudden urgency seemed unfair to Cemile. While a number of residents were gone at that point, large-scale demolitions had not begun, and several of her neighbours still lived in their houses and kept their businesses open. The deputy mayor had promised Cemile transparency and security, promises on which he did not deliver. One day after

<footnote n="3">³ Turkish: mother. This address signals both respect and a certain familiarity.</footnote>
the frightening visit by the delegation that had meant to evict her, she went to see Fatih Bey in the sales office that he shared with GAP İnşaat representatives on Tarlabaşı Boulevard. She wanted to talk to him about the police showing up at her door, which had deeply humiliated her, and about the threat of an unexpectedly sudden eviction that he had not warned them of. She went to the office in the morning and sat down on the stairs at the entrance of the building, waiting for Fatih Bey to turn up. After a while she lost patience and went inside to ask an employee if it was possible to talk to the deputy mayor.

I said that I wanted to have a few words with Fatih Bey and that that was all. I said that I had not come to make [Fatih Bey] feel sorry for me, that I only wanted to talk to him. But he didn't come out. He was scared of me. Did he think that a 60-year-old woman had come to kill him? [makes a dismissive gesture with her hand] What good would it do me to kill him? I swear he didn't come out, even though he was there in his office. He had told the [employee] not to let me come up. I said that he should come down and talk to me by the traffic lights, that I wouldn't do anything to him in the street. I didn't have a knife or a gun, I had nothing! What would I be able to do to Fatih Bey? Then he called me and spoke to me on the phone. I begged him to come and talk to me, just this one time, I told him that that was all I wanted from him. Just this one talk. I told him that my house was his now anyway, that we would leave, that all I wanted was to talk to him. But he told me that he was done with us, that we had sold the house, that he would not get involved in anything anymore.

Fatih Bey did not come down to talk to Cemile. She said that the employee broke out in tears at her plight, but that she did not manage to soften the deputy mayor's heart enough to come see her for that one conversation she had asked for.

This anecdote might raise the question if Cemile, in her continuing attempts to interact with and seek anything from Fatih Bey, was dumb, naive, or ignorant about the nature of the renewal project. Why did she think that her interventions might change the course of the project? Why did she, even after her eviction was underway, try to reach out to the deputy mayor again?

One fundamental fact about the renewal project, and one I would like to analyse in this chapter, is that it 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 by reneging on promises that had been made very publicly at the beginning of the project. Cemile was neither too dumb to engage with the system, nor was she naive and trusted Faith Bey. However, she was trying to engage with a constantly moving target, the directions of which were impossible to anticipate based on the information that she was being given, both publicly and in private conversations with agents of the project.

This chapter, with the help of a close reading of two different project catalogues published over the course of five years, will trace the history of the project and the drastic changes it underwent over the years. An analysis of the changes to these promotional materials will show that project stakeholders did make certain promises and commitments to Tarlabaşı residents that were later broken, even while the municipality and the developer GAP İnşaat kept claiming publicly that negotiations with residents remained mutually amicable. What follows is a thick description of promotional texts produced
and disseminated at two very different points in the ‘life’ of the project, bookending the ethnography in this book. As such it provides an exploration of the immediate context and history of the project against which the residents of Tarlabaşı struggled, 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, and 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. Both the subtle and the more substantial alterations made to the promotional material, as well as to the way this material was handed out, provide insight into contextual changes in Turkey and in Istanbul that impacted the renewal project’s development, and in turn, the way residents positioned themselves vis-à-vis the project. Furthermore, it shows that, like in the case of Cemile, residents had to navigate and react to a constantly changing entity, which profoundly impacted the way they tried to accommodate or oppose the project. The first part of this chapter provides the analysis of the catalogue published in the first half of 2008, and the second part deals with the revised catalogue, published around 2011.<fnref n="4" /> I would like to, as linguistic anthropologist Megan Clark (2016:77) puts it, judge these books by their covers.

## 2008 catalogue: The exhibition

In May 2008, Beyoğlu mayor Ahmet Misbah Demircan opened an exhibition titled “Tarlabaşı shares its future” [*Tarlabaşı Geleceğini Paylaşıyor*] in the municipality-run Beyoğlu Art Gallery on Istiklal Avenue, where the planned urban renewal project was presented to the public for the first time. I attended the opening reception with two friends who lived in Tarlabaşı and were interested in what the renewal project entailed. All of us had been alerted to the planned project by a short article in the liberal daily *Radikal* in January 2008 that heralded the “End of Tarlabaşı”, citing mayor Demircan as saying that negotiations with property owners were underway and going smoothly (Radikal 2008). Owners of a Tarlabaşı apartment themselves, my friends were wondering what this announcement meant for their home and their neighbourhood. At the time I had reported on the project but did not yet conduct any research in Tarlabaşı. I also did not know that I would shortly do so, and it would be another year until I moved to Tarlabaşı myself. However, I was interested in urban renewal in Istanbul. It was at this vernissage that I picked up the first project catalogue and the accompanying brochure entitled “The Tarlabaşı Renewal Project in 50 questions”.

<footnote n="4">4 A third version of the sales catalogue is now in use. I am not entirely sure if a paper version still exists, but I was unable to obtain one at the sales office in 2019. However, the catalogues are available online at https://www.taksim360.com.tr/tr/kataloglar. A close reading of this commercial promotional material as a text object is sadly outside my fieldwork timeline and the scope of this book. However, it is important to note that the name of the project has been rebranded as “Taksim 360”, dropping the immediate reference to Tarlabaşı. The catalogue is now available in Turkish, English, Arabic and Farsi and promotes the neighbourhood with aggressive nostalgia of an imagined “old Beyoğlu”.</footnote>
The presentation of the project, advertised as an “exhibition opening”, took place on an early May evening. A small bar served non-alcoholic refreshments for guests, and bowls of snacks and finger foods had been placed on small tables around the room. Entry was free, and anybody interested was welcome to walk inside and have a look at the exhibition: large-scale printed panels that showed current pictures of Tarlabaşı juxtaposed with rendered images of what the same street would look like after renewal. A 3D architectural model of the project stood, under glass, in the middle of the gallery. Following the vernissage, it was moved in the window looking out onto Istiklal Avenue.

This display resonated with a familiar genre of exhibition: corporations, especially banks and large Turkish holding companies, dedicated at least part of their spaces, or even entire buildings, to galleries and cultural spaces on Istiklal Avenue or elsewhere in Beyoğlu.<fnref n="5" /> Running such prestigious locations, along with other cultural stewardship roles as a form of PR such as cultural sponsorship or inhouse publishing houses, is a regular domain of activity for corporations or holding companies of that size in Turkey. However, the stakes for “Tarlabaşı shares its future” were of course different. The municipality, in cooperation with a private developer, advertised a high-profile, predatory urban development project in a very consciously constructed art exhibit milieu, and handed the audience PR and propaganda materials in a form that resonated clearly with an art exhibit catalogue.

At the vernissage, Beyoğlu mayor Demircan justified the “exhibition” like this: “We wanted the Tarlabaşı Renewal Project to be implemented through widespread participation. Architects, property owners, civil society organisations – everyone should evaluate the project. Before starting with the implementation, we wanted to bring together positive and negative feedback. The project has been designed by considering the views, propositions, and participation of a wide range of people, most importantly of those who live in the area. This is what is needed for an open, transparent, and participatory management mentality. Before the project takes its final shape, it is being presented at this exhibition to garner the opinion and interest of the people and experts” (Kaya 2008). This promise of inclusiveness was mirrored in the 2008 catalogue as well, and residents like Cemile were initially told the same thing about nature of the project.

## 2008 catalogue: The material

In order to better understand the position that the catalogues convey, it is important to pay attention to their material form. Linguistic anthropologists have highlighted the necessity of analysing the materiality of text objects because of “the tendency of media to disappear in the act of mediation” (Eisenlohr 2011: 44). In her work on Kurdish linguistic

<footnote n="5">5 These galleries exhibited not just strictly visual arts, though they did that, too, but historical exhibits about a very diverse range of topics and disciplines, such as engineering, textiles, or literature. One good example is the Akbank Sanat cultural space, run by financial institution Akbank, a subsidiary of Sabancı Holding. Prominently located on the pedestrian avenue close to Taksim Square, it houses a large art exhibition space on the ground floor, as well as stage rooms for concerts, theatre and dance performances and a library specialised in the arts. Akbank Sanat regularly hosts well-known international contemporary artists and exhibitions.</footnote>
disobedience, Megan Clark (2016: 93) writes that with “any graphic object, be it textbook or notebook or calendar or road sign or bank statement or driver’s license or pink slip or credit card receipt, there is an analytical tendency to skip past a consideration of the way the materiality of such objects and the mediation they perform necessarily influence the meaning they are meant to carry.” And Matthew Hull (2012: 13), in his ethnographic study of urban bureaucracy and the material forms of bureaucratic documentation in Pakistan, points out how the material qualities of graphic objects contribute to their meanings. “Just as discourse has long been recognized as a dense mediator between subjects and the world, we need to see graphic objects not just as neutral purveyors of discourse, but as mediators that shape the significance of the linguistic signs inscribed in them.”

This is why I would like to draw attention to the material forms of the two different
project catalogues, and how the differences in materiality influenced their semiotic
engagement with their audience. Both project catalogues have a square shape and are
smaller than A4 in size. The 2008 catalogue has fold-out covers on both sides made of
high-quality carton in a matte grey and is reinforced with Bordeaux-coloured linen
binding. The front cover is imprinted with the official logo of the project, then called
the “Tarlabaşı Beyoğlu Municipality Renewal Project”, embossed in a lighter shade of
grey than the catalogue carton. The logo of the Beyoğlu Municipality is the only other
graphic, placed on the bottom of the front cover. The paper of the catalogue itself is
glossy card stock paper. The catalogue and the smaller brochure entitled “The Tarlabaşı
Renewal Project in 50 questions” are a matching pair. The brochure is bound in the same
high-quality matte grey carton trimmed with Bordeaux-coloured linen on one side, but
the paper used inside is thick newspaper material. The catalogue is stapled together,
whereas the brochure is glued because of the greater number of pages. The 2008 project
catalogue is difficult to categorise: it is not a book, not a political handout object, and its
makers have very carefully avoided making it look like the commercial catalogue that it
technically is. Its materiality and style resemble the portfolio of a top-tier architecture
firm or an art exhibit catalogue. Regardless of what the materials used for the catalogue
and the brochure actually cost, the style of binding, the embossed logo on the cover
and the high-quality grey paper read as “expensive” and “prestigious” in most circum-
stances, but even more so in the Turkish context, “where domestic publishing has until
recently been marked by the use of very low-quality materials (newsprint weight paper,
photocopied and not printed pages, glue-and-cardboard binding)” (Clark 2016: 100).

2008 catalogue: The content

On the first page of the 2008 catalogue, next to a smiling portrait photo of himself, Bey-
oğlu mayor Ahmet Misbah Demircan directly addresses “esteemed Beyoğlu residents and
Tarlabaşı property owners”<fnref n="6" /> in a foreword styled like a personal letter. This signals the in-
tended audience of this catalogue, which he formally addresses with the polite personal
pronoun “siz”. At the same time, his address excluded roughly 80 percent of Tarlabaşı res-
idents impacted by the project, all of whom were tenants (75 percent) or non-paying resi-

<footnote n="6">6 All citations in this chapter are from the project catalogues unless otherwise stated.</footnote>
dents (five percent) (Kentsel A.Ş. 2008). With this conspicuous position in the beginning of the catalogue, Demircan stands in as the “face” and main driver of the renewal project, giving the municipal side in this private-public partnership prominence. He consciously includes himself in the community of Beyoğlu residents by talking about “our district”. The participation of all interested parties, first and foremost of property owners and local, but not necessarily Tarlabaşı residents, stands at the centre of the foreword-letter. The foundational principle of the entire project, Demircan claims, is to ensure that current property owners will find a place inside the new development and that the municipality's responsibility to the public – finding solutions for the problems of local residents and preparing them for a better future – is fulfilled. He goes on to praise the planned renewal project, lauding its emphasis on not only spatial, but also social and economic dimensions as well as its “conservationist renewal approach” as a trailblazer for similar future urban projects. A misnomer, since law No. 5366, on the basis of which Tarlabaşı was declared an urban renewal zone in 2006, overwrites all other laws and regulations, including those that pertain to the conservation and protection of listed buildings. Finally, Demircan extends words of thanks to Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, then prime minister, who “did not spare assistance and support in order to make the project a reality”. Erdoğan had previously assured the Beyoğlu mayor of “any necessary support”, including legislations and political weight in Ankara, to “solve the Tarlabaşı problem” (Posta 2007). Demircan also extends words of thanks to then Istanbul mayor of the Greater Municipality Kadir Topbaş, as well as to unnamed property owners, district residents and “all local organisations”. The latter also remain anonymous.

In the 2008 catalogue the Beyoğlu municipality is presented as the main interlocutor for the project. Developer *GAP Inşaat* is clearly portrayed as the employed subcontractor, mentioned only as the 2007 winner of the tender for the renewal project, and as one of several members of the “Project Team” presented on a double page. Beneath the Bordeaux-coloured header is a list of the people involved in the planning, design, and execution of the renewal project. These are grouped into *GAP Inşaat* Project Director Nilgün Kıvırcık and the *GAP Inşaat* Project Coordination Team made up of four men who are named but whose functions and titles are not described further. Then follows a list of members of the “Advisory Council”: three professors who are named with their full academic titles, functions, and universities, one academic advisor with the title of “Doctor” but no further information as to his function or expertise, and one man without any academic titles, who then worked for the “Planning Office” of the Mimar Sinan Academy of Fine Arts in Istanbul. Finally, the catalogue lists the names of the members of the project’s “Design Team” – seven architects or architect firms, referred to elsewhere in the catalogue as “star” architects of Turkey, who each are working on one or two different units in Tarlabaşı. Their names are listed next to the name of their firm and the project unit they have been assigned. This list of names and titles appears next to six black-and-white photographs, each of which depicts a group of unspecified and unnamed people sitting or standing around a large meeting table in various settings. Each picture shows a different room and a different table in a professional or, presumably, an academic context, and participants involved in the planning and discussion of what can be assumed is the renewal project. Scattered architectural maps and drawings, open laptops, pens, paper, open notebooks as well as half-drunk plastic water bottles, tea glasses and coffee
cups index work and/or an ongoing debate and the busy-ness of the people depicted in each picture. The top left photograph was taken in what appears to be the municipal-ity, with mayor Demircan sitting at the head of an oblong meeting table surrounded by what appear to be other municipal or government officials. However, due to the lack of all captions or explanations, their identities remain unclear.

Nobody else involved in the renewal project is featured anywhere in the catalogue. Despite the repeated claims by the municipality of wanting to involve actors from different fields and interest groups, and despite the repeated assurances of widespread participation, the catalogue makes no mention of any civil society organisation, of any outside expert group, or even any Tarlabaşı residents, by name or picture. None of the property owners whom Demircan addresses in the foreword, and some of whom own several large buildings inside the planned renewal zone, are mentioned.

## 2008 catalogue: The neighbourhood

Arguably the main protagonist of both project catalogues, the neighbourhood of Tar-labaşı appears in a variety of maps, coloured photographs, and text descriptions. The 2008 catalogue features an aerial photograph to which the spatial boundaries of the re-newal zone were added in a Bordeaux-coloured line, another that shows the neighbour-hood from above and from a sideways angle, as well as several colour photographs of present-day Tarlabaşı and the streets that will be renewed. These photos rarely depict actual Tarlabaşı residents but include iconic images of washing lines criss-crossing the streets, some parked vehicles, and shopfronts of greengrocers. A coloured picture on the very last page of the first catalogue is the only one where Tarlabaşı residents – three small boys sitting on entrance stairs in front of a building, one holding a plastic gun – look into the camera.

This image of the three boys is striking, because it is the only one that explicitly fea-tures Tarlabaşı residents. There are no photographs that show recognisable adult resi-dents in their neighbourhood. Also lacking is a presentation or actual discussion of the neighbourhood association's organisers who were very active in 2008. There is no rep-resentation of community advocates. None of these people, all of whom are massively impacted by the project, have a voice in this catalogue. They do not get to speak, and they do not get named.

The language in the catalogue describes Tarlabaşı as plagued by physical and social decay, by crime and economic precariousness. It depicts an area whose heritage and beauty currently lie dormant, or stronger even, are under siege. To underline this, dif-ferent slogans are scattered throughout the catalogue, each time on a page in a different colour that each feature both the project and the municipality logos. These slogans clearly advertise the renewal project as the saviour of a beleaguered neighbourhood: a green page carries the slogan "Tarlabaşı encounters greenery" [Tarlabaşı Yeşille buluşuyor], a dark yellow page the slogan "Tarlabaşı encounters the light" [Tarlabaşı Işıkla buluşuyor], a pur-ple page the slogan "Tarlabaşı comes to life" [Tarlabaşı Canlaniyor], and a light blue page the slogan "Tarlabaşı meets the air" [Tarlabaşı Havaya kavuşuyor]. Describing the future
that the renewal promises, these slogans forego all subtlety in order to frame present-
day Tarlabaşı as a rank, dark, and lifeless place.

2008 catalogue: The project

The catalogue offers little detailed information about the actual implementation of the renewal project. Some basic numbers are given on one double page, with the information as follows: The renewal zone covers an area of 20,000m². 278 buildings, 210(213)<fnref n="7" /> of which are listed, will be (partly) demolished and joined into nine building blocks. The page includes two architectural maps of the renewal zone inside Tarlabaşı: the first shows the designated plots of the 278 houses included in the project area. The second map, the “suggested plan”, shows the same area after the demolition, with buildings joined into nine blocks invested with augmented spatial capacities for their future various functions as residences, offices, and different commercial ventures. The catalogue reader is further informed that the Beyoğlu Municipality invited bids for the project tender on March 16, 2007, and that construction company GAP İnşaat was awarded the project execution. The contract between the developer, Beyoğlu Municipality, and the Greater Istanbul Municipality, which acted as the supervising umbrella institution for all Istanbul renewal projects, was signed three weeks later, on April 4, 2007.

Despite repeated reassurances, not least by the mayor at the “exhibition opening”, that opinions and suggestions of residents and third-party experts would be considered during the preparation phase, the 2008 catalogue handed out at that opening introduces a final design for the finished development project, illustrated with rendered images of what Tarlabaşı will look like after the renewal. These graphics are each juxtaposed with photographs of the old Tarlabaşı, depicting a “before” and an “after” in the same street. Computer-generated architectural images – the Tarlabaşı that project developers imagine and promise to create – show lush courtyards planted with palm trees and colourful flowers, clean cobblestone streets lined by narrow sidewalks, and a combination of restored and rebuilt bow-front façades and modern architecture that adds steel railings and floor length windows to Tarlabaşı buildings. However, these graphics do not only show what the *buildings* in the neighbourhood will look like in the future. They also introduce what kind of *people* project stakeholders imagine will live, work, and shop there. These new residents very pointedly have nothing in common with those that the mayor claimed he wanted to include. The computer-generated inhabitants in the catalogue index a Western model of wealth and middle class lifestyles by way of their clothing, their means of transport, and the accessories they carry. All of them are white, and a large number are blond. Furthermore, the new Tarlabaşı is depicted under bright blue skies compared to the drab and grey neighbourhood shown in the opposite pictures:

Under the headline “Purpose”, the 2008 catalogue lists the main goals of the renewal project as defined by project stakeholders in four bullet points:

<footnote n="7">7 The headline of that page claims that there are 213 listed buildings, while the number 210 is given in the text.</footnote>
* A participatory partnership between the municipality, investors, property owners, civil society organisations and local residents

* An approach of conservation through renewal and revitalisation that will replace the small plots unable to accommodate contemporary functions into buildings blocks in line with principles of design and functionality

* Intervention with the purpose of improving the quality of life of local residents, and to ensure their social and economic development

* A vision that will substitute urban disintegration with liveable spaces that are in harmony with their surroundings

The stated “fundamental purpose” of the project, highlighted in the catalogue in Bordeaux-coloured font, is “to ensure that property owners and long-time tenants will continue to live in the area after the finalisation of the construction works and that they will be able to profit from the generated surplus value.” Maybe the most important aspirational description of the project’s relationship with Tarlabaşı residents is the repeated emphasis on the planned implementation of a “social recovery” [sosyal kalkınma] programme with the argument that physical renewal must go hand in hand with the social development of the neighbourhood. The municipality promises a two-pronged approach to this: One the one hand the project will bring economic regeneration to Tarlabaşı and the surrounding areas through the massive investment in commerce, tourism, and the high-end service sector, all of which are expected to generate “work and habitation opportunities” for local residents. A municipality-led “capacity building programme” based on research of residents’ “social profiles” aims to provide short-term employment in the construction sector during the development phase of the project, and long-term employment in the commerce, tourism and service sectors that will be introduced to the area once the project is completed. On the other hand, the municipality promises education and job training programmes for local residents, with a special emphasis on youth and women, as well as the establishment of a municipality-financed “Tarlabaşı Social Centre” in order to implement this “social plan”. All of this, the catalogue pledges, will be planned and executed in cooperation with (unnamed) universities, civil society organisations and trade associations.

## 2008 catalogue: The stated project objectives and procedures

Both catalogues describe Tarlabaşı as an area plagued by decay, crime, and as a neighbourhood that does not live up to contemporary middle class expectations and standards. In the 2008 catalogue, under the headline “Economic recovery” [Ekonomik canlanma] and an image of a dilapidated Tarlabaşı street where the only visible person is an unrecognisable individual in a wheelchair who inexplicably faces a grey wall, the catalogue text reads:

> “Although Tarlabaşı neighbours important central locations such as Taksim Square and Istiklal Avenue, [the neighbourhood] was unable to benefit from the increasing economic and cultural revitalisation in the area. Even the buildings that line Tarlabaşı
Boulevard were unable to draw big-scale commercial activity, due to the image prob-
lems that stem from the high crime rate and the dilapidated state of the neighbour-
hood. While this area has a lot of potential, it has engraved itself in the collective mem-
ory with empty buildings and neglected streets."

Throughout the 2008 catalogue, this narrative of a neighbourhood where physical, economic, and social abandonment has created the need for urban renewal is dominant. The chosen colour photographs resemble images that a certain type of tourist might find alluring and that have been criticised elsewhere as “poverty porn” (Miles 2009; Jensen 2014; Feltwell et al. 2017): slightly grubby-looking children, hastily scribbled graffiti, crumbling façades, garbage in the street, battered satellite dishes, improvised and shabby additions to buildings such as plastic awnings, and the slightly disorderly fronts of “unmodern” neighbourhood corner stores.

The 2008 catalogue points out problems in the neighbourhood identified by project stakeholders, but it is unclear if any of the residents' concerns are being included in them, or if residents were asked to identify problems that they wanted the project to address. However, the accompanying brochure "The Tarlabaşı Renewal Project in 50 Questions" lists nineteen questions that are voiced from the position of a(n imagined) Tarlabaşı resident. Surprisingly detailed, these questions are as follows:

2 Could not everyone who wanted it, do the renovations themselves?

7 What will the project gain for the people who live there?

15 What will be done for tenants and property owners?

16 How will the victimisation of property owners in the interim period be prevented?

17 Will there be special support for those who have to move their businesses?

20 What are the education, life and future opportunities offered to local children and youth in the framework of the project?

21 Has it been established where families will move to and where children will go to school?

22 What will negotiations between the Tarlabaşı Renewal Project and local residents look like?

25 What rights are given to property owners in the framework of the project?

26 How is the value of the properties included in the project established?

27 What rights are given to those who own businesses and workshops in the project area?

28 What rights are given to local tenants?

29 Will those who live in the neighbourhood without paying any rent be given any claim?

30 Will property owners be able to claim rental aid?

31 Will those who do not own property be able to claim rental aid?

32 What suggestions will be made to property owners who own small shares or parts of shares?

33 Will the construction area be emptied of people in stages or all at once?

35 What will happen in the job training programmes aimed at local residents?

36 What kind of training programmes will be offered to local residents?
The answers to these questions put an emphasis on fairness and the inclusion of all residents throughout the project planning and execution stage. Just as in the (2008) catalogue, the corresponding answers in the brochure imply that the project will bring an improvement of living conditions, employment opportunities as well as training programmes for local residents. The nature of these training programmes remains vague, but it is stated that young people will have access to (unspecified) job training [İstihdam Odaklı Mesleki Eğitim Programları], “talent improvement” [Yeteneklerin Artırılması Programları] for foreign languages and computer use as well as artistic skill development programmes [Sanatsal Becerilerin Geliştirilmesi Programları], for example in music, theatre and cinema. Education programmes geared towards women include literacy courses, unspecified job training and “mother and child health”. The municipality further promises to offer business development training and “micro-credit possibilities”, without further specification what this might entail. All of these courses and training programmes are announced as free of charge, though the brochure specifies that funding strategies and financial sources for these programmes remain to be clarified.

The brochure guarantees that “not a single property owner” will be victimised, and that “all tenants” will receive some form of (unspecified) assistance [kolaylıklar]. While tenants were initially not included in any compensation schemes at all, the brochure promises them the right to the priority purchase of a TOKI social housing unit in a location not specified in the brochure.<fnref n="8" />

Property owners, the brochure alleges, will be presented with various options during sales negotiations. In reality they had two options that were not specified in the PR materials: They could agree to sell their property and receive monetary compensation or buy a property in the finished development project. The latter meant that according to the plans drawn up by GAP İnşaat, they would only receive units that covered 42 percent of the floorplan of their old properties. Their properties were to be appraised by an unspecified “Licensed Real Estate Evaluation Company” [SPK Lisanslı Gayrimenkul Değerleme Şirketi]. It was possible that owners lost their Tarlabaşı homes in exchange for a smaller property in the new project and on top of that, were saddled with additional debt to cover the difference of the assessed value. This is what happened to Cemile and Ramazan. Homeowners who did not reach an agreement with GAP İnşaat or who were unwilling to negotiate at all would be expropriated by the municipality on the basis of renewal Law No. 5366. That was supposedly “option” number three.

Property owners who wanted to exchange their old homes against a new apartment were guaranteed a monthly rental aid of 400 TL for the period between their having to move out and the moment their new apartments in the renewal project were handed over. This aid was only offered to property owners who did not own any other real estate than

<footnote n="8">8 Priority purchase meant that tenants did not have to attend the usual “lotteries” and other bureaucratic hurdles to buy a TOKI unit. The location was later specified to be a newly built TOKI satellite city in Kayabaşı, a suburb at a 40-kilometre distance from Taksim Square. The option to rent a TOKI apartment was not offered, and mortgage payments for the Kayabaşı units usually ran over fifteen years. While these monthly payments were relatively low, they did not include amenities, extra fees (such as for the mandatory concierge), or public transportation costs, which meant that residents, most of whom did not have a secure monthly income, took a considerable risk.</footnote>
the one they themselves inhabited. This was the amount Cemile and Ramazan received, and, as they soon realised, it was not enough to find an acceptable temporary rental in the area.

The brochure further claims that business owners would have “various rights” [çeşitli haklar] in relation to income loss and employee compensation. Squatters would not receive any compensation for their eviction but were promised a place in the planned “certified” [sertifikali] training programmes. The options for business owners, including landlords, proposed in the brochure are vague: solutions for those who risk losing income, be it from their business or rent, are to be worked out in cooperation between the municipality, the project developer, and the Tarlabaşı Association. The brochure also states that construction was planned to start by the end of 2008, which means that project stakeholders foresaw negotiations with property owners to last a few months only. Ten out of the fifty questions in the brochure reflect an outsider's concern about Tarlabaşı and Tarlabaşı residents:

8 What are the social profiles of local residents?

9 Where do property owners in the project area originally come from?

10 What kinds of work do property owners in the area do?

11 How many people in the project area are property owners, how many are tenants?

12 How livable are the buildings in the project zone?

14 What is the employment status of local residents?

18 What is the education level of local children?

19 What is the situation of young people in the area?

23 When have negotiations with local residents started?

34 When will construction begin?

It is evident from the brochure that, while the emphasis is still on inclusiveness and assistance to current Tarlabaşı residents, the municipality hopes to attract a new kind of urban resident to the area (Ünsal 2013: 127). This is why the text states that local students will be told at a later date which (permanent or temporary) school they will transfer to during the construction phase,<fnref n="9" /> and why the Beyoğlu Municipality promises to provide support to those local residents who “prefer to rent a new home” or “move in with relatives in other neighbourhoods”. Contrary to the 2008 catalogue and brochure statements concerning the inclusive and participatory nature of the renewal project, the municipality had awarded the tender to a private developer already in the spring of 2007, despite the fact that the buildings inside the designated renewal area belonged to Tarlabaşı property owners who were unaware of the renewal plans.<fnref n="10" /> At that time, residents such as Cemile were told that rumours about eviction and demolition plans of the municipality were false.

<footnote n="9">9 There were no schools inside the renewal area, but families who had to leave Beyoğlu faced the problem of having to find new schools for their children.</footnote>

<footnote n="10">10 In 2009, the Tarlabaşı Association launched a criminal case against the Beyoğlu Municipality for opening up private properties for tender. 120 members and property owners participated in the complaint (Ünsal 2013: 144).</footnote>
Project stakeholders never disclosed the criteria and methods used by the real es-
tate evaluation company, unnamed in the PR material, for appraising Tarlabaşı proper-
ties. The contracted evaluation experts never entered any of the buildings, or even visited
the neighbourhood. They based their findings solely on the buildings' title deeds, which
leaders of the Tarlabaşı Association thought gave them an incomplete idea of their actual
value. The developer also refused to share the definite final size of the planned buildings
with the association, which made it impossible for property owners to know if they were
adequately compensated for their homes.<fnref n="11" /> Project stakeholders' inconsistent and vague
manner in engaging with residents' concerns became one of the reasons that the associ-
ation finally withdrew from talks with GAP İnşaat and the municipality and concentrated
on rallying grassroots resistance (Ünsal 2013: 131). The anecdote at the beginning of this
chapter illustrates that this inconsistency also pervaded one-on-one interactions with
individual Tarlabaşı property owners.

<figure><img src="image_15.png" /><figcaption>Rooftop pigeon raising</figcaption></figure>

Photo by Jonathan Lewis

The social programmes, a prominent part of the municipality's advertisement and
renewal justification campaign in their 2008 promotional material, had been introduced
under the pressure of the Tarlabaşı Association. The same was true for a revised demo-
graphic survey of the area. This indicates an initial will to take at least some suggestions
of residents on board. However, in the end none of the negotiation options offered to
property owners or tenants took the findings of that new survey into account, and project
stakeholders ignored repeated demands by the association to find viable solutions for

<footnote n="11">11 As part of their tender bid, GAP İnşaat promised 42 percent of the newly built units on their title deed (Ünsal 2013: 145–146).</footnote>
tenants who after all made up the vast majority of Tarlabaşı residents. The advertised inclusiveness and social responsibility remained only on paper.

In all of the marketing material, there are no photographs or textual descriptions of a neighbourhood where residents are themselves involved in planning, discussing, or negotiating with project stakeholders. There are no pictures of residents interacting and working together to improve the neighbourhood, or even talking to each other. And while the catalogue repeatedly states that the project's main goal is the involvement of local residents, as well as the improvement of their housing, and of their economic and social situations, not a single Tarlabaşı resident is identified or quoted in the entire booklet. They appear as a huddled, nameless mass waiting for their neighbourhood to be lifted from poverty by outside institutions. As I have argued in chapter two, the rendered images of the neighbourhood after renewal literally erase all of the present Tarlabaşı as it was before the arrival of the bulldozers.

## 2008 catalogue context: The association

The Beyoğlu exhibition and the publication of the 2008 catalogue came in the wake of the foundation of the "Tarlabaşı Association of Property Owners and Tenants for Progress and Solidarity" in March 2008. By that time Tarlabaşı residents had already heard rumours of a renewal project, including the possibility of large-scale demolitions. Anxious whispers began to spread. While neither the declaration of Tarlabaşı as an urban renewal zone, nor the awarded tender had been communicated to residents, some property owners had already been approached by the developer's lawyers. The association, realising that the project was already underway and threatening not only property rights, but also the cohesion of the neighbourhood, set to work immediately. In a short amount of time, and with the support of three volunteer lawyers, the founding members mobilised local residents, and convinced more than 200 property owners to accept, via letters of attorney, the association as their legal representative. This clout amongst property owners – the principal interlocutors for negotiations with project stakeholders – secured the association a (temporary) seat at the planning table, especially because prior efforts by the Beyoğlu Municipality and GAP İnşaat to convince individual owners to sell their properties had failed (Ünsal 2013: 140). Between March and July 2008, the association attended at least 13 meetings with project stakeholders, during which association representatives collected and documented all project-related data and information. They made this material available to local residents in mass neighbourhood meetings organised in local tea-houses. Property owners who were not members of the association, such as Cemile and Ramazan, had access to those meetings and this information as well. Criticism and input collected at these gatherings was then taken back to the municipality and GAP İnşaat. Most importantly, the association succeeded in convincing the municipality to commission a new demographic survey of the neighbourhood, as the then existing one not only lacked crucial information but was partly incorrect (Ünsal 2013: 131). If a social programme really was to be successfully implemented, they argued, the municipality needed precise information.
In July 2008 the association withdrew from the talks over disagreements concerning transparency, legality, negotiation tactics, and the way compensation for residents was being calculated. Project agents also refused the association's demand to view drafts and details of the renewal project. Instead of negotiating with project stakeholders, the association set off a phase of intense campaigning to effect change in the way the planned renewal project was to be implemented. As a result, association members who owned property in Tarlabaşı unanimously agreed to refuse any one-on-one negotiation meetings with *GAP İnşaat*. The idea was to prevent the developer and the municipality from splintering the resistance through manipulation and individual offers for different property owners. Project stakeholders refused the idea of holding collective sales meetings with the association, which effectively meant that negotiations reached a stalemate. The association's efforts were supported by a stringent information campaign for Tarlabaşı residents, organised by association spokesman Erdal Aybek. Up until the summer of 2010 he manned an office on Tarlabaşı Boulevard where worried residents could approach him with project-related questions five days a week. The association painstakingly documented the meetings with project stakeholders and kept tabs on all title deeds, as well as on the development of ongoing court cases. Therefore, Erdal was able to inform residents, and anyone who wanted to know, about who had sold their property, and who had not. Journalists and researchers could also approach him with questions about the project that stakeholders were more hesitant or unwilling to answer.

Erdal was very successful in dispelling residents' fears about landlords or fellow Tarlabaşı property owners secretly selling their title deeds. He was able to provide copies of the necessary legal documents, therefore putting to rest many of the circulating rumours and forestalling panic sales. With the help of the volunteer lawyers the association was able to provide valuable legal assistance. They helped Tarlabaşı residents to cut through the legalese of all official correspondence with the municipality, advised them on further possible steps, and how to manage their interactions with project stakeholders.

The association also rallied for the support of civil society organisations, academics, trade chambers as well as opposition MPs. They organised demonstrations on Tarlabaşı Boulevard and in front of the Beyoğlu Municipality to raise awareness amongst the general Istanbul population. It was a very efficient strategy. All these combined efforts successfully stalled the entire renewal project and put negotiations in a deadlock for almost two years (Ünsal 2013: 133).

## 2008 catalogue context: Non-resident opposition to the project

The Tarlabaşı Association was not the only obstacle for project stakeholders. In April 2008, the Istanbul Chamber of Architects filed a lawsuit to halt the Tarlabaşı Renewal Project on the grounds that it violated the Turkish constitution on several accounts, including on citizen's rights, private property rights, and conservation norms (Ünsal 2013: 133). Following the public announcement of the renewal project at the exhibition and the publication of the 2008 catalogue, outside scrutiny and criticism of the planned project increased. Tarlabaşı residents started to take legal action in 2009, when they joined their cases to the court case initiated by the Chamber of Architects the previous
year. In 2010, the association filed an additional complaint with the European Court of Human Rights in order to prevent the looming expropriations. A number of Tarlabaşı property owners opened individual court cases to contest the pending seizure of their homes by the municipality because they had not come to an agreement with GAP İnşaat. At the same time, the planned Tarlabaşı renewal and other AKP-led urban development projects had begun to garner negative press both in Turkey and abroad. The association received a letter from UNESCO stating that the organisation shared residents' concerns over the preservation of historical heritage in Tarlabaşı (Ünsal 2013: 135). In September 2010, supported by the Chamber of Architects, civil society initiative SOS Istanbul organised a small gathering and the public reading of a press statement on Tarlabaşı Boulevard, urging against the demolition of “perfectly intact historical buildings”. In July 2011, Amnesty International issued an Urgent Action press release, demanding a stop to forced evictions in Tarlabaşı (Amnesty International 2011a).

## 2008 catalogue context: The red flag

By the time of the 2008 exhibition and the publication of the catalogue, most local civil society associations already harboured serious doubts that AKP government officials, both nationally and in the Istanbul and Beyoğlu municipalities, would follow through on their promises that the Tarlabaşı Renewal Project and other similar urban regeneration plans meant to improve the living conditions and the socio-economic status of the urban poor. To an important extent this was due to the then still ongoing “renewal” of Sulukule.

Sulukule, a Romani neighbourhood in the Istanbul district of Fatih has a history that dates back to the 15th century. In 2006, it became the first area in Turkey to be declared an urban renewal zone under Law No. 5366. The highly contested and widely mediatised urban renewal project drew local and international protest. Despite widespread criticism, despite a pending application to the Board of Listed Buildings to declare Sulukule protected urban heritage, and despite an ongoing court case against the project, demolitions in the neighbourhood began in February 2008. It was at almost exactly the same time that Tarlabaşı residents learned that their neighbourhood was threatened by a very similar project, and under the same legislation. In her analysis of organised grassroots resistance against the Tarlabaşı renewal project, Özlem Ünsal (2013: 130) notes that the “juxtaposition of ‘the beginning’ and ‘the end’ held strong implications for the community members of Tarlabaşı since the experience of Sulukule provided them with a foresight as to what could happen in the future.” And indeed, Tarlabaşı residents often described Sulukule as a warning to them. The Sulukule project attracted a lot of attention (and scorn) by local and international media, by NGOs, civil organisations, as well as by several EU bodies. The 2007 EU Progress Report for Turkey criticised the Sulukule renewal project for disregarding the rights of local residents and discriminating against Romani citizens. (This EU objection was possibly one of the reasons for the very different frame that the Beyoğlu Municipality initially chose for the Tarlabaşı project.) Turkish opposition parties and the mainstream media criticised the Sulukule project for the violation of regeneration standards and blatant profiteering by project stakeholders (Ünsal 2013: 23). Demolitions and forced evictions continued even as the resistance received
various forms of widely-mediatised support from local and international actors such as UNESCO, the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), the UN Habitat Advisory Group on Forced Evictions (AGFE), the US Helsinki Commission, MPs of the European Parliament, the co-chairman of the Turkey-EU Joint Parliamentary Commission, the commissioner for human rights in the Council of Europe and a number of celebrities, such as popular Turkish singer Sezen Aksu, film director Tony Gatlif, French singer Manu Chao, and US punk band Gogol Bordello. Despite such widespread and diverse protest, the project went ahead. By July 2010, the Sulukule renewal area had been razed, and more than 400 families had been moved to social housing units in Taşoluk, a high-rise TOKI settlement approximately 45 kilometres from their former places of residence. Just as in Tarlabaşı, tenants were offered the right to purchase an apartment in the newly built TOKI settlement of Taşoluk. They were expected to pay instalments over a period of 180 months, by the end of which they would become the owners of their property. Added to this were monthly amenity bills as well as a fee for a concierge, plus considerable costs for public transport. Many former Sulukule residents lived off precarious day jobs and had no secure monthly income. Most defaulted on their mortgage and sold their new apartments to move back in the vicinity of Sulukule, in several cases cramped in with relatives, as housing prices in the neighbourhood had increased considerably (Letsch, 2011; Ünsal 2013).

All this sounded eerily familiar to Tarlabaşı residents and the leaders of the Tarlabaşı association, who closely monitored eviction proceedings and resistance tactics in Sulukule, as well as the experience of Sulukule residents who were sent to a far-away – and ultimately unaffordable – suburb. The question remains if and how the realisation that Sulukule was destroyed despite high-profile solidarity from international organisations and celebrities, something that Tarlabaşı residents never had at this scale, influenced neighbourhood morale and opposition to the Tarlabaşı renewal project.

## 2008 catalogue: Socio-economic and political context

The public announcement of the Tarlabaşı renewal project at the Beyoğlu Municipality's art gallery came during a time that historian Kerem Öktem (2011: 144) calls the AKP's “European years”, when the Kemalist project of a unitary identity and historiography had come increasingly under pressure in favour of a diverse and more democratic political debate that challenged the hegemonic narrative.

Contrary to their predecessors, the AKP, who had come to power in the 2002 national elections, “embraced the free market economy, adopted the discourse of democracy, human rights and rule of law, and enthusiastically supported Turkey’ entry into the EU” (Patton 2007: 343). The government undertook a series of legal and structural reforms in order to bring the country in line with both EU accession and IMF programme standards. The (most enthusiastically mediatised part of the) negotiations for Turkey to join the union were to a large part based on the EU’s demands for Turkey to guarantee human rights, minority rights, and equity for its citizens. With regards to urban regeneration, EU expectations for social and economic development therefore included that this would be done without dispossessing and further disenfranchising the poor urban populations.
In April 2006, Istanbul, along with Pécs in Hungary and Essen in Germany, was announced as a European Capital of Culture 2010 (ECOC 2010). The project was led by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, the Istanbul Governorship, the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality, and coordinated by the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (IKSV).<fnref n="12" /> The designation as European Capital of Culture put a spotlight on urban regeneration as part of the effort to preserve cultural heritage, but also on the fact that at the time, Istanbul was under threat to be included on the “World Heritage List in Danger” due to the lack of effective and adequate conservation, and the overuse of regeneration policies and practices (Gunay 2010: 1179). One of the stated goals of the ECOC 2010 Istanbul initiative was to “restore cultural and industrial heritage”, including the revitalisation of historic urban sites. Istanbul received the biggest-ever budget for any European Capital of Culture at that time. However, 95 percent of all projects were funded by the central government, which meant that Ankara exerted more control over planning and execution of the programme than local organisers had anticipated (Rampton et al. 2011). Furthermore, in her research on the impact of ECOC 2010 Istanbul on the approach to the regeneration of historic buildings and sites in the city, Gunay notes that “perceived economic benefits from the re-usage of cultural heritage cause the transformation of historic sites into large-scale development projects” with an emphasis on real estate development and tourism (Gunay, 2010: 1175). In this vein Kadir Topbaş, the AKP mayor of the Greater Istanbul Municipality, stated that Law No. 5366 would be used to “meet the demands of 2010”, and a number of historical sites were declared urban renewal zones under this law in the run-up to the ECOC 2010 events (ibid: 1175).

By the end of 2008, the effects of the global financial crisis reached Turkey, which meant that the availability of investment funds was fundamentally impacted. Over the course of the next twelve months, the Turkish economy contracted by twelve percent, with the real estate and construction sectors amongst the most severely affected (Öktem 2011: xviii; Coşkun 2013). Domestically, the slowdown was only temporary. The Turkish economy continued to grow at a seven percent rate on average, mostly on the back of the government-driven construction boom, as the AKP government focussed, in economic policy, legal reforms, and public message, on massive infrastructure and construction projects as one of the main motors to drive economic growth.<fnref n="13" />

By then, urban regeneration had long been a crucial part of the AKP's neoliberalisation of Turkey, and Istanbul played a central role. In 2005, six years after the devastating Marmara earthquake, a report published by the Greater Istanbul Municipality entitled “Urban Renewal and the Historical Environment” stated large-scale restructuring and renewal provided the opportunity to turn Istanbul into a “world city” in harmony with EU standards and expectations (Ünsal 2013: 78). With the help of 400 million dollars

<footnote n="12">12 IKSV was founded in 1973 by a group of Turkish entrepreneurs headed by industrialist Nejat F. Eczacıbaşı.</footnote>

<footnote n="13">13 The economic success of the AKP depended on the ability of the government to initiate projects like the one in Tarlabaşı, and to enter into public as well as large-scale public-private construction endeavours. This necessitated the government to be able to push through required laws and regulations, such as Law No. 5366 that was used to declare Tarlabaşı and Sulukule urban renewal zones.</footnote>
granted by the IMF to make the city earthquake-resilient, the municipality, in close coop-
eration with the Ankara government, worked out a comprehensive urban development
plan, supported by various master plans and reports, that included "the regeneration and
rehabilitation of run-down and de-industrialised areas, the central business district and
its surroundings", and "the creation of new landmarks unique to Istanbul" (ibid.). This
was justified by the stated need to "advance on a local level", "develop a progressive sense
of urban governance", "boost the competitive qualities of the city", "trigger metropolitan
development" and "create a conducive environment for national and international part-
nerships and investment" (ibid.).

In order to overcome and lift obstacles for reaching this goal, the AKP government,
starting in 2004, passed a number of substantive legal and institutional reforms in the
fields of construction, real estate, local governance and housing finance. This included
additional, extensive powers and authorities for greater and district municipalities to
implement urban renewal projects, to establish partnerships with private companies,
and to sell publicly owned land and assets to private developers (Kuyucu and Ünsal 2010).
The heavy reliance on the real estate and construction sectors were increasingly and de-
liberately being driven and secured by the state (Ünsal 2013: 75). Large-scale urban regen-
eration projects in Istanbul aimed to integrate public land, coastal and industrial zones
and gecekondu areas into the capitalist rent circuit (Ünsal 2013; Sakızlıoğlu 2014a; Demi-
ralp 2016; Ay 2019; Yardımcı 2020; Rivas-Alonso 2021). On a more symbolic level, state
officials, such as then prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan or Istanbul mayor Kadir Top-
baş, touted massive urban renewal as the driving force to heighten the country's prestige
and standing on the global stage (Ünsal 2013: 76–77).

In the same vein, the government enacted sweeping reforms in regard to informal
housing. Framed as security risks in the case of an earthquake, the greater municipality
moved to implement massive urban regeneration projects in at least seven different Is-
tanbul districts. Gecekondu neighbourhoods became the focal point of this urban renewal
strategy in order to fully integrate them into the neoliberal real estate market. As a re-
sult, informal housing was criminalised, portrayed as "the sole responsible [agencies] of
irregular urbanisation" (ibid.: 83), and informal neighbourhoods were stigmatised as ar-
eas of concentrated crime and terrorism. It is important to note that this discourse was a
substantial change from the way previous governments dealt with gecekondu neighbour-
hoods. They had formalisation, amnesties and the provision of infrastructure and ser-
vices to garner votes from residents. The AKP, by vilifying informal neighbourhoods and
the urban poor, arguably their biggest voter base, and by continuing to run on a ticket of
social justice, the eradication of poverty as well as increased democratic participation,
walked a fine and complicated line (ibid.: 83).

Parallel to the demolition of informal housing, the government vastly increased the
authority of the mass housing agency TOKI, granting them powers to claim public land
for free, build for-profit housing units, set up real estate and construction companies,
grant credit for renewal and regeneration projects, establish partnerships with both pub-
lic and private companies to implement housing and infrastructure projects both locally
and abroad, and expropriate home owners in urban renewal zones. This arguably turned
have vanished. The municipality's emblem does appear on the back cover, but beneath the more prominent logo of *GAP Inşaat*, who also lists their website, email, and the address of the project office on Tarlabaşı Boulevard. The catalogue is bound with white thread and glued, which makes it sturdier than the previous version. The "50 Questions" brochure that accompanied the 2008 catalogue had been discontinued. Contrary to the 2008 catalogue, the revised 2011 version is easily recognisable as a catalogue for a development project. The name and contact information of the developer is prominently printed on the back cover, whereas all traces of the municipality's participation have been minimised. The prestige value of this catalogue is lower than that of the first one. The object still signals "high-end housing development project", but it is clearly a project sales brochure rather than aiming to appear as an art exhibit catalogue.

## 2011 catalogue: The content

Inside the 2011 catalogue the Beyoğlu municipality's involvement moves to the background as well. It is introduced as the “project leader” on the fourth page, and *GAP Inşaat* as the contractor. However, the company is mentioned six times in the catalogue, taking a much more prominent position. Beyoğlu mayor Ahmet Misbah Demircan, on the other hand, is no longer introduced as the “face” of the project, and the personalised foreword-letter that opened the 2008 catalogue is no longer there. Therefore, most of 2008 foreword promises of inclusivity and full participation of all concerned actors have been scrapped as well. Rather, the first, and very short, text in the catalogue describes Tarlabaşı as “one of the most important historical areas in Istanbul”, but one unable to meet “contemporary requirements”, where “property owners have been unable to invest in their real estate because of the bad surroundings”. 40 percent of buildings, the catalogue alleges, stand empty. The source of this number is unclear, as evictions had not yet started at the time of publication. In the survey urged by the Tarlabaşı Association and commissioned by the municipality in 2008, only 30 percent of buildings inside the renewal zone were found to be vacant (Kentsel A.Ş. 2008).

When lamenting the lack of owners' investment, the text fails to mention state restrictions on renovations due to the area being listed. It is clear that the focus of this catalogue is on the renewal of the physical area, and no longer even superficially concerned with social regeneration or residents' rights.

The actors behind the project remain anonymous. The only people that are mentioned in relation to the planning of the “multi-actor” project are nameless “experts from different disciplines”, “university lecturers”, “star architects” and “representatives from the private sector and the municipality”. However, no further details or information about any of these people involved in the renewal project are given, nor are their functions specified. The more detailed “Project Team” page from the 2008 catalogue has been substituted by a double page spread entitled “A Multi-Actor System” and is illustrated with ten black-and-white photographs similar or equal to those in the 2008 catalogue and showing various groups of people sitting or standing around a large meeting table in various settings. And again, due to the lack of all captions or explanations, the identity of the persons depicted remains unclear if one does not know them already. The lists of the project
team, the design team, and the advisory board were dropped in this second version of the catalogue. Three of the originally seven architect firms withdrew from the project by the time the second catalogue was published, but no information on this is given, and in the text itself no more mention is made of which architects participated in the project.<fnref n="16" />

## 2011 catalogue: The neighbourhood

In the 2011 version of the catalogue, the first images of Tarlabaşı appear on a double page spread showing two colour photographs of two different street scenes. One depicts the shopfront of a local greengrocer, and the prominent display of profanity graffiti. The other shows cars parked alongside the curb, a pot-holed asphalt street, a full washing line hung across the street, and hazy shapes of passers-by, none of which are photographed in a way that makes it possible to identify them. The slogan on that page reads “Heritage that has resisted obliteration and collapse is revived”: The wording and the accompanying images establish that the heritage in question only includes buildings, and not humans. Such framing pits the buildings, the vast majority of which were going to be at least partly demolished as part of the renewal plan, against the residents who are portrayed as agents of chaos and obliteration. In light of this slogan the graffiti, the posters, the shop signs and makeshift constructions depicted in the two photographs can all be read as part of the attack on the heritage that the urban renewal project purports to “revive” by removing what it posits as the perpetrators of the “destruction”.<fnref n="17" /> The layout of the renewal zone is depicted in two aerial photographs, one of which puts it in context of the district of Beyoğlu, and the other, taken from closer up, shows the buildings and streets included in the Tarlabaşı project. Next to four colour photographs that show traces of Levantine architecture in run-down Tarlabaşı buildings – a row of bowfront houses, an arched doorway – the catalogue text lauds the neighbourhood as one where 19th-century civil architecture can be found, the historicity of which is underlined by an image of a 1945 Pervititch map<fnref n="18" /> of the area. The 2011 catalogue clearly emphasises the “heritage value” of Tarlabaşı, as well as the planned modernisation of the existing housing stock, over the (improvement of the) socio-economic situation in the neighbourhood. Only one short, rather vague text even alludes to “social responsibility”, but without listing any details of what such responsibility would entail. The photograph of the three small boys looking into the camera, the only one that featured actual residents, was omitted in the 2011 version of the catalogue.

<footnote n="16">16 One can however confirm this by comparing the architects mentioned in the 2008 catalogue and the remaining four architects now listed on the project website: https://www.taksim360.com.tr/en/concept. I learned of the withdrawal by a friend who knew one of the architects that dropped out and whom I had previously interviewed.</footnote>

<footnote n="17">17 Furthermore, it is highly problematic, to say the least, if an originally Greek neighbourhood in Beyoğlu that was abandoned by its original non-Muslim residents due to discriminatory state policies and physical violence, is talked about in the context of a state-led renewal plan as “heritage resisting obliteration”.</footnote>

<footnote n="18">18 Topographical engineer Jacques Pervititch drew these maps upon the initiative of fire insurance companies in the period 1922–1945 (Sabancıoğlu 2003).</footnote>
## 2011 catalogue: The project

The 2011 version of the catalogue includes more technical details about the renewal project than the 2008 version. It still promises a “conservationist renewal” approach, whereby the façades of listed buildings will allegedly be preserved, and the building itself demolished in order to accommodate planned functions (Ünsal 2013: 122). The 2011 catalogue claims that the inventory of all listed buildings was made according to the rules and standards of the Convention for the Preservation of European Architectural Heritage, and that building surveys and restitution plans drawn up by *GAP Inşaat* have been presented to the state Preservation Council for approval. This information is illustrated by two sheets of building surveys of Tarlabaşı property. However, no other information is given about how the project aims to abide by international preservation standards.

Under the headlines “A historical experience” and the more obscure “Service to expectations and culture”, this catalogue consecrates two double page spreads to colour photographs of the 3D architectural model of the project that had been part of the 2008 Tarlabaşı exhibition on Istiklal Avenue. The participation of an “expert project team” charged with the physical renewal of the buildings is announced. However, none of these experts are named or otherwise identified on this page or anywhere else in the catalogue. The question, asked by sceptics and critics of the renewal project, such as the Istanbul Chamber of Architects, how the conservation of listed buildings will be assured when only the façade, if that, of the houses will be preserved, is not answered either. The 3D model only makes this concern more pressing, as it shows that not much will be left of the old neighbourhood.

The same rendered images of what the developers plan to build in Tarlabaşı – and whom they imagine will live there after the renewal – return in the 2011 catalogue. A few pictures were added, including two images of Tarlabaşı Boulevard that were not featured in the 2008 version. Interestingly, this includes a current-day photograph of the building that until its closure in 2011 housed the office of the Tarlabaşı Association where Erdal Aybek provided information on legal proceedings and sales. While the date of the photograph is unclear, the office, located in the first storey of a bowfront house above a betting shop, appears to be empty.

The social and economic development programmes allegedly planned by the municipality and so prominent in the 2008 catalogue, get only minimal space in the 2011 version. Under the headline “Social Responsibility”, developer *GAP Inşaat* claims that as one of the participants in this project, the corporation will take this obligation seriously. This vague claim is accompanied by three black-and-white photographs of what seem to be professional meetings of some kind. None of the photographs are captioned, and there are no further explanations of who, or what, is depicted in them. In one of the images one can see a stack of the first version of the project catalogues as well as the accompanying brochures, which indicates that this image was taken around or shortly after 2008. It is the only acknowledgment of the issue in the entire catalogue, and neither the mayor nor the NGOs and civil society organisations, all frequently alluded to in the 2008 catalogue, find mention here.
In 2011, in preparation for demolitions, and during a time when some of the buildings were already emptied and being scavenged for scraps, a silver metal construction fence was put up around the renewal site. In 2012, the municipality added a row of commercial billboards along the fence facing Tarlabaşı Boulevard that showed rendered images of the finished Tarlabaşı project similar to those in the project catalogue with the slogan "Tarlabaşı is renewed" [Tarlabaşı yenileniyor], as well as the project logo, the logo of GAP Inşaat and of the Beyoğlu Municipality. One panel advertised the GAP Inşaat sales office across the boulevard. The scale of the text and the scale of the images were clearly meant for people who were driving by on Tarlabaşı Boulevard, very quickly, and not turning into the neighbourhood. (These panels were changed in 2013 to a more "inclusive" row of stock photos that represented "more local" personages, and text that lauded the inclusionary nature of the project, claiming that it would bring improvement of social and economic standards for residents. As the court case against the project was ongoing at the time, this might have been a fig leaf aimed at the judges.)

**2011 catalogue: The stated project objectives and procedures**

Under the headline "Fully participatory negotiation", the 2011 project catalogue claims to have reached and solved the "most crucial" stage of the project: the successful negotiation with property owners. "The large majority" of property owners, the text insists, came to an agreement with project stakeholders. Above a prominent black-and-white photograph of the project coordination and sales office on Tarlabaşı Boulevard, the catalogue informs readers that the Beyoğlu Municipality directed talks and negotiation agreements with both property owners and tenants. Parroting a condensed version of what had been promised in the 2008 catalogue, the 2011 version claims that the co-operation between property owners, local residents and civil society organisations have shaped and "enriched" the project. Again, no further details about the nature of this supposed participation are given. Across this page are twelve black-and-white photographs, eight of which presumably show the successful agreement between project stakeholders and property owners. None of the people in the photographs are named or in any way identified. All of them show smiling people, apparently content with what they have been offered, and negotiators content with what they have managed to get their interlocutors to agree on. In all other current-day photographs of the neighbourhood residents remain unidentified, and often only vague, blurry shapes that populate the streets as no more than extras. Most of the photographs show empty streets.

I only recognised one person in any of the negotiation photographs: second-hand furniture seller Cemal, around 65 years old at the time, who is depicted with his two smiling, grown-up children, and a female representative of GAP Inşaat. While this picture appeared in the 2011 catalogue, it was taken a couple of years prior. Cemal had been one of the first property owners to sell his house to the developer. Never a member of the Tarlabaşı Association and not one of the many property owners who took the municipality to court, he was deeply unhappy about the deal he had agreed to. In exchange for his five-story building on Tree Street he had been offered two apartments in the new development. He had been told that the handover of these new units was supposed to
happen by 2010 at the very latest, which had been the initial deadline for the renewal
project and the year that Istanbul was European Capital of Culture. When we spoke in
2011, Cemal talked a great deal about how he felt he had been deceived by the munici-
pality and cheated by the developer. He told me that he would have preferred to do his
own renovations and stay in the neighbourhood where he had lived and worked for more
than 40 years. Part of his anger stemmed from the fact that he used to rent out several of
the apartments in his building for modest amounts to bolster his family's income, and
that he had lost these regular earnings. Despite initial promises made by project agents
(echoed in the "50 Questions" brochure) that there would be compensation for any loss
of rental income, none had materialised. Furthermore, as construction had not yet be-
gun in 2011, it was unclear when the two promised apartments would be handed over
to him. Cemal said that the amicable attitude of project stakeholders - portrayed in the
catalogue - changed fundamentally after he had put his signature on paper:

They throw us out on the street, they tell us to get lost. When they bought the house
from me, it was all “Cemal Bey, come and have tea with us. Cemal Bey, have a coffee
with us. Cemal Bey, let’s sit down and talk”. The same people who said that now send
armoured vehicles to kick us out. [...] So what, I sold the house! I don’t have to have it
anyway, may God provide for a better one. But we don’t want to be treated with such
brutality. [The *GAP Inşaat* people] were so nice to me then. But only until I had sold
my house to them. After I sold it, they said, alright, that’s it, we’re done with you. For
them we were nothing more than an opportunity. [...] I didn’t go to court. I didn’t go
up against [GAP]. Instead, we sat down [with them] like neighbours, and we talked
and came to an agreement, but I’m the one who suffers now. If I had gone to court, I
would have gotten 750,000 Lira, maybe even 900,000 Lira. Houses like mine are fetch-
ing more than 1,000,000 [Lira] now. They agreed to give me two apartments in the
new development. But how many years will I have to wait for that? What will happen
until then? That’s all unclear! I have no hope that I’ll ever get anything. If the govern-
ment changes, if the municipality changes, or if the developer changes, then I’ll lose
everything, too.

Some of his (former) neighbours, like the barber Halil Usta, amicably taunted him for
having sold his house immediately after the project was announced. Even so, most agreed
that the 400 TL Cemal received in monthly rental aid<fnref n="19" />, the uncertainty about the time-
line of the project, and the developers' unwillingness to discuss either with Tarlabaşı res-
idents, were unacceptable. By contrast, the 2011 catalogue claims that negotiations with
property owners had been "successful" and concluded to the satisfaction of all involved
parties. The grievances, the anger and worries that Tarlabaşı residents continued to ex-
press at the time were ignored. The "50 Questions" brochure that had accompanied the
2008 catalogue had been discontinued, so the questions and issues that were addressed
there, and that were for the most part still unanswered and unresolved, were rendered
invisible. As the only appearance of residents in the 2011 marketing material are the pho-
tographs of smiling unidentified property owners who seem to have eagerly agreed to

<footnote n="19">19 This was the money allotted for him to rent an apartment (or in his case, a shop) elsewhere while waiting for the completion of the project, not a substitute for his lost rental income as a landlord.</footnote>
sell their homes, the catalogue makes all resistance, all criticism, and the many worries of residents disappear. The 2011 catalogue does not elaborate on what happened to property owners who did not come to an agreement with *GAP Inşaat*, either. It does not allude to compulsory purchase orders and ongoing court cases. In the eyes of project stakeholders, and in what they told an interested non-resident public, the negotiations with Tarlabaşı property owners were a done deal.

## 2011 catalogue context: The association

By 2011 the Tarlabaşı Association had started to fall apart. In 2009, they had joined the case against the project filed by the Istanbul Chamber of Architects (that started in April 2008). In 2010, the association applied at the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg with the hope of fighting ongoing expropriations. However, resistance and unity began to crumble. Several property owners, amongst which leaders of the association, had gone against the internal association agreement and started to attend one-on-one meetings with *GAP Inşaat* and the municipality to negotiate. In April 2010, Erdal Aybek told me that the association's leadership had de facto been split, and that board members, including a one-time association president, had sold their properties or part of their property, which triggered (panic) sales of other association members and other residents. Following these sales, Erdal explained, board members did not concern themselves any further with tenants who were handed eviction notices as soon as their landlords had sold. For him, this was the final straw, and he left the association:

> [They said] that tenants would look after themselves. That's when I said that I will look after myself as well. I understood that we didn't want the same thing. That we were not fighting for the same thing. I even felt used. What had I spent so much time doing then? I fought for those 200, for those 300 people who came to our meetings, those people who trusted me and handed over their homes and their lives to me! I did not fight for these men to become rich.

Project stakeholders successfully exploited cracks in the unity of the association and Tarlabaşı residents. *GAP Inşaat* offered (sometimes significantly) higher amounts to property owners who had large amounts of economic and social capital at their disposal, and who for that reason were the most influential inside the association.<fnref n="20" /> This then swayed them to abandon the united front that the association had been able to keep intact for almost two years. Tenants felt abandoned by the association and indeed decided to look after themselves, with many moving out before they could be evicted. This left property owners who had not sold yet without rental income, forcing them to reconsider as well. The fragmentation of the association led to the quick unravelling of grassroots resistance (Ünal 2013). Several individual court cases started by residents were still ongoing. So were the proceedings initiated by the Istanbul Chamber of Architects that attempted to halt the entire project on the basis that it violated constitutional rights. However, following

<footnote n="20">²⁰ These property owners often owned more than one building, and in prime locations, such as on Tarlabaşı Boulevard.</footnote>
the landslide win of the AKP in the June 2011 national elections, letters of expropriation
were sent to property owners who still refused to sell their homes or buildings. Two weeks
after the elections, a Kurdish widow was very publicly evicted from her home by officers
accompanied by armoured vehicles and riot police. The atmosphere in the neighbour-
hood was sombre and pessimistic. Entire buildings were already empty. The growing
uncertainty and the resulting anxiety had started to push more tenants who wanted to
avoid evictions and sudden homelessness out of the neighbourhood. A growing number
of property owners sold their title deeds to the municipality. In August 2011, demolitions
of evicted buildings started. By November of that same year, they were in full swing.

2011 catalogue: Socio-economic and political context

On June 12, 2011, the AKP won a record 49.9 percent of all votes in national elections. It was the third successive electoral victory for prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the AKP, and, according to political economist Ziya Öniş (2019: 202), “the beginning of a new era of Turkey’s political economy, which we could classify as Turkey’s ‘new developmentalism’ or Turkey’s encounter with ‘state capitalism’.” This broad economic and political shift was shaped by profound domestic political changes, as well as by the growing importance of Russia and China following the 2008 financial crisis (ibid.).

Following the 2011 election, the AKP consolidated its power as the hegemonic force
in Turkish politics, setting off a strong authoritarian turn in domestic politics on the
one hand, and a shift in foreign policy orientation from the EU and the West towards
Russia, China, and the Middle East (Müftüler-Baç and Keyman 2012; Öniş 2019: 207).
The post-2011 period effectively marked the beginning of a period of de-Europeanisation
and de-Westernisation, characterised by a dwindling of the EU membership process and
a decline of the rule of law (Acemoğlu and Murat 2015). Turkey started to increasingly
align with the Russia-China axis in terms of economic development, and the Muslim
Middle East in terms of identity. This also meant that Turkey was able to explore alter-
native routes for finance and economic expansion, becoming less dependent on Western
institutions such as the EU, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), or
the World Trade Organisation (WTO) (Öniş 2019: 205).

Allegations against the government of large-scale corruption increased. By then the
government's focus on the construction sector and large infrastructure projects had be-
come even more dominant. Land and real estate continued to be a major source of capital
accumulation, with the construction sector still as the key motor of economic growth.
As part of the new "state capitalism" economic model, conventional privatisation was
increasingly replaced by privatisations based on public-private partnerships as well as
mega-infrastructure and construction projects and large-scale housing through actors
like the mass housing agency TOKI. The AKP further consolidated its control over insti-
tutions outside of its direct authority by transforming Independent Regulatory Agen-
cies (IRAs), set up after the 2001 economic crisis to curb opportunities for partisan prac-
tices in the distribution of public funds, into extensions of different ministries (Esen
and Gümüşçu 2018: 353). Business groups and family holdings in sectors such as con-
struction, energy, transport and media were able to benefit from the state-led rent dis-
tribution process through often overlapping ownerships and close ties to the AKP gov-
ernment (Buğra and Savaşkan 2014; Öniş 2019: 207-208). This development was reflected
in the 2011 AKP election campaign that had been based on a number of planned radical
urban transformation projects that prime minister Erdoğan called his “crazy projects [çil-
gın projeler]”: the construction of a canal from the Black Sea to the Marmara Sea, an entire
satellite city to be built outside Istanbul, a third airport, a third bridge over the Bosporus
as well as mass housing construction.<fnref n="21" /> On another level, the 2011 election victory and
the resulting consolidation of power through increasing authoritarian policies meant a
strong mandate for the AKP to follow through with contested renewal plans and mega
projects, and the opportunity to silence critics.

In the beginning of this chapter, I wondered why Cemile tried to negotiate and in-
teract with unwilling and powerful project stakeholders even after her husband had sold
the title deed to the municipality. A close reading of the presentation of the Tarlabaşı ur-
ban renewal project through the promotional material as text objects has shown that the
renewal project was not a static entity, but a moving target that was shifting in very spe-
cific ways around the relationships with Tarlabaşı residents. Between the two versions
of the catalogue, the most significant changes are to the expensiveness and the quality
of the materials used, how they were made available, the context in which they were pre-
sented to the public, and to what audience they were geared. In short, the “Tarlabaşı is Re-
newed” project catalogue changed from appearing as an elegant book-catalogue that was
produced using high-quality, expensive materials to being a more obvious commercial
promotional text-object of a considerably less prestige value aimed at potential buyers.
The language of inclusion and participation, so prevalent in the beginning of the project
and the 2008 catalogue, changed in a relatively linear and contextually informed way,
and those changes had a direct bearing on what was possible for residents to do, and the
ways they were allowed to engage with the project. The stigmatisation of the neighbourho-
hood and its residents, very visible in the 2008 catalogue, intensified with the complete
erasure of residents’ concerns in the catalogue that circulated in 2011.

The constant and substantial shift of the project makes sense when one considers the contextual political, economic, and social changes in Istanbul and Turkey at the time. The turn towards increasing authoritarianism and a state capitalist model similar to that of Russia and China, as well as the quasi-abandonment of the country's long-standing commitment of westernisation and its close ties with Western-dominated institutions, such as the EU or the World Bank, meant a shift for the target audience and financialization of the Tarlabaşı renewal project that is reflected in the promotional material.

In retrospect, going back and reading the 2008 catalogue and the accompanying
brochure feels like visiting an alternative universe. What is written in those promotional
text objects is highly dissonant with what actually happened later, and none of what
Beyoğlu mayor Ahmet Misbah Demircan said in the foreword and none of what was
promised to residents bore any relation to the reality in Tarlabaşı at any point. It is pos-
sible that plans of cooperation, social regeneration and inclusiveness were aspirational
in the beginning, but none of it materialised.

<footnote n="21">21 Both the third bridge over the Bosporus as well as the third Istanbul airport were finalised despite widespread criticism and opened in 2016 and 2018, respectively.</footnote>
Chapter four: Experiencing territorial stigma in Tarlabaşı

Tarlabaşı residents generally agreed and were well aware that their neighbourhood was stigmatised, and that they were subject to differential treatment by agents of the state and public institutions. For example, some residents said that in Tarlabaşı, they were being treated with disdain and considerably less civility by the police than they were used to from other Istanbul districts. Barber Halil Usta, an ethnic Turk, ran a small barbershop in Tarlabaşı, but owned and lived in an apartment in a “respectable” gated community-type neighbourhood in Bostancı, on the Asian side of the city. He commuted between both places almost daily, and he keenly felt the difference between the attitude of the police towards him in Bostancı in comparison to his encounters with law enforcement in the neighbourhood where he worked:

> I never see any police or checkpoints where I live! [...] On the [Asian] side we might have traffic police, but that's it. They say [to me]: 'Sir, good evening.' [...] That's because of how they see [Tarlabaşı]. On the [Asian] side it's 'Good evening, Sir, good evening.' Here? 'Grandpa! Come here, lan.'"<fnref n="1" />

Halil Usta was not used to being accosted this rudely by the police. Recognising this behaviour as disrespectful, he drew the conclusion that this blatant disregard of social norms was tied to the neighbourhood where it occurred. Halil Usta was an older cishet, married and successfully self-employed Turkish man who had acquired the necessary cultural and social capital to be considered “urban” [şehirli], and who had earned the hon-orific of Usta as a master barber. He therefore occupied a social position that was least likely to draw discriminatory treatment. However, when he entered Tarlabaşı, a deeply stigmatised place, he suffered the consequences of that stigma regardless. Anecdotes like this may lead to the assumption that territorial stigmatisation is solely anchored to place and affects all residents of that place equally, but Halil Usta’s experience raises an impor-tant question: if a person with his level of social capital encounters this sort of everyday discrimination, how are residents that are already marginalised by Turkish society af-fected by territorial stigma? In Tarlabaşı it was easy to apprehend that stigma of place

<footnote n="1">1 Lan is a slang expression and a pejorative term used for men. It is considered aggressive and in-sulting, especially when the addressee is unknown to the person using the term.</footnote>
did not ‘stick’ to people in a uniform way; as a resident of the neighbourhood, I witnessed such discrepancies over the course of my everyday interactions, and these differences were the subject of conversation and concern. It is important to describe and analyse how territorial stigmatisation is experienced by a diversity of individuals that live and work in a stigmatised neighbourhood. Doing so allows for a better understanding as to how stigma of place and stigma of type of person are inextricably intertwined.

This chapter investigates how Tarlabaşı residents experienced and interpreted the material consequences of the symbolic denigration of their neighbourhood and the everyday manifestations of territorial stigmatisation. This is an important step towards a more effective analysis of how they reacted to this stigma. Here I want to understand how individuals understood and explained their encounters with institutional disinvestment and discriminatory treatment by public institutions. How did individuals deal with the everyday consequences of stigmatisation they faced during the different stages of the urban renewal project and how did their marginalisation as an individual inform this? Firstly, I want to show how the burden of the territorial stigma in Tarlabaşı was not equally felt by all inhabitants. Residents whose social identities matched the negative ethnic, cultural, and material stereotypes associated with the Tarlabaşı imaginary and the stigmatising narrative connected to it, discussed in chapter two, suffered more grievous consequences of the territorial stigmatisation than others. I will then describe the ways and circumstances under which the blemish of place was most keenly felt and the impact that this had on residents’ everyday lives, and how this experience changed, became more acute, with the announcement of the urban renewal project and during the time of negotiations and evictions. Following that I will show that trans*women, sex workers and Kurdish residents were confronted with multiple stigmas, which heavily influenced how they experienced everyday stigmatisation and the growing pressure resulting from the weaponised stigma immediately ahead of and during evictions. And finally, with the help of thick descriptions of the very different eviction experiences of two women, I would like to show how gendered notions of respectability were used as pressure points for state-based cruelty, facilitated by the territorial stigmatisation of Tarlabaşı.

Microsocial processes and macropolitical dynamics structured the way that neighbourhood reputation stuck to particular residents in particular ways. They also structured the diversity of tactics one sees in Tarlabaşı meant to manage or negotiate social life in a deeply stigmatised neighbourhood, which I will discuss in the following chapters of this thesis.

## Encountering everyday stigma

Tarlabaşı, wedged between central Taksim Square, the more gentrified and touristic Be yoğlu neighbourhoods of Cihangir and Şişhane as well as the more religiously conservative Kasımpaşa, stood out in how differently it was approached by state agents and public institutions. The neighbourhood was visibly much more securitised than surrounding urban spaces. Security cameras canvassed the area 24/7, and militarised ID checking
points were located at several points on the neighbourhood's boundaries.<fnref n="2" /> The area was in proximity of three police stations, one of which was located in Tarlabaşı. A relatively high number of police officers, both in uniform and plainclothes, patrolled the area by car, motorcycle, and, more rarely, on foot. Spontaneous ID checks and stop-and-frisk encounters with law enforcement personnel were common for residents deemed "suspicious". Tarlabaşı was, symbolically and materially, framed as a space of "concentrated insecurity" that legitimised and required heavy policing in the eyes of the non-resident community.

While the physical space of Tarlabaşı was hyper-policed, Tarlabaşı residents were notably underserved by law enforcement. Most did agree that petty crime and drug dealing were a problem in their neighbourhood, with the majority saying that they did not feel safe (Ünlü et al. 2000). At the same time, residents said that the authorities made little to no effort to deal with these issues. Müge, a trans* woman sex worker in her mid-30s described how her emergency calls to the police were routinely ignored, and assistance delayed:

> When I call the police to tell them that a woman is being molested or that there is trouble right outside my door, do you know how long it takes them to come? 45 minutes. Why do they come so late? Because [they want] people here to be fed up, they want us to fuck off. They want people here to get upset, to feel desperate, do you know what I mean? This causes problems for the shop owners, and for residents. But then I don't know any other place except Tarlabaşı where there are ten ID checks, one after the other. That exists only in Tarlabaşı. There is an ID check at every step.

Müge was the frequent target of disciplinary surveillance, of police harassment and abuse. She knew that the police were both willing and able to make their presence felt in Tarlabaşı when doing so was deemed worthwhile by the authorities.<fnref n="3" /> Her experiences led her to interpret the selective engagement of the police with security problems in the area as intentional.

I often heard complaints about the sluggishness of the police response to emergency calls. It was especially remarkable because of the stark contrast between this seemingly wilful negligence, and the overt, aggressive securitisation of the neighbourhood. Unlike the European or North American cities addressed in much of the literature on the topic, it was not the "concentrated poverty" that rendered the neighbourhood suspect, but as analysed in chapter two, the concentrated presence especially of Kurds and trans* persons – categories of people that have historically been deemed a risk to the integrity of the Turkish state and its declared ideals. The high visibility of police, ID checkpoints,

<footnote n="2">² Ahead of expected unrest, for example due to the Mayday demonstrations in the Taksim area, additional checkpoints were set up along Dolapdere Street and around some entry points from Tarlabaşı Boulevard.</footnote>

<footnote n="3">³ Due to the controversial 2005 misdemeanour law, she and other trans* women in Tarlabaşı were repeatedly fined for "obstructing traffic" and "inappropriate behaviour" while going about their daily chores. Once Müge was fined for wearing a "revealing" top, another time police made her pay the fine for "breaching the peace" because she had been eating lunch on her own doorstep.</footnote>
and other measures of urban securitisation placed the area's inhabitants “radically out-
side the conceptual boundaries of emancipation, humanness, and global citizenry” (Loyd
and Bonds 2018: 900), marking them as not connected to the rest of the city. At the same
time the police routinely neglected security concerns expressed by residents themselves.
The police were there to keep the city safe from them, not for them.

Tarlabası was also underserved when it came to municipal services such as garbage
collection and street cleaning. Müge said that living in Tarlabası meant living in a “for-
gotten” area:

The streets are full of garbage. Do you know when the garbage guys come here to clean
up? Either ahead of a referendum, or ahead of elections, or just before we vote for a new
muhtar<fnref n="4" />, that's when.

<figure><img src="image_16.png" /><figcaption>"Cleanliness is beautiful"</figcaption></figure>

Photo by Jonathan Lewis

As in many other Istanbul neighbourhoods, regardless of the income of residents, it
was common in Tarlabası to deposit garbage bags on the street to be picked up by a pass-
ing garbage truck. The municipality did provide sporadic garbage bins, but they were
few and far between. Garbage trucks served nearby Istiklal Avenue several times a day,
whereas they sometimes skipped areas of Tarlabası altogether. Sedat Usta, who with his
father Zeki Usta worked in the family shoemaking workshop in Bird Street, said that res-
idents did much of the clean-up themselves:

<footnote n="4">4 In cities, a *muhtar* is the elected head of a neighbourhood [*mahalle*] as the smallest administrative unit. Urban *muhtars* are elected every five years and are tasked with administrative duties, such as the address registration of neighbourhood residents, the provision of official copies of birth certificates, ID cards and "poverty cards" [*fakirlik belgesi*]. The poverty card facilitates the application for further state assistance in healthcare, education, childcare, or other material assistance.</footnote>
Nothing has changed in this street since I came back from my military service in 2001, even though we tried to change it so many times. For example, I sweep the street every day. I clean it every day. But the municipality's cleaning car never comes. Even if it does come by here, it doesn't turn into this street! You have to force them to run through our street. We also have to clean the garbage up ourselves. Every two weeks I manage to catch that guy [who collects the garbage]. Most of them live here! But it's either us or the neighbours who do most of the cleaning in this street.

Rats, cats, dogs and seagulls were the reason that abandoned garbage bags often ended up scattered all over the street, adding to the image of a “dirty” neighbourhood. Residents thought that this municipal neglect, in combination with frequent breakdowns of electricity and water supplies, were a direct consequence of their neighbourhood's stigma because it meant that local politicians felt entitled to ignore Tarlabaşı without having to fear any consequences. This was not only the case for the ruling AKP. In the run-up to the 2011 national elections, Berhan Şimşek, a local politician of the main opposition Republican People's Party [Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi – CHP], made a press statement on Tarlabaşı Boulevard where he said that the renewal project was “unjust”, and accused the ruling AKP of profiteering and nepotism (Hürriyet 2010). However, his appearance failed to rally a large crowd and he left immediately after having delivered his speech. Sitting in their small Tarlabaşı restaurant afterwards, Seray and Ekin, a married Alevi couple, discussed the disappointingly swift departure of the politician with Halil Usta. Both Seray and Ekin were lifelong CHP voters and had put their hopes in the support of their party against the AKP-initiated urban renewal project. The barber argued that journalists had given up on Tarlabaşı long ago, and Seray agreed, dismissing Şimşek's brief appearance as a half-hearted attempt at electioneering. Nobody in the small group expected any substantial follow-up to his visit. Seray maintained that the CHP did not see any electoral profit in defending Tarlabaşı residents against eviction:

> What did he do? Nothing. Because there's nothing *to* do. Because there's no voter potential here. So why would they care about us? What is Tarlabaşı to [the CHP politician]? They don't need to care. This is how they discriminate against us. That's all this is.

Another example of this “power to disregard” referenced in chapter two was the infamous expert report commissioned by the 3rd Beyoğlu Administrative Court as part of the court case opened by the Istanbul Chamber of Architects (TMMOB) with the goal of stopping the Tarlabaşı renewal project. The report stated that the designated urban renewal area looked “abandoned” due to the physical appearance of the remaining buildings. In a conversation with a Turkish social researcher who documented housing rights violations ahead of evictions, Cemile recalled how shocked she had been to hear of the report's conclusion:

> How can they write such a thing? They told everyone that our houses were empty! They said that nobody lived here! Can you believe that? We are right here, and none of them came to visit to talk to us. We are here, but they pretend we are not.

This deliberate neglect by the authorities and other powerful actors was carried out in ways that Tarlabaşı residents were sure to notice. As shown in chapter two, this feeling of
being overlooked, this “corrosive social erasure” (Carter 2010: 5), is closely related to territorial stigmatisation, because negative stereotypisation hides residents behind a discursive wall of negative tropes (ibid.: 12–13). Being made to disappear in plain sight was painful and frustrating for Tarlabaşı residents. When they leafed through the project advertising catalogues that presented their neighbourhood as lifeless, dark and unwanted, they expressed both anger and disillusionment. They were angry about the lack of any subtlety, fully recognising that the future Tarlabaşı would not include them at all. On one occasion Müge asked me while we were all having tea in Hakan's *kiraathane*:

> Where are we? [waves vaguely at the page of the catalogue] Can you see us anywhere in here? Who are these people walking around with their fancy clothes and their fancy bags? Look at all these people, these kids with their expensive toys! Did you ever see anyone like this in Tarlabaşı? It's as if we don't even exist! What we want doesn't matter.

She jokingly pointed out that even the sky was bluer in the rendered images of the planned project. Her neighbourhood of more than ten years had quite literally been erased before the first bulldozers made their way into Tarlabaşı.

## Ordinary iconic figures

Long-time Tarlabaşı barber Halil Usta obscured his shop's address when speaking to non-resident outsiders because he was aware of the neighbourhood's bad reputation and the devastating effect this notoriety might have on his own social standing and that of his family. Scholars who write about territorial stigmatisation have researched residents' fears that they might be perceived in light of the negative stereotypes attached to tainted spaces. Randol Contreras (2017: 657), in his study of Los Angeles South Central, notes that residents feel “spatial anguish” over being associated with their neighbourhood's negative stereotypes. He writes that they struggle with feelings of stress, shame and frustration, all caused by living in a stigmatised neighbourhood and the fear “that outsiders will attach the space's stigma onto them” (ibid.). Contreras observes that residents are afraid, like Halil Usta in his interactions with non-resident outsiders, “that they will become living embodiments of their blemished space” (ibid.). In chapter two, I have analysed how anxious public discourses and stigmatising narratives of Tarlabaşı are organised around imagined and stereotyped, generic types of residents that Anouk de Koning and Anick Vollebergh (2019) call “ordinary iconic figures.” I have discussed how, in the context of Tarlabaşı, the “problem profiles” of Kurds, in particular young Kurdish men, and trans* women sex workers are the two most salient stereotypes that play into territorial stigmatisation.

It is important to acknowledge the presence of other marginalised (and stereotyped) groups in Tarlabaşı that I did not have access to, which is why I cannot speak to the specifics of their experiences of territorial stigma in the neighbourhood, such as Romani
residents as well as refugees from Syria and various African countries.<fnref n="5" /> For example, stereotyped images of the Romani community were put to use in other violently renewed neighbourhoods more exclusively imagined as Romani, like Sulukule in Istanbul (Kara- man and Islam 2012; Ünsal 2013; van Dobben Schoon 2014; Lelandais 2014). The presence of a sizable Romani community was certainly part of how Tarlabaşı was imagined in the collective consciousness of the city, and Romani residents undoubtedly experienced ter- ritorial stigma and its material consequences in a particular intersectional way. However, I did not have ethnographic access to that segment of the neighbourhood.<fnref n="6" /> It is crucial to underline that the stereotypes of problem people I want to analyse here do not just stand for all residents, but instead they are icons for the place itself. It is partly for this reason that different types of people experience the territorial stigma and its material consequences differently, and why they choose different tactics to deal with them.

While the territorial stigma attaches to a physical place, it is justified and rationalised using these everyday iconic profiles that index bigger threats. The more salient these iconic stereotypes become, the more every individual resident gets viewed as an em- bodiment of the problem and a justification for their own stigmatisation. As with any stereotype, the everyday lived experience for people in Tarlabaşı involved constantly be- ing calibrated by others to the negative everyday iconic figures. They were being profiled: Any trans* woman was seen as immoral and treated like a sex worker regardless of her working life, Kurdish men were suspected of drug dealing and anti-state political activity and Kurds in general as hostile to the Turkish nation, as backwards and uncivilised. Peo- ple that looked like poor rural migrants were subject to patronising and discriminatory treatment by public institutions and private corporations. This blatant everyday discrim- ination, the disdain and the constant subjection to symbolic and physical violence were justified with the notion of ordinary iconic figures, the stereotypes of “problem people”. The everyday discriminatory treatment was therefore not a novel experience for many Tarlabaşı residents the way it was for Halil Usta, whose social identity did not line up with any of the iconic profiles detailed above.

## Intersecting stigma / everyday discrimination

While most Tarlabaşı residents encountered territorial stigma in one way or another in their daily lives, and increasingly so during the months immediately preceding evictions, it is obvious that they did not all experience it in the same way. Instead, different encoun- ters with this blemish of place happened at the intersection of ethnicity, gender identity, and class and were heavily influenced by the degree to which residents' social identities matched negative stereotypes associated with Tarlabaşı (Pinkster et al. 2020).

<footnote n="5">5 One can understand why members of these communities would refuse to participate in interviews – they are in a profoundly precarious situation and there is no degree of research-protocol assur- ance one could offer to assuage their very valid concerns.</footnote>

<footnote n="6">6 This was partly due to the fact that working closely with some communities directly entailed be- ing excluded by others. This, too, is proof of how strong the stigma of iconic profiles are: people victimised by one profile believe the stereotypes about another.</footnote>
The intersectionality framework was developed by feminist and critical race theorists to describe analytic approaches that consider the interlocking and mutually reinforcing relationships among multiple systems of oppression (Collins 2000; Browne and Misra 2003; Grollmann 2012; Kapilashrami et al. 2015). This means that any form of discrimination, such as racism, cannot be fully understood without acknowledging how it intersects with, and mutually reinforces, other forms of oppressive bigotry, such as sexism, ableism, or transphobia. Therefore, intersectional perspectives recognise that “individuals exist on multiple dimensions of privilege and disadvantage and, as a result, examinations of their lives and experiences must consider the simultaneous, intersecting nature of these systems” (Grollmann 2012: 201). Specifically, scholars have sought to understand causes of inequality by describing how the intersection between multiple social categories, such as gender, race, or ethnicity, and structural forms of discrimination may negatively impact an individual’s life experience, thereby maintaining inequality within marginalised groups (Crenshaw 1995; Cole 2009; Kulesza et al. 2016). For example, research of racial discrimination against people of colour obscures that women of colour may face additional disparities of gender and social class discrimination (Grollmann 2012: 201).

In the same way, residents' experiences of territorial stigma and their engagement with it heavily depends on how their identities “intersect with stigmatising narratives of place” (Pinkster et al. 2020: 522). Wacquant (2007: 67) writes that territorial stigma is “superimposed on the already existing stigma traditionally associated with poverty and ethnic origin or postcolonial immigrant status, to which it is closely linked but not reducible”. However, whereas recent theoretical work emphasises the importance of adapting an intersectionality framework in diverse fields of stigma research, such as in public health or psychology, territorial stigma is most often analysed as a generalised experience for all residents of a tainted neighbourhood. Pinkster et al. (2020: 524) affirm that very few studies acknowledge and investigate the multi-dimensionality of place stigma, and that “there has been little attention for the way in which lived experiences of territorial stigmatisation may diverge due to different degrees in which people “fit” negative stereotypes associated with place.” As they have pointed out in their work on the “stickiness” of territorial stigma in the Amsterdam suburb Bijlmer, “substantial inequalities are observed in who carries the burden of renegotiating the blemish of place”, depending on who “fits” certain negative stereotypes associated with a certain place, and to what degree (Pinkster et al. 2020: 522). Bijlmer is often associated with racist stereotypes regarding crime and poverty in the mainstream narrative and described as a “black neighbourhood” [*zwarte buurt*] in the Dutch mainstream media. Pinkster et al. found that residents of colour had to “work harder” to renegotiate the neighbourhood’s stigma than their white, middle class neighbours. The symbolic denigration is felt more keenly by those residents whose social identities and placement in the neighbourhood align more closely with negative racial, cultural and material stereotypes of the “ordinary iconic figures” (De Koning and Vollebergh 2019: 396) described above.

Just as Pinkster et al. (2020: 533) had found in Bijlmer, Tarlabaşı residents whose ethnic, cultural, class, or gender identities did not match the negative stereotypes associated with the neighbourhood felt (much) less affected by the stigmatisation. Some of those who were able to largely disregard the spatial taint even felt that the images and demo-
graphic groups used to stigmatisate Tarlabaşı were an asset. Advertisements for student housing and holiday rentals that targeted a middle class, often Western audience, sold the neighbourhood as “colourful” and “authentic”.

Vanessa and Berk were a middle class Italian-Turkish couple who had purchased and renovated a historical Tarlabaşı building that was later included in the urban renewal project. They described their choice to live in the neighbourhood in positive terms that meant to underline their tolerant, cosmopolitan outlook and global lifestyle.

We use this home to welcome family and friends from all over the world. This house was our dream. It's in the heart of the city, right in the centre. It's close to everything, the best possible location in Istanbul. We love this neighbourhood, because all these different cultures live here, together. There are Roma weddings, it's lively, there are children in the street all the time. It's beautifully diverse. Everyone is together here, it's a truly global community.

This was a common view amongst Western and middle class residents. While Vanessa and Berk did not adhere to the negative stereotypes about Tarlabaşı, they nevertheless re-scripted place identity by describing the neighbourhood as “lively” and “diverse” rather than in the racially and socially more loaded terms found in stigmatising narratives (Cairns 2018; Nayak 2019, Pinkster et al. 2020). This corresponds with Pinkster et al.’s (2020: 533, emphasis in original) findings in Bijlmer, where white respondents, even though the spatial blemish did not directly affect their sense of self, discursively attempted “to neutralize the stigma” because “they do feel the need to justify why *they* live in a place like *this*.”

For me, too, it was easy to navigate the existing stigma. At the very worst, I imagine I was silently judged to be a stingy foreigner who deliberately chose not to live in a “more respectable” Istanbul neighbourhood or who was thought to be hopelessly naive for thinking that Tarlabaşı was “pleasantly diverse”. If I got any reactions beyond the usual shocked gasp after revealing my address, they never went beyond well-meaning advice about apartment prices and living standards in other neighbourhoods deemed more suitable for me. My Tarlabaşı address never once led to any form of violence or discrimination. However, for Tarlabaşı residents whose social identities closely lined up with the negative tropes that featured as ordinary iconic figures in stigmatising narratives, like trans* sex workers and Kurds, the everyday experience of the spatial taint was more salient, and often tied up in symbolic and physical violence.

## Being a trans* woman in Tarlabaşı

Trans*women Tarlabaşı residents, the majority of whom were (de jure illegal) sex workers, suffered multiple disadvantage due to the stigma attached to their gender identity, their occupation and their address.<fnref n="7" /> Intersecting trans* stigma and the stigma attached

<footnote n="7">7 As a result of pervasive discrimination and the exclusion from almost all social spheres, the vast majority of trans* persons in Turkey is forced to make a living through sex work. According to a 2011 İKGV report, 4,000 out of 5,000 identified trans* persons living in Istanbul are engaged in sex work (İnsan Kaynağını Geliştirme Vakfı 2011).</footnote>
to the visible, transgressive sex work economy that Tarlabaşı was associated with con-
tributed to the neighbourhood's spatial blemish in the dominant narrative.

<figure><img src="image_17.png" /><figcaption>*Müge in the teahouse*</figcaption></figure>

Photo by Jonathan Lewis

Gender-motivated violence and hate crimes against trans* persons are widespread in Turkey, and victims do not only suffer the violence, but also the government's unwillingness to prosecute perpetrators – in many cases police officers – and protect their rights. According to Trans Murder Monitoring (TMM), a project run in Turkey by Transgender Europe (TGEU) and Kırmızı Şemsiye, 62 trans* persons were murdered between January 2008 and September 2022 alone, by far the highest number of registered hate crime murders against trans* persons in Europe (TvT Research Project, 2022). The trans* women I spoke to in Tarlabaşı had all, without exception, lived through horrific violence, including sexual assault and police torture. Once, while we were standing outside the informal brothel on Bird Street, a Turkish-speaking researcher working for an international human rights organisation approached the group: She explained that she was researching rights violations of LGBTQ individuals in Turkey ahead of the 2011 parliamentary elections and wanted to engage in an informal chat about the women's experiences. Müge and Burcu, a trans* sex worker in her late forties who worked out of the Bird Street brothel most of the time, explained that the situation was bad, and that they were angry being denied workers' and citizens' rights. Gülay, a trans* sex worker who by the time we met had worked in the sector for 30 years, did not mince her words.

They look at us as if we were animals. If they could, they would like to put us all in a cage
and exhibit us in Gülhane Park, that's what they would actually like to do to us. They
don't see us as human beings. [...] Our friends are being horrifically murdered. In some
places they are being killed without consequence. When we go to the police station, we
cannot explain ourselves. When we go to the health clinic, we cannot explain ourselves. Because we are transvestites<fnref n="8" />, they refuse to register us. Go to any health clinic and give them your ID, and the doctor will sneer.

Most trans* women in Tarlabaşı had an ambivalent relationship with the neighbourhood and other residents. They variously faced discrimination by neighbours, landlords and local shopkeepers at one point or another. While she often said that she generally felt at home in Tarlabaşı, Müge was also angry at the hypocrisy of the men she socialised with in the teahouse in her street and other shopkeepers whose businesses she frequented:

> When we sit together in the teahouse, they laugh with me, but on the street, they turn their heads and pretend they don't know me. I run into them on Istiklal Street and they turn up their noses. You know why? Because [trans* women] are always seen as prostitutes. I think that's hypocrisy. They take my money, they joke with me when I come to their shop, but they turn their heads when we meet on the street. Why? Do they think they'll be treated as a whore only because they walk next to me? What nonsense. [...] But if they'll tell them one day to kill us, they'll be in the very front, I am telling you. They'll be the first to comply, just so that their own shit doesn't come to light.

Being trans* in Tarlabaşı meant the immediate assumption of being an (illegal) sex worker, and being identified as a sex worker in Tarlabaşı equalled being treated as immoral, not worthy of respect, and, as Müge's words show, it could mean being shunned by their neighbours. Some trans* women experienced physical violence at the hands of their neighbours. Cansu, a trans* sex worker from Adana who had arrived in Tarlabaşı in the late 1990s, said her neighbours' children regularly threw empty bottles and stones at her and her trans* friends, and even "very small children" spat at her in the street. She also described how interactions with the police were more discriminatory as compared to other Istanbul neighbourhoods she frequented:

> Living and working in Tarlabaşı is very difficult. Very difficult. [...] You walk on the street and get called names. Faggot [ibne], poof [top], stuff like that. 'Son', *lan*. In Şişli and other places they say 'Ma'am', could we please see your ID?' What's with this discrimination? I am the same person in Tarlabaşı and there. [...] The police treat me very differently here. 'Lan, come here! ID!' Or: 'Get lost, *lan!* Get out of here, *lan!*' Where am I supposed to go? Am I not a human being? I just walk on the street, and they fine me. A fine! Why? I just walk on the street, and they want my ID, my social security number and give me a fine. I give them my ID and bam, it's a 69 Lira fine. Like I'm a car. They stop me, and it's like I'm committing a number plate offense. Think about that. Look, in Pangaltı, in Şişli they call me 'ma'am', the police here say: 'lan, come here, hand over your ID.' Should such discrimination be allowed? Why do they treat me one way there, and another here?

Trans* women in Tarlabaşı were subject to constant and aggressive police harassment. Müge said that police violence against trans* women and sex workers had decreased, but that law enforcement officers used ID checks to intimidate them and their customers.

<footnote n="8">8 All trans* women I met in Tarlabaşı referred to themselves as "transvestite" [travesti].</footnote>
They don't look at the ID's of thieves, of criminals and pickpockets. But wherever they can find a prostitute, a transvestite or a homosexual person, or a customer of transvestites and homosexuals, they want to see their IDs. Seriously! An officer sees a criminal and turns his back. How is that possible? But it is.

As I will detail further below, police harassment increased significantly with the announcement of the urban renewal project. However, it is evident that trans* residents had a very different everyday experience of the discrimination and the territorial stigma in Tarlabaşı than someone like Halil Usta did.

## Being Kurdish in Tarlabaşı

The framing of Tarlabaşı as *Kurdish-hence-dangerous* facilitated aggressive policing and discrimination by law enforcement officers. Militarised checkpoints, the use of police barricades and frequent, often highly mediatised police raids associated with organised crime and illegalised political activity made this securitisation of the neighbourhood visible and provided “proof” that Tarlabaşı was a “bad place”, which in turn both generated and fed into the existing stigmatising narrative.<fnref n="9" />

For Kurdish residents, in particular for Kurdish men who lived or worked in Tarlabaşı, being cast as involuntary actors in this “security theatre” meant frequent police harassment, violence, and the feeling that it was impossible to hold those responsible to account. Ahmet, a young Kurdish man from Van in his early 20s, described one particularly violent encounter with the police that he tried to record on his mobile phone:

> [The police] were beating up some kids, really beating them up. Kurds. Right here on the street. I took out my phone to film them. But they saw me and caught me. So they started to beat me up, too. I was bleeding, and they took my phone away. They threatened me. They asked me: Who do you think you are messing with here? Who are you going to complain to? Our superiors? They laughed at me, beat me up some more. I got out of there by the skin of my teeth [kendime zor kurtardım].

His story was by no means an exception, and many Kurds in Tarlabaşı that I spoke to had experienced similar violence or knew of family members who had. Reports of police abuse in Turkey have been repeatedly published by human rights organisations (Pino and Wiatrowski 2006; Human Rights Watch 2008b).

Like Ahmet, many Kurdish residents voiced the belief that the police exclusively targeted Kurds and ignored, or even cooperated with, organised crime and petty thieves in the neighbourhood. Research has shown that ethnic Kurds distrust the police and are more likely to view Turkish state institutions, such as law enforcement, as oppressive and illegitimate, due to past and present experiences of severe state repression and discrimination (Sahin and Akboga 2019). The hostile demeanour of the police was also deeply injurious to residents' sense of self. Mehmet, the Kurdish owner of a successful catering

<footnote n="9">9 Sensationalist police raids regularly feature on Turkish news programmes, usually in relation to the PKK and other outlawed leftist organisations as well as in relation to drug rings and organised crime. TV crews are invited to accompany special police units on such operations which increases their dramatic appeal and blurs the line between news reporting and fiction.</footnote>
business running out of Tarlabaşı, described stop-and-frisk encounters with the police in the neighbourhood as aggravating and humiliating:

> People are fed up with being treated like that here. The police treat us badly, they stop and search us, they make us take off our shoes. People see this and it's bad for us. They think that we are all drug dealers.

As a Kurdish man in his 30s, Mehmet was forced to navigate an urban landscape that was being viewed through the racist Turkish nationalist lens that generalises Kurdish men as criminal and a threat. This narrative, and the stigma it fed into, distorted his feeling of self-respect, demanded constant alertness and emotional labour, and impacted on his everyday life.

## Experiencing stigma while under threat of eviction

The period between the official announcement of the urban renewal project in 2008 and the start of evictions in 2011 was characterised by a lack of reliable information and intense insecurity for residents. While there is a growing body of literature on the various effects of territorial stigma on residents' health (Kawachi and Berkman 2003; Burns and Snow 2012; Pearce 2012; Keene and Padilla 2014; Graham et al. 2016.), employment (Warr 2005a; Wacquant et al. 2014), or social cohesion (Levitas 2005; Warr 2005b; Macdonald et al. 2005; Pereira and Queirós 2014), little research has been done into how the spatial taint is experienced by residents who live under the immediate threat of eviction and displacement. Bahar Sakızlıoğlu (2014b) underlines the importance of looking at residents' experiences who live under the threat of displacement in order to better understand the trajectory of neighbourhood change in areas targeted for demolition. In what follows I would like to investigate the experience of territorial stigma for different Tarlabaşı residents and communities after the official announcement of the urban renewal project in 2008.

During those years project stakeholders revived and weaponised the existing territorial stigma to bolster their claims that Tarlabaşı was in urgent need of renewal and to rally public support for the contentious project, which in turn aggravated the impact of the stigma. However, residents were not passive victims of this deliberately intensified stigmatisation. Instead, they showed sophisticated understanding of how negative images and narratives operated through the media and state discourse, framing their district as bad. Erdal Aybek, founding member of the Tarlabaşı Solidarity Association, said in an interview with a Turkish journalist:

> We saw that all the news reports about us were unrealistic, made-up. I will tell you an interesting anecdote. Of the 269 buildings inside the project zone, 6 were in ruins, in a dilapidated state. *Star TV, Sabah* and *ATV* showed only these 6 houses for months. They said Tarlabaşı and showed these 6 houses. But in fact, these 6 buildings were the only ruined ones inside the project zone. [...] We all know that. The media only showed those buildings. For the entire time of the project, they showed only these 6 buildings
to all the people of Istanbul and the whole country and said that they were Tarlabaşı (Doğan, 2017:177).

Many residents also suspected that existing problems such as crime, dilapidated building structures and a run-down infrastructure were wilfully exacerbated by the authorities in order to make the neighbourhood look worse than it was (İşeri 2008; Kuray 2008). As I will show in the following chapter, rumours started to circulate that the Beyoğlu Municipality deliberately withheld services such as garbage disposal in order to put additional pressure on residents to leave. Müge concluded that the conspicuous underpolicing of the neighbourhood at the time, in tandem with an increase in drug dealing, petty crime, and the general increase of insecurity as buildings and streets started to empty out, was intentional:

> Nobody cares. The police have left [the neighbourhood] to the drug dealers. They don't want the people to complain, they want them to fuck off and leave. It's as simple as that. If the police wanted to, would they not crack down on [the dealers]? They would! That's all there is to it. Yeah, the municipality. They don't clean up here, there's garbage everywhere, it's dirty. At one of the meetings the municipality told the [residents]: transvestites have taken over the neighbourhood, drug dealers have taken over, all kinds of people have taken over. So why don't they do anything against that? You handle anything that doesn't suit you, so why don't you handle this? They abandon Tarlabaşı so they can do what they want to do here.

However, the provision of municipal services sometimes drew similar criticism if their execution was interpreted as deliberately disruptive, sloppy, or lacking respect. In the summer of 2010, the Beyoğlu Municipality undertook lengthy road improvement works on Tree Street, the main thoroughfare that connected Dolapdere to Tarlabaşı Boulevard. Noisy construction vehicles and machines raised clouds of dust, obstructed the movement of residents and heavily impeded on local businesses, such as green grocers and street sellers. The steaming heat, the pollution and the smell of the fresh asphalt forced locals to keep doors and windows shut during the hot summer months. Laundry that had to be dried on shared washing lines had to be washed twice, or three times. This became a bigger problem as the construction works stretched into the month of Ramadan and interfered with preparations for the festivities that mark its end, *Şeker Bayramı* [Sugar Feast]. Halil Usta interpreted the road improvement as yet another sign that Tarlabaşı residents had a lower standing in the eyes of the municipality than those of other Istanbul neighbourhoods:

> People are doing their holiday cleaning. They hang the laundry outside, and it gets all dirty again. [...] I'm telling you, they wouldn't do that in any other neighbourhood. In any other neighbourhood they'd spray water [against the dust from the construction] right away. On the [Asian] side they'd spray water. But here they don't, so people are unhappy about that. It's shameful, very shameful! I find it shameful as well. It's another attempt to make people here fed up. So they'll leave. That's not how it's supposed to be. They should provide public service, like everywhere else, and not use it against us.
It is important to note that the disruption caused by the road works was no different from the noise and dirt that plagued Istanbul neighbourhoods everywhere in a city dotted with construction sites. However, the sensitivity of Tarlabaşı residents to stigmatisation and its effects was such that the nuisance of road improvement works was interpreted as a deliberate affront against, and strategy to chase out, residents.

As tenants began to leave the neighbourhood, and with the crumbling of the united front of the Tarlabaşı Association, the pressure on property owners to sell quickly increased. This pressure frequently translated into unpleasant interactions with the representatives and lawyers of GAP Inşaat during talks. Many reported that they were generally treated “without respect” [saygısız], treated like “animals”, “criminals”, or “terrorists”, and that during their interactions with them they were made to feel “like nobodys” [bir hiç gibi]. Tarlabaşı residents variously described officials, police officers, and GAP Inşaat employees as “inconsiderate” [anlayışsız], disrespectful [saygısız], offensive [hakaret eden], and merciless [merhametsiz]. Ramazan, who had signed away the title deed to his 6-bedroom apartment on Tree Street, said that the lawyers he met with had threatened him during the “negotiations”:

> They didn't even let me look at the contract properly. They just shouted and told me to sign. So many pages, they just told me to sign them all. They said that if I didn't, we would get nothing at all. I felt intimidated. I didn't understand what was written there, I could not really see well, because of a [recent] eye surgery. They treated me like a child. I signed in the end, because I felt that I had no choice.

I heard several similar stories from other property owners, who felt that they were being looked down on and not taken seriously by project stakeholders, and many argued that this was because they lived in a poor, intensely stigmatised neighbourhood. Some, as I will detail in a later chapter, pushed back against this discrimination and their marginalisation. Others did not.

There were significant differences in how residents responded to the stigma and the discrimination during the period between 2008 and evictions, and these reactions were informed by their earlier experience of territorial stigmatisation and the intersection of that experience as members of marginalised communities.

## Experiencing pending eviction as a trans* woman

The announcement of the Tarlabaşı renewal project coincided with a legislative change that aimed at the bureaucratic and legal control of marginalised populations in urban centres. Introduced in March 2005, the new misdemeanour law, dubbed the “Law on Public Disgrace”, in combination with existing traffic laws and the Law on the Powers and Duties of the Police, became the principal method for harassing trans* persons in public space under the AKP government.<fnref n="10" /> It gave police the power to arrest people based

<footnote n="10">10 The law, aiming “to protect public order, general morality, general health, the environment, and the economic order”, criminalises a number of misdemeanours such as begging, public drunkenness, gambling, making noise, breaching the peace, “occupying” the street, carrying an unlicensed gun and smoking in places where it is prohibited, and punishes them with various fines. While</footnote>
on their own prejudice and transphobia – for example, if a person apprehended in the street was dressed in clothes deemed “too revealing”, a judgement entirely at the discretion of the police officer. The law severely limited trans* persons’ freedom of movement and impacted on even their most mundane everyday activities, such as walking in the street, shopping, or visiting a café, all deemed potentially “immoral” by the state solely based on their trans* identity (Amnesty International 2011b). The fines handed out under this new legislation, a considerable emotional and financial burden on trans* women who were disproportionately targeted, were applied differently in different districts of the city, with the result of trapping trans* persons in certain areas, while shutting them out of others. Initially, upmarket areas of Istanbul were policed much more vigorously, and fines were imposed more frequently than in certain areas of Beyoğlu, turning the discriminatory laws into tools of mapping out places in the city that became de facto “off limits” for trans* persons. For a while, Tarlabaşı was a space of relative safety and one of the last areas in the city where trans* persons were able to rent a house and to work. In the run-up to evictions, when the municipality increased efforts to pressure residents to leave and to frame Tarlabaşı as a space that needed “cleansing”, policing of trans* women in Tarlabaşı became much more aggressive. Müge was fined several times under the new misdemeanour laws while walking on Tarlabaşı Boulevard and in other parts of central Beyoğlu. Once she was fined 69 Turkish Lira for “breaching the peace” because she ate lunch on her own doorstep in Bird Street.

This is a kind of deterrence. They don't want [trans* persons] to walk on the main streets. They should not be visible outside, they should stay in the parks and side streets. [...] They fine you, so that you will constantly have to pay, pay, pay, pay. Where will the money go that you make? To these fines. Eventually, you will be fed up. That is what they want. [...] Now I cannot even eat food in front of my own house! The municipality wants us to leave Tarlabaşı now, too, they want to show that there is no place for us when they build their fancy houses and their hotels.

Müge had no doubts that this blatant violation of her private space was yet another municipal strategy tied to the planned evictions and made possible because of her identity as a trans* woman sex worker. She also knew that project stakeholders wanted to remove her and all other trans* persons from the neighbourhood.

Trans* property owners, even those who immediately agreed to sell their home to the project developers, experienced trans* stigma when trying to obtain a fair sales agreement. Cansu had bought her 30m² flat on Tree Street when she first arrived in Istanbul. In 2010, almost immediately after sales negotiations began, she sold her apartment to the municipality for a meagre amount several times below market value at the time, convinced that nobody else would even consider buying property from a trans* woman.

[The municipality] estimated the value, they said 50,000 TL, they gave me 48,500 TL in the end. [...] That was fine with me, so I sold it. You know, nobody else would buy this [apartment] because transvestites live here. A family could not come and live here.

<footnote>some of these behaviours are specific, others are extremely vague, thus giving security forces carte blanche for prejudicial enforcement (Republic of Turkey Law 5326).</footnote>
[...] Who else would come, and who else would pay more for this flat? Nobody would. Even if I tried to sell it to somebody else, nobody would buy it from me. Because I am a transvestite. Nobody would buy it, that is just the reality in Turkey. 'Ewww, from them?' [She clicks her tongue to indicate no.] They just would not buy it. So I was glad, who else would I have sold it to?

Cansu thought of the disadvantageous sale as her only chance not to walk away empty-handed – a threat project stakeholders routinely levelled against property owners who were hesitant to sell their homes – and she expressed gratitude towards the municipality even though they had, to be frank, screwed her over. Just like the municipal authorities, who had used this to their immediate advantage, she was aware that the stigmatisation she experienced in Tarlabaşı transcended her trans* identity and affected the space she owned and inhabited.

How Cansu responded to the intensifying pressure following the announcement of the renewal project was directly informed by her negative experience of the double stigmatisation of being a trans* woman sex worker who lived and worked in a deeply stigmatised neighbourhood. Based on her previous experience of everyday discrimination, she knew that she did not have a realistic chance of fighting the looming eviction, in court or otherwise. Furthermore, having repeatedly suffered abuse and violence at the hands of the police in Tarlabaşı over the years, Cansu had no interest in provoking an expulsion from her home accompanied by law enforcement. She was aware of the depth of the multiple stigmas constructed around her social identity, and of the consequences they had for her. Unlike other residents in the neighbourhood, she decided not to go to court. What is more, Cansu was able to interpret the events in the run-up to evictions in Tarlabaşı through the prism of the collective experience of what had happened in nearby Ülker Street in 1996, when the police had violently, and unlawfully, evicted trans* women who refused to leave (Selek 2001). Such shared or individual understandings of what had happened before influenced what residents' choices they thought they had.

## Experiencing pending eviction while Kurdish

For Kurdish residents, most of whom had come to Istanbul as a result of forced displacement from their towns and villages in the southeast, the renewed threat of state violence, eviction, and losing a home played into an activation of trauma. Alev was in her late 20s by the time the municipality prepared Tarlabaşı for demolition, but she had been only seven years old when her village in Mardin province was burned down by the Turkish military. This destruction had been preceded by experiences of intense discrimination. Her sister had been detained, and Alev remembered how the young woman was taken away blindfolded. Her brother had been tortured by members of the Turkish security forces during the days of his detention. And once, her father told me, all male villagers, from teenagers to old men, were rounded up by the military and severely beaten in front of everyone. Finally, following the destruction of their village, the family first moved to the provincial capital, and from there to Istanbul. Alev described the looming eviction in continuity of these various violent displacements:
This is the third house that the state will take away from us. That's how it is! The law...in Turkey, the law doesn't work. It never worked, especially not when it comes to Kurds. The third house the state will take [from us]. Our village was burned, they chased us out of [Mardin], now they take away our house in Istanbul. It's hard. Really, it's so hard. Just when you thought you had made yourself a nice home, it's being destroyed again.

In her study on the effect of forced migration on Kurdish women, Ayşe Betül Çelik (2005) describes how the collective experience of displacement and general patterns of social exclusion in the city reinforce Kurdish identity. Her observation that ethnic consciousness is enhanced due to the shared sense of discrimination was true for Kurdish migrants living in Tarlabaşı. Alev conflated territorial and Kurdishness stigma when she said: "The only reason that they want to demolish Tarlabaşı is that it is a Kurdish neighbourhood. They want to get rid of us." In her eyes, the urban renewal project was as much about monetary profit as it was about a revanchist Turkish state trying to cleanse the inner city of unwanted Kurdish migrants.

Maher, a tenant who had spent considerable amounts of time in Istanbul as a seasonal worker since the 1970s, was forced to permanently relocate to Istanbul in 1996. As a former village guard, he feared retaliation from the PKK.<fnref n="11" /> However, it was the Turkish military that destroyed his village as part of their scorched earth policy, forcibly displacing all residents. Maher moved his wife and children to Tarlabaşı, where he was able to tap into an existing and vital support network of Kurdish migrants. He, too, read his experience of the coming evictions in Tarlabaşı through the prism of violent discrimination against Kurds in Turkey:

> Tarlabaşı was a place where many Kurds lived. They destroyed that, too. They tried to cast us aside. [...] We were not able to live in our village. They took away all our rights and we migrated here, and here they don't leave us alone either. They made us travel 2,000 kilometres, we worked hard to open a business here, our children grew up here, they did their military service, I helped them open a shop so they could have a profession, but [the state] doesn't allow for that either. We started from scratch. We're still in debt. They don't let us have a life here. [...] They trampled on our rights. The state crushes its own citizens! Is that democracy? Is that justice? They burned our garden to

<footnote n="11">11 Village guards, officially known as *Türkiye Güvenlik Köy Korucuları* ("Security Village Guards of Turkey") are a semi-official and locally recruited paramilitary group linked to the Turkish government. Originally set up and funded by the Turkish state in the mid-1980s, the village guard system was supposed to protect southeastern towns and villages from the attacks and reprisals of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), in support, but not as part of the regular military. It is important to underline that people were recruited into the role of village guard for different and highly complex reasons. Recent research has shown that the majority of village guards became paramilitaries either because they were pressured by the state, because they felt that there were no other options for salaried employment, or because their tribe as a whole took up arms against the PKK. This means that village guards generally have a more fraught relationship with the Turkish state, the Kurdish mainstream political movement writ large, and the larger Kurdish social community. It will certainly complicate guards' relationship with their fellow villagers if it is not an entire village that is being recruited (KHRP 2011; Acar 2019).</footnote>