at the protest, from taking photographs or video footage. While unable to gather any reliable information, several people loudly expressed their opinion about the ham-fisted demolition.

A few people suggested that it might be an attempt to intimidate locals on the day of the planned protest. One man, a resident whose name I did not know, was sure about it.

Who demolishes a house like this, with only four men? I work in construction as well. I know how this should be done. This is not how you're supposed to do it! This is them trying to put psychological pressure [on us], nothing else!

After this first demolition the rumour that the municipality had embarked on a form of “psychological warfare” quickly spread in Tarlabaşı. A second bulldozing in the same street barely two weeks later had a similar effect, except that this time residents were not only unimpressed, but also angry because the shock waves caused by the heavy machinery had seriously endangered neighbouring buildings.

The tenants in these houses had not been notified by the municipality and were woken up by tremors that they at first mistook for an earthquake. It was unclear – and impossible for outsiders to know – if these demolitions were part of the renewal project or if they would have been undertaken in any case. What was important, however, was that many residents interpreted them as an attempt by the municipality to exert “psychological pressure” [psikolojik baskı] in order to make people nervous, enough to sell them their property without much dispute. This rumour was picked up by outside activists and lawyers of the Istanbul Chamber of Architects who were still locked in a court case against the Tarlabaşı project. The plaintiffs then turned this particular rumour into a legal argument, an accusation of deliberate intimidation, and used in litigation proceedings (BIA Haber Merkezi 2010b).

Tarlabaşı residents again had no way of knowing for sure if their assumptions were accurate. Previous false statements by the municipality and the developer, residents' prior experience of intimidation tactics and threats, either first-hand or told to them by neighbours and friends, influenced the way this particular rumour was generated, interpreted, and passed on. The demolition of the ruined buildings certainly did not cause the panic I had expected. It even strengthened some residents' resolve not to let themselves be intimidated and continue their legal battles against expropriation.

Violent resistance never occurred in the run-up to evictions. However, rumours about the possibility of riots circulated in the neighbourhood from the moment that I began my fieldwork in 2010. These rumours spread both inside and outside the neighbourhood. Outsiders' expectations of riots were largely based on the stigma-fuelled assumption that Tarlabaşı was an inherently violent place, and its residents hostile to the Turkish state. As David Samper (2002: 5) states, rumours not only strengthen social and solidarity ties in the community where these rumours circulate, but they “become expressions of a community's collective anxieties and beliefs” as they circulate in a community. Most of these speculations centred on the neighbourhood's majority Kurdish
population, and the (stereotyped) presumption that any state activity would inevitably be met by violent opposition.<fnref n="5" />

<figure><img src="image_33.png" /><figcaption>*Police disperse May Day protests with teargas*</figcaption></figure>

Photo by Jonathan Lewis

However, these rumours were not always framed as negative, and could also relay the hopes of the speaker for forceful pushback. Some Kurds in Tarlabaşı, people who had first-hand experience of excessive state violence, thought that the renewed threat of forced displacement *did* necessitate violent resistance, partly because they knew that unquestioned surrender would result in defeat. Research has shown that rumours can be strong indicators of the narrators' anxieties, prejudices, or aspirations, as well as the communities' collective unconscious (Allport and Postman 1947; Rosnow 1991; Samper 2002). This is why second-hand furniture seller Maher speculated, with no little certainty, that there would be riots and that Tarlabaşı would “turn into a warzone” if people would actually be evicted. (Violence as a resistance tactic was a disputed topic in Tarlabaşı. For example, a number of Tarlabaşı Association members were opposed to any protests that risked breaking the law or drawing a violent police reaction because it would “make them look like terrorists”, a thinly veiled discriminatory insinuation that non-legal protest might make *all* Tarlabaşı residents “look like Kurds”.)

<footnote n="5">5 Due to the fact that the pro-Kurdish, then Peace and Democracy Party (BDP, renamed as the Peoples' Democratic Party, HDP, in 2012) had its headquarters in Tarlabaşı, violent clashes that involved the police and Kurdish youth were not uncommon in the area. Media reports on street protests in the Taksim area, especially when they were related to the Kurdish political movement, often included the naming of “Tarlabaşı”, anchoring the location as a centre for Kurdish political violence in the collective memory of the city.</footnote>
## Splitting solidarity

There were other macropolitical past events that impacted the production and spread of gossip and rumours in Tarlabaşı. In Turkey, corruption and nepotism in government institutions have been pervasive problems for many years, and corruption appears to have permeated all levels of government (Adaman 2011; Soyaltin 2017). A multitude of corruption scandals have been exposed and mediatised over the years, but rarely anyone has been held accountable. Rumour studies have shown that people who distrust the government are more prone to accept rumours that criticise the government, since rumour then activates and confirms pre-existing assumptions and prejudice rather than creating new ones (Allport and Postman 1947: 182). Since corruption amongst members of all levels of the government was expected by many people, the rumours of graft in the Beyoğlu administration took hold very easily. These allegations were bolstered by accusations of corruption in the media and by oppositional and civil society groups, who argued that the tender for the renewal of Tarlabaşı had not been organised openly and transparently, and was finally awarded to Çalık Holding, a company at the time under the leadership of Berak Albayrak, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's son-in-law.

Tarlabaşı residents who had moved to the neighbourhood before 1990, like Cemal, also remembered the construction of Tarlabaşı Boulevard between 1986 – 1988 under Bedrettin Dalan, the first mayor of Metropolitan Istanbul who had a reputation for being a dishonest and fraudulent politician, as well as fabulously corrupt. Despite widespread opposition from professional chambers as well as local and international organisations for the preservation of historical buildings, the plan was implemented under the auspice of “cleansing the area of prostitution and drugs” (Sakızlıoğlu 2014a: 166; Rüzgâr 2018). For many Tarlabaşı residents, this renewed threat of forced evictions and demolitions under a similar pretext was thus somewhat of a déjà-vu. Urban policy and re/development under Dalan, under whose leadership corruption, clientelism and nepotism flourished, and who had licensed numerous high-profile projects in areas that were either under protection or that were not slated for construction to companies with strong ties to the administration, became known as one of the most “corrupt” and “scandalous” within the history of Turkish urbanisation (Ünsal 2013).<fnref n="6" />

Knowledge of government corruption, dysfunctional courts, the lack of accountability for the misconduct of the police and the authorities, as well as knowledge of the brutality of other urban renewal projects in Istanbul heavily influenced much of the rumour production in Tarlabaşı. While optimist interpretations of such rumours existed, a large part of the speculation about government misconduct in Tarlabaşı was negative. Such pessimistic takes had a detrimental effect on neighbourhood cohesion, solidarity ties, and the will to engage in any kind of resistance. One example were rumours about the eventual enlargement of the project zone to include neighbouring, previously untouched parts of Tarlabaşı. Kerem Usta, a musical instrument maker who owned the title deed for his workshop that lay just outside the designated renewal area, wondered if he would

<footnote n="6">⁶ Dalan infamously reacted to the threat of losing a court case over the demolition of 370 listed buildings with the comment: “I’ll demolish, and I’ll accept my punishment” (Rüzgâr 2018: 54).</footnote>
have to leave his atelier, how much money he would be able to get from the municipal-
ity in terms of compensation, and whether he would be allowed to reopen a workshop
if he was to agree to exchange the two title deeds of his atelier. (As all businesses had
to rely on the municipality to grant operating licenses, it was easy for the authorities to
keep them out of the renewal project, leaving small business owners in doubt about their
future income. Unsurprisingly this led to considerable anxiety.) Kerem Usta, an ethnic
Turk in his fifties whose grandfather had migrated to Istanbul from the Black Sea city
of Giresun three generations ago, was not a very contentious person to begin with. His
political views were much less anti-AKP than those of the other master carpenter em-
ployed in his atelier, whereas his younger brother, who also worked there, supported the
AKP government. While he saw himself as a “leftist” in the vaguest sense, he was not po-
litically active.<fnref n="7" /> He generally trusted the Turkish state, if not the current government,
to protect deserving citizens. He certainly expressed his dismay over the pending forced
displacement of old friends, such as barber Halil Usta, when we chatted about the re-
newal project. However, Kerem Usta also saw the planned revitalisation of Tarlabaşı as
an opportunity to restore the neighbourhood to its former glory, a sentiment I will ex-
plore in more detail in chapter eight. He did not see political motives or betrayal in the
municipality’s plans to renew the neighbourhood, partly because he was not yet person-
ally affected.

However, the lack of reliable information had a negative impact on his ability to make
plans for the future, which is why he paid attention to rumours and speculation, trying to
assess if his shop was about to be included in future demolition plans. It was impossible
for him to be sure. At some point, the municipality published a statement on its website
claiming that the current version of the renewal project was only a “first step”, and that
other parts of Tarlabaşı would be included in demolitions later on. They did not specify an
exact area or a date when this was supposed to happen. The plans never materialised, and
the announcement was later deleted without further comment. This insecurity affected
the instrument maker’s solidarity with friends and neighbours who did live and work in
the allocated renewal zone. Despite his awareness of the distress and anger his long-time
friend, barber Halil Usta, felt at his pending eviction, Kerem Usta did not attend public
protests or voice opposition vis-à-vis authority figures or in settings where he could not
be sure if anyone present might report his discontent back to the municipality. After all,
he had to be careful not to anger or alienate the authorities with whom he might have
to negotiate a deal for his property in the future. The rumoured extension of the renewal
project limited Kerem Usta in his ability to openly voice criticism, participate in protests,
and to demonstrate solidarity with other Tarlabaşı residents.

There were other reasons that rumours either caused or widened existing fault lines
between people impacted by the project. In the run-up to evictions, residents kept a keen

<footnote n="7">7 A lifelong Democratic Left Party [Demokratik Sol Partısı – DSP] supporter, he briefly became a mem-
ber of the pro-Kurdish HDP in the run-up to the national elections on June 7, 2015, something he
admitted to me in a gleeful conspiratorial whisper. He was thrilled when the co-leader of the party,
Figen Yüksekdağ, showed up in his atelier to inquire after his work and take a selfie with him. How-
ever, his support for the HDP waned after the breakdown of the peace process following the June
2015 elections and the renewed, catastrophic violence in the southeast.</footnote>
eye on what their neighbours, landlords or, in the case of business owners, what their customers were doing. They were eager to extract as much information as possible from their actions and comments since property sales or even the willingness alone to negotiate with project stakeholders could have an impact on their own situation. This led to a large number of rumours that dealt with levels of resistance and compliance of landlords or other property owners. Following the closure of the Tarlabaşı Association information office, suspicions over property sales increased and were eagerly exchanged. Barber Halil Usta rented his small shop on Tree Street from an entrepreneur whose family had migrated to Tarlabaşı from the Black Sea city of Tokat in the 1970s. That businessman, by 2010 the owner of a simit<fnref n="8" /> empire, had bought the entire apartment building for a relatively low price immediately after his arrival in Istanbul.

<figure><img src="image_34.png" /><figcaption>*Inside the barber shop*</figcaption></figure>

Photo by Jonathan Lewis

In 2011, the sale of the building was still being disputed in court, because the landlord was not content with the amount of money offered for his property. This left a lot of guesswork to Halil Usta and his business partner Necmi Usta, since both wanted to avoid sudden eviction and were planning to reopen the barber shop in a new location close by. Halil explained:

[My landlord] has not sold the building yet. But he will! They will sell the building. When they offer him one million and two hundred thousand. Because he has been in

<footnote n="8">8 Simit is a circular bread dough pastry covered with sesame seeds that is very popular for breakfast or as a snack. Commonly sold from street carts, simit-selling fast-food chains and franchises have opened since the early 2000s in Turkey.</footnote>
Istanbul for fifty years, and he has never even seen fifty thousand in one place. He'll sell it for sure. If it wasn't for this project, our [shop] would not even be worth two hundred thousand. That's the reality. It wouldn't be! That's why [our landlord] was able to buy it for thirty thousand years ago. In instalments. Only because of the project [prices went up]. [Erdal Aybek] fought a lot [for Tarlabaşı], at first. He came to the shop to talk. But he saw that everyone would sell once they'd see the money, every Tom, Dick, and Harry. [Ahmet de verir, Mehmet de.] [...] Our Cemal<sup>9</sup>, and the hardware shop owner as well...I asked Cemal: you own a place here, what are they giving you? 50,000, or 60,000. Ok, I say, now you fight against it. 50,000. If they'd give you a million, or two hundred thousand, will you sell? He says he would! Nobody cares about history here. [...] That's why...those that fight a lot now will get more money and leave. There is no more work, what are they supposed to do?

As a tenant Halil Usta had no legal recourse to fight his pending eviction. His landlord did not inform him about the ongoing court case against the Beyoğlu municipality that by then had been dragging on for more than a year, which meant that Halil Usta also lacked the necessary information to base any kind of business decisions on. He remained in the dark about a possible eviction date, when people and businesses around him started to move out of the neighbourhood. It was unlikely that he and Necmi Usta would receive any assistance from the municipality for moving the barber shop, but as the municipality did furnish movers and a lorry to some tenants in Tarlabaşı, he could not be sure of that either. In the meantime, and contrary to other tenants whose landlords had sold their property to the developer already, Halil still had to pay the full rent every month, a fact that he thought was an indicator of his landlord's love of money. If he was going to be paid royalty for his property anyway, why did the businessman not at least lower or waive the rent? After all, his landlord knew that his business had almost trickled to a halt since the announcement of the renewal project in 2008. While Halil never directly accused his landlord of being greedy, he did say that he found the court dispute over a higher amount of compensation unjustified. After all, Halil Usta reasoned, the landlord had bought the building very cheaply and now took advantage of the renewal project to ask for a larger sum. It was impossible to independently verify how much different property owners had actually received, as such information was not freely shared, and amounts allegedly varied wildly. However, rumours about property sales prices and the fantastic sums that some owners had supposedly received were enthusiastically exchanged. Depending on the context and on who was involved in the conversation at the time, property owners who were suspected of having made a good deal were disparaged as greedy or praised as clever. Absentee landlords, such as the Tokat entrepreneur, were more often criticised for their excessive demands of compensation, as their ties to the neighbourhood were seen as built on money only, and not on their connection to the community. Halil Usta was certain that his landlord, just like other property owners, would eventually give in and sell, as long as he was paid enough for his building.

This distrust in the businesspeople who had cheaply bought up property in the neighbourhood in the 1970s and 1980s, and who now vied for a large profit on their invest-

<footnote n="9">9 Halil Usta is referring to second-hand furniture seller Cemal whose shop was in the same street.</footnote>
ment also extended to the board of the Tarlabaşı Association. One evening Halil Usta and his shop neighbours Ekin and Seray, talked about ongoing negotiations and the association that Seray and Ekin were both members of. Halil, who did not own property in Tarlabaşı and thought that as a tenant he would not gain anything from a membership, was not. The conversation turned to the recent disputes between different factions of the association and the falling-out between the board and spokesman Erdal Aybek. Someone jokingly wondered if it had been the association president who might have driven Erdal “crazy”. It was clear that nobody in the room had much respect for the president, a property owner who did not live in Tarlabaşı and who owned several buildings on Tarlabaşı Boulevard. They were convinced that he was only after the money and would have dropped the association and everyone in it at the drop of a hat in exchange for a large enough sum from the developer. By then rumours circulated that the association president had already sold part of his property to the municipality and was now merely hoping to break off a larger piece of the profit for what remained. These rumours were fed by the public claim of Beyoğlu mayor Ahmet Misbah Demircan that of seven Tarlabaşı Association board members, four had already come to an agreement with the municipality. Demircan had told the press that those board members only “pretended to care” about cultural heritage, when they had really “asked for the construction of high rises behind closed doors in order to make a larger profit on their properties” (Birgün 2010). It later became clear that these claims were not unsubstantiated.

Rumours about sales and the greed of landlords were deeply divisive and led to distrust and the corrosion of solidarity ties in Tarlabaşı. I was told at numerous occasions and by different people that property owners might say they would resist, but that their claims were really a lie designed to keep face. Sometimes such cynical speculation extended to tenants, too. Halil Usta, for example, did not think that second-hand furniture seller Maher actually meant it when he said he would resist eviction:

> Let's talk about the tenants. Maher across from us, those. So, they are "resisting" right now? They talk about injustice and politics. They talk and stuff, you know...if the municipality would tell them, here take one hundred thousand for every apartment that you rent, they'd also leave immediately.

Halil's speculation was moot since tenants were not offered any financial compensation by project agents for moving out. However, his comment illustrated how little faith he had in neighbourhood solidarity ties, which in turn had a profound impact on his will to participate in public protests:

> If you ask me, Halil Ağbi<fnref n="10" />, will you participate in [a protest]? I won't. If you ask me why, I will tell you that I am a tenant here, so they won't give me anything. If the property owner sells, I will say: whatever, that doesn't concern me.

It was clear that rumours and speculation about residents' assumed self-interest, no matter how much they themselves said that they wanted to fight, had a detrimental impact on neighbourhood cohesion and therefore, joint opposition.

<footnote n="10">10 The word ağbi means “brother” and is commonly used to address a male interlocutor. It is an expression of friendly informality and/or familiarity.</footnote>
Rumours of conspiracy

Tarlabaşı residents were aware that the municipality and the developer used the intense stigma that surrounded the neighbourhood in order to rally public support for the renewal project. As I have shown in chapter four, many believed that the Beyoğlu Municipality deliberately withheld services such as garbage disposal and policing in order to put pressure on residents and make the neighbourhood look worse than it was (See also İşeri 2008; Kuray 2008). It is no surprise that these suspicions fuelled rumours that project stakeholders were actually staging criminal acts and illegal activities in the neighbourhood to deepen the already existing intense stigma. The stories I heard reflected at how much residents distrusted the authorities. One of the most poignant anecdotes came from Burak, the younger brother of baker Gökhan Usta:

> The taxi stopped [at the end of Tree Street] before turning [onto Tarlabaşı Boulevard]. A man came running and opened the door and snatched the purse of the woman inside. Can you believe it? Right here, during the day. He got away! Everyone was so stunned. The police station is right there, the municipality building is across the street. I am telling you, the municipality is behind this. They send all these thieves and criminals here to make us look bad. They send them here. Because of the project. They do this on purpose.

His claim that it was the municipality who had staged the purse snatching was significant because petty crime was common in Tarlabaşı. However, the mugging that Burak had witnessed had apparently been unusually audacious. It had been committed in broad daylight and in close proximity not only to various businesses and a busy bus stop, but also the local police station and across from the project sales office that the municipality was jointly running with *GAP İnşaat*.

While Burak, too, was under no illusion concerning the existence of crime in the neighbourhood, this particular mugging did not entirely align with his knowledge and his experiences of Tarlabaşı. In his eyes it was highly unlikely that any thief would risk mugging a taxi in close proximity to the police, and if he did, that he would not get caught. There was usually a high police presence on Tarlabaşı Boulevard, and local residents complained about the frequent ID checks and police harassment they were subjected to. Burak also said that he generally knew the local pickpockets and thieves at least from sight, and that he had never before seen the man who had robbed the taxi. This is why he interpreted the entire incident as one that had been staged by the municipality, an assumption that squared with many residents' beliefs that the municipality actively and intentionally tried to make Tarlabaşı look bad.
<figure><img src="image_35.png" /><figcaption>Neglect</figcaption></figure>

Photo by Jonathan Lewis

I cannot know if the rumour that the municipality had sent the mugger to Tarlabaşı originated with Burak or another eyewitness, as by the time we spoke the news of the incident had already made the rounds in the neighbourhood, and the claim that it had been orchestrated travelled with it. It is irrelevant to the discussion if residents' suspicions that the municipality deliberately encouraged crime to speed up the eviction process was true. The collective belief that they did was a social fact, whether it was "real" or not, with real effects in the social world of the neighbourhood. People made decisions based on that "fact". This does not imply that Tarlabaşı residents believed that crime did not previously exist. Most agreed that petty crime and drug dealing were a problem in their neighbourhood, with the majority saying that they did not feel safe (Kentsel A.Ş. 2008). At the same time residents were aware that, while their neighbourhood was described as "dangerous" and "criminal", the authorities did little to deal with these issues.

With the announcement of the renewal project and the effort of project stakeholders to push residents out of the neighbourhood, they increasingly suspected that the municipality exploited social problems in order to make Tarlabaşı look worse than it was. Marginalised groups who were frequently the target of discrimination and police violence, such as Kurds or the trans* community, were especially quick to believe rumours that the authorities intentionally pushed crime and ignored criminals, or, like Burak claimed, even entirely orchestrated illegal acts.

The municipality-sanctioned, gradual abandonment of an emptying, but still inhabited neighbourhood made people feel less safe on the streets (Sakızlıoğlu 2014b). An increasing number of people from outside Tarlabaşı had begun to deal and use drugs on street corners and in deserted buildings, and a number of sex workers who were not part of the local sex economy had moved in and were soliciting in broad daylight and in
plain view of residents and passers-by. These women often consumed drugs and alcohol. Many residents were scandalised, and women who lived in Tarlabaşı were especially scared to walk past them. People could not make sense of the fact that both the police and the *zabita*, usually so quick to fine trans* women who lived and worked in Tarlabaşı, simply turned a blind eye to such blatantly illicit activity. Some residents were convinced that this was, again, a deliberate attempt by the municipality to smear their neighbourhood, and that the authorities not only let the sex workers peddle their trade on one of Beyoğlu's busiest thoroughfares, but that they had shipped in the sex workers themselves.

<figure><img src="image_36.png" /><figcaption>*Sex worker in a ruined building on Tarlabaşı Boulevard*</figcaption></figure>

Photo by Jonathan Lewis

In late 2011, GAP Inşaat started to demolish the façades of most buildings lining Tarlabaşı Boulevard, further destroying the outward-facing exterior of the neighbourhood, in part to prevent squatting. However, it also added to the impression that Tarlabaşı was an abandoned, run-down slum while hundreds of people in fact still lived in the renewal zone. The construction company put down concrete slabs painted in bright yellow and bearing the brand logo of the renewal project, which lent the decrepit scenery behind them an air of officially branded endorsement. At the same time the developer hired a number of uniformed, private security guards to patrol the streets. These guards strictly prohibited all photographs and filming whenever they noticed someone doing it, but ignored sex workers, drug users, dealers, and scavengers, which provided more fertile ground for rumours that the neglect of security issues and street cleaning was deliberate and orchestrated by the authorities.<fnref n="11" />

<footnote n="11">11 One time, a photographer and I had to run away from a private project security guard who wanted to confiscate my notebook and the photographer's camera because we had been looking at (and</footnote>
Again, the veracity of these conspiratorial assumptions is of little importance to the discussion, as many believed such rumours to be fact. David Samper (2002: 5) argues that “[t]he individual’s ability to (re)shape the rumor multiple times transforms it into a collective representation of fears and anxieties.” One might also argue that this narrative was a form of stigma management. These rumours helped to make sense of the pervasive stigma that had been mobilised by project stakeholders in order to justify the evictions.

<figure><img src="image_37.png" /><figcaption>“Beware of the dog.” Tarlabaşı Boulevard in December 2011</figcaption></figure>

Photo by Jonathan Lewis

In Tarlabaşı, territorial stigmatisation was deeply intertwined with project stakeholders withholding reliable information on the renewal project. Without access to this information, residents had to rely on rumours as a tactic to cope with the material consequences of the stigma, their invisibilisation, social isolation and exclusion. Rumours that circulate in a community starved of information can be read as collective interpretations of an ambiguous, or possibly dangerous situation in a moment of crisis. They can be a tool and a tactic to manage uncertainty. However, the interpretative step of determining how to decipher that rumour might vary, as different members of the group will differ on the credibility of sources, the reliability of communicative channels, and the motives of the involved actors. Previous personal experience as well as collective experiences play an important role in making those decisions. Therefore, rumours could be the cause for less cohesion and a break-down of solidarity in Tarlabaşı, both of which have a detrimental effect on resistance, be it as an organised group or as individuals. Even if rumours sometimes offered hope, this happened largely on an individual level and did not lead to more organised resistance. The analysis of the rumours in Tarlabaşı shows that residents were

<footnote>taking pictures of) the construction site. The legal basis for his claim was unclear as we were on a public street, but we did not want to take any chances.</footnote>
very critical of the way their neighbourhood was portrayed, and aware of the munici-
pality's attempt to exploit existing crime and problems to advance the renewal project.
In this context, rumours functioned as a form of symbolic opposition which shows that
residents were conscious that the state weaponised the stigma.
## Chapter seven: In the eye of the beholder

In 2012, after evictions had gotten well underway, geographer and anthropologist David Harvey came to Tarlabaşı for a video interview about state-led gentrification and housing rights with our (now defunct) blog “Tarlabaşı-Istanbul” (Tarlabasi Istanbul 2012). The videographer suggested using an abandoned row of buildings just inside the renewal zone as a backdrop for the shoot. Refuse lined the entrance of the deserted houses, and the walls were covered with scribbles and graffiti. All doors and windows had been removed, which reinforced the image of ruin. Harvey offered to sit down on the stoop of one of the buildings, behind him a gaping hole where the door had been. Scattered garbage bags thrown into the empty building were visible behind him. However, before the interview could begin, a woman who lived in an opposite building, the row of which lay outside the project area, started to shout from her window. She castigated us not only for making Harvey sit “in the dirt”, but also for choosing to portray Tarlabaşı in such a negative way:

> Why do you make that old uncle [amca] sit in the dirt like that? Why do you have to film him in this filth? Can't you see what it looks like here? Why would you want to show this to the whole world? All this garbage, these ruined houses! What a shameful sight. Why do journalists always want to show everyone how dirty Tarlabaşı is? As if this was the only thing people want to see!

I told her that our location choice for the interview was supposed to illustrate the injustice of ongoing evictions. Still talking to us from her window, she disagreed and argued that such a frame rather perpetuated the image of Tarlabaşı as a dirty, run-down neighbourhood. After a few minutes of friendly squabbling, the woman joined us outside. There she explained how she regularly swept the street. She also threw the garbage bags that others carelessly tossed between the ruins behind the aluminium construction fence that had been erected around the renewal area. The municipality had more or less stopped to dispatch garbage collectors and street sweepers, she explained, so she took it upon herself to keep the surroundings clean. She did that not only because she still lived there and had an interest in basic urban hygiene, but also because she detested that the garbage bags, often ripped open by stray cats and other animals, made Tarlabaşı look dirty and uncared for to outsiders and passers-by.
The woman who objected to our shooting location did not simply accept the negative
narrative about her neighbourhood and did not want to concede to the frame of Tarlabaşı
being a filthy, bad place. Her efforts to keep at least her own street clean and her protest
over our choice of filming location were a “strategic re-scripting of place” (Nayak 2019:
928). This tactic is not dissimilar to the concept of impression management in social psy-
chology, which is closely related to Erving Goffman’s (1959) concept of self-presentation.
Goffman demonstrates that people present themselves strategically in order to try and
control how others perceive them, chiefly to ward off embarrassment and loss of status.
Scholars studying impression management have shown that the tactics people employ
to manage their own image vis-à-vis their audience depends on context, and especially
on the identity of the person or persons they are speaking to, including their race, class,
gender, and their social status (Baumeister 1986; Leary and Kowalski 1990; Banaji and
Prentice 1994; Tice et al. 1995; Brown 1997; Pitcan et al. 2018). This is particularly challeng-
ing for marginalised groups who are expected to align their presentation of self with the
dominant, white, heteronormative, and middle class narrative in order to be accepted as
respectable (Pitcan et al. 2018).

This chapter explores examples of how individual Tarlabaşı residents tried to control outsiders' perceptions of them through impression management of themselves and their immediate surroundings. Firstly, I establish how territorial stigma creates a backdrop of negative bias that tips interpretation of outsiders' impressions of an individual who lives in that tainted area towards less favourable interpretations from the outset. Then I analyse the removal of dirt and the investment in one's physical surroundings as one tactic of impression management in stigmatised Tarlabaşı. Finally, I examine how the urgency of the successful performance of respectability in Tarlabaşı was gendered in a particular way. The below examples of impression management do not constitute a direct challenge, or opposition to the territorial stigma, but individual attempts by individual residents to shift the negative focus away from themselves by trying to prove that the stigmatising narrative was unjustified or wrong.

Impression management in a stigmatised neighbourhood

On August 10, 2011, the now defunct left-leaning daily newspaper *Radikal* published a reportage about the ongoing evictions in Tarlabaşı. The piece, available online and in print, included written portraits of all the remaining inhabitants of the apartment building on Tree Street and a photo gallery that included, amongst others, pictures of Cemile and her husband Ramazan. On the day of publication, I visited them in their new rental apartment they had finally found and moved into after their eviction in July 2011. Cemile was very upset. She had received a phone call from her relatives in Antakya about the *Radikal* article, letting her know that they had seen her and her husband's pictures. They also told her how shocked they had been to hear about the circumstances of her expulsion and the destitution that she and Ramazan apparently found themselves in. I had not yet seen the article and neither had Cemile, so I went out to buy a copy of the newspaper in a nearby *bakkal*. A picture of Cemile was at the top of the frontpage, and more pictures of her illustrated the article itself. The photograph on the cover showed her in half pro-
file, standing in her old bedroom. The bedroom floor was covered in rubble, shards, and pieces of bricks. She was looking towards the large gaps where the windows had been, but both the glass and the PVC frames were missing. The most humiliating detail of the photograph, in Cemile's eyes, was that she was not wearing her headscarf, but only the undercap that she wore to prevent slippage. Cemile was a deeply religious woman who did not even allow her own children to own or display photographs of her in their homes, therefore the fact that her semi-uncovered face was now on display for the whole nation to see horrified her. Furthermore, she was deeply ashamed that her home looked like an uncared-for ruin on the frontpage of a national newspaper. And her relatives in Antakya now thought that she had lived in such a place!

In addition to the images that Cemile felt had been published without her consent<fnref n="1" />, she was deeply offended that the accompanying article portrayed her and Ramazan as destitute. The journalist, a reporter who had worked on housing issues and urban renewal in Istanbul for years and who was sympathetic to the plight of Tarlabaşı residents, described the bad deal that Ramazan and Cemile had been forced to accept by the development company, the insurmountable debt they had incurred as a result, and the few remaining possessions they had been able to take from their old home to their new, “tiny”, rental apartment. She quoted Cemile as follows: “There is no money left in our pockets. [...] We boiled eggs for iftar and ate them, we haven't eaten anything else in 16 hours. We never relied on anyone all our lives, how can we now ask anyone to buy bread for us” (Ince 2011a)? When Cemile later explained to me why she was upset about this, she argued that her comment had been framed to make her look discontented and poor, but that she had in fact only expressed a logistical problem:

> Yes, I boiled some eggs in the evening. I never expected that [journalist] to do something so bad. My son called me, he was very upset that we had gone hungry. But we had not gone hungry! I simply didn't have anything else to cook that evening. You know how it was! The oven was already gone, that's why I boiled the eggs. I was so ashamed, [the article] made us look like beggars. And we never ask anyone for anything!

The journalist had wanted to show the desperation of Tarlabaşı residents to illustrate the destructiveness and injustice of the renewal project. On the day of her visit in mid-July 2011, during the month of Ramadan, Cemile and Ramazan were waiting for their eviction and lived, somewhat improvised, amongst their packed and boxed-up possessions. At the time an intense heat wave swept the city, making daytime fasting more difficult and sleep almost impossible. Cemile suffered from insomnia, extreme stress and anxiety following several altercations with project officials and the police. Ramazan, angry

<footnote n="1">¹ The photographer who had accompanied the Turkish journalist was an American woman who did not speak any Turkish. I had been in Cemile's apartment when she had taken the pictures, and it was not entirely clear to me where the miscommunication had happened. The photographer had openly and very obviously taken pictures in the house and of Cemile. I am not sure if the photographer had assumed consent for publication in the newspaper because she had been with the journalist, or if she had asked, but had not been clear about the planned publication in *Radikal*. However it had happened, Cemile would have never agreed to having her picture published like that, had she been asked to give her informed consent on the matter.</footnote>
about the municipality's refusal to postpone the expulsion, had broken out all PVC window frames that the couple was still paying instalments for at the time, and given them away to recyclers. He had taken to them with a sledgehammer, which meant that pieces of brick and plaster had come off the walls and were still strewn on the floor when the photographer took the pictures.

On the day of the interview Cemile had told me, too, about the meagre *iftar* meal consisting only of boiled eggs. I knew that her despair at the time had been real. Both the description of the apartment and the quote in the article were accurate. Cemile and Ramazan *had been* destitute, and they had been, and still were, very anxious about the large amount of money they would have to pay the developer as part of the deal they had been forced to make with them. This begs the question why Cemile was this upset about the frame of the *Radikal* article. At the time of the interview, she had desperately tried to postpone the eviction from what she felt was still *her* house. Moreover, she and her husband had been forced to relocate to a small, somewhat run-down rental apartment a few streets over from her old building, since the housing market pickings had been limited and they urgently needed a place to go. This meant that they had to get rid of many of their possessions, such as pieces of furniture that would not fit in the new rental flat.

Cemile's numerous attempts to hold the municipal authorities to account for their lie – or at least consequential misinformation – that there would not be any demolitions had fallen flat. By July 2011, nobody at the Beyoğlu Municipality or *GAP İnşaat* even accepted her phone calls anymore. It had been a rare and somewhat unexpected opportunity for Cemile to be able to talk to the journalist about her situation, about her outrage, about her feelings of helplessness about the looming eviction and the difficult situation it left her and her husband in. Finally someone, and someone who was potentially able to get the attention of the authorities via the national media, was willing to listen. It was impossible for Cemile not to seize this chance when she was so full of anger and when those responsible for the project refused to listen to her.

By mentioning the boiled eggs she and Ramazan had eaten for *iftar*, she had meant to send a message to project stakeholders, shaming them for the desperation they had forced on residents, especially during Ramadan. However, it was not them who responded. Her son who lived in Istanbul with his family and who visited her often, also called Cemile about the article, distressed to hear that his mother had gone hungry and not told him about it. Her Antakya relatives, including two of her younger sisters, were distraught to hear about her debt. Cemile was afraid that neighbours and members of her Qur'an study group might also read what she had told the journalist and think of her as destitute and in need of assistance. Cemile felt that this was especially shameful because her answer in the newspaper had implied that none of them had come to help her, which was not true. Her decision to tell the journalist about the difficult situation she had been left in also potentially shamed those closest to her, especially her own children. In the end Cemile called the journalist and asked her to take down the photographs and amend the article. To the reporter's surprise and distress, she even threatened to open a court case. It was an attempt to manage the intersecting stigma of being poor and living in Tarlabaşı, and to have some control of how she, her home and her life were being represented. Instead of succeeding in her attempt to show that
it was really the fault of the renewal project and project stakeholders that they only had a few boiled eggs to eat for *iftar*, Cemile found herself having to manage the fact that her children, her sisters, and other family members or members of other groups she was a part of felt embarrassed and ashamed by the *Radikal* article.<fnref n="2" /> For Cemile, it was the almost impossible balancing act of describing her destitution to accuse and shame project developers while at the same time hiding it from her family, neighbours and friends. In a way, Cemile struggled with the management of what Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb (1972: 196) call the “divided self”, the “[p]rotective alienation of the real person from the performing individual”, whereby this performing, socially mandated self is called into service by people who hold any kind of power over the person, such as, in Cemile’s case, strong social expectations by her family or her Qur’an study group. Necmi Erdoğan (2007: 72), in his research on the “injuries of difference” of poor people in Turkey, demonstrates that the performative self is regularly mobilised inside the home and the family. Ismet, a worker from Istanbul, conceals the fact that he cleans stairs for a living from his elderly mother and his teenage daughter, telling them that he is employed as a chef in the local municipality instead, in order to spare them the grief and preserve his own self-respect in front of his close family members (ibid.).

Cemile exposed her real feelings, and her private problems, to the journalist in an attempt to reach the audience that project stakeholders refused her. However, the familial guilt and the implied blame of the family's expressed concern moved Cemile to retract her original statement, and to say that it just been a coincidence and logistical issue that they could only eat boiled eggs for *iftar*, when in fact she knew that this was really not the case – and so did the journalist who tried to convey the destitution that Tarlabaşı residents had been abandoned to.

This effort to manage her own image did not cease after her eviction. When I visited Cemile almost a year after she had to leave her old home, she insisted on showing me a glossy brochure published by the Beyoğlu Municipality as part of a marketing campaign advertising large urban renewal projects in their district. She had first come across it in one of the municipal neighbourhood houses [semt konakları] and picked up a few copies after leafing through it and finding a photograph of her old building alongside a text advertising the Tarlabaşı renewal project. One of the pictures chosen to illustrate the municipality's plan, taken from a low angle, showed the front façade of her old apartment, with the PVC window frames and the balcony railings missing. One had to look very carefully to even notice this detail in the photograph, but Cemile had seen it right away. She was incensed:

> I took this brochure because I saw our house in it. It must be a recent photograph because there is no balcony and no window. It is outrageous [çok ayıp] to put such a photo-

<footnote n="2">² On one hand they were right to be embarrassed, because according to social norms in Turkey, they were responsible for their close relatives being destitute, which is also one important reason why project developers could get away with their abject treatment of Tarlabaşı residents: people in need are not supposed to be the problem of the state, but of their families and communities. The most important part of this narrative, that they had just destroyed this community in Tarlabaşı, remained unsaid.</footnote>
graph in this magazine. They make it look as if everything was run-down, but it wasn't like that! We had washing lines, we had everything!

The picture that upset Cemile was by far not the most stigmatising in the brochure. However, because it showed her own house, the one that she had taken such pride in renovating and maintaining before being evicted from it, the manipulation at work in the marketing campaign was deeply injurious to her. Employed to illustrate the need for the renewal of a dilapidated neighbourhood, it had in fact been taken after residents had already been moved out. Furthermore, the image angered Cemile because it not only misrepresented her home, and by extension her and her family, but also because she felt that it somehow blamed her for the bad state of the area.

Parallel to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's (1988) well-known observation that subaltern groups cannot speak, these anecdotes show that they also have very little say in how they and their environments are being represented. I have shown in chapter two that the municipality had the power to determine which representations secured hegemony and how the narrative around Tarlabaşı and the renewal project were framed. John Beverley (1999: 66) writes that “[o]ne of the things being subaltern means is not mattering, not being worth listening to”. Cemile had no control over how her neighbourhood was portrayed to a wider audience. However, she did not unquestioningly internalise the prevailing negative representations. Therefore, she picked up several more copies of the offending brochure and showed them to others, visitors like me, in order to provide a rectified narrative. She explained that the picture was a deliberate attempt by the marketing department of the Beyoğlu Municipality to manipulate the perception of the neighbourhood by using images of homes that had already been evicted. Cemile insisted that the dominant image of Tarlabaşı as a neighbourhood of decay omitted the positive aspects of it, underlining only what was bad and glossing over the many smaller and more substantive actions that residents took in order to make it better.

These three examples show that images of and anecdotes about Tarlabaşı in the press (or promotional material such as the catalogue Cemile picked up) operated on more than one level. The same image might be read in two different, and diametrically opposed, ways. The physical backdrop we chose for the video interview with David Harvey operated on the level of stigma that the woman across the street was worried about: she was sure that the dilapidated houses, the garbage and the rubble would reinforce the dominant negative image that the neighbourhood already had. However, the backdrop also worked on a visual level that involved contextual knowledge of why the street looked abandoned and run-down, and why the garbage was not being picked up, which was the reason that the videographer had insisted on this location and why it was valuable. The same backdrop that the woman in the window had found embarrassing was also evidence of the injustice inflicted upon the neighbourhood and that we were trying to report on.

The images and anecdotes that proved how grim and deeply injurious the entire project development process had been could equally work as something deeply embarrassing that only bolstered the existing stigma. However, the balance between the two is not even. Territorial stigma influences the interpretation towards the unfavourable explanation. Any such interpretation has to rely on an audience that is both able and willing to hear the full context surrounding an image, and the dominant narrative
surrounding Tarlabaşı foreclosed that option in the vast majority of cases. Most people in Istanbul did not have access to or were unwilling to find out about the full context surrounding the many Tarlabaşı images and descriptions that circulated, which is why the municipality had the privilege to subsequently make sure that the majority looked at only their representation of Tarlabaşı and agreed with its destruction.

In the same way, the photograph of Cemile's old home in the municipal marketing brochure, given the right and full context, could have been an excellent example of why the renewal project was deeply problematic. It could have illustrated how this building that had been painstakingly renovated by its occupants, with a nice balcony and new PVC frames, was destroyed and left abandoned by project stakeholders, leaving its former residents to scramble for lower quality housing wherever they could find it. The same image, robbed of its context, was used to stand in as what the house was like when Cemile still lived there, which is entirely implausible. However, this is what it was used as in the brochure. Since it was just an image that depicted a neighbourhood *known* as run-down, as ruined, and as dirty and uncared-for, it was easy for viewers to interpret it the same image by using that frame.

<figure><img src="image_38.png" /><figcaption>"Don't litter, lan". Neighbourhood beautification</figcaption></figure>

Photo by Jonathan Lewis

While not a physical image, the story conveyed by the *Radikal* article could also be understood either way, depending on the available context. Readers could interpret Cemile's anecdote as having been failed by her own family, or they could use it as an explanation of how she and her husband had been crushed by the renewal project. In the case of the reportage, the journalist had provided background information in order to convey the injustice inflicted by project stakeholders. However, the stigmatising narrative of the municipality that there was no community or virtue in Tarlabaşı, making it plausible
to readers that Cemile's family abandoned her to her fate, overwrote the story the journalist had attempted to communicate. Territorial stigma here puts the burden of proof on the “victims” because the bias leans against them from the start. Even the children, despite having all the necessary background information on how Ramazan and Cemile had been deprived of their home and under what circumstances evictions had been carried out, read the article as an accusation against them, instead of an indictment of the municipality and their project partners.

## Scrubbing off stigma

Scholars have shown that low-income neighbourhoods have long been associated with filth in the middle class imagination (Douglas 1966; Stallybrass and White 1986; Skeggs 1997; Özyegin 2000; Erdoğan 2007). A perceived lack of hygiene and the apparent physical disorder in these urban areas are interpreted as signifiers of deeper character flaws, as a sign of disease, crime, and moral depravity of the poor. The accusations of uncleanliness transcend mere aesthetics, and instead pass judgement on the (contemptible) moral character of poor people (Özyegin, 2000: 10).

The stigmatisation of Tarlabaşı as “filthy” was especially injurious to women who are primarily held responsible for the upkeep of their domestic space. In Turkey, especially in rural areas and low-income urban households, inegalitarian gender relationships and deep-seated patriarchal dynamics result in a normative division of labour (Fikret-Pasa et al. 2001; Sarıoğlu 2013; Kavas 2019). Housework tasks and childcare are seen as a woman’s prime duty. The concern over cleanliness is therefore a strong (and gendered) marker of status. A clean and orderly home not only represents the housewife, but also her competence as a homemaker and her respectability as a woman (Gürel 2009). In her research about the identity building of working-class women in England, Beverley Skeggs (1997) underlined the way in which hygiene is a strong signifier of respectability. Mary Douglas (1966), in her work on dirt, purity and pollution, argues that many industrialised and non-industrialised societies associate cleanliness with goodness and dirtiness with badness, such that cleanliness and dirtiness take on moral connotations. “Because dirt threatens the sanctity of cleanliness, it is cast as taboo, and societies strive to separate what is clean from what is dirty” (Ashforth and Kreiner 1999: 416).

In Tarlabaşı, the performance of domestic work was visible everywhere. Many household tasks had to be carried out in the staircases of buildings, on the stoop at the entrance, or in the street, primarily for lack of space inside homes, but also as an important opportunity for women to socialise. Many women completed their chores together with other women from the same family or with female neighbours. This included soaping down and vigorously scrubbing rugs and carpets that were spread out on the street, knitting and other needlework, and the washing and subsequent beating of sheep's wool used as upholstery in pillows and blankets. (The wool was then hung up and dried on lines hung along walls and windows.) Shared washing lines, strung between windows across the street, were ubiquitous. Many kitchen chores, such as preparing bread dough, baking bread, cleaning and cutting vegetables, were also done in shared, public, and semi-public spaces. Women who spent time outside their homes were rarely idle. This visibility of
domesticity was also a way to *show* that one kept busy. It was a way to demonstrate, and for others to witness, that a woman was “doing her job” as a respectable housewife.

As visitors could, and frequently did, drop in unannounced and at any time, this impression management included keeping the house tidy and uncluttered at all times. Cemile described her own fear to be perceived as careless by outsiders:

> I am always cleaning. I get up in the morning, and I clean, it's a habit you know. Believe me, I want to wipe down everything, sweep everywhere. [...] I love cleanliness and hygiene. Everything should always be really clean and orderly. Even if it's not that clean, it should at least be orderly. I always tell my daughter and my daughter-in-law, whatever you do, after you get up in the morning you should clean up around yourselves before breakfast. Just in case. The doorbell rings, a guest arrives, and you have to make that guest wait at the door to make the beds? Would that be possible? No way. Sometimes, when you go on a visit to someone's house, there are pyjamas, socks, and other stuff [laying around]. [Makes a disapproving noise.] I always say: what if someone comes to visit? Your home should always be clean and orderly.

Just like Cemile, who judged if other women were deserving of respect by the state of their homes, the women in Tarlabası were constantly aware of their social positions and the judgement of real and imaginary others (Skeggs 1997: 4). This anxiety to position themselves as respectable was fed by and intersected with the “haunting shadow” of territorial stigmatisation (Pinkster et al. 2020: 526). The stakes to successfully evade being read in light of this taint were especially high during the run-up to evictions. As described in chapter two, project stakeholders insisted that the neighbourhood was “run-down” and “dirty”, and that homes were “abandoned” and buildings “about to fall down by themselves”. Women challenged this narrative by underlining how much time, money, and effort they invested not only in the daily upkeep, but also in the renovation of their homes. Alev often talked about how she, then still a teenager, had fixed up the apartment that her family had been able to afford because it had been in a state of neglect. She told me how it had taken her several months and a lot of effort to make it liveable again, and how proud she had been for, quite literally, making her own home. When she reminiscent about those times, Alev got very emotional.

> There was no glass in the windows, no doors, no floor. [...] When I came here, there was no toilet, there was nothing, nothing at all. You know when you enter a cave? That's what the house was like. [...] I did the entire floor, did you know? All by hand! All by myself. I carried [the materials] up the stairs. [...] I never got tired. I had one pair of pants, one jumper. I put my hair up and I pushed a handcart, for the concrete. I would get one bag, then split that bag up into two, and bring them up here. I could not bring up one bag all at once. [cries] Making your own house liveable with your own hands, that's great. I didn't just sign somewhere to get this house. This is why this all makes me so sad.

Alev recognised that the house *used to be* decrepit and in a very bad state, but she underlined this only to draw attention to the vast amount of labour and effort she invested to fix it, to make her home “liveable”. Alev had worked day shifts at a textile workshop in the neighbourhood and at night, she had renovated the apartment. Her mother had been
almost immobile due to an illness, her older brother had been away to do his military service, and it had taken her many months to complete the renovation. Together with her father, a kind, elderly man who spoke hardly any Turkish, Alev sold bottled water and packages of tissue paper on nearby Taksim Square to be able to buy plaster, paint, and flooring. She was very proud of what she had achieved, at that age and with such limited resources at her disposal, and proud that all the hard work had resulted in her ability to provide a comfortable home for her elderly parents.

At the time my mother was sick. [...] My only worry was to have enough food so we could eat. Oh dear...it was wonderful despite all that. There is a memory for me in every corner of this house. The electricity lines, the water pipes...I changed all of it. I brought in one or two repairmen. My father and I went out to sell water and we earned a bit of money that way. Sometimes we made five [TL], sometimes ten. I would make tea and bring in a couple of workers. And I had a few friends, I asked them to lend us a hand. There were friends I worked with. I am so grateful to them. That's how we did it. [...] I painted the doors myself because I had no money left. But that's what they say isn't it? You might buy something under difficult circumstances, but you'll keep the beautiful memories.

<figure><img src="image_39.png" /><figcaption>Home decoration</figcaption></figure>

Photo by Jonathan Lewis

Alev was sentimentally invested in her house, partly because a great amount of physical and emotional labour had gone into it. To her, the family apartment was much more than just "a place to live", or mere "brick and mortar", as British sociologist Chris Allen (2008) claimed of how working-class respondents felt about their homes. In his study of the intersection of social class and housing consumption, Allen notes that working class informants only expressed "a basic functional attachment to where they live" and did not,
as middle class residents did, strongly identify with the home they occupied (Paton 2014: 51). But it is clear from how Alev described the many memories attached to “every corner” of her apartment, as well as from the careful choices of colour, of decoration, and of the effort that she put into the renovation, that her Tarlabaşı home was much more than just a roof over her head.

Cemile, too, felt a strong emotional connection her home. Both of her then still teenaged children had worked in part-time jobs in order for the family to afford the necessary renovation materials. Cemile recalled that they had to wait for each week's salary to be able to buy another bucket of paint, plaster, or paint brushes. She and her husband Ramazan had bought the house somewhat in a rush in 1992 after they had to vacate their rental house in a nearby street. Cemile had never actually seen the inside of their future home before they bought it. The tenant at the time of the sale, a woman who rented out the rooms to foreign sex workers, was angry at her landlord for selling his property and did not want to let the new owners in. Even after Cemile and Ramazan held the title deed to the house, the woman refused to vacate the apartment. When she finally did, she left the apartment in a state of utter disrepair out of spite. Cemile said that she was so shocked when she saw the state of the flat that she initially told her husband to sell it again right away.

I remember what the house looked like then. The tenant had broken a flowerpot inside the house because she had been so angry with the landlord. She didn't open the door when we came. We had to open a court case because she just wouldn't leave and there was nothing we could do. [...] When she did leave, she broke the windows and filled the toilet with glass. She broke all the keys inside their locks. She also left everything in a dirty state, the whole house was so dirty! When I first saw it, I said [to my husband]: oh dear, I don't want this [house], go and sell it immediately. When they sent the eviction notice, she just ran off. She had left the electricity and the water running, we had no idea! We were afraid to come here, she was such a vile woman! She shouted and cussed [at us], I was so ashamed. She had such a dirty mouth. She shouted at us from the balcony, she said she was going to kill us. How can you talk to such a person? So we went to court. And finally, after this whole ordeal we were finally able to move into our house...we suffered so much from this house, so much.

In addition to an immense amount of economic capital and physical labour that Cemile and her family had invested in the house, she felt that the emotional hardship – the humiliation and the insults suffered at the hands of the former tenant – had created a strong attachment to this new home. I heard similar stories from other women in Tarlabaşı: of how they had turned dilapidated houses into habitable, clean, and comfortable homes by investing economic capital, their labour, and their social skills. Interestingly, I was rarely told such anecdotes by men. However, the attempt to manage the stigma of being a woman in a tainted urban area by performing gendered respectability fell flat when project stakeholders refused to recognise this effort. Cemile explained:

> We told [the municipality and the developer] that we renovated the house, but they didn't believe us. I invited [deputy mayor] Fatih Bey for tea so many times, but he never came to visit to see for himself. None of them ever came to visit. If they would have
come and seen what it looks like inside [our house], they would have been amazed!
And the experts go around and say that all the houses here are empty. None of them
came to have tea with us.

The deputy mayor's brush-off was even more offensive because he had positioned himself
as a person who took a deep interest in her and her husband's case.

This, too, was part of the “corrosive social erasure” (Carter 2010: 5) Tarlabaşı residents
were subjected to. The voices and labour of the women who lived in the neighbourhood
(were) disappeared behind “a discursive wall of negative tropes” (Carter 2010: 12–13), like
the stereotypes of Tarlabaşı being “dirty”, “run-down” and “empty”, while the experiences
of women like Alev and Cemile, of their constant and hard work to perform and prove
their respectability, were ignored. However, despite this hyper-marginalisation women
found ways to rewrite, reframe, and contest the stigmatising discourse. Cemile once told
me an anecdote about how she invited a group of strangers into her house. The small
group that included some foreigners had been walking around Tarlabaşı, engaging in
conversations with local residents. Cemile had insisted on serving them food. This invi-
tation had been an act of kindness and hospitality, but it had also presented her with the
opportunity to show outsiders that her home was, contrary to dominant claims about
Tarlabaşı, well-kept, clean, and beautiful. Since her guests had been journalists familiar
with the renewal project and those responsible for it, Cemile also hoped that they might
communicate their positive impressions to project stakeholders:

I saw this group walking around in the streets, and I invited them in to have breakfast. They were so hungry! They were journalists, some of them were foreigners. [One of the journalists] who came here said: ‘Fatih Bey or Nilgün Hanım should talk to me whenever they want, I will go to them and give them my name and tell them that I have been to many houses in Tarlabaşı, but that I have never seen a cleaner, more beautiful, or bigger apartment than this one. That’s what I’ll tell them and that’s all I’ll tell them.

This desire to refute the stigmatisation by performing respectability through cleanliness transcended the effort to oppose forced displacement. While waiting for her eviction and without knowing when the police would turn up to make her turn over the keys to her house, Cemile continued to meticulously clean the entire apartment every day:

I cleaned everything. Everywhere! [My children] say: mum, are you crazy, you are leav-
ing anyway, why are you cleaning? I am so used to it...Look, it's squeaky clean, look, not a
single speck of dust anywhere in the whole house! They'll see. [...] They said they would
demolish the house, I said fine, let them demolish it, but despite that I will clean things
up, there were some scratches and stripes and I scrubbed them off as best I could. I
painted my daughter-in-law's old room. So that it would look clean.

For many women in Tarlabaşı, negotiating daily life amid the looming threat of eviction while coping with the impact of stigmatisation required constant innovation and tactical impression management. Performing as a “respectable woman” and a diligent housewife was one such tactic.

However, female residents were not only concerned about physical grime, the
garbage, and the dust on the streets, but also about the metaphorical “dirt” of crime and
the visibility of commercial activities that were illegal and/or deemed to be immoral. When evictions were well underway, and an increasing number of buildings and entire streets were abandoned and fell into ruin, sex work, petty crime, and drug dealing started to become more and more visible. Many of the sex workers who solicited in Tarlabaşı during that time were non-residents who openly consumed alcohol and used drugs, which stood in stark contrast to local trans* sex workers. Trans* sex worker Müge was very uncomfortable with the arrival of these women. She thought that the presence and demeanour of these intoxicated sex workers not only violated an unwritten contract of how sex work was supposed to happen in the neighbourhood, but also put her and her Tarlabaşı colleagues in a bad light and possibly in danger:

> We don't know who these women are, we have never seen them before. They act badly, they behave badly. It is not how it is supposed to be, they have no respect for us and the people who live here. And the worst part is that they make us look very bad. People think that we are like them. That they work with us. People get angry at them, but they also get angry at us.

Like Müge, many residents who remained, and especially women, were left feeling unsafe and “tainted” by their deteriorating surroundings and by the increasingly visible illicit behaviours and activities. Several women I spoke to during that time expressed their discontent over the feeling that these “indecencies” reflected badly onto them, putting their respectability, already threatened by their place of residence, further into question.

Fikriye, the Kurdish woman who lived on the top floor of the building in Tree Street, described how she experienced the increased visibility of daytime sex work in the run-up to and during evictions:

> It's very shameful [çok ayıp]. As a woman [bayan]<fnref n="3" /> I don't want to see this, it's shameful to have to see this. There are families living here, women have to go past [the sex workers] every day, and they feel ashamed when they have to do that. And what should my [family members] think when they come to visit? They shouldn't have to see that.

Fikriye expressed her deep discomfort with having to walk past sex workers who solicited in full view of passing women and their children. She was worried what visiting family members who themselves were not Tarlabaşı residents would think, and think of her, when they saw the dirt, both literal and metaphorical, in the neighbourhood she lived in. She underlined the particular shame women, and in extension, their families, experienced in the face of perceived dirtiness and vulgarity. However, and as much as it added to her own feeling of stigmatisation of living in Tarlabaşı, as a woman Fikriye had very little influence or control over what happened on the street. While she was aware that the regulation of sex work was in no way her responsibility, she was unable to shake the fear that she would be *held responsible* for the image it projected to outsiders, a feeling of shame for living in a stigmatised space that Randol Contreras (2017: 657) calls “spatial anguish”.

<footnote n="3">3 *Bayan*, loosely translatable as “lady”, is the conservative way to refer to a woman, since it does not distinguish between *kız* [girl/virgin] and *kadın* [woman/no longer a virgin].</footnote>
In order to resolve this tension of being caught up between the dominant negative imagery of the neighbourhood and a different, more positive self-image, Fikriye and other women in Tarlabaşı “devised tactics to preserve a sense of themselves as decent and respectable” (Reay and Lucey 2000: 415). One of the tactics available to them was to successfully *perform* domesticity, to keep their domestic space, one of the few where they wielded influence and control, meticulously clean.

A clean and well-ordered house is thought to reflect the good moral standing of the woman who lives there, and by extension, that of her husband and family. Conversely, a cluttered and dirty home is a sign not only of a woman's laziness, but also her suspected lack of morals and family values. This perceived connection between disorder and immorality “exists to such an extent that the dirt and disorder are considered to be the external manifestations of an innate flaw or moral lack, and the dirty woman [...] becomes dirt in herself” (Gallagher 2011).

## Respectability politics in a stigmatised place

Trans* sex worker Müge once told me about a day she had spent with other trans* women friends on one of the Princes' Islands, a popular getaway destination for Istanbul residents. Müge had been looking forward to the day away, but came back disgusted, telling me about the “scandalous behaviour” of her friends who had sunbathed topless or by pulling the straps of their bikini tops down in order to avoid tan lines. She felt that this lack of modesty had reflected badly on her, and the negative attention she thought their group had drawn had spoiled her day on the beach. Her friend and colleague Gülay, Müge's best friend and mentor<fnref n="4" />, agreed that this was unacceptable behaviour. Both women felt that trans* women “like these” reflected badly on the entire trans* community and were the reason that others disputed their respectability. This fear translated directly onto their life in Tarlabaşı.

They both lived and worked in Bird Street, a cul-de-sac that led onto Tarlabaşı Boulevard and that housed the informal brothel. All of the trans* women who worked on Bird Street solicited customers at the end of the small lane and on the corner with the main boulevard, which allowed them a certain amount of control and relative security, as they could keep an eye on each other there. Both Müge and Gülay never dressed in tight or revealing clothing, not only in their off time, but also when they were soliciting customers. Müge often wore a buttoned-up short-sleeve blouse and trousers, or woollen tops and cardigans in the colder winter months. She usually wore sneakers or other flat-heeled walking shoes, or flat sandals during the summer, and always only wore a subtle amount of make-up and faint lipstick. Gülay wore a similar “office chic”- outfit when she was waiting for customers at the end of the street. When talking to others about herself, she regularly described herself as a “good Muslim woman”, and she observed fasting days.

<footnote n="4">4 Gülay had taken Müge “under her wings” after her arrival in Istanbul and taught her the ropes of the sex trade and life in the city as a trans* woman. This system of “big sisters” (abla) taking on and helping those who were just entering the trans* community was very common in Turkey (see Selek 2001; Siyah Pembe Üçgen 2012).</footnote>
Müge said that she did not like the way some of the other trans* women in their street dressed, those that preferred tight fabrics, short skirts, and high heels, dismissing them as “too flamboyant” and “unladylike”.

Müge also did not like to use flirty language when she tried to attract customers in the way that some of the other women did. Burdened with the intersecting stigmas of being trans* women, sex workers, and Tarlabaşı residents, both Müge and Gülay managed their image and their respectability very carefully. They sought to distinguish themselves from the hyper-feminised and explicitly sexualised self-presentation by some of their trans* colleagues through embodied and discursive practices meant to establish themselves as respectable and *different* than other trans* sex workers in Tarlabaşı. Scholars have described similar processes of disidentification and distinction from the negative narratives that surround sex work in other contexts (Skeggs 1997; De Meis 1999, 2002; Blanchette and Da Silva 2011; Rivers-Moore 2010; Carrier-Moisan 2015).

Both Gülay and Müge were also very clear about the fact that they had not chosen to do sex work. In conversations with me and other researchers, journalists or other interested outsiders I accompanied, they insisted that they had been forced into that line of work due to the pervasive discrimination against trans* persons in Turkey. Both women said that sex work was a necessity they endured in order to be able to earn a living and save enough money to buy an apartment and retire without having to fear poverty in old age. This rhetoric was a discursive pushback against the dominant, and stigmatising, assumption that trans* women in Tarlabaşı preferred sex work to any other type of labour, and that it was in their “nature” to sell sex. Müge sometimes reminiscent on the jobs she would have liked to do – beautician, architect, computer engineer – if she would have had the chance to choose her profession. She dreamed of joining one of the vocational courses offered by the education ministry in order to get a “respectable” job.

As an unregistered sex worker, the service she offered was de jure illegal, and her business was not listed in any government ledgers. Sometimes she said that she would love to pay taxes like all other working citizens, but “they did not want her money”, and that the law on prostitution in Turkey did not allow for her to participate in society that way. Her identity as a trans* woman who did sex work, combined with her place of residence in a deeply stigmatised neighbourhood, made her feel like a second-class citizen. It was important for her to discursively push back against this:

> It doesn't matter if you're a prostitute [hayat kadını], or a transvestite. Why? Because we are all citizens of the Turkish Republic. Every single citizen holds citizenship. They might not be able to have me do my military service, but they are still relying on me. How? I buy this [picks up a glass from the table], so I am paying taxes for it. That's the truth. Fine, I don't pay income tax for what I earn. But I buy this, I buy that, so I still pay taxes. But many people don't know that. Many people think that I work without paying any taxes. No! You pay rent, you pay taxes. I buy food for [my cat], one kilo costs 7.50 [TL], so I pay taxes on that after all.

Müge carefully navigated the corridors of state bureaucracy and made sure that all her papers, such as court orders, filed reports or receipts for misdemeanour fines, were shipshape. Whenever a human rights researcher, a journalist, or any other person came by to talk with her about any of these issues, Müge produced a binder where she kept all her
documents. She would explain: "Everything is neatly filed away. I have proof for everything, I don't throw anything away, not for years."

Beverly Skeggs (1997: 3) writes that respectability is a moral discourse: it characterises a person in moral terms and accords moral authority to some but not others. Beverly Skeggs writes, "[r]espectability embodies moral authority: those who are respectable have it, those who are not do not. But only some groups were considered to be capable of being moral, others were seen to be in need of control." Respectability is therefore a system of hierarchy and domination grounded on distinctions between the respectable and the degenerate.

Historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham (1993: 186) introduced “the politics of respectability” to describe how late 19th-century black Baptist women presented themselves as polite, morally upstanding, chaste and thrifty in order to reject “white America’s depiction of black women as immoral, childlike, and unworthy of respect or protection”. Since then, scholarship on respectability politics has shown how marginalised and stigmatised groups enact a sequence of attitudes and behaviours that recreate dominant norms, self-presentation strategies that aim to counter negative stereotypes that aim to disavow them of their right to full citizenship (Giles 1992; Higginbotham 1993; Harris 2003; Joshi 2012; Morris 2014; Pitcan et al. 2018). Higginbotham (1993) describes respectability politics as a successful strategy to overcome social and legal exclusion based on racist structures. However, critics of respectability politics point out that the concept both reflects and reinforces the norms of the status quo: a white middle class, cisheteronormative frame for understanding the behaviours of marginalised groups from a gendered, sexist, classist, and racist perspective (Wolcott 2013). Furthermore, the focus on the individual struggle ignores structural inequalities (Pitcan et al. 2018: 164). Others have argued that respectability politics reinforces intra-group hierarchies by ostracising those perceived as shameful and unworthy of respect, in favour of normative behaviour that is deemed respectable (Ward 2008; Wolcott 2013; Pitcan et al. 2018). This is well illustrated by the anecdotes of Müge and Gülay.

This begs the question how the stakes of successfully performing respectability varied for different Tarlabaşı residents. What happened if the performance failed? Cemile performed respectability as a means to social safety, to avoid being ostracised from her social surroundings and her peers. Müge used it as a tactic to assure her physical (Human Rights Watch 2008a; Amnesty International 2011b; Ördek 2016) as well as her social safety. She felt that she needed to distance herself from the hyper-feminised, “flamboyant” trans* women around her, and she needed to disassociate herself from the sex workers who arrived in the neighbourhood after evictions had started. For Müge, the successful performance of respectability really was an issue of safety, which raises the question how territorial stigmatisation can put people in danger, and if women are affected in a particular kind of way.

## Gendered respectability politics in a stigmatised neighbourhood

While the stakes were very different for either woman, they were high for both Müge and Cemile. Müge had to worry about a different category of personal safety and secu-
rity than Cemile, but for the older woman, the danger felt just as real. For Cemile, be-
ing perceived as “good”, as a respectable, and pious woman by others, determined her
level of social acceptance. This important social capital was threatened by the neighbour-
hood stigma that was made more salient by the dominant narrative that surrounded the
renewal project. These were different categories of consequences, but (the necessity to
achieve) respectability was urgent and similar enough for both Müge and Cemile, and it
was so in a gendered way.

In order to illustrate this, I would like to convey the story of Kemal. A Kurdish man in his late fifties who had migrated to Tarlabaşı from Urfa province in 1972, he had been very eager to talk about his dire situation and the danger of being made homeless by the renewal project. Kemal had worked in a restaurant after his arrival, and later became a dolmuş driver. In 2005 he developed coronary artery disease. In addition to medication, his doctor prescribed oxygen therapy, which meant that Kemal had to use an oxygen tank with a face mask three times a day. His illness fully incapacitated him for any kind of even light physical labour, and he was told that there was no chance of recovery. When I met him, he received invalidity benefits from the state, a monthly amount of 200 TL that was paid once a trimester. Social security covered the (substantial) cost for his oxygen treatment and his medication. Divorced from his wife, he had no further income. Two of his grown-up sons were in prison, one for murder and the other for aggravated assault, though Kemal never volunteered the details of their convictions, and I never asked. His third son was married and lived in an apartment above Kemal's own. The son's wife did not work. Kemal explained that his youngest son's "brain angels were gone" [beyin melek-leri yerinde değil], by which meant to explain that he was seriously mentally disabled and had been declared unfit for employment by a government agency. Kemal had a sister who lived in a suburb close to the now defunct Atatürk Airport and who came to clean and do his laundry almost every week. Quite poor herself, she sometimes cooked for him or brought some groceries. Kemal was well-known in the neighbourhood, and many of his neighbours brought him food, or gave him small amounts of money. He was a regular [müdavim] in the teahouse on Tree Street where he often played cards or okey with barber Halil Usta, who also cut his hair and gave him regular shaves.

The house that Kemal, his son and his son's wife lived in was a dilapidated two-storey Levantine building. While many people in Tarlabaşı lived in unsafe and substandard housing, Kemal's apartment was one of the most decrepit that I had visited in the neighbourhood. The walls were cracked and crumbling, electric fixtures were broken, and his bathroom, a small nook that doubled as his toilet and his shower, was run-down and dirty. The staircase between apartments was extremely worn-down. However, Kemal spoke fondly of his landlord because he had “mercifully” kept his rent at 200 TL a month, the entirety of Kemal’s invalidity payment, despite the continuous rent increase in the Beyoğlu area. However, in June 2009, the landlord sold the building to the municipality. Kemal told me that the landlord did not tell him about the sale. For more than one year, nobody came to collect the rent and Kemal, relieved over not having to pay, never asked why. In March 2011, project officials turned up at his doorstep “out of the blue” to tell him that he was behind on his rent and therefore 35,000 TL in debt. They also said that the building would be sealed and demolished. Kemal was stunned and outraged.
I told them: You have bought [this house], but have you ever come here to consult with me? Did anyone ever come here to ask for rent and did I not give it to them? Thirty-five thousand! I have never seen such an amount of money in my life! They told me that I was squatting. Squatting! I said, no sir, I am not squatting, I have a contract, the electricity is in my name, I am registered with the *muhtar*. I am registered in Beyoğlu. I have proof.

Kemal insisted that his tenancy was legitimate because he had never refused to pay rent but had not paid because nobody had ever come to ask for it. He angrily underlined that his paperwork regarding the occupancy of his home was in order: he had registered at his address both with the district administration and with the *muhtar*, and all amenities bills were in his name.<fnref n="5" /> He bristled at being called a squatter [*işgalcı*], because the term does not merely refer to someone who lives in a property without paying rent, but it is indexed as disreputable and dishonest. In the Turkish context, the term is commonly used in relation to the illegal appropriation of (mostly public) land and the construction of *gecekondu*.<fnref n="6" /> In the run-up to the project and especially during the eviction period, project stakeholders, municipal officials, and the police indiscriminately labelled residents “squatters”. Contrary to other large urban renewal zones in Istanbul that predominantly targeted *gecekondu* neighbourhoods in lucrative areas of big cities, less than five percent of Tarlabası residents were squatters in a legal sense.<fnref n="7" /> Property owners in Tarlabası frequently underlined their legitimacy to reside in the city in comparison to *gecekondu* dwellers perceived as having illegally “invaded” the land they occupied. (Sakızlıoğlu 2014a: 160). Kemal argued for his legitimacy by underlining that he was an officially and legally registered tenant who was subscribed to and paid his own utility bills.<fnref n="8" />

Somewhat indignantly Kemal pointed out that the only reason that he was not in gainful employment, the main reason that he was poor and in need of assistance, was not because he was workshy, but because he was incurably ill.

I have a government disability card. I have to use the [oxygen] tank in the morning, at noon, and at night. If I don't use that machine, I cannot breathe properly. I can't breathe. Without the machine I wouldn't be able to speak for more than two minutes. I cannot walk up hills because I cannot draw breath. [...] I am ill. That's why I cannot work. And this illness is forever. I have the card, and then I have a doctor's certificate for all the medication I have to take. [He takes an assortment of pill packages out of a plastic bag.] I

<footnote n="5">5 This was not self-evident. In Turkey it is not uncommon that the electricity, water, and gas bills are registered in the name of the landlord, or previous tenants. This can make claims on outstanding bills very complicated, but also puts tenants in danger of undue demands to pay the bills of previous renters by their landlords.</footnote>

<footnote n="6">6 While the definition and description of *gecekondu* housing has undergone significant reanalysis and critique over the past decades, the term is generally associated with urban poverty and an inferior, threatening Other (Pérouse 2004; Erman 2001, 2013).</footnote>

<footnote n="7">7 In their assessment of the renewal area, the municipality-hired consultancy firm found that five percent of residents did not pay any rent. Some of these people were friends or relatives of property owners, and some were squatters in the “classic” sense (Kentsel A.Ş. 2008).</footnote>

<footnote n="8">8 Interestingly and somewhat ironically, *gecekondu* dwellers frequently use this tactic to establish legitimacy as well in the hope of obtaining an official title deed.</footnote>
have to take these, and this, and I have to take blood pressure medication. I mean, I have to take all of these. [He places a few more packages of medication on the table.] All of this is medication.

One day a videographer who wanted to film a documentary about the renewal project in Tarlabaşı came to Kemal's home. Half an hour into the interview, Kemal suggested that he display his assembled oxygen tank with the facemask as well as the various boxes of medication that he kept in a plastic bag by his bed. That done, he insisted on being filmed while using the tank, because, he reasoned, viewers should be aware how serious his illness was, and how much the treatment impacted on his life. He hoped that this self-presentation would motivate charities and human rights NGOs, some of which he had been in touch with at the time, to support him. Kemal had an entire folder of documents, receipts, and filled-in forms that certified his illness and his resulting poverty, and that documented his applications for financial assistance at various Turkish charities and government offices.

I wrote these letters to the [Beyoğlu Municipality], and to the district governor [kaymakam]. In them I explain my situation. I tell them, look, here is my poverty card<fnref n="9" /> that I got from the muhtar, where the muhtar confirms that I live only on assistance. [...] All I need is some help, I am still waiting to hear back from everyone. [...] I talked to all the places I was supposed to. I got registered with Kimse Yok Mu and with Deniz Feneri.<fnref n="10" /> They came to my house, they had a look, made some notes, but so far nobody has come back or given me any assistance. I tried human rights [organisations]. I did interviews with journalists. Until now I have not been able to get any aid, or any offer. So, there is nothing I can do.

In contrast to Cemile, who insisted on not wanting to ask anyone even for “a piece of bread” because it would make her feel ashamed, Kemal was offended that he had so far been denied the necessary assistance to move from his home.

All I want is some help. But nobody does anything. I talked to everyone. I am still waiting to get something from them. The district governor gave me 200 Lira. But for 200 Lira you cannot rent a house, and you cannot go anywhere, *kardeşim*<fnref n="11" />.

<footnote n="9">9 The "poverty card" [fakirlik belgesi] is a document that residents have to apply for with their local muhtar. The requirements to qualify for this document are to have an income below the state-specified hunger line, not to be party to any other social security coverage, such as a state pension fund, and not to own a car or real estate property. The document facilitates the application for further state assistance in healthcare, education, childcare or other material assistance.</footnote>

<footnote n="10">10 The Kimse Yok Mu foundation was established in 2002 to organise poverty, and later emergency relief in Turkey and abroad. Closely affiliated with the Fethullah Gülen movement, it was shut by government decree in the aftermath of the 2016 coup attempt. The Deniz Feneri charity association, close to the AKP government, delivers relief and aid both in Turkey and abroad. In 2008, the association was involved in a scandal when executives in Germany were sentenced to prison terms for swindling and illegally acquiring funds.</footnote>

<footnote n="11">11 Denotationally, the word *kardeşim* means “my brother”, but it is a word of solidarity and familiarity between men as well. Here this choice of a word indexes a certain condescension and cynicism. Other than the common address ağbi/m [my/brother] that is also used, mostly between men, *kardeşim* retains a lateral, rather than a hierarchical quality. Because this distinction matters, but</footnote>
His attempt to acquire a TOKI apartment was rejected because he did not have the necessary 5,000 TL for a downpayment, and because the 480 TL of the monthly mortgage he would have to pay over a span of about twenty years was too high an amount for him. Kemal was not ashamed that he was too poor to afford a home in what the government provided as mass social housing. Far from it, he was justly outraged that TOKI was only available to those who had enough money to advance a large sum for a downpayment and who therefore, in his eyes, were neither really poor nor in need of state assistance.

As a destitute handicapped man, the stakes to find social acceptance and feel safe were extremely high for Kemal, just as they had been for Cemile and Müge. However, and even though Kemal was forced to prove his deservedness in order to get the assistance he was entitled to, he did not feel the need to prove his respectability. For him, that was a given.

The above anecdotes have made clear that in the context of Tarlabaşı as a stigmatised neighbourhood under the threat of renewal, the urgency of successfully performing respectability was gendered in a very particular way. Kemal was a divorced, unemployed and impoverished man. Two of his sons were in prison for serious crimes. He was never uneasy about the disorder in his home, or worried that it might not be clean enough, not even when he was giving an interview on camera.<fnref n="12" /> He was never ashamed of his living situation, or for not being able to pay back the rent he allegedly owed, because he was confident that the reasons for being unable to pay provided a satisfactory enough explanation. He never doubted that anyone would deny him the respect he deserved. Even though Kemal's material situation was arguably worse than that of both Müge and Cemile, and though he risked homelessness in case of an eviction, the stakes for his successful performance of respectability were lower. At no point did he risk physical violence like Müge or being socially ostracised like Cemile. He did not risk ceasing to exist as a person. Even if Kemal's physical living situation would change for the worse, his social status would not undergo significant changes. As a poverty-stricken, disabled man with no other recourse than charity, he nevertheless did not risk further debasement. Cemile and Müge both felt a threat of deep shame with potentially noxious consequences, and both women worked very hard, and knew they had to work hard, to achieve the respectability they hoped would offer a certain level of safety.

Stigma is as much about marginalisation as it is about power and privilege (Link and Phelan 2014; Tyler and Slater, 2018; de Souza 2019). It is “about the power to present and to represent – the power to mark, assign, stereotype, and frame issues, people, and situations in particular ways. Stigma is about the power to levy accusations, to cast suspicion, and to be heard. Stigma is the power to shut up and silence others” (De Souza 2019: 19).

The above anecdotes have shown that territorial stigmatisation meant the loss of residents' control over the narrative of themselves and their physical reality, because that reality had been prefabricated through the lens of territorial stigma. When people saw an elderly man sitting between ruins and garbage bags in Tarlabaşı, they might readily

<footnote>is invisible in English, I retain the Turkish in my transcription where it is important to the meaning of the quote.</footnote>

<footnote n="12">12 A similar observation can be made about Cemile's husband Ramazan.</footnote>
interpret this as proof not of the injustice of the renewal project and the wilful negligence of the municipality in the run-up to evictions, but of the general and well-known dilapidation of the neighbourhood. In the same way, the photograph of Cemile's building included in the municipality's marketing catalogue should have been evidence of the destruction of a community, but instead it was used as proof for a fabricated counter-reality in which it was plausible that residents lived in half-ruined buildings void even of window frames and balcony railings.

Since communication and the production of images and narratives are central to the production of stigma, the power to stigmatise is a discursive privilege. It gives those who have the power to stigmatise the privilege to "to tell a story about who the Other is and who 'We' are. (ibid.)".

This means that the work of impression management for residents of stigmatised neighbourhoods is always an uphill battle, as outsiders have been steered towards the less favourable interpretation of what they see before they have even cast the first glance. Furthermore, as the above examples have illustrated, the stakes of the successful performance of respectability are gendered. While Tarlabaşı residents were all deeply affected by the stigmatisation of their neighbourhood in various ways, the need to successfully perform respectability against that prefabricated stigma was more urgent for women, as they risked physical or social obliteration if they failed.
<figure><img src="image_40.png" /></figure>
Chapter eight: Giving in to stigma

Lute and saz maker Kerem Usta owned a two-storey workshop on a corner just outside the project area. He had spent his childhood in Tarlabaşı and used to live there, but by the time I met him in 2010, he owned a modest apartment in a high-rise residential complex in Sefaköy, two hours from Taksim by public transport.

Kerem Usta commuted to Tarlabaşı every weekday, and sometimes on weekends as well. His workshop was spread out over three and a half floors (the low room that he used as a depot occupied a low-ceilinged room accessible via a set of steep stairs), and he shared the workspace with his younger brother and another master instrument maker. The three men arrived in the morning and stayed until the early evening, which made it necessary to cook and eat breakfast and lunch in the shop. For the various customers, business partners, neighbours and random guests, Kemal Usta kept a small stock of biscuits, and of course tea. There were several corner shops [bakkal] and a few eateries in proximity of the workshop, including a good mussel kitchen<fnref n="1" /> just across the small street. Despite this, Kerem Usta never bought or ate anything at any of them, with the exception of one esnaf lokantası<fnref n="2" /> that he had frequented for decades and that was at a 15-minute walking distance. If he could help it he did not even buy bread or packaged biscuits at any of the corner shops in Tarlabaşı, arguing that the wares there might not be “clean” or of a quality he would be able to offer to guests. He balked at the idea of eating cheese or eggs from any of the bakkal closest to his workshop, and only did so as a last resort, for example when they hosted an unexpectedly high number of guests for breakfast or lunch. His brother Efe sometimes went all the way up to and across Tarlabaşı Boulevard to buy food – at least a twenty-minute walk at a brisk pace back and forth – even for items as simple as savoury biscuits to serve with tea. Both Efe and Kerem Usta frequently warned me not to “trust” local Tarlabaşı sellers, be it in a shop or on the Sunday vegetable market, because, they argued, in shop owners might “mix anything” into the foodstuffs they sold.

<footnote n="1">1 While many mussel kitchens in Tarlabaşı were informal, and often quite unhygienic – businesses in the basement of buildings that sold the mussels on itinerant trays – this mussel kitchen was a state-of-the-art manufacture that delivered to several well-known restaurants in Beyoğlu.</footnote>

<footnote n="2">2 Literally a “small shop owner restaurant”, an esnaf lokantası is a restaurant that offers a range of home-cooked meals in self-service style. They usually do not offer dinner.</footnote>
Residents of stigmatised neighbourhoods find different ways to manage the stigma of living in a defamed place. Some residents of stigmatised urban areas this territorial taint, which sets off a number of negative social effects (Wacquant 2007). Feelings of guilt and shame can lead residents “to deny belonging, to distance themselves from the area and their neighbours, and to emphasize their own moral worth in contrast to other residents (Jensen and Christensen 2015: 75)”. This chapter examines the various ways in which some Tarlabaşı residents internalised the bad reputation of their neighbourhood and how they tried to deflect the stigma onto other groups they blamed for the disrepute. Following that I analyse along which fault lines residents mirrored the stigma onto other groups. Finally, I want to show the role that weaponized nostalgia played in such lateral denigration. The main question hereby is not if lateral denigration happened amongst residents in Tarlabaşı, but more crucially, how this denigration happened, and what kind of “symbolic boundary work” (Lamont 2000) maintained and justified it.

## Internalisation

Kerem Usta was ambivalent about the neighbourhood that he was, after all, very familiar with, and he was not the only one. Halil Usta's barber shop was an important fixture in the neighbourhood, and both he and his associate Necmi Usta often spoke lovingly about their *mahalle*. However, this affection for Tarlabaşı was not without handicap. For example, they both bemoaned the decline of quality standards in their trade that had apparently occurred over the years they had been working in the neighbourhood. Halil partly blamed the lack of *zabıta* controls. The regulatory officers were tasked with the control of hygiene standards and working hours in barber shops. This absence of oversight, he argued, meant that some barbers did not always use fresh towels, or that shaving blades might be reused to save money. He thought that the *zabıta* had not dared to come to the neighbourhood for a long time, which affected his trade and his business. Hygiene regulations were violated to cut costs, leading to worsening overall quality in an attempt to undersell the competition. It also meant that Halil felt the need to open his shop on Sundays:

> Barber shops are supposed to close on Sundays, but nobody checks if they do. The *zabıta* are worried that they will get beaten up if they come. So, they just let it slide, but that means that I have to open my shop on Sundays as well, because I'm afraid that I will lose customers otherwise. The *zabıta* are afraid to come here, so they don't, or just very rarely. Here they'd be told anyway [by residents]: Get lost, man, what do you want from me?

Halil said that the *zabıta* checks were important because they were a public service that would have alleviated barbers' workloads and forced everyone to stick to basic hygiene rules. It was also beneficial to their health and kept them safe in their jobs:

> Before everyone would get licenses, there were public health checks, like 20 years ago, I remember that, done by the *zabıta*. Now they don't exist anymore, and I don't go to these check-ups either, which is bad in fact because it would be good for my own health
to have them. Customers could be sick, they could have tuberculosis, these checks were good for me, too.

Necmi added that the lack of control and check-ups was not the fault of the zabıta, but in fact the fault of Tarlabaşı residents whose “rudeness” towards public officers and municipal officials was the reason they stayed away in the first place. He argued that people in Tarlabaşı did not “deserve” public service if they did not show the necessary appreciation and deference:

> Some of the shops here are not very diligent with hygiene. Some of the cheaper barbers use the same blade for several customers, things like that. Normally the zabıta would fine them for that, but if people treat them so disrespectfully, why would they bother to come here? If people here behave like that, why would they care about such things?

During my fieldwork I have indeed never seen a zabıta control – or even a zabıta patrol – in Tarlabaşı.<fnref n="3" /> I have also never heard of first-hand incidents in the neighbourhood where zabıta had been insulted or beaten. The municipal police were not popular amongst Tarlabaşı residents, especially those who were engaged in the informal and illegalised economies of recycling and itinerant sales karts. However, they usually dealt with the municipal police through avoidance, not confrontation. Anecdotes of encounters with the zabıta by other residents did not reflect what the two barbers alleged. On the contrary, zabıta officers were often unfriendly and high-handed, and showed neither mercy nor understanding for the often-desperate situation of those they reprimanded.<fnref n="4" /> This is not to say that verbal, or even physical, violence against zabıta officers was impossible, but I have never encountered any evidence for it during my fieldwork. What the thoughts relayed by Halil and Necmi do show is their impression that Tarlabaşı was a neighbourhood so uncivil that it did not deserve the municipal attention and care that were expected and taken for granted in other districts of the city.

Residents that have internalised the stigma associated with their neighbourhood sometimes view experiences of inequality as a natural consequence, a rational reality for them to face simply for living in a ‘bad’ place. As Wacquant (2010: 217) writes, the “physical disrepair and institutional dilapidation of the neighbourhood cannot but generate an abiding sense of social inferiority by communicating to its residents that they are second- or third-class citizens undeserving of the attention of city officials and of the care of its agencies.”

It was also not uncommon for inhabitants to acerbically joke about Tarlabaşı as a no-go zone, a place void of beauty and interest for any visitor. (Incidentally, this was also

<footnote n="3">3 They were quite common on nearby Istiklal Avenue and its side streets in Beyoğlu, however, where shops and itinerant sellers were rigorously policed, and beggars and street musicians not seldom – and often rudely – removed. This also concerned street sellers and recyclers from Tarlabaşı, whose goods and karts were regularly seized by the zabıta, but usually outside of the neighbourhood. The only zabıta officer I regularly came across in Tarlabaşı was one man tasked with logistics during the eviction period.</footnote>

<footnote n="4">4 The seizure of karts and products meant a considerable financial (and temporary income) loss for sellers and recyclers that was difficult to recuperate. For example, the iron kart and the large bag used by recyclers cost 100 TL at the time, a large sum that could mean several days’ work.</footnote>
an argument put forth by the municipality in order to justify the renewal project.) Sometimes people mocked me for my interest in the neighbourhood, and my bringing visitors with me to walk the streets and meet the people I was spending so much of my time with. Tourists also found their way into the neighbourhood, mainly because of the rapid proliferation of apartment hotels in the area. Halil Usta ridiculed the tourists who chose to stay in one of the accommodations in the neighbourhood, or who came wandering in to see Tarlabaşı:

> Tourists come here, their guidebooks in hand, and wander around Tarlabaşı. [animated] One should say to them: You idiots, why did you come here? [...] They are building hotels everywhere now, in every street, and for what? What is there to see here? The only thing Tarlabaşı is famous for is being the worst place in Istanbul!

This internalisation of the neighbourhood stigma affected how residents thought about the renewal project. When I asked trans* sex worker Cansu what she thought of the renewal project in general, she said that she was in favour of it. She agreed that Tarlabaşı could only be salvaged if it was demolished and rebuilt from the ground up, because it was dilapidated beyond saving and its infrastructure hopelessly outdated:

> They will demolish this place and there will be new construction projects. That's great! At least there will be natural gas then. Look, we don't have natural gas here. In the very centre of Istanbul. Natural gas! In Istanbul! We don't have it here. But all that will come now. With the new projects. The streets are way too narrow. They are right [to demolish]. Something happens here and the fire trucks cannot even enter! The ambulance cannot enter! But if everything is demolished and cleaned up nicely, it will be much more beautiful, I think.

Cansu thought that the only way to improve the infrastructure in Tarlabaşı was not by careful renovation or the installation of lacking amenities, but by the neighbourhood's destruction, including the displacement of everyone in it. She accepted the loss of her home and her workplace in exchange for a meagre compensation because she considered Tarlabaşı to be beyond the pale and impossible to redeem. Views like hers were not uncommon. I regularly heard residents argue in favour of the renewal project, even if they themselves were to be displaced or cheated on the sales price of their property, by saying that Tarlabaşı just “did not deserve better”, “residents had only themselves to blame”, or because the neighbourhood was “simply too bad to save it”. Bahar Sakızlıoğlu (2014a: 199) found that a number of residents supported the renewal project as an opportunity to get rid of the Kurdish community, and the concentration of crime, even if it meant their own displacement.

Such an unfavourable view of the neighbourhood and its residents obviously had a detrimental impact on any opposition to the renewal project. If residents accepted that Tarlabaşı was the dirty, dangerous, and irreparable place that project stakeholders described it as, they would not fight against its demolition. The internalisation of stigma also led to a lack of empathy for residents who did resist their eviction, and who sought to rally support from their neighbours and fellow Tarlabaşı dwellers. More than once I told someone about a pending expulsion, hoping (and fully expecting) that my interlocutor would share my outrage. However, that was not always the case. Sometimes that person
defended the developers' arguments and interests. Once I told Halil Usta about how upset some people I had spoken to were about being thrown out of their homes. He argued that they were wrong to complain:

> Believe me, and I am telling you this from the bottom of my heart, most of the people who live here are squatters. No matter who you ask here, no matter who you interview, that person will be a squatter who lives in an apartment that they don't own or rent, I guarantee you this. They'll say that they are being thrown out, that this is unfair. But that's not true. They are squatters and have no right to live there.

Halil based his assessment on the allegation of project stakeholders that the vast majority of Tarlabaşı residents had no claim to the area. The point that only five percent of all residents in the renewal zone were squatters has been made several times throughout this book (Kentsel A.Ş. 2008). The existing negative image of Tarlabaşı, painting it as a neighbourhood of undeserving squatters, criminals and terrorists made it easy for the municipality to manipulate and exploit the stigma, and residents who aimed to distinguish themselves from that negative image sometimes took these arguments at face value, without questioning them.

## Lateral denigration

Hakan, a Turkish man in his late forties who ran the small teahouse on Bird Street, often complained about the amount of garbage scattered on his street. A relatively narrow cul-de-sac inside the renewal zone, municipal cleaning vehicles rarely passed through to mop up refuse. Even street sweepers, many of whom played cards in his teahouse, seldomly took to the street with their brooms. On one side of the street, a development company renovated an old Armenian school independently of the renewal project. Several abandoned, half-ruined houses steadily filled with rubble and material discarded at the construction site and garbage. These were at least partly the reasons that Bird Street looked increasingly uncared for, though the residents that still lived there, such as Müge and cobblers Zeki Usta and his son Sedat, often swept in front of their places. Nevertheless, Hakan blamed local residents, not the municipality or even the construction site owners, for the dirty appearance of the street.

> Look at this mess. Bags everywhere, rubble everywhere! [In other neighbourhoods] there are garbage containers and people leave their garbage in those containers. They don't do that here. They just don't! Here people just open the window and throw their garbage on the street. They couldn't do that elsewhere. Some people in Tarlabaşı just behave in such a bad way. I don't think this is right.

His words implied that there was something about Tarlabaşı residents that made them inherently dirty. In his eyes, the problem was not a lack of garbage bins, infrequent garbage disposal, or negligent construction site management inside a residential area, but a negative quality that was ingrained in some residents because of where they lived. Hakan's argumentation therefore perpetuated the stigmatising discourse used to describe his neighbourhood. Wacquant (2007, 2008) has identified such “lateral denigra-
tion” as a coping strategy for residents of tainted neighbourhoods to try and deflect the stigma from themselves onto a demonised Other. Like Hakan did, they might describe faceless others as the “real” transgressors whom they blame for the bad reputation of their neighbourhood (Hastings 2004; Palmer et al. 2004; Warr 2005b; Watt 2006; Eksner 2013; Contreras 2017; Cuny 2018; Verdouw and Flanagan 2019; Sisson 2020). However, while the accused were name- and faceless, they did fit into certain identity categories. Some people in Tarlabaşı tended to variously direct their anger and distaste against (more recent) rural migrants, Kurds, Roma, Syrian refugees, trans* sex workers, and migrants from African countries instead of against the municipality or the media, to blame them for how Tarlabaşı was being perceived from the outside. These narratives were often informed by the same ordinary iconic profiles that project stakeholders used in their stigmatising discourse about the neighbourhood. This inclination to blame neighbours for the area’s bad reputation corresponds with sociologist Michèle Lamont’s (2000) concept of “symbolic boundary work”, which she uses to explain that members of a group increase their own sense of moral worth compared to those of another group by denigrating them (see Contreras 2017).

Necmi Usta, the 35-year-old assistant barber [kalfa] to Halil Usta had first migrated from the central Anatolian province of Konya to Tarlabaşı in 1985 to start his apprenticeship. When I met him, he had been working in the barbershop on Tree Street for ten years. There, he served customers of “all kinds of” ethnic and religious backgrounds, as he often hurried to underline during our chats. However, when he spoke about the people who lived in the immediate vicinity of the shop, predominantly Kurds from the provinces of Mardin and Siirt, he complained that their lifestyle and daily practices were incompatible with what he considered to be “urban culture” [şehir kültürü]. He argued that these newcomers he euphemistically termed as “coming from the east” [doğudan gelen] were to blame that the neighbourhood and its image had deteriorated. As was often the case in the Tarlabaşı, this did not prevent Necmi from entertaining excellent relations with his Kurdish neighbours and customers. When talking to me, knowing about my pro-Kurdish stance, he stressed that he meant “no harm” by his complaints, and that it was a “simple fact” that Kurds, who had migrated to Istanbul from the countryside, did not conform to life in a big city. Once I observed the following conversation between Necmi and long-standing (Kurdish) customer Murat in the barbershop:

M: I used to live here, and I've had a business here since 1983. I own a textile workshop here. This used to be a very nice neighbourhood, believe me. A lot of successful [karyerli] people used to live here. Respectful people. It was a more luxurious place, a cleaner place...

N: Many artists used to live here.

M: A lot of distinguished people used to live here. An elite. When the people from the countryside came here, in the 80s and the 90s, those people fled. They went to more luxurious neighbourhoods, to quieter neighbourhoods. Because when those villagers came here, those people that lacked city manners, these people, the former inhabi-
tants, they started to withdraw from here. [...] When that happened, they left Tarlabaşı to a different kind of people.

N: Yes, that's how it is. Whatever these people that came from the east did in the east, they now do in Tarlabaşı as well. [...] For example the thing they do with their bedding. We buy our blankets and pillows, but they don't. [They use] sheep's wool. Ok, it's nice to use natural things, but to do this in the middle of the street...you saw it in the summer. They take a stick and start beating that wool, bam, like that.¹³¹ Necmi refers to the practice of filling pillows and blankets with sheep's wool, which is common in rural areas in Turkey. This wool is regularly taken out of the cases, washed, fluffed up and dried in the sun. Ok, that's what you are supposed to do [with wool], but not in the centre of Istanbul! Urban culture is different. If you'd take these people and put them in a residential complex...[...].

M: I now live in one of the more luxurious apartments in my complex. But you know what they do [in Tarlabaşı]? Those people who have come from the southeast, these guys they just open the window and, bam! They throw their used baby diapers out into the street from their window. There really are people with peculiar manners who live here. Very peculiar. How many times have they landed on my head...when I got into my car...I have seen all sorts of things here unfortunately. There really are very strange, very peculiar people here now. And when you say something, they give you a rude answer. [...] Don't get me wrong, they are our brothers, I don't mean to badmouth them, that's not my intention.

N: And this has nothing to do with education. It has nothing to do with education when you throw your used diapers from the balcony. It's not required to teach someone not to do that. You should think of that yourself! Put it in a plastic bag and put it in front of your door in the evening. When the garbage truck comes, it will pick it up. You cannot just throw a diaper from the third floor.

M: And they bring out their garbage just after the truck has left! How hard is it to bring the garbage down in time? Put it at your front door before the truck comes! Those people have a very peculiar outlook on life. Because I own a building here and my business is here, I couldn't move it elsewhere. But I really want to move my business elsewhere. This is the centre of Istanbul. Tarlabaşı, Beyoğlu! Beyoğlu, the place where gentlemen [beyler] live! It's supposed to be a place where distinguished people, elite people live. I have not seen that either, I came in the 70s, but there really used to be very different people in Beyoğlu, in the centre of Istanbul.

N: I really don't mean to talk badly about anyone. After they came, the feeling of neighbourhoodlessness declined a bit more. Do you know what I mean? It's not like when the madamlar [non-Muslim women] lived here. Those colourful bowfront houses...some guy moved in and has lived there for thirty years, why doesn't he paint it, at least once? Should the government come and do it for you? There is [cheap] paint, and there is [expensive] paint. Only to make it look nice and clean, but they don't even do that.

The complaint about the “ignorant villagers” who migrated to the city but do not know how to adapt to urban life has been a well-known and much-used trope in the media, fictional artwork and daily conversations in Turkey for decades. During my fieldwork
I heard it often, mostly from ethnic Turks who had come to Tarlabaşı a decade or two
before their Kurdish neighbours.<fnref n="5" />

It is important to note that Murat, a Kurdish businessman whose family had also
migrated to Istanbul, did not protest Necmi's observations. Similar to Müge, who was
trying to distance herself from trans* sex workers she deemed unworthy of respect, Mu-
rat distinguished himself from stigmatised Kurdish rural migrants by adopting the same
negative narrative used in the mainstream Turkish discourse.

Randol Contreras (2017), in his research on residents' reactions to territorial stigma
in Compton and South Central, Los Angeles County, cites Patricia Hill Collins' concept
of the "matrix of domination" to point out how marginalised communities deflect neg-
ative stereotypes onto more vulnerable groups, and by so doing reinforcing intersecting
marginalisation and oppression based on categories such as gender, ethnicity, sexual ori-
entation, class, etc. The belittling of other residents, evident in the barber shop conversa-
tion, reflects macrosocial divides in Turkey that are not specific only to Tarlabaşı. It does
not echo random hostilities either. Necmi Usta airing his grievances about Kurdish rural
migrants in his street has little to do with his neighbours specifically. The differences and
conflicts he described followed lines that are salient and meaningful outside of Tarlabaşı,
and in Turkey as a whole. They will be recognised anywhere. Contreras (ibid.: 657) shows
that residents of stigmatised neighbourhoods do not just deflect the stigma to anyone,
but to those that are lower in the social hierarchy made up of intersecting categories such
as gender, race, or class. The way people deflected the Tarlabaşı stigma depended on cat-
egories of Other that are supplied by the broader political context. In that sense they are
only Tarlabaşı-specific inasmuch as there are very few neighbourhoods in Turkey that
were threatened by urban renewal and where such a diversity of groups lived side by side.

The faceless Others that some residents blamed for the bad state and bad reputation
of the neighbourhood often corresponded with the ordinary iconic icons (De Koning and
Vollebergh 2019) that personified macro-political fissures and societal problems. Burcu,
a trans* sex worker in her fifties who worked from the informal brothel in Bird Street
alongside trans* sex workers Gülay and Müge, reproduced well-known racist stereotypes
about the criminal Kurdish male when she explained why Tarlabaşı had deteriorated:

> Things went downhill in Tarlabaşı. Fifteen, twenty years ago there was not a single
> Kurd. They are all with the PKK. All of these backstreets are in the hands of the PKK.
> A Turk or a tourist cannot go there, they'd rob the tourist. There are thieves and pick-
> pockets. [...] There's all kinds amongst the Kurds. The whole place needs to be cleaned
> up.

As a trans* sex worker in Tarlabaşı, Burcu did arguably not have more social power than
most of her neighbourhood's Kurdish residents. Like them, she represented a "marked"
member of society in Turkey, a person significantly "below" the norm of the unmarked,
perfect ideal of a Turkish citizen.<fnref n="6" /> Her distance to the ideal put Burcu in danger of vio-

<footnote n="5">5 Ethnic Turkish rural migrants who arrived in Istanbul after 1950 were disparaged in the same way by Istanbul residents who were living there before (see Lanz 2005).</footnote>

<footnote n="6">6 Sociologist Wayne Brekhus (1998: 35) writes that the "unmarked represents the vast expanse of social reality that is passively defined as unremarkable, socially generic, and profane". In the Turkish</footnote>
lent discrimination. It is no surprise then that she felt moved to deflect the stigma onto anyone else who might be perceived as the “real problem” instead of her. In order to do that, she points to the same “problem categories” anchored in the Turkish dominant discourse that Necmi Usta did. In the same way, I frequently witnessed Kurdish residents rail against the local trans* community and the visible sex work economy.

The discrimination of an entire ethnic group or a community sharing a social identity was common in the deflection of the spatial stigma. Once, during a family gathering at Alev's house, her uncle who lived in a different part of the neighbourhood talked about the changes in Tarlabaşı and the ongoing renewal project. He elevated the successes of the Kurds compared to the Romani residents who, he argued, had lived there much longer but achieved much less:

> Just take the local Roma. They've been here for 100 years, and they've not been able to wise up in 100 years. I don't mean to talk badly about Roma. But they are, how should I put it...they're lazy people. They have been living here for 100 years, but they are all renting their homes. They are not hard-working people. We have them on our street, too! And we get in fights with them. That happens. Look, it's been 15 years that our people have moved here from the east and all of them are property owners, are homeowners, are business owners. They're hard-working people. We're hard-working people, not like the Roma. The Roma have been here for 100 years, and they're still tenants, they languish in cellar flats. But us Kurds are not like that. We made a life for ourselves here in only 15 years, that's a short time. For example, 90 percent of the people from our village have become homeowners here, they've become business owners.

The stereotypes used in such deflective descriptions reflected racist and discriminatory tropes that I heard many times in various settings and contexts in Turkey, and they were directed at Romani residents, African and Syrian refugees, but mainly at Kurdish residents. Randol Contreras (2017: 667) points out how the symbolic violence of constant violent discrimination in stigmatised spaces drives targeted groups to search for “an enemy within”. The Kurdish, trans* or the Romani communities were an obvious target.

However, sometimes these scolding narratives reflected the kind of intra-group denigration that members of marginalised and stigmatised groups used to prove their own respectability in comparison to peers who were described as less deserving of respect and rights. When I told Cansu about the difficulties that Müge, Gülay, and the other trans* women who lived and worked in Bird Street were facing, she expressed no sympathy. On the contrary, Cansu argued that the women, whom she knew personally, had no one but themselves to blame for being threatened by eviction and displacement.

What else is [the developer] supposed to do? And they have been working there for so many years! They should have saved some money and invested it in something, buy a house...something! They have been working there for years. Where did all that money go? You have to work, save money, and do something with it. People should use their

<footnote>context, the closest to an ideal citizen that does not require additional markers to “Turk” would be an ethnically Turkish, Sunni Muslim, able-bodied, cishet male. The image of the “ideal Turk” has arguably shifted with the rise and consolidation of power of the AKP, but I would argue that at least these signifiers remain largely the same.</footnote>
brains. It's not right to now whine and complain and ask [the developer] not to evict people. Save your money and do something. Isn't that right?

In her time in Tarlabaşı Cansu had continuously faced violent discrimination from some of her Kurdish neighbours, and especially their children who had thrown stones and bottles after her and some of her trans* friends. On the other hand, she said that she got along well with her ethnic Turkish neighbours, a family who had migrated to Istanbul from the Black Sea, and with whom she shared a negative view of Kurds. In fact, she defended that most Kurdish rural migrants in Tarlabaşı had unduly profited and had no right to claim victimhood.

Do you really think that anyone here is a victim? Are those that have been living here for years without paying rent really victims? For years [the Kurds] have been...what do you call it? They've been squatting here. They broke into buildings, they painted them and started living there. Can those people be called victims? For years they have not paid any rent! They could have worked, saved money, and bought a house! [In instalments], like paying rent. Is this victimhood? They've been living here for years, have not paid for electricity, nor for water, nor for rent – so where has their money gone? They don't have any. Don't you think so? This has nothing to do with being a victim, they've been living for free for years. [...] There are people that are much worse off. Are the people in Tarlabaşı being victimised? They walk around decked in gold everywhere [points to her upper arms, where some women wear gold arm bands]. They cover it up! There are so many hard-up, hungry people. [...] Those are the people that are really being victimised. I don't mean them. But there are so many people who live here for free. Squatters.

Cansu never explicitly specified that she was talking about Kurdish families. However, the descriptions she used to vent her anger over alleged squatters corresponded to the anti-Kurdish narrative used in the dominant Turkish media and political discourse, accusing Kurds of free-loading and failing (or refusing) to pay their amenities bills, while presenting themselves as victims. She tried to establish privilege over space and respectability she had worked very hard to secure for herself and did so by portraying Kurds as undeserving. The accusation that many Tarlabaşı residents were in fact "not really" victimised by the urban renewal project was one I heard repeatedly, and it was very detrimental to neighbourhood solidarity. Barber Halil Usta once angrily told me that the majority of the people who lived in the project area were shirkers:

> You see the people that live [at the end of this street]. 80 percent of them are unemployed. When you go to our teahouse, ask those people, those people are all opposing the project. But none of them even have a job! If you give those guys a house, they'll want a villa. Sometimes the fault lies with the people, they don't work.

Halil Usta's estimation of unemployment in Tarlabaşı, based on his encounters and gos sip in the tea house, was much higher than it actually was.<fnref n="7" /> Halil Usta, who was officially

<footnote n="7">7 A 2008 survey conducted by a consultancy firm that had been hired by the municipality concluded that 11.5 percent of household heads were without employment. However, 92 percent of surveyed household heads were unskilled workers, many of whom were employed in precarious and poorly</footnote>
retired by the time we met, owned his own small business and was proud of the honorific of “Master” that he had worked hard for. His assessment of the living situation of many of his neighbours made clear that Halil Usta did not think that those men, idle, poor, and “unemployed” as they were – the “undeserving poor” – had the right to complain about the project, or about the threat of being evicted from their homes without adequate, or any, compensation. Halil Usta, while himself a tenant of his shop, and therefore just as much a victim of pending evictions as the other tea house patrons, set himself apart from those he dismissed as “unemployed”. As a business owner who spent his entire working life in a respected profession, he thought that the “idle unemployed” did not have the right to complain about evictions and demand compensation, certainly not if he did and could not. As a tenant whose landlord was still in a legal dispute with the municipality, he had no possibility to do either. Furthermore, Halil Usta was very angry that he still had to pay his monthly rent to the landlord, despite an increasingly painful lack of business, while tenants whose landlords had sold their property to the developer were often granted a rent hiatus until the start of evictions. This led him to double down on disparaging other residents, while trying to demonstrate that *he* was treated unjustly, because in his eyes, he was offered even less choices in a situation that was in fact unjust to everyone:

> Sometimes fault lies with the people here, too. That *han*<fnref n="8" /> for example. They told [the people] there: we will not take rent from you until the project is implemented. Look, it's been two years. [The municipality] didn't ask for rent for two years. Look, this guy, the turner next door. That adds up to 24,000 [TL]. He was told to sign, he did. Now the [agreed] day has come, and he says he won't leave. Now there's a thing called justice in this country. There are laws. I'm talking about the turner. For two years you didn't pay rent, you sign a contract where you promise you'll leave, and then you go and say: Conni<fnref n="9" />, write this and that. Who is right now? If it's one-sided...look, this is going to happen to me, too, one day or another. Look, I still pay rent now. If they would say: Halil Usta, you don't have to pay rent for two years, I'd be fine with that. Even though we are paying rent, we'll be the first to be thrown out, you'll see. [laughs]. [...] Ya believe me...I am telling you with all sincerity, many people here are squatters. They're squatters, [but] they say: they are throwing me out. They say: they are cheating me.

Halil did criticise the project for destroying the social fabric of the neighbourhood he had lived and worked in for more than 40 years. However, he believed that the state-

paid jobs in the service sector, construction, textile, or recycling. Only 19 percent of household heads had health insurance through their employers (Kentsel A.Ş. 2008). Those that worked in these insecure jobs often found themselves without employment over longer stretches of time, or they had to work evening or night shifts, which could mean idle time during the day. Pay was very often dismal, and it was not unusual in these jobs not to be paid on time, or at all. The local tea house was a place where men who were, for whatever reason, without occupation at that time, could congregate with friends and neighbours. However, in Turkey, the tea house (*kiraathane*) has a reputation as a space for idle men who do not work, and some men, like Necmi Usta, underlined with pride that they never went there.

<footnote n="8">8 *A han* is a collection of several businesses and workshops inside one building.</footnote>

<footnote n="9">9 Almost everyone in Tarlabasi called me by my nickname.</footnote>
led renewal, no matter how much he disliked the general idea of it, nevertheless happened within a legitimate legal frame, because contracts were signed between residents and stakeholders that were equally binding for each side. Halil believed the legal norms set by the state justice system to be "objective" and binding for every person operating within it. While activists and lawyers opposed to the project argued that the laws passed to make the Tarlabaşı renewal possible were in itself a violation of people's rights, and the contracts signed largely unjust or even illegal, Halil demonstrated faith in "the law" as being above politics. On the other hand, his unquestioning belief that the men in the teahouse, who in his eyes refused to adhere to it, were "shirkers", was informed by his experience of living in a deeply stigmatised neighbourhood. Halil Usta argued that many residents in Tarlabaşı were in fact squatters and cheats who had no right to protest the evictions. This was part of the narrative that the municipality and the developer used to stigmatise the neighbourhood, and to stifle protest inside and outside of Tarlabaşı. Halil Usta overlooked the fact that most tenants had signed agreements with the municipality because they had no other choice at the time, and he glossed over the reasons why Kurdish families had to move to Istanbul in the first place. He did not challenge the social problems, the structural inequality, the racism, and discrimination against many of the neighbourhood's inhabitants. Instead, he accepted the dominant narrative and viewed Tarlabaşı, the residents, and the renewal project through that same lens.

Sometimes the deflection of the stigma was used as a direct way to try and fend off discriminatory treatment during the evictions. When Cemile faced the small delegation of policemen who appeared at her door, demanding that she vacate the apartment she was "squatting" and hand over the keys, she felt that it was not *her*, but the Kurdish residents in the neighbourhood who merited such humiliating treatment:

> I told the policemen: 'There is no need for you to come, we are two people, we are both old, we won't do anything to you.' Those others, they have ten kids and fifty grandkids, that's a different matter. It's of them that they should be afraid, not of us.

Cemile also used a bigoted stereotype – "they have too many children" – that has constantly been used against Kurds in the dominant narrative.

In some cases, lateral denigration meant that people blamed others for the planned demolitions, arguing that it was them who were *really* responsible. Osman Yazıcı, a Turkish man in his sixties whose family had migrated to Tarlabaşı from the Black Sea coast in the 1970s, co-owned a hardware shop on Tarlabaşı Boulevard with his brothers. He had decided to take the municipality to court in order to increase the compensation he had been offered. Aware of the bad image of the neighbourhood and of the excuse it provided for the municipality to demolish, he was keen to rectify whatever I, the foreign researcher and journalist, might think the reason for the planned renewal might be. He told me:

> Do you know why they are really demolishing this place? All these people here came from their villages, from the East, they came straight here, before going anywhere else, before seeing anything else. They came with their trucks, they don't know how to dress in the city, they don't know how to talk in the city.
The rumour that Kurds were to blame for the project were not generated in a vacuum either. The prevailing Turkish nationalist ideology, anti-Kurdish sentiment and bigotry were generally accepted in the mainstream.

## Nostalgia

During a conversation with Halil Usta and Necmi Usta, I told them about family members who had recently visited me. I excitedly described our various walks through Istanbul and added how much they had enjoyed strolling through Tarlabaşı with me. Halil was pleased but said that they had not come “at the right time”. Necmi agreed, stating that they “should have come twenty years ago instead”. Halil nodded emphatically, and launched into a detailed, nostalgic description of what they would have encountered in those (imaginary) years:

> Yes, exactly. Had they come then, they would have moved here! Then there were the madamlar [non-Muslim women], these sweet old ladies, all of them so beautiful! They had these sweet accents. Had they come then, they would have not wanted to leave again. The houses were designed in a certain way back then. Almost everyone had their kitchen downstairs, one little bathroom, and in these very small houses they lived with their own families. They took off their shoes at the door, the families were not that big anyway, for example there was a preacher who had two daughters. He was a carpenter himself, what a nice man! They took off their shoes at the door and went upstairs. And now? It stinks everywhere. [...] And they wore such nice clothes, even when they sat on their doorsteps. We would always go and play elsewhere in order not to disturb them, they had to say only one word and we would leave.

If my guests *would* have come to Istanbul twenty years earlier, we would have wandered Tarlabaşı in the very early 1990s. The neighbourhood would have indisputably been very different from the one we visited in 2011. However, we would not have found the community that Halil Usta described. There would not have been less poverty, nor less dilapidation, and most of the non-Muslim residents who used to live in Tarlabaşı would have been long gone. There *would* have been fewer Kurdish families living in the neighbourhood. The migration of Kurdish people, most of whom had been forced out of their homes in the southeast of the country by Turkish state forces, was just starting to accelerate in those years, and only a part of those migrants had moved to Beyoğlu by then.

The kind of nostalgic image of an earlier, better Tarlabaşı that Halil and Necmi were describing was a very common narrative exclusively shared by non-Kurdish residents. The exact time frame used in these nostalgic descriptions was always vague, sometimes reaching twenty years back, sometimes thirty years or slightly longer, somewhat depending on the age of the speaker (though Necmi Usta was in his mid-thirties at the time and had only just arrived in Tarlabaşı in the 1990s), but the point of reference was always an idealised, better past that included the presence of a “civilised” non-Muslim community, and the absence of the more recently arrived Kurdish “villagers”. On one occasion I witnessed a conversation in Halil’s barber shop between the Usta and one of his customers, a middle-aged small business owner who had moved away from Tarlabaşı, where had lived
for eighteen years, to the high-rise suburb of Şirinevler. The customer, an ethnic Turkish man, explained that he had left because he could not stand how much the neighbourhood had changed, and that it was “no longer a place to raise a family”.

C: The culture in this place used to be very different. Before, in the summer around midnight families sat together, and guests came to join them to eat with them, and it didn't matter what your financial situation was, that was the humanity of this place.

H: And nobody thought of stealing your money!

C: Nobody would have even been able to glance at it, that's how good it was. I was small, in the evening we would play, and when our parents went somewhere, the neighbours would look after us, take us into their house. People swept in front of their doorstep every day. they kept flowers in their windows. Everything was neat and tidy.

H: Everyone was well dressed, too. People were polite and would not shout and use bad language. There was no spitting in the street.

C: Yes, these people were civilised [medeniyetli] people. It has changed a lot since then. A lot!

I have analysed how the nostalgia for an imagined, counterfactual multiculturalism, harmonious ethnic diversity and distinctive culture had been exploited by those interested in marketing Beyoğlu, stakeholders such as the municipality, real estate developers, investors, and local business owners (Maessen 2017: 91). This nostalgia was also aggressively marketed by the Beyoğlu Municipality in order to justify the Tarlabaşı renewal project and sell the future development to investors. And just like their marketing campaign, the romanticised narratives by residents entirely erased the area's, and Turkey's, violent past and ignored the forced displacement of the non-Muslim minority populations from Beyoğlu. Trans* sex worker Burcu, who had lived and worked in Bird Street for several decades described the “old” Tarlabaşı as an improbably rosy, idealised place:

> The street used to be very beautiful. The shop owners were good, everyone was good, they respected us. We had nice chats. We sang together, had tea together. How nice, right? [...] Greeks and Armenians didn't harm us. They were gentlemen, the neighbours waved at us. Even tourists and Americans came here. They came from Austria. They came, they sat down...they walked around, they were on holiday. But now the neighbourhood has filled up with indecent people.

None of the residents who lauded the former presence of a “civilised”, “friendly” and “well-mannered” non-Muslim community in Tarlabaşı made mention of the fact that all of them, in one way or another, moved into buildings, homes, and shop spaces that had at some point been forcibly abandoned by their former owners, and that these former owners had been subjected to violent discrimination by their fellow citizens and the Turkish state.<fnref n="10" /> Sometimes these accounts claimed that former (non-Muslim) Tarlabaşı residents

<footnote n="10">10 Following the 1955 anti-Greek September pogroms, the Turkish state expelled more than 10,000 Istanbul Greeks in 1964. Tens of thousands more left Turkey in the following year, and the Greek population in the city decreased from around 80,000 to 30,000 in 1965.</footnote>
had left because “those people from the countryside” had arrived in the 1980s and 1990s, and that they had simply relocated to “more luxurious neighbourhoods” in the suburbs. Baker Gökhan Usta argued that the Greek residents left because the neighbourhood deteriorated and that Greeks who could not afford the Istanbul suburbs left to Greece:

> Things got bad here, very bad. There are none of the old Istanbulites left. They all left. Those with money went to Etiler, to Bebek or to Tarabya. To pretty places. To areas along the Bosphorus. Those without money went abroad. Many went to Greece. And why did this happen? There was pickpocketing here, too then. There were only non-Muslims here, normal families, everyone knew each other. There were thieves, there were misfits, too. But they wouldn't do their thing here. They'd go elsewhere to do that, this was a neighbourhood of families, everyone was like a family. So there was no crime, no problem. That changed with time, and pickpocketing started here...after 1997. After 97 things went downhill here. Maybe it was state policy. Before that there were all kinds of small businesses here. Bag makers, shoemakers. But all these workshops are gone now. They were all here. Belt makers, wallet makers. They left. When the pickpocketing started. [...] There is nothing likeable left about Tarlabaşı. Tarlabaşı used to be very likeable! There were non-Muslims, there were friends, there were decent [düzgün] people. There's none left now, it's been 15 years and they are all gone.

While Gökhan Usta argued that Greek residents left because they did not like the increase of petty crime in the neighbourhood and because, how he euphemistically puts it, “things got bad”, the vast majority of Greeks, who used to be the largest group of non-Muslims in Tarlabaşı, had left because they had been violently chased out of their homes.

I once had the opportunity to hear a first-hand account of the everyday violence against Greeks in Tarlabaşı by a Greek woman I interviewed in Athens. Then in her late fifties, she was born in Tarlabaşı in the early sixties, and said that her parents had told her not to speak Greek in the street as a child, for fear that she would be attacked. With an increase in violence and anti-Greek sentiment due to the ongoing Cyprus crisis, her parents told her not to speak Turkish in the street anymore either, because they were afraid that her Greek accent would be detected and spark violent reactions. She remembered that her family home, a house on Kalyoncu Kulluk Street, was repeatedly targeted by stone throwers. The sad result of her parents' anxious policing of her language was that she refused to speak at all for several months following their arrival in Athens.

Trans* woman Burcu arrived in Tarlabaşı in the late 1970s. Throughout Turkey this was a time of unstable coalition governments, violent political strife and extreme economic hardship that was neither peaceful nor in any way safe.<fnref n="11" /> The early 1980s, particularly the time following the violent military coup of September 12, 1980, were characterised by intense political repression and state violence against activists and marginalised groups, especially on the left.

The residents quoted here all expressed a nostalgia of an era in Tarlabaşı and Beyoğlu that never existed, and none of them could possibly have lived in or remember a time that was not in any way violent towards minorities, non-Muslim or otherwise. Nor was the

<footnote n="11">11 Between 1976 and 1980, 5,000 civilians were killed in street violence between opposing political factions in Turkey (Ersan 2013; White and Gündüz 2021).</footnote>
nostalgia for a better past unambiguous, or ignorant of the historical events. Halil Usta, for example, told me about violent police repression he had experienced as a younger man in the neighbourhood in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Once he was arrested in a tea-house for simply "looking like a leftist", due to his, as Halil explained, "thick, leftist-style moustache". Burcu told me in great detail about the horrific violence she lived through as a trans* woman at the hands of the military and the police in the months following the 1980 coup.

But just as the municipality had done in their city marketing campaigns, the sentimental discourse recounted here weaponized nostalgia as a way of deflecting the neighbourhood stigma onto a group of "newcomers" that had put an end to the alleged "golden days" of Tarlabaşı. This discourse almost exclusively targeted the Kurdish community, even if this was not always explicitly expressed. These veiled allusions to Kurdishness sometimes referred to a certain point in time such as the 1990s, when forced Kurdish migration to bigger cities in the west of the country accelerated. In other cases, they were voiced in the form of racist complaints used to describe problems understood in the collective nationalist narrative as being rooted in Kurdishness, such as Cemile's comment about having a large number of children and "shady" connections. Whatever the angle, these frames always erased the reasons why Kurdish families arrived in Tarlabaşı in large numbers. It remained unsaid that most of them had been burned out of their homes in the southeast of the country, and that Turkish state policy towards Kurds was the reason they had to migrate elsewhere.

Most non-Kurdish residents I came across, including ethnic Turkish business owners and artisans, trans* sex workers, Romani, and non-Muslims (such as members of the Orthodox Assyrian community who came together in a local church or two elderly Armenians whom I met via lute maker Kerem Usta) were united in their resentment of having to live amongst a Kurdish majority.

Especially those residents who had been in Tarlabaşı prior to the arrival of forcibly displaced Kurds in the late 1980s and the 1990s felt that they had been "robbed" of "their" neighbourhood specifically by the incoming Kurdish population. This was also true for non-Muslim residents who really did remember the days when a Greek majority resided in the neighbourhood. Sarohi Hanım, an 84-year-old woman of Armenian descent who still lived in the family house built by her great-grandfather, said that her only friend left in the neighbourhood was a single Turkish woman of the same age as herself who lived in a vakıf-owned building across the street. Both women entertained distant, yet friendly relationships with their predominantly Kurdish neighbours, and they said that they never had any problems with them, on the contrary: When Sarohi Hanım fell ill, and after breaking her hip falling down the stairs of her house, the Kurdish woman next door looked after her, cooked and brought her food, and did her shopping, since Sarohi Hanım did not have family left. However, when it came to their views on the more abstract idea of a Kurdish majority in Tarlabaşı, both women insisted that they did not like
what their neighbourhood “had become” and that “it had all gone downhill after the Kurds had moved in”.<fnref n="12" />

## Turkness as Whiteness

Lute maker Kerem Usta, whose workshop was close to Sarohi Hanım's building and who had introduced me to her, expressed a similar sentiment:

30 years ago, there were almost only Non-Muslims [Gayrimüslim] in Tarlabaşı. I came to Tarlabaşı around 35 years ago. That's how it was then. [...] Later they came from the east, they came from Diyarbakır, from Mardin, they filled all the houses. [...] It was much better before. When the [non-Muslims] lived here, people respected each other. We would drink tea together in front of my shop, for example. We don't do that anymore. These things just don't happen anymore. Neighbourly relations were good back then, but now neighbours don't have any relations anymore.

It is worth picking apart the instrument maker's stance. While not entirely surprising, it is nevertheless important to note that Kerem Usta maintained a very good relationship with the Kurdish owner of a stuffed mussel kitchen across from his workshop and generally got along very well with Kurdish neighbours and other Kurdish owners of neighbouring businesses. Many of his customers were in fact Kurdish musicians, and many of them were regular visitors in his shop. In 2015, Kerem Usta even joined the pro-Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) as a member, and he voted for the HDP in the June national elections. HDP co-chair Figen Yüksekdağ had visited his shop during the election campaign and Kerem Usta told me several times about how pleased he had been to make her acquaintance, and how proud to have taken a selfie with her.

Therefore, it is worth asking why Kerem Usta thought that Kurds were responsible for the decline of the neighbourhood, and why he, like other ethnic Turkish residents I had spoken to, tried to deflect the territorial stigma onto them. It was obvious that he felt alienated from Tarlabaşı. The neighbourhood taint weighed on him, and like so many other of his fellow non-Kurdish neighbours had done, he blamed the Kurds for the physical and symbolic deterioration of the neighbourhood. In his eyes they, in the most abstract sense, were “intruders”. It is not a stretch to say that this nostalgia was a euphemistic way to vocalise racist thoughts against the Kurdish community. But how did Kerem Usta reconcile his favourable view of the Kurdish neighbours he appreciated with his bigoted view about the local Kurdish community as an anonymous whole?

I would like to suggest that “Turkness”, the metaphor of a naturalised performed identity of privilege, can provide a useful analytical tool. Most (especially cishet, male, Sunni Muslim) ethnic Turkish residents never questioned their own position, their “right” to live and work in Tarlabaşı, or if their presence impeded on the comfort of other

<footnote n="12">12 Sarohi Hanım never once talked about Turkish state violence against the non-Muslim minority, which was arguably a protection mechanism and something I have witnessed many times in Turkey.</footnote>
communities. In that sense it can be argued that *Turkness* is similar to the idea of whiteness.<fnref n="13" /> Ruth Frankenberg (1993: 1) characterises whiteness as a “structural position of social privilege and power”, a standpoint, a “location of structural” advantage. Research on whiteness has shown that whites benefit from a number of social understandings and institutional processes, “all of which seem – to whites at least – to have no racial basis” (Hartigan 1997: 496).

*Turkness*, then, is a position of invisibilised privilege and of naturalised “everywhere-ness”. It is a point at the top of the social structure in Turkey, a position that affords ethnic Turks to settle, live, and work at a place of their choosing without having to justify or defend their presence. From a position of privileged *Turkness* one will expect to be treated with respect in any shop, restaurant or business, and that one’s needs and standards, such as to be able to communicate in Turkish, be met. However, many ethnic Turks will bristle at the idea of affording a Kurdish person, or any member of a native non-Turkish minority community, the same rights and privileges in Turkey.

In the context of Tarlabaşı, the fault lines along which lateral denigration happened was often based on this kind of naturalised position of entitlement when it was practised by ethnic Turks. The underlying assumption was, similarly to the concepts of whiteness and white privilege, that belonging to the unmarked category of a person meant that it was mainly their comfort that the surroundings needed to cater to: the non-Muslim community was perceived as nice and respectful, even as “civilised”, but historical and structural reasons why they would behave that way towards an ethnic Turkish majority were ignored. Kurds, on the other hand, did not necessarily perform niceness in Tarlabaşı, and did not take Turkish sensitivities (and privilege) into account. This was one reason why some Turks derogated the entire neighbourhood as a “shithole” that deserved to be bulldozed to the ground, even if it meant that Turks would, metaphorically, be buried under the rubble, too.

Lateral denigration as described by Wacquant was something I observed in Tarlabaşı. However, that some residents tried to deflect the neighbourhood stigma onto “a faceless, demonized Other” (Wacquant 2007: 68) was only the starting point of the analysis in this chapter. Maybe more important than the existence of lateral denigration in a stigmatised neighbourhood is the analysis of the fault lines and symbolic boundaries along which such denigration happens, and why. The denigration of fellow residents in Tarlabaşı was not random, and neither was it specific only to the central Istanbul neighbourhood. Instead, that the grievances some residents voiced about their neighbours reflected macrosocial conflicts and fissures that were supplied by a broader political context in Turkey. This context provides the background before which the work that goes into drawing, maintaining and reinforcing symbolic boundaries is done, and it determines peoples’ ability to make choices of whom to direct their anger and blame against. It partly explains why neighbours were able to angrily point at neighbours in an area with strong social ties.

<footnote n="13">13 Here I do not refer to the concept of “White Turks” and “Black Turks”, terminology that was used as “an explicit reference to the American racial categories suggesting an analogical similarity between the oppression of African Americans by the white supremacist system and that of pious Muslims by the secularist regime in Turkey” (Güner 2021).</footnote>
Furthermore, the kind of weaponized nostalgia I observed in Tarlabaşı offered a two-pronged form of stigma management. As a concept it was oriented both towards an imagined past, insisting that the neighbourhood *used to be* beautiful, tidy, and safe, while the messy, violent, and discriminatory history of the area was erased. As lateral denigration it offered a forward-oriented explanation of why the neighbourhood was not beautiful and safe anymore, pointing mainly at the Kurdish community as a scapegoat in the form of bigoted blame. Implicit in this use of lateral denigration, both before and during the run-up to evictions, are two categories of deflection: pointing at a vilified Other as the reason for one's own marginalisation and mistreatment rooted in stigma ("They are the reason this is happening to me!") and the assertion that it is these Others that should in fact be targeted ("This should happen only to them!").

The question arises why people do not direct the denigration against someone else, for example against the people who dehumanise them and their neighbourhood. Why did many residents target other marginalised communities at all, when the threat came from such a clear institutional centre located in plain sight and just across the street? One could argue that socially, the naturalised location of structural advantage *Turkness* as a position of naturalised privilege did not make that choice likely. However, in the following chapter I examine several ways in which Tarlabaşı did decide to reject the neighbourhood stigma and “speak back” at those who stigmatised them.
<figure><img src="image_41.png" /></figure>
## Chapter nine: Speaking back

Alev once told me about a meeting with Nilgün Kıvırcık, the GAP Inşaat executive responsible for the project and relations with local residents on the developer's side. Kıvırcık was often present at negotiation talks. At her most recent meeting, Alev then told me, there had been an elderly man in the room with her, a resident she did not know but someone who had also been in negotiation talks with GAP Inşaat over his property. During his conversation with the executive, he addressed her as “my daughter” [kızım], a common, rather familiar appellation used by elderly people when addressing a younger person. Kıvırcık, sensing a lack of respect – or at least a lack of the professional distance her position during the rather unpleasant negotiation required – reacted angrily, reprimanded the man that she “was not his daughter” and harshly demanded that he address her with the more formal “Nilgün Hanım” in the future.<fnref n="1" /> Alev remembered how shocked she was by the female professional's behaviour toward an elderly man, and she told Kıvırcık that it was inappropriate, after which the executive lost her temper.

[Kıvırcık] told me: ‘You talk a lot. You’ll finally be able to live among human beings [when you leave Tarlabaşı]. You’ve been raised amongst animals. You’ve been raised in a place where animals roam around all day. You should go and live amongst human beings for a change.’ I became angry when she said this and I asked her what she meant by this, if she had meant to insult me. That it sounded like she wanted to call me an animal. I said that if she had, I might take her to court for that. She apologised. I said that I have seen sheep walk around Etiler as well during the Sacrifice Holidays [Kurban Bayramı] and asked her why she insisted that [Tarlabaşı] was a place for animals and Etiler wasn’t. We fought like that for a while.

In retaliation for the perceived slight of criticising her in front of other Tarlabaşı residents, Nilgün Kıvırcık targeted Alev's self-worth. Similar to the sanitary reformers of 19th-century Britain who described the topography of the city along lines that divided

<footnote n="1">¹ The more familiar address also implies social norms that Nilgün Kıvırcık had no interest in recognising for the negotiation talks. The formal, more distant relationship gives her the opportunity to disregard social norms that would otherwise shame her for treating an elderly man badly/depriving him of his home.</footnote>
the “respectable” quarters from the “depraved” slums, the poor neighbourhoods characterised by filth and a population that was indistinguishable from animals, the executive framed Tarlabaşı as dirty and disgusting, a place “where animals roam around”. In the bourgeois imagination, “the poor are pigs” (Stallybrass and White 1986: 131). Kıvırcık did not mention a specific animal, using the word “hayvan”, which can be read as “beast”. Alev, in her reply, rejected this metonymic association between the poor of Tarlabaşı and animals, and instead chose to understand this grave insult literally: Tarlabaşı as a place where animals, like rams and sheep, can sometimes be seen on the street.<fnref n="2" /> She underlined this by comparing her neighbourhood to the upscale Istanbul quarter of Etiler, a place that Alev associated with the white-collar, middle class lifestyle that Nilgün Kıvırcık represented. In the run-up to the Sacrifice Holidays [*Kurban Bayramı*], she said, animals could be found anywhere in the city, signalling that the rich residents in Etiler were really no different from her poor neighbours in Tarlabaşı. Alev’s “interpretation” was not only a rejection of a negative stereotype about poverty, but also a clever way to use the executive’s insistence on a formal, legal framework of the interaction to her advantage: she asked if Kıvırcık had meant to call her and other Tarlabaşı residents animals – the metonymic association that is clearly implied here – and if so, that this would be an insult Alev was willing to take to court for defamation.

Poverty does not only imply the lack of certain material possessions or money. Scholars differentiate between absolute and relative poverty. The former usually refers to a lack of basic human needs such as food, housing, health care, education, and clothing, whereas the latter is based on economic inequality in a society and related to an unequal distribution of resources and power (Akfirat et al. 2016). Research has shown that relative poverty does not only bring material deprivation and economic insecurity. It also has severe socio-psychological consequences, such as reduced self-esteem as well as feelings of humiliation and disrespect (Jones and Novak 1999; Lister 2004; Erdoğan 2007; Tomlinson et al. 2008; Yongmie 2013; Akfirat et al. 2016). In his study of poor people’s self-perception in a Turkish context, Necmi Erdoğan (2007: 66) underlines the central role that symbolic and emotional violence, through the constant assault on the self-respect of the poor, play in their everyday lives. Most of the people that he and his colleagues interviewed found these aspects of poverty more difficult to deal with than increasing material deprivation and social inequality, making the defence and preservation of self-respect the “main pre-occupation” of the urban poor in Turkey.

Alev underlined that this unpleasant conversation with Kıvırcık had been the final straw for her. She would not talk to *GAP İnşaat* representatives again, not about the prospective sale of the flat or any other topic pertaining to the renewal project. She also forbade her mother, who was the legal owner and whose name was written on the family's title deed, to interact with Nilgün Kıvırcık in any way, fearing that the elderly woman who barely spoke any Turkish would not be able to “handle” the conversation without being insulted. Alev expressed her contempt for project stakeholders by turning

<footnote n="2">² There was indeed a shepherd in Tarlabaşı whom I sometimes spotted from the window of my apartment, and whose presence was revealed through sheep droppings along certain routes. However, I never met him in the street or spoke to him. Just prior to the Sacrifice Holiday, some people would keep rams on their balconies or terraces.</footnote>
the assault on worth around and stating that it was them who were “just not worth it”. Speaking back to the *GAP Inşaat* executive was a form of breaking through the stigmatising frame that posited Tarlabaşı residents as invisible, as having no voice, and having entirely accepted and internalised the negative narrative about their neighbourhood and themselves. Imogen Tyler and Tom Slater (2018: 725) point out that “stigmatisation arises in contexts that are shaped by unequal relations of power, and [...] stigma and anti-stigma initiatives are the site of intense social struggles”. There is ample evidence that project stakeholders used their power and their discursive privilege to frame residents of the neighbourhood as immoral, as lumpenproletariat and as criminal as part of their deliberate stigmatisation strategies (Paton 2018), and to erase them from the present and the future of Tarlabaşı.

<figure><img src="image_42.png" /><figcaption>“Those that call Tarlabaşı residents ‘terrorists’ should be ashamed.”</figcaption></figure>

Photo by Jonathan Lewis

This chapter examines different ways in which Tarlabaşı residents tried to push back against this effort to invisibilise them. In the following pages, I explore what “speaking back” looked like under the circumstances in Tarlabaşı, and how such “backtalk” not only gave voice and form to residents’ humiliations, their anger, and their attempt to circulate a counternarrative to the stigmatising discourse that targeted their neighbourhood and themselves, but also opened cracks in the façade of project stakeholders’ pretence that the stigma was the “objective”, “natural” state of Tarlabaşı, and not a fabricated lens that necessitated enormous amounts of work to build, maintain, and renew. To do that, I open the chapter with a thick ethnographic description of a failed eviction, and of how the problematic position of one single municipal official lifted the curtain of seamless stigmatisation and allowed a glimpse behind it. Then I go on to describe the symbolic and discursive struggles that some residents engaged in to reframe the story about them-
selves and their neighbourhood. And finally, the chapter lists various messages that residents, unheard and ignored by project stakeholders, nevertheless attempted to deliver to them during evictions.

## Dissonance

On a hot afternoon in July 2011, a small delegation of two lawyers and several municipal officials as well as two uniformed policemen turned up in Tavla Street to evict Kemal, his mentally ill son and his daughter-in-law from their small rental house. Kemal was almost 60 years old at the time. The arrival of the municipal delegation and the looming threat of Kemal's eviction immediately caused a small commotion on his street. The two uniformed policemen parked their car away from Kemal's front door, got out and each lit a cigarette. They appeared otherwise uninterested in what was happening. They had arrived with a lawyer, a bald man holding a briefcase who turned out to be a municipal official, and another woman. The lawyer, a young woman in casual business clothes, approached Kemal and told him, in no uncertain terms, that he and his family would have to vacate the building right away. A few neighbours had started to gather around the scene, but nobody commented or interfered. Kemal did not let himself be intimidated and told the lawyer matter-of-factly that he was unable to leave because he simply had nowhere else to go. If she really was to evict him that day, he explained, he and his son's family would have to sleep in the street. The young woman, who explained that she had come at the behest of the developer *GAP İnşaat*, was unmoved and dismissively told Kemal that he was not the only one in the neighbourhood who “had this problem” and that he should not expect her delegation to help him out in any way. Kemal, unfazed by her rude demeanour, told her that he had recently turned down a 500 TL charity offer by the municipality because that money would not be enough to rent an apartment elsewhere, and that he would need at least three months' rent in advance in order to be able to leave his current house and pay a deposit elsewhere. The lawyer scoffed that he should expect neither the municipality nor the developing company to help him out: “Do you suppose that we will pay from our own pockets or what?” She impatiently reminded her colleagues and the lone municipality official that more evictions were planned for the same afternoon and that there was no time or reason for any further delay. She further accused Kemal of having long overstayed his assigned leaving date, which, in her words, made him a “squatter”. Therefore, she barked at him, he did not have the right to protest his eviction.

The municipal official on the other hand, a man of approximately Kemal's age, seemed inclined to enter into discussion with him. He offered to give him “fifty, maybe one hundred Lira as a mercy”, but said that he could not possibly hand him the minimum of 1,500 TL Kemal had said he needed to be able to find another home. Again, Kemal protested that he would not be able to do anything with 100 TL, that it was simply not enough to avoid homelessness. At that point the official theatrically turned to the group of neighbours who had gathered around the stoop to watch the altercation between Kemal and the eviction delegation. Raising his voice, and with a sweeping gesture over the small crowd, he said that there were “so many people present”, and might they not
be able to help Kemal out? This rather disingenuous suggestion was met with stunned silence. Falsely interpreting this silence as a lack of objection, the official continued:

> The municipality has no obligation [to help]. But this citizen is in pain, he is in trouble...anyone with a shred of humanity in them would be sad about that. Right? If I had the means, I swear I would give him [1,500 TL] from my own pocket. If I just had the means! But I don't have the means, I am a lowly government official, I work, I make one and a half [thousand TL] a month. I have kids and stuff...but small alms, a little bit of help...you for example, you live in this neighbourhood...you could [help] this citizen.

At this point Kemal, troubled that the official seemed to insinuate that his neighbours were to blame for his destitution, tried to interject by saying that the people in his neighbourhood *were* helping him, but the municipal official, now on a roll, was having none of it:

> Ssssh. You don't understand, that's different. In the coffeehouse, if each of your friends gives 50 Lira each, and you can collect that, and if [the municipality] gives you five hundred, then look, you'll get the 1,500 you need. If everyone would pitch in like that...it wouldn't hurt anyone.

His attempt to put the onus on other poor residents of Tarlabası was not immediately picked up by the crowd. Instead, the gathered neighbours replied by asking the official if the eviction could not be delayed by another week, or maybe two, so that Kemal would have a chance to find another house. The official volleyed their question back at them, and again tried to implicitly shame them for not helping out Kemal themselves.

> If I had the authority to delay the eviction, I would. Why would I want to hurt a disabled person like that? Do you think I am that cruel? Am I not human? Come on! Now there are so many people here who want to help this person. You all want to help your friend, right? [He dramatically puts his briefcase on the stairs and gets up, clearly about to make a speech that turns the outrage back at them.] So, let's see it, why don't you all give him fifty, or one hundred Lira from your pockets? [He demonstratively puts his hand in his pocket without pulling anything out.] I'll go first.

However, his thinly veiled attempt to deflect the responsibility for Kemal onto the neighbours gathered in the street fell flat. While most of them only grumbled at his suggestion, one young man got angry, and retorted in a voice dripping with sarcasm: "Ağbi, what a great idea! What a wonderful idea! [He turns around to other neighbours.] Who has fifty Lira here?" His biting comment was greeted with angry derision from other bystanders, and another man, someone I only knew as a minor drug dealer who had set up a small guerrilla garden on the corner of Kemal's street, started to shout at the municipal official who was now nervously attempting to calm the crowd. The drug dealer yelled at him:

> As if anyone here has the means to help Kemal Ağbi! You come from the municipality! It is your fault that he is being put out on the street! You want to throw him out today, you have the power to do that, so surely you can stop it, too! If anyone here had this kind of money, we would not be in this situation, would we?
The *muhtar* and some others held him back while he angrily raised and shook his fist at the official who had gotten increasingly anxious and stepped down from his entrance stair podium. The drug dealer continued to express his dismay about the way the project stakeholders treated local residents, but was finally led away by the *muhtar*, a young Kurdish man popular in his district, while the rest of the crowd looked on.

As soon as both men were out of earshot, the official tried to rally everyone's sympathy again. With theatrical gestures, he stressed his own weak position as a lowly municipal employee who maybe represented the authority of the state but who was in fact only a cog in the wheel of government and did not have the power to change the course of events and halt Kemal's eviction. However, the scene ended with the delegation leaving after all, and the eviction postponed for another week. Some of Kemal's neighbours went to congratulate him for "standing up" to *GAP İnşaat* and the municipality, and for a while, grumbling discontent and outrage was exchanged in conversations on the street before people dispersed again.

However, it had been the guerrilla-gardening dealer who pushed back at the seemingly innocuous attempt by the official to “ease” Kemal’s hardship. As one of the only people there, he had shown his anger publicly and embarrassed the municipal official in front of everyone, drawing attention to the hypocrisy of his request. Just as the aforementioned *GAP İnşaat* executive had done by insisting on being called “*Hanım*”, instead of the more familiar “*kızım*”, the municipal official charged with Kemal’s eviction was appealing to a certain social code of appropriateness by asking the gathered neighbours to help out Kemal. At the same time, and just as Nilgün Hanım had done, he violated this code by acting inappropriately, since he was himself the agent of the institution that set out to destroy this kind of social contract of appropriateness for the entire neighbourhood. Part of the state-led stigmatisation was the allegation that Tarlabaşı was an empty, forgotten place without any sense of community, and that this “fact” had nothing to do with the municipality or national urban policies. However, chapter six described the basic accommodations of a social contract that residents in Tarlabaşı had access to, and that included support networks and the importance of solidarity and mutual care between neighbours. The scene between Kemal, the official, and the guerrilla gardener laid bare the deep dissonance between the way the neighbourhood was framed by the municipality, and the municipal representative’s publicly displayed knowledge that this frame in no way corresponded to the reality on the ground. His implicit accusation of Kemal’s neighbours showed exactly that: he (wrongly) blamed them for being disrespectful and in violation of the social contract he clearly knew existed in a neighbourhood like Tarlabaşı. The social contract, the solidarity ties in the neighbourhood that the state-led stigmatising discourse erased, were real. The official’s appeal to that contract proves that he, too, knew that it was real.

The solution the official suggested was highly hypocritical. Charged with the oversight of evictions in the street, he knew that most of the people gathered there were facing problems similar to Kemal’s. The official also knew that despite their poverty and their destitution, they had been helping Kemal, because that is what Kemal explicitly told him. He on the other hand represented the state authority who was just about to evict a handicapped man, his handicapped son and that son’s wife. He was the problem he appealed
to the solidarity network in the neighbourhood to solve. The drug dealer's public display of anger was the pushback that made this contradiction visible for everyone at the scene.

The marginalisation and discrimination of Tarlabaşı residents during the negotiation stage of the renewal project and in the run-up to evictions was to a large part based on the neighbourhood stigma, that both created and justified the victimisation of those deemed unworthy of justice and respect. A lot of the work of the municipality, of the project lawyers, of the development company representatives, and of the entire neoliberal state apparatus and its agents was only possible by pretending that this stigma was not, to a very large part, the result of the power and discursive privilege of these actors, powerful people and institutions that were able to shape the narrative about Tarlabaşı and its residents. The municipal official's reaction, his appeal to the very social contract that the agents of his and other state institutions denied, lifted the curtain, and afforded onlookers a glimpse of the machine that churned out the stigma of that the municipality pretended it did not exist.

## Symbolic struggles

Considerable marketing efforts initially went into the attempt to sell the demolitions as progress that would benefit everyone. However, few Tarlabaşı residents believed the glossy advertisements over their own experiences with state agents, with the knowledge about state corruption and their view of the rich and powerful as self-serving, greedy, and dismissive of the urban poor. When Müge and Gülay looked through the project's marketing catalogue together, they were under no illusions who the target audience of the renewal project really was:

> Look at this. All these rich people. These streets. Look at this guy with his nice brief-case. What does this have to do with Tarlabaşı, or with us? These expensive cars, the shopping bags, the cafés they want to build, there will be no room for us. This is all for rich people. They are lying when they say that the new Tarlabaşı is for us. They want us to leave, they want us to disappear.

Kurdish second-hand furniture seller Maher reacted similarly when he was leafing through the catalogue, calling project stakeholders out on their discrimination against Tarlabaşı residents, even when they attempted to dress the project up as benevolent. He pointed out that none of the people or the objects in the catalogue represented current Tarlabaşı residents:

> Nobody in Tarlabaşı looks like that. Where are the women wearing headscarves? Where are the Kurds? No kid in Tarlabaşı has nice toys like that. Who here has the money to buy such a [tricycle]? Where is the laundry? They make it look like our Tarlabaşı is bad, and as if only rich people deserve to be here. They are not better than us. It's shameful [ayıp].

Just like Gülay and Müge, Maher was offended by the aggressive “Before/After” imagery that the municipality was using. He rejected the suggestion that the Tarlabaşı he recognised, where most people were poor, where many of his neighbours were Kurdish like
himself, where laundry lines crisscrossed the streets, and where women were dressed
in traditional long skirts and headscarves, were in some way “worse” than the polished,
gentrified version of the neighbourhood that the project promoted. On the contrary, he
shamed the municipality for this insinuation. Tarlabaşı residents regularly underlined
the strong neighbourhood ties in the *mahalle* as more important than material wealth.
Özgür, Alev’s fiancé, said that the marketing speak in the promotional material was
merely a thinly veiled attempt to hide the immoral financial gain and the planned socio-
demographic engineering.

So, they'll demolish this neighbourhood. [...] They are kicking people out of their
homes overnight. Why? Because there is money to be made. So that rich people can
come and live here. [...] What are we then? Are we not human?

Özgür called the developers greedy and only interested in profit. This ties in with the
widespread image that many poor in Turkey have of the rich (Erdoğan 2007). Cemile of-
ten underlined that she did not wish for material wealth, since she thought that rich peo-
ple lacked human qualities that she considered more important.

How about that! So we are not allowed to live here. Why shouldn't I live here? What are we then? You are rich, but you're just as human as me, no matter if I am poor. Maybe my poverty is better even than your wealth! There is more goodwill...our table is full, we are rich that way, but most importantly we are rich in goodwill. Wealth has no use. If I have ten Lira today, I'm a rich person. [...] *Vallah*, I really don't want any wealth. I say *Allah*, if you want to change me, don't make me rich. If I stay as I am, it's better. When I find five Lira, two Lira, that makes me so happy, I buy bread for one Lira and cheese for one Lira, there you go, that's our dinner.

In his study of self-perceptions of the urban poor in Turkey, Erdoğan (2007: 48–49) underlines that the many “discriminating, degrading and hurtful” descriptions of class difference show that, despite a lack of thorough analysis of social hierarchies, the relationship between “the rich” and “the poor” rests on mutual enmity. In the narratives of the poor that he and his colleagues interview, the wealthy are described as “arrogant”, “greedy”, “spoilt”, “tightfisted”, “cruel”, “immoral”, or “dishonest”, to name but a few, whereas the poor are depicted as “helpful”, “cooperative”, “morally above the rich”, “pure”, “sympathetic”, or “generous” (ibid.: 49).

Erdoğan underlines that it is not wealth per se that is seen as offensive, but the pat-
terns of behaviour that wealth produces, as well as the lifestyle of the wealthy and the
way money is spent. This finds its echo in countless Turkish movies where the bour-
geois/middle class is portrayed as degenerate, cruel and manipulative as opposed to the
pure, morally upstanding poor (ibid.: 50). While the poor generally differentiate between
the “good rich” and “the bad rich”, the general image they have of the wealthy is a negative
one.

This is something I came across in Tarlabaşı as well. I heard anecdotes and stories
that aimed to illustrate how frivolous, unhelpful, and stingy wealthy people were, often
in relation to food and shelter. Hospitality, I was told, was freely offered in Tarlabaşı, but
I would never find it in richer Istanbul neighbourhoods. Sometimes these stories centred
on anonymous actors, and sometimes they were stories about rich relatives who behaved
badly. Following an unpleasant encounter with Nilgün Kıvırcık, during which Cemile felt she had been treated with particular disdain and disrespect by the younger woman, and had finally been thrown out of Kıvırcık's office, Cemile told me a story about an invitation to distant, wealthy relatives in order to explain to me why the wealthy – a class to which Kıvırcık belonged in her eyes – not only lacked manners, but were in fact ridiculous, too:

> I don't like rich people's places [sosyete yer]. Once we went [to visit relatives] and there was a small child, and they were so worried the whole time. 'Oh, the ashtray was so expensive, be careful, it'll break', it was 'be careful with this' and 'be careful with that'. I don't like to visit them unless I have to. [...] And you know what, you always stay hungry in the homes of the rich. *Vallahi*, you stay hungry. Once we went, they invited us to eat. We were 15 people. So we sat there and waited, I couldn't ask them for anything because I was ashamed to. But then I was so hungry that I started to get dizzy, so I asked them for a piece of bread. [The host] said: 'Oh no, what do you want with dry bread, we'll eat food!' He said 'food', but what can I tell you, it was a tiny pot filled with a little bit of meat! [Shows how little with her hands.] Such a small pot. So that was the meat from the sacrificial animal, right? They said they cooked the meat, and then he lifted the lid off the pot, and there was so little in it! I thought that I'd fill my stomach with bread...but there was one loaf of bread for 15 people! [...] They told me not to eat bread because there was food, and how could I have said anything about how little meat there was in the pot? [Laughs] I didn't say anything. There was one loaf of bread, *vallahi!* They put out the bread, and a tiny bit of rice, a small dish of peas. There were 15 people! The kids had one spoonful of rice, a spoonful of peas. [...] Then we went home, can you imagine how fast we went? [Laughs] Bread! Eggs! I said, get out all the food, let's eat until we are full! I don't like going to these chic homes. You'll stay hungry in rich peoples' houses. That's how the rich are.

Cemile told me this story about rich people violating one of the most basic social norms in Turkey, generous hospitality, with considerable glee. While it did not directly target Nilgün Kıvırcık, it was a way to re-establish self-worth in the face of the condescension of the wealthier woman who had clearly positioned herself as belonging to a higher class than Cemile. James Scott (1985: 197) writes that in the symbolic struggle between the rich and the poor, “character assault is one of the few remaining social weapons” for the latter. The anecdote that Cemile told me provided her with proof, and the consolation, that the rich might own more things and put on airs, but that they were in fact attached to material objects more than to their own family and comically greedy despite their material wealth. Poor people, on the other hand, could claim generosity and warmth for themselves, and were therefore at least morally superior.

Cemile also explained that she preferred Tarlabası to more luxurious, or more “modern” Istanbul neighbourhoods. When she visited her daughter who lived in a residential complex on the outskirts of the Alibeyköy neighbourhood, Cemile said that she often felt sad because of the lack of interaction in the street, the anonymity of big supermarkets she had to go to. She was also unable to “lower a basket”<fnref n="3" /> when she wanted to buy a few

<footnote n="3">3 In many more traditional Istanbul neighbourhoods, shopping-by-basket was a very convenient way of purchasing a small number of items without having to leave the house. One would lower</footnote>
small items, because that way of shopping did not exist where her daughter lived, a place
that, however, was “very modern, with beautiful villas everywhere”.

The symbolic struggle over what qualities characterise a liveable neighbourhood was
one way in which residents challenged negative assumptions and stigmatising narratives
about Tarlabaşı. In a similar vein, Halil Usta underlined that his barber shop might lack
the design that reflected luxury and a certain type of commercialised modernity, but that
he and his associate Necmi Usta offered the intimacy and the congenial atmosphere that
more fashionable, and more exclusive barbers in wealthier neighbourhoods, shops that
might be labelled “kuaför” rather than “berber”, did not provide. By highlighting what was
good and desirable about his shop as an example for Tarlabaşı, Halil underlined that dif-
ferent values than just signs of material affluence could be important, contesting that his
neighbourhood was without worth (Cairns, 2018).

Erdoğan (2007: 49) writes that the importance of goodness plays a central role in the
self-identification of the poor and becomes a “weapon of the weak” that shields them
against material deprivation and psychological suffering in the face of the all-pervasive
poverty stigma. The struggle for recognition and agency therefore is also a struggle over
moral superiority.

It is important to note that in Turkey, poverty is not framed in the same way as in
the US, Canada, Australia, or many other Western European countries where aggressive
neoliberal agendas and austerity policies have not only led to deepening economic and
social inequalities, but where the poor have been increasingly demonised, stigmatised,
and misrepresented as workshy scroungers who lack the ambition and will to improve
their life circumstances (Macdonald et al. 2013; Jensen 2014; Jensen and Tyler 2015; Wright
2016; Shildrick 2018). This “poverty propaganda” can be so powerful and pervasive that
even those who experience inequality and severe material deprivation adhere to this im-
age (Shildrick and Macdonald 2013; Shildrick 2018: 785). Amongst the poorest in Turkey,
Erdoğan (2007: 76) argues, the responsibility for poverty and the unjust distribution of
resources is frequently laid at the feet of the state and the “selfish” rich. Excessive wealth
is seen as suspicious. The difference in status between the rich and the poor is often de-
scribed as unfair, and those that are rich are suspected of having attained their wealth
and status in unfair ways and not “by the sweat of brow”. Put differently, the rich came
by their possessions by illicit means, by stealing the belongings of others and by corrup-
tion, and therefore do not deserve what they have (Akfirat et al. 2016: 420). The poor in
Turkey offset this injustice with the claim that they might be destitute, but that they are
at least honest, and that they did not try to climb the social ladder with the help of im-
moral and illicit means. In short, they express moral agency by stressing the choice of
their own self-respect over wealth, and in so doing establish moral superiority over the
rich (Erdoğan 2007: 76). In the context of the urban renewal project, residents had ample
ammunition to accuse project stakeholders and other powerful actors interested in the

<footnote>a basket, or any other sturdy receptacle, like a bucket, from one's window or balcony, call out to
either the shop owner or even some passer-by and that person would take the money in the bas-
ket and buy the requested items, and put them back in the basket (with the change). This way of
shopping required a certain level of trust and familiarity in the neighbourhood and was entirely
impossible in the high-rises that now dominate the suburbs of big Turkish cities.</footnote>