the ground, our fields. If none of this had happened, we wouldn't need to deal with a big corporation now.

Even for Maher who, as a former village guard, had a complicated relationship with Kur-
dishness, the PKK, and the Turkish state, what happened in Tarlabaşı resonated with
the collective Kurdish experience of forced displacement from villages in the southeast
carried out by the Turkish military.<fnref n="12" /> His view showed that this experience was separate
from alignment with the PKK or any other political affiliation, as well as from an indi-
vidual's experience, and that these alignments were not absolute categories according to
the positions they occupy.<fnref n="13" /> Maher's narrative of past displacement is a shared boundary
marker (Barth 1969) for conflict-induced Kurdish migrants in Tarlabaşı, regardless of the
actual cause for their dislocation, and heavily influenced how they experienced stigma in
their neighbourhood, both before, and in the run-up to evictions.

Kurdishness and anti-Kurdish discrimination also played an important role in how
the municipality and the developer *GAP İnşaat* approached property “negotiations” and
the process running up to evictions. Commonly held in an office building on Tarlabaşı
Boulevard and attended by municipal officials, company representatives, and their
lawyers, these talks between property owners and project stakeholders purposely ex-
ploited residents' lack of economic, social, and cultural capital. But what was more,
negotiators on the municipality's side also abused the lack of language proficiency. In
at least two cases, Kurdish women who did not understand or speak enough Turkish to
give their informed consent on proposed sales contracts were not provided translators
or allowed to bring family members who did understand Turkish. The latter was justified
with the argument that only the names of the women, and not those of their children
or other family members, were written on the tittle deeds, and therefore only these
women were admissible interlocutors for project stakeholders.<fnref n="14" /> The failure to provide
a translator for monolingual Kurdish speakers was in line with decades of Turkish state
policy regarding the refusal to recognise Kurdish as a language in formal domains, such
as state offices or a courtroom. This was based on a variety of statutes in Turkish law that

<footnote n="12">12 Since guards were recruited for very complex and different reasons, an individuals' calibrations to Turkish nationalists or the PKK or other involved actors is complicated. Village guards might attempt to display loyalty to opposing factions. Furthermore, hundreds have been accused, and in many cases convicted, of aiding and abetting the PKK despite their role as village guards (see Letsch 2013; Acar 2019).</footnote>

<footnote n="13">13 In fact, the view that one must be affiliated with the PKK if one is critical of state military action in the southeast has been used by the Turkish state since the beginning of the Kurdish-Turkish conflict. This false binary has been used as a justification for state violence, but it was also useful for the PKK who has successfully argued that the Turkish state leaves very little room outside the dichotomy of either having to assimilate or be branded a terrorist (see Marcus 2007).</footnote>

<footnote n="14">14 It was not uncommon for women, often the wives of the male heads of families, to be the offi-
cial owners and sole title deed holders. One explanation I was once half-jokingly given by several
women was that men were “bad with money”, as they were “prone to gambling” and therefore more
likely to lose family property to debt collectors. Another reason I heard was that because men often
owned businesses, families wanted to make sure that business debts would not endanger private
family property.</footnote>
granted state officials the discretionary power to deny access to a translator, as there can be no translation of “gibberish” or of an “incomprehensible dialect”.<fnref n="15" />

The deliberate shaming, intimidation and threats of force were keenly felt by all Tar-
labaşı property owners, but for Kurdish residents, these talks tapped into a shared mem-
ory of a traumatic past. Alev argued that this strategy of fear worked well because it
resonated with the collective Kurdish experience of violent displacement by the Turkish
state:

[The municipality] behaves unjustly towards us, and why do they do that? Because 90 percent of people here have migrated from villages, especially from the southeast. Because this is a poor place, because people have large families. [...] Because people here are uneducated, they have no idea about the law...so what do [the authorities] do? They use this to play with people's feelings, with their gullibility. Those that come from the southeast are very good and innocent people [temiz insanlar], they don't know anything. And because they are so innocent, they think everyone is like them. [The project stakeholders] say: 'we will cut the electricity, we will make trouble and send the police if you don't make an agreement, you will either agree or we will cut the electricity, we will throw you out with the police...' People don't know what to do about this, they don't know their rights and how to get legal help, so what do they do out of fear? They look to make an agreement. Because they have had all that back home! Yes, 90 percent of villages have been burned down, people were tortured, some lost their children, so they came here. So what do they do now? [...] [The municipality] tries to cheat people by exploiting their fears.

Many Kurdish residents in Tarlabaşı had experienced state violence, including ethnic dis-
crimination, civil rights violations and human rights abuses, physical assault and tor-
ture, forced relocation, and expropriation of land and resources. A majority of the Kur-
dish community in Tarlabaşı had fled the violent conflict between the Turkish state and
the PKK, and many lost their homes due to the destruction of their villages. These shared
memories only influenced how Kurdish residents experienced what was happening in
Tarlabaşı, but it also informed how they interpreted the municipality's threats and the
rumours of planned, heavy-handed police deployment during evictions. Anthropologist
Stuart Kirsch (2002a: 70), in his analysis of the relationship between rumour and violence
in West Papua, shows "how particular rumours emerge in reaction to political violence
and the experience of terror that such rumours evoke." Through "rumour people both
experience the threat of political violence and express their concerns about it. Yet these
rumours may also be exploited by the state, exacerbating local fears" (ibid.: 57). Rumours
of municipal threats to forcibly evict residents, to cut the electricity and curtail access
to municipal services with the help of the police merged with people's previous experi-
ences of state violence, and, as Alev noted, they spread fear and drove some residents to
seek agreements with the municipality rather than resist the injustice of forced displace-
ment, partly because they lacked the cultural and social capital to seek legal recourse.

<footnote n="15">15 Until 2013, and unlike non-citizens who were not fluent in Turkish, Kurdish citizens were denied the explicit legal guarantees of access to a court-appointed translator and the protection of their right to testify in their mother tongue (Haig 2004; Bayir 2013; Clark 2016).</footnote>
These rumours, therefore, not only gave voice to local experiences, but perpetuated un-
equal power relations between the state and Kurdish locals (see ibid.: 70). However, some
of those who had first-hand experience of excessive state violence decided that the re-
newed threat of forced displacement *did* necessitate resistance, because they knew that
unquestioned surrender would result in humiliation and defeat. In 2010, before evictions
had started, Maher predicted riots in the case that the police would try to forcibly remove
(Kurdish) residents:

If they come to throw people out onto the street, there will be riots. [This place] will burn. Everyone will be on the street, you'll see. They'll come from Taksim, too. [...] This is Tarlabaşı. We fight back. This place will be a warzone. They can't just come here and throw people out. I have been displaced once by this state, I will not let them do it again. I'll fight back.

Maher was sure that Kurdish solidarity would motivate even non-residents to protest the planned evictions, since they, too, would see them as a state-sanctioned injustice. Ann Stoler (1992: 154), in her description of the significance and function of rumours, writes "[a rumour] is a key form of cultural knowledge that [...] shaped what people thought they knew, blurring the boundaries between events 'witnessed' and those envisioned". Maher's prediction of not only opposition, but violent resistance was likewise shaped by his previous experiences. In a way, his forecast was both a way to deal with past trauma, and the threat of yet another violent eviction from his home. He shared this memory of suffering with the vast majority of his Kurdish neighbours, and the resulting, shared knowledge provided a form of "resistance capital" that other social groups did not have access to. I was often told by Kurdish residents that they did not want to allow the Turkish state to commit the same injustice again, that they had been chased from their homes before, and that this time, they would stay put and fight back.

Evictions as an ethnicised, gendered experience of stigmatisation

Evictions were experienced differently by different residents, and one removal did not entirely resemble another, both materially and procedurally. Some people received only written notification, whereas others got additional “warnings” by municipal agents or through an informal network of communication and influence. Even the final intervention – the appearance of the police and municipal officials at a resident’s door – differed from one person to the next, depending on their social identity.

Furthermore, the gendered aspect of the material consequences of stigma for Tar-
labaşı residents became evident once the evictions began. Individual women's experi-
ences varied depending on their social status and identity, but they did share the expe-
rience of eviction as a particular gendered form of (state) violence, and one that was ex-
tremely humiliating. Evictions were the ultimate violation of (female) domestic space.
Intrusive as they were, evictions weaponized the threat of the complete and irreparable
obliteration of a woman's capacity to claim the particularly feminine (Muslim) virtue of
discretion for herself, the maintenance of socially and morally appropriate boundaries
of privacy, and the social protection of the femininity and respectability it entails (Pfeil 2020).

## Esma

The municipal authorities made selective use of excessive force during evictions. In a few cases, they deployed militarised police units, commonly associated with anti-terrorism and drug raids. In June 2011, barely two weeks after the ruling AKP had won a landslide victory in Turkey's general election, the municipality dispatched geared-up riot police armed with teargas and armoured vehicles to Tarlabaşı in order to force a tenant, a Kurdish widow and mother of an eight-year-old boy, to leave her apartment. This first eviction, a seemingly arbitrary example of the disproportionate use of state force, became a cautionary tale that travelled through the neighbourhood like wildfire. It was one story that almost everybody seemed to had at least heard of. I had not witnessed the expulsion but heard about it in the Halil Usta's barber shop that was just across the street from Esma's building on Tree Street. Burhan, a burly real estate agent and Tarlabaşı property owner who was a regular customer in the shop, first told me about it. He knew Esma personally and, since he was aware of my research interest, insisted I talk to her about what had happened. Both he and Halil Usta were outraged that a young widow had been treated this way.

Esma immediately agreed. A Kurdish woman in her 30s who had moved to Tarlabaşı from the province of Ağrı, and was the second, or co-wife [kuma]<fnref n="16" />, of a man who had died in a car accident several years prior. He had been the owner and title deed holder of their shared flat in Tarlabaşı. However, he had never divorced his legally married wife, which meant that she, and not Esma, inherited the apartment after his death. The first wife sold it to the developers in 2010, immediately after property sales negotiations for the renewal project had started. The sale, done without her prior knowledge or consent, had left Esma in a desperate situation. Working as a cleaner in private apartments in nearby Cihangir, she was the sole provider for her elderly mother and her son and was only able to get by because she did not have to pay any rent. Following the sale of her home, the municipality offered Esma a vague ultimatum that allowed her to stay in the apartment rent-free "until the start of the project", without specifying a date. Of course, she knew that she would eventually have to leave, but it was impossible for her to know when exactly that would be. Like most Tarlabaşı residents, she could only rely on the interpretative labour of trying to glean nuggets of information from the scarce, contradic-

<footnote n="16">16 A *kuma* is married only via a religious, and not a civil ceremony. Second wives therefore lack official recognition and legal protection. While polygamy was outlawed in Turkey in 1926 with the adoption of the Civil Code, it is still practiced, especially in rural areas. While not legally recognised, co-marriage is nevertheless a socially accepted bond between a man and a woman in some conservative communities, and men who take more than one wife are expected to provide for them. A *kuma* is not considered to be a mistress and is respected as a legitimate spouse in their community. While polygamy is often associated with the Kurdish population, this assumption is not free of prejudice: the practice exists in other Muslim communities in Turkey, for example in towns that border Syria where the numbers of co-marriages have increased since the outbreak of the war in Syria.</footnote>
tory announcements made by project stakeholders, and the many rumours going around the neighbourhood. She did, just like other residents who had been extended similar arrangements, receive a couple of formal letters reminding her of her pending eviction, but Esma had hoped to push back the date until she had found another home in Beyoğlu where her son went to a good school and where she had established a support network that provided her with employment opportunities, material help, and other forms of assistance.<fnref n="17" /> However, finding an affordable apartment in the area proved to be extremely difficult. Most rentals in the immediate surroundings were out of reach on her budget. With the approach of summer, Esma had doubled down on her search for another place. At the same time, she still had to go to work, had to care for her chronically ill mother and raise her son. Wanting to be prepared she had stocked up on cardboard boxes and arranged for a porter [hamal], so she could move immediately after having found a new place. Nonetheless she had counted on the municipality to grant her at least some leeway since she was a desperate [çaresiz] single woman, a young window, a caregiver to a child and her elderly mother.

One June morning, while at the emergency room with her mother, Esma received a phone call from a municipal official who demanded that she come home immediately. “When I arrived at my house, I was shocked by what I saw”, she said later. “Uniformed riot police, armoured vehicles, lorries, journalists and a growing crowd of people, many of them local residents, were gathered in front of her building. “I could not believe that they had come with all these people, just for me.”

To her horror she found that the police had already broken down her front door, and that ten men, including several officers and a municipality-hired porter were going through her possessions, throwing them onto the floor or out of the window onto the street. They violently dismantled her furniture, including newly bought bedroom furnishings Esma was still paying instalments for at the time. Some of it was damaged in the process. They shattered diverse items of kitchen wares and crockery, and were rummaging through Esma's clothes and undergarments, throwing them out onto the street where a lorry was waiting. One of the policemen in her apartment had, she recalled, screamed at her that she was "committing a crime" for "squatting an apartment", that she was occupying a place that "she did not own" and had been "told to leave" by the authorities. "I was afraid to say anything because I thought that if I did, he might have slapped me." She later recalled that day during a conversation with some of her former female neighbours and me:

> They came to evict me from my house. They broke down the door. They came in like that while we were gone, as if I had an army of one hundred people behind me. Outside [our building] all hell had broken loose. Journalists had come, eviction officials had come, there was riot police. They brought armoured cars, they brought...what...Molotov cocktails or what do you call them? [laughs] Teargas, they came with teargas. I asked them: What is going on? I live all by myself, did you come to wage a war? I told them that I am

<footnote n="17">17 Literature on the migration of Kurdish women to Turkish metropolises underlines the importance of the availability of such networks that not only provided access to employment opportunities, but also alleviated the trauma of isolation and coping in a new, and not seldom hostile, urban environment (see Secor 2004; Çelik 2005).</footnote>
a woman [bayan] who lives by herself. [...] They also took [the clothes] and threw them out of the window. They threw everything on the street. [...] Who does that?

Esma said that she raced up and down the stairs, horrified and overwhelmed by what was happening, trying to retrieve whatever she could, and to prevent the police from throwing more of her private things onto the street.

Nobody talked to me, nobody. I also didn't really pay attention to anyone. I just cried. They were breaking all these things in front of me! I tried to gather what I could. That's why I also couldn't pay attention to anyone, I really wasn't myself. I said yes, I said no, I cried, I was angry, I really did not know what to do. I was stunned about what was happening to me so suddenly.

Following the eviction her apartment door was welded shut, even though some of her things were still inside. Her possessions were taken to a municipal storage facility that charged a rental fee for every week that she did not retrieve them. Esma did not have the means to pay for the release of her things, and she did not have the money to pay someone to pick them up. By the time she told me about the eviction two weeks had passed, but she had not been to the storage yet. In fact, she was not even sure where it was, and said that in any case she did not have an apartment that she could have moved her belongings to.

The unannounced eviction from her house during an emergency hospital visit with her mother had been horrific for her, but Esma underlined several times that the “worst part” had been the public humiliation and the blatant transgression of social decency codes. She still could not believe how nonchalantly these men had violated of her private female space. The arrival of armed riot police and armoured vehicles, typically associated with serious crime and illegalised political activism, had made her feel like “a criminal” and “a terrorist”.

Esma's marriage to her Istanbul husband had been arranged by her family in Ağrı. Though not sanctioned by the state, it had been officiated by an imam. While such religious second marriages are illegal in Turkey, *kuma* have a socially accepted status and moral legitimacy in their communities and the eyes of society.<fnref n="18" /> Esma had shared the apartment with her husband for more than ten years and they had a son together that carried the late husband's last name. The municipality argued that Esma did not have any claim to the apartment since the title deed had been sold by the legally married first wife of her husband, which is – in a purely legal sense – correct. I argue, and will underpin this in a later chapter, that the municipality nevertheless violated a working social contract in pretending that Esma had no claim to legitimacy whatsoever. More importantly, they wilfully ignored the fact that she had filed a court case for inheritance recovery that had not been resolved at the time, since it was a long process during which her

<footnote n="18">18 I do not wish to insinuate that the practice is not highly problematic. Women's rights groups in Turkey have long tried to put an end to religious marriages as it leaves women without any legal recourse and therefore makes them especially vulnerable to abuse. However, it is important to underline that in the conservative rural communities where *kumalik* is practiced, the religious marriage ceremony conducted by an imam carries social and moral significance, while the state-sanctioned, civil one is not necessarily accepted in the same way (see Magnarella 1973:103).</footnote>
husband had to be exhumed twice to conduct DNA tests. The court needed to determine if Esma's eight-year-old son was his child like she claimed, in which case he – and his mother – would have been able to defend a partial claim to the inheritance, and therefore the apartment. Both the sale of the apartment and the eviction were problematic, to say the least, because they happened before the conclusion of the paternity trial, but Esma did not possess the necessary economic and, in the eyes of project stakeholders, social capital to object and claim her rights.

## Cemile

Only two weeks after Esma's eviction, during the fasting month of Ramadan, a small group of plain clothes police officers, accompanied by a young female *GAP Inşaat* lawyer, arrived unannounced at Cemile's door. The police told the bewildered woman that she and her husband, a retired textile worker who was not home at the time, were to vacate their apartment immediately. On that scorching hot day in early July, Cemile was at home looking after her infant grandson who was dozing in a makeshift cradle in the living room. Her daughter's mother-in-law, who lived in another Istanbul neighbourhood, was gravely ill and required constant care, so Cemile babysat for her.

The small group of officials had arrived in two armoured police vehicles that were parked in front of the building and started to draw curious onlookers. With Esma's humiliating eviction still fresh in residents' minds, some were wondering if this was a police raid or indeed another expulsion.

One of the officers at Cemile's door gruffly demanded that she hand over the keys right away, arguing that she was staying in the apartment illegally. He called her a criminal. Since Cemile's husband Ramazan had signed the title deed to their apartment over to the project stakeholders in May 2010, it was true that it did not officially belong to the elderly couple anymore. This had been the topic of worsening fights between Ramazan and Cemile, who was unable to forgive her husband for having agreed to the terrible deal he had been offered by *GAP Inşaat* lawyers. Ramazan the lawyers for having pressured him into it – his pride did not allow for him to accept at least part of the responsibility – but neither he nor Cemile wanted to try and challenge the problematic sales contract in court, fearing that their debts would only increase if they lost.

However, between the moment of the involuntary sale and that hot summer day, Cemile had repeatedly tried to appeal to Fatih Bey, the deputy mayor charged with resident relations, hoping for some, any really, kind of concession. To no avail. Their title deed had only carried her husband's name and he had signed the sales contract, she was told, so there was nothing they could do. At some point the deputy mayor stopped taking her calls altogether. Cemile knew that the chance to try and declare the sale null and void was extremely small. The helplessness she felt she was forced into literally made her sick, and by the summer of 2011, Cemile suffered from high blood pressure, anxiety and severe insomnia. Her marriage began to deteriorate, and Cemile told me that she had seriously considered a divorce.

I always fight with this [my husband]. I tell him: 'How can you sign something without reading it first? How can you do that, without reading it? Just think about that, he
signed [a contract] that stated that we'd leave the house 15 days after the sale! How can something like this be in a contract? 15 days! Apparently, we sold them the house on the 29th of May, and apparently, he promised to leave in June. How is that even possible? In 15 days! [...] At the municipality they ask me: don't you know your husband's [beyinin] signature? He turns the computer around to me and says: 'Look! That's your husband's signature.' I was shocked. [...] I swear, it'll be a miracle if I survive this. I am getting scared that I am losing my mind.

Like Esma, Cemile and Ramazan had received a string of formal letters from the municipality following the sale, including an eviction notice. However, on that fateful day in July, and despite the disproportionately aggressive eviction of her neighbour Esma only two weeks prior, Cemile was aghast at the sudden appearance and disrespectful behaviour of the police.

I saw them arriving from the balcony, I said [to my grandson]: look, the military has come, let's look and see, and then they went into our building! [The officer] said they would take our things. I asked him how he would be able to pack our things and he said he was authorised to do that. I swear, that's what he said. They had never told us that we'd have to leave on a certain day, nobody had told us anything. I opened the door, and I was shocked. He told me to give him the keys. He said I was a squatter. I asked if he could not let us be. He said: absolutely not, take the child and get out. I cried, my blood pressure shot up, I have high blood pressure anyways, I cried a lot.

She explained that she was currently fasting and taking care of her grandchild, so that her daughter was able to look after the sick mother-in-law. The police officer in charge, the one who had demanded her keys, was unimpressed by Cemile's plea to grant her and her family a little more time since they had not even found an alternative apartment yet. He told her in no uncertain terms that she had to leave immediately. The discussion continued, and after the conversation went on like this for a while, the officer agreed to come back ten days later, that time with "more and better equipped police". Cemile believed that it was only because the young female lawyer took pity on her that the group left without evicting them. She was both relieved and aghast. Why would they need to come back with even more police? The image of her poor neighbour trying to retrieve her possessions from the street was still fresh in her mind. Why, she thought, had the officer felt the need to threaten her with even more humiliation?

This announcement set off days of anxious waiting and a race against the clock to find an affordable rental flat elsewhere, since the ultimatum she had been given was by no means binding. What if they came back earlier? In addition to the terrible stress that the unannounced police visit, and the pending eviction were causing, her daughter's ill mother-in-law passed away the next day. Cemile went to stay with her daughter to take care of the funeral and help with household chores. This further delayed the already very strenuous search for a new apartment. (In the end it took another three weeks for the police to come and seal the old apartment, and by then Cemile had found a small apartment nearby.)

But like Esma, Cemile found the humiliation of having been treated like a criminal worse than the actual expulsion. When she later retold the events of that afternoon to her
upstairs neighbours Alev and her sister-in-law, she made clear her indignancy over the municipality sending the police to her door to evict her:

> Why would I squat in my own house? Why are they sending the police, how shameful of them [çok ayıp]! I have been living here for years, how can they send the police to my door? As if I'm some drug user, as if I have killed a man! That's what I am sad about. That they sent the police to my door. They should have come to tell me that I have to leave. I would leave [if they came to tell me]. But how can you send four, five policemen to our door? They came with armed vehicles...armed vehicles [panzer]! I cannot get over it. I should have told that girl lawyer: please don't come with the police. As if I have done something bad, I really resent this. We have never even seen the police station from the inside, never! We never had trouble with the police, in all my years in Istanbul.

Since militarised police raids were predominantly associated with organised crime and outlawed political activity, they were associated with Kurdishness in the dominant discourse and shared consciousness. Cemile's social positionality did not match the Tarlabaşı imaginary as closely as Esma's did – she was an ethnic Turk, a pious elderly woman married to a Turkish man who had been the legal owner of the apartment they occupied – and she felt the need to deflect the stigma attached to the neighbourhood when talking to the police, and when talking to others about the day that the police came to her house. She underlined that she rigorously observed the Ramadan fast even under the strain of a significant workload and the stress of looming displacement. She positioned herself as a caregiver who had a married daughter, who in turn also observed the labour of caring (vis-à-vis her mother-in-law) that was expected of her, which could be read as proof that Cemile had raised her “right”. While the title deed was no longer theirs at the time of the evictions, Cemile did stress that the house *was* hers, that she had thus never been a “squatter” like the “illegal residents” that, in the Tarlabaşı imaginary, dominated the neighbourhood and who had never actually held the title deed to their homes. I will further expand on residents’ tactics to deflect the stigma in more detail in a later chapter of this book.

Both women, Esma and Cemile, shared a similar experience before the eviction from Tarlabaşı. Both had their apartments – their domestic space and their (gendered) private domain – sold without their consent. Both were largely ignored by project stakeholders when they tried to appeal the sale, or when they tried to renegotiate the terms of their eviction. And finally, both women decided to ignore the growing threat of forceful removal from their apartments, disregarding formal letters and eviction notices sent to their home. However, when faced with the arrival of the police at their door, the experiences of both women were materially very different. Cemile, whose husband had in fact signed over the title deed to the municipality and who had been promised an, albeit meagre, amount of rental aid for her and her husband's interim apartment, was not evicted on the day that the *GAP Inşaat* lawyer and her small delegation of municipal officials and police officers came to claim her keys. While Cemile's experience of that day was invasive and extremely unpleasant, the group left and gave her ten more days to pack up her things and leave. Esma, on the other hand, at the time a young widow who was looking after her son and her ailing mother and who was still involved in a court case regarding her son's inheritance and therefore the ownership of the apartment, experienced the ex-
tremely violent destruction not only of her home, but of her privacy. What happened to Cemile was different in part because her social identity could not easily be lined up with any of the everyday iconic profiles connected to the Tarlabaşı stigma. Cemile knew this. The way that she particularly argued against her own stigmatisation as a squatter and a criminal cannot be separated from the fact that she imagined herself as incongruent with any of the problem profiles. A few days after the aborted eviction, she told me that it “made no sense” that militarised policemen had been sent to her apartment, because she did not, like her (Kurdish) neighbours, have a “small army of children and grandchildren” behind her that would “surely cause trouble” if the municipality tried to evict them.

Cemile knew how other Tarlabaşı residents had been treated, and she had closely witnessed Esma's eviction. However, as can be seen in the fact that she “wanted to go look” when the armoured vehicles arrived, she had never expected that she would receive a similarly violent treatment. Esma, on the other hand, was easier to line up with the problem profiles of Tarlabaşı, which meant that she was easier to victimise. Her categorisation as “bad” was underwritten by anti-Kurdish prejudice and discrimination. Mesut Yeğen (1996: 218–219) writes that the Turkish state, in their exclusion of Kurdish identity from Turkishness, has equated Kurdishness with tribal politics, Islamism, banditry, backwardness, and everything that the modernist, secular nation state was supposed to have overcome as negative characteristics of a pre-modern past. Despite the fact that the negative stereotype of the “uncivilised” rural migrant as an everyday iconic profile had begun to pivot under the AKP, who claimed for themselves to represent these formerly vilified citizens, Kurds remained excluded from that shift. *Kumalık*, commonly associated with Kurdishness in the dominant Turkish discourse, could therefore be dismissed as illegitimate by all project stakeholders as well as by the police officers involved in Esma’s eviction, even if all parties were aware of the violation of expected decency codes. Esma experienced the culmination of Tarlabaşı stigma, located at the intersection of (Kurdish) ethnicity, gender, and class position, as a violent, humiliating disregard for her capacity for discretion (Pfeil 2020).

While the practice of violent police evictions is not new in Turkey and has, due to the neoliberal turn in urban policies under the AKP government, increased in recent years, it is important to add the factor of territorial stigmatisation as an analytical tool to understand the mechanisms and structures that informed such disproportionate use of state force. Territorial stigma intersects with and deepens prolonged discriminatory practices against marginal groups, and the place stigma of Tarlabaşı is deeply intertwined with the people stigma that surrounds these groups. It follows that the terrain of territorial stigma was uneven and unequal, as were the consequences of the stigma for different people, depending on how their social identities lined up with the everyday iconic profiles. What resonates for different people in what they are seeing happen in Tarlabaşı in terms of them being stigmatised and the actual, material discrimination that they experience in the run-up to evictions, the intimidation and the legal disingenuity, resonates with earlier (collective) experiences. Kurds recognised the threat of displacement in Tarlabaşı as something they had seen and experienced before. Trans* residents felt that what happened in Tarlabaşı resonated with the experience of being run out of other neighbourhoods. These interpretations influenced imaginations of possible reactions or resistance. The state actions in Tarlabaşı, framed by and intrinsically linked to territorial
stigmatisation, have a “canny familiarity” to them. For others, whose social identity did not line up with the ordinary iconic profiles, such as Halil Usta or Cemile, the discrimination and disrespect they faced did come as a surprise and a shock.
<figure><img src="image_18.png" /></figure>
Chapter five: Belonging

One of my favourite anecdotes that described the convivial – and, as I later found out, somewhat starry-eyed – sense of community in Tarlabaşı I wished to convey to outsiders was one told by cobbler Zeki Usta. The story began with a stranger that entered Bird Street on an unspecified late afternoon while a number of children were playing outside. The stranger – in different versions of the anecdote he was “a normal-looking middle-aged man” or “a suspicious-looking middle-aged man” – then tried to lead one of the children away, and when the child resisted, one of the trans* sex workers approached him to ask who he was. The man, pretending to be the child’s relative, tried to walk away with the crying child, but the trans* woman – whose identity was never revealed in the cobbler’s tale – insisted on knowing his credentials, and said that since she had never before seen him in their street, he could hardly be a close enough relative to walk away with the child. A mild commotion ensued. More trans* sex workers gathered around the man who started to get afraid and left, leaving the child in the care of the women. “See”, Zeki Usta would say, “We are a tight community here. These transvestites [travestiler]<fnref n="1" /> saved that child. We keep an eye out for each other.” I never found out if the story was actually true, but it illustrated a narrative I often heard in Tarlabaşı, by residents and non-resident critics of the planned demolitions: the neighbourhood, despite the “colourful” and very diverse mix of people, had been able to preserve what many Istanbul neighbourhoods had already lost – a sense of community.

By the time the master shoemaker, the last artisan on his street, shared this story with me, he had known me for several months; we had sat in his shop a couple of times, and I had interviewed him about his history as a craftsman in Tarlabaşı, his family business, and his ongoing court case challenging the pending threat of compulsory purchase. He knew that I, too, lived in Tarlabaşı and that I shared his appreciation of the familiarity and the sense of belonging in the neighbourhood. We both agreed that Tarlabaşı was being vilified unjustly, and he told me the story as a call to solidarity, as an example of something meaningful about the neighbourhood that he could trust me to grasp. This was also the anecdote that Zeki Usta told several people I visited Tarlabaşı with, other

<footnote n="1">1 Just like the trans* women themselves, most residents referred to trans* persons as transvestites [travestiler].</footnote>
journalists, activists, researchers, friends and family. He would detail it in a joking manner to family and friends because he assumed that I had already brought them onto “our” side. However, he delivered the same anecdote with seriousness and didactic intent to journalists and researchers, relative newcomers in need of convincing—all the more urgent, as it was understood that they might be able to influence the course of the project. While his demeanour and tone changed depending on who he was talking to, he always told this story with the same goal in mind: wanting to prove what a close-knitted community his neighbourhood was in order to convince his interlocutors that Tarlabaşı was worth saving. The story Zeki Usta chose to tell outsiders is even more remarkable because he had witnessed, and presumably been a part of, the violent conflict with the trans* sex workers soliciting in his street that Müge had told me about. The local (informal) trans* brothel, and the teahouse next to it, used to share one entrance, which meant that customers of both businesses had to use the same door. Not surprisingly this became the source for neighbourhood conflict, but at no point did any of the angered parties think to involve the police. Instead, they decided to handle the conflict themselves. Müge was clear in that she believed the interactions between the local men and the trans* sex workers were largely based on fear and informed by hypocrisy, and Müge often derided Hakan and many of his regular (male) customers as “uptight AKP voters” and supporters of their conservative (and discriminatory) policies. However, and despite this, Müge also insisted to me and others how well she got along with Hakan, the local shop owners and the neighbours in her street, because theirs was a tight knit *mahalle* community—the same prized attribute of the neighbourhood Zeki drew attention to with his anecdote.

Zeki Usta was not necessarily very sympathetic towards the trans* community in Tarlabaşı. On a good day he was trans*obnoxious, and like Hakan and other non-trans* residents he routinely referred to his trans* neighbours in transphobic slurs. He believed that their presence and the visible sex work economy were part of the reason that Tarlabaşı suffered a bad reputation. And yet he thought that the anecdote of the trans* women saving the child was the best one to illustrate why Tarlabaşı was not only a neighbourhood worth saving, but also pleasant to live in. This begs the question why it was this story that he retold over and over, when surely there were many others that he, a Tarlabaşı artisan of almost forty years, could have chosen. And Zeki Usta insisted on it whenever I brought around someone new. He would invariably ask me: “Have you told your guests already about that time when the transvestites [*travestiler*] saved the child?” An uninformed outsider might not consider this anecdote to be a virtuous story about Tarlabaşı, a narrative that presented the neighbourhood as a place where a child might get kidnapped off the street, and where trans* women sex workers chased the prospective kidnapper off. It is interesting to dwell on the fact that Zeki Usta, himself not a trans* friendly person, chose and crafted this story into the perfect dramatic explanation of why Tarlabaşı was great, and what, in his eyes, it said about the vilified neighbourhood. A lot of understanding of what is considered a social virtue in a *mahalle* goes into why this is such a touching story that paints Tarlabaşı in a very different light than the mass of stigmatising narratives put forth by the media, the municipality, and the private developer *GAP İnşaat*. His anecdote wanted to prove that Tarlabaşı was a real *mahalle*. Other than any of the anonymous residential blocks and gated communities [*site*] that shot up all over the city, the Tarlabaşı he
described had maintained the familiarity, solidarity, and sense of belonging that fed so much nostalgia in the rapidly changing city.

In this chapter I discuss how anecdotes like the one put forth by Zeki Usta were part of a tactic to refute territorial stigmatisation by centring the neighbourhood around the narrative of it being a traditional *mahalle*, and therefore a place that had social virtue, and was not, like the dominant discourse alleged, a virtueless place.

When I first met Tarlabasi Association spokesperson Erdal Aybek, his first argument against the demolitions was the existence of strong social ties, diversity, and a deep sense of community in the neighbourhood.

This is a very cosmopolitan place. There are Kurds, Turks, Armenians, Greeks, Arabs, Roma, African refugees, Muslims, Christians, Jews, Assyrians, people without a religion, transvestites, homosexuals. [...] If you look at the mosaic of religions in the project area, it is a real laboratory. [...] We all live here, tolerate each other. We are not at each other's throats. When [Beyoğlu mayor Ahmet] Misbah [Demircan] called us for the first project meeting in 2008 he tried to convince us to agree to it by saying: 'I will rescue you from the transvestites, they have taken over Tarlabaşı.' But we are content to live side by side. If the transvestites who live here will be sent to Fatih, or to Bağcılar, they will have many problems there.

At our first meeting, Erdal had made a point of taking me to Hakan's teahouse, located just around the corner from the association's office on Tarlabaşı Boulevard. It was part of the “tour” that he gave anyone interested to find out about the association's struggle to save Tarlabaşı, and most activists invested in stopping the urban renewal project picked up on his argument that the strong neighbourhood ties were an important reason that Tarlabaşı was not the hopeless case that the municipality pretended it to be. This claim is prone to sentimentalism and romanticisation, as is the idea of the *mahalle* as a space of unspoiled tradition. Sympathetic newspaper articles and media reports underlined the warmheartedness, the tolerance and the hospitality they believed to find in the neighbourhood, not seldomly to the point of well-meaning caricature.

Neighbourly relations in Tarlabaşı were certainly a lot more complicated than this, and the friendly co-existence of inter-ethnic and inter-religious groups, as well as of trans* and non-trans* residents was based on fragile ties of mutual need, constant re-negotiation, and sometimes, as the example of the trans* brothel next to the teahouse has shown, on a truce following a violent conflict. Stigmatised groups also frequently blamed each other for the bad reputation of the neighbourhood. However, while the picture of Tarlabaşı as a rare haven of tolerance, void of prejudice and bigotry, was a wishful effort to paint the endangered neighbourhood in a good light, it is true that conflicts between different communities almost never escalated, and that most residents described neighbourly ties as good. Bahar Sakızlıoğlu and Justus Uitermark (2014: 1373) describe “a ‘live and let live’ mentality and quotidian form of tolerance” that characterised the neighbourhood prior to evictions and allowed for marginalized groups to live in relative safety.
<figure><img src="image_19.png" /><figcaption>"All our neighbours are invited", neighbourhood wedding celebration</figcaption></figure>

Photo by Jonathan Lewis

In the face of the constant vilification and the municipality's claim that Tarlabaşı was nothing more than a loose assemblage of relegated people and ruined buildings, void of any sense of community, the romanticised dismissal of everyday conflict and discrimination was just as much a form of stigma management as Zeki Usta's anecdote had been. Such narratives aimed to demonstrate that Tarlabaşı, presented as dangerously "different" in the dominant discourse, was in fact a positive example of cultural, ethnic and gender heterogeneity, "juxtaposed with the homogenising effect of the stigma" (Garbin and Millington 2012: 2075).

What is even more important than residents and activists glossing over the negative aspects of living with marginalised communities in Tarlabaşı, and what I would like to focus on here, is how residents expressed what they valued in the place where they lived. For this analysis it is irrelevant if the anecdotes and descriptions that people shared were factually true. It also does not matter if Zeki Usta had participated in the door blockade and the attempt to remove the trans* brothel years ago, or if the relationship with his trans* sex worker neighbours was sometimes strenuous, conflicted or even hypocritical. Erdal Aybek did sometimes express bigoted views about black Tarlabaşı residents, while at the same time lauding their presence as "proof" that the diversity in Tarlabaşı "worked". No social environment is without discord, without pain and struggle, but the way that people talk about their social situation can be analysed independently of that. When Zeki Usta told the story of the child snatcher and the trans* women who successfully interfered, he meant to impress on outsiders the strength of neighbourliness, of solidarity ties, and of the virtuousness of his neighbourhood. Tarlabaşı residents, in full acknowledgement of all the problems that did exist, tried to prove that their neighbourhood met the requirements for being a real *mahalle*, even if this happened in sometimes unconventional ways.
<figure><img src="image_20.png" /><figcaption>After the Easter service at the Syriac Orthodox church</figcaption></figure>

Photo by Jonathan Lewis

Therefore, it is necessary to recognise that the way people talked about their stigmatised neighbourhood and which anecdotes they chose to convey – in full knowledge of what Tarlabaşı was – were “social facts” (Durkheim 1965), and therefore data in itself. Conversations about what they liked about their neighbourhood did not happen in a vacuum, but against the backdrop of looming evictions and the prospective destruction not only of people’s physical homes, but also of their solidarity networks and their community, their *mahalle*. These narratives therefore focussed on reasons why the neighbourhood did not deserve to be destroyed. They challenged the municipality’s argument that the planned demolitions aimed to improve Tarlabaşı and were done for the good of its inhabitants. Wacquant (2007: 69) alleges that territorial stigmatisation leads to “a dissolution of ‘place’, that is, the loss of a humanized, culturally familiar and socially filtered locale with which marginalized urban populations identify and in which they feel ‘at home’ and in relative security.” Neighbourhoods that carry a spatial taint are no longer such places, but “spaces” void of community and intra-local solidarities that residents detest and seek to leave as soon as they are able (ibid.: 70). This is too rigid a statement for Tarlabaşı, where residents’ relationship with their neighbourhood was not only more layered and complicated, but also more positive than that.

In this chapter I propose the notion that the traditional *mahalle* as a social concept is a social virtue attached to place, and that the point of Tarlabaşı being a real *mahalle* was being used by residents to argue against the stigma of Tarlabaşı as a virtueless neighbourhood. This was not merely a point of argument. The collectivity, the solidarity, and the mutual exchanges that people described and experienced were deeply virtuous social structures that are characteristic of the idea of a *mahalle* in Turkey. The recurring discourse of talking about Tarlabaşı as a *mahalle* weaved the neighbourhood into a larger narrative about Turkish modern urban life and Istanbul, and it positioned Tarlabaşı on
the virtuous side of that story. It staked a claim that Tarlabaşı, despite the intense stigma attached to it, was a place that one could feel and express belonging to.

First, I describe what a traditional *mahalle* signifies in the Turkish context, and why a *mahalle* is considered a socially virtuous place. I will then proceed to detail the basic accommodations of a social contract that those who are members of a *mahalle* have access to. Furthermore, I detail how the *mahalle* was both considered an ideal/alised place, and how *mahalle* networks foster a feeling of belonging in the city, for which I would like to introduce the term of “*mahallelik*” – *mahalle*-ness. And finally, I describe why the *mahalle* and its support networks were important for Tarlabaşı residents, and how the risk of displacement threatened these networks of socio-economic interdependence. In order to better illustrate this, I have chosen five nodes of these networks and will detail how they were connected to each other and their surroundings, in short, what *mahallelik* looked like “on the ground”.

## The mahalle

Often translated simply as “neighbourhood” and defined as the smallest administrative urban unit in the English language literature, the *mahalle* is much more than a spatial marker in the Turkish city. It is difficult to assign a *mahalle* to a single social category. In everyday discourse it is thought of as a space of familiarity, social closeness, and collective identity, but also as a moral territory of mutual control and oppression. As modus vivendi the traditional *mahalle* involves certain expectations and demands for those who live there, just as it offers close-knit social ties and support networks. In opposition to the *mahalle* as a geographical and administrative unit, the *mahalle* as a social concept does not have a clear physical shape or size. Instead, its boundaries are set by the everyday practices and itineraries of people and commerce.

Cem Behar (2003), in his examination of a traditional neighbourhood in 18th- and 19th-century Istanbul, argues that the Ottoman *mahalle* prescribed a close-knit hyper-local network of social relationships before it started to be used to outline an urban administrative unit, and that the sense of a shared *mahalle* identity was largely based on the upholding of morality and functioned as a collective defence mechanism. Similarly, Işik Tamdoğan-Abel (2000) argues that the everyday practices that create the collectivity of a contemporary *mahalle* are rooted in their historic socio-political organisation. Ottoman tax and criminal law operated on the basis of a *mahalle* being a legal person, which meant that if one member of the *mahalle* violated these laws, the entire *mahalle* was held responsible by the authorities. This legal framework facilitated and relied on the mutual surveillance and control of fellow residents’ behaviour which strengthened the sense of a collective identity and explained the preoccupation with the collective reputation that is reflected in the cultural practices in a present-day *mahalle*. It also cemented the collective interest in settling intra-*mahalle* conflicts without involvement of the police or the authorities – similar to what Müge described in trans* sex workers’ handling of the obstruction of their brothel – since this meant avoiding being collectively held responsible by outside institutions that might inflict material consequences on *mahalle* residents. While Behar claims that the traditional urban *mahalle* as a social category has all but van-
ished from the urban fabric of neoliberal Turkish cities, others argue that it remains rel-
evant in today's everyday life and discourse as a "contested system of order" (Woźniak
2018: 80) and as a "cultural space of closeness and belonging" (Mills 2007: 339).

In her discussion of the Istanbul neighbourhood Kuzguncuk, Amy Mills (2007: 341) writes that it is the concept of “knowing” [tanımak] that defines a *mahalle*: “everyone ‘knows’ each other, or is ‘known’ in the neighborhood”. Mills observes that these “bonds of ‘knowing’” are produced through “neighbouring [*komşuluk*]”, the (gendered) practice of frequent and reciprocal neighbourly visits, mostly amongst women, that link the inside of homes to the residential street, turning it into “an extension of private family life” (ibid.: 339). The idea of a neighbourhood embodied by the Turkish *mahalle* turns neighbours into extended family, “a ‘we’ particular to Turkish culture” (ibid.). The idea of the traditional *mahalle* feeds a “rich ‘semiotic pool’. Innocence, unspoiledness, purity, warmth, intimacy, unbrokenness…all of these qualities are in this pool” ibid.: 339). The (imagined) ideal *mahalle* is a place of longing, of profound nostalgia and romanticisation, which is why “authentic” traditional neighbourhoods such as Kuzguncuk or Fener-Balat have become a popular backdrop in Turkish popular culture, and a primary location for rapid gentrification.

<figure><img src="image_21.png" /><figcaption>Neighbourhood cooperation</figcaption></figure>

Photo by Jonathan Lewis

More generally, the familiarity of a *mahalle* is to a large part cultivated through “mi-
cro-publics” (Valentine 2008: 330–331) that residents incorporate into their daily routines
and that include the frequentation of available social spaces, for example the barber shop,
the teahouse, or the corner shop [*bakkal*], as well as neighbourhood socialisation on the
street, at the weekly market, and festivities such as weddings. Regularly patronising the
same local shops is also an important part of developing social bonds and trust in a ma-
halle. As a regular customer [müdavim], be it in a shop, a restaurant, an artisan workshop, or any other business, one will be treated courteously and with friendly familiarity and can be sure to get the choicest offers and best prices.<fnref n="2" /> These loyalty ties are mutually beneficial, as it guarantees income for the business owner, and the – often crucial – possibility to buy items on credit for the customer.<fnref n="3" />

The image of vibrant collectivity is mirrored in traditional and contemporary Turkish forms of cultural expression. For example, in the traditional *Karagöz* shadow puppet theatre, the *mahalle* is represented by a single group of neighbours fixed under one umbrella (Mills 2007: 339). This character was used to show that, when rumours, gossip or news travelled through the community, it became known to the *mahalle* as a whole. In the TV show *Perihan Abla*, the first of the popular genre of “*mahalle dizileri*” (*mahalle* TV series) that began broadcasting in 1986, the problem of an individual resident is resolved by the collective effort of the entire *mahalle*. Solutions are proposed by the community, and plans devised and discussed in the street under the inclusion of all the neighbours (ibid.: 339–340).

For many Tarlabaşı residents, the sense of belonging to their *mahalle* meant being known and recognised in their community, being respected and greeted on the street [*merhabalaşmak*]. It was a place of real emotional value. Alev, who moved to Tarlabaşı in her early teens, described her experience of the neighbourhood in almost romantic terms:

> What is there not to love? Every street, every corner...I don't know. Not because it is in the heart of [the city], but because I grew up here, I spent my childhood here, I was able to have a childhood here. What I love most is that I have a friend at every corner, how we greet each other in the street, the warmheartedness...even if there are some rascals. [laughs] If you greet somebody, you'll get a warm greeting back. No matter how much Tarlabaşı is being vilified, Tarlabaşı is beautiful. [...] And neighbourly relations are very good here. We all depend on each other. There is support...people are kind, you never feel like a stranger. Neighbours here are great neighbours! Tarlabaşı is beautiful, it just is.

Residents of all groups often spoke about the different ways in which they were connected to their neighbourhood. They described the length of time that they had lived in Tarlabaşı and the depth of detailed knowledge that they held about the area, its residents,

<footnote n="2">2 Once a customer is considered a *müdavim*, loyalty to the business in question is expected by the business owner, even if this might occasionally be to the customer's disadvantage. At the weekly vegetable market, I regularly had to forego better produce from a stand if the same items were sold at the tables where I was considered a regular. Similarly, getting "caught" by one's *bakkal* with a shopping bag filled with another shop's wares was, at the very least, awkward.</footnote>

<footnote n="3">3 In corner shops [*bakkal*], especially in low-income neighbourhoods, the possibility to buy essential everyday items and food on credit are the only possibility for residents with a low and often irregular income to secure their subsistence. It is common that the items bought are written down and paid at the end of the month, or whenever money comes in. It is not unusual that the *bakkal* does not know every customer's name, and credit sheets will sometimes be marked with qualifiers such as "woman from red house at the corner". The important thing is that there is a trust relationship between the *bakkal* and customers that has developed over time.</footnote>
and its recent history. Many said that their social and professional life was firmly embed-
ded within the neighbourhood and its immediate environs.

Without any parks or playgrounds in Tarlabaşı, residents socialised in the street.<fnref n="4" /> During the warmer months, women congregated on the outside stairs of their buildings and the stoop to drink tea, snack, and chat. They tended to (and shared) their chores as well: preparing food, doing needlework, soaping down and cleaning rugs, or washing and drying sheeps' wool used for the filling of bedding and pillows. Local business owners left doors open, and sometimes put chairs in front of their shops to engage with neighbours and passers-by. Some, like the second-hand furniture sellers on Tree Street, moved part of their wares onto the street to display them, turning couches and chairs on sale into impromptu outdoor seating. Men extended their social interactions to the men-only barbershop as well as to local teahouses. Trans* women frequented an otherwise all-male teahouse. These everyday interactions and micro-publics strengthened familiarity bonds and trust networks in Tarlabaşı, creating the *mahalle* that Alev praised.

It bears mentioning that the constant monitoring of *mahalle* spaces by its members is also an oppressive tool of social control. Turkish sociologist Şerif Mardin coined the term *mahalle baskısı* [neighbourhood or community pressure] to describe the intra-community policing of collective (religious) morals and conservative values in a *mahalle* (Çetin 2010). Non-conformance to *mahalle* norms and expectations can lead to shunning, sham-ing, or (verbal) reprimands (Çakır and Bozan 2009: 155). This equally important charac-teristic of a *mahalle* such as Tarlabaşı, as a space of mutual control, further defies Wac-quant's claim that residents of a stigmatised neighbourhood commonly distance them-selves from it.

A social contract

Following the birth of his two children in the mid-1980s, barber Halil Usta bought an apartment in a middle class *site* in a suburb on the Asian side of the city, because he did not want to raise a family in a “bad neighbourhood”. However, he kept renting the bar-ber shop he ran in Tarlabaşı, where he had lived for more than ten years and worked for over four decades. When we met, Halil Usta spent almost every day of every week in the neighbourhood, even Sundays and most official holidays, when the shop was (supposed to be) closed. He explained that he “did not feel at home” in his residential neighbourhood where he had by then lived for many years.

No matter what problems I have for [working] in this place, I miss it a lot. When I
have been away for ten days it feels like I have been away for a whole year. I moved
to Bostancı in '86, but I don't know anyone in my building [there]. I don't know any-
one where I live. That's how it is. You leave in the morning, and you come back in the
evening. You use it like a hotel. The neighbours...we see each other on the stairs. In the
mornings, we say 'good morning', in the evenings, we say 'good evening'. That's it. I don't

<footnote n="4">4 With the exception of Tree Street, most smaller streets in Tarlabaşı did not have any transit traffic and were mostly car-free.</footnote>
know who lives on which floor, and who they are. I am [in Tarlabaşı] all day. The fam-
ily lives [in Bostancı], and business is here. [In Tarlabaşı], people greet everyone they
meet, they pass the barber shop and say hello. People meet each other all the time and
are together. [...] In five years I have maybe talked to the muhtar [in Bostancı] five times.
I know the muhtar [in Tarlabaşı] much better. My family asks me why I go to [Tarlabaşı]
even on Sundays. I tell them: 'What am I supposed to do [in Bostancı]? Who do I know
here? It's only one hour [when I take the ferry], I come here, there are people here that
I have known for years. This is such a lively place. It's an amazing place.

The intimacy of *mahalle* life that Halil *Usta* experienced in Tarlabaşı is a social ideal that is anchored to place. As an intransitive virtue it cannot be moved from the neighbourhood it is connected to, even if one is part of that *mahalle*, which is why Halil *Usta* spent as much time in Tarlabaşı as he did. The modernity of the *site* that he talked about provided respectability and status, but it lacked the close social ties and the familiarity associated with a *mahalle*. Of course, he attached positive attributes to his residential complex in Bostancı – he described it as “very clean” [*tertemiz*], “safe” [*güvenli*] and “modern” [*modern*]. However, none of these attributes are considered to be the social virtues that characterise an (idealised, imagined) *mahalle*, such as warmth, hospitality, generosity, charity, or solidarity.

Murat, a Kurdish man who owned a small apartment building and a textile work-
shop in Tarlabaşı, expressed similar ambiguity about his *site* as Halil *Usta* had. Murat
and his family had moved to the suburb of Başakşehir where they lived in a “clean and
modern” apartment in one of the newly built tower blocks that were praised by the gov-
ernment as the future of urbanism in Turkey. He was proud of having, literally and fig-
uratively, “moved up”. However, he also said that the population density of large resi-
dential complexes, paired with the anonymity of these blocks, brought with it problems
that he had never encountered in Tarlabaşı, where the familiarity between neighbours
facilitated communication, and therefore could make it easier to sort out conflict and
misunderstandings.

When so many people live in such a small space, it's not always easy. One guy turns the radio up all the way, another turns the sound on the TV really high. In the evening when you come home from work, you're tired, but it's very loud in your flat, I can't stand that. It's more crowded, you get edgy. You want to take the elevator, but someone left the elevator door open again, you wait for the elevator for hours. I mean, there are many problems. [...] People [in Tarlabaşı] are much closer to each other, they talk to each other if there are problems, but there you just don't.

As I have mentioned, the social virtuousness of a *mahalle* can be stifling and oppressive,
and the social control exerted to maintain it has been investigated by scholars research-
ing the *mahalle* (Tamdoğan-Abel 2002; Behar 2003; Mills 2007; Woźniak 2018). However,
and maybe as the other side of the same coin, the familiarity ties of a traditional neigh-
bourhood such as Tarlabaşı also offer access to basic accommodations of a social contract
for those who are part of it.
<figure><img src="image_22.png" /><figcaption>Drying sheeps' wool for bedding</figcaption></figure>

Photo by Jonathan Lewis.

The social contract I am referring to here does not concern the legitimacy of the au-
thority of the state over the individual described in political philosophy, but the basic abil-
ity to accrue social capital for the social participation in a community. This social capital
includes access to material support, like food, clothes, or even money, as well as the ability
to receive credit at local businesses, such as the *bakkal*. It also includes close neighbourly
relations, protection, cooperation, and, in the form of *torpil* [influence], access to work.<fnref n="5" />
All these things are supplied by the community itself, not by institutions or outside agen-
cies. Just as the neighbourhood familiarity and intimacy that Halil Usta praised, these
accommodations of a social contract were anchored to the neighbourhood, intransitive,
and could not be earned in Tarlabaşı and then taken away to a new place. Residents who
had moved away from Tarlabaşı to a different neighbourhood described how they were
unable to do certain things that the social capital accrued in their old neighbourhood had
made possible and that they used to do in their old homes, for example display their Kur-
dish identity, do sex work, or clean and dry sheeps' wool on the street. Like Murat had,
they said that the lack of a *mahalle* social network made the communication and conflict
resolution with neighbours who might object to these activities and displays, more diffi-
cult. Even without the need to resolve neighbourhood discord or disagreements, people
who had moved away said that they simply missed the easy contact and the everyday con-
versations with neighbours they had considered family. Other scholars who conducted
research in Tarlabaşı made note of the common complaint that the evictions destroyed a
certain personal "order" [düzen], built up over years of living in a neighbourhood (Ünsal
2013; Sakızlıoğlu 2014a).

<footnote n="5">5 "Torpil" might best be described as a (masculine) form of social capital. It includes the ability to secure advantages via "influence", often in the form of employment. It has negative connotations as nepotism.</footnote>
Outside of Tarlabaşı, these forms of social capital were not only lost to many people but could not be accrued again at all. The ability to amass social capital for the social participation in a community is the one thing that marginalised people are denied. These accommodations of a social contract gave marginalised communities in Tarlabaşı access they would not, and did not, have anywhere else.

## The *mahalle* as urban ideal/ism

When talking about positive aspects of Tarlabaşı to outsiders, many residents underlined the solidarity networks that provided various forms of support. I was often told that people would readily help each other out, that the doors were always open for neighbours and those in need. Cemile said:

> Whatever I have, I eat with my neighbours. If there is nothing, there is nothing for either of us. Isn't that right? [...] Our neighbours upstairs are not so well off. I give them a few things and tell the children to sell them so that their mother can cook some chicken. The children are happy about that. [...] I cried a lot when [my downstairs] neighbour died. I was screaming at the top of my lungs in the hospital in Okmeydanı, they were wondering if I was his sister. They told them that no, I was a neighbour, I cried even more than the sister, that's how sad I was. That was Esma's husband. He was such a good person, whenever he made some food, he shouted: Cemile Abla, come join us for eating, otherwise I will shout even louder! He shouted this from downstairs. I told him: Stop, everyone is going to hear you, it's three in the morning! He said he would keep shouting if I didn't come down to eat with them. At three in the morning, I would eat with them. He was like a son, that one.

Again, it is important to underline that these descriptions were very rosy, and that they glossed over existing rifts and conflicts between residents and different communities. In a neighbourhood like Tarlabaşı, where many people lived under precarious circumstances and in poverty, resources were sometimes too scarce to share. There were many residents, especially women who raised children in the neighbourhood, expressed their dislike of the dirt, the crime, and the dilapidation, and said that they would leave if they could. Discrimination, especially of the trans* community, existed.

However, I did witness many instances of neighbourly solidarity and charity, big and small. One case even made it into a national newspaper, the left leaning daily *Radikal* (Ince 2011b). Jirayr Zincirci, who was known as Jirayr Amca in Tree Street, was a 65-year-old Armenian man who had fallen on hard times. He shared a single ramshackle room with several cats, on the ground floor of the building where Alev and Cemile also lived. Otherwise without any means of his own, he could rely on his neighbours for support. Several of them, including all the women in his building and the barbers Halil and Necmi across the street, brought him food. He got free shaves and haircuts at their shop, and neighbours would give him leftovers to give to his cats. Alev said that he sometimes turned up at her door to ask for a cigarette, and that she gave him tea, or a little bit of money if she could spare any. By the time that evictions started, he had lived there for forty years. He had been a concierge in the building, and the previous owner had left the room to him,
unfortunately without giving him a title deed for it. That meant that he risked home-
lessness and losing the support network of his *mahalle* because of the Tarlabaşı renewal
project. However, because of the newspaper article in *Radikal*, the subsequent pressure
on authorities in social media, and the tireless engagement of Necmi Usta, the Beyoğlu
Municipality offered Jirayr Amca a small apartment in the new development, and free
temporary housing nearby until the planned apartments were finished. Elif Ince (2011c),
the journalist who had initially reported on his case, wrote that Jirayr Amca was more
worried about having to leave his *mahalle* and everyone he knew there than about his
housing situation. His life, and that of his cats, depended on the trust and solidarity net-
works he had built there over many decades. Necmi Usta, who often spoke to me about
Jirayr Amca, later told me that he refused to leave his room for many months, fearing that
his cats that he was not allowed to take to his temporary apartment, would die without
him.

The traces of the strong social network in the neighbourhood coloured many of the residents' anecdotes about Tarlabaşı. Second-hand furniture seller Maher told me the story of one of his Greek neighbours, an elderly woman who had passed away in her home:

She would always go out to buy bread at the corner shop [bakkal]. Or lower a basket to ask someone on the street to do it for her. But when she wasn't seen for a day, everybody started to get worried. Everyone asked: 'Have you seen the [Greek lady]?' We went to her house, she didn't answer, so we broke down the door. We were worried! You know, we always hear how in other countries old people die alone and how nobody finds them for days, or even weeks! That would never happen here. Muslim, non-Muslim, Christian, it doesn't matter, we look after each other.

Such narratives of Tarlabaşı as a space of unquestioned tolerance and mutual acceptance
were another aspect of how residents imagined their neighbourhood as an idealised ma-
halle, one where inter-ethnic and inter-religious conflict did not exist. Research in the
neighbourhood of Kuzguncuk has shown that such descriptions serve to "obscure a con-
tentious and traumatic minority history" (Mills 2006: 368). Romanticised narratives such
as the one Maher told me did erase the violence that historically marginalised commu-
nities suffered in Turkey. However, in the context of Tarlabaşı and the looming evictions,
this idealised frame of multi-ethnic tolerance can also be read as defiance against the
dominant ideology of a unified, ethnonationalist Turkish identity, the "monolithic cul-
ture" imposed from above that excludes different identities as disorderly and corrosive
of the Turkish nationalist project (Secor, 2004: 355), and, by extension, the planned state-
led urban renewal project. By declaring the "right not to be classified forcibly into cate-
gories which have been determined by necessarily homogenising powers" (Garbin and
Millington 2012: 2075) residents asserted their attachment to Tarlabaşı as a real mahalle
despite the stigmatising discourse that framed the presence of the diverse communities
there as threatening and dangerous.
Mahalle/lik as belonging

The various ways in which people develop emotional attachment to their places of resi-
dence, if and how they develop a sense of belonging, have caught the interest of social sci-
entists from different disciplines, including sociologists, geographers, anthropologists
and environmental psychologists (Pinkster 2016: 873). Scholars have developed a wide
variety of conceptual approaches to analyse how people relate to a certain place, such as
feeling at home, place attachment, sense of belonging and sense of place, with the spa-
tial scale ranging from their own residential surroundings to the nation state and beyond
(Morley 2001; Fenster 2005; Mee and Wright 2009; Antonsich 2010; Pinkster 2016).

However, instead of trying to make my observations fit into theoretical concepts from
the English language literature I would like to contextualise the sense of belonging that
Tarlabaşı residents expressed, and that cannot quite be captured by the aforementioned
theoretical concepts. For how Tarlabaşı residents related to their neighbourhood, I would
like to propose a Turkish word that is attached to a salient, tangible concept of the shared
social virtue of place, and use the term “mahallelik” (mahalle-ness) as one that describes
what belonging means in the Tarlabaşı context.<fnref n="6" />

<figure><img src="image_23.png" /><figcaption>Backgammon</figcaption></figure>

Photo by Jonathan Lewis

Michel de Certeau, in his study of neighbourhood spaces in Paris, writes that a sense
of belonging is created through daily practices that transform a place into a space of “ac-
cumulated attachment and sentiments of accumulated knowledge, memory, and inti-

<footnote n="6">6 The Turkish -lik is a suffix that forms abstract or collective nouns (from adjectives, nouns, numerals), similar to the English suffix -ness. Here it is meant to describe the quality or attribute of being a *mahalle*.</footnote>
mate corporal experiences" (Fenster 2005: 243). Many Tarlabaşı residents justified their attachment to the neighbourhood in similar terms. Barber Necmi Usta had lived in Tarlabaşı for several years before moving to a nearby neighbourhood in 1999 following the devastating earthquake in Izmit. But like Halil Usta, he continued to work in the *mahalle* barbershop.

He was content with his apartment in an adjacent residential neighbourhood, which was also considered a traditional *mahalle*, but which had a more favourable reputation. However, this did not diminish his strong sense of belonging he had about Tarlabaşı, or his grief for losing the neighbourhood:

> I have been here for 25 years. it is difficult to leave. I came here from the village when I was ten years old, and I have been here for 25 years. I know everyone. [Tarlabaşı] is a part of me now. I visit other parts of Istanbul, I go to the [Princes'] Islands, I go here and there, but I always miss Tarlabaşı. There is something about this place. We all feel bitter inside for having to leave.

In Tarlabaşı, “daily examples of solidarity and small gestures of ‘keeping an eye on each other’” (Ünsal 2013: 165) were an important part of how a sense of belonging was created through the *mahalle* network. Despite the widely shared discontent over the crime and the bad physical state of the housing stock, residents stressed that any solution to these issues, and any kind of renewal “should not cause displacements and disrupt working networks of solidarity” (ibid.: 168).

Contrary to Wacquant's (2010) claims that residents of a stigmatised neighbourhood will distance themselves from the area and their neighbours, deny any kind of belonging, and try to leave as soon as they are able, most Tarlabaşı residents I met rarely had an unambiguously negative experience nor were they desperate to move. Far from it, many people expressed an affection for their neighbourhood that was deeply rooted in their experience of *mahallelik* as a sense of belonging. Despite the constant and intensifying stream of media and state narratives of social abandonment, crime and desolation in the run-up to evictions, residents spoke of a vibrant, supportive community and of strong neighbourhood ties that they had built through social relations of everyday life, of solidarity networks, the establishment of businesses, and years of memories of living and working in Tarlabaşı. When given the opportunity to buy into social housing blocks in the newly built suburb of Kayabaşı, many residents said that they did not consider moving so far away from their old support networks, their neighbours, and work opportunities.

## The importance of *mahalle/lik* for Tarlabaşı residents

For many residents, spatial belonging was prescribed by a lack of viable alternatives, their poverty, the necessity to access informal and low-skilled jobs available in the Beyoğlu service sector, by (relatively) cheap housing, or because Tarlabaşı provided relative safety for certain socio-demographic groups and marginalised communities, such as Kurds or trans* sex workers. However, as I aim to show here, this lack of viable alternatives transcended mere coping mechanisms. To people who were marginalised and excluded, in some cases violently and physically, from other Istanbul neighbourhoods, Tarlabaşı of-
fered not only an absence of exclusion, but a real sense of inclusion. Many Tarlabaşı residents described more than the ability to walk the streets without being physically or verbally assaulted. Instead, they went through the effort to describe that their belonging in Tarlabaşı was more than just a neutral state, that they were able to be part of a real *mahalle* there: they talked about relative physical safety, about economic inclusion, and access to basic accommodations of a social contract supplied by their community and their neighbours.

In her work on belonging in the low-income Nottingham neighbourhood of St Anns, anthropologist Lisa Mckenzie (2012: 459) shows that communities who are denied access to resources that make up various forms of social, economic, cultural and symbolic capital “do not simply passively accept their fate, but instead engage in a local system that finds value for themselves and their families in local networks and a shared cultural understanding” of how their neighbourhood, stigmatised by the dominant discourse, works. She notes that local solidarity networks might bind people living with social disadvantages together instead of only bridging those disadvantages. Therefore, these networks can have use-value to residents, even if this value is not recognised outside of the (stigmatised) community and is sometimes dismissed as a way of “mere coping”. Mckenzie writes: “It may be the case that poor neighbourhoods have strong systems, resources, and social capital but these are not recognized because they have no relationships with the institutional capital which can be exchanged in wider society such as employment, as a route to becoming ‘respectable’” (ibid.: 471). She adds that the spatial concentration of poor and marginalised communities within stigmatised neighbourhoods can therefore act as a buffer against said stigma, therefore increasing social capital locally (ibid.: 472).

Prior to the announcement of the urban renewal project, rents in Tarlabaşı were relatively affordable, and many places – municipal offices, banks, the post office, a large public hospital – could easily be reached on foot. In Istanbul, where public transport and taxi costs can quickly add up, this is important for those who do not own a car and who have to get by on a tight budget. Just as importantly, many residents' workplaces were at walking distance from their homes.

In addition to that, and counter to the dominant discourse that framed the neighbourhood as “chaotic”, some residents found that the constant bustle, the diversity of people and businesses, and the informality made Tarlabaşı a better, and livelier, place than the more homogenous neighbourhoods that were praised as “modern”, “clean”, and “family-friendly”. In their eyes, these districts were “too quiet” and “boring”. The central location of Tarlabaşı was not only convenient from a financial, or professional, point of view, but it also meant that residents could take part in the 24/7 Beyoğlu economy. Baker Gökhan Usta explained:

> In Tarlabaşı, there are two days, two days in one! One lasts from morning to the evening, and the other from the evening to morning. Some guys run places that are open from evening to morning. There are guys who run bars, coffeehouses, and restaurants. You need clothes? You can find clothes. If you get sick, there are doctors right here. Right at your fingertips. If you want to buy something, no problem. If you feel like reading, you can go to a bookstore. You really can find anything you might want here. There's everything!
The geographical make-up of Tarlabaşı, as for many more traditional neighbourhoods where small shops and businesses are scattered throughout residential areas, facilitated shopping, especially for women. Cemile explained how she found this more difficult in a more “modern”, more upscale neighbourhood:

> Sometimes I visit my daughter in Alibeyköy, and I don't like it there very much. My daughter asks me why and says that I have just grown used to the smell of Tarlabaşı...yes, probably! When I lower the basket from my balcony, I can get anything I want from the *bakkal* here. And [in Alibeyköy]? You can't even find bread there after six o'clock! There is no cornershop. You have to go all the way to the [centre] of Alibeyköy, to the supermarket. The market is there, and the supermarket. There is no shop where they live. But they have built very luxurious villas.

Bahar Sakızlıoğlu (2014a: 174) underlines the importance of social solidarity networks as a crucial channel for the exchange of information about where and how to apply for material support, such as government assistance, or the availability of cheap rental housing in the neighbourhood. However, Sakızlıoğlu also stresses that kinship ties and local solidarity networks that bolster, and sometimes substitute social welfare in Turkey, have been considerably weakened due to neoliberal policies (Sakızlıoğlu 2014a: 268, see also Kalaycıoğlu and Rittersberger-Tılıç 2002; Keyder 2005). This was certainly true for Tarlabaşı, and residents could not fully rely on these informal networks to alleviate poverty and hardship.<fnref n="7" /> However, people who were part of the neighbourhood, who were “known” and part of the *mahalle*, could nevertheless count on neighbours to assist them with the provision of food or clothing if they fell on hard times or lacked the sufficient funds to provide for themselves and their families.

Residents were also able to turn to solidarity networks to rally support and charity in the case of bigger disasters elsewhere. Veysi, a recycling worker in his early 20s originally from the eastern, predominantly Kurdish city of Van, collected several truckloads of clothing, blankets and foodstuffs in the neighbourhood with the help of Tarlabaşı co-workers and neighbours after an earthquake had laid waste to his city in October of 2011.<fnref n="8" />

Since the familiarity of everyday *mahalle* life is partly created through the frequent patronage of local shops and businesses, these social relationships allowed for residents, people known to shop owners, to buy goods and pay for them later, which was a vital option for those who lived on low, insecure incomes. This way of doing business is impossible in neighbourhoods increasingly dominated by large supermarkets and more anonymous housing complexes, and equally difficult as a newcomer in a more traditional *mahalle*, especially as part of a minority community.

<footnote n="7">7 Bahar Sakızlıoğlu describes the increasing fragmentation of Tarlabaşı, mostly along class and ethnicity lines, that accelerated after 1980 with the implementation of neoliberal policies that led to the precarisation of labour, the criminalisation of informal labour such as the itinerant sale of goods, paper and metal recycling and sex work. This in turn resulted in the considerable limitation of opportunities to cope with poverty, increased destitution and therefore weaker solidarity networks (Sakızlıoğlu 2014a: 175).</footnote>

<footnote n="8">8 On October 23, 2011, a severe earthquake killed 604 and injured 4,152 people. Due to the number of buildings that sustained damage, at least 60,000 people were left homeless.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_24.png" /><figcaption>Home delivery</figcaption></figure>

Photo by Jonathan Lewis

It was also not uncommon that residents were afforded access to gainful employ-
ment through neighbourhood and kinship ties. For example, Alev had a job in a local tex-
tile workshop that she had found with the help of a relative who also lived in Tarlabaşı.
Sometimes local kinship networks provided the basis for the set-up of a modest busi-
ness. Recycling worker Veysi had pooled money with relatives from Tarlabaşı to rent a
local depot in order to start a metal and recycling business with them and his brothers.

Networks of socio-economic interdependence

The overwhelming majority of project area residents were employed in low-skilled, insecure jobs in the Beyoğlu service sector, in construction, or local textile, leather, and metal workshops.<fnref n="9" /> Close to one fourth of renewal area residents worked in semi-legal, informal and (increasingly) criminalised businesses, in metal and paper recycling, the sex economy, or as street vendors – all businesses that were possible in Tarlabaşı partly because they relied on the proximity to the Beyoğlu retail, service, and night time economies.

For many people on a low, insecure income without benefits or social security it
was crucial to live within walking distance of their workplaces. Residents who lived
and worked in Tarlabaşı, or who owned or ran a business there, were facing the double
threat of losing both their home and workplace, and therefore their income. Several

<footnote n="9">⁹ According to the survey conducted on behalf of the Beyoğlu Municipality in 2008, 77 percent were employed in temporary, insecure jobs. Only 19 percent of those in employment had health insurance and retirement through their jobs. 29 percent were employed in the local service sector. Another 22 percent worked in construction or textile workshops (Kentsel A.Ş. 2008; Sakızlıoğlu 2014a: 173).</footnote>
residents used their homes and basements to prepare, store, and sort food that they sold from mobile karts, such as vendors of filled mussels, of fruit and vegetables, or sandwiches, pastries, and puddings. The link between the informal labour and informal housing markets in Istanbul is strong, because “many workplaces on the ground floors of residential buildings are operated by the owners of these buildings or their family members” (Sakızlıoğlu 2014a: 175).

Moreover, local artisans felt a deep emotional connection to the neighbourhood. Many had learned their trade there as children, either from their fathers or their, often Greek or Armenian, *Ustalar* through the traditional apprentice system (Ünlühisarcıklı 2001). Furthermore, artisan workshops, of which there were only a few left in the neighbourhood by the time the renewal project was announced, depended on “the osmotic relationship between the workshop and its surroundings” (Kaya et al. 2011: 64). A tight exchange network between suppliers, employees and customers, the overwhelming majority of whom were regulars, made moving an established business extremely difficult, if not impossible. Generally, Tarlabası business owners felt great pride in the small-scale, cordial atmosphere that characterised the local *mahalle* economy and that stood in stark contrast to the nearby commercial district around Taksim that was increasingly dominated by global chain stores, franchises, and supermarkets. In what follows I examine what *mahallelik* looked like “on the ground”, and what residents were talking about when they praised their deeply stigmatised neighbourhood for its support and solidarity network that ultimately created their sense of belonging.

## The bread baker [fırıncı]

Gökhan and his younger brother Burak took over the eight-storey building from their family's tenant, a Turkish bank, in 1990 and opened a bakery there in 1993. Both men had been born in Istanbul into a family of bakers originally from Camlihemşin on the Black Sea coast. Like many of his compatriots at the time, their great-grandfather had emigrated to learn the trade in Russia and returned to Turkey to open a bakery (Biryol 2007). His sons and grandsons continued the family business in various cities in Turkey before Gökhan and Burak opened the Tarlabası bakery they had been running without interruptions except for the time when they went to do their military service.

The actual bakery – an industrial-size oven for bread, a dough mixer and shelves to proof the dough and the raw loaves – was situated in the basement of the building. The ground floor held the shop for over-the-counter sales and a gallery where bags of flour were stored as well as a small office where Gökhan kept files, orders and bills and did all his administration. The ground floor was also the space where he and his employees sat down for breakfast and lunch. The main business of the bakery consisted of the sale of the yeasted white wheat loaves fashioned after French baguettes and sold all over the city, and, during the month of Ramadan, of the traditional flat *pide*. Weight, ingredients, and prices of these loaves and the *pide* are fixed by the state. Prior to the announcement of the renewal project, the bakery put out around 7,000 loaves a day, one third of which was sold to customers over the counter. The rest was delivered, in plastic crates by hand truck and on foot, to nearby restaurants, eateries and *bakkal* shops. However, with the start of
the project, and as residents and local businesses started to leave, the total output of the bakery dropped to around 2,500 loaves a day.

The project announcement had caught the two brothers unawares and in the wake of a large shop renovation that had been part of a Beyoğlu beautification campaign initiated by AKP mayor Demircan. Gökhan explained:

> That [renovation] put a large dent into our budget. The mayor gathered [the local bakers]. Back then nobody spoke of demolitions yet. He said that he would start controls of all the bakeries. Those days there was a lot of talk about bakeries in the city being dirty. He said that bakeries should be renovated, that he would make the rounds with cameras to show everyone how clean and nice Beyoğlu bakeries were. We spent almost 5,000 Lira back then. We put the oven downstairs, built the upstairs [gallery], fixed everything on this floor.

Both Gökhan, who was married with two small children, and his brother Burak lived in the building above the shop and rented out the remaining eight apartments, the money of which provided a comfortable extra income. By 2010, all but two of their tenants had left. Gökhan employed ten people in his bakery, all of whom lived in Tarlabaşı. As a business owner and their Usta, Gökhan felt the obligation to provide alternative employment for all of them once the bakery would be shut down. He hoped to be able to “arrange” [ayarlamak] jobs in nearby businesses for all of them, as he was well known in the neighbourhood and confident that his recommendation would open doors.

What Gökhan was about to lose was not only the material investment in the bakery, such as shop renovation, a new oven and modern machinery, but also the accumulation of social capital: the employ of local and reliable staff, the establishment of a distribution network, of suppliers, as well as loyal network of customers, both businesses and private residents who bought their bread at his shop.<fnref n="10" /> For neighbourhood bakers [mahalle fırncilar] like Gökhan and his brother, who had a more or less fixed network of customers in the vicinity of their shop and whom they were able to rely on for their monthly income, a move into another quarter, one where other, similar bread bakeries were already established was precarious at best, and impossible at worst.<fnref n="11" />

Gökhan had accrued this social capital through his long-standing participation in the neighbourhood community, an involvement that transcended the everyday commercial ties between him as a small businessman and his regular customers. Over the years he had built up the trust that his bread would be delivered on time and meet quality standards, and his customers, in turn, had earned the possibility to buy bread but to pay for

<footnote n="10">10 The bulk of the bakery's income came from nearby restaurants who bought crates of bread from Gökhan every day.</footnote>

<footnote n="11">11 This was further complicated by the fact that bread prices were fixed by the authorities. In general, small businesses that were firmly embedded in a neighbourhood and dependent on a loyal, predominantly local clientele, such as bakeries, barbers, tea kitchens, or corner shops (bakkal), could not easily transfer to a new neighbourhood, where similar businesses had already established a customer and loyalty network.</footnote>
it later [veleziye]. In low-income neighbourhoods, where people had to rely on bread as *the* substantial staple for any given meal, this option could be vital.<fnref n="12" />

It was also not uncommon for men who worked in nearby shops and workshops to heat up their lunch in Gökhan's oven. Women who did not have access to an oven at home sometimes asked him to cook a casserole, *lahmacun*<fnref n="13" />, or other food that required one. Lunchtime usually brought a lull in bread baking, but the large oven was not allowed to cool down entirely in order to be ready for the pre-dinner bread run.<fnref n="14" /> Burak, who was very interested in herbal remedies, ran a veritable little pharmacy from behind the bread counter. He swore that poppy seeds were the best medicine against light headaches, and often made teas for me when I was under the weather. Many local residents trusted him with advice on ills such as fatigue, small aches, a lack of appetite or digestive problems, and Burak regularly handed out teas and herbs, or advised people on where to get and how to take them.

Bakery

<figure><img src="image_25.png" /><figcaption>Photo by Jonathan Lewis</figcaption></figure>

Gökhan was angry about the deal offered to him by the municipality, but he agreed to exchange the title deed for his eight-storey-building of more than 700 m² for an apart-

<footnote n="12">12 While bread is an important staple and accompaniment for all income groups, tomato paste [salça] or raw onion on dry bread constitutes a main meal for very poor people.</footnote>

<footnote n="13">13 *Lahmacun* is a thin flatbread topped with minced meat, minced vegetables, and herbs including onions, garlic, tomatoes, red peppers, and parsley, flavoured with spices such as chili pepper and paprika, then baked like a pizza.</footnote>

<footnote n="14">14 Neighbourhood bakeries in areas and villages where women bake their own bread but lack the access to an oven or the hot metal plate required to bake flat breads, commonly accept for residents to drop bowls with risen bread dough and bake it for them in exchange for a small fee, which is cheaper than having to buy ready-made bread from a bakery.</footnote>
ment of 40m² and a shop of around 150m² at no extra cost for him. Furthermore, he was
paid a monthly rental supplement of 2,800 TL for the duration of 30 months, the pro-
jected amount of time it would take for the new buildings to be finalised. However, when
asked by a foreign housing rights researcher if he was content with the deal, Gökhan
said that he was not: “They gave us very little. We are losing our work, we are losing our
homes. We have a life set up here, and we will lose that, too.” For him, the looming loss of
familiarity ties and his place in the *mahalle* was irreplaceable:

We invested a lot of work in this place, a lot of work. We gave years of our lives. When I walk from here just across the street, I exchange greetings with 500 people. We exchange greetings at every shop, we know everyone. We know who everyone is. Now we have to build a new life. We don't know anyone there. Everything starts from scratch.

The social capital that he and his brother had managed to accrue in Tarlabaşı over the years, and that firmly connected them to the neighbourhood, was at risk of being squandered by the looming demolitions.<fnref n="15" /> In addition to that, the municipality had already announced that it would not renew businesses licenses for bakeries and most other artisan workshops inside the development project once that it was finished, because they were considered “dirty” and “not modern” enough for the upscale neighbourhood they aimed to establish.

The cobbler [kunduracı]

Zeki Usta, an ethnic Turk originally from Konya and in his 60s when we met, had been a cobbler for more than five decades by the time the renewal project was announced. He got his start in the profession when he was eight years old and an apprentice for a Greek Tarlabaşı family. His business was set up in a historical four-storey building that he had bought in a dilapidated state from an Armenian woman in the early 1980s and renovated. Close to Tarlabaşı Boulevard, it housed the workshop, a depot for the raw materials, shoes and extra tools, a small shop/showroom and, not unimportantly, a small apartment on the second floor that he could use if work hours required it, or for eating and taking a nap. Running the workshop together with his then 35-year-old son Sedat, Zeki Usta said that the business of quality handmade shoes was viable only because they did not have to pay rent for the building, and that renting out a similar-sized workshop would be impossible almost anywhere else in Beyoğlu.

Before the announcement of the urban renewal project in 2005, twenty people had been in the master cobbler's permanent employ, but by the time I met him, this number had shrunk to a small handful of three, sometimes four employees. The looming loss of his property and business had forced Zeki Usta to cut costs and decrease financial risk. At the height of success, dozens of customers, shoe sellers from various Istanbul neighbourhoods and other Turkish cities, had come to visit his place to order and buy the shoes Zeki had learned to make from his Greek master and from study trips to Italy, but now this

<footnote n="15">15 Gökhan fought his eviction in court for many months, while his shop and bakery remained open. However, he noticed a considerable drop in income during the time that residents moved away, and other local businesses closed down.</footnote>
constant stream of visitors had dried up to a small trickle. He had a number of fixed customers who required a particular model or material, and who had frequented the shop for many years.

Our customers come here because they know us. But for them to find out where our new place is, to come there will probably take, I would say, five to ten years. What will I do in these five to ten years? In order to make a living, that is a long time to have to wait. And in order to cover the cost [of moving, of rent], we will have to increase our customer base by at least two or three times as many. We have to earn something.

Hilal Usta, a shoemaker for 45 years who still worked with Zeki Usta and his son at the time, and the other few employees lived nearby and could walk to work, saving on commuting costs and time. An established network of shoemakers, leather traders and makers of metal ornaments used in clothing, bag and shoe making were all located in the immediate vicinity, which facilitated the exchange and sale of materials, of tools, and expertise. The short distances were crucial and cheap. Sedat explained:

> We don't make an enormous amount of money with these shoes anyway. And many people are involved! Each of the shoes that you see here went through the hands of maybe fifteen or twenty people all in all. Just the pieces of leather...[holds up a large sheet of leather] they come like this to the workshop. But this piece of leather has already passed through the hands of another fifteen people. That also means that one shoe feeds fifteen families. [...] All these people will be unemployed.

Zeki Usta had also established deep social ties with the neighbourhood he lived and worked in: he spent many hours in Hakan's teahouse a few houses down, and the trans* sex workers who also lived and worked in Bird Street directed searching customers to his shop, and watched over it when it was closed. Sedat once told me, in somewhat of an extension of his father's anecdote above, that, when he had just come back from his military service and was unknown to the people in his father's street, a group of trans* sex workers almost beat him up when he tried to open the workshop, thinking that he was a burglar:

> Only when [one person] recognised me as Zeki Usta's son did they let me go. I was really scared! It's because everyone knows everyone here. This is a real *mahalle*, that is how it is. We also know who the real thieves and the drug dealers are, and they know who we are. That's why they don't harm us, or my customers.

In 2011, Zeki Usta was the last shoemaker on that side of Tarlabaşı Boulevard. Some of the workshops that used to supply parts he needed to make shoes had already left. A majority of the master craftsmen who used to work (and sometimes live) in Tarlabaşı – the carpenters, bag, belt and other shoemakers – had either stopped or left the neighbourhood to settle in one of the industrial parks that had been set up in the faraway suburbs. This was not an option for Zeki Usta because the entire production process of the shoes made in his workshop, all the way to their sale, was linked to an intricate system of labour and support that he had established in the vicinity of his Tarlabaşı workshop.
The barber [berber]

Halil Usta's barbershop was small. It fit only three chairs, one of which was never occupied since it was only him and his business partner Necmi Usta who worked in the shop. During the colder months his shop window was often fogged up by the steam rising from the ever-boiling teapot or the meal he was cooking on the camping gas stove for lunch. During the summer, Halil often sat on a stool outside the shop, smoking and interacting with neighbours and passers-by.

Halil, originally from the central Anatolian province of Kayseri, had arrived in Tarlabaşı in 1972. He had started his career as a teenage apprentice and opened a barber shop in the neighbourhood soon after. In those years, Tarlabaşı had been a centre of artisanship and small-scale industrial production. Halil recalled that he and Necmi often had to work for fifteen hours a day, and that for a while, there had been a third barber in order to keep up with the pressing demand of the local male workforce who wanted to maintain a neat appearance. Back then long lines outside the shop were a common occurrence – something that by 2010 happened only during the days immediately preceding religious holidays. With the migration of the wood, textile and leather workshops to the city's suburbs, business had begun to slow down and, with the announcement of the renewal project, had almost dried up completely. The two barbers sometimes reminisced that it would have been smarter to move their shop into one of these new industrial centres, that they had missed their chance to keep up with urban development and economic requirements. Despite that realisation, neither Halil nor Necmi ever seriously considered moving the shop to Merter, Ikitelli, or any other neighbourhood where sprawling factories and manufacturers promised a steady supply of customers.

<figure><img src="image_26.png" /><figcaption>Barber shop</figcaption></figure>

Photo by Jonathan Lewis
Despite the increasing difficulties facing the barbers in Tarlabaşı, Necmi and Halil
still served a significant number of loyal patrons, many of whom lived or worked in
the neighbourhood. Some of their customers travelled long distances after moving
away from Tarlabaşı, and not wanting to miss out on the excellent service of Halil's
and Necmis's shop. There I also met Murat, the Kurdish textile workshop owner who
had moved to Başakşehir, a high-rise suburb to the west of Istanbul, in 1987. Murat
frequently crossed half the city to get a shave and a haircut. True, he owned a business
in Tarlabaşı as well as a small apartment building that he rented out. While these ven-
tures brought him to the neighbourhood at regular intervals, he could of course have
frequented another barbershop, somewhere more conveniently located and closer to
where he lived. Even though I was told that Halil Usta was renowned for his soft touch
and smooth shave, he certainly was not the only possible option even for very demanding
customers in a city awash in barbershops. However, Murat did not only come for his
personal hygiene, but for the familiarity and the friendly banter. He once told me that
no matter where Halil and Necmi would move their business following the demolition
of the neighbourhood, he would come and find them.

Loyalty ties between customers and the owners of small businesses are an important part of what makes a *mahalle* and the network of social ties that runs through it. I once witnessed an interesting scene at Halil's shop. A customer, obviously a regular, came for a haircut. After he had sat down, Halil remarked that he had gotten his hair cut elsewhere. While this was done in jest and was accompanied by some friendly bickering, the customer also felt "caught" – a feeling he alleviated by fervently agreeing with Halil that whoever had cut his hair had done shoddy workmanship.

By the time I met Halil, he was officially retired, but like many men in Turkey contin-
ued to work to bolster his meagre pension check and, just as importantly, to nurture the
deep relationships he had established with neighbours and friends in the *mahalle* over the
years. A considerable number of men that frequented his shop in 2011 had gotten their
haircuts there as little boys. The wall above the barbershop mirrors was covered with pho-
tographs of their numerous customers, passport photos and professional studio head-
shots, as well as a couple of pictures that displayed haircuts that Halil and Necmi had
done and that they were especially proud of or thought of as funny. Both barbers had de-
tailed knowledge of their customers' lives, they knew their children and grandchildren,
were informed about their health, the state of their marriages, and their professional
successes and failures. With the proliferation of hairdressers in Beyoğlu, many of whom
were more modern than theirs, or offered very fast service and cut-throat prices, Halil
and Necmi relied on their reputation as an excellent "neighbourhood barbershop" [*ma-
halle berberi*] with longstanding ties in the community to stay afloat. Necmi said:

We are neighbourhood barbers. That's not just any quick thing. [...] Customer rela-
tions...[they] don't just pass by and have a quick shave. We are now like the barbers
of the family, that's how it is.

Halil underlined the importance of familiarity over style and appearance of the shop for
his customers. He said that it was the convivial atmosphere and his detailed knowledge,
accumulated over many years, about them, their tastes, and their conversational prefer-
ences that motivated their customers to stay loyal to his business. It was agreed that this,
maybe more even than the skill to wield a razor and scissors, was the core ability every *mahalle* barber needed to master (Toklucu 2015: 106).

My shop is a bit old, it's not as modern as others. You might look inside and wonder: Is this an animal stable or a barber shop? [laughs] But our customers come here because they can find something that those shiny big barbers don't offer. They come for the warm, friendly atmosphere, for the conversations. As a barber, you need to know how to make conversation in the same way that you need to know how to cut somebody's hair. When you have known your customers as long as I have, you also know what they like to talk about, or if they don't want to talk at all.

Halil's small barber shop was an important fixture in the neighbourhood, and a point for the exchange of information in the *mahalle*, for example concerning the availability of rental apartments or jobs. Since Halil was reliable and always there, residents would leave their keys with him, and I often observed that he functioned as a sort of “neighbourhood telephone” and black board, transmitting messages from one person to another.

I met several of the people I later interviewed either in his shop, or via his customers. There were often neighbours who had just dropped by, or customers who had come a little early and were now waiting their turn (though having to wait in line became a rarer occurrence as time and the project progressed). Halil cooked lunch in his shop every day, delicious one-pot meals that he would prepare on a gas flame and that he shared with hungry customers and visiting (shop) neighbours, or journalists and researchers like me. During Ramadan, he cooked *iftar* meals, sometimes jointly with Ekin and Seray, the chicken döner restaurant owners a few doors down, even though they were Alevis and did not observe Ramadan. Halil had developed deep friendship ties with the couple who lived in the *gecekondu* suburb of Sultanbeyli on the Asian side of the city, but who owned a building on Halil's street. When Ekin retired<fnref n="16" />, Halil joined them at their local *cemevi* for a feast of a sacrificial ram Ekin had bought to celebrate the occasion.<fnref n="17" />

Halil said that he felt at home in Tarlabaşı despite living in an apartment on the Asian side.

I don't have a place here, but this is my neighbourhood, and it has been for many years. I am sad [that it is being demolished], even though I don't live here. I will not be able to see my friends as we used to, except maybe for a wedding, if everyone is free, every now and then. That will be it. For years we were together as a family, this will be over and that is what I am sad about.

Halil had developed a strong network of micro-publics over the years. When business was slow, as it was increasingly wont to be as the renewal project advanced and evictions picked up pace, he walked the few metres down to the teahouse in his street to play a

<footnote n="16">16 He also only retired on paper. While he did receive a pension check, he continued working in the restaurant together with his wife.</footnote>

<footnote n="17">17 In neighbourhoods where Alevis were in the minority, as they were in Tarlabaşı, they sometimes faced discrimination and were shunned by some Sunni Turks who would refuse to even eat food from the hands of Alevis. The chicken döner restaurant worked well despite that, but the close relationship between Halil and Ekin's family was noteworthy.</footnote>
few rounds of cards. Halil was a regular there, and he did not have any problem to either find co-players or join an already ongoing game. If an unexpected customer did show up, Halil would make him wait until the round was finished, since drop-out players were considered the losers of the game and therefore expected to pay for everyone's beverages (usually tea and Nescafé).

When eviction began and the first buildings were gutted, scavenged for metal and wood, Halil said he felt “orphaned”. Despite having found a rental suitable for opening another barbershop further down the street (outside the renewal zone), Halil lost his enthusiasm for the job he had loved so much when his entire social network broke down around him. After Ekin had packed up his restaurant and left, Halil’ Tarlabası visits became rarer. When the teahouse shut down, one of the last businesses to go, he stopped coming altogether, leaving most of the remaining business in the new shop to Necmi.

## The trans* sex worker [seks işçisi]

Müge had lived and worked in Tarlabası for almost ten years when we met. She had moved to the neighbourhood after the violent evictions of trans* persons from Ülker Street in Cihangir (Selek 2001) and rented a two-bedroom apartment that she shared with her copper-red Persian cat named “Çapkın” (Rake). Her street was a cul-de-sac that housed the workshop of cobbler Zeki Usta, Hakan’s small teahouse, a former Armenian school that was currently being refurbished by a separate developer, an informal brothel as well as the homes of several other residents. Except for the very occasional municipal or police vehicle, it was a pedestrian street which meant that there was room for a lot of interactional activity between residents. Importantly, the trans* women were able to solicit customers there without having to brave traffic.

Müge was able to work at home, but her best friend and “mentor” Gülay, a trans* sex worker then in her late 40s, rented a room in the informal brothel up the street. There, up to six women were able to share extra costs, exchange information about customers, and generally look out for each other. Müge and Gülay said that Tarlabası was one of the last places in Istanbul where they could live and work in relative physical safety. As a result of pervasive discrimination and the exclusion from almost all social spheres, the vast majority of trans* women had few, if any, other work opportunities in the city.<fnref n="18" /> The same rigid cultural norms and deep societal prejudice could make it extremely difficult for trans* persons to rent a house in Istanbul, or any other Turkish metropolis.<fnref n="19" />

Müge paid 400 TL for her entrance-level flat and said that she was on good terms with her landlord, who did not object to her working at the house. But when he sold the building to the municipality, Müge was forced to think about alternatives.

<footnote n="18">18 Müge told me on various occasions that she would rather work in a different profession, but that this was impossible due to ubiquitous discrimination and ferociously anti-trans* prejudice in Turkish society.</footnote>

<footnote n="19">19 In most cities it is impossible. The trans* and sex workers' rights group Kirmizi Şemsiye [Red Umbrella] lists inflated rents, arbitrary evictions and the sealing of trans* homes by the authorities on accusations of harbouring illegal brothels (without further proof than the presumption that all trans* women engage in sex work), as examples of how trans* persons' right to housing is routinely violated (see Ördek 2016).</footnote>
She did not consider moving to the faraway suburb of Kayabaşı, where the municipal-ity offered Tarlabaşı tenants priority purchase of a flat in one of the TOKI social housing high-rises.

Why should I live anywhere else when I am so comfortable here? While I have a nice house and pay little rent? Why should I go and pay 700, 800 [TL] elsewhere? Look, if you live somewhere else, you have to pay for public transport, but here I don't have to pay for that. Here I have everything at my fingertips. Down this way there is the teahouse, that way is the cornershop [points]. Go that way, you'll get to the post office. Everything is here. That's why. But when you want to go to the post office in other neighbourhoods, you'll have to pay for the dolmuş<fnref n="20" /> or a taxi. If you want to go to a restaurant, you have to pay for public transport. Here we are right in the [city] centre. I would make a loss otherwise. I would have to change busses twice to go to Kayabaşı, one-way, how much does that add up to every month? And it's not even safe there.

<figure><img src="image_27.png" /><figcaption>Müge and Çapkın</figcaption></figure>

Photo by Jonathan Lewis

Another issue was that investment in flat ownership, with instalments sometimes running over decades, posed an important risk.<fnref n="21" /> For sex workers like Müge, this risk was compounded by the lack of a guaranteed monthly income, and the absence of social

<footnote n="20">20 A *dolmuş* is a shared taxi that runs on fixed routes at a set price inside and between cities and towns.</footnote>

<footnote n="21">21 In Turkey, even social housing offered and managed by the Housing Agency TOKI is only available to buy, not to rent. People on low and/or unstable incomes who are forced to move to such a TOKI settlement because of urban renewal-related evictions risk to default on their long-running mortgage payments, leaving them to scramble for different housing options or to lodge with relatives. This has happened in the majority Roma neighbourhood of Sulukule.</footnote>
security or insurance of any kind. Health issues, misdemeanour fines and unexpected legal fees could have an unplanned and severe impact on the ability to pay the monthly rates. In addition to that, many trans* sex workers had to break ties with families and other previous solidarity networks and could therefore not fall back on them in case they had to default on their payments.

Nevertheless, Müge eyed the option of moving to Bahçeşehir, a middle class residential neighbourhood in the western suburbs, where she had even made a down payment on a flat in a gated community [site]. She argued that from Taksim, Bahçeşehir was easily reachable via public transport, which was important since Müge wanted (and had) to continue to work in Tarlabaşı. She knew that sex work would prove to be very difficult, if not dangerous, to do from an apartment in a residential complex. But this was not the only reason she hesitated.

> I won't be able to sit in front of my house [in my new neighbourhood]. But here I sit in front of my house, I go to the teahouse, all the shop owners know me. And they love me. There is no one who doesn't, they all love me, I know that. How do I know that? For example, when I leave my house, they keep an eye on it. When a stranger approaches, they ask him what he is doing there. Someone who does this loves me. Do you know what I mean? But there...it's a giant site. I'll be all alone there.

Despite the many problems in the neighbourhood and the prejudice that she sometimes faced from other residents, Müge said that Tarlabaşı had become a place where she felt at home.

For better or for worse, I manage to fill my tummy here. Okay, maybe it's a disgusting place. Maybe it's falling down. Maybe the streets are smelly. There might be thieves, there might be this and that. But this is my home after all. It's where I get by, where I help my family get by. It's where I live, where I get up and where I sleep. It's where I open the window in the morning, where I wash my face and exchange greetings with other people. I won't be able to do that anywhere else. Maybe, in order to do that, I will need five or six years. One doesn't create a home like that in a couple of years. Because [people] increasingly live in [anonymous] housing blocks, in gated communities. Here you can ring anyone's doorbell and ask for a cup of cooking oil, for water, for salt, or for food. But in a *site* that's impossible.

In Tarlabaşı she felt a certain respite from the continuous struggle against different forms of discrimination that she faced everywhere (else) in the city. When asked how she would describe *komşuluk* [neighbourliness] in Tarlabaşı, Müge replied:

> It's very nice. If only it was like that everywhere. I get along well with the local shop owners, and they tolerate me. I can get credit [at the shops], I don't have any problems with them here. I can postpone the payment of my debts [veleziye]. I can tell them that I don't have money, I can even tell them to get lost if they pester me. If you can say that [to a shopkeeper], that means there is great familiarity between us. As for my neighbours, they bring me food when they have cooked something, they ask how I'm doing. And I'm a working woman [sex worker]. Is it right for a family woman to greet me in the street? If you ask most people, they'd say that it isn't. But here, when [a woman] walks past me,
she asks: 'Mügecim, how are you sweetie? Do you have any worries, any problems?' They ask me how things are. I tell them: 'I am fine, *anneciğim*, what can I do, I get by.' I ask: 'Do you have any worries?' And I say that if she does have any, she should tell me, and she says that she will. That's how it is here. After all, I can buy on credit, when I am sad the people here console me and support me. They are helpful. I have no problems with the shopkeepers, the neighbours, the families. Because we are like relatives here now, that is how I could sum it up. We are like family. We have been around each other for a long time by now. I can ask [neighbours] for a handful of bulgur. No problem. I know they will always give it to me. If I say 'good day, *hayatım*' to a woman I don't even know she will smile, and [wish me well and success at my work]. If someone says this, that means they have accepted [me]. I mean, many of them are hypocrites. They say [have a good workday] to your face, but then turn around and gossip. [laughs].

Müge's entrance-level flat was only a few metres down from the corner where she waited for customers. The teahouse was frequented almost uniquely by regulars: local shopkeepers, artisans, workers, municipal cleaners, and the trans* sex workers from the brothel next door. Müge and Gülay both spent a considerable amount of their time there during the day, especially when it was cold or raining, if they needed a break, or to play a round of cards or *okey*<sup>22</sup> with the other guests during a lull in customers. Other trans* sex workers would make use of the place to rest and refresh their make-up, or to have a tea or Nescafé. The atmosphere in the teahouse was convivial and friendly. Hakan and the other men would refer to Müge affectionately as "my girl/daughter" [*kızım*] or "sweetie" [*canım*], and she seemed to be at ease with the jokes and sometimes teasing comments. She could also hold her own, and did not shy away from wisecracking, even if the pun was somewhat "slippery". There were few, if any other places in Istanbul that I knew of where trans* residents and non-trans* residents entertained such friendly ties, let alone played cards together. However, and as I have described earlier, what at first glance looked and felt like a tight neighbourhood community had required a lot of negotiations, emotional labour and, at times, physical violence, and still amounted to a somewhat uneasy truce that papered over the underlying tension and conflicts. As she describes above, Müge was ambivalent about her neighbours and the men in the teahouse. At times she accused them of hypocrisy, arguing that they were in fact transphobes who talked badly about her behind her back and who only tolerated the brothel because they had received "a good beating" ten years prior. However, she equally underlined the good relations that she had established in the neighbourhood and said that the men in her street loved her enough to keep an eye out for her and her home. It was this "certain level of familiarity" (Sakızlıoğlu 2014a: 184) that she was going to lose with the demolition of Tarlabaşı and her move into a suburban *site*.

Other than relative safety and acceptance, a diverse infrastructure had emerged around the illegal and semi-illegal sex trade in and around the wider Tarlabaşı and Taksim area. It included bars, music halls [*pavyon*], discos and hotels that allowed trans*

<footnote n="22"><sup>22</sup> *Okey* is a popular tile-based game that is often played in coffeehouses/teahouses. While in theory it can be played by two or three players, it is usually played by four. It is very similar to the German game *Rummikub* as it requires the same set of boards and tiles, but it is played under a different set of rules.</footnote>
sex workers to enter and to find and entertain possible customers. This network also encompassed a number of hairdressing salons and wig makers, tailors and cobblers that catered to a trans* clientele. I had been granted a seat off the side in one of these salons thanks to my friendship with the women in Bird Street. It was run by Ciğdem and her husband, an impossibly gaunt man who rarely spoke, and who, under the direction of his wife, was responsible for hair styles and wigs. Ciğdem tended to outfits and make-up, and was assisted by Kemal, a young man bedecked in tattoos, and her teenage daughter.

On Friday and Saturday nights the shop was usually packed. The usually harried owner, wielding fake nails, bottles of glitter and large make-up palettes, shouted commands to Kemal and her husband who was trying to efficiently rotate the use of their four chairs. Some customers – those that were good at it and could not afford the hairdresser's service each time – were allowed to do their own hair, makeup, and nails. The women also helped each other with hair clips, zippers, or putting on jewellery. Some used the computer in the shop to find customers on websites set up to arrange the exchange of sex against money. Here, too, the presence of colleagues made it easier to screen potential clients, as information about those that cheated on pay or were prone to use violence could be pooled and exchanged. Müge, who preferred subtle make-up and sober outfits, only made use of the hairdressers to sit and rest during the day, when business was slow.

<figure><img src="image_28.png" /><figcaption>*Hairdresser, Saturday night*</figcaption></figure>

Photo by Jonathan Lewis

The fact that Tarlabaşı had a “spoiled” reputation and was, in the shared consciousness of the city, a trans* space, afforded a certain, if relative, safety for trans* people. The sizeable trans* presence in the neighbourhood gave rise to a trans* infrastructure and strengthened solidarity ties of the trans* community. The trans* women I got to know better during my fieldwork in Tarlabaşı had all, without exception, experienced discrim-
ination, and harassment in their everyday lives. All had lived through horrific violence, including sexual assault and police torture. The proximity to each other and the possibility to exchange information – on customers, police controls, safe and unsafe working locations – was therefore vitally important.

Trans* solidarity networks extended beyond Tarlabaşı. Several of the women, including Müge, regularly frequented the LGBTQ and sex workers' rights associations that were situated in the proximity of Taksim Square at the time, and could all be easily reached on foot.<fnref n="23" /> These associations not only provided legal and health advice, but also organised marches, conferences and street protests around Taksim Square and on the main Istiklal Avenue. These extended trust networks gave trans* women, as Müge put it, a sense of increased agency: "There are many of us in Tarlabaşı. We are a community. We are strong here." She added that she felt trans* persons had more power to act in Beyoğlu than elsewhere in the city because they were many. She believed that the police refrained from all-out discrimination and violent abuse in Tarlabaşı because the government dreaded local trans* person's ability to organise legal street protests quickly.<fnref n="24" />

## The (female) neighbours [kadın komşuları]

When I first met Alev, she was in her late twenties. Unmarried, she lived in a three-bedroom apartment in the building on Tree Street. She shared the place with her elderly parents, her older brother, his wife, and their two young daughters. Because Alev was working in a textile workshop in Tarlabaşı six days a week, the family had been able to afford comforts such as a washing machine that they kept in the entrance for reasons of space. Like many women in Tarlabaşı, Alev and her sister-in-law made their own bread. They baked the flat bread on an electric sheet metal oven [sac], a not inexpensive kitchen utensil that in cities had replaced the open flame and gas ovens used in rural homes. Since there was too little space in the kitchen and baking too messy to be done in any other room of the house, bread baking happened in the hallway. Done usually once a week, they moved the large bowl of dough and the sac there and set to work. Their front door always remained open then, and the baking spilled out into the shared staircase. It was common that Cemile or other female neighbours from the building joined them there. They would either help, make use of the oven (since they didn't necessarily own one themselves) and bake a few batches of bread, or take care of each other's children and grandchildren. It also was an opportunity to chat and keep each other company.

Over the years, the women had developed close friendships and a close-knit support network across the floors of their building in Tree Street. The doors of their apartments were always open, and the women (and their children) arrived unannounced in each other's homes to visit almost every day. In her work on gender and belonging in

<footnote n="23">23 Some of these NGOs, such as Lambda, had to move away from Beyoğlu since then.</footnote>

<footnote n="24">24 By that time, the LGBTQ movement in Turkey had gained considerable traction. Despite the prevalent attitude of AKP politicians, especially following the election success of 2007, of opposing LGBTQ rights, groups such as Lambda were able to substantially increase LGBTQ visibility and solidarity with LGBTQ persons in Turkey. Somewhat counterintuitively, the conservative AKP and the queer movement in Turkey grew stronger at the same time, as the space for social movements had grown considerably, at least until 2011 (see Çetin and Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik 2016).</footnote>
Kuzguncuk, Amy Mills (2007: 341) identifies such frequent neighbourly visits as a constitutive (and gendered) practice that creates and sustains *mahalle* life. She writes: “The responsibility of visiting frequently enough to demonstrate membership in the community and the ways of visiting with other women (talking, reading coffee fortunes, drinking tea, eating, helping prepare food or interacting with children, or keeping company while someone does chores) are important characteristics of *mahalle* life.”

For these women, the most crucial neighbourhood community in Tarlabaşı was that of their own building. And while all of them had other relatives and friends in the area and visited them, the most frequent social calls were on the other women in the same house. Neighbourly activities in Tree Street included the sharing of childcare duties and household chores, but also crucial emotional and material support. The looming threat of displacement brought the women closer together.<fnref n="25" /> Alev’s downstairs neighbour Cemile, the only non-Kurdish woman in the building by the time I met them, spent many hours in Alev’s company to discuss her fears of displacement, her marital problems, the mountain of debt that she and her husband Ramazan were facing, and the difficulties of finding another apartment.

Cemile’s marriage had begun to deteriorate after Ramazan signed away their shared six-bedroom flat. She was stressed and angry over Ramazan’s “idiocy”, and he had started to become violent towards her during their increasingly frequent fights. The crucial support of her female neighbours helped her a lot, she told me later. Both Alev and Esma regularly took her in when Ramazan had again thrown her out of their shared house, and once even went to the project sales office to hold Fatih Bey and his colleagues accountable. The women blamed them for the abuse their neighbour Cemile now suffered at the hands of her husband. Cemile said:

> Go and ask Esma! The whole house went [to the sales office] and told them: you just come and see how badly Cemile Abla is being beaten up because of you. My husband even threw me out of the house. [points] He opened this door and threw me out. He said, leave, go wherever you want. Whose fault was that? Theirs!

Esma also offered to speak to the lawyer she had hired to claim her late husband’s inheritance for her child when Cemile started to consider getting a divorce.

Most of the women had little or no say in what happened to their homes, because title deeds were in their husband’s names. They were not being consulted by their families or the developer over alternatives and the options they had. Fikriye, a Kurdish woman in her thirties who shared a two-bedroom apartment with her husband, three small boys and a newborn baby girl lived on the top floor of the building in Tree Street. Her husband was working long hours as a porter [*hamal*] in the Istanbul neighbourhood of Eminönü<fnref n="26" />,

<footnote n="25">25 This manifested also in political engagement. In the 2011 national elections Cemile, a long-time AKP voter, was swayed to cast her ballot in favour of the independent candidate, a well-known film director backed by the pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party (BDP). Alev, who was invested in the Kurdish struggle and interested in politics, had jokingly rallied for that candidate for months in front of Cemile, and praised him as “handsome”. Cemile later told Alev that she had voted for “one of yours this year”.</footnote>

<footnote n="26">26 The historic district of Eminönü has been a centre of business and trade for centuries. Narrow paths and steep, often very crowded streets prevent lorries from passing through, which is why porters</footnote>
and was therefore often alone at home with the children. The family was quite poor even for Tarlabaşı standards. Contrary to Alev, Fikriye did not work outside the home and was dependent on others, her husband, her relatives, and the charity of her neighbours. After the first families moved out of Tarlabaşı, the presence of drug dealers and non-resident sex workers on the streets increased, and a general feeling of insecurity worried those that had stayed behind. Because Fikriye was alone and did not dare to send her small boys to buy food from the cornershop after nightfall, Alev often did it for her, and generally kept an eye out for the other woman.

<figure><img src="image_29.png" /><figcaption>*Staircase socialising*</figcaption></figure>

Photo by Jonathan Lewis

The women's local solidarity network had taken a first hit early in project negotiations. Two former (female) neighbours had sold their apartments early on during the negotiation stage and left the building, which was cause for reproach from the remaining women in Tree Street and who blamed them for their lack of neighbourly solidarity. I never met either of them. Cemile told me that one of these women had agreed to sell her apartment at the very first meeting with the municipal lawyers and *GAP İnşaat*. While she added that the woman “had wanted to leave anyway to be with her son in Eskişehir”, it was clear that she resented her neighbour’s decision because, she felt, it had weakened her own resolve. “They did not object to anything, never! That’s why it all happened the way it did. Because they never objected to anything, we never even thought of [resisting] either.” Alev was more direct. She blamed the two defecting neighbours for the eviction of all remaining residents in the building. “I swear, those people made a mistake. If we had all stuck together, they wouldn’t have been able to do anything.”

carry heavy loads (up to 200kg) on their backs. *Hamallık* is an extremely precarious occupation, as it does not provide any form of financial stability or social security.
Alev's outgoing personality, her resolute demeanour in the face of threats by the municipality and the *GAP Inşaat* lawyers and her decision to fight them in court led her other neighbours to seek her out when they wanted to talk about their fears and worries regarding the renewal project. Even though she was younger than all the other women, she was the one who often gave them advice.

Despite the closeness of the women to each other, the network that connected them was ultimately tethered to place and very fragile. After all of them had had to move out, and despite most of them finding at least temporary accommodation in the immediate neighbourhood that put all of them within walking distance from each other, mutual visits grew infrequent. And since they did not live in the same building anymore, the nightly chats and the sharing of chores ceased altogether.

Contrary to Wacquant's claim that residents will seek to exit a stigmatised neighbourhood as soon as they are able, many Tarlabaşı residents displayed a profound attachment to their *mahalle* based on a wide variety of reasons. Rather than distancing themselves from their deeply tainted neighbourhood, residents challenged the stream of negative representations of it (Kirkness 2014: 1289). They defied stigmatised aspects of Tarlabaşı through ideas of mutual care, solidarity, kinship ties and strong community relations (Nayak 2019: 936).

By describing Tarlabaşı as a real *mahalle*, a spatial qualifier that evokes socially virtuous traits that are not commonly associated with the “modern” neighbourhoods that are increasingly replacing them, residents insisted that Tarlabaşı, too, was in fact a virtuous place and worth saving. Despite the problems and tension that existed in Tarlabaşı as they do in any other neighbourhood, it was evident that people felt a strong connection to their *mahalle*. For many, these ties were born out of necessity and for a lack of alternatives. They were dependent on the relatively cheap rents, on the proximity to a large number of service jobs in Beyoğlu, and on the existence of minority group networks they could fall back on for support. However, as the above examples have shown, belonging in Tarlabaşı did not mean the mere absence of exclusion, but real inclusion and access to the basic accommodation of a social contract that is available to those who are members of a traditional *mahalle*. Many of the minority groups that had access to such crucial support struggled to find it elsewhere. Furthermore, Tarlabaşı was a place of memory for the many people who have lived in the neighbourhood for years, who were raised there, who found a home after experiencing the trauma of displacement, who established strong neighbourly ties, and who built a business there. Highlighting social relations of everyday life rescripts a neighbourhood as stigmatised as Tarlabaşı and challenges the stigmatising narrative. Such a portrayal speaks to the kind of deep ties and relations of mutual support and solidarity that can be found in a *mahalle* but are erased in outsider accounts and the negative frame put forth by project stakeholders and much of the media (see August 2014; Nayak 2017; Cairns 2018).
<figure><img src="image_30.png" /></figure>
## Chapter six: Have you heard?

In 2006, the Beyoğlu Municipality convened a meeting with Tarlabaşı residents to discuss a possible regeneration of the neighbourhood financed by a World Bank loan. Municipal officials told attendees that property owners would be able to renovate their own properties with the help and guidance of municipal authorities and public institutions responsible for the preservation and upkeep of listed buildings. Residents were told that nobody would be displaced. For the most part, the community welcomed the idea, as people generally agreed that the housing stock in the neighbourhood was in dire need of repair. Furthermore, regulations and conservation norms concerning the renovation of listed buildings in Tarlabaşı had prevented house owners from investing in their properties, and several people had been slapped with fines for undertaking repairs without consulting officials and obtaining required permits.

Second-hand furniture seller Cemal, the 60-year-old Turkish man who had sold his five-storey Levantine building on Tree Street, recalled his initial excitement at the prospect of a neighbourhood upgrade: “We were not against the project. Tarlabaşı needed renovations. We were happy about the idea, and we thought that we would make gains from it.” However, for more than one year there were no further news about the proposed World Bank-financed regeneration project. But rumours began to circulate in the neighbourhood. Some property owners had received letters from the municipality and corporate lawyers that worked for a project developer, inviting them to engage in one-on-one talks. Were these sales negotiations? Would the World Bank regeneration project actually happen? But now there was talk of demolitions – was that true? Would people lose their homes after all? Some property owners, like the retired Turkish couple Cemile and Ramazan, were suddenly unsure of their plans to take on a considerable debt to undertake urgently needed home renovations. Furthermore, the media began to report on the Romani neighbourhood of Sulukule that was being evicted under contentious municipal renewal plans. Was Tarlabaşı in danger of suffering the same fate? Tarlabaşı residents were suddenly afraid that they, too, would receive meagre compensations and lose their homes and businesses. The municipality stalled and put to rest individual fears of displacement. Cemile proceeded to take out a loan, buy new PVC windows and a new balcony door, and hire painters and plasterers. At the same time the municipality tried to negotiate with some property owners, and it was one of their
private lawyers who was finally able to obtain hard information: the urban regeneration scheme was going to be implemented on the basis of a public-private partnership between the Beyoğlu Municipality and construction company GAP İnşaat, a subsidiary of Çalık Holding, a business conglomerate then under the leadership of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's son-in-law Berat Albayrak (Ünsal 2013: 140). Upon receiving such alarming news, some property owners called for a meeting with the municipality, where they learned that the municipality had declared Tarlabaşı an urban renewal zone on the basis of Law No. 5366 back in 2006 and issued a tender behind their backs. Not they, but GAP İnşaat, who had already signed the contract, would redevelop Tarlabaşı. Some residents learned this, together with the rest of the Turkish public, from the media. Cemile had to obtain this information from the same municipal officials who had previously told her that no demolitions would take place. She was not the only one who later told me that the shock of the news had made her and her husband sick. In later conversations residents blamed at least two strokes and one death in Tarlabaşı on the distressing revelation that a large part of the neighbourhood would be destroyed, and everyone evicted.

Even after the public announcement of the Tarlabaşı renewal project, access to information for residents remained difficult. During the three months that the Tarlabaşı Association had a seat at the planning table, and therefore (limited) access to renewal proposals and strategies, there was somewhat more transparency. When association spokesman Erdal Aybek ran the consultation office on Tarlabaşı Boulevard, residents were able to find out who had already sold their buildings or homes, and who had not. However, most other reliable information was hard to come by. It became an even rarer commodity, and one that was more difficult to decipher when the association fell apart, and project stakeholders started to liaise with property owners individually. Just like Cemile, residents were given conflicting information from various – or the exact same – actors. In the same way that the materiality and content of the promotional material changed, information radically fluctuated over time, in tandem with radical shifts in the project and the general political and economic context.

This lack of information and transparency provided the perfect breeding ground for speculation and rumour. James Scott (1990: 144) writes that “rumour thrives most in situations in which events of vital importance to people’s interests are occurring and in which no reliable information or only ambiguous information is available.” Because the channels of reliable information were intentionally strangled or obscured by the municipality, residents had to rely on rumour to navigate the preparations for the project and base their decisions on whichever rumour seemed the most likely. Even data gleaned from sources like municipal press releases did not have more value than a rumour, because there was no single reliable channel of information. All little pieces of information delivered by whatever means, be it the municipality, the *muhtar*, a lawyer, or a conversation overheard somewhere, had the insecure, unreliable status of hearsay.

Rumours could be pessimistic and defeatist, and sometimes they could be reason for renewed hope that the project might stall or change to the advantage of residents. Some rumours centred on possible resistance, and others conspiratorially whispered of project stakeholders' nefarious efforts to break it and make the neighbourhood look worse than it was. More often than not, rumours were confusing and paralysing, making residents second-guess their own decisions. In November 2011, when evictions and demolitions were
well underway, furniture seller Cemal told me that “someone from the municipality” had told him that stakeholders were lacking the funds to continue the project and might yet resort to asking people to renovate their individual homes, just as the municipality had initially suggested in the 2006 meeting. If true, these were not welcome news for Cemal. He had signed over his title deed early on during the negotiation phase and exchanged his building for two apartments in the new project. He was therefore dependent on the project to continue as planned. The “information” he received came from an individual municipal official he had randomly encountered in the street and was not more than a rumour, but Cemal had no way of knowing if it was credible. It contradicted media statements previously made by mayor Ahmet Misbah Demircan, and the information Cemal had been given in talks with the notorious deputy mayor Fatih Bey. Cemal was desperate to know when he would be able to access the two new apartments. By 2011 he had already spent years without being able to collect the rent from the tenants he had lost together with his property. The promised deadline for the official opening of the new development and the handover of apartments had long passed, and no new final date had been given to future owners. Anthropologist Jayaseelan Raj (2019: 53) underlines that it is irrelevant if rumours are accurate and based on “facts” because they have real life consequences. Cemal had to decide on how to react to the conflicting information he had received, but how? Should he act on the rumour he had heard on the street, for example by taking legal action, or by rallying fellow property owners who were in a similar situation? Or should he trust official channels of communication and dismiss this disquieting rumour as unlikely? The instability of available information stemmed partly from the uncertain accuracy of the information itself, but also from the unpredictability and unreliability of the source delivering it. After all, Cemal was given contradictory information from different people who nevertheless all worked for the municipality. Thinking of himself as a law-abiding citizen and a Turk who, if not entirely trusted, nevertheless respected the authorities, he was unsure if the word of a lower municipal official could be trusted over public statements made by the mayor himself. Then again, project stakeholders had not been open and transparent either and some of what the mayor had promised, like the microcredit for owners to renovate their own homes, had turned out to be untrue. Cemal’s Kurdish shop neighbour Maher dismissed either source as untrustworthy, as both were representatives of the Turkish state. Cemal was at a loss. What would be the most sensible decision?

Despite the fundamental impact that the planned urban renewal project would have on their lives, Tarlabaşı residents were given very little information on the planned procedures, the legal steps, or the timeline of the project. The municipality and the project developer fully exercised their power over the dissemination of information and peoples' time in order to pressure them to leave. They made people wait, both for personal appointments and as a community as a whole. They deferred plans without explanation, leaving people to guess if this happened for a lack of funds or for political gain, for example prior to local and national elections. The municipality toyed with residents' hopes and told them that they might not have to leave for a while, only to then rush parts of the project along unexpectedly (Sakızlıoğlu 2014b: 215). They also used elements of surprise to shock residents, for example by sending riot police and armoured vehicles for an eviction without clear prior announcement that the people in question would have to leave
that day. During the years of nerve-wrecking delays and project changes, people had to contend themselves with “anxious, powerless waiting” (ibid.).

<figure><img src="image_31.png" /><figcaption>*Fencing in the renewal area*</figcaption></figure>

Photo by Jonathan Lewis

In the absence of meaningful information, they resorted to speculation and the circulation and interpretation of rumours in an attempt to make sense of the continued ambiguity. Anthropologist David Samper (2002) writes that rumours are more likely to develop when the need for news and reliable information is not, or not sufficiently, met. He defines a rumour as “unverified information that is constructed in order to explain uncertain, ambiguous events or intangible fears, anxieties, or perceived dangers. It emerges in situations where news and information is scarce” (ibid.: 4). It is not surprising that rumours fall on most fertile ground in life-threatening situations, such as war, epidemics. Famine, or riots (Scott 1990: 144). The looming menace of displacement and the fear of losing one's home, work, and social network presented a threatening situation for people living in Tarlabaşı. In their seminal work on rumour, sociologists Gordon W. Allport and Leo J. Postman (1947) point out that, in situations of crisis and confusion, both the importance and the ambiguity of information increase considerably. The reasons for this initial ambiguity can vary. It can be caused by the absence of information as well as by a lack of clarity in the information someone receives, or by the fact that conflicting versions of information have been spread. It is also possible that the person receiving the information does not manage to comprehend it, for example because of the scientific complexity of the reported facts that may require expert knowledge (ibid.: 2).

In Tarlabaşı, scraps of information, and clues scoured from direct or indirect interactions with the municipality or the developing company, from the media, from marketing materials, or simply hearsay, were eagerly interpreted and retold. Rumours, as
they travelled through the communication channels of the community, underwent small alterations, depending on who was retelling the “facts” and who was listening. Rumours were therefore a tool of sense-making during a time of growing and stressful uncertainty, a “tactic of the weak” (Scott 1985, 1990) that aimed to glean as much information as possible from their surroundings. In circumstances where people’s safety, livelihoods, and homes are potentially threatened, they have no other choice than to “keep their ears close to the ground” (Scott 1990: 144). The example of Cemal illustrates how Tarlabaşı residents were burdened with the task of interpretative labour, forcing them to constantly evaluate the sources of information and their trustworthiness. For that they had to rely on their personal history and their previous experiences. People decided if and to what extent they trusted a particular piece of information according to their own wishes and expectations, which in turn determined what they communicated to others. “As rumor travels it is altered in a fashion that brings it more closely into line with the hopes, fears, and worldview of those who hear it and retell it” (ibid.: 145).

In this chapter, I examine different forms and functions of rumour during the run-
up to evictions and analyse how rumour interacted with territorial stigmatisation in Tar-
labaşı. While the relation between rumours and violence (Kirsch 2002a; Samper 2002;
Stewart and Strathern 2003; Bhavnani et al. 2009; Espeland 2011; Santos 2021.), as well
as between rumour and stigma (Varas-Díaz et al. 2005; Zhu and Smith 2016; Bresnahan
and Zhuang 2016; Kwesell and Jung 2019) have been extensively researched, the link be-
tween rumour, territorial stigmatisation, and the violence of eviction and displacement
remains a gap in the literature. My fieldwork in Tarlabaşı has shown that rumour can
provide explanations in that context.

Demolitions

<figure><img src="image_32.png" /><figcaption>Photo by Jonathan Lewis</figcaption></figure>
The symbolic denigration of the neighbourhood was a constantly renewed process of undermining peoples' social and moral authority, denying them the access to some basic form of social contract, including the right to reliable information and transparency. The municipality's strategy of actively withholding or confusing reliable information had profound legal impacts and material consequences for residents, such as the denial of their rights to recourse, their right to institutional inclusion, and protection from a state in which they were citizens. While these forms of denigration took different shapes, they were all bound up in stigma and intentionally marginalising.

Being forced to rely on rumour was therefore both a material consequence and a mechanism of the neighbourhood stigmatisation. And as I have shown in chapter two, the invisibilisation of residents, which is causally linked to the withholding of information, was part of the stigmatisation process. In a way, the rumours, and the massive amount of interpretative labour that went into their assessment and interpretation, were part of peoples' tactics to cope with the material consequences of stigma. On the other hand, withholding of reliable information was part of the everyday work that agents of the state and the developers were doing to make the stigmatisation of the neighbourhood stick. In the following pages I aim to show how the lack of information and circulating rumours made it difficult for house owners and tenants to make sense of what was going to happen to their homes and their neighbourhood, and thus difficult to plan or take actions about how to deal with looming evictions.

Firstly, I will show how a certain rumour gained momentum in the neighbourhood, how it was interpreted by different people, and how, through a chance encounter, this specific rumour was put to rest. I will then elaborate on how residents, unable to verify the accuracy of the information they received, tried to analyse the channels of communication that the information was spread through, and how their own personal experiences influenced the way they might reach a conclusion of what to believe and act on. Following that I will give examples of rumours that created stronger solidarity ties in the run-up to evictions, as well as examples of rumours that weakened them. And finally, I want to show how residents used rumour to make sense of the stigmatisation and the discriminatory treatment they felt they were subjected to by the municipality.

## The scope and life cycle of a rumour

In June 2010, Feyzullah Yetgin, then a board member of Çalışk Holding and the CEO of its construction company *GAP İnşaat*, publicly said that 75 percent of all property owners in Tarlabaşı had reached an agreement with the municipality, and that demolitions were imminent. Yetgin argued that the majority legally necessary for the start of the project had thereby been reached. His statement was widely published in the mainstream media. Two months later, Beyoğlu mayor Ahmet Misbah Demircan claimed that 70 percent of property owners had sold their title deeds to the municipality, and that compulsory purchase proceedings had been launched for the remaining 30 percent (NTV 2010).

These statements created a wave of panicked rumours amongst residents who were still in dispute over their property, and amongst tenants who lacked the access to infor-
mation on when they would be evicted.<fnref n="1" /> It is impossible to verify if the public claims made by Yetgin and Demircan were true at the time. Contradictory as they were in their chronology, they likely were not. The Tarlabaşı Association was adamant that the number of sold title deeds at the time was considerably lower. Furthermore, both men failed to mention that a considerable number of residents were still opposing their expropriations in court, and that the court case to stop the entire project, initiated by the Istanbul Chamber of Architects (TMMOB) in 2008, was ongoing. And both the executive and the mayor glossed over the threats, blackmail, and lies that had preceded a number of “agreements” made with residents. And even if their numbers were (close to) being accurate – and none of the residents had any means to verify this independently of the media reports – their statements clearly meant to inject fear into the neighbourhood and motivate property owners to sign over their title deeds by insinuating that sales negotiations would soon be replaced by legal expropriations.

It is just as impossible to determine if project stakeholders deliberately spread rumours in order to further their interests, but it is certain that they contributed to their spread. Intentionality in the rumour process is complex (Scott, 1985; Kapferer 1990; De Feyter 2015). Sophie De Feyter (2015: 291) underlines that “[e]ven if rumour-mongers are eyeing certain interests, this does not necessarily mean that a rumour was started by a particular actor with the deliberate intention to influence public opinion on a large scale”. Actors who are involved in spreading rumours are “profiteers”: while they might not be the authors of a certain rumour, they do have an interest in seeing the rumour spread in order to further their aims (ibid.: 297).

The above media statements were made during a time of growing uncertainty in the neighbourhood. The Tarlabaşı Association had succeeded to considerably delay the progress of the renewal project and to rally support from a number of local and international civil society organisations. During that time, *GAP İnşaat* and the municipality followed the strategy of approaching religious charitable trusts [vakıflar] and other larger institutions who owned property inside the renewal zone. Additionally, they made revised offers to some property owners, predominantly to those who owned large properties and properties in advantageous locations, in order to convince them to restart one-on-one negotiations. They also contacted individual property owners who were not members of the Tarlabaşı Association in the hope to persuade them (Ünsal 2013: 134). None of these efforts were made public, and none of them were transparent for residents. They were nevertheless aware of them, as bits and pieces of information travelled through the neighbourhood. This only increased the uncertainty and provided ample fodder for rumours of a growing number of property owners who were secretly attending negotiation meetings and selling their properties (ibid.: 135). Furthermore, the press announce-

<footnote n="1">¹ It was common knowledge in Tarlabaşı at the time that project stakeholders were legally authorised to expropriate the remaining buildings if they came to an agreement with 75% of homeowners. However, originally there was no law that stated this. I was told by a fellow researcher that the law was later modified to legalise threats of and actual appropriations, but I have not been able to independently confirm this. Tarlabaşı residents believed this regulation to be law at the time, which drove the resulting panic. This is further proof of how incoherently and constantly the stakes, and, in this case, literal laws changed during the time residents had to interact with the project.</footnote>
ments that more than 70 percent of properties had been sold were made at a time that the association's provision of information was faltering, as spokesman Erdal Aybek had left over disagreements with the board. That meant that residents had lost the option to verify which title deeds were still in the hands of their Tarlabaşı owners, and which title deeds had already been sold. Tenants had started to move out, fearful that they might find themselves homeless, which in turn put pressure on landlords unwilling to sell, as they were losing rental income without compensation or the possibility to find new tenants. In short, both *GAP İnşaat* CEO Yetgin and the Beyoğlu mayor exploited and fed into an already well-established rumour, which convinced some residents that it must be true.

Alev was one of the property owners who fought compulsory purchase of her fam-
ily's apartment in court. The title deed of the three-bedroom flat was in her mother's
name.<fnref n="2" /> Since Alev's mother she did not understand or speak Turkish Alev accompanied
their lawyer to the courthouse. One day after a hearing in January of 2011, Alev started a
casual conversation with one of the project lawyers in the hallway. The tone of their con-
versation was pleasant, and Alev felt comfortable enough to complain about the pace of
the Tarlabaşı cases being reviewed. In reply, the project lawyer accidentally told her that
the property sales were not going as fast as the mayor had previously alleged. A few days
later Alev retold the story in her home:

So the lawyer told me: 'We are three lawyers. I am in charge of [court cases for] one hundred houses. By myself.' So I said: There are three lawyers, that makes three hundred houses, if each lawyer is in charge of one hundred. But I thought half of Tarlabaşı has already been sold? So how is that possible? [...] Then [the lawyer] started to get nervous. I said: that's a nice number. If this is how it is, not many people have sold [their homes]. Most court cases are still ongoing then. [The lawyer] said: 'Yes, that's mostly the case.' Because [this information] had already slipped out of her mouth.

Alev was delighted when she told me about this encounter. She felt that she had gotten
the better of the project lawyer in the courthouse. Even more importantly, she had fi-
nally received some tangible information. She judged the lawyer's blunder to be more
reliable in part because she had the impression that the woman told her about the lag-
ging sales by mistake. The fact that the developers and the municipality were still battling
such a large number of cases in court was not meant for the ears of property owners who
were resisting compulsory purchase. The lawyer's immediate discomfort following her
slip of tongue suggested to Alev that this unintentional private comment was the truth,
even though it contradicted stakeholders' previous claims that the necessary majority of
property owners had already come to an agreement with the municipality. For Alev, this
inconsistency was less surprising than it could have been. Her experience with Turkish
state institutions and agents of the state had been almost entirely negative, and she did
not trust the municipality or the pro-government developers to tell residents the truth
and defend their best interests. It follows that when she got one of their lawyers to slip
up in the courthouse corridor, she knew that she had succeeded to catch a glimpse of

<footnote n="2">2 Alev had worked hard to be able to buy the apartment for her family while still in her late teens. She told me that she had not wanted to put it in her father's name because her father was so "good-hearted" and would give away the apartment to help "the first relative in trouble who would ask".</footnote>
the offstage, the hidden transcript (Scott 1990) that powerholders did not want Tarlabaşı residents to see. This knowledge strengthened her resolve to pursue legal steps against the municipality, and to follow through with a court case before the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.

Alev chose how to act based on her interaction with the project lawyer and on the interpretation of the information she received from her, even if this piece of information was still just rumour, and not an authoritative fact. Those never existed. For Alev, the rumour that more than 70 percent of property owners had come to an agreement with project stakeholders was therefore laid to rest. Despite the fact that the lawyer's information could not be independently confirmed and that it contradicted what the mayor and the project company had publicly claimed, Alev picked it up as a trustworthy piece of information, that aligned more closely with her hopes and her previous experiences with the Turkish state.

## Traffic analysis

Neither Alev nor second-hand furniture seller Cemal had any way of verifying the information they received. In order to assess their response based on what they heard, be it in the corridors of a courthouse or during a random encounter on the street, they needed to consider the person who told them, and the circumstances under which the news had been delivered.

If people have no access to material fact of a piece of information, they make their determinations of factuality based on other aspects, such as the channel that the information moves along. This form of interpretative labour can be compared with “traffic analysis – an analytical practice more commonly associated with intelligence/espionage activities” (Clark 2016: 246). Traffic analysis is defined as “the process of intercepting and examining messages in order to deduce information from patterns in communication, which can be performed even when the messages are encrypted” (ibid.). Gretchen Pfeil (2012: 52) underlines that “traffic analysis becomes the privileged mode of interpretation precisely in those cases where other aspects of communication are obscured or occluded.”

This is what happened with the rumours in Tarlabaşı. People did not have access to information of where a rumour originated, and whether it was truly fact. However, it was possible to know who spread them and under which circumstances, and some sources were considered to be more reliable than others. The process that people based their reactions to rumours on were, to say the least, complicated. Whether someone sold their house could come down to the question of who was considered a credible source of information, and who was not.

The rumour that the legally required 75 percent of property owners had signed over their title deeds to project stakeholders had been delivered by senior officials and through the “serious” channels of mainstream media. And the stakes were high. Worries over possible disadvantageous expropriation agreements amongst property owners increased the pressure. Tenants were afraid that their landlords had sold their buildings without telling them, leaving them at the mercy of the municipality and the project
developer. Whispers of residents that this had happened to (and it did happen) further
fuelled this fear. These fears accelerated the domino effect of them moving out, forcing a
number of property owners to consider selling as their rental income vanished. However,
at the same time the Tarlabaşı Association was still lobbying for fairer negotiations and
more profitable deals. Residents often knew property owners, or tenants of property
owners who were still deadlocked in legal disputes with project stakeholders over the
sale of their title deeds. It was difficult for residents to decide whom to believe.

It is therefore no surprise that people tried to estimate the veracity of the mayor's and
the GAP Inşaat CEO's statements from conversations with neighbours, landlords, shop-
keepers or an occasionally passing low-level official. They tried to keep track of people
who had moved out and observed which buildings had been abandoned. (However, since
the knowledge of who was a tenant, and who held a title deed was often confined to their
immediate surroundings and not known to each resident for the entire project area, this
was in no way a reliable method to reach a conclusion.) Rumours about how many build-
ings had been sold were avidly exchanged. Knowing, at least approximately, how many
people were still negotiating with the municipality was important to decide if further
resistance was a good idea, or possibly detrimental to the final sales price of one's prop-
erty. It is important to note that project stakeholders had an interest to fuel the belief that
most property owners had reached an agreement, since they wanted to force doubters to
follow suit and accept cheaper sales prices. GAP Inşaat representatives and municipality
officials regularly threatened property owners with dropping sales prices should they be
amongst the last to agree.

Having to rely on traffic analysis is in itself not that unusual. For example, one might
do this during personal conflicts, or to assess the efficiency of a work meeting. However,
in Tarlabaşı the stakes to come to the most accurate conclusion based on the analysis
of communication channels and signs were incredibly high. Residents faced displace-
ment, loss of income and their social network, and in many cases, being evicted from
a house they owned without adequate compensation. People had to rely entirely on ru-
mour, without any underlying layer of statutory fact that they could somehow find and
compare. They had ample proof that everybody interested in the progress of the renewal
project was lying to them: the municipality, the developer, the project lawyers, zabıta of-
ficers, and the media. Alev had been “lucky” in the courthouse and decided that it was to
her and her family’s advantage to appeal the low price the municipality had wanted to
pay. Cemal, on the other hand, had more difficulties to discern the best possible action
based on his conversation with a zabıta officer, as he was not only interested in the fast
completion of the project, but also reluctant to flatly dismiss the words of the Beyoğlu
mayor.

Interpretative labour

There was not only a lack of reliable facts, but the information that was made available
was constantly changing. The project catalogues analysed in chapter three are an impor-
tant example of that. Project deadlines had come and gone without any real progress and
without explanation from the municipality. Most crucially, residents were largely kept
guessing as to when they would have to leave their homes and workplaces. There were multiple reasons for that. In some cases, tenants who lived or worked in buildings whose owners were locked in court disputes with the municipality had no way of knowing what the outcome of these court cases would be, and when they would come to an end. Tenants whose buildings had already been sold received eviction orders from the municipality but were also told by individual municipal officials that they could stay "until the start of demolitions". They were not told, however, when that might be. Many tenants struggled to find new lodgings and had nowhere else to go. Property owners who opposed compulsory purchase orders had to depend on the slow, and often erratic, timeline of the courts. And even with ongoing court cases, such as the trial initiated by the Chamber of Architects, the municipality illegally pursued evictions, and later, demolitions.

Unverified scraps of information became rumours that residents had to weigh for their credibility in order to make a meaningful decision on how to react to it. In the same way that certain groups experienced stigma differently and depending on previous collective or individual experiences, all interpretative labour was informed by a person's personal history and previous experience, their relationship to the source of the rumour, their political affiliations, and their own expectations.

With the summer of 2010, the rumours of expropriations and the de facto dissolution of the Tarlabaşı Association, much of the talk in the neighbourhood centred on the question when evictions and demolitions of homes would really begin. Temporal markers like national elections, religious holidays, or the return to school in the fall were all feared possible starting points. These rumours were in turn fanned by project stakeholders. Again, people tried to guess the “right” course of action from conversations with neighbours, from things they had randomly overheard, and from events happening around them. Again, project stakeholders did not volunteer reliable information.

In January 2011, rumours on pending demolitions caused a renewed wave of fear in the neighbourhood. One evening, Cemile joined Alev and me to talk about the latest snippets of information they had heard.

A: [cheerful] Girl, there will be demolitions in February, have you heard?

C: That's what they're apparently saying in the association, I don't know about that.

A: Who in the association said this? How can they start to demolish, half of the houses are still disputed in court! That would be illegal.

C: Vallah, in the teahouse they say that there has been talk of it.

A: But where do they know this from?

C: I don't know either. I just got here. I haven't yet talked to my husband. [In the teahouse] they asked me what I was going to do, but I told them, look, now I'm really depressed, don't talk to me right now. That's how I left it. There's nothing we can do now.

Alev, had left the Tarlabaşı Association in 2011 and hired her own lawyer because she did not believe the association to be very effective or even trustworthy, which made her sceptical about all unverified information coming from that group. Alev wanted to exhaust all court instances in Turkey to be able to take her case to the European Court of Hu-
man Rights, because she was convinced that the project and the planned expropriations were unlawful. This was only possible if all instances of Turkish courts rejected her claim. Her belief that the dispute *would* go all the way to Strasbourg reflected her distrust in the Turkish judicial system and the state, whom she did not view as a reliable “provider of justice” (Biner 2012: 243). Despite her bad experiences with unjust laws, she did believe that “the law” as an abstract and “a normative order of potential social justice” (Eckert 2012: 152) would protect her against arbitrary illegal actions by the state. It is one reason why she dismissed the rumour of the February evictions. Julia Eckert (2012: 150–151), in her research on the “rumours of rights” in an Indian slum, demonstrates how law appears “as a site of hope, of a just world in which the poor would not lose out.” She shows that marginalised groups, despite their adverse experiences with the law as it was enacted by state institutions, place their hope in a “diffuse idea of law” (ibid.) that, in their opinion, will deliver (social) justice.

Alev’s hope to attain justice rested on the law (as an abstract), and less on political means such as demonstrations or protests, a phenomenon analysed under the term of “juridification”: “[P]eople demonstrate a startlingly persistent faith in ‘the law’, as evidenced by their ever-increasing recourse to legal means to settle conflicts” (Eckert et al. 2012: 5–6). While this may lead to depoliticization, it is a tactic that is increasingly being used by marginalised groups to hold the powerful to account. A detailed analysis of the perception, especially among the Kurdish population, of the European Court of Human Rights as an almost mythical institution that infallibly delivers justice is beyond the scope of this work. Suffice it here to say that the court was often mentioned as *the* place that would stand up to the Turkish authorities in the fight against evictions from Tarlabaşı, and most often by members of the Kurdish community.

Cemile, on the other hand, reacted very differently to the rumour of pending evic-
tions. Her family’s adverse experience with legal procedures, due to the way in which
project stakeholders pressured her husband into signing away their title deed, had weak-
ened her trust in the idea of “justice”. While her two adult children, both employed in
white collar jobs, argued that their father’s signature had been coerced, rendering the
contract null and void, the family lacked the economic and social capital to pursue legal
action and never formally contested the agreement. Cemile said that she “did not know
how” to pursue a court case, and that they “did not know anyone who could have pushed
such an endeavour”, and, on another occasion, that she “did not want any money” and
that she “simply didn’t see the point”. Despite having been property owners, Ramazan
and Cemile had never been members of the Tarlabaşı Association, because, she told me
roughly a year after her eviction, she did not believe that the association would have
been able to halt the project: “What could they do? The association did not serve any pur-
pose. Everyone protested, but [the project stakeholders] kept saying: we will demolish
this place.”

By January 2011, the precariousness of their situation was putting considerable strain on Cemile. She suffered from insomnia, anxiety, and chronic stress. Her marriage had deteriorated. This partly explained her morose reaction to the rumour she had heard in the teahouse. She told Alev and me what she had told her unknown interlocutor: that she was “depressed” [moralım bozuk] and therefore not willing to discuss the information she had received further. Though it was only based on hearsay and not more credible than
any of the other fearful estimations of when demolitions would begin, I sensed that it
had significantly lowered her morale.

Furthermore, she was not reassured by Alev's comment that evictions before the con-
clusion of all court cases would be illegal, or that this would stop project stakeholders.
Cemile did not believe in the justice of the Turkish court system, and unlike her younger
neighbour, she also did not believe in any kind of abstract idea of The Law as a site of hope
and possible opposition to injustice. This negative view of what The Law could or could not
do for her partly stemmed from her family's recent encounter with actual lawyers who
had abused legal tools in order to force her husband to sign the sales contract. A number
of scholars have underlined the importance of past events and experiences for the pro-
duction and spread of rumours (Kapferer 1990; Stewart and Strathern 2003; Greenhill
and Oppenheim 2013; De Feyter 2015). Based on her recent history Cemile did not be-
lieve that any kind of justice system could protect her. Alev, on the other hand, had hired
a lawyer, closely followed each judicial step, and was set on exhausting all legal avenues
available to her because she was confident that justice and The Law, once freed from the
confines of Turkish state discrimination, would prevail. For Cemile, an ethnic Turkish
woman who had never had any legal troubles before, this was the first time that she was
confronted with such lawlessness and injustice from the Turkish state, and she experi-
enced this as a deep betrayal of her as a citizen. It made her hopeless and passive. Alev
already knew what Turkish state institutions were capable of in terms of structural and
physical violence. Her trust in a vague notion of the law was not anchored to the Turk-
ish judicial system, but outside of Turkey, in the European Court of Human Rights, an
institution she believed would protect her and her neighbour's rights and deliver (social)
justice. She knew that in order to be able to litigate her case, she had to fight and exhaust
all legal avenues in Turkey first. As one consequence of this, Cemile's reading of the sit-
uation had a paralysing effect on her solidarity with others, such as Alev, and her will to
oppose the project.

Tenants: Between a rock and a hard place

Around the same time, the continuous delays of project key points and the resulting de-
ferment of its completion fuelled rumours that the developer had vastly miscalculated
costs and run out of money. A number of residents wondered if the renewal project might
be postponed for a longer period of time, or if it might be shelved altogether. This was
similar to what the zabıta officer had told Cemal. Starting in 2011, I noticed the circula-
tion of rumours that alleged a fallout between GAP İnşaat and the Beyoğlu Municipality
over financial matters. Whispers that neither party could agree on how to proceed fu-
elled hopes – I have to admit that I, too, was susceptible – that the demolitions might be
stalled indefinitely. It was impossible to verify these claims. However, some tenants de-
cided to stay put which put them at considerable risk. They partly based that decision on
the rumours that evictions were far off, or would perhaps never materialise at all. Kur-
dish second-hand furniture seller Maher was the tenant of a small shop and the above flat
where he lived with his wife and three children. He also rented a shop for his grown-up
son in the vicinity of Tree Street. As the (alleged) dates of planned evictions neared, Ma-
her said that it was near impossible to find affordable spaces under similar conditions in the neighbourhood. His livelihood and that of his older son were tied to Tarlabaşı. While he was searching for alternatives, he decided to stay put despite receiving a string of eviction letters. The rumours that the project would be postponed were more convincing – and more manageable – to him than the municipal correspondence. Furthermore, these letters contradicted the messages and rumours he heard more and more often in his daily neighbourhood interactions.

I asked both the municipality and the company when they would start with the project, and they said: oh, it will take a very long time [moves his arm in a gesture that illustrates this]. At this rate it will take at least 20 years to demolish Tarlabaşı. Why? Look, it takes them one month to fix ten metres of asphalt on one street.<fnref n="3" /> Nothing is clear here. I heard that the municipality has pulled out [of the project] for a while. Some say that the company fired three different [subcontractors]. And they said we could stay in our houses until the bulldozers come. They said we can stay and that we don't have to pay rent until then, they said otherwise other people would come in and squat these buildings anyway. That's what I'll do. They said that they won't throw anyone out on the street. But then they throw them out and seal the doors to their houses! It's like a children's game. They said we can stay until they start to demolish, and afterwards we can fuck off and go wherever. I have received [eviction] letters, but I haven't signed anything. I didn't open them anymore. They want us to leave right away, but they haven't even started to demolish yet! They should come and buy all the houses, then they can put people out on the street and demolish all the houses! We can stay until they start to demolish, and that's a long time away.

Maher's Kurdish landlord had sold his building to the developer in early 2010. This had left Maher to renegotiate all further rental agreements with project officials and their lawyers. As a tenant he had next to no judicial recourse to appeal his pending eviction, or to demand compensation. In Turkey, housing legislation provides almost no protection for tenants against arbitrary rent increases or eviction, and existing regulations are rarely enforced by state institutions charged with their oversight. Few people rely on the justice system to settle rental disputes. Furthermore, written contracts are rare, which leaves tenants vulnerable to abuse by their landlords. In Tarlabaşı, rental agreements were frequently based on verbal negotiations. Housing arrangements with relatives or compatriots were based on kinship ties rather than legally binding contracts. Therefore, information and queries about money, the necessity of renovations or the sale of a building were based on kinship norms rather than on the less socially charged relationship between landlord and tenant. In the framework of the renewal project this could mean that details of the sales negotiations were not openly discussed between landlords and tenants who shared family or kinship ties, for reasons of propriety or custom. This of course added to tenants' uncertainty about if and when they would have to leave.

<footnote n="3">³ At the time of our conversation, the municipality was renewing the pavement on Tree Street, presumably to prepare for the passage of large construction vehicles. Work on the street proceeded very slowly, which caused anger amongst local residents who suffered from the disruption caused by the dirt and the noise.</footnote>
Maher never received a written contract from his new, temporary landlords, but was initially told that he and his family would be able to stay without paying rent for at least another year. However, he soon began to receive ambiguous and conflicting information concerning his rental status. Official letters that set an eviction date for mid-summer of 2011 started to arrive. Yet in January 2011 Maher was told by civil servants touring the neighbourhood, somewhat randomly, that he should “leave right away”. A few weeks later a *zabita* officer told him during a chat on the street that the renewal project was in fact far from nearing completion, and that he would be able to stay in his home and shop until “the arrival of the bulldozers”. The officer did not specify when that would happen, but implied that this would take a long time.

This left the burden of interpretative labour to Maher. It was impossible for him to know which of the conflicting messages he received was credible enough to act on. He was unable to distinguish inaccurate from accurate information if he ever came across it at all. He therefore based his decision on prior experiences and his hopes for the future (Scott 1985). One could argue that the official eviction letters were the most tangible piece of information he had and likely to be the most definite. However, Maher also knew that other official statements, for example the claim that no resident would be victimised or claims concerning the project timeline, had been false. Besides, he had nowhere else to go, which made the rumours about the delayed project at least more pleasant to believe.

Maher deployed a very limited arsenal of “weapons of the weak” (Scott 1985) in order to strengthen the rumours of delay for himself: he did not open, or did not react to, official letters threatening eviction in the summer of 2011 – he dragged his feet as much as possible – and feigned a certain amount of ignorance despite the risk of being forcibly evicted. His banking on a scrap of unreliable information given to him by a *zabita* officer on the street, a man he had a friendly relationship with and to whom he had often offered glasses of tea, over the official eviction letters of municipal lawyers was also informed by his deep distrust against Turkish state institutions. Since his forced displacement from their home village in Siirt, promises by the Turkish government to compensate him and his family for their losses and to restore a sense of justice had not materialised.<fnref n="4" /> His personal history and his identity as a Kurdish man shaped how he made meaning of the various rumours he had heard. Anthropologist Julia Eckert (2012: 154), in her research on how rumours of rights interpret, communicate, and shape legal norms and laws, underlines: “Rumours, more than any other kinds of knowledge and because of their particular uncertainty, are strongly shaped by fears and hopes, and thus on the one hand by norms of what should or could be, and on the other hand by social constructions of dangers and threat.” In Maher’s case, the deep distrust in the state and its institutions, paired with his precarious situation as a tenant who had nowhere else to go, led him to favour rumours relayed to him by a minor municipal official he had a prior relationship with over, in his eyes at least equally unreliable, written municipal orders of eviction.

<footnote n="4">4 Failures of the Turkish state to compensate victims of the violent conflict in the southeast have been well-documented (Ayata and Bilgin 2005; Kurban et al. 2007; Biner 2012).</footnote>
Creating opposition

Rumours have been discussed in the context of insecurity and uncertainty, for their po-
tential to instigate violence (Stoler 1992; Kirsch 2002a; Osborn 2008), to express collective
fears (Kaler 2009; De Feyter 2015) and exacerbate social tensions (Stewart and Strathern
2003; Espeland 2011). However, they can also play an important part in fuelling hope.
Scholars have shown that rumours can lead to more unity in a beleaguered community,
and that they might encourage people to look for solutions. David Samper (2002: 17),
drawing on the work of Ralph Rosnow, Gary Alan Fine and Tamotsu Shibutani, writes
that rumours can “create cohesion in social groups”. His findings reveal that the exchange
of stories that reflect collective worries and anxieties among members of a concerned
public bring people together and strengthen community bonds, solidifying the social
network. They might even lead to open defiance: “Rumors, shaped by the historically con-
stituted experience of a community, allow people some measure of joint control over am-
biguous, stressful situations; they affect the solidarity of a group, creating a public that
can then participate in collective action. As counter-hegemonic discourse, rumors may
lead to resistance” (ibid.: 2). Rumours might also stand at the beginning of hopeful action:
“People act on rumours of possibilities, of opportunities; many a strategy, many a plan
or endeavour is motivated by rumours of possibilities”. Economic investments, specu-
lation or migrations to safety are all examples of how rumours motivated people to be
optimistic about outcomes and take certain risks (Eckert 2012: 155).

In Tarlabaşı, even if the municipality was able to capitalise on the existence of certain rumours, they were unable to control how they would play out on the ground. On 11 August 2010, the first day of Ramadan, the grassroots organisation “SOS Istanbul” held a public protest against the planned demolitions on Tarlabaşı Boulevard. Around fifty people participated, including a handful of local reporters and non-resident activists. Three large banners bearing the three letters “S”, “O”, and “S” and the logo of the initiative were unveiled on building façades facing the street. The organisers read a press statement that called on “all concerned institutions and all attentive citizens to protest against this secretly and quietly conducted project”. There was no visible municipal or police presence.

On the morning of the same day a small number of construction workers and one
mechanical digger moved into the neighbourhood to demolish the remaining shell of an
abandoned house, a ruin really, on Old Fountain Street. It was the first municipality-led
demolition in the renewal zone since the official announcement of the project in 2008.
When returning home from the protest, some people noticed the ongoing construction
work, but to my surprise, nobody was alarmed. (I, on the other hand, was shocked. For
me it was a tangible sign that the project had really started.) People were mostly incensed
that the AKP municipality would authorise such a measure on the first day of Ramadan. It
was not entirely clear to me if they were upset because they saw it as a provocation nobody
expected during the fasting month, or because the messy tear-down caused considerable
dirt and noise.

A handful of residents inquired about what the construction workers were doing,
but the all-Kurdish work crew somewhat timidly replied that they were not authorised
to give out any information about the demolition, or about possible future demolitions
in Tarlabaşı. They unsuccessfully tried to prevent journalists, most of whom had been