Suchergebnisse

AbstractThis article demonstrates residents' transformative practices and discusses attendant outcomes to contribute to an understanding of state‐built housing estates for people affected by urban transformation projects. It draws upon ethnographic fieldwork conducted in a social housing estate (K‐TOKI) in the Northern Ankara Entrance Urban Transformation Project (NAEUTP). It addresses questions on why formalization of informal housing takes place today, under what conditions it is countered by re‐informalization practices, and what the outcomes of this process are. As informal housing became formalized by NAEUTP, gecekondu dwellers were forced into formalized spaces and lives within K‐TOKI, which was based on a middle‐class lifestyle in its design and its legally required central management. Informality re‐emerged in K‐TOKI when the state's housing institution, in response to the estate's poor marketability, moved out, allowing residents to reappropriate spaces to meet their needs and form their own management system. When cultural norms that are inscribed in the built environment and financial norms that treat residents as clients conflict with everyday practices and financial capabilities, the urban poor increasingly engage in acts of informality. I argue that the outcome of this informality in a formal context is a site of multiple discrepancies.

This article aims to develop a critical approach to squatter (gecekondu) studies in Turkey and investigates the various representations of the gecekondu people in these studies in different periods by placing them in their social, political and economic contexts. It details changes in the representation of the gecekondu population from the 'rural Other' in the 1950s and 1960s, to the 'disadvantaged Other' in the 1970s and early 1980s, to the 'urban poor Other(s)', the 'undeserving rich Other(s)' and the 'culturally inferior Other(s) as Sub-culture' between the mid 1980s and mid 1990s, and finally to the 'threatening/ varoşlu Other' in the late 1990s. It asserts that, while the approach to the gecekondu people varies from an elitist one, to one which is sympathetic to the gecekondu people, this group, nevertheless, has been consistently the 'inferior Other' for Turkish gecekondu researchers.

This article investigates patriarchy in the context of migration to cities in Turkey. It focuses on the ways in which patriarchy reproduces itself in the lives of migrants – for example through the local community, which reproduces traditional patriarchal control in the urban context, and through the social construction of female labour within the framework of the ideology of familialism and the housewife ideology in which women's economic contributions are devalued. Furthermore, the labour market, which offers low‐level jobs for migrant women, as well as growing concerns about moral corruption in the city, inflated by the media, act to keep women at home and inside their communities under the control of 'their men'. The article also examines the attempts of individual migrant women to create niches for themselves in which they enjoy some autonomy and find personal meaning. This suggests a dynamic relationship between women and patriarchy. By examining the significant role of culture in reproducing patriarchy, the article contributes to a further elaboration of the concept of patriarchy developed by Walby.Cet article étudie la patriarchie dans le cadre de la migration urbaine en Turquie. Il s'attache aux modalités d'auto‐reproduction de ce système dans la vie des migrants, notamment: la régénération, par la communauté locale, du contrôle patriarcal traditionnel dans le contexte urbain; la structure sociale du travail féminin dans le cadre idéologique du familialisme et de la femme au foyer, les contributions économiques des femmes y étant dévalorisées. En outre, le marché du travail (offrant des postes peu qualifiés aux migrantes), et les préoccupations croissantes de corruption morale dans la ville (amplifiées par les média) participent au confinement des femmes à la maison et dans leur communauté sous le contrôle de 'leurs hommes'. L'article retrace également les tentatives de certaines migrantes pour créer des niches individuelles où elles jouissent d'une certaine autonomie et trouvent un but personnel. Cela suppose une relation dynamique entre les femmes et la patriarchie. En examinant le rôle important de la culture dans la reproduction de ce système familial, l'article affine le concept de patriarchie développé par Walby.

The mass migration from rural areas to larger cities in the Third World and the rapid social changes entailed by this transformation have attracted the attention of social and political scientists since the 1950s. The problematic issue of the "integration" of rural migrants into the urban society and the changes this transformation has brought about have long been among the most studied questions. Yet they still call for more research to increase our understanding of the phenomenon, particularly in our era, which is witnessing radical shifts from earlier times in terms of social, economic, and technological characteristics. The question of "integration to what?" becomes important in political and practical terms. In the 1950s, when mass migration to cities started, the answer to this question seemed quite clear. The cities were the places of the modernizing elites, especially in the case of Ankara, the capital of the modern Turkish Republic. As in other Third World countries, the modernizing bureaucratic and military elites of the early republic, who had assumed the role of transforming the society into a modern, Western one, regarded the city as an effective means for the acculturation of its inhabitants to modern–Western values and ways of life. The modernization theory, which maintains a dichotomy between rural and urban, supported this idea.

This article investigates the expeNences of rural migrant women in an apartment district and a squatter (gecekondu) settlement in Ankara, Turkey. It demonstrates the significant role the housing environment plays in the lives of women, both by defining who they are and by shaping their daily lives through encouraging some behavior and discouraging others. Gecekondu housing is potentially a source of negative identity for those migrant women whose reference group is the modem established urbanites, whereas those migrant women who take the gecekondu community as their reference group tend to preserve a positive image of themselves. On the other hand, apartment housing enhances a feeling of achievement in its residents of village origin. Furthermore, gecekondu housing encourages intimate social relations and thereby social control, whereas apartment housing demands some formality in neighborly relations and provides privacy. As social agents, women use their environment actively, attempting to foster certain images of themselves, and communicafing those images to others as well as to themselves. This is particularly apparent in the case of modern gecekondu women who, by their outward appearances and demeanor, challenge the negative image attributed to gecekondu residents by the larger society.

This article argues for the need to understand gendered dimensions of space in a contextualized way. It investigates residential space in three different types of housing settings of the poor, namely, a peripheral squatter neighborhood coded by rurality, a central slum neighborhood coded by criminality, and the housing estates in squatter/slum renewal projects coded by middle–class urbanity. Based on two field studies conducted in Ankara, Turkey's capital, it challenges the feminine–private versus masculine–public dichotomy: With women's presence inside the neighborhood, the squatter area was a "feminine space," whereas, with the violent control of neighborhood spaces by local men, the slum area was a "masculine space." Through its association with urban modernity, the public/private divide was enforced in the housing estates. While in the first housing estate, women's informal practices in its public spaces "feminized" and "ruralized" the estate, in the second housing estate, it made women feel safe inside apartments.