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Views on a new Near East

Tarlaba Is Renewed
NearEastQuarterly Saturday, June 11th, 2011

By Constanze Letsch

Constanze Letsch moved to Istanbul in 2005 has been working as a freelance journalist, research consultant and literary translator ever since. She is currently pursuing a PhD in cultural anthropology about the impact of gentrification on the urban poor at the Europe University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder), Germany.

The Istanbul neighbourhood of Tarlaba has long been the black sheep of the chic and rapidly gentrifying central Beyolu district. While in the proximity of Taksim Square, Cihangir and Galata, very few Istanbul visitors would ever stray into Tarlaba and most Istanbul residents avoid setting foot in the area, for fear of its reputation as being inhabited solely by robbers, drug dealers and terrorists. But the current AKP Municipality under Mayor Ahmet Misbah Demircan is now set to change the image of the neighbourhood by implementing a radical urban renewal project dubbed Tarlaba Yenileniyor Tarlaba Is Renewed. In 2006 the Turkish Cabinet turned a 20,000-square-metre part of the neighbourhood into an official Urban Renewal Area. The following year, the tender for the planned project was awarded to GAP Inaat, a subsidiary of alk Holding. The CEO of the holding company is Berat Albayrak, the son-in-law of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoan. However, the residents and house owners in Tarlaba were only informed about the tender and planned demolition of their properties in 2008.1 Two
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years previously, the municipality had spoken 2 of World Bank assistance and micro-credits to assist people in renovating their homes. But this did not last long. Glossy brochures published by the municipality show 15-storey buildings with glass fronts, and computer-generated residents in business suits holding cell phones and shopping bags. As it is now, the renewed Tarlaba will likely not be the neighbourhood of the urban poor, of the transsexual sex workers, of Roma and marginalised migrants on their way to Europe. People have living around the Tarlaba area of Istanbul since the mid-16th century, when non-Muslim diplomats began to settle in the imperial Ottoman city. However, it was not until 1870, after a fire consumed large swaths of the wooden buildings in Pera (todays Beyolu), that the municipality itself a new administrative concept in the city laid out the district at the drawing board for the first time. It would follow Western standards in its planning, with most houses built in stone to diminish the ever-present danger of fire. The new Tarlaba then became the neighbourhood of the non-Muslim lower-middle classes: Greek, Armenian, and Jewish craftsmen, smaller merchants and employees catering to the businessmen and diplomats working in the countless embassies and companies on and around Istiklal Caddesi, today Beyoglus main shopping avenue. The houses in Tarlaba are unique examples of turn-of-the-century Levantine architecture in Turkey: slim, four-storey bow-fronted homes that huddle along narrow streets. The ground floors often served as stores or workshops a very large percentage of the furniture in Istanbul at that time came from carpenters in Tarlaba. Erol Usta, who, together with his brother Erdal has been running a workshop for ud (lute) and saz for 37 years still remembers the time when Tarlaba was a centre for craftsmanship: There used to be about 60 carpenters in our neighbourhood. Today only very few are left. Furniture, shoes, belts most of these things are now produced in big factories. He points to a violin displayed on a cupboard in his shop. These come from China. They dont sound as good, but are more affordable. Many of Erols customers include local musicians, often Roma and Kurds who entertain people dining in the meyhane of Beyolu. He laments the absence of his former Greek and Armenian neighbours and colleagues: Tarlaba was a very different place then, he says. With the signing of the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923, Greece and the newly founded Turkish Republic decreed a population exchange that led to an exodus of Ottoman Greeks from Turkey. Greeks residing in Istanbul were exempt from that regulation and allowed to stay at least for a while. The Wealth Tax (Varlk Vergisi), targeting non-Muslim citizens and signed into law in 1942, impoverished many of the merchants and craftsmen in Tarlaba; while some went to jail because they were unable to pay, sometimes leaving their stores and workshops in the hands of their Turkish apprentices, others simply ran out on their tax debts, abandoning everything they owned. On September 6 and 7 of 1955, after the beginning of the Cyprus crisis, the Turkish government under Adnan Menderes organised pogroms on non-Muslim Istanbul citizens during which numerous houses, shops, and churches were looted and damaged and in some cases even completely destroyed.3 An elderly Armenian resident, 24 years old at the time, recalls the attacks: A
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neighbour put up a Turkish flag in front of our store to protect it from the looters. The Greek-Orthodox church in Dolapdere was demolished; they threw everything on the floor, I saw it with my own eyes. Children wanted to pick up money that had been scattered from the collection box, but their parents scolded them and told them not to touch that filthy gavur money. (Gavur is the pejorative term in Turkish for non-Muslims.) Can you believe the attitude of these people? he added. These coins were Turkish; the money was Turkish and bore the profile of Atatrk. With tensions still high following the pogroms, many of the remaining Istanbul Greeks left the city in the years that followed. Today, very few of the original non-Muslim inhabitants are left in Tarlaba. Groups of Greek visitors can sometimes be seen searching the streets for the houses of their childhood and of their families. In the early 1950s, waves of rural migration led to profound demographic and socio-economic changes in Istanbul. 4 Empty houses in Tarlaba and other neighbourhoods were soon claimed by workers arriving from all over Anatolia. Young men started working alongside local master craftsmen, or usta, and sometimes went on to open their own stores and workshops. Riza Furat* who owns a small upholstery workshop, has learned his trade alongside an Italian master, in Tarlaba. After briefly trying to run a teahouse in the room underneath his workshop, he now works as an upholsterer full-time and provides sofas, chairs and benches to bars and posh nightclubs all over the city. I love my work, and it provides a good living for me and my wife. What else could I want? Asked what he will do once the demolitions start, he sighs and says: I will retire and we will go back to our hometown on the Black Sea, I dont have the energy anymore to start from scratch somewhere else. Yusuf Karapinar, a shoemaker, got his start in the profession at the age of 8, as an apprentice in a Greek family. They were lovely people, extremely nice to me, he said. During the month of Ramadan, they never ate in front of me and my mentors wife always insisted on cooking an iftar meal for all of us. Forty years later, Yusuf Usta is today one of the very last shoemakers in the neighbourhood and his shop is threatened with demolition. Turan Usta, who works with Yusuf and his son Kadir Karapinar and has been a shoemaker for 45 years, is angry about the prospect: If they tear Tarlaba down, it will be the end of the artisans and of the craftsmanship here. Following the military coup in 1980 and the subsequent implementation of neo-liberal policies in Turkey, radical urban restructuring in Istanbul left its stamp on Tarlaba. As in many Western cities, the rapidly expanding construction sector focused on brown- and green-field development at the urban outskirts, far away from the city centre, which was left to become dilapidated and decayed. This was especially true for Tarlaba, the lower part of the formerly elegant district of Pera; physically cut off from the rest of Beyolu in 1988 by the disputed six-lane Tarlaba Boulevard, it was literally left to rot. The Istanbul Chamber of Architects opened a court case against the then-mayor, Bedrettin Dalan, who ordered more than 360 historically protected buildings to be demolished.5 He was found guilty and sentenced to several years of prison, but never served his term. Mcella Yapc who works for the Chamber today, says: City planners and architects told Dalan that this project would abandon Tarlaba to its fate, and that is exactly what happened. While early signs of development and gentrification started to appear in other parts of the district starting in the 1990s, Tarlaba was exempt from any renovation efforts.
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The current mayor of Beyoglu, AKP politician Ahmet Misbah Demircan, has vowed to change the face of the long-neglected neighbourhood, to turn it into an upscale area complete with five-star hotels, shopping facilities and office lofts. Tarlaba Boulevard, currently lined with cheap hotels by the hour, wig shops and smaller businesses will become The Champs-Elyses of Istanbul, according to Demircan. Uur Tanyeli, professor of Architecture History at the Technical University Yildiz Istanbul, explains: In Turkey, renewal means the illusion of a historical building. It has to be clean and new. Houses should only look like they are old, and only on the very surface. It is a little like Disneyland, in fact. In a column for the Turkish daily Radikal, writer Gndz Vassaf asks: Why does Istanbul constantly strive to resemble London, Paris or New York? Is our city not self-confident enough to simply be itself? Critics of the project say that Tarlaba Yenileniyor is not only a fierce attack on the historical fabric of Istanbul, but also on its growing Kurdish population: about 80 per cent of Tarlaba inhabitants have migrated there from the Kurdish Southeast. As a result of the intensifying Turkish-Kurdish civil war, Tarlaba began to receive a large number of Kurdish migrants in the early 1990s. Many of those newly arrived had been forcibly displaced from their villages; those who were too poor to move elsewhere settled in the small, run-down apartments on the lower, less popular side of Tarlaba Boulevard. Havva Yildiz*, a housewife from Bitlis, is looking after her three children while her husband, Sakir Yildiz* from Mu, works as a cleaner in a nearby hospital, making the minimum wage of 600 Turkish Lira (TL) per month. Her youngest child suffers from asthma attacks because of the moisture in her small apartment, but the family cannot afford the necessary treatment. I hate Tarlaba, she says. Its not a good place to live. If I could, I would prefer to live somewhere else, but this is the only neighbourhood where we can afford the rent. Living costs increase every year, only the minimum wage stays the same. Her husband does not agree: I live here. This is my neighbourhood. I would not move, even if theyd offer me a luxurious villa to stay in. They destroyed our village, we dont have a house there anymore, and we cannot return anywhere. Now we are facing eviction again. In a local teahouse, many men think like him. mer Altan*, the owner, came to Istanbul from Siirt and invested the substantial sum of 50,000 TL into the renovation of his shop as recently as 2004. We wont let them drive us out this easily, he says. Osman Tulumcu*, also a Kurd from Siirt, came to Tarlaba 15 years ago and now runs a small shop selling second-hand furniture. Sometimes he misses his home village, he says, but his three children were born and have grown up in the neighbourhood: They belong here. Tarlaba is their home and it would be difficult for them to have to move anywhere else now. Osman, himself a tenant, emphasises that he does not want to be forced out of his home a second time: The government chased us 2,000 kilometres to Istanbul, and now they want to chase us out again? I dont think so. The tension in Tarlaba increases a little bit more with every eviction letter that arrives from the municipality. Speaking about the urban policy in Istanbul, Mcella Yapc points out: At this point in time cities are no longer planned in order to sustain urban peace. She adds: Once the residents are evicted, once they cannot find housing anymore and become even poorer, insecurity and crime will become even worse. As a result, you will get the total and unsettling control of surveillance cameras everywhere, of total control at all times.
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Together with TOKI, the Social Housing Administration of Turkey, the municipality does offer the residents of Tarlaba an alternative: an apartment in one of the newly built high-rises in Kayaba, a remote development zone on the outskirts of the city, a two-hour bus ride from Taksim Square. With demand often higher than supply, especially in Anatolian cities and towns, TOKI usually sells its apartments through a lottery. In Kayaba, people from the low to very low income groups and people who trade in houses classified as a danger in the event of an earthquake and this applies to house owners in Tarlaba in accordance with law No. 5366 can apply for a TOKI apartment without having to go through that process. At the moment, however, only 3 per cent of the planned 65,000 apartments target the very low income group. Apartments in this category require a monthly payment of 306 TL (approximately 139 Euros) over the course of 180 months, as well as an initial 1,000 TL fee to be paid upon application. Additional costs of the move will include bills, fees for the doorman and money for the daily commute to work. Taking one public bus and a dolmu the round-trip journey to Taksim costs approximately 8 TL, a considerable chunk out of the average Tarlaba residents salary. For many of the current Tarlaba residents, the total cost of that bill is too high. Irregular employment and pay add to the pressure; very few people living in the area have social security, some do not even have health care. Esad Yar, who has lived in the neighbourhood for years and has been told by the Beyolu Municipality to evacuate his house by the middle of March, is desperate: I would move to Kayaba immediately if I could afford it. But 306 TL a month is simply too much for me. We cannot pay more than 100 TL a month. Since he has a disability that prevents him from working, he has to rely on the very modest income provided by the rest of his family. Since they cannot afford to buy property, roughly 70 per cent of the people living in Tarlaba are tenants just like Esad Yar compared to an Istanbul average of 20 to 30 per cent. Taking on the mortgage required to buy a house in a TOKI development is a risk that could only too easily end in homelessness and the Housing Development Administration does not provide any rental housing. In a renewal project similar to the one in Tarlaba, the residents of the Sulukule neighbourhood, known as being one of the oldest Roma settlements in Europe, had been offered TOKI housing in Taoluk after their houses had been destroyed by the Fatih municipality and TOKI, in order to make room for upmarket Ottoman style villas. After only six months in the new apartments, only nine of the 300 Roma families remained in Taoluk, the rest had moved back to their old neighbourhood, often to live in tents or the ruins of their old homes, because they had been unable to pay the mortgage and to make a living. Mcella Yapc of the Chamber of Architects is concerned: A few years ago, Istanbul did not have a homelessness problem. Most people always managed somehow, either in squatter housing the gecekondu or in neighbourhoods such as Tarlaba or Sulukule. But this new demolition policy of the municipality leaves more and more out in the streets because they simply do not find any place they can afford anymore. Even architects who are involved in Tarlaba Yenilenyor are unhappy with the lack of foresight in urban planning. Tlin Hadi and Cem Ilhan, whose architects office TeCe Mimarlik is responsible for one of the renewal islands in Tarlaba, say: Of course the neighbourhood requires urgent renovation. Many of the buildings would not resist
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even a medium earthquake. And Tlin Hadi continues: But it is very irresponsible to leave urban renewal projects on such a scale in the hands of only one developer who of course will only care about making profit. The timeline of the project is still uncertain: While it was originally scheduled to be finished by 2010, only four buildings have been demolished thus far, with numerous court cases between property owners and GAP Inaat still pending. While people have slowly started to leave their homes, many residents remain, despite claims by the mayor Ahmet Misbah Demircan in August 2010 that sales agreements had been reached with 70 per cent of the house owners. Debate continues over the accuracy of Demircans claim, an assessment complicated by the fact that the percentage of tenants in Tarlaba is very high. Some tenants have stayed even though their former landlord has already sold the building to GAP Inaat some because of the proximity between their living and work spaces, some because they cannot afford to move, and others because they simply do not want to leave. Professor Uur Tanyeli sums up the problem: A city is a place for people, not for buildings. But I have the feeling that those who want to renew cities in Turkey prioritise buildings over people. We have to start to look for compromises together, and these compromises first and foremost have to include that the current residents of Tarlaba can stay in their neighbourhood if they wish.

*Names changed by the author

1. See http://www.milliyet.com.tr/2007/03/30/ekonomi/eko17.html 2. The author derived this information from interviews with several Tarlabasi residents. 3. See The Mechanism of Catastrophe: The Turkish Pogrom Of September 6 7, 1955, and The Destruction Of The Greek Community Of Istanbul, by Speros Vryonis. 4. See for example Self Service City Istanbul by Orhan Esen and Stephan Lanz. 5. Interview conducted by the author with Mcella Yapici of the Chamber of Architects.

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