Stigmatizing Discourses in the Legitimization of Renewal Projects in Informal Housing Areas and the Historic Urban Center in Istanbul, Turkey

This paper aims to evaluate how discourses and accompanying interventions on the housing areas of the urban poor have evolved since the 1950s in Turkey, exemplified in the case of Istanbul. After 1950s, the import-substitution industrialization necessitated low-paid labor force in industrial establishments located in a few cities, including Istanbul. The governments directly or indirectly supported the development of informal housing areas, which served to decrease the cost of reproduction as well as state expenditure on housing. Those housing areas also helped building survival strategies for the urban poor through embedded social networks and mutual help mechanisms.

Since the mid 1990s, the vision of Istanbul as a center of international finance and tourism has guided the new urban policies, based on the development of real-estate and construction sectors. Therefore, urban regeneration/ renewal practices have become the major tool of urban policies, leading to an intensified pressure on the housing areas of low-income population in central locations. In the last decades, this pressure was coupled with disinformation and stigmatizing discourses, prevalent among the members of a hegemonic urban coalition, consisting of central and local governments, state institutions as well as developers, land owners, professionals, and the leading media. These discourses try to legitimize the clearance of those informal housing areas by stigmatizing the inhabitants as “invaders” or “criminals”.

In this paper, the findings of the research made in six urban regeneration/ renewal areas will be utilized together with a comprehensive study of the leading media to analyze the changing discourses of prominent actors on the housing problem of the urban poor. This analysis will also cover the accompanying laws, regulations and implementations, which have led to the displacement or eviction of disadvantaged segments of population in most cases, as well as social movements for the right to housing and the city.