Muhtars becoming real estate agents: Changing roles of neighborhood representatives in relation to the state-led urban transformation in Çinçin, Ankara, Turkey

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates the changing roles of muhtars (neighborhood representatives) through the state-led urban transformation of a gecekondu (squatter housing) district named Çinçin, close to the historic center of Ankara, Turkey. Muhtars are specific actors in the local government, elected independently of political parties as respected members of neighborhood communities, having social and political roles entailing leadership and mediatorship. However, scholarship exploring muhtars as key social figures and active urban agents is limited. The present study draws on fieldwork mainly conducted in the summer of 2019, including in-depth interviews with muhtars and residents still living in Çinçin, revealing that the muhtars of gecekondus played an active role in initiating urban transformation processes in association with formal agents. Alongside negative consequences such as increasing crime rates and forcible displacement of residents, the social power of muhtars over their neighborhoods has diminished; they have recently been working more as unofficial real estate agents than social figures. This case provides a specific reading of local social actors and their roles, blurring the lines between informal and formal processes of state-led urban transformation.

KEYWORDS:

• Muhtar
• social actors
• urban transformation
• Çinçin
• gecekondu

Acknowledgments

The fieldwork of this article, based on my dissertation research at Middle East Technical University (METU), was partially supported by Koç University - Vehbi Koç Ankara Research Center (VEKAM) in 2019. I am indebted to my supervisor, Prof. Dr. Güven Arif Sargın, for his invaluable guidance throughout my doctoral studies. I would like to thank the members of my scientific committee, Assoc. Prof. Dr. Ela Alanyalı Aral, Prof. Dr. Namık Günay Erkal, Prof. Dr. Helga Rittersberger-Tılıç, and Assoc. Prof. Dr. Nurbin Paker Kahvecioğlu, as well as Dr. Hülya Demirdirek and Assoc. Prof. Dr. Burak Erdim, for their thoughtful engagement over the course of my research. I would also like to thank Leslie Demir, anonymous JUA reviewers, and the editors of the JUA and its Scholar Development Program for their intense readings and motivating comments on this article. Finally, I am indebted to the participants of my fieldwork for generously sharing their spatial experiences with me.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. As a strategy, I started the unstructured interviews by asking participants random biographical questions, such as where they were born or where they went to school. While processing the interviews, I used pseudonyms instead of real names to preserve the privacy of the participants (Aykaç, 2020b, pp. 13–35).

2. The Kemal Zeytinoğlu and Server Somuncuoğlu neighborhoods in Çinçin have the names of politicians (fieldwork, 2019).

3. In many academic sources, Çinçin is defined as one neighborhood, the Gültepe neighborhood (Ankara Kalkınma Ajansı, 2011; Güzey & Aksoy, 2014; Yılmaz, 2010). However, it is defined as a district of six neighborhoods by two biographical novels of the 1980s (Güney, 1977/1980; Seyman, 1986) and by the residents who participated in my fieldwork in 2018 and 2019. In the search for the names of these neighborhoods, municipal documents revealed that three neighborhoods (named Gültepe, Plevne, and Aktaş) were enlarged in 2014 over five others (named Çalışkanlar, Server Somuncuoğlu, Kemal Zeytinoğlu, Özgürlük, and Atilla). The Gültepe neighborhood was then enlarged over the Plevne and Aktaş neighborhoods in 2019.

4. Composed of a community council of elders and helpers (ihtiyar heyeti and azalar), who are all volunteers for the muhtar.

5. Helpers of the muhtar volunteer; they are not paid by the government like muhtars are. Since they are all unsalaried, they are typically already retired from other sectors (The Law on Muhtars in Cities and Villages, 1944).

6. According to the latest law on municipalities (2005), the responsibilities of a muhtar under the governance of the district municipality are defined as followed:

A neighborhood is administrated by the muhtar and the council of elders.

• -Establishment, abolishment, merging, and separation of neighborhoods within the municipal boundaries as well as determination and alteration of their names and borders should be decided by the municipal council (belediye meclisi) and the decision should be approved by the governor (vali) with the input of the district governor (kaymakam).

• -The muhtar is obliged to determine common needs with the voluntary participation of the residents, to improve the quality of life of the neighborhood, to maintain relations with the municipality and other public institutions and organizations, to provide opinions on the issues related to the neighborhood, to cooperate with other institutions, and to perform other duties given by law.

• -Within the boundaries of the municipality, a neighborhood cannot be founded if the population is under 500 (as a part of rescaling; hence, the number of neighborhoods was diminished).

The municipality provides the necessary assistance and support to meet the needs of the neighborhood and the muhtarlık, and to solve the problems within the limits of budgetary resources. It considers the common requests of the neighborhood in its decisions and tries to ensure that services are administered in accordance with the needs of the neighborhood. (The Municipality Law, 2005 [translated by the author])

7. People’s houses (halkevleri, the plural form of halkevi) were initiated as a part of the modernization process by the state in 1932 in Turkey. Therefore, they symbolized the leftist, secular project of modernization and were mainly located in city centers between 1932 and 1951. The opposition party, the Democrat Party, came to power in 1950 and closed the people’s houses in 1951 (Toksoy, 2007). In 1963, those centers were opened again by civic communities in many locations such as low-income gecekondu neighborhoods, independently of the government. Those civic centers acted as umbrella organizations of the leftist activists in Çinçin between 1963 and 1980, and particularly in the late 1970s (interviews, 2019).

8. The Altındağ Municipality stated that “almost 45,000 gecekondus” were demolished in 2016 (Altındağ Municipality, 2016).

9. The Bahar and Sefa movie theaters (interviews, July 2019).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Koç University [VEKAM Research Awards, 2019].

Notes on contributors

Gülşah Aykaç

Gülşah Aykaç received her B.Arch (2009) and MSc. (2013) in architecture from İstanbul Technical University (ITU). She earned her PhD degree in architecture from Middle East Technical University (METU) (2020). She has been focusing on urban theory and history, sociospatial narratives of urbanization in Turkish context, diverse urban histories, and contemporary work and labor processes in urban design and architecture.