Pardoning Kaçak: politics of building amnesties and the making of the (im)moral urban economy in Istanbul

ABSTRACT

Like many metropolises in the global South, unregulated/informal (kaçak) construction is not an exception in Istanbul, but rather the norm. Most recently, in a 2018 building amnesty dubbed as ‘the Building Peace’ (İmar Barışı), 1.8 million kaçak structures in Istanbul were pardoned by the government. Given the ubiquity of building amnesties of this sort and their failure to prevent unregulated construction, this article questions what role the concept of kaçak plays if it fails to mark a boundary between formal and informal. By tracing the long history of building amnesties and examining how Istanbulites have partook in the 2018 Building Peace, I suggest that kaçak is an ongoing conversation on value in the city. Contrary to mainstream accounts that reduce building amnesties to mere populism, I understand kaçak, a la Ayşe Buğra (1998), as an important component of a larger urban moral economy through which conceptions of justice, reciprocity, public amenity, and good life are constantly negotiated. Thinking through the negotiations over kaçak allows us to see a multi-valent urban moral economy, illustrated in the article through the example of Kuzguncuk neighborhood where ultimate legalization of kaçak housing is contingent upon resident’s consent to an urban renewal project.

KEYWORDS:

• Building amnesty
• urban informality
• Istanbul
• moral economy
• formalization

Acknowledgement

All translations from Turkish are mine. I am grateful to Emrah Yıldız, the editor of this SI, for his endless patient and guidance. For their insightful comments on the earlier versions of this work, I would like to acknowledge the participants of two “Kaçak” conferences, one hosted by the Keyman Modern Turkish Studies Program at Northwestern University and the other supported by the Wenner Gren Foundation. The comments of the anonymous JCE reviewers are much appreciated as they helped me significantly to sharpen my arguments. I would like to express my gratitude to the Center for Spatial Justice for granting me access their gecekondu achieve. I would also like to extend my thanks to Yaşar Adnan Adanalı, Erbay Yucak, and Atila Yılmaz for their insights on the 2018 Building Peace.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 İmar is an Arabic word that means liven up, improvement, development (of a place). İmar Affı, as the legislative action that legalizes illegal settlements, has been translated into English in three different ways as construction amnesty, zoning amnesty, and building amnesty. Although neither of these translations is inaccurate (as the amnesties of this kind may offer some degree of forgiveness to violations regarding zoning, construction, as well as land tenure and titles, all of which can be labeled as kaçak), in this paper, I will be using the term building amnesty as it is a preferred phrase in non-Turkish contexts as well.

2 For more on the relationship between gecekondu amnesties and general elections, see Özler 2000.

3 The research that made this paper possible is threefold and was conducted in separate episodes extending over several years in late 2010s. The archival portion of the research is based on ‘the Gecekondu Archive 1932–2016’, a digital collection of 1500 gecekondu-related newspaper articles compiled by Center for Spatial Justice, an Istanbul-based non-profit that I am personally affiliated with. I was also able to follow ‘the Neighborhood Walks’ program conducted by the center which familiarized me with Istanbul’s old-gecekondu neighborhoods, their tenuous property regime and community organization that they founded to fight against urban renewal-led evictions. The more specific anthropological field knowledge on Kuzguncuk stems from my ongoing engagement with the neighborhood which I have been regularly visiting since 2013 as an activist, a researcher and as well as an educator accompanied with students. In the aftermath of 2018–2019 Building Peace, I conducted several unstructured interviews with Kuzguncuk residents, urban activists, planners, and realtors asking specifically about the impact of the amnesty program.

4 Literary meaning ‘landed overnight’, gecekondu is a Turkish term used for informal housing in the country flourished since the second quarter of the twentieth century. While words like ‘shanty’, ‘slum’, and ‘squat’ are all used interchangeably as rough translations of the gecekondu form, the gecekondu term is often used untranslated in the literature as a distinctive self-standing informal housing category (Karpat 1976; Tas and Lightfoot 2005; Erman 1997). While slum and shanty connote overcrowded, underserved, debilitated housing, gecekondus of Istanbul now have access to municipal services and public amenities (Baharoglu and Leitmann 1998) and often come with a small garden or a courtyard. More critically, and highly more pertinent to this paper, the gecekondu has historically been quite successful in acquiring legal recognition unlike most counterparts (Mahmud and Duyar-Kienast 2001).

5 By 2021, Istanbul’s current population stands at 15.8 million (TURKSTAT, 2022).

6 Table data compiled from Erbaş 2018; Gürkaynak 2018; Tercan 2018; Özlüer 2018; Boz and Çay 2020; Giritlioğlu and Özden 2020; Genç 2014.

7 The project is expected to lead to a series of publications the first of which is a book of conversations with leading gecekondu experts/activists by Adanalı (2020).

8 As I was completing the final round of revisions for this article, Turkey was struck by a series of deathly earthquakes in February 2023 with casualties reaching upwards of 50,000 in multiple cities across the Eastern Anatolia Fault line. With tens of thousands of collapsed buildings – formal, kaçak, and pardoned – the earthquake revealed the shoddy building practices in the country and turned critical eyes to the routinely passed building amnesties. President Erdoğan, once the eulogist for the 2018 Building Peace, shifted gears and promised to outlaw building amnesties altogether, as a new building amnesty drafted by his party in preparation for the May 2023 Elections was shelved quietly.

9 Upon criticism three special protection zones were also left outside the scope of the legislation. These exceptions are the Bosphorus Coastline and its foresight area and the neighborhoods around Sultanahmet and Süleymaniye Mosque in Istanbul Historic Peninsula and the Gallipoli Historical Area in Çanakkale.

10 The Building Peace failed to sway the March 2019 Municipal Elections for the government despite the continuing hype and publicity around the program. The election cost AKP several mayoral seats in multiple metropolitan cities including İstanbul and Ankara.

11 Like urban informality, building amnesties are not unique to the cities of the Global south nor do they only formalize slums. One of the countries that frequently resort to building amnesties is Italy where building amnesties have been regularized since early 1980s (Chiodelli 2019; Clough Marinaro 2021). Chiodelli (2019) reports that many structures pardoned by recent amnesties are gated large estates or residential complexes build on cheap agricultural land owned by powerful families associated with organized crime.

12 While this story is widely circulated in the neighborhood as sign of diversity and tolerance, Mills’ account debunks it (2010, 208).

13 Conversations at a local coffeehouse, December 2019.

14 Interview, 55-year-old male, January 2021.

15 Interview, 64-year-old male, December 2020.

Additional information

Funding

Funding support from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement no. 680313).

Notes on contributors

Sinan Erensu

Sinan Erensü is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, Turkey.