Plight of Istanbul Roma Focuses Attention on Flawed Urban Renewal Plans

Their clarinetists revolutionized Roma music and their flamboyant dancers once were featured in a James Bond film. Today, the inhabitants of Sulukule, one of the world's oldest settled Roma communities, face eviction, as Istanbul spruces itself up for 2010, when the city will enjoy the designation as the European Capital of Culture. Officials insist the resettlement policy is benefiting those being displaced. But some Roma advocates suggest the government action is rooted in prejudice. Others say the debate exposes deeper problems with urban renewal efforts.

Citing earthquake risk, local authorities aim to demolish Sulukule, nestled under the old city's huge 5th century walls, and build Ottoman-style townhouses worth $77,000 apiece. "This is the most social project I have ever seen," insists local mayor Mustafa Demir, describing some of the houses marked for destruction as "hovels you wouldn't dump coal in."

"We are buying the houses from the present owners and they can move into brand-new lodgings as soon as they are finished, and pay off the difference over 15 years," Demir continued. Those unable to pay, including 450 tenant families, will be moved to new flats 28 miles away on the northern outskirts of Istanbul.

The head of a local association trying to halt the evictions, Sukru Punduk, agrees that Sulukule -- a neighborhood that never recovered from the closure of its nightclubs in the 1990s -- is in a bad way and could benefit from redevelopment. But talk of social projects makes him laugh. When renovation plans were hatched in 2005, he says, "we learned about them from the media, not the municipality."

Ceding to pressure, Punduk says city authorities now are engaging local residents in a dialogue. "But only to explain their plans, not to listen to what we want," he adds.

Punduk thinks the municipality's aim is to clear the area of its current Roma inhabitants. "Look at the models they've made of the new houses, little model people carrying laptops, middle-class people, not people like us," he says.

Sulukule is not the only area in Istanbul targeted by the government for urban renewal. Three other neighborhoods have been razed in the past 18 months in Istanbul alone, and a dozen more are on the list.

Some observers of the Sulukule saga say that to focus on "ethnic cleansing" would be to miss the main point. For them, Sulukule is just the best-known example of a much vaster -- and deeply flawed -- urban renewal scheme that constitutes a central plank of government policy.

The effects are evident in cities throughout Turkey: endless lines of brand-new, identical tower blocks, painted garish pink, green or pale blue. Most are the work of TOKI, the state body responsible for meeting national housing needs. Founded in 1982, it built 40,000 housing units in the first 20 years of its existence. Since then, bolstered by a broad legal mandate empowering it to rebuild "run-down areas," it has completed 280,000. A chief target of the agency's redevelopment zeal is what Turks call "gecekondu," or shanties built quickly and illegally by migrants from the countryside. In Istanbul, a city built close to a major fault line, TOKI wants to reconstruct 1 million buildings out of a total of 1.2 million.

While nobody doubts Turkey's often shabby cities need a clean-up, TOKI's plans leave many skeptical. Urban renewal doesn't necessarily mean knocking down and rebuilding, critics say, pointing out the frequency with which companies close to Turkey's ruling party win TOKI construction contracts. There is also unease at the increasingly harsh criticism that officials level at their critics. On November 17, for example, TOKI chief Erdogan Bayraktar suggested that people "involved in the trafficking of drugs and women" were the chief organizers of opposition to the agency's redevelopment plans.

Erdogan Yildiz is a member of a neighborhood association in Gulsuyu, an area slated for urban renewal that also occupies a potentially prime piece of Istanbul real estate high on a hill overlooking the Marmara Sea. Yildiz asserts that Bayraktar's words are based on the fallacy that people like him -- those who have lived in gecekondu -- are squatters. "Yes, our fathers built without permission, but only because they had no alternative," he says. "But we were given deeds in the 1980s, and have paid property tax ever since."

"We are not opposed to modernization," he adds. "We simply believe we are capable of modernizing ourselves without state diktats."

For Pinar Ozden, head of Istanbul's Chamber of Urban Planners, the fundamental problem is Turkey's lack of a true social housing system. "TOKI is basically selling properties to low-income families," she explains. "That's unrealistic: nowhere in the world is everybody a house-owner."

Sulukule -- where nearly half the families earn less than 500 lira ($427) a month -- offers a perfect example of the redevelopment dilemma. Many locals doubt they will be able to afford the new suburban flats -- where mortgages start at 200 lira -- let alone the houses planned for Sulukule itself. "What happens if the bread-winner dies," asks Erdogan Yildiz. "This system will cause countless human tragedies."

In some areas of Turkey, people faced with relocation have expressed a willingness to violently resist redevelopment efforts. In mid-December, the contractor rebuilding the area adjoining Gulsuyu quit after inhabitants dug a symbolic grave and stuck his name on the mock tombstone.

Neither Punduk nor Yildiz think violence will solve the problem. Yildiz has helped found a platform -- now comprising 16 Istanbul neighborhoods -- which he wants the municipality to sanction as an official interlocutor in the ongoing dispute.

Punduk, meanwhile, has pleaded his case to Turkish deputies and the European Parliament. His aim, he says, "is to turn Turkey into a country where the people talk, rather than being talked at."