Çağlar Keyder: Istanbul Between the Global and the Local

Istanbul: Between the Global and the Local (1999) is the volume edited by the Turkish sociologist Çağlar Keyder, a professor at Boğaziçi University and Binghamton, that analysed how Istanbul went, from the economic liberalisation of the 1980s, from national industrial capital to a city aspiring to be global, and what that transition cost its residents. Its thesis is that Istanbul's globalisation took place on a city largely built informally, the gecekondu raised by Anatolian migrants since the 1950s, and that the arrival of international capital, skyscrapers and image projects turned that informal land into a commodity, fragmented the urban fabric and sharpened inequality.

Gecekondu and the populist pact: Istanbul before 1980

Keyder reconstructs the earlier city. Between 1950 and 1980 Istanbul multiplied its population with rural migrants who housed themselves in gecekondu, homes self-built overnight on public land, tolerated by governments and regularised in successive amnesties in exchange for votes. That populist pact produced a city of informal peripheral neighbourhoods with ambiguous ownership, precarious services and strong community networks, governed by a developmentalist state that protected national industry. Turgut Özal's opening from 1983 broke that model and exposed the city to global flows of capital, tourism and consumption.

Informal land turned commodity: towers, malls and enclaves

Globalisation changed the land market. The volume's authors show how gecekondu land, once regularised, became an asset: owners built upward, developers bought in, and informal peripheries turned into apartment blocks. At the same time, along the Levent and Maslak axis rose the office towers, shopping malls and hotels of the global city, and on the shores of the Bosphorus and in the northern forests, gated communities for the new upper classes. The resulting fragmentation, luxury enclaves beside migrant neighbourhoods, is the landscape Keyder describes as a city of separate worlds.

Refah, TOKİ and the megaprojects: the politics of the global city

Politics accompanied the process. In 1994 the Islamist Refah party won the Istanbul mayoralty with Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, supported by the gecekondu neighbourhoods the secular elite had abandoned, and the volume analyses how the global city and popular religious politics grew together. The following decades confirmed the diagnosis: the state housing agency TOKİ and the urban transformation law of 2012 demolished neighbourhoods such as Sulukule and Tarlabaşı in the name of seismic risk and renewal, displacing their residents, and megaprojects such as the new airport, the third bridge and Canal Istanbul carried urbanization into the forests and water basins of the north.

Gezi 2013 and later research: the local resists

Resistance also went global. The Gezi Park protests of 2013, which began against the construction of a shopping mall on one of the last green spaces in the centre, turned the defence of public space into the largest citizen movement in recent Turkish history. Later researchers, from Ayşe Çavdar to Tuna Kuyucu, have followed Keyder's line to study urban renewal, TOKİ public housing and the financialisation of the city, and their work shows that heritage, the Bosphorus and the historic neighbourhoods are now the fronts where the global and the local contest Istanbul.

The lesson of Keyder's volume is that a city does not become global without deciding what happens to the city that already existed. Istanbul built its modernity on informality and then turned that informality into a market, and the result is a metropolis of sixteen million with an inequality and fragmentation the towers do not hide. For planning, it is the case that shows integration into the global economy can be done by expelling the poor or by recognising their rights, and that this choice is political before it is economic.