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‘No one is larger than the state.’ Consent, dissent,
and vigilant violence during Turkey’s neoliberal
urban transition
Defne Kadıoğlu Polat
To cite this article: Defne Kadıoğlu Polat (2021): ‘No one is larger than the state.’ Consent, dissent, and vigilant violence during Turkey’s neoliberal urban transition, Southeast European and Black Sea Studies, DOI: 10.1080/14683857.2021.1909290
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14683857.2021.1909290
© 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
Published online: 31 Mar 2021.
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ARTICLE
‘No one is larger than the state.’ Consent, dissent, and vigilant
violence during Turkey’s neoliberal urban transition
Defne Kadıoğlu Polat
Institute for Urban Research, Malmö University, Sweden ABSTRACT
Tophane is a conservative quarter in central Istanbul that has become known for its political support of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). This support has included violent vigilantism against oppositional groups. In the last decade, since gentrification has become more tangible in the area, violence has also turned against perceived newcomers and outsiders. Gentrification, however, is openly condoned and politically enforced by the AKP. Taking the neoliberal transformation of a neighbourhood in Istanbul that dis-plays strong support for the governing party, as a starting point, this article engages with the governance of dissent and the production of consent on the sub-city level. I employ the Gramscian notion of the integral state to argue for a dialectical understanding of consent production in which consent and coercion are seen as intertwined, rather than opposed. To specify this point, I focus on the important, yet ambiguous, role of local state- and party-cadres (local intermedi-aries) in Istanbul’s urban governance. Drawing on ethnographic field-work and interviews, I show that the neighbourhood in Turkey is a crucial political arena in which intermediaries function as important links between civil society and the state apparatus.
ARTICLE HISTORY
Received date 18.1.21 Accepted date 23.3.21
KEYWORDS
Istanbul; gentrification; consent; integral state; local intermediaries;
neighbourhood
Introduction
The question of how consent is produced during times of rampant neoliberalism, economic and political volatility and democratic backsliding is a challenging one. Why do, for example, ordinary people lend support to populist parties that undermine their material interests and infringe on their rights? Some clues can be taken from the field of urban studies, since the production of consent for neoliberal urban policies and projects has sparked ample interest among scholars (McGuirk 2004; Loopmans 2008; Slater 2014; Holgersen and Baeten 2016). In Turkey, for example, corporatism, ideological alliances and political polarization, as well as paternalistic redistribution schemes, figure promi-nently among the explanations why residents are either actively supporting urban trans-formation projects or – at least – fail to resist (Kuyucu and Ünsal 2010; Karaman 2013; Çavuşoğlu and Strutz 2014; Gündoğan 2019). While some of these analyses draw on specific neighbourhoods to illustrate differences in mobilization (Gündoğan 2019;
CONTACT Defne Kadıoğlu Polat defne.kadioglu@mau.se Institute for Urban Research Malmö University 205 06 Malmö, Sweden
© 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.
Kuyucu and Ünsal 2010), the neighbourhood itself is typically not highlighted as an arena for the production of consent.
In this paper, I aim to zoom in on the neighbourhood as a distinct space of urban governance (Tomba 2014; Massicard 2015; Tang 2019). More specifically, I focus on the question, how is dissent managed and consent maintained in the context of a Istanbul neighbourhood that displays strong support for the governing party and the state?
As a case study, I present the central Istanbul neighbourhood of Tophane, located at the shore of the city’s tourism and entertainment district Beyoğlu. Tophane is a conservative place that in the past has displayed political support for the ruling Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, hereafter AKP), occasionally taking the form of violent vigilantism against opponents. These vigilante acts, such as assaults on anti-government Gezi protestors in the summer of 2013, were publicly endorsed by political leaders (CNNTürk 2014). In fall 2010, Tophane, once again, made headlines across the country. A group of residents had attacked several gallery receptions, ending up injuring five art-connoisseurs. The incident was followed by a polarized debate within Turkey’s left and liberal intelligentsia: one side interpreted the violence as symptom of an onset of fascism in the country, sponsored by the ruling party (Birkan 2010; Evren 2010). The other side read it as an unarticulated act of resistance to the burgeoning gentrification in the quarter (Kentel 2010). Numerous verbal and physical assaults on tourists and other Istanbulites followed up in the neighbour-hood. Leading AKP authorities did not offer much support to Tophane residents in the aftermath. This is not particularly surprising, given that is the political leadership of the AKP that champions the renewal and consequent gentrification efforts in Tophane and its surroundings (Çavdar 2010). Tophane thus inspires an interesting question: how is urban conflict, arising in the context of gentrification, negotiated and the order restored in a vigilante, state- and party-affine neighbourhood in Istanbul?
Based on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews conducted in 2015–2016 and in 2018, my study argues that consent neither amounts to unwavering support nor to full-blown resistance, but that dissent can take place within a ‘consensual arena’ of interaction between state and society (Tomba 2014, 20). I utilize Gramsci’s (2010) notion of the integral state to illustrate this point. The integral state is helpful in explaining how consent is produced on the local level while establishing a processual understanding of consent that is not opposed to but intertwined with coercion. I furthermore suggest that in the case of Turkey, a focus on local state- and party-cadres, whom I refer to as local intermediaries and who act between civil society and the state apparatus, provides us with a nuanced picture of consent production. The narratives and everyday interaction of local intermediaries illustrate how discontent with ‘actually existing neoliberalism’ (Brenner and Theodore 2002) is governed in a specific locality and in the context of a populist and increasingly authoritarian neoliberal urban regime. In this course, I also describe how local intermediaries find themselves in an ambiguous position in which they are at once commissioned to maintain order and support in the neighbourhood while, at the same time, frequently feeling victimized by the urban agenda of their higher-ranking superiors.
The article is structured as follows: first I discuss the theoretical framework, in specific the notion of consent and the integral state and how the occurrence of violent vigilantism fits into this framework. I here advance an understanding of consent that does not contradict coercion but sees them as ‘dialectically entwined’ (Mitchell 2003, 79). Then,
I depict the role of the neighbourhood and local intermediaries in the AKP’s rule. I then proceed to the case where I first describe my research process, then provide a brief context on the eruption of conflict and gentrification in Tophane. In the field analysis, I first discuss Tophane as a political arena, second, I debate the ambiguous role of local state- and party-cadres in Tophane when dealing with discontent resulting from the gentrification process. Lastly, I elaborate on the response from above, i.e., from top- ranking AKP authorities, to the violent vigilantism in the quarter. The paper concludes with a brief discussion and prospects for future research.
Producing consent in the neighbourhood: the integral state
Empirical studies on local urban politics and the production of consent in Turkey often draw selectively on North American scholarship (Keyder 2010; Kuyucu and Ünsal 2010; Erman 2011; Arslanalp 2015; Kuyucu 2018). Particularly prominent are network- governance theories such as urban regime theory (Stone 1993) and the related thesis of the urban growth machine (Logan and Molotch 1987). These approaches are fruitful in that they bring a differential view of politics and human agency into the discussion of urban change. Critics have argued, however, that these theories do not work well outside the North American context (Goodfellow 2018), and neglect the conflictual, yet depen-dent, relationship of local actors with the central, often authoritarian, state and macro- economic processes (Davies 2012, 2013; Rodgers 2009).
To avoid the ‘localist focus’ (Goodfellow 2018, 208) of urban regime and growth coalition theories, I use Gramsci’s (2010) notion of the integral state to understand how consent is produced on the scale of the neighbourhood. This concept allows us to conduct a concrete, micro-level analysis of urban politics and governance, while account-ing for the intertwinement of different scales of government. The Gramscian integral state is a combination of political and civil society. The state is here defined as ‘the instrument for conforming civil society to the economic structure’ (Gramsci 2010, 208). Civil society itself is seen as part of the state though not synonymous with it. Resistance to the dominant ‘common sense’ (Crehan 2011), i.e., the dominant ideology and culture that reproduces the economic order, takes place in the realm of civil society, making conformity a crucial element for the political autonomy of the state.
As Davies (2013) maintains, scholars who have utilized Gramsci’s more famous concept of hegemony, often tend to contrast power and coercion. Bosteels (2014, 6) similarly remarks that especially postmodern readings of hegemony, as popularized by Laclau and Mouffe, have worked along ‘the binaries of hegemony and coercion, civil society and the state, war of positions and war of manoeuvres, and, finally, West and East.’ The theory of the integral state is useful in defying this dichotomy, explicating the dialectical interaction of coercion and consent and offering us a fruitful way to engage with different modalities of consent-production, without falling into a conceptual and/or geographical dichotomy (Mitchell 2003, 79; Thomas 2009; Bosteels 2014; Davies 2013). With the crises and contradictions emerging from the capitalist mode of urban devel-opment, urban governance never solely remains an issue of more or less stable consent but consent itself is in constant motion and never isolated from coercion.
Gramscian analysis has also been used widely in Turkey to explain the success of the AKP and its brand of neoliberal populism (e.g., Tuğal 2009; Alpan and Diez 2014;
Çavusoğlu and Strutz 2014; Adaman et al. 2019), also in connection to the concept of the integral state (Bayırbağ 2010; Altınörs 2016; Madra and Yılmaz 2019; Gündoğan 2019). Gündoğan (2019), for example, utilizes Gramsci to explain differences in community mobilization against urban transformation projects and state responses to these mobili-zations. He shows that the ideological affinity of a neighbourhood can have a big impact on how residents organize and how the local state reacts to it, though the actual outcome might not change. Looking at the intricacies of consent-production in different settings can thus help to ‘demystif[y]’ (Gündoğan 2019, 912) the idea of unwavering support for the AKP in conservative, right-leaning neighbourhoods such as Tophane and help us to identify how discontent forms and how consent is maintained. Contention and consent then, are not to be evaluated along the lines of full political loyalty or radical resistance, rather a neighbourhood can form a ‘“consensual arena” of interaction between state and society’ (Tomba 2014, 20).
The question what role everyday violence and vigilantism play within the consensual neighbourhood arena, is intriguing. As Yonucu (2018) discusses, while vigilantism is often perceived as a threat to social order and the state’s monopoly of violence, it does not always emerge in opposition to the state but can function as ‘cheap way of law enforce-ment’ (Pratten and Sen 2007, 3). In Tophane it has typically been interpreted as this form of ‘establishment vigilantism’ (Rosenbaum and Sederberg 1974), in support rather than in resistance to the hegemonic state ideology (Wozniak 2018, 82).
The role of establishment vigilantism in the theory of hegemony and the integral state, however, is not widely discussed. One might say that violent vigilantism and lynching bear ambiguous results for state power: on the one hand, they serve to reproduce common sense, on the other, they may undermine the state’s monopoly of violence if not properly managed and controlled (Steedman 2004, 81). This ambiguity is even more trenchant when considering the violence against perceived gentrifiers in Tophane over the last decade. I suggest that a focus on local intermediaries – i.e., low-ranking state and political party-cadres who I see as important actors of the integral state linking civil and political society – can help us to understand how these contradictions are governed on the micro-level of the neighbourhood.
The significance of the Mahalle and role of local intermediaries
In the past, neighbourhoods, as the smallest administrative unit in the Ottoman Empire had a significant amount of autonomy; religious leaders (imam) and neighbourhood headmen/women (muhtar) would collect taxes, otherwise the Empire would not interfere with the everyday life of its subjects. They were also organized spatially along religious lines, with Beyoğlu being home to many non-Muslim neighbourhoods. While much has changed since the proclamation of the Republic in 1923 and the emergence of a modern Turkish state, in Istanbul, the meaning of the neighbourhood is still quite different from the cities of the Global North. While it is often lamented that the so-called neighbour-hood culture (mahalle kültürü) has disintegrated with the onslaught of globalization and the rapid growth of the city, neighbourhoods remain as an important unit of identifica-tion for many Istanbulites (Mills 2007; Neyzi 2009). Lower-income neighbourhoods are also frequently shaped by chain migration from the same village or Anatolian city, which at times increases social cohesion.
However, while we know fairly well about the socio-cultural function of the conservative
mahalle (Mills 2007; Neyzi 2009; Karaman and Islam 2012; Erman 2016; Woźniak 2018),
we know less about its political quality. Mahalles are primary site for the socialization, training and recruitment of new political party members (Doğan 2016) and significant battlegrounds in elections, with many neighbourhoods perceived as strongholds of a respective party. Accordingly, Islamic parties engage quite closely with neighbourhoods: the AKP-precursor, the Islamic Welfare Party (Refah Partisi, RP), through which President Erdoğan became mayor of Istanbul in 1994, was known for its close-knit organization on the local level and redistribution schemes based on Islamic values. This form of organiza-tion helped RP to establish a ‘fragile equilibrium’, incorporating losers of neoliberal globalization while, at the same time, providing enough opportunities for capitalist expan-sion (Öniş 1997, 763). AKP, coming to power in 2002, essentially carried on this mode of governance and even more successfully managed to reconcile its orientation towards western-style globalization with the interests of its conservative constituency (Adaman and Akbulut 2020; Eraydın and Taşan-Kok 2014; Cavusoğlu and Strutz 2014; Karaman 2013; Öniş 2012; Tuğal 2009). AKP also pays great attention to local actors: so have, for example, muhtars been invited to the ‘political stage’ (Woźniak 2018, 81) as representatives and – where necessary – defenders of the (conservative) neighbourhood order (Massicard 2015). Moreover, Erdoğan himself has repeatedly emphasized the importance of lower-tier positions within the party’s organizational structure, such as the so-called neighbourhood presidents (mahalle başkanı, elected locally by the party), which he defined as one of the most significant ties between the party and the Turkish people (CNNTürk 2019).
I conceptualize muhtars as well as low-ranking party-cadres on the scale of the district/neighbourhood as local intermediaries between civil society and the state apparatus. In the northern and western context, neighbourhoods have seen an ‘increasing decline in, and remoteness of, visible figures of authority’, that are more likely to be replaced by modern surveillance technology (Crawford 2006, 964). In Turkey, however, and, as the literature highlights, in other southern and eastern geographies, human actors are crucial as ever for the production and maintenance of consent and order. So does Tang (2019), for example, describe the emergence of an intermediary governance space in Suzhou, with intermediary actors ‘negotiating the relations between the state, the market, and the citizens’ (57). Tomba (2014), again in the Chinese context and through detailed ethnographic work, discusses how local party authorities are ‘micro-governing the urban crisis’ through close, daily encounters, with urban residents. In Turkey, Massicard (2015) has similarly shown that muhtars are not to be understood as part of a Weberian rational bureaucratization, but as intermediaries that provide a ‘link between the official order – itself complex and shifting – and the local society in which he or she is embedded through multiple links of proximity and dependence’ (257).
As will be further discussed throughout the analysis of the empirical material, the position and role of the local intermediary is not without ambiguity: they are subject to simultaneous ‘demands from both above and below’ (Tomba 2014, 82) and frequently take on a double-position as, on the one hand, the embodiment of ‘the voice of the state’, and, on the other, as ‘the victims of its contradicting rationalities’ (Ibid., 64).
Research in Tophane
The paper is based on a combination of ethnographic fieldwork and semi-structured interviews between November 2015 and August 2016 and in Spring and Fall 2018. I focus on the narratives and interactions of individuals who have an official position with the local AKP or state apparatus and on my observations conducted in the weekly ‘people’s parliament’ (halk meclisi) meetings in the neighbourhood house (semt konağı) of Tophane that take place every Tuesday morning. I participated in these meetings (about twice a month on average) between January and late August 2016 and again around ten times in Spring and Fall 2018. This gave me the opportunity to get acquainted with the local AKP organization and politicians as well as neighbourhood head persons (muhtar), some of whom, while in no representative position, were also AKP members. A table of the main respondents, used in this paper, can be found in the appendix. I complemented the field data with an analysis of newspaper articles, visual material, commentaries and social media statements.
Research in Tophane came with some serious challenges. During some interviews, my identity as a researcher who did not reside in the neighbourhood, was unveiled and an unlikely AKP voter, seemed to create distrust, though this was never openly articulated. In other cases, it might have created an interviewer effect, where some respondents seemed to produce answers that were coined towards what they presumed was my view of the AKP. I tried to counter these problems by increasing my visits to the people’s parliament, where I avoided formal interviews and rather relied on observations and informal conversations.
Lastly, it is important to mention some ethical concerns: while I am using pseudo-nyms, it is possible – for someone who knows Tophane – to identify some of the respondents from the local AKP- and state-cadres. First, I openly introduced myself as a researcher who will write about her observations in Tophane, so respondents were aware about my intention. Second, to be certain that I do not endanger my respondents’ position, I only use statements in this article that they did not ‘confide’ in me alone, but openly discussed with other residents or colleagues present.
Tophane: Mahalle culture, vigilantism and politics
Tophane is the oldest industrial zone of Istanbul and located at the shore of the city’s entertainment and tourism district Beyoğlu (see Figure 1).
Despite being perceived as one mahalle, the area does not constitute an administrative unit but lies at the intersection of three official neighbourhoods. This at times leads to different, conflicting views on where Tophane is actually located, where it begins and ends, with residents sometimes demarking a larger area than outsiders (Zeeman 2014). However, being ‘from Tophane’ (Tophaneli) is a crucial part of residents’ identity. This sentiment is visible throughout the neighbourhood and its adjacent areas where graffiti tags stating, ‘this is Tophane’, ‘Tophaneli’ or just ‘Tophane’ are abundant, somehow signalling to outsiders that they are entering a specific territory in the city (see Figure 2).
The perception of a collective identity in Tophane is also shaped by the presence of a loosely defined religious community (cemaat). Different Islamic sects have a dominant presence in the quarter and are organized through endowments and village-based
associations (Çavdar 2010). Political Islam, as in all of Turkey, became more prominent in the 1970s and 1980s, however, there is no organic relationship the cemaat has with any specific party or religious movement (Başaran 2015). Accordingly, its composition is rather eclectic, and the community has various ties with different Islamic/right-wing movements and organizations.
Ties to the AKP, however, seem to have being growing stronger throughout the party’s rule. For example, during the period of my first field research, Rabbi’ah signs – a four- fingered hand sign signalling protest against the military coup by general Morsi in Egypt in 2013 and solidarity with the Muslim Brotherhood – were printed on flyers and posters hanging across the neighbourhood. These were, in my interpretation, simultaneously functioning as symbol of support for political Islam as well as for the ruling party and Erdoğan in specific, who made abundant use of the Rabbi’ah hand sign throughout his presidential election campaign (Hecker 2020) (see Figure 3).
These visual and verbal performativities are accompanied by a long history of violence and right-leaning vigilantism. Some Tophane residents, accordingly, have also identified themselves as ‘Tayyip’s soldiers’, a provocative nod to the Kemalist slogan ‘We are Mustafa Kemal’s soldiers’ (Koç 2013).
Massicard (2019) in this context has argued that Tophane is characterized by a ‘vigilant configuration’, a term that describes the form of collective and violent mobilization that has evolved in the quarter over its history. In line with this configura-tion, several Tophane residents have instigated incidents that involved assaults on anti- government and left-wing protests since AKP came to power. May Day demonstrators, protestors against the IMF summit (both in 2009) and Gezi protestors (in 2013) have been variously attacked with glass bottles, pepper spray and even frozen fruit or have simply been beaten up (Karaca 2011). These assaults were also explicitly pro-police, with some residents apparently defining themselves as defenders of and aides to the police force, or ‘auxiliaries of the state’ (Massicard 2019). I will now illustrate how Tophane’s
vigilante configuration intersects with state-led neoliberal urban transformation and how this renders visible the contradictions between the hegemonic discourses around Islam, public morality and nationalism and the material and spatial practices of neoliberal urban transformation.
Gentrification in Tophane
In Beyoğlu, gentrification, based on tourism and a booming entertainment sector, has been an issue since the 1990s (Uzun 2003; Eder and Öz 2015; Yetişkul and Demirel 2018). However, until the law 5366 ‘on the protection of deteriorated historic and cultural heritage through renewal and re-use’ was introduced in 2005, residential displacement in the district remained limited to certain neighbourhoods and gentrification proceeded rather slowly. Law 5366, informally referred to as ‘Beyoğlu Law’, allowed municipalities to intervene in physically deprived areas, including possibility of expropriation. At the same time, gecekondu (Turkish word for squatter housing, meaning ‘built over night’) construction was criminalized and another law that facilitates the destruction and reconstruction of gecekondu settlements was introduced in 2012. The Beyoğlu
Figure 3. Rabbi’ah sign on a residential building in Tophane. Photo credit: Onur Ekmekçi. Reproduced with Permission.
municipality has used both laws to push forward renewal and transformation processes in the district (Çavusoğlu and Strutz 2014).
Tophane has been included via a large port-renewal project (known as Galataport) that stretches from the shores of the neighbourhood to the adjacent, and already more gentrified, Karaköy. The project had already been announced in 2002, however, after being challenged in court, it took 15 years for it to be finally kicked off (Uğantaş 2019). The prospective opening date of the 110,000-square-metre large site – which will include a ‘ultra-luxury hotel’, restaurants, boutiques, luxury residencies, the Istanbul Modern Museum and 42,000 square-metres of office space – is now the end of 2020 (galataport. com). Naturally, Galataport will have a significant impact on Tophane’s residential areas, a place in which – as indicated by the assaults – public alcohol consumption or displays of intimate affection are informally sanctioned. It is likely that non-residential, commercial spaces in the area will increase, as it is the case for other parts of Beyoğlu, where the number of residents is going down and the share of commercial establishments is increasing. During a conversation with several muhtars in the Tophane and adjacent Galata area, they lamented that the number of registered voters in local elections – that includes the election of the local head person – had fallen approximately threefold within the last decade. Tophane residents will thus, in the longer-term, not be replaced by new, middle-class, residents but more likely by souvenir shops and tourists.
While Galataport was still in the making, the residential parts of Tophane already started to change from the mid-2000s onwards: the main artery, Boğazkesen street, that is leading down from the adjacent neighbourhood of Cihangir, hosts numerous cafes, restaurants, galleries and boutiques. The smaller and narrower streets within the neigh-bourhood offer a more diverse sight with traditional tea houses and barber shops lining up next to designer stores and hip cafes. This has caused uneasy daily encounters between the – on-average – conservative, working-class Tophane residents, and tourists and middle-class newcomers with mostly secular lifestyles (Woźniak 2018; Öz and Eder 2018; Schuitema 2016; Kadıoğlu Polat 2016; Karaca 2011; Pehlivan 2011). In September 2010, then several residents attacked a series of gallery reception in the quarter, causing injuries to five art-connoisseurs and resulting in 35 temporary arrests. In the aftermath, the incident was mostly discussed along the lines of a fascist and AKP- supported onset in the wake of Turkey’s political polarization (Evren 2010; Birkan 2010) or seen as an unarticulated reaction to art-led gentrification (Kentel 2010).
In a more nuanced account, gentrification researcher Şen (2010) noted that the reason why Tophane has become such a conflictual space is the lack of ‘fine tuning’ of gentrifica-tion: in many other neighbourhoods in Beyoğlu, long-term residents’ houses were already demolished and they were transferred to mass housing settlement – typically far away from the centre – before significant encounters between old-timers and new-comers could occur. The destruction of these neighbourhoods also leads to a more rapid decline of the social fabric, impeding collective action. This is not the case in Tophane, because the renewal takes place at the shore, while the residential areas (separated from the Bosporus by Kemankeş Caddesi, a broad street with busy traffic), are only bought off by investors piece by piece and then renovated (see Figure 4).
This results in a prolonged transformation period, more akin to traditional gentrifica-tion processes we know from other European cities. In a walk-along conversagentrifica-tion with Ahmet Bey, a member of the local district parliament, representing the AKP in Tophane,
he acknowledged this as problematic by commenting that the neighbourhood should have been subject to a comprehensive urban development plan and renewed more systematically to avoid the tension.1
Öz and Eder state that Tophane turned into a ‘litmus test for the country’s democracy and inclusive citizenship’ (2018, 1030) with people from utterly different cultural, social and economic backgrounds being thrown together in ‘dangerous proximity’ (Ibid.,1031). In fact, the incident in 2010 was only the beginning of numerous verbal and physical assaults in the quarter. In the rest of this paper, rather than elaborating further on the relationship between different social groups and classes in the area, I would like to draw attention to how discontent and violence against newcomers in Tophane are governed at the micro-level of the neighbourhood.
Tophane: making sense of vigilance against gentrification
While it is difficult to pin down electoral outcomes for the whole neighbourhood, given that Tophane is not an administrative unit, it is, at least fair to say that the ruling party has a strong presence in the quarter and has received vigilant (and violent) support for its suppression of oppositional voices by some. Moreover, during my encounters, residents in many instances emphasized the personal, long-standing, rapport the neighbourhood has with top-ranking AKP cadres and Erdoğan himself, underlining that they come from the same village as the First Lady, Emine Erdoğan. They also emphasized that Erdoğan used to play soccer in the local club, Tayfun Spor – an amateur soccer club that was also associated with the 2010 incident (see also, Öz and Eder 2018, 1036).
I would suggest that the specific form discontent with some of the effects of gentrifica-tion in Tophane takes and how it is responded to by the nagentrifica-tional and local state/ruling party cadres is shaped by the relationship the neighbourhood has with the ruling party, the state and the hegemonic discourses on public morality, nationalism and the like. In November 2013, for example, unidentified Tophane residents alarmed the police to raid a private apartment that was inhabited by two students.2 This happened a few days after Erdoğan, then still Prime Minister, had condemned mixed student dorms as violating public morality. While open to interpretation, I see the act, rather than as a following of orders, as a reaction to the gentrification of the quarter, that is making Tophane more attractive to students. In the spring of 2016, when the conflict between the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and the state flamed up once again and the AKP was using more aggressive nationalist rhetoric, the local news website claimed that apart hotels function as hatcheries of terrorism, in order to push the local government to raid them (Tophane Haber 2016). In 2016, after a violent assault on a record store, perpetrators – and residents who tried to defend them – claimed that beer-drinkers in front of the store had harassed a veiled woman who was walking by.3 The harassment of veiled women is a popular, often repeated, claim by Erdoğan, which he also used to discredit Gezi protestors and agitate his own base (Kocamaner 2013). While it is only a small minority in the neighbourhood that seems to engage in outright violence, in my own encounters with residents, there was a general understanding that – even if the violence itself was condemned – the newcomers were the main culprits, who had failed to adjust to the moral rules of conduct in the neighbourhood.
The reasons given for why newcomers were a problem in the neighbourhood and deserved to be verbally or physically assaulted clearly fed off common sensical Islamic- brand and populist neoliberalism perpetuated by the AKP (see Karaman 2014). So did one resident, who voiced his dissatisfaction with the AKP’s government of Beyoğlu,
quickly clarify that any contention around gentrification in Tophane was not to be interpreted as ‘resisting’ but as a ‘reproaching’4, since resistance is often framed as treason in Turkey (Özdüzen and McGarry 2020). Another respondent noted that he would not complain in front of other residents, which he saw as show-off, but would directly approach the local AKP representative, if he had something to say.5 By remaining within the boundaries of what is considered legitimate dissent, residents tried to uphold their status as ‘legitimate subjects’ (Nicholls 2013). While disagreeing with the social effects of gentrification, they thus made an effort to remain within the consensual arena.
This, however, does not mean that the violent vigilantism towards newcomers does not pose a challenge to the AKP. In fact, consent quickly ‘becomes a bargaining chip in the relationship between citizens and the state’ (Tomba 2014, 23). Local intermediaries take on a crucial, yet sometimes conflictual, role within the integral state in that they are part of civil society, while also providing an important link between civil and political society, aiming to maintain or produce consent and avoid a fragmentation of the dominant, common sensical, order (Howson and Smith 2008, 4).
Governing gentrification on the ground – pressure from below
Ahmet Bey never planned to go into politics. Yet, he found himself as the main representative of the AKP in Tophane. Elected to the local Beyoğlu parliament, he held weekly meetings at the neighbourhood house that were known as people’s parliaments (halk meclisi). Though supported by a muhtar of the area and sometimes one of the neighbourhood presidents or other Beyoğlu cadres, he found himself frequently tired out by the relentless requests and problems of the residents. A political institution taken over from the RP, where people’s parliaments functioned as important democratic forums (Doğan 2016), the parliament had, under AKP-rule, transformed into a venue for the formal and informal distribution of welfare, with strong, paternalistic undertones. Tophane residents, mostly mothers, here asked and sometimes begged for help – reach-ing from food stamps, over clothreach-ing donations to employment (see Figure 5).
Ahmet Bey frequently voiced his frustration in my presence:
We are the most hard-working in Beyoğlu. Over in Cihangir [adjacent, gentrified neigh-bourhood], they only talk about stray dogs and cats. People here have more serious problems. And quite frankly, it is only me and the muhtar who are doing all the work here.6
While variations in neoliberal urbanism are widely discussed in the literature, the discussion on how different spaces in the city are governed by the goal of preserving a certain order, deserves more attention. In the case of Tophane, the management of the pains and troubles of gentrification must, as the expression of the discontent itself, again be understood through the daily interactions and relationships between residents, the state, the ruling party and the hegemonic common sense. As argued earlier, intermedi-aries hold an important position, in which they have to reconcile both – pressures coming from civil society and the state apparatus, i.e., the political society.
Ahmet Bey personified this contradiction: on the one hand, unsatisfied with how Tophane was governed, he frequently tried to smooth over hardships and urged residents to remain loyal to the party, particularly before elections. Another example is the muhtar who was present at almost all meetings. While muhtars are not political cadres, many
have at least an informal ideological alliance (Massicard 2015). Accordingly, the muhtar in the people’s parliament was part of the women’s section of the AKP and a fervent supporter ‘in love with Erdoğan’. She praised the local government for beautifying Tophane:
My relationship with the başkan [Misbah Demircan, former mayor of Beyoğlu] is good. I like him, but that could be of course because I am AKP’li7 [laughs]. . . The other day we were at a dinner to talk and we talked about the changes here in Beyoğlu.
Author: You mean about the good and the bad aspects?
No, not only the good aspects, how we can make it even more beautiful.8
In another instance, she added that the then mayor of Beyoğlu, Misbah Demircan, had urged residents not to sell their apartments immediately, but that many did not listen because they were short on money and felt they needed to take advantage of the rising housing prices. Accordingly, many long-standing families had already left the neighbour-hood, which she felt sorry for but saw it as their own mistake. The muhtar also had good relations with hoteliers, restaurants and bar-owners in the neighbourhood and during the people’s parliament meeting frequently tried to use these contacts to find job-seeking Tophane resident employment in the service industry, especially cleaning and cooking for women. Often these women declined because the late hours would not agree with their caretaking and household responsibilities. She also found herself mediating between
Figure 5. Distribution of care packages by the local representative before Bayram, in front of a newly opened furniture designer shop. Photo credit: Author.
the owners of establishments and residents when it came to noise levels, telling me that she thinks that residents are sometimes exaggerating.
On the other hand, two years after my first fieldwork, the same muhtar also shared more critical views of how Tophane was governed, being very open about not being willing to vote for the AKP in the next local elections ‘if Misbah candidates again’, stating that ‘they renew all the streets in Cihangir, but not in my neighbourhood. Why? Because the elite lives in Cihangir and they know how to complain.’ Both Ahmet Bey and the
muhtar were of the opinion that the party had somewhat neglected Tophane, saying that,
for example, before the June 2018 presidential and parliamentary elections, not one member of parliament had visited the neighbourhood, leaving them alone in the cam-paign. They were well aware that residents were not happy with the local government and felt that they were not benefitting from the valorization of the area. Conversations with two residents at two different occasions, who were also members of the AKP, but in no representative capacity, mirrored this sentiment:
Nuri: Misbah [Misbah Demircan] comes to weddings and funerals. The local administration has failed in Tophane. They think of our votes as guaranteed. They think of us as their children, but they are wrong.9
and
Author: What do you think about the AKP’s role in Tophane’s recent transformation? Cemil: Everyone is Tayyipçi [for the President], but Tayyip agrees with what is happening here, the profit-making. . . .
Author: Do you think people in Tophane can profit from the change too? Cemil: No, they would hardly take us as servants.10
While obviously many problems in Tophane are not related to gentrification per se, and some residents indeed profit from the rising real estate values, the gentrification process seemed to intensify the dissatisfaction of locals (including intermediaries) with the party.
Another example of AKP-cadres’ double-position was Inan, a 30-something Tophane neighbourhood president, who was temporarily unemployed. Commissioned to identify needy residents and gather complaints, he had himself become a victim of gentrification. In 2015, his families’ building on Boğazkesen Street was sold to an investor who wanted to turn it into a hotel. When the investor could not get the permit, Inan and his family were allowed to stay, at least temporarily.11 Higher up the hierarchy was Muhsin Bey, a 40-year-old deputy for the local AKP Beyoğlu administration, who started to participate more frequently in the parliament meetings when I did my second round of fieldwork in 2018. Despite his own position in the party, Muhsin Bey frequently addressed the Beyoğlu government and Erdoğan himself on Twitter regarding the, to him, worrisome developments in Tophane and urging the party to intervene. In a comment on an article about the 2010 assault, he even clearly sided with the perpetrators (and was possibly one of them): ‘Is this art? Sitting on the street and drinking? Take care of these issues Başkan [i.e. addressing the Beyoğlu mayor] or we will’ (Milliyet 2010). In a personal encounter, Muhsin Bey added that he might not candidate again as deputy, saying somewhat angrily to me that ‘he has his reasons’.12
While Tophane, generally speaking, is an area that supports the AKP and reproduces many of the party’s dominant tropes, the ambiguous position of local intermediaries
shows how they struggle with on the one hand being the main representatives of the party’s voice in the neighbourhood, and on the other being themselves frustrated with some of the less desirable side effects of gentrification in Tophane. Consent here, not only for private residents but also for lower-ranking AKP functionaries and representatives of the state, at least potentially, turns into a ‘bargaining chip’ (Tomba 2014, 23).
‘No one is larger than the state’ – pressure from above
While party and state-authorities on the ground in Tophane receive complaints from residents and from time to time feel frustrated with how the neighbourhood is governed by the higher ranks of the party, the gentrification process is state-led and not only the municipality, but Erdoğan himself has emphasized the importance of the Galataport project. In reply to the cancellation of the first project plan for Galataport in court, Erdoğan during a ceremony of the Istanbul tourism awards in 2009 stated that
If Galataport Tophane had been realized already it would not have been like this. The mess there would have been removed and a totally different, historical Tophane would have emerged (Ihlas Haber Ajansi 2009).
He had also previously supported the opening of the Istanbul Modern Museum in Tophane in 2004. The museum served as a flagship for the area and triggered its art- led gentrification (Polo 2015). Accordingly, top-tier AKP authorities considered the assaults on art connoisseurs as a problem.
After the 2010 gallery incident, Hüseyin Çelik, former Deputy Prime Minister, expressed that he doubts that as many perpetrators were involved as the media had claimed, implying that the event had been exaggerated. He thereby not only criticized the media but also made clear that the sentiment the perpetrators communicated through the assault did not have a broad basis among their electoral base in Tophane. The common sense was intact. Contrary to the celebratory reaction that had been given when Tophane residents assaulted Gezi protestors, Çelik directly addressed and delimited the realm of the civil society:
I want to underline this once more, under rule of law no one can – regardless of what behaviour they like or dislike – name oneself the court, police or judiciary and execute their own law. They cannot execute, they cannot put themselves in place of the police, the military, the gendarme, the judge or the public prosecutor. Under rule of law there is no tolerance for this (quoted in Sol 2010).
How sensitive the issue was, given the extent of polarization in the country and the economic agenda the government tries to pursue, also became clear when the Minister of Tourism and Culture, Ertuğrul Günay, visited the neighbourhood after the first gallery assaults stating that
Change always hurts. But let this be known, nobody can force their Anatolian lifestyle [upon others] in Istanbul, but nobody has the right to turn a blind eye to the [traditions] of the people here, either (quoted in T24. 2010).
As especially Günay’s statement shows, AKP’s first reactions were rather moderate, which is also related to how Tophane is perceived by the party, namely as a stronghold in which residents more or less belong to the religious community the AKP claims to
cater to. However, reactions grew more determent as more conflicts emerged: accord-ingly, in June 2016, after an attack on a small beer –drinking crowd at a record store close to Tophane, a high-ranking AKP deputy completely dismissed this behaviour by labelling it as ‘ISIS [Islamic State] mindset’ – thereby marking some Tophane residents as potential Islamist terrorists (quoted in Bianet 2016). In Turkey, it is typically the victims of lynching incidents, often Kurds or socialists, who are labelled terrorists by politicians and the media (Borsuk 2016).
While the assaults by the perpetrators as well as passive bystanders were framed not only by referring to the general conservative common sense but also by explicitly drawing on statements by Erdoğan and the party, they did not resonate well with the AKP. Particularly after the attack on the record store, the actions were dismissed as outside of the boundaries of what could be considered legitimate dissent. By likening the attackers to ISIS, the deputy not only wrote off their status as legitimate subjects but also, indirectly, conveyed a message to those residents who silently or openly defended them. Conformity was demanded. A conversation I witnessed in the neighbourhood house two days after the attack showed that this message had also been effectively transmitted to the local level:
Muhtar: I was at a dinner with the Istanbul major last night, and I told him that I am behind the people of Tophane and that we don’t want to become like Galata or Cihangir.
Ahmet Bey: This is an organized thing. They were 25 people.
Muhtar: But maybe there was some kind of harassment. This is Tophane, this is not Cihangir. This is a rooted neighbourhood.
Ahmet Bey: Why do you believe everything that is said? This harassment lie has been told before. The President already condemned it, what else is there to say?
While consent does not mean full support or passive loyalty and does not preclude conflict, the nature of the relationship the AKP has with a state-affine, conservative, neighbourhood such as Tophane, also means that the party, particularly higher-ranking authorities and – if necessary – Erdoğan himself, can change tone to underline the boundaries of what constitutes tolerable forms of vigilantism and what does not. Accordingly, Ahmet Bey, as the primary embodiment of the party in the neighbourhood, was well aware of the importance of being clear about not pushing the boundaries of the established consensual arena:
The cemaat is not happy with Galatport. But this is not just any place in Istanbul, this is in the middle of the city. No one is larger than the state, you cannot oppose the state. You cannot be ungrateful, you can go on and live your life calmly, but if you oppose, problems start.
Consent and coercion are, as this quote illustrates not two opposites. The changing tone that evolved as the attacks on perceived gentrifiers, secular groups and tourists increased in Tophane, shows that the production of consent itself is underpinned with coercion or at least the threat of coercion.
Conclusion
While gentrification scholars have long taken inspiration from studying specific localities as expressions of ‘actually existing neoliberalism’ (Brenner and Theodore 2002), the
neighbourhood as a realm for the production of consent for neoliberal urban policies and projects and the crucial role of neighbourhood-level actors is largely omitted. In the context of Istanbul, and possibly other cities of the global south and east, however, the neighbourhood unfolds as an important political arena and local intermediaries play a crucial, yet contradictory, role in ‘micro-governing the urban crisis’ (Tomba 2014). The case of Tophane, located in central Istanbul, is illustrative of this.
When violent vigilantism against perceived gentrifiers erupted in September 2010 in the neighbourhood, a passionate discussion evolved around Turkey’s socio-political and economic polarization, the motivations of the assaulters and emerging fascism. The role of the relationship between the party, the state and the neighbourhood, however, remains underexplored: in this article I pay specific attention to the production of consent and the role of neighbourhood-level intermediaries in this process. I utilize the notion of the Gramscian integral state, to stray away from a polarized conception of consent and coercion and to argue that consent itself is constantly re-negotiated and is dialectically intertwined with coercion. Moreover, I describe how local intermediaries, through their everyday interactions with residents, provide a crucial, yet ambiguous link between civil society and the state apparatus. The ambiguity emerges from the double-position they take on as being at once the personified representatives of the state/party, but also as victims of the inevitable contradictions caused by the neoliberal economic order.
With this article, I hope to have illustrated the need for more empirical exploration of the intricacies of consent production. Rather than thinking in terms of consent, coercion or full-blown rebellion, I conclude that it is useful to take a closer look at how contention forms and is governed in a state-affine neighbourhood. This can serve to ‘demystif[y]’ (Gündoğan 2019, 912) the idea of unwavering support for the AKP in conservative, right- leaning neighbourhoods such as Tophane and instead help us to identify how discontent forms and is expressed in a space in which residents largely attempt to remain inside the boundaries of what is considered legitimate dissent.
Notes 1. Interview, no. 1 2. Interview, no. 9 3. Interview, no. 2 4. Interview, no. 5 5. Interview, no. 10 6. Interview, no. 1
7. The term ‘AKP’li’ colloquially means ‘someone supporting the AKP’ but can also signify party membership. In this case, the muhtar was also a member of the party.
8. Interview, no. 2 9. Interview, no. 5 10. Interview, no. 8 11. Interview, no. 6 12. Interview, no. 7 Acknowledgments
This research has been partially funded by the Stiftung Mercator – Istanbul Policy Center Fellowship Program. I would like to express my gratitude to the editors of this Special Issue and
two anonymous reviewers for their valuable guidance throughout the publication process. I would also like to thank the participants of the fourth annual conference of the Consortium of European Symposia on Turkey 2018 (CEST) for their questions and comments.
Disclosure statement
No conflict of interest has been reported.
Notes on contributor
The author is a post-doctoral researcher at the Institute of Urban Research at Malmö University in Sweden. She holds a PhD from Boğaziçi University in Istanbul and was a Stiftung-Mercator- Istanbul Policy Center Fellow. Her research engages with issues around gentrification, housing and neighbourhood stigmatization in Germany, Sweden and Turkey.
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Appendix with Interviews
Number
Primary relation-ship with
Tophane Relationship to AKP Occupation
Gender/
age Age Date of interview 1 Former Resident/
Political Representative
AKP Member of Beyoğlu Parliament
Retired worker Male 62 Repeatedly January– August 2016; April– November 2018 2 Resident/Muhtar AKP Beyoğlu District
Women’s Division Member
Neighbourhood head person in Tophane
Female 47 Repeatedly January– August 2016; April– November 2018 3 Resident/Muhtar Not known Neighbourhood
head person in Tophane
Male 60–65 Repeatedly January– August 2016; April– November 2018 4 Resident/Muhtar Not known Neighbourhood
head person in Tophane
Male 55–60 December 2015
5 Resident Association of the Presidents of the Resurrection Movement/former member of AKP Youth Organization
Entrepreneur, various
Male 30 January 2016
6 Resident AKP Neighbourhood President
Unemployed Male 30–35 Repeatedly January– August 2015; April– November 2018 7 Political
Representative
AKP Beyoğlu District Deputy
Entrepreneur in energy and construction sector
Male 40 Repeatedly April– November 2018
8 Resident AKP Party Member/wants to be a candidate for Beyoğlu Parliament
Local journalist Male 40–45 December 2015
9 Former Resident None Student Female 26 December 2015 10 Resident/Business owner (Interviewed together with Urszula Wozniak)
Not known Owner of local football club cafe
