Invisible City: Istanbul’s Migrants and the Politics of Space

Abstract

This paper takes Istanbul’s substantial population of migrant-bachelors (bekâr) as vantage point to address urban space and foreground everyday spatial agency. Working from police and judicial case records, state documents, and narrative accounts, I show that despite their increasingly regulated exclusion from the city’s dominant spaces of economy and residence, bachelors’ agency in the politics of urban space was pervasive, and galvanized by everyday acts of resistance against their peripheralization. These acts, which ranged from intrusive and violent to seemingly insignificant, amounted to creative or subversive forms of engagement with the spatial opportunities and social networks available to them.