The Enclosure of Urban Space and Consolidation of the Capitalist Land Regime in Turkish Cities

Abstract

This article discusses the role of squatters in the commodification of urban space in Turkey since the 1960s. Although squatting until the early 1980s was regarded as the expression of the demands of rural-to-urban migrants for their citizenship rights, early migrants eventually built multistorey buildings on the plots they occupied and rented the extra space to late migrants. Thus, squatting as ‘self-help put into practice’ became a major mechanism of commodification of urban land in Turkey. The commodification brought about significant antagonism between early migrants/new petty bourgeois and late migrants/new working class, as the latter became the tenants of the former. This division in working-class neighbourhoods is mostly invisible to the current literature. However, if this historical transformation is conceptualised as the ‘enclosure of urban space’, contradictions among different segments of squatter communities can be analysed in a comparative manner.