Great anachronism: The role of the architectural analysis in the relationship between urban tranformation and migration

Abstract

This article will discuss the historical trends in the scholarship about the urban transformation in Turkish cities in the second half of the 20th century. Inasmuch as the urban transformation has been to a great extent accounted for by the domestic migration, the squatter settlement-apartment building dichotomy has been a major theme in the architecture and social science literature. As the squatters were widely represented as 'the rural' and 'the traditional', apartment buildings were seen as 'the urban' and 'the modern'. Accordingly, the expectation was that the gradual move of the squatter dwellers to modern apartment buildings would be corresponded with their adaptation to the urban context through their eventual 'modernization'. However, thanks to their patronage card, the squatter dwellers swiftly converted their rural-looking squatters into modern-looking apartment buildings, while they developed an alternative urban community and culture. This was, for many, an 'untimely' transformation; an anachronism: 'villagers' moved to the modern dwellings without becoming modern. This paper criticizes this approach. On the one hand, squatters provided cheap access to housing and helped the rural-to-urban migrants to develop social attributes widely associated with modernization. On the other hand, apartment buildings in the worker neigh-borhoods emerged simultaneously with the rising poverty. Thus, though the migrant families started to live in 'modern' dwellings, they could not afford to pursue a 'modern life style': nuclear families were replaced with the re-emerging extended families, apartments began to be used for economic activities, and primary social relations prevailed over the secondary relations. The existing data provides some insights about the physical characteristics and the use of space in the apartment buildings erected by the former squatter dwellers. The last section gives an overview of the role of multi-storey buildings in the urban transformation in the contexts of the USSR and the USA in the 20th century in order to assign the analysis a comparative dimension. The argument of this paper is that the squatter settlements contributed to the modernization of the migrants, while the apartment buildings de-modernize its dwellers in the context of Turkish cities. This is the great anachronism of the Turkish urbanization.