Humanity under the bulldozers
Right at the bottom of the neighborhood, high concrete blocks rise. There is a difference in land values that exceeds tenfold. This is what creates the gap between people who want to preserve their memories and those who are trying to erase them.
Your municipality sets its sights on your small, single-story houses, not the six or seven-story buildings without proper projects right next to its own fancy building. The neighborhood where you were born and raised, where you have lived for exactly 60 years, Sarıgöl, is declared a “risky area.” Then your municipality tries to make your neighborhood, your living environment, where you have lived for all these years, risky. Eradicating memories is the job administrators know best. That is why they start with your neighborhood first.
Suddenly, you see giant excavation trucks start to move around the streets where small children play. Your modest square suddenly becomes a maneuvering area for concrete mixers. That is not enough. Every day, dozers come and destroy the houses of your neighbors who have surrendered their houses to transformation, who cannot stand it and say give up, with noise and earthquakes. There is nothing you can do. Your municipality, your administrators who are supposed to serve you, have sold your neighborhood to companies. You think, “What I saw, what I experienced must be a nightmare.” You go outside your neighborhood, you look. Life continues as normal. You return to your neighborhood, dust and smoke. It is as if the city has split, divided into two worlds. They are digging yours, while others are left standing. That is why you feel like the other people living in this city do not see you, do not hear you, and that you are all alone. Because your municipality, your administrators who are supposed to serve you, do not listen to you, but to companies. Moreover, they see you as stubborn, harmful creatures that prevent development. They do not collect the garbage. They tell you that it is time for you to go, that you should not be stubborn for nothing. Your administrators haunt your dreams. Every now and then an announcement is made: “What are you standing there for!” You look at them and ask, “Me?” It is hard to believe that this is real. The voice repeats even louder: “Yes, you!” You wake up. Waking up does not change anything. The greedy architects see your neighborhood, which is “not even worth living in anyway,” as an empty lot on which they will build their projects. They instantly turn your neighborhood into rubble and design fancy houses in its place. As they say, “a new life begins” for the new residents of your neighborhood. Yours ends. Your neighborhood is no longer yours. The young people of the neighborhood are inexperienced. They are looking for ways to survive elsewhere. The elderly are desperate. They have nowhere to go from now on, no life to rebuild. You have to live with ruins, debris and garbage in your neighborhood.
NO DANGER DUE TO EARTHQUAKE
Sarıgöl has not only been declared a “risky area”, it has been created by its own management practices. It has been declared a “risky area” but the municipality is the one creating the risk. There is no danger due to earthquake in the neighborhood. However, there may be much more risk outside the neighborhood, in the nearby high-rise buildings. But who cares? For example, on the sloped land above the neighborhood’s one-story or one and a half-story (with attics) houses in the valley, an excavation soil dozens of stories high has been piled up, ready to slide at any moment. In order to make the threat more visible, the excavation from the giant concrete blocks under construction is piled up on the slope above the single-story houses. This pile threatens human life in a way that could slide down onto the houses at any moment. When the residents of the neighborhood go to say that they no longer have security of life, they receive the answer from the municipality “your neighborhood has been declared a risky area, leave that place immediately.” When viewed from the front, they say “an accident” is coming. If you say there is a risk of death, that is why this pile was built, to scare the people. But this threat was not enough. By immediately demolishing the houses it bought and leaving the debris in the open, the municipality has made the neighborhood, which is “normally” risk-free, dangerous for a healthy life. The residents of the neighborhood live among the debris. The debris spills onto the roads. In addition, since it is not collected, it has mixed with the garbage that has accumulated in the middle.
PROBLEMS “URBAN TRANSFORMATION”
The old people of the neighborhood tell the story: They were exiled here because it was outside the city during the Menderes demolitions. They were left hungry and thirsty. The soldiers who took pity on them shared their rations and gave them water. Then they created their neighborhood from nothing. They worked, they struggled and step by step they built everything in their neighborhood themselves. Their mosques, their streets, their houses. Now the municipality wants to demolish this old neighborhood because Sarıgöl is a Romani neighborhood. They do not touch the ones who came later. No research has been done in the neighborhood until today. What these people want, what they do, what they live on has never been asked. On the one hand, there are people with professions who can make a living. First of all, musicians who go to weddings, bars, and taverns. There is a coffeehouse on the street that provides saz sets to those who are looking. Those who work in shoe and slipper manufacturing find work in nearby workshops. Young people who cannot find work The problem is “urban transformation”. What does the declaration of the neighborhood as a “risky area” indicate? Many things. But mostly the helplessness of the poor. When we say “urban transformation”, several features come together: First, the land in the region has appreciated, in other words, there is a big difference between the current situation called the “rent gap” and the value that will be created after the investment. However, this is not enough. At the same time, the people living in the region are poor, and they do not have the political representation power to use the difference in value to their advantage. In other words, investors are watering their mouths. The rest, disasters and earthquakes, are excuses. Sulukule, Tarlabaşı, Okmeydanı, Ayazma, Ayvansaray, Lonca, ... wherever you look, the situation is the same. The people of the neighborhood are deprived of their rights and marginalized like citizens of another country.
AN ALTERNATIVE LIFE
It is seen that an alternative life has sprouted in the neighborhood, formed by solidarity, cooperation and voluntary work. This must be the problem. After wandering the streets, we gather at a mosque that remains on the lower edge of the excavation pile. The mosque was built by the locals themselves, working with their own hands. The interior is covered with carpets. The entrance, the shelves where shoes are taken off, the service areas, namely the toilets, the ceramic-covered wet area where ablution is performed, everywhere is spotlessly clean. It is constantly maintained by volunteers. On one side, the administration that wants to make the neighborhood risky, on the other side, the people who want to protect life here, who are in solidarity and who are living a different experience. Despite their poverty, they are striving to create a virtuous life and a livable environment. If it were anywhere else, the municipality would support these honorable people. It supports their efforts for the neighborhood.
Right at the bottom of the neighborhood, on the opposite side of the road, high concrete blocks rise. This area is surrounded by high walls. Construction machines are working hard. The contradiction between these different worlds located on both sides of the road is immediately apparent. There is a difference in land value that exceeds tenfold. The locals are offered one-tenth of the value that will emerge in return for their title deeds. Poor people are expected to leave their neighborhoods. In the words of Şadi Çatı, a neighborhood volunteer who is called “hacı” (pilgrim), “Instead of giving us bread, they are looking at our bread.”
This is what creates the gap between those who have lived in the neighborhood for sixty years and want to preserve their memories today and those who are trying to erase them.
Korhan Gümüş
07.07.2014
