Gecekondu

Gecekondu (plural: Gecekondular ) is the Turkish name for an informal settlement, so an unplanned neighborhood with primitive accommodation on the outskirts of a large city, but not a slum. Translated it means something like " put down at night " (Turkish gece: night).

History

The term was first mentioned in the Dictionary of the Türk Dil Kurumu from the year 1945. Often it is argued that the construction of the Gecekondular sprang from the old ( Ottoman- Islamic ) customary law, according to which a house that has been built " overnight " on public land, no longer allowed to be demolished.

However, this is questionable and is called Modern Sage. That there is such a common law, is contested in modern Turkish research. 1947 issued a demolition law for the Gecekondular in Zeytinburnu / Istanbul.

In order to actually build a house in one night, many people pack usually on together. As soon as the first not available temporary structure, it will be expanded as a rule gradually further. Thus, the construction is actually not built in a night, but you can read it quickly because suddenly.

Although the Gecekondular are not officially legal and therefore illegal, the establishment of these settlements will probably often tolerated due to the economic growth of the government. The Gecekondu Act of 1966 allowed for the first time the legalization of these settlements. The Gecekondular are one of the reasons why it was able to come in recent decades to an enormous population growth, especially in the regions of Ankara, Istanbul and Izmir.

In the past, it came with evictions repeatedly committed by the residents. In the Turkish private television violent clashes between the police and the residents of entire neighborhoods were Gecekondu sometimes shown. Because the authorities intended to houses and settlements caused the infrastructural problems, allow, without prior notice and to be demolished, moved the police with water cannons and tear gas. This partly led to several days of clashes that bloody ran frequently.

With the most large-scale police actions, the problem of gecekondu was not to get a grip.

As part of a more peaceful modernization therefore there are now on the part of city government in Ankara to compromise from the former squatters to make owners. So many of the families living there were given a land registry, which strengthened the social status of people living there.

In many cases Gecekondular been connected to the public power supply in the course of time. In recent years, so in Ankara, on the face of former Gecekondular new neighborhoods were often built. This is often done by the so-called Yapsat principle ( Turkish: yap: Construction; sat: sell) at the contractor with the most likely indigent property owners to contract negotiating to build a new building (mostly multi-storey earthquake-proof apartment buildings ), the owners but in the top return some of the apartments left. Many former migrants, this allows social mobility into the middle class.

Romanticizing

In Ankara, and also in other Turkish cities romanticizing traditional Gecekondu quarter is observed. Beispielspweise by approximately the Ultra movement around the soccer club MKE Ankaragucu today calls itself Gecekondu and is reported in their war cries and slogans with pride by the supposedly hard life in the slums.