ISTANBUL – Istanbul is experiencing acute growing pains as explosive growth devours public spaces while doing nothing to stifle rising rents throughout the city.

Activists energized by last year’s Gezi Park rebellion continue to clash with security forces but much of the fight has taken a subtler tone with core groups choosing to occupy and restore long dilapidated buildings in neighborhoods struggling with gentrification.

It’s a complex dynamic pitting neighborhood groups and idealistic activists against well-connected real estate speculators, building interests and a paranoid centralized state that appears determined to bring down anything it doesn’t control or understand.

That was underlined earlier this month when riot police raided and destroyed a social center in the Kadikoy district that had been established in a picturesque wooden building and laid abandoned for decades. The Dec. 9 raid came despite the social center's good working relations with the local municipality and neighborhood groups, the solar panels it had installed to produce its own electricity, and an art exhibit promoting peace between Turkish and Kurdish communities.

Riot police have since sealed the Caferaga Neighborhood House, but those who created it say they will work to re-open it or take it to another space.

“It’s like a public space and in Turkey we don’t [have] any public spaces and we don’t give it away just like that,” said 22-year-old student Melis Ozbakir, who helped keep the community space running. Fellow activists agree that Caferaga and other reclaimed community centers are filling a niche that’s missing.

“Like in other central districts of Istanbul there’s a rapid urban transformation and the rents are going up very rapidly,” said Baris Yildirim, 36, who stood watch outside after police had posted an eviction order. He noted that with rent control abolished this summer, many shopkeepers are being priced out of the market and long-running business replaced by chain stores.

“In case we didn’t occupy this place it would probably turn into a boutique hotel or a luxury cafe or whatever.”

But it’s more than a simple fight against gentrification. Turkey’s construction boom – estimated by leading economists to be fueling about 9 percent of the economy – is overheating while ordinary people are seeing little benefit. A peek at Turkey’s build-or-bust attitude suggests the government's willful ignorance to avoid making the same mistakes that caused real estate markets to collapse in Europe and the United States.

Murat Cetin, an architect who teaches about the re-use of historic structures at Istanbul’s Kadir Has University, says the construction boom has left the majority of Turks – the working poor – behind.

“Upper and middle income classes own the majority of the housing stock whereas the lower income classes are unable to pay the high rents in urban areas,” Cetin said. “So although the number of housing seems to reach the level of housing surplus, the urban poor are still unable to afford living in them.”

Activists say that before the Gezi Park uprising in June of last year, they were afraid to occupy buildings because of neighbors’ potentially hostile reaction. But thanks to the divisive politics of the Islamist-rooted AK Party, led by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, they have found common ground among many of their working class neighbors.

On the opposite edge of Kadikoy, a bustling commercial and entertainment district on Istanbul’s Asian side of the Bosphorous, is Don Quixote, a community center squat that emerged in the wake of the Gezi Park protests when activists began holding regular forums in neighborhood parks.

The colorful multi-story building has laid abandoned for years; disputed ownership tied up in the courts had prevented anyone from using it for anything other than a rubbish dump, says Zafer Ulgen, a 40-year-old postgraduate student from Istanbul.

Almost immediately, neighbors were glad to see someone clean up what had been an eyesore and attractive nuisance for neighboring kids. The fact that long-haired activists began holding meetings inside hasn’t raised many eyebrows even among the older populations.

That’s illustrated when Ulgen fetches the squat’s front door key, which is kept behind the bar of a traditional tea house where a group of elderly men quaff tea, play cards and choke down cigarettes. He says many of the older inhabitants of the neighborhood grew up when Istanbul was a more diverse city before most of its religious minorities fled, leaving many Churches and Synagogues shuttered, their properties boarded up and left to fall apart.

“They carry this cosmopolitan history,” Ulgen says of the older Turks who remained, “they still remember their old friends, Jews and Armenians and Greeks.”

But Don Quixote is not a complete success story. In recent weeks there have been fierce arguments whether the social center should be converted into a residential squat. Meetings have gotten heated, Zulgen says, over questions of ideology, house rules or whether there should even be rules at all.

On Friday, Dec. 5, someone threw a brick through the front window of the squat. A note claimed responsibility from a non-affiliated residential squat, but there are questions whether it came from rival activists or is in fact a provocation by nationalists or agent provocateurs working for the state.

Meanwhile, the squat has seen a drop in participation. Core members like Ulgen say they're concerned about the broader implications for the future that emerged from last year’s protests.

“The Gezi soul is interested in the common space – we want to protect the common space,” Ulgen said.

A third squatting experiment is the residential community of Samsa. Taken from the name of the protagonist of Franz Kafka’s short story "The Metamorphosis," the underground squat community differs in that it doesn’t hold community events. But its roots also lie in the Gezi movement, as activist Atakan explained in a video interview made with an Italian media collective in April.

“At Gezi Park we realized that we can be against (something) but we need to create something too,” Atakan said. “Some of us tried to focus on this mentality, we are living in this city so what are we fighting (for)?”

Fellow Samsa activist Yakup said in a companion interview that the members believed full-time occupation was necessary to build real alternatives.

“I believe that occupation is done with your body,” Yakup said. “Cleaning up a place and putting a lock there doesn’t really mean it’s an occupation. We want to build a life itself inside this building and see how it develops.”

How it develops remains an open question. So far, with the exception of Caferaga Neighborhood House, police have made few visits and even then only on flimsy pretexts, such as checking up on noise complaints or on purported tips of marijuana use.

Erhan Imrak, a 37-year-old café owner who had gathered outside Caferaga in anticipation of a police raid, says people are finally making a stand.

“In Istanbul everything is commercial. Everything is sold, everything is bought. We wanted something outside this system, this capitalist system,” he said.

It’s not an uncommon sentiment and Cetin, the architect who researches patterns of urban public space, predicts it’s likely to heat up.

“As long as the destruction of free-access public spaces continues, the movement of reclaiming vacant buildings will continue in an increasing pattern,” he said. “As long as the income differences in society continue to be polarized, the trend to occupy these vacant buildings will continue to grow.”

was7606206.jpg