After a week in Istanbul it all seemed terribly glamorous, a city of
marble palaces and
cosmopolitan streets. But I’d read that 400,000 people arrived every year, hoping for work or a better life. There was a ten-million person slum somewhere nearby, but where? In a city that had to be mostly struggling migrants, the poor were completely invisible.
My guidebook mentioned the strife of an immigrant sprawl, but only in a sidebar, never really saying where these people actually lived. Googling “Istanbul slums” gave almost nothing substantial, at least in English. Millions of people simply don’t exist in the infosphere of a Western tourist. Eventually I began to find references to the
Gaziosmanpaşa district northwest of the center, with a population of a million or so. With a
reported population increase of 79% in the decade 1990-2000, this is an immigrant city risen whole from the fields: migrants from all over the country and sometimes further, speaking Turkish, Greek, Armenian, Kurdish, and Arabic, refugees from rural poverty and
violence and the war in neighboring Iraq. Gaziosmanpaşa was on my maps, but just barely, a name on the corner of the page.
...
But you could make a life here. I have heard that there are shantytowns in other sections of Istanbul, regions of
illegally built dwellings without proper power or water or sewage, but these cities are even further hidden to me; I cannot find their names and no tracks will take me there. I know there must be problems in Gaziosmanpaşa — unemployment, domestic violence, illiteracy, and blunted dreams are not something an outsider with a camera can see, nor could I know how many would wait for how many years for legal-immigrant status. Still, this was not the desperate cardboard slums of Mumbai, or the hard favellas of Rio....
Türkiye
Originally Posted by Shah-Jehan
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