Abstract
Informal settlements have been crucial sites of spatial dispossession and neoliberal urbanization with the displacement of the urban poor from profitable urban areas. This study examines the gendered implications of dispossession and changing dimensions of women’s poverty as a result of slum/squatter redevelopment projects. Based on the research of the Kadifekale Urban Transformation Project in Turkey that resettled residents of a highly concentrated Kurdish migrant squatter settlement into a new mass housing estate, the study highlights the impacts of profit-driven urban development projects on women's access to affordable housing, support networks, care work, and employment opportunities. Kurdish women's experiences of displacement and resettlement illustrate in particular the intersectional aspects of gendered dispossession and asset erosion with their exclusion from affordable housing options, dispersal of their communities, and separation from their ethnic employment niches. Drawing upon dispossession and feminist development literature, the study sheds light upon the gendered experiences of displacement, changing livelihood opportunities, gendered access and control over resources, and strategies of resistance that result from slum redevelopment projects.
Introduction
Over the past decade, informal settlements have been a major site of neoliberal urbanization and slum redevelopment projects to burnish city images and alleviate poverty in the urban context. These projects, which are implemented under various forms like slum eviction, upgrading, replacement, and/or resettlement, are exemplary of the accumulation by dispossession as they commodify the lands inhabited by the urban poor and displace them from profitable urban areas. There is a real need to focus on women's dispossession in its own right, given that the onus of dealing with poverty, displacement, and/or resettlement falls disproportionately upon women. Drawing upon dispossession and feminist development literature, the paper draws out gendered and intersectional experiences of dispossession and traces women's changing experiences of poverty by slum redevelopment projects based on a case study from Turkey.
It was estimated that over 50% of the population were living in squatter settlements in metropolitan cities of Turkey (Istanbul, Ankara, and Izmir) at the beginning of the new millennium (Keleş, 2002). As a part of liberalization in Turkey since the early 2000s, the financial transformation of the economy significantly changed the housing market with the increased involvement of the state in urban development projects and the commodification of housing (Erol, 2019). A large number of inner-city squatter settlements that have been part and parcel of cities’ landscapes up until the 2000s have been transformed into market-driven profitable estates and the property right holders of squatter settlements have been resettled into mass-housing estates located, in general, in peripheral areas. This displacement and resettlement not only drastically change the geography of poverty but also gender inequalities reconstructing the socio-spatial organization of households, communities, neighborhoods, and the broader urban system.
Drawing upon the research of the Kadifekale Urban Transformation Project (KUTP) in Turkey, the study discusses the specific and globally interconnected aspects of gendered dispossession and sheds light upon the changing experiences of women's poverty by profit-driven slum redevelopment projects. The paper highlights how gender-blind slum redevelopment projects affect women's right to land and housing, support networks, care work, and employment opportunities. Kurdish women's experiences of displacement and resettlement, in particular, show how gendered dispossession works through the axes of difference (age, ethnicity, class, and poverty) and creates gendered deprivation and asset erosion with their exclusion from affordable housing options, dispersal of their communities, and separation from their ethnic employment niches. Considering the experiences of “poor women” not as a “fetishized category” but as a gendered category that comes to be constructed (Roy, 2003: 19), this study shows the myriad aspects of women's poverty shaped by the intersectional boundaries of patriarchy, household, states, discrimination, urbanization, and economy.
This study proceeds as follows. It begins first with the theoretical framework based on dispossession and feminist development literature. Second, it describes the research field and methodology tracing Turkey's experience of neoliberal urbanization and slum/squatter redevelopment. Finally, it discusses gendered and intersectional experiences of dispossession with an examination of women's changing poverty from slum/squatter settlements into new public housing areas based on the case study.
Theoretical framework
Harvey's theory of “accumulation by dispossession” has been very influential to explore neoliberal policies of commodification and privatization of land and other resources (food, water, forests, etc.) displacing and dispossessing previous users from their environments (Hart, 2006; Harvey, 2003). Reinvigorating Marx's notion of “primitive accumulation,” Harvey (2003) draws attention to the “New Imperialism” that occurs not only through the exploitation of the working class and the extraction of surplus value but also through the forced appropriation of nature and resources. Inspired by Rosa Luxembourg's remarks on the role of international finance in furthering colonialism, Harvey stresses the key role of financial capital in furthering neoliberalism across the world. Accumulation by dispossession is a violent process that involves both economic and extra-economic coercion (often in the form of state power). It brings about the dispossession of people not only of their physical and economic means of production and consumption but also of their cultural and social means of existence. It has been widely used to explain the process of land acquisition, expropriation, and dispossession across the world, especially in the context of developing countries.
The process of accumulation by dispossession is, in fact, closely intertwined with the social categories of difference (race, gender, class, etc.). The interlocking practices of exploitative social relations inform contemporary circuits of capital and dispossess specific populations that are marginalized on the basis of gender, race, sex, religion, ingenuity, etc. (Behrman et al., 2012; Chu, 2011; Doss et al., 2014; Levien, 2017; Sargeson and Song, 2010). Although there is a growing literature on the theorization, policies, and complicated forms of dispossessions (Adnan, 2013; Akram-Lodhi, 2012; Araghi, 2009; Glassman, 2006; Hall, 2012; Paudel, 2016; Perreault, 2013), gendered impacts of dispossessions have received less attention in the literature. The existing studies on gendered dispossession as a consequence of land appropriation for commercial agriculture, industry, and urban expansion reveal that their impacts on gender inequalities and women's rights are quite dismal. Rather than improving their lives, they even leave women worse off regarding livelihood resources and opportunities (e.g. Agarwal and Levien, 2020; Casolo and Doshi, 2013; Doss et al., 2014; Julia and White, 2012; Tsikata and Yaro, 2014; Verma, 2014). This study will contribute to these studies by analyzing gendered and intersectional experiences of dispossession resulting from slum redevelopment projects based on a case study from Turkey.
Informal settlements branded as “slums” in pejorative and stigmatizing discourses (Gilbert, 2007) have been hotspots of accumulation by dispossession as a result of neoliberal urban development projects. Women living in informal settlements are given specific attention as they are considered at most risk of structural socio-economic and gender inequalities (UN Habitat, 2020). They seek to compensate for insufficient basic services and poor infrastructure with their unpaid labor for their household members and communities that, in turn, puts more strain on their work. The problems of security, crime, and violence in informal settlements also aggravate violence against women (McIlwaine, 2013). Feminist development studies have emphasized the importance of incorporating gender perspectives into slum redevelopment projects since the 1980s due to the complexity of the gendered nature of poverty (see e.g. Chant, 1996; Moser, 1987). However, such explicit attention has, by and large, been ignored by profit-driven development projects implemented in various parts of the world. Reading off gendered processes, these projects compounded, even more, the complex and power-laden connections between space, gender, and poverty.
The gender implications of slum redevelopment projects are interdependent with intersectionality affecting women's experiences of privation and dispossession. Critical race studies put forth the importance of intersectionality to better understand how multiple categories of domination and exclusion operate on social categories of difference (race, gender, ethnicity, class, location, etc.) multiplying and entrenching gendered forms of exploitation, marginalization, and oppression (Anthias and Yuval-Davis, 1983; Crenshaw, 1989). The intersectional aspects of slum redevelopment projects have been analyzed by a few studies. Doshi reveals that Mumbai's slum redevelopment was laden with “accumulation by differentiated displacement” working through class, gender, and ethnic relations. On the one hand, it dispossessed Muslims, North Indians, and other marginalized groups through violent eviction. On the other hand, it compelled pavement-dwelling women coming from marginalized sections of society to engage with the NGOs and renegotiate the terms of resettlement (Doshi, 2013). In Paris, where several Roma families living in shantytowns are relocated into temporary social housing and receive vocational training for integration, Roma women still live with difficulties to access better social housing and find decent work due to the lack of affordable housing options and institutional racism in the labor market (Puerto, 2016). In South Africa, the impact of better housing on Black women's livelihood was uneven. The mass-subsidized housing program provided better infrastructure and security but placed more responsibility on women to support household income due to the mounting costs of housing and basic needs (Meth, 2016). Comparing two housing programs of slum redevelopment projects in India and South Africa that adopted inclusive gender governance mechanisms, Meth et al. (2019) demonstrate that Black women in South Africa and women from low caste and Muslim communities in India are content with increased levels of privacy and security but the impact of gender-sensitive housing development projects on gender inequality is complicated by the complex relations between poverty and patriarchy. While the greater unemployment among women strains their capacity to hold housing ownership in the long term, they also experience gendered tensions and acute loss of privacy in the case of overcrowded families.
This study advances our understanding of gendered dispossession based on an examination of women's changing poverty from slum/squatter settlements into state-led public housing areas. It will analyze women's poverty from the perspective of the asset approach. Asset approach is very useful to present a holistic and culturally grounded bottom-up approach to livelihood (Moser, 1998) and has its roots in the concepts of “entitlements” and “capabilities” (Sen, 1985), “vulnerability,” and “poverty as process” (Chambers, 1989; Haddad, 1991). Feminist development studies also benefit from the asset analyses to discuss the interplay between urban inequalities and the gendered nature of asset ownership and accumulation (Chant, 2011; Moser 2007, 2016). As these studies have shown, there is not a direct and spontaneous relationship between asset accumulation and women's empowerment. However, accumulated assets have the potential to enhance the “transformative agency” facilitating women's capabilities to challenge the patriarchal system (Kabeer, 2005). The asset analyses provide insights into the five most important assets that people seek to accumulate to escape from poverty and sustain a livelihood: natural resources (land, water, etc.), physical resources (housing, equipment, infrastructure, etc.), financial resources (wage, savings, credit loans, government transfers, etc.), human resources (investments in nutrition, health, and education), and social resources (household relations, community networks, etc.). Providing a lens into both material and nonmaterial resources like human and social capital, asset analysis will help me demonstrate the “circuits of dispossession and privilege” that stem from the interconnected relations between institutions, resources, and opportunities (Fine and Ruglis, 2009). It will also reveal how women's subject positions as workers, students, carers, parents, migrants, and unemployed have been reconstituted concurrently in the new spatial context as a result of their access and control over resources.
Research field and methodology
Squatter settlements have been a landmark of major cities in Turkey until the 2000s as rural-to-urban migrants were able to use public land to build a squat known as gecekondu in Turkish (meaning built overnight) due to the inability of the state to provide housing for the growing population and populist–clientelist concerns that overlapped with developmentalist land tenure patterns (Buğra, 1998). Studies in Turkey demonstrate that migrants were able to access social capital, cheap land, and job opportunities through the networks of trust and reciprocities developed in squatter settlements (e.g. Ayata and Güneş-Ayata, 1996; Pinarcioğlu and Işik, 2001). Composed of close social networks based on ethnic, religious, and kin ties, squatter settlements were considered an integral part of the informal welfare regime in Turkey in the absence of effective welfare policies (Bugra and Keyder, 2006). The existing scholarship describes women living in squatter settlements in Turkey as low educated, married in the early 20s, and unable to access higher education due to limited income and poor living conditions. Families, in general, live as extended families in which elderly and married children live together or in different stories of squatter dwellings (Erman, 1996; Kandiyoti, 1988). This was also the case of the KUTP under examination in this study.
The acceleration of neoliberal urbanization in the early 2000s drove the implementation of large-scale urban development projects in squatter settlements. While recent studies reveal the shortcomings of these projects such as nonparticipatory implementation process, zoning of the urban poor in the margins of the city, difficulties in transportation, dissolution of social networks and income sources (Bartu-Candan and Kolluoğlu, 2008; Baysal, 2013; Karaman, 2013; Kuyucu and Ünsal, 2010; Zayim, 2014), the impact of these projects on relocated women is less studied in the literature (Erman and Hatiboğlu, 2017). Thus, this study will also contribute to studies on urban development in Turkey shedding light upon the changing forms of gendered dispossession and privation that are compounded by these top-down spatial schemes.
The KUTP is implemented in Izmir, the third metropolitan city of Turkey located in Western Turkey. By the late 1990s, state officials and politicians in Izmir began to articulate the goal of turning the city into a “world-class tourist” place by investing in tourism and cultural projects. New city plans were designed to convert the undervalued areas occupied by squatter dwellers into renovation-improvement areas (Izmir Metropolitan Municipality Department of City Planning and Urban Development Directorate of City Master Plan, 2009: 124). As an old inner-city squatter settlement inhabited earlier by migrants coming from Balkan regions, Kadifekale turned into a highly concentrated Kurdish neighborhood in the 1990s by the settlement of Kurdish migrants especially from Mardin in Eastern Turkey escaping from the war between the Kurdistan Workers’ Party and the state in Southeastern Turkey. The area was known to be prone to disaster since the 1950s (Kaya, 2002) but the project of resettlement was put into place in 2006 in line with the development of place-marketing strategies by the Municipality (Saraçoğlu and Demirtaş-Milz, 2014) with the acceleration of resettlement after 2010. The KUTP aimed to turn Kadifekale into a recreational touristic area while relocating the property rights holders into a mass housing estate. The project was developed by the collaboration of Izmir Metropolitan Municipality, Konak Municipality, and the state's Mass Housing Administration (Toplu Konut İdaresi Başkanliği, TOKI). Many of the squatter dwellers in Kadifekale did not have formal land titles but property rights known as tapu-tahsis documents distributed by the Municipality. The property right holders who agreed on a housing contract with the Municipality were resettled in TOKI Uzundere, a peripheral mass housing estate that is more than 10 km away from the city center. The majority of tenants in Kadifekale were composed of Kurdish migrants and did not have land titles. This was because when Kurdish migrants settled in the area in the 1990s, the land market was already undergoing privatization that discouraged urban authorities to distribute land titles to new squatter dwellers.
The spatial design and planning of mass housing estates like TOKI Uzundere are based on established “modern” conceptions with vertical planning, middle-class lifestyles, and capitalist socio-spatiality incompatible with the previous livelihood of squatter dwellers (see Eranil-Demirli et al., 2015). The facilities of the mass housing estate are located at the entry of TOKI Uzundere such as the health center, the mosque, the school, and the mall in which there is a supermarket, a coffeehouse, a gaming cafe, a restaurant, a pharmacy, and some shopping stores. TOKI Uzundere is built in a hilly area; thus, while inhabitants living in apartment blocks close to TOKI Uzundere center can walk to the facilities, inhabitants living in apartment blocks on the lower hills need to use transport vehicles to reach any social services and facilities. There is no metro station in the area. There is only one bus that connects the area to central districts in addition to minibuses run by the private sector. Inhabitants need to use at least two transport vehicles to reach central districts that are in general uncomfortable and costly for residents.
This study is based upon interviews, informal conversations, informal group interviews, and observations in Kadifekale squatter settlement and TOKI Uzundere mass housing estate. A total of 39 relocated squatters including 20 men and 19 women, mostly of middle and old ages, were interviewed concentrating on changing demographics, accommodation, working conditions of the household members, family welfare, social space and social networks, sense of belonging, and current problems. The TOKI Uzundere mass housing estate is built on a hilly area; thus, interviews were conducted in different locations of the mass housing estate to understand how residents’ experiences of resettlement change in different areas of the mass housing estate (center, upper, and lower hills). Interviewees were recruited through random sampling during June–July 2012 and interviews varied from 0.5 to 2 h. The interviewees included the managers of apartments, service workers, street vendors, and shop owners in the area. Five interviews were also conducted with urban authorities in February 2013. Interviews were transcribed verbatim both in Turkish and Kurdish. The data were analyzed through the detection of patterns and the specification of similar and different themes that result from participants’ experiences and accounts (Lincoln and Guba, 1985). Reviewing sub-themes, concepts, and categories used by participants allowed us to focus on the gendered and intersectional aspects of dispossession and poverty.
This study represents a genetic approach that traces how a “singularity” is formed as a result of both interconnected processes and local positions that affect the shaping of repeated urban phenomena in a particular urban context (Robinson, 2016). Urban development and upgrading projects in low-income housing areas that are marked as “slums” in public discourse are a common phenomenon affecting countries from the USA, UK, and France to China, Brazil, Turkey, and Egypt. However, as studies on slum redevelopment projects from India, Brazil, and Turkey highlight, the new development projects go beyond the simple displacement as the displaced inhabitants are also made stakeholders of the new public housing projects through payment schemes, the promise of better housing, and increased property value (Karaman, 2014; Koster and Nuijten, 2012; Roy, 2009). Residents who comply with eligibility conditions are resettled into new public housing areas that are located mostly in peripheral areas, and are representative of the modernist residential high-rise buildings and the massification of high-rise living solutions (Jacobs, 2006). While these new housing areas recast the livelihood opportunities of women and change poverty's gendered geography, the research of the KUTP will allow us to discuss both the dispossessive impacts of slum redevelopment schemes and the making of gendered and intersectional experiences of poverty in the local context.
Housing and tenure rights
Neoliberal urbanization enables the reconstruction and gentrification of low-income housing areas as they possess a significant rent gap that can be boosted by real estate investment (Smith, 1979). Informal settlements become an easy target for neoliberal development policies as these areas are pervaded by unregulated lands, incompletely commodified housing areas, derelict, and low-productive areas (Smith, 1987). While housing in informal settlements provides a critical asset for the urban poor to access cheap shelter in the competitive housing market especially in the context of global cities, slum redevelopment policies that enhance the formalization and commodification of housing bring about significant changes in land tenure systems with differential effects on women. This stems from the fact that the distribution and regularization of land are affected by social relations, inheritance practices, land uses, laws, and institutional structures that are deeply interconnected with gender, race, class, etc. (see Behrman et al., 2012; Rakodi, 2015).
The eligibility conditions and documentation requirements of slum redevelopment schemes are very influential in drawing the inclusive and exclusive boundaries of the projects. Informal settlements have a range of tenure and property relations with formal, informal, and perceived property rights that stem from patronage relations, zoning of informal settlements, and distribution of land and resources across the area (Nakamura, 2016). The ownership and distribution of these property rights are often discriminatory against marginalized populations due to the legacies of history, nationalist ideologies of citizenship and belonging, violent policies of exclusion, and neighborhood struggles over housing and property rights. In Turkey's slum redevelopment and renewal projects, the right to housing in mass housing areas is only given to dwellers with property rights, leaving the tenants out of the scope of the development projects. This enables community displacement of marginalized populations like the case of Kurds (Borsuk and Eroglu, 2020; Göral, 2011) as many displaced Kurds who migrated to Western cities in the 1990s settled in squatter settlements as tenants and could not benefit from the distribution of land titles to squatter dwellers by municipal authorities like the case of former migrants due to increased commodification of land in the 1990s. The KUTP also illustrates how this exclusion of tenants set the stage for actions and negotiations among better-off and poorest squatter residents that work through class, gender, and ethnic divides. Women from households with property rights in Kadifekale were better positioned than tenant women to benefit from the slum redevelopment project as many of them already aspired to have a house with better infrastructure, social services, and neighborhood facilities. The security issue and the danger of landslides in the area were also important factors motivating them for a new house. The exclusion of tenants mostly hurt the Kurdish community as many of them were tenants in the area. Many Kurdish tenant women were anxious about losing their house and community as a result of the development project. They did not want to leave the area due to the competitive housing market and emotional attachment to their neighbors. While the municipality disinvested the area during the negotiation phase of the project with cut-backs in social services, many of them continued to live in Kadifekale as they were not able to find comparable housing in other central districts with limited means. These tenant households sought to move into squatter settlements close to Kadifekale. In addition to the anxiety and insecurity over housing and community displacement, ongoing demolitions and cuts in social services including schools and health care hardened even more women's livelihood aggravating the domestic and reproductive tasks thrust upon them. I could not trace the life of Kurdish tenant women after the resettlement but Kurdish tenant women's experiences of dispossession of their homes and community illustrate how gendered and intersectional inequalities shape the process of accumulation and cast the differential and gendered consequences of dispossession.
The transfer of the right to housing from informal settlements into formal housing areas is also gendered as it is compounded by the complex entanglements between patriarchy, capital, land, and poverty. Even in slum redevelopment projects with gender-sensitive schemes, women's right to land and housing can be undermined by local and cultural interpretations and implementations that skew the design of laws and regulations (Meth et al., 2019). The urban development projects implemented in squatter settlements in Turkey, like the KUTP, do not have a specific gender agenda and remain limited to the negotiation over the compensation amount and possible housing(s) that would be allocated as a result of the demolition of squatter buildings. These negotiations are also gendered as they open contestations among household members over who will receive the right to housing in the new housing area. Many elderly interviewees indicated during the negotiation process that they sought to have another house for their sons in the TOKI Uzundere mass housing estate. As they put it, their married daughters “had already gone” during the resettlement phase implying that they were living in their husbands’ house. While there were female-headed households with property rights, I also found during the fieldwork that some women who had property rights due to inheritance felt the pressure to transfer their right to housing to their husbands with the resettlement project since being illiterate and/or unemployed, they felt unable to deal with monthly mortgage payments and bureaucratic regulations. Some women interviewees also noted that they make contributions to mortgage debts but as their husbands signed the housing contract, the legal deed will be in their husbands’ name. In some cases, interviewees also mentioned that they used their daughter’s or wives’ dowries to cover mortgage loans due to their limited financial means. These cases illustrate the interconnectedness between patriarchy, poverty, and capital that reproduce women's discrimination in the right to land and housing as quotations (quotes from interviews are used with pseudonyms throughout the paper) below show:
Social and solidarity networks
The disinvestment of low-income housing areas by the neoliberal retreat of public services and welfare state rests upon exploitative gender relations. Moser (1987) stresses the “triple role of women” in deprived human settlements “reproductive” tasks (childbearing and child-raising), “productive” tasks (first or second breadwinners), and “community managing” tasks (organization and mobilization for basic services such as water and sanitation). Aggravating women's work in relations of production and social reproduction, poor neighborhoods can thus turn into a catalyst of “spatial poverty traps” that embed women in poverty in the long term (Chant and Datu, 2015; Unterhalter, 2009: 16). However, there are cases where women develop mutual support mechanisms and coping strategies for survival over time in low-income housing areas that help them to negotiate, mediate, and resist power relations in the state, market, and society (e.g. Miraftab, 2006; Moser, 2009; Patel and Mitlin, 2010). Shenaz Hossein (2013), for example, notes the Black social economy organized by women in African slums that runs counter to the discrimination in the financial market. In Turkey's squatter settlements, squats often worked as a vector of social networks as many of squatter settlements were built upon kinship, ethnicity, and religiosity ties. Erman (1996) highlights that social networks in squatter settlements cultivated a special place attachment among women and provided practical and emotional help in the absence of effective welfare policies in Turkey.
The spatial change generated by slum redevelopment schemes thus triggers the reorganization of women's social relations, practices, and obligations. In the case of the KUTP, relocated women interviewees note that they now have a “modern” and “clean” house and an increased sense of privacy due to changing social relations. This also resonated with the Turkish modernization discourse that associates apartments with modernity and higher status for women (Gürel, 2009), contrary to the negative image of squatter dwellings depicted as backward and rural in popular discourse (Erman, 2001; Karpat, 1976). However, they also report that they miss the neighborly relations as they feel a greater social distance in the new housing areas. Interviewees relate this social distance to several factors such as new consumption patterns among women (e.g. renovating houses and decorating their new houses with new furniture) that drive jealousies, different socio-spatial arrangements in the new mass housing area (e.g. phoning neighbors before visits), and lack of social spaces for their gatherings. There is also a language issue in the case of relocated Kurdish women with limited Turkish to connect with Turkish neighbors. Women respondents report these changing social relations as follows.
Resettlement into apartments and the mass housing estate tamed the social networks of relocated women in many ways. First, extended families broke apart as apartment space is designed for nuclear families. Married children who do not have the right to a house in TOKI Uzundere mass housing estate choose to live in central districts close to employment opportunities. Second, there has been a dissipation of neighborhood relations from Kadifekale squatter settlement into TOKI Uzundere as tenants in Kadifekale moved into other neighborhoods. In addition to residents who did not want to live in TOKI Uzundere, many neighbors and families who settled in TOKI Uzundere ended up in separate apartment blocks.
Many interviewees reported that they miss their solidarity ties that were intrinsically tied to their social relations in the squatter settlement. These solidarity ties were working as a moral economy with many functions in women's everyday life. First, it provided emotional support for poor women cushioning the sense of isolation that may emerge because of poor living conditions. Socialization among neighbors either through chatting, doing household chores together, or sharing their problems instilled a sense of intimacy and support with bonding ties. Neighbors were not only a source of emotional support but also practical help for domestic and reproductive responsibilities. Especially in case of urgencies such as birth, death, or illness, female mutual support was stronger in helping each other through the ties of reciprocities that enhanced a sense of security as well. This female network was also helpful in bringing up and supervising children while they play together in the street alleviating the care work of mothers. It helped rebuild the sense of security in the unfamiliar urban context of Izmir for Kurdish women who had settled in Kadifekale as a result of the war and forced migration in Southeastern Turkey. Due to this emotional attachment to Kadifekale, Kurdish tenant women did not want to leave the area. However, it is important to remember the interconnected relations between moral and patriarchal economies. Erman notes social control effects that emerge from close social networks enforcing gender oppressive norms among women by actions like gossiping about each other, criticizing dressing, or behavioral codes (Erman, 1996). Earlier studies show that young women and women aspiring for an urban lifestyle were particularly disturbed by this social control and desired more privacy (Erman, 1997). While the resettlements and apartment life may lead to less social control and decreased domestic workload for women with smaller households, there is also a growing sense of isolation and vulnerability due to the loss of social networks, especially among women who enjoyed the emotional and practical help of these social networks. Elderly and relocated Kurdish interviewees reported that they feel separate from their community not only because of resettlements but also difficulties in transportation that make it hard for them to go to the city center and/or visit their relatives. Thus, they seek to reconstruct the new housing estate through their everyday practices and new social relations. They form new neighbor relations, chat on the pavements and sitting benches, and engage in gardening. It was found during the fieldwork that some relocated women formed open bazaars (markets) facilitating informal credit markets with neighbors. Thus, women actively negotiate, contest, and rework their positions and social relations in the new mass housing estate as illustrated by interviewees:
Changing gendered labor geography
Residents in informal settlements like townships in South Africa, favelas in Brazil, and squatter settlements in Turkey have for a long time provided labor reservoirs for industries with limited participation of women in the labor market (Perlman, 2005; Samson, 2008; Senyapili, 1982). However, these residents become part of the growing informal economy in line with neoliberal economic and institutional restructuring in line with deindustrialization, deregulations, decreasing number of stable jobs, and worker protections. This undermined men's capacity to provide for the family but pushed women to participate more in the labor market, albeit in low-page and causal jobs. In Kadifekale as well, many women were working in low-skilled jobs of the informal economy either as cleaners, babysitters, textile workers, etc. The central place of Kadifekale enabled many women to reach more easily to their workplaces and invest time and energy for both production and social reproduction obligations. Although this involvement in the labor market cannot be considered as “women's empowerment” in its proper term as it does not challenge patriarchal relations (Erman et al., 2002), it facilitated “bargaining with patriarchy” in Kandiyoti’s (1988) terms since it bolsters women's self-esteem and voice in the family (Eroğlu, 2009). Studies in Turkey show that working close to their home makes it easier for poor women to find kinship and neighbor networks accompanying them, save time and energy for their domestic work, and overcome the feeling of insecurity in unfamiliar urban spaces (Dedeoğlu, 2010; Erman et al., 2002; Eroğlu, 2009). However, it should be also recognized that these gendered preferences for close workplaces and women's exploitation in employment serves, in turn, to maintain gender inequalities in households and institutional structures including the labor market.
The spatial dispossession and peripheralization created by public housing areas transform the uneven relations between patriarchal, moral, and political economies and restructure the employment opportunities available to women. In Kadifekale squatter settlement, sharing and/or delegating their reproductive responsibilities with social networks served many women to ease their obligations and engaged in waged labor albeit in the informal economy. They were also informed about job opportunities through women's networks. Resettlement curtailed women's opportunities to work outside the home not only by decreasing word-of-mouth information about employment opportunities but also by increasing care work upon women. The elderly and children need to use several transport vehicles to reach basic services because of the peripheral location of TOKI Uzundere mass housing estate; thus, it falls upon women to accompany them to hospitals and schools in public transportation as the traditional caregiver. Furthermore, difficulties in commuting invigorate the gendered geography of fear stirring patriarchal control upon women's spatial and temporal mobility that, in turn, undermine women's access to employment opportunities.
The KUTP also illustrates how the peripheralization may generate economic dispossession intersecting with other axes of inequality (ethnicity and poverty) The resettlement into a peripheral housing area disrupted the ethnic niches built by, what Sassen (1995) terms, the workplace-community/workplace-household nexus in the case of Kurdish migrants. Kurdish migrants from Mardin were involved in particular niches in the local economy producing stuffed mussels in their squatter dwellings and distributing them to their clients. The centrality of Kadifekale enabled them to reach their clients with relatively low or no costs in commuting. Women were often engaged in this business as unpaid workers with an extensive role in the production. While the changing home spatiality prevents the use of home space for the production of stuffed mussels, the peripheral location of TOKI Uzundere has detached these households from their clients and brought about the loss of their work including women due to increased production costs. Unable to afford a car or increased commuting costs, the peripheralization meant the loss of available jobs in the informal sector for both men and women. Urban authorities promised to open a center for stuffed-mussel production during the negotiation process but these promises have not been kept so far. While men in these households searched for other jobs in the informal market, women ended up losing their work.
Women's role in human capital investments
Women's labor in social production also works as a buffer against resource deprivation and impoverishment as women contribute to household survival with everyday stuff like elderly care, child-rearing, food provisioning and cooking, cleaning, and other homemaking activities, etc. and decrease household expenses through their unpaid social and economic contribution. The commodification of basic amenities and services as a consequence of neoliberal policies has an aggravating impact on low-income women's work in social reproduction (Katz, 2001). The KUTP illustrates how spatial dispossession is felt in women's everyday life not only in terms of limited access to employment but also with the increased strain put on their work in social production. Relocated women are especially content with the better infrastructure of their new houses as they do not have to deal with many household chores they were assuming in squatter dwellings such as warming soba (wood-burning stove used for heating) for heating. However, many of them also lament losing their housing spaces, like gardens, balconies, or courtyards that enabled them to engage in household production. Squatter dwellings in Kadifekale had fuzzy external and internal boundaries. The layout of squatter dwellings was variable with flexible size and multi-purpose usage of rooms where household members engaged in a series of activities, from household chores to productive activities and social gatherings. The exterior boundaries of dwellings were also porous with extensions such as gardens, balconies, or courtyards, which served women to do their household chores such as cleaning rugs, cooking bread, making tomato or pepper paste, stocking food via low-cost shopping in the open bazaars. Many women were also socializing by gathering together for household chores. In the new mass housing estate, the enclosure of housing space obliges them to pay for services that they handled before with their labor in the squatter dwellings. This bolsters a sense of captivity and deprivation coupled with the pressure of additional living expenses.
Moreover, many women were able to go out and shop from street vendors and discount markets in Kadifekale and provide nutrition for family needs at low costs. Relocated residents close to the entry of the Uzundere mass housing estate now can access the supermarket in the center, those living in the lower hills need to use transport vehicles to reach it. In addition, while women were able to reach out to central districts by walking or 15-min bus ride with their dependents either for socialization, leisure, or social services in the Kadifekale squatter settlement, they now have to take several vehicles with their dependents to reach central areas. While women from better-off households are still able to benefit from the city center, this limited access to basic social services and the city center aggravates their domestic and intergenerational care work and enables by extension, the feeling of captivity and social exclusion under the pressure of increased expenses in the case of poor women:
As Kadifekale had problems like disorder, poor infrastructure, many interviewees hoped that resettlement into TOKI Uzundere mass housing estate will enable them to access better social services. However, it was missing adequate basic infrastructure and social services like schools, markets, and health care in the early phase of its development that affected disproportionately the domestic and care work that falls upon women. While these facilities were later built into the center of the mass housing estate, residents living in the lower ends of the hills complain that they still have difficulty to access to them due to transportation costs. Women respondents also note that the increased expenses pressure their ability to spend on children including education. For example, one female respondent who heads the household notes:
Conclusion
This study pushes beyond the thinking of urban development projects in poor neighborhoods as an intractable structural improvement and demonstrates the relationship between neoliberal urban development, dispossession, and women's poverty. Examining slum redevelopment projects as a process of accumulation by dispossession, the discussions highlight how dispossession is experienced in women's lives affecting their access and control over resources under the complex intersections of state, capital, land, housing, and social relations.
Based on a case study from Turkey, a slum redevelopment project that resettled the residents of a highly concentrated Kurdish migrant squatter settlement into a mass-housing estate, the research reveals that the transition from informal to formal property relations did not necessarily empower women's right to land and housing as this transition is mediated by gendered and racialized power asymmetries in marital relations, land market, and institutional structures. Conversely, the slum redevelopment project ended up boosting the precariousness and dispossession of Kurdish women, who were an integral part of tenant households and had to migrate to Izmir due to the war conditions in Southeastern Turkey. The resettlement led to the reorganization of social relations within households, communities, and neighbors with the erosion of moral economies that were of practical and emotional importance in women's everyday life especially for Kurdish tenants and elderly women. While women reconstruct the new housing estate according to their needs and new social relations, the peripheralization created by the new mass housing estate's location changed the intersection of patriarchal, moral, and political economies and limited women's access to employment with increased care work, patriarchal control over mobility, and transportation difficulties. The peripheralization also enabled the intersectional experiences of economic dispossession for relocated Kurdish women, separating them from their employment niche. Furthermore, it significantly hardened women's work in social reproduction hardening their access to social services and central places that bolster, in turn, a sense of social exclusion.
While this study does not contend to be exhaustive as neither informal settlements nor poor women are a homogenous group, it represents an attempt to incorporate gendered dimensions of dispossession and poverty that result from neoliberal urban development projects. Feminist geographical insights are crucial to understanding the impact of development interventions that operate on the axes of difference and the gendered and racialized consequences of dispossession.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This paper was originally prepared for presentation at the conference Overcoming Inequalities in a Fractured World: Between Elite Power and Social Mobilization, organized by the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD), November 2018, Geneva. It is supported by the Swedish Institute post-doc fellowship and Critical Thinking Residency Program.