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Varoş identity: The redefinition of low income settlements in Turkey

The aim of this article is to outline the transforming media representations of the concepts gecekondu and varo4, which refer to squatter settlements in Turkey. The identities of gecekondu (gecekondulu) and varo (varo4lu) have been defined and redefined in recent years in relation to the politics of urbanization in Turkey.' As a novel concept that entered the agenda of public debate in the late 1990s and has been used both in place of and alongside the concept gecekondu, varo4 will be given particular importance in this investigation. The concept has taken the form of a label that artificially defines low income settlements as a homogenous space and in recent years has carried a robust exclusionary potential. Although the usage of gecekondu and the representations of these settlements in the public debate have always incorporated negative connotations and imposed a falsely homogenous identity on the people living there since the 1940s, the nature of the 'othering' process as part of the dominant discourse2 has changed and gained a new impetus since the 1990s with the introduction of the term varo4. The nature of this change and motivations behind it will constitute the subject matter of this article. To situate these developments, the history of gecekondu settlements and changing representations of them will be elaborated by comparing two historical periods. First, we will very briefly tackle gecekondu politics and the changing public and academic approaches to these settlements between the 1940s and 1980. Secondly, and more extensively, we will discuss the structural changes in gecekondu settlements after 1980 and how the nature of public perception altered in parallel to these transformations. Before doing that, however, it would be helpful to give a brief definition of gecekondu. Gecekondu is accepted as an informal component of Turkey's rapid urbanization process, as is the case in many developing countries. Gecekondu literally means built overnight. Although the concept has taken on new meanings in recent years with these settlements' changing physical and social context, it originally referred to the groups of houses or neighbourhoods constructed on state or privately owned land without planning permission through the efforts of migrants and their fellows. We will examine the period covering the years between the 1940s, when gecekondu settlements first entered the agenda of public debate, and the early 2000s, by which time these settlements had proliferated in social and spatial terms and when the processes of their establishment and inhabitation had taken on a more complicated form. The low income settlements in recent years, which have constituted the majority of urban space today, and hold a certain potential to transform it, are perceived from a mainly urban elitist perspective as the source of