Migration from rural Anatolia to Metropolitan cities

Abstract

This chapter explores migration from villages to metropolitan cities in Turkey starting in the late 1940s. It aims to reveal how this transformed cities and villages alike. First, I identify the defining features of Turkish urbanization engendered by rural-to-urban migration, namely, chain migration, spatial clustering, migrant networks and hometown associations, and the continuing relationship with the village, all function as support mechanisms in a context in which state provision and regulation are minimal. I argue that this type of urbanization challenged the idea of the transformation of society under the modernizing effects of the urbanization process identified with the Western experience, defying the project of Western modernity envisioned by the founders of the Turkish Republic. Second, I discuss the changes and challenges posed by the shift from the import-substitution model of industrialization to a neoliberal development model. I argue that the support mechanisms of earlier times are dissolving under state policies that prioritize economic gains and promote the formation of new subjectivities embedded in relations of competition and consumption, and that new support mechanisms provided by tarikats (Islamic orders) are emerging. And as the third and final point, I demonstrate the political repression in the 1990s in the Kurdish southeast as the cause of migration to cities in the region as well as to western Anatolia, producing multiple victimizations.