Urban studies final paper, Leonora Grcheva, MaHS

8/7/2019 Urban studies final paper, Leonora Grcheva, MaHS

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Final paper in

Urban studies: Research Methodology, part 1

Taught by:

Moulaert Frank (coordinator)

De Meulder Bruno

Urban landscapes of ethnic minorities

Comparative analyses of three Turkish neighbourhoods

Leonora Grcheva, MaHS

Abstract

This research paper focuses on the Turkish minorities in several western

European cities, and the way in which they influence the urban landscapes of

the neighbourhoods where they are settled. Based on the observation that

the urban landscapes in the three ethnic neighbourhoods have all been

transformed to closely resemble a Turkish settlement, an initial presumption

is made that ethnic minorities tend to settle in urban spaces that hold

potential to be transformed in a way that they would resemble their places

of origin. Comparative analyses will be conducted between the different

neighbourhoods, investigating the historical, urban and social context in

which the ethnic enclaves were created, in order to discover whether this

presumption is true.

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Introduction

The aim of this paper is to explore the spatial manifestations of ethnic

minorities in cities, the influence that their migration has on the

transformation of the neighbourhoods, as well as the reasons for the initial

formation of isolated ethnic enclaves within the cities.

Having decided that the phenomenon of ethnic enclaves in the cities would

be subject of research of this paper, the Turkish immigrants were chosen as

a study case for two reasons: they are one of the most wide spread

immigrants in the Western European countries and they have very specific

mental and physical connections to their country of origin as well strong

traditional values that have not been influenced by the new host countries,

which has direct influence on how they interact with the new urbanenvironments.

The Turkish neighborhood in Schaerbeek, Brussels was the choice for a place

as a typical representative ethnic enclave.

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The first thing that was observed was the striking similarity of this

neighborhood with many other previously visited Turkish areas in different

European cities, expressed with the similar ways of re-interpreting theirplace of origin into the new environment, that gives the neighborhoods a

recognizable Turkish feel and appearance.

This led to the presumption that the reason this happens is because

immigrants tend to search for spatial configurations in the new environment

that hold transformative potential, urban spaces that could possibly become

reenactments of their spaces of origin.

The aim of this paper was to explore whether this presumption is true.

To prove the presumption, comparative analyses needed to be conducted,

taking several Turkish neighborhoods in different European cities as

examples. Starting with the neighborhood of Schaerbeek in Brussels, thechoice of neighborhoods to compare it with was based mostly on the

percentage of Turkish population, the distinctive character of the

neighborhoods, and the availability of data. Eventually, the choice was set on

Schaerbeek in Brussels, Kreuzberg in Berlin and Ottakring in Vienna.

The goal was to analyse and compare the physical appearance and urban

tissue of the three neighbourhoods and how they were transformed as a

consequence of the ethnic minorities inhabiting them, see if a connectingpattern exists, and if so, explore the character of the pattern and the reasons

for its appearance through comparative analyses of the social, historical and

urban context. A closer examination of all three neighborhoods was to be

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conducted by photographic surveys, extensive literature reviews and

statistical data reviews.

Introduction of the three ethnic neighbourhoods

Schaerbeek, Brussels, Belgium

Allthough not highest in numbers, the Turkish immigrants still constitute a

big percentage of Belgiums’s immigration population, with over 200.000

people, 25% of which are concentrated in the Brussels area, mostly in

Schaerbeek.

Schaerbeek is a municipality located at the northeast of Brussels, adjacent to

the Brussels North train station and it dates back to the 19th century, when it

was built in the period of the massive urban growth that Brussels went

through after the proclamation of independence of Belgium in 1830.

Counting over 120.000 inhabitants, it is an extremely diverse municipality,

encompassing two almost contrasting neighbourhoods - Uptown Schaerbeek

with its calm posh elegance, a solid number of Art Nouvae and Art Deco

houses and its vicinity to the Pentagon is a popular living spot for EU

employees and other upper-class Belgian citizens, whereas downtown

Schaerbeek, with a notably higher density of 13.753 inhabitants per square

kilometer and livelier atmosphere, is the “immigrant area”, where 40% of the

population is Turkish, originating mostly from the countryside aroundEmirdag, a district in central Anatolya.

The Turks were originally concentrated in the area around the North Brussels

Station, where they had arrived by train and cheap rental housing was

available. However, in the 1970s the majority of the population was evicted

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from the western part of the zone by the “Manhatten plan” which was meant

to restructure the area as a modern international business district. As a

consequence, concentration of Turks increased in the neighbourhoods to the

east of the station, forming a strong ethnic neighborhood, notwithstanding

the fact that at that time the Turks only accounted for about 25 per cent of

the local population. (Kestelloot & Cortie, 1998) The Turkish area of

Schaerbeek is mostly concentrated on the “downtown part” of Chaussée de

Haecht/ Haachstesteenweg, a street framed by 19th century three storey

high buildings, with partially damaged facades, charactarised by the ground

floor ethnic shops.

The housing market in Brussels is dominated by the private rental sector,

and the largest part of it is labeled as residual rental sector in the sense that

it lies at the bottom of the quality range of housing. (Kesteloot & Cortie,

1998) The residual rental sector is where the immigrants were concentrated

in the first period of migration, as this is where the cheapest housing was

offered. The oldest, most poorly equipped areas built in the 19th century

consistute the largest part of the residual sector. The housing was originallybuilt for workers (the so-called quartiers with individual apartments on each

floor), or in a smaller percentage it results from the sub-division of former

middle-class, single-household dwellings.

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Haachstesteenweg, Schaerbeek, Brussels

Kreuzberg, Berlin, Germany

Turkish form the largest ethnic minority in Germany with over 3.5 million

people of Turkish origin living in there, accounting for 25.1% of the country’s

foreign population. The majority of the Turks in Germany are concentrated

in the cities, predominately in the former West Germany. Berlin is the most

ethnically diverse city in Germany, with its population of 250.000-300.000

people with Turkish citizenship or Turkish ancestry. The most famous Turkish

neighborhood in the city is the working-class neighborhood of Kreuzberg,

consequently known by the name of Little Istanbul.

Kreuzberg was formed by a group of Jewish settlers in 1820, and remained a

distinctively rural place until the end of the 19th century, when Berlin started

to grow rapidly due to industrialization, and with its growth the housingneeds increased. A large quantity of Kreuzberg’s building were built in that

time, as the borough became the most populous of Berlin’s boroughs with

more than 400.000 people, and as it was and remains geographically

smallest, it also became the most densely inhabited with more than 60.000

people per square kilometer. Today the neighborhood is known for the large

percentage of immigrants and second-generation immigrants, 15.1% of

which are of Turkish origin.

The current demographic of the neighbourhood is mostly a result of what

happened to the neighborhood in the 1960s. Plans for urban renewal of West

Berlin were made, focused mostly on construction of new, higher-standard

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housing estates in the periphery of the city. Due to shifts in policies, the

renewal program was extended from the city’s edges toward the inner city,

including Kreuzberg, where a biggest number of renewal plans were situated.

The city-owned housing corporations deliberately neglected the buildings,

purposely allowing them to deteriorate, hoping for them to be slated for

demolition, since new construction guaranteed heavy public subsidies. This

resulted in massive relocation of the residents who could afford this, which

bequeathed a residential population in Kreuzberg’s renewal areas of poor

people, old people and migrant workers. By the late 1960s these dwelling

became an attractive low-costing options for immigrant families who found

they did not have to compete with Germans for affordable housing or fear

discrimination by landlords. This led to further increasing of the percentage

of Turkish people in the neighbourhood.

Similar to the Schaerbeek neighbourhood, Kreuzberg’s Turkish population is

mostly concentrated or at least most visible on Oranienstrasse, a lively street

with a high concentration of ethnic shops, restaurants and businesses.

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Oranienstrasse, Kreuzberg, Berlin

Ottakring, Vienna, Austria

Same as in Germany, Turks form the largest ethnic minority in Austria,

counting over 142.000 people of Turkish origin, constituting 3% of the total

population, which puts Austria right before Belgium in the statistics of main

European host countries for Turkish immigrants. With a little over 40.000

immigrants, the capital Vienna is the city hosting the biggest percentage of

the Turkish population. Unlike in Brussels and Berlin, in Vienna the Turkish

population isn’t concentrated on solely one area of the city, but they are

rather dispersed through several different zones, where they are mixed with

other ethnic minorities, predominantly from the former Yugoslavian

countries. Of the several Turkish concentration points in the city, the most

eminent one is Ottakring, the 16th of the 23 disctricts of the city of Vienna,

where 26% of the inhabitants are immigrants, almost half of which of Turkish

descendency. Ottakring is located near the center of Vienna, directly outsidethe Gürtel, which is Vienna’s second city center ring. The eastern part of

Ottakring, where the immigrants are concentrated is closer to the city center

and has historically been a working class mixed use area. In contrast,

western Ottakring is a more luxurious residential area called the

Wilhelminenberg which includes villas and is surrounded by a forest.

When the waves of immigrant guest workers first started moving to Vienna

in the 1960s, they did not have access to municipally owned housing (until

2006) and older privately owned housing was the only housing they could

afford, which usually meant units built in the 19th century, that were always

more likely to be of lower quality.

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The most distinctively Turkish part within the eastern part of Ottakring is the

Brunnengasse where the Brunnenmarkt, the largest street market in Europe

is located. The market takes place on daily basis and the food and clothing

stands are run mostly by Turkish and former Yugoslavian immigrants. More

than half of the residential buildings on the street originate mostly from the

19th century, but unlike in Berlin and Brussels they were not municipality

owned buildings meant for workers, but rather cheap private dwellings.

Brunnengasse, Ottakring, Vienna

Comparative analyses of the neighbourhoods

Causes and circumstances of immigration

The first obvious link between the three neighbourhoods is that they were all

inhabited by the Turks in the same period for identical reasons. It happened

in the late 1960s, when Turkish immigration on a world scale was at its peak.

This was a consequence of the economical status of Turkey at the time,

when due to high population growth and massive unemployment, emigration

was supported as a way out of the crises. Turkey was actively signing

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bilateral agreements with a number of countries that at the time were in

need of extra labor, as they had shortage of labor for post-war reconstruction

and economic expansion, and started recruiting workers from abroad, mostly

from the Mediterranean countries as a solution to their problem. The newly

arrived “guest workers”, as the immigrants were called since their initial

intention was to work temporarily, earn money and go back to their home

country, were from predominately rural origins, and were invited to fill in the

gaps left by the host populations in the industrial sectors (textiles, leather

and food), as well as in the low-skilled services , public works, the building

and cleaning sectors (Ural Manco, 2005) Belgium, Germany and Austria were

quite liberal at the time in granting migrants the right the migrate with their

families, as they had policies with objectives to both fill the demographic

deficit and attract immigrants to their own instead of to their rival countries.

It was also part of the policy to keep the immigrants’ salaries within the

country’s economy instead of the money being sent to the countries of

origin.

When looking at the migration of the Turks, the motives for the choice of aplace to live can be related to their housing needs, which have been

changing through the years. Usually three phases are distinguished: the

phase of the labour migrant; the phase of primary family reunification; the

phase of secondary family reunification. (Kesteloot, Cortie, 1997)

The first phase begins where the single males immigrate alone looking for a

job. In this period they look for cheap temporary accommodation, and

sometimes the employer provides it. Buying a property is not an option,

because the stay is considered as temporary and the immigrants tend to

earn and save as much money as possible to bring back home. In the second

phase the women and children join the man, which has great influence on

both the housing needs, as now entire families need to be sheltered, as well

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as on the general process of integration as the arrival of the women and

children usually means that the stay becomes permanent. In this phase

cheap housing is no longer the priority; the priority is now to have sufficient

rooms for the big Turkish families that would also enable separate spaces for

men and women. The third phase is tightly related to the traditional customs

that Turks stick to when it comes to marriage, namely, the young men and

women marry fellow Turkish that are already living in the host countries. This

category is in need of large, cheap, rented housing. And at the same time,

the first generation Turks that have already accumulated finances and have

grown accustomed to living in the country might opt for buying a house. By

the third phase the immigrant status slowly shifted from “guestworkers” to

“foreigners”.

Turkish community organizations

One thing that all Turkish immigrants have in common, regardless of their

exact place of origin or host country is the exceptionally strong links they

keep with their homeland. The majority of them visit Turkey every summer,

the Turkish people from Schaerbeek even do it together, as a community. As

a result of this, the Turkish immigrants hold on very tight to their traditional

values, meaning their families always comes first, marriage to men/women

from the same ethnic background is preferred and encouraged, the

knowledge of their history and folklore is kept and passed on to the next

generations, religion and ethnics are put on a pedestal and Turkish language

is the only one spoken within these neighbourhoods, which can be clearly

seen on the shop-windows when passing the streets where the ethnic shops

and restaurants are concentrated. In order to preserve this and to keep the

social consistency amongst themselves stronger, Turkish immigrants have a

very high number of Turkish community organizations of any kind. In all

three neighbourhoods many of these organizations are present, and it’s a

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part of the daily life a Turkish immigrant to be a part of them- these is how

they maintain their social networks, support each other and educate the

younger generations.

Levels of integration

Even though the reasons for immigration were the same, and the Turkish

population settled in the different cities while the host countries were going

through parallel economic developments, the local people reacted differently

in terms of accepting the newly come immigrants, which resulted in different

concepts of citizenship and different levels of integration with the local

society that have developed during the decades and up to today. The level of

segregation has influenced the neighbourhoods to develop to be more

exclusively Turkish or rather of mixed ethnic consistency. In both Germany

and Belgium, the problem of intergration of the Turkish minority is not a

small one. According to the Berlin Institute for Population and Development,

the Turks come last among the other foreigners in the integration ranking.

The situation is somewhat better in Belgium, where part of the Turks feels

rather well accepted, but still a majority of them feels outcasted by the

Belgians, according to the surveys conducted by the King Baduoin

Foundation. It is possible that the poor level of integration and the existence

of ethnic segregation was the reason that the these two ethnic

neighborhoods were created to be more exclusively Turkish, although this

theory gets disproven in the case of Wien, where even though the Turkish

“share” their neighbourhoods with the former Yugoslavian community, they

are still not being treated evenly, and the situation is even worse than in the

other cities, considering only one fifth of the Turks claim that they feel

integrated , although this might be more due to their own resentment of the

new culture, as studies show that young Turks feel more strongly tied to

Islam than to the society in which they live.

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migration and reading through the available data about the circumstances of

them inhabiting the host cities, one comes to the opposite conclusion.

The choice of neighborhoods in which the Turks settled was not something

that was up to them, it was not on any level a selection of suitable urban

morphology, it was quite contrary, an imposed choice, or more accurately,

lack of choice due to racial discrimination on the housing market, insufficient

financial resources, unfamiliarity with the local language and lack of

connections in the cities that lead them to what were the poorest, most

affordable areas at the time.

The fact that the chosen neighborhoods have similarities in their urban

morphology and typology is merely because in most of the western European

cities, it is the unrenovated

19th century buildings that are known to be of lower quality considering the

poor housing standards at the time, and the negligence that they have been

subjected to, which has resulted in them becoming the cheapest available

dwellings.

The ethnic economies have not had any power to do any real changes in the

urban tissue, they have had little or no influence in the shaping of the urban

morphologies of the ethnic neighbourhoods, as going through the housing

laws and current situation of the immigrants, one notices they don’t haveany actual legal or financial power to do so. And so they tend to adjust and

re-shape the new environment as much as possible to resemble their home

places, using subtle tools, such as advertisements, colors, foods, smells,

small interventions in the ready-made space they were put into. And yet the

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superficial changes they have imposed onto the urban tissue has given the

three neighborhoods the same appearance, the same “feel”, it has made

them be perceived by outsiders in the same way. From this we can conclude

that any number of different neighborhoods, filled with the same

“homogenous” ethnic structure of people gains nearly the same overal

“package”, the same “first impression appearance”, slowly assimilating into

a certain type of neighbourhood.

Zooming out and looking at the larger scale, guided by nostalgia and need of

social consistency, all migrants have the urge and tendency to transfer their

world, not only socially, but also literally and physically in the country where

they migrate. That is exactly what the ones who have had the power did –

the rich and powerful colonizers transferred both the physical character and

the toponymes from Europe to the colonized cities on the other continents.

On the other extreme are the poor migrants – forced to move into the parts

of the cities that have been rejected by the host population as unwanted;

they have inhabited any given kind of urban formation and paint it with their

own colors, letters, music, foods and smells that made them feel more athome.

Talking about the Massai, Claude Levi-Strauss describes the way the

colonizers moved them to new lands, so they could easily disintegrate their

social structure and rule them. The Massai’s reaction was to name all the

rivers, hills, valleys with the same names as they had in their homelands,

regardless of their topographic inconsistency. They transferred the entire

geography of their original lands on a toponymical and symbolic level, so

they feel more at home. On a parallel urban level, this is what the Turkish

immigrants have been doing; they have been using the same coping

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mechanism to deal with their nostalgia, by transforming the new

environment into a familiar one.

A new question emerges from this conclusion that calls for further research.

The notion of whether the creation of ethnic ghettos is deliberate or

involuntary becomes arguable.

While the obvious conclusion might be that the ethnic minorities have settled

in certain areas of the city due to racial discrimination on the housing

market, or as Kesteloot & Cortie argue: “The restriction of Turks to a specific

housing market sector quite obviously determines their spatial location”

(1998), this can also be seen from a completely different angle. Namely, Van

Kempen writes that “The spatial segregation of immigrants has its basis in a

multitude of factors, but a particularly important one is finding mutual

support”. It is possible that the ethnic communities create their ghetto

communities consciously, in order to create an isolated, safe environment,

get help in finding a place to live or a first job, receive social, economic andemotional support and look after each other, shielded from the

discrimination and judgments of the host communities. Parallel to the way

the upper classes created gated communities in order to protect themselves

from any danger or intrusion, the ethnic minorities create their ghetto

communities to protect themselves from the bad treatment of the host

society, both communities having the wish to keep their privacy and feel safe

as a common factor.

Self-ghettoisation might be their free choice in order to stay among their

own; they don’t look for better, cheaper, nicer conditions, they look for the

familiar. Finding the real answer to this dilemma goes beyond the scope of

this paper, but it is possible that it could be a crucial starting point for

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implementation of any kind of future social and urban policies for

improvement of the life and integration level of the ethnic minorities.

References:

KAYA, Ayhan & KENTEL,Ferhat, “Belgian-Turks, A Bridge or a Breach between

Turkey and the European Union?”, King Baudouin Foundation, Brussels, 2007

VAN KEMPEN, Ronald, “From the residence to the Global, The relevance of

the urban neighbourhood in an era of globalization and mobility”,

Proceedings of the ENHR-conference Urban Dynamics and Housing Change,Istanbul, 2010

MEURS, Lisa, “Ethnic concentration and economic outcomes of Turkish and

Moroccan immigrants in Belgium”, unpublished thesis (B.A.), Uttrecht

University, Utrecht, 2010

KESTELOOT, Christian & CORTIE, Cees, “Housing Turks and Moroccans inBrussels and Amsterdam: The difference between private and public

markets” in Urban Studies, 1998 (35) 10, pp.1835-1853

LENTIN, Ronit, “At the heart of the Hibernian post-metropolis, Spatial

narratives of ethnic minorities and diasporic communities in a changing city”

in City , 2002 (6) 2

MANCO, Ural & KANMAZ, Meryem, “From conflict to co-operation between

Muslims and local authorities in a Brussels borough: Schaerbeek” in Journal

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SCHAEFFER, Blair, “Immigrants, housing and urban renewal in Vienna’s

Ottakring”, unpublished professional report for the Institute for Regional and

Environmental Economics, 2009, Vienna

VAN KEMPEN, Ronald, “Segregation and housing conditions of immigrants inWestern European Cities”, Eurex Lecture, 2003,

MANCO, Ural, “Turks in Western Europe”, unpublished paper, Centre d-

Etudes Sociologiques, 2009, Brussels

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[Retrieved on January 10th, 2011]

VAN KEMPEN, Ronald & VAN WEESEP, Jan, “Ethnic residential patterns in

Dutch cities: backgrounds, shifts and consequences” in Urban Studies, 1998

(35) 10, pp.1813-1833

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http://www.tagesspiegel.de/kultur/oranienstrasse-aussenseiter-

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[Retrieved on January 10th, 2011]

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http://gatesofvienna.blogspot.com/2010/12/turkish-mentality-in-austria.html


http://www.tagesspiegel.de/kultur/oranienstrasse-aussenseiter-spitzenreiter/1881890.html


http://diepresse.com/home/sport/fussball/euro2008/392792/Ottakringer-Strasse_Portraet-einer-Meile











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Urban studies final paper, Leonora Grcheva, MaHS