Urban Neighbourhood Formations: Boundaries, Narrations and Intimacies

273 Pages·2020·8.689 MB·English

by  Hilal Alkan and Nazan Maksudyan

Urban Neighbourhood Formations

This book examines the formation of urban neighbourhoods in the Middle East,
Africa, and South Asia. It departs from ‘neighbourhoods’ to consider identity,
coexistence, solidarity, and violence in relations to a place.
Urban Neighbourhood Formations revolves around three major aspects of the
making and unmaking of neighbourhoods: spatial and temporal boundaries of
neighbourhoods, neighbourhoods as imagined and narrated entities, and neighbour­
hood as social relations. With extensive case studies from Johannesburg to Istanbul
and from Jerusalem to Delhi, this volume shows how spatial amenities, immaterial
processes of narrating and dreaming, and the lasting effect of intimacies and vio­
lence in a neighbourhood are intertwined and negotiated over time in the construc­
tion of moral orders, urban practices, and political identities at large.
This book offers insights into neighbourhood formations in an age of constant
mobility and helps us understand the grassroots-level dynamics of xenophobia
and hostility, as much as welcoming and openness. It would be of interest for
both academics and more general audiences, as well as for students of under­
graduate and postgraduate courses in urban studies and anthropology.
Hilal Alkan is a research fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at
Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin. Her work focuses on charitable
giving, migration, gender, and social welfare, through the lenses of anthropol­
ogy, citizenship studies, and urban studies. Her publications include ‘The Gift
of Hospitality and (Un)welcoming Syrian Migrants in Turkey’, American Eth­
nologist (2019) and ‘The Sexual Politics of War: Reading the Kurdish Conflict
through Images of Women’, Les Cahiers du CEDREF (2018).
Nazan Maksudyan is Professor of History at the Freie Universität Berlin and
a research associate at the Centre Marc Bloch, Berlin. Her research focuses on
the history of children and youth, with special interest in gender, sexuality, edu­
cation, humanitarianism, and non-Muslims. Her publications include Women
and the City, Women in the City: A Gendered Perspective on Ottoman Urban
History, ed. (2014); Ottoman Children & Youth During WWI (2019), ‘Orphans,
Cities, and the State: Vocational Orphanages (Islahhanes) and “Reform” in the
Late Ottoman Urban Space’, IJMES 43 (2011).
Routledge Studies in Urbanism and the City
Balkanization and Global Politics
Remaking Cities and Architecture
Nikolina Bobic
Cities and Dialogue
The Public Life of Knowledge
Jamie O’Brien
The Walkable City
Jennie Middleton
Urban Restructuring, Power and Capitalism in the Tourist City
Contested Terrains of Marrakesh
Khalid Madhi
Ethnic Spatial Segregation in European Cities
Hans Skifter Andersen
Big Data, Code and the Discrete City
Shaping Public Realms
Silvio Carta
Neighbourhood Planning
Place, Space and Politics
Janet Banfield
Urban Neighbourhood Formations
Boundaries, Narrations and Intimacies
Edited by Hilal Alkan and Nazan Maksudyan
For more information about this series, please visit www.routledge.com/Routledge­
Studies-in-Urbanism-and-the-City/book-series/RSUC
Urban Neighbourhood
Formations
Boundaries, Narrations and
Intimacies
Edited by Hilal Alkan and
Nazan Maksudyan
First published 2020
by Routledge
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and by Routledge
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© 2020 selection and editorial matter, Hilal Alkan and Nazan Maksudyan;
individual chapters, the contributors
The rights of Hilal Alkan and Nazan Maksudyan to be identified as the
authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual
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without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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ISBN: 978-0-367-25510-7 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-28814-2 (ebk)
Typeset in Times New Roman
by Swales & Willis, Exeter, Devon, UK
Contents

List of figures vii
Editor and contributor biographies viii
Acknowledgements xii
Introduction 1
HILAL ALKAN AND NAZAN MAKSUDYAN
PART I
Borders: material, temporal and conceptual boundaries of
neighbourhoods 15
1 What makes a township a neighbourhood? The case of Eldorado
Park, Johannesburg 17
ALEX WAFER AND KHOLOFELO RAMEETSE
2 Killing time in a Roma neighbourhood: habitus and
precariousness in a small town in Western Turkey 36
SEZAI OZAN ZEYBEK
3 Of Basti and bazaar: place-making and women’s lives in
Nizamuddin, Delhi 52
SAMPRATI PANI
PART II
Stories: neighbourhoods as imagined and narrated entities 73
4 Two tales of a neighbourhood: Eyüp as a stage for the Ottoman
conquest and Turkish War of Independence 75
ANNEGRET ROELCKE
vi Contents
5 Past neighbourhoods: Palestinians and Jerusalem’s ‘enlarged
Jewish Quarter’ 99
JOHANNES BECKER
6 Where is Alexandria? Myths of the city and the anti-city after
cosmopolitanism 119
SAMULI SCHIELKE
7 Jerusalem’s lost heart: the rise and fall of the late Ottoman city
centre 138
YAIR WALLACH
PART III
Intimacies: neighbourhoods as sources and objects of
claim-making 159
8 Violence, temporality, and sociality: the case of a Kashmiri
neighbourhood 161
AATINA NASIR MALIK
9 Syrian migration and logics of alterity in an Istanbul
neighbourhood 180
HILAL ALKAN
10 Negotiating solidarity and conflict in and beyond the
neighbourhood: the case of Gülsuyu-Gülensu, Istanbul 199
DERYA ÖZKAYA
11 Urban tectonics and lifestyles in motion: affective and spatial
negotiations of belonging in Tophane, Istanbul 218
URSZULA EWA WOŹNIAK
12 The Basij of neighbourhood: techniques of government
and local sociality in Bandar Abbas 237
AHMAD MORADI
Index 257
Figures

1.1 Aerial view of part of Eldorado Park (police station

in upper right quadrant) 28

2.1 Coffeehouse on New Year’s Eve 37

2.2 A day at the social services, waiting for the coal aid 42

4.1 Eyüp cemeteries before (above) and after (below) transformations

by the Welfare Party-led Municipality of Eyüp 76

4.2 Beybaba cemetery street in 1919 (above) and in the mid-2000s

(below) 78

4.3 Cover of the Municipality of Eyüp’s 2008 city guidebook 85

6.1 The Chinese Housing 120

6.2 The Corniche by Ramleh Station 125

6.3 Inland al-Mandara in the East of the City 134

7.1 Celebrations of the completion of the clock tower, 1907. On the

right, the Sabil, built in 1901 142

7.2 The border walls in Mamilla 150

7.3 Old City Park, on the site of the former Ottoman post office, 2016 152

8.1 Martyr’s tap (Shaheed Nalq-e) in the memory of a neighbourhood

militant 167

8.2 Graffiti on the wall of the shrine of Bah-ud-din Sahib 169

10.1 Gülsuyu-Gülensu 201

11.1 Logo of Gönülbağı Vakfı 228

11.2 Teahouse/AKP election information booth in Tophane 231
Editor and contributor biographies

Hilal Alkan is a Georg Forster Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foun­
dation at the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient. She received her PhD in
Political Science from The Open University, UK. She was a EUME
Fellow of Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin in 2016–2017 and the
receiver of Potsdam University’s Voltaire Award for Tolerance, Inter­
national Understanding and Respect for Tolerances in 2017. Her work
focuses on charitable giving, migration, and social welfare, through the
lenses of anthropology, citizenship studies, and urban studies. In her
recent project called ‘The Dyad of Care and Discipline: Aiding Syrian
Migrants in Turkey and Germany’, she is working on informal neighbour­
hood initiatives that aid Syrian migrants in their settlement in both
contexts and comparing migrants’ experiences in both countries. Her
wider research interests include gendered experiences of war and vio­
lence, feminist ethics of care, and plant–human relations.
Nazan Maksudyan is Einstein Guest Professor at the Freie Universität Berlin
and a research associate at the Centre Marc Bloch, Berlin. She was
a EUME Fellow 2009–2010 at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin and an
Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung Postdoctoral Fellow at the ZMO in
2010–2011. Her research mainly focuses on the history of children and
youth in the late Ottoman Empire, with special interest in gender, sexuality,
education, humanitarianism, and non-Muslims. Among her publications are
Orphans and Destitute Children in the Late Ottoman Empire (Syracuse
University Press, 2014), ed. Women and the City, Women in the City
(New York: Berghahn, 2014); Ottoman Children and Youth During World
War I (Syracuse University Press, 2019), ‘Orphans, Cities, and the State:
Vocational Orphanages (Islahhanes) and “Reform” in the Late Ottoman
Urban Space’, IJMES 43 (2011); ‘Foster-Daughter or Servant, Charity or
Abuse: Beslemes in the Late Ottoman Empire’, Journal of Historical Soci­
ology 21 (2008).
***
Editor and contributor biographies ix
Johannes Becker is a Research Fellow at the Center of Methods in Social Sci­
ences, University of Goettingen, and coordinator of the research project
‘Dynamic Figurations of Refugees, Migrants, and Long-time Residents in
Jordan since 1946’, sponsored by the German Research Foundation.
Aatina Nasir Malik is a PhD candidate in the Department of Humanities and
Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. Her research inter­
ests include political violence, Kashmir studies, gender, and the everyday. Her
PhD thesis explores political violence and the everyday in Kashmir, underscor­
ing the way political violence makes and unmakes social life in
a neighbourhood in Srinagar, and thereon how different subjectivities emerge.
Ahmad Moradi received his PhD in Social Anthropology at the University of
Manchester, UK. His thesis titled ‘Politics of Persuasion: Making and
Unmaking Revolution in Iran’, explores the intersection of sacrifice and
citizenship in the Islamic Republic of Iran. His research interests include
collective and individual experience of loss, welfare and networks of care,
political anthropology, and the anthropology of the Middle East. He is also
involved in the practice of creative ethnography, the result of which has
been an artistic monograph on the subject of illegal migration and exhib­
itions in Tehran, Budapest, and Amsterdam.
Derya Özkaya is a doctoral researcher at the Otto Suhr Institute of Political
Science at Freie Universität Berlin. She is currently working on the role of
emotional and affective dynamics for political participation and transform­
ation exploring the possibilities and limitations of change starting from the
Gezi uprisings of 2013 in Turkey. Her research interests include social
movements, collective memory, commemorative practices, revolutionary
movements in Turkey, collective emotions, and political affect.
Samprati Pani is a PhD candidate at the Department of Sociology, Shiv Nadar
University, Uttar Pradesh. Through intersections of urban informality,
design, and spatial practices, her research focuses on the making and tech­
niques of weekly bazaars in Delhi. She has a Master’s and MPhil in Soci­
ology from Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi. She has
worked in academic publishing as an editor for many years and is also
a trained graphic designer. Her interests include ordinary aesthetics, urban
spatialities, street typography, and practices of street vending. She blogs on
various aspects of the everyday city at chiraghdilli.wordpress.com.
Kholofelo Rameetse holds a BSc Honours degree in Geography and Environ­
mental Studies from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.
Over the past three years, she has conducted her MSc research in Eldorado
Park and neighbouring locations. Her research interests are post-apartheid
urban development policies and practices. She is also a business develop­
ment associate for an independent renewable energy developer.