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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 urban
environments.

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 their
place 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, the
choice 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 connecting
pattern 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 around
Emirdag, 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 originally
built 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 housing
needs 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 outside
the 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 a
place 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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It seems that the Turkish immigrant all throughout Western Europe is still
perceived in the stereotypical image of conservative, religious, veiled, poor,
non-integrative and even violent people, regardless of the fact that there is
increasing evidence of Turks who have become permanent settlers, active
social agents and decision-makers in their adoptive countries (Ayhan Kaya &
Ferhat Kentel, 2005)

Urban transformation of the neighborhoods


The more or less successful integration with the local population might have
influenced the general quality of life of the Turks, however it did not change
the fact that in all three cities, they remained a lower class and an outcast
group, meaning they did not and do not have the financial resources, the
power, nor the legal rights to make any actual changes in the urban tissue of
the neighbourhood. The streets, pavements, buildings, facades, have all
remained as they were when the minorities were first settled. No
renovations, building extra floors, changing styles or adding architectural
elements have taken place. The only changes that they have had the power
to do was to literally add the life into the buildings, filling the ground floors
with the small ethnic economies, coloring the windows with advertisements
and national symbols, filling the streets with music and smells of their
national foods.

Conclusion

The initial presumption given in this paper was that the Turkish ethnic
minorities consciously or subconsciously seek out urban spaces that hold
transformative potential that they could melt into an urban space resembling
their places of origin. However, after analyzing the historical aspects of their

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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 have
any 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 at
home.

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 and
emotional 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.

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