The Economies of Urban Diversity

As European Capitals of Culture in 2010 and metropolitan areas of immigration and transmigration, both Istanbul and the Ruhr Area (Essen was designated as European Capital of Culture on behalf of the Ruhr Area) share a complex cultural and social history. Strong human, political, and economic ties have long linked the European Capital of Culture of Turkey to Germany’s main immigration region, which is about to become a new cultural center thanks to the recognition of its industrial heritage by UNESCO (Zeche Zollverein in Essen).¹ Even though the cultural history of each region is different, a crisscross reading of ‘parallel lives’ between the two countries helps to understand better the use and the potential of urban diversity over time.

The marketing of diversity in urban contexts results from two recent phenomena. First, the positive view taken of cosmopolitan and diverse urban environments (by city governments, by tourists, and by investors), and, second, the empowerment of minorities who put their religious, ethnic, and gendered expressions of (multiple) belonging on stage. In the following chapter, I give an overview of the concept of diversity in different scientific communities, starting from the first uses of the term 30 years ago in the United States. Recently, the German Sociological Association (GSA) organized its annual conference around the theme “Diversity and Cohesion: Challenges of a New Societal Complexity.”²

Following a workshop organized in Essen in January 2011, this volume investigates possible ways of understanding and, hopefully, facilitating the integration of “the others”—broadly defined in terms of ethnic and/or religious difference from the majority—into urban life in Western Europe, through their potential economic contribution to the community. The participants in the workshop convened around a discussion based on case studies from two metropolitan areas, the Ruhr in Germany and Istanbul in Turkey, both past and present. The aim was to compare and contrast, over an admittedly large divide in time and space, the status of minorities—or non-majority communities—and the dynamics of their integration (or lack thereof) into urban life, in the hope of gaining possible insights into the viability of present-day social and economic options. To put it rather simply, was there anything in the Ottoman experience with diversity and its management that might inspire the European trans-or metanational project and its dealings with a growing issue of immigration, past, present, and future?

This chapter aims to trace the process of change of the Turkish guest worker migration through to transmigration, and to highlight the corresponding role and significance of Istanbul as a logistical and organizational center and key sending region, and of the Ruhr as a central host region. The Turkish migration process, which began in 1961, by 2011 had involved the movement of a total of 6.8 million people between the two contracting countries. The intensity and direction of migration is thus a statistically credible reflection of the intake, anchoring, and change processes of Turkish migration in Germany. The migratory relations between Turkey and Germany can be divided into four phases: (1) Guest worker phase (1961–1973), (2) Hoping-to-return phase (1974–1985), (3) Putting-down-roots phase (1986–2005) and (4) Transmigrants phase (from 2006). This division into phases aids explanation of the process of development from temporary migration (guest worker phase) to permanent residence and to the increasing flexibility of life orientations and belongings (transmigration). The first part of the chapter is concerned with these four developments and decision phases of the Turkish migration process and makes clear which response to the issue at hand tends to emerge from the Turkish migrants in the course of migration.

Leafing through the telephone books of the Ruhr cities, it is impossible not to notice the many Polish-sounding names, Czerwinski, Komarek, Kowalski, or Wischnewski for instance. It is estimated that 600,000 descendents of the so-called Ruhr-Poles now live in the Ruhr and Rhineland areas. The term Ruhr-Poles was used contemporaneously to refer to the migrant workers that came to the Ruhr between 1870 and 1914 from the eastern Prussian provinces of East and West Prussia, Posen, and Upper Silesia to find mining and industrial work. As these originally Polish provinces belonged to Prussia, the immigrants were legally Prussian citizens.¹ Although it is therefore formally incorrect to speak in this context of Poles, the term can be used because it reflects both external and self-perceptions of the group in question.

As a case study for the social potential of different ethnoreligious groups in urban development processes, this examination focuses on the role of the Greek Christians in the creation of a new urban landscape in Istanbul during the late Ottoman period. While scholars have long viewed the Ottoman Empire as a Turco-Muslim space, its Christian subjects have traditionally received very little attention in historiography. Likewise, the history of Istanbul under the Ottomans has often been examined from an imperial point of view, neglecting the Christian presence in the city or relegating it to a secondary position at best. Regarding the development of an urban space, not only do we know very little about the Byzantine legacies that lived on after 1453 when the city became the Ottoman capital, but we still have much to learn about the place of Ottoman non-Muslims in Istanbul’s built environment during the succeeding periods of the new empire. The modern Istanbul that came into being in the nineteenth century was mostly the work of local Greek and Armenian architects. This information, however, is hardly known by current inhabitants of Istanbul using the buildings that were designed and constructed by Ottoman Christians.¹ An examination of Istanbul’s history from the perspective of its non-Muslims therefore is all the more relevant considering the wide gap between the little attention Christians have traditionally received and their indisputable role in turning Istanbul into the city we know today.

The development of the Ruhr area and its (core) cities has been significantly influenced by immigration. The largest immigrant groups were the Polish in the nineteenth century and, in the context of the so-called guest worker recruitment of the mid-twentieth century, the Turkish workers (see Ulusoy and Bachem-Rehm in this volume). These former immigrants and their descendents have left their mark on the Ruhr, and are today a decisive influence on its cityscapes and the region as a whole.

The rising concentration of ethnic minorities and low-income households in certain urban neighborhoods has become a salient policy issue in Germany and many other Western European countries (Musterd, 2005; Smets and Salman, 2008). Residential segregation processes are discussed as being of potential relevance to the individual life chances of ethnic minorities and their path to integration in urban contexts. Ethnic segregation can also be perceived as an indicator for how societies deal with migration. While in general the levels of ethnic concentration and segregation in German cities are reported to be low as compared to American cities and cities in other European countries such as the UK and Belgium (Musterd, 2005), there has been intense policy debate on social mix and neighborhood effects in segregated areas. This is particularly true for the Ruhr area, which with a population of more than five million is one of the largest urban agglomerations in Europe. The Ruhr has undergone dramatic economic decline and has a significant low-qualified migrant workforce that was hit hardest by job losses in manufacturing industries. Approximately 22 percent of the population of the Ruhr area has a migrant background, including both those who migrated themselves and those descended from migrants. The proportion is even higher among the young. So, for example, approximately 40 percent of those aged ten and younger have a migrant background; most of them are of Turkish origin (Hanhörster, 2011, p. 110).

Nomination of Istanbul as the 2010 European Capital of Culture probably made many Istanbulites feel proud of their city. After all, Istanbulites believe that they live in the Western/ized part of Turkey and this nomination could be considered as proof of that. Istanbul, as a city, was considered to be one of the important European centers even in the 1800s and has always represented the Westernized face of Turkey (Türeli et. al., 2010). This chapter discusses how the modern image of Istanbul is established by the ‘Otherization’ and exclusion of its working classes. First, attention is directed towards examination of the contemporary working-class history of Istanbul as the ‘constitutive outside’* of Istanbul as a modern city, and the ways in which Istanbul has been imagined as a Western city by continuously highlighting the differences between its legitimate and illegitimate residents are considered.

Istanbul is the largest city in Turkey with respect to population size, the scale of economic activity, and the extent of its hinterland. Parallel to changes in economic dynamics, the city has undergone significant changes in terms of sociospatial structure since the foundation of the Turkish Republic in 1923. This chapter shows that in the twentieth century the dynamics behind residential segregation in Istanbul shifted from being predominantly ethnic in nature to involve issues related to socioeconomic status. Gentrification has been a significant type of transformation, leading to notable forms of residential divide based on socio-economic status. It is argued that gentrification and urban transformation projects realized in the central neighborhoods of the city in recent years tell an insightful story about whether and how Istanbul represents and employs its urban diversity.