Amal Cavender
Architect
Indianapolis, U.S.

Submission: "Gecekondu: Illusion and Reality"

Gecekondu, as a term, concept, and physical entity, was initiated in Turkey in the 1950’s. Two forces brought it, and them, into being. The first: the introduction of modern procedures to agriculture caused most peasants to be unemployed in their own villages. The second force paralleled the first: the modernization of big cities offered new opportunities for employment. As a result, many people migrated to the urban life in Istanbul, Ankara, and other major metropolitan areas. Massive self-built gecekondu settlements soon surrounded Turkey’s largest cities.

The illusion of gecekondus is obvious to those seeing them for the first time. For example, Mary-Ann Ray, in her 1993 article “Gecekondu,” observed that gecekondus are “built in one night” by “quick builders.”

On both counts, she is not quite right. First, gecekondus must be understood to be “built at night.” It is important to acknowledge the illegal actions of the builders. These houses are constructed without permission, their builders taking advantage of a loophole in Turkish law that allows a structure to stand if it has walls and a roof even when no permission has been granted for construction. Second, the self builders engage not only a “quick” process, but a continuous building process, one that begins with walls and a roof (to symbolize a room) and grows to accommodate more people and activities, over time, often years and generations.

One finds, among the realities of gecekondus, that they are dynamic social environments whose residents maintain implicit and explicit links to rural areas, extended families, and village groups even as they are economically integrated into the employment offered within the city. It can be shown that when building gecekondus, immigrants were guided by knowledge they learned while living as rural people or village residents. Furthermore, the houses and housing clusters reflect a deep architectural understanding towards the use of space, materials, scale, and colors. Typically they followed a harmonious building process adapted to climate, rhythms and patterns of living, and the environment as they staked out yards, and built one- or two-bedroom huts of scavenged materials.

To better understand gecekondus, architects need not only be aware of them as an illegal phenomenon. They must also understand the housing communities as positive adaptations by rural masses to the urban situation in ways that are fundamentally sensitive to nature and open to change.


Bio:

Amal Cavender was born in Aleppo, Syria; attended high school in Saudi Arabia, graduated from Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey with a professional degree in architecture, and moved to the U.S. in 1999.  She enrolled in the post-professional Master of Architecture Program at Ball State University in 2003.  Her thesis, titled "Village of Endurance: The Case of Ma'aloula," studies recent alterations done to houses standing for centuries in the old section of the Syrian town and asks why such inappropriate design and construction ideas found their way into the architecture of the historically significant village.  To conduct field research, she traveled through Turkey and Syria for eight weeks in the summer of 2005. Cavender is fluent in five languages: Arabic, Turkish, English, French, and Spanish.


“By 2030, 1 person in 4 will be a slum dweller”
Robert Neuwirth, Shadow Cities (New York: Routledge, 2005).