It’s not something that I often share very openly, but Turkey is not so far off from being considered a third world country, for many reasons.

I spend quite a lot of energy lauding my adopted homeland with positive accolades about its people, its culture, and its cuisine. I have found myself in the position of having to defend my decision to live here to folks back home who cannot fathom why I would choose such a life. I think I have done a mighty good job of it, as well. Since I have lived here, I have had four friends visit me here and my brother even came for an extended stay of three months when I was going through a rough patch. All left with extremely warm feelings about Turkey, vowing to come back one day. Mostly I want to paint a positive picture of living here for the sake of my family, who worry about me being so far away in a land they can hardly imagine.

Now I do not mean to portray the fact that I am living in a dangerous place or that my health or well-being are at stake in any way. That would be far from the truth. I suppose what I am getting at is that once you have been a part of a landscape for long enough, you begin to see things as a native might in some regards. You start to pay attention to what’s happening politically, what’s going on in the society in a deeper way.

Let me attempt to get my point across on a microcosmic level as it is not in my interest to get too controversial about this.

I have made mention before about the state of the neighborhood where I am living currently. It is a satellite suburb of Istanbul that has been gobbled up by developers. It is now home to luxury high rise apartment buildings, shopping malls, fast food establishments and no less then three Starbuck’s within walking distance.

The problem is that this land was not vacant. There were already people living here. These people are living just across the street in a makeshift village in illegal housing cobbled together out of scrap building materials. Our post office is located in that neighborhood so whenever we need to make a visit there to pay a utility bill, I get an eyeful of life “on the other side of the tracks”.

There are families of who knows how many people living in what appears to be an average size gardening shed with nothing more to cover them than a piece of tin roofing. It is not unusual to see chickens and the occasional rooster strutting through the main road. Women sit outside and wash their rugs in an empty concrete lot next to their homes. Children play soccer in the streets wearing only house shoes, usually without coats on very cold days. There are even a few emaciated horses trying their best to find viable grass to nibble on in barren lots.

What will happen to these people when some developer decides that they want this land or that they do not want their well-heeled future tenants to have such a view? Where will they be pushed next?

This is not a unique experience that I am having in my part of town. One can see evidence of this in urban lanscapes all over Istanbul, on both continents. In my old neighborhood in Çengelköy, we had a gypsy village that even managed to steal our site’s electricity with some anarchistic electrical rigging. You almost had to admire their tenacity. There was a house there that was completely obscured in the summertime when the corn stalks all around the house towered over it. There were days when the air was completely polluted outside my apartment because they had chosen that day to burn the trash they threw on a hillside. The whole environment was a source of endless fascination for me in those days, but I knew better than to wander down there alone.

Recently, I was reminded of Celebration, Florida. For those of you not familiar, this is a town that was built and maintained by the Walt Disney Corporation. I have never been there, but just reading about it gave me the creeps along the lines of the Stepford Wives. This is a city where leaf-shaped confetti streams out of the lamp posts in autumn to simulate the falling of the leaves and where a fountain foams over with soap suds in December to simulate snow falling. Reportedly, it is a community that has very strict standards about conformity, as is this is a city sponsored by a heavy hitting corporation, none of that should come as any surprise.

While I most certainly do not wish to see this sort of homogenization happen here, I do wish that there was a more proactive approach by local goverment and city planners for some sort of cohesive living plan. But really what can be done? Do we just erect walls and seperate the haves and the have nots like cities such as Los Angeles have managed to do? Do we push the poor further and further out into undesirable parts and let them form their ghettos away from our line of sight?

I certainly do not have the answers to these questions. I just wish I knew what to do with the guilt I feel as a relatively wealthy foreigner living in a country that seems content to leave so many behind.