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Paper short abstract

Middle-class mobilities from "central" Istanbul to peripheries illuminate how negotiating the boundaries between these normatively charged signifiers entails class contestations. Classed apprehensions of urban imaginary vis-à-vis center and periphery continually relocate and thus magnify Istanbul.

Paper long abstract

Istanbul’s center and peripheries have historically shifted yet the normatively and politically charged relationship between these two signifiers endures. This ongoing shift is enabled and enacted through border negotiations and contesting boundaries between center and periphery simultaneously entails negotiations over class. Istanbul’s in-between middle classes – waged Istanbulites who pay rent, tuition and feel ambivalent about “making it” in the city – redefine and recenter peripheries to maintain and claim middle-class urban positions. Thus, social class is necessarily spatial.

Istanbul’s in-between middle classes reckon with “farness” as sought versus imposed. Unlike affluent Istanbulites who claim choosing farness through suburban residence, in-between middle classes must continually come to terms with whether, how and why they are literally and conceptually “far” from the center. Moreover, dwelling in the periphery entails constantly fencing off places of sociality to avoid mixing with neighboring “others.” Finally, these ongoing border negotiations relocate Istanbul, possibly in the periphery yet still distinguished from Turkey’s countryside.

This talk is based on 18 months of fieldwork in 2024–2026 with middle-class Istanbulites who have in the past decade moved from Istanbul’s central neighborhoods to three peripheral locations. Through outward mobilities we analyze the classed apprehensions of Istanbul’s changing urban imaginary vis-à-vis center and periphery. This exercise also unsettles common analyses of Istanbul’s housing construction boom since the 2000s by illuminating how economies of desire, i.e. the revalorization and resignification of the periphery thus magnifying Istanbul, can be gauged as bottom-up incentive for what is generally interpreted as a one-sided, government-led process.