Paper short abstract:

The Turkish protection regime in the face of Syrian Crisis denies the accommodation as a refugee right. This paper explores the urban accommodation of Syrian refugees at the Turkish geographic margins facilitated through the networks of informal housing and economy, as well as relief distribution.

Paper long abstract:

The Turkish protection regime and local governments accentuate hospitality rather than accommodation in the face of Syrian influx across its border and do not grant the accommodation as a refugee right, although the camps for fleeing Syrians are allocated as "temporary protection centers". Based on the fieldwork on slum areas of Gaziantep, a border city, this paper explores the urban accommodation of Syrian refugees at the geographic margins of Turkey. The Turkish government enforces their concentration at the border cities under a temporary protection regime, compelling the lower-class urban refugees to engage in place-making in the midst of dispossession, disenfranchisement and precarity. Their outnumbering in slum areas changes the demography of urban settlements, while pitting the locals against the refugees and even escalating tension into sporadic mass violence against the latter. Drawing on Asef Bayat's notion of "quiet encroachment of the ordinary", the paper analyzes how the refugee and local communities contend each other in appropriating the urban space and collective consumption through networks of informal housing and economy, as well as relief distribution. As a conclusion, the paper argues, the withholding of urban accommodation as a refugee right does not prevent the refugees from encroaching on the urban space and making their place in the city. But it deprives them from their right to city, turns them into a domicile labor force on the hook for the Turkish and Syrian entrepreneurs and undermines the urban cohabitation of the two communities.