Public housing for domestication: The socio-spatial politics of settling the Bulgarian immigrants in Turkey after 1950 and 1989

Turkey has been allowing immigrants from the early years of the republic. Most immigrants were from Greece due to the nation building policies after Lausanne Peace Agreement of 1923, forced to displacement through population exchanges between Turkey and Greece. However, the immigrants were mostly from Bulgaria after the Second World War, forced to displacement based on ideological and political tensions between the Bulgarian and Turkish governments within the two-poled world system. The displacement of the Bulgarian immigrants continued at intervals through mutual opening and closing of borders during the Cold War, but 1950 and 1989 are of significant importance in scenarios of domesticity. The Turkish Government initiated two different housing programs for settling the Bulgarian immigrants in Turkey after 1950 and 1989. Both programs were performed as part of ideological dispositions against communism whereas they differed in socio-spatial tools of integrating immigrants to their new homes. The former settlement program was assisted by the financial and technical assistance programs of the Marshall Plan whereas the latter was performed by a national institution called as the Migrant Housing Administration, which was founded as a branch of the Mass Housing Administration to perform planning, design and construction of migrant housing. The experiences of 1950 and 1989 share a top-down policy in the application of few housing types in all regions regardless of local characteristics of populations, but differ in terms of socio-spatial policies as well as settlement morphologies and housing typologies. The former program was headed towards rural settlement in single-family housing blocks of vernacular characteristics whereas the latter was focused on urban/suburban settlement in low-cost and standardized multi-family housing blocks. In this regard, this presentation aims to discuss public housing experiences of both periods via discursive formations in socio-spatial practices of settling and home-making by comparative analysis of multiple cases.