Begüm Sonbahar
Dimitris Avgelis
In Tarlabaşı, it is not unusual to see police officers stop residents for identity checks as they sit eating at their own front doors. It is an ordinary scene here, familiar to anyone who spends time in the neighborhood, and it says something essential about the place: even the doorstep of one’s home offers no guarantee of being left in peace.
Pierre Bourdieu described how domination operates not only through force but through what he called symbolic violence: the small, routine acts that teach people they do not fully belong, even in the place where they live. An identity check on one’s own doorstep is a textbook example. In a neighborhood shaped by this kind of everyday domination, where every encounter with an institution takes place on unequal terms, the Tarlabaşı Community Centre (Tarlabaşı Toplum Merkezi, TTM) managed for nearly two decades to be the opposite: one of the few institutions residents actually trusted.
Children who could not attend school, who lacked identity documents or spoke little Turkish, came for lessons and a safe place to spend the day. Women came for legal referrals, sexual health education, support through divorce, or simply to talk. Roma and Dom families facing structural discrimination came, and after 2015, so did Syrian refugees trying to find their footing in an unfamiliar city.
Today the center, in any meaningful sense, is gone. By late 2024 it had no salaried employees left. It moved from its accessible neighborhood building into an office of roughly ten square meters, kept alive by the board and former staff working as volunteers. Where it once worked with around 120 children every week, it now maintains contact with about twenty women and their families. The court cases against the association continue, as well as the social consequences.
To understand what was lost, listen to the people first.
During a group gathering at the center, one woman told the room: “This is the first time in my life that anyone has asked me how I am.” The former coordinator describes what happened next. The woman began demanding the same recognition elsewhere in her life, including from her husband. A question that costs nothing became, for her, a new standard of how she expected to be treated. The undoing of that kind of domination, it seems, can begin with something as small as a question.
Children tell similar stories. One Dom girl who could not attend school earned money playing the melodica on İstiklal Avenue. She started coming to TTM, and over the years grew confident enough to help run workshops for younger children herself. “For as long as I can remember I’ve been coming to TTM,” she once said. “I might have been coming for thirty years.”
Behind these stories stood an informal infrastructure of protection that appeared in no project report. Between roughly 2019 and 2023, the former coordinator says, she knew almost every child working on İstiklal Avenue. When children were rounded up by police or municipal officers, TTM staff could sometimes intervene through personal networks, including sympathetic social workers. Her conclusion about that system is blunt: “It all runs on individual effort. A good teacher saves lives.”
The trust mattered most among Syrian Dom families, many of whom avoided state institutions, the Red Crescent and large NGOs altogether. “In the middle of all this, the Tarlabaşı Community Center was the only place they could reach,” the former coordinator says. What the center gave them was, in Bourdieu’s terms, capital of another kind: the connections, the codes and the confidence needed to deal with institutions built by and for others. It acted as a bridge, helping families navigate bureaucratic systems without surrendering their dignity in the process.
None of this was static. TTM began in 2006 as a pilot project supported by the European Union through Istanbul Bilgi University’s Center for Migration Research and became a formal association a year later, with a mandate to promote equal access to urban life. “A community center is a structure that constantly remakes itself; it has to be,” the former coordinator says. When Syrian refugees arrived in large numbers after 2015, the center deliberately rejected the sector’s favorite word. “In the civil-society world the word people used a lot was ‘integration,’ but that wasn’t our framing,” she recalls. “Coexistence was our core concern.”
The end began in 2021, when a media report publicly targeted the organization. Inspections followed, then administrative investigations, lawsuits, a suspension decision, police raids, and eventually the sealing of the building, along with a fine of around 250,000 Turkish lira for allegedly providing education without a permit. The former coordinator insists the center never operated a formal educational institution; what it ran were workshops, peer learning and rights-based activities for children who otherwise had nowhere to go. In practice, the distinction did not save the center.
In the courtroom, what is at stake is the future of a civil society organization. Τhe neighbourhood, however, has been affected by a serious loss.
Since the closure, residents feel the difference in the texture of daily life. “There is no place we trust that we can drop by,” women in the neighborhood now say, according to the former coordinator. She connects the center’s absence to a growing sense of insecurity: a heavier police presence, more visible drug dealing, more fear among women. “When we were there, the drug dealers couldn’t act this freely,” she says. It would be too simple to blame Tarlabaşı’s problems on the absence of a single organization, but its closure removed a protective presence that nothing has replaced.
None of this can be separated from what has been happening to Tarlabaşı itself. Demolitions, rising rents and the broken promises of urban renewal have pushed many Roma, migrant and poor families toward Kasımpaşa, Dolapdere, Esenyurt and Bağcılar. Migrants are especially exposed: landlords refuse to rent to them or demand far higher prices, and in some cases three or four families share a two-room apartment. The more displacement disrupts the neighborhood, the more an organization like TTM matters, precisely because it offers continuity where everything else keeps changing.
At the same time, the neighborhood has grown weary of outside attention. Residents have been the subjects of academic research, media reports, documentaries and policy discussions for years, and have watched researchers disappear the moment a project ended. Women are now reluctant to speak even anonymously. “They treat us like test subjects,” the former coordinator says. “They come, they ask, they leave, and then we never learn anything.” The skepticism is entirely earned. We write this knowing that we, too, are part of that procession of outsiders asking questions. What we can offer in return is modest: to put on record what was lost, in the words of the people who lost it.
That may be the real lesson of TTM’s experience. The center’s true value, and its lasting legacy, was the trust it built where trust had become scarce, something no number of workshops or beneficiaries could ever measure. It took the center nearly two decades to build that trust of the neighborhood’s vulnerable residents.
“TTM, or an independent, rights-based organization working this way, absolutely needs to be in the neighborhood,” the former coordinator says. Until something like it returns, the place where Tarlabaşı’s most invisible residents were known by name remains a ten-square-meter office and a handful of volunteers.
Photograph: Mondo79