Istanbul

This chapter traces Istanbul's transforming property markets over the twentieth century, examining how the geopolitics of Ottoman defeat in World War I, affective experiences of the city as a space of melancholy, antiminority violence and exodus, sensorial experiences of industrialization, and infrastructural programs that reoriented the city from an imperial center into a regional industrial hub and then into a global hub produced working-class property owners in the city's center that looked quite different from property owners in Cairo. The final section then traces how the Turkish regime mobilized notions of urban crisis and disaster risk to justify expropriation that was far more overt in its violence than took place in Cairo. Comparing the two cities' experiences with neoliberal property transfers to corporate developers, it argues that the overtness of a regime's violence depended not on the extent of its appetite for brute force but how urban property came to be valued over time.