Earthquake risk-driven urban transformation in Istanbul: a relational analysis of changing community and employment ties

This dissertation is an investigation into intersections of housing and labor markets; community and employment relations; urban and economic inequality. Specifically, it focuses on the ways in which urban change in the form of earthquake risk driven urban transformation in Istanbul, Turkey restructures economic and community relations between employer homeowners and their employees doorkeepers. Doorkeepers are minimum-wage workers and live rent-free in return of providing daily cleaning, grocery shopping, and delivery services to their employers upper middle-income residents, with whom they share the same building and neighborhood. In other words, doorkeepers are members of service workers who serve the urban elite and allow the continuation of the daily lives of the affluent and the city at large. My research demonstrates that doorkeepers are increasingly being priced out of their communities as a result of the urban transformation that acts as an intervention into the labor market by leading to the replacement of formal work with on-demand economies and minimum-wage service workers with gig workers. Hence while urban change is a wealth accumulation mechanism for the urban elite, it aggravates the urban working poor’s precarity by generating the risk of simultaneous unemployment and involuntary displacement. This dissertation enriches our understandings of relational dimensions of service work by examining how urban policies shape construction, negotiation, mediation, and discontinuation of employment relations and in return, how social, class and economic inequalities find spatial manifestations. Therefore, by examining social relations of wage labor, more specifically spatial embeddedness of service work in rapidly transforming metropolitan settings, this dissertation puts various sociological subfields in dialogue and links labor relations to housing policies and urban change. The analysis draws on data collected from 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Istanbul, Turkey, comprising of 110 semi-structured interviews with various urban actors, including urban policy makers, business owners, service workers, and urban residents living in areas designated to be under earthquake risk. These interviews are supplemented by participant observation while volunteering at doorkeepers’ labor union.2024-02-23T00:00:00