Limontepe'de Yaşamak, Büyümek, Beklemek by Leyla Bektaş Ata (review)

Limontepe'de Yaşamak, Büyümek, Beklemek (Living, Growing Up, and Waiting in Limontepe) is a narrative of a neighborhood, as Bektaş puts it, which seeks to analyze the process of establishment and development of an informal settlement and its current position on the threshold of urban transformation and to investigate the residents' experience of neighborliness, the neighborhood, and the city. Putting Limontepe, a gecekondu (squatter) district of Izmir, Turkey, into perspective, this book investigates a variety of urban dynamics, including gender relations, formal education, employment, the notion of the home, urban poverty, and the right to the city, based on the author's fieldwork in January 2017 and Summer 2017. Hence, while documenting the urban memory of a district of Izmir established in the late 1970s, which is not available in the official records, Bektaş also identifies current problems of the mentioned area and the expectations and demands of its residents regarding the impending urban transformation project.

The book has two main critical axes intersecting all chapters: differences between men and women and differences between the first- and second-generation dwellers. Great attention is paid to women's experiences throughout the book, as Bektaş argues, for two key reasons. Firstly, female dwellers tend to be more active in neighborhood life as their husbands were engaged in formal employment. Secondly, the distinctive feature of this book, its methodological approach combining feminist ethnography and auto-ethnography is a critical and gender lens to examine the embedded power relations in everyday life of a gecekondu settlement. Returning to the neighborhood she spent her childhood as a young female researcher after twelve years, Bektaş examines Limontepe within the framework of spatial knowledge based on her spatial experiences during her childhood and early youth and her evidence of the spatial practices of the urban poor in an informal settlement. Therefore, the author is able to reflect on the details of everyday life which is not recorded in the interviews. In this regard, Bektaş encourages the reader in a way that our individual positions and experiences might be inspirational and fruitful for academic work. Furthermore, comparing the two selected neighborhoods of Limontepe, Bektaş sheds light on how the physical conditions, the degree of deprivation, and in connection with them, the sense of belonging impact the perception of urban transformation.

The book consists of four chapters, except the introduction and conclusion, with a path flowing throughout different periods, spaces, and spatial practices: pre- and post-migration and the threshold of transformation; from the private to the semi-public and public spaces; from the class mobility to the sense of stability in space, through homeownership. The first chapter is a field journal that introduces Limontepe and discusses the potentials and pitfalls of being both an outsider and insider, or a female researcher in the field. The second chapter revolves around the theme of ambiguity considering the legal issues in the development process of the neighborhood and the tension caused by urban transformation. Additionally, it describes the positions of the dwellers as immigrants, inhabitants, and passengers, according to their interaction with the neighborhood. In the third chapter, Bektaş maps out how gender norms are intertwined with daily spatial practices on the home, neighborhood, and city scale. While exploring how the floor plans of houses have evolved in time according to household needs, within legal permissions, this work also contributes to the related literature by revealing the multiple meanings of the home, i.e., exchange value, use-value, and the sense of belonging through ownership. Moreover, Bektaş addresses daily spatial tactics deployed by second-generation women against social control, mainly determined by the transformation of "neighborliness to kinship" (komşuluğun akrabalaşması) as the author describes. Following this, Chapter 4 firstly discusses the issue of education and class mobility over it through the perspectives of the second generation, on the background of the analysis of social, economic, and class conditions. Here, Bektaş predicts...