A marginal place for the Gypsy community in a prosperous city: Izmir, Turkey

As a developing country, Turkey still continues the urbanization process in most of its metropolitan settlements, due to the incomplete transition from rural to urban life. This migration still continues from the eastern to the western regions of the country, and it has an impact on the homogenity of the built environment, as displayed here in the case of Ä°zmir. In a globalizing world, all countries are trying to adapt a global vision in their metropolitan settlements and the present conditions of slum housing are being rehabilitated as a part of this vision. However, some communities living in these places adapt their own local cultures and lifestyles so much that they shape their environments according to these conditions. They do not permit the rehabilitation plans of the local authorities, so their settings become more isolated from the rest of the built environment that surrounds them, and they form a duality in the socio-cultural structure of the city. In this paper, a special setting within Ä°zmir city, a slum-housing area, a conflicting area of ethnic culture which has become a problem for the local authorities, has been analyzed.