The Genesis of the Gecekondu: Rural Migration and Urbanization (1976)

Abstract

The author of the The Gecekondu explains the reasons which drived him, in the course of his academic career, to write this book. The author gives many insights, sometimes in a personal way, to understand the place of this book, both in his own cursus and in the field of urban studies. He explicites his interest in migration as a factor of changes in the social structure and modernization process in the late Ottoman and Republican Turkey. Confronted to multiple difficulties in finding adequate data, he turned to more contempory and empirical subjects, providing insights about his method as well. He finally analyses the ‘impact’ of the book, which has contributed to initiate the development of gecekondu studies in the late 1980’s.