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“The Quality Customers Don’t Go to Akmerkez Anymore”: A Social Topography of the Istinye Bazaar
Abstract
Recent decades have seen an immense expansion of the retail sector in Turkey, particularly in its largest cities. The rapid construction of shopping centers has reshaped urban environments, introducing new venues in and around which social life takes place. Such a reordering of space has prompted new strategies for maintaining boundaries between the country’s rich and poor and achieving socially recognizable claims of spatial belonging. This paper examines how social hierarchy is reflected in and expressed throughout Istanbul in practices of consumption. The everyday acts of shopping, browsing, selecting and displaying wares make implicit claims of belonging or exclusion that distribute inequality across the cityscape. This social topography describes a politics of who goes where, and how myriad actors shape the social contours of the city: how urban planners orchestrate movement, how prospectors design sites of privileged access, and how self-selectivity is achieved or challenged in the activity of everyday life. This research examines one such relational space in Istanbul, where the city's most high-end shopping mall has recreated a stylized version of the neighborhood bazaars frequented by the city's middle- and working-class residents. Through aesthetic reconfigurations of products, mannered performances of service workers, and the coordination of movements within and access to this site, this elite shopping arena reappropriates a symbol of popular consumption as authentic high fashion. However, the Istinye Bazaar is something other than an homage to the vernacular or a cultural pastiche; it is a method for reinscribing social distinction into where and how people shop. Based on open-ended semi-structured interviews with 40 patrons of the Istinye Bazaar, this research examines how social actors enact hierarchies in social space with specific reference to the social contours of their city. Through privileging particular forms of consumer practice within socially and spatially exclusive venues, these elite actors remap values upon the physical shape of the city itself, providing a spatialized understanding of how inequalities are distributed.
Discipline
Sociology
Geographic Area
Turkey
Sub Area
None