ABSTRACT
Istanbul is home to more than half a million Syrian migrants who have fled violence and destruction in their home country and self-settled in the city. The neighbourhoods they now reside in are changing not only demographically but also in terms of relations between neighbours, and between the people and the space. This chapter explores the logics of alterity that are enacted and embodied in this formative moment based on ethnographic research in a lower-class Istanbul neighbourhood. It discusses the solidaristic, agonistic, and antagonistic strategies the older inhabitants have developed in response to the proximity of those whom they identify as strangers.
