ABSTRACT
This chapter traces informality in practices of state on one side and the neighbourhood community on the other. Identity policies accompanying depoliticisation policies of the post-1980 military intervention; urban entrepreneurialism/clientelism accompanying neoliberal urban land policies; and philanthropic/Islamist social assistance schemes accompanying the policies of dismantling welfare state, will be discussed with reference to their fragmentary impacts on urban poor, along socioeconomic and ethnic lines. The poverty experienced in gecekondu settlements and the class-based politics had triggered the radical politicisation of traditional identities based on sectarian and hemsehri differences in gecekondu society, along extreme leftist and rightist lines. The extended space of informality makes the issue of ethnicity an inseparable part of urban poverty in the neoliberal era.
