By 2004, Erdogan’s AK Party controlled not only the national government but also the municipalities of Istanbul and Ankara, the capital city. The party embraced a new global trend in urban management: It helped establish a series of distinct city-run corporations. At first, the public-private synergy produced real benefits; the AK Party expanded metro service throughout Istanbul and created new parks and pedestrian spaces. But as the party’s power and the country’s economy grew, the government began selling off empty state land to private developers, often partnering with them through the national housing commission, TOKI. Together they built apartment towers, bridges and airports, tunnels and shopping malls with valet parking. Erdogan, in a sense, came to define the public’s space and its values. “In many parts of the world, the state’s role is to safeguard the interests of the public when negotiating with private developers,” says Sibel Bozdogan, an architectural historian who has been a lecturer at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. “In Turkey, the state is the biggest developer.”

Soon entire neighborhoods might be torn down and rebuilt. Yenimahalle, one of the locations for Behrendt’s photographs, is an enormous district of 650,000 residents that was established in the 1940s as a modernist symbol of the new Turkish republic. As the district expanded, it took on other characteristics, notably as a home to gecekondu, or shantytowns “built overnight” by migrant Turks from other parts of the country. Rather than kicking out the arrivistes, shrewd politicians won elections by promising to bring services like water, electricity and mail to constituents. This relatively humane solution to homelessness worked until fairly recently, when Erdogan recognized that he could cite the questionable legality of some settlements in order to undertake so-called urban-transformation projects — essentially ejecting the tenants, destroying the old houses and erecting new ones, the TOKI contracts for which were often directed toward businessmen friendly to the government.