The examination of household satisfaction and residential mobility towards gated communities case study: Ataköy settlement

Recently, the phenomenon of housing has gained a social symbolic character with the influence of neo-liberal policies and globalization that became widespread in 1980s while affecting human life, way of behaviors and social balances socio-economically from being an interior space until reaching to the urban scale throughout the history. The house showing the life style of the society has recently gained a meaning beyond a shelter and become a part of consumption culture as it has been modernized. It is the most common situation seen in the housing market in recent years that the new residential settlements under structuring due to the population growth in rapidly developing cities, have aimed certain social classes. Cities growing and changing by the effects of neo-liberal policies and consumption ideologies are in a transformation of globalization and facing gated communities as a most notable sign. Current residential communities in metropolitan cities are increasingly urbanized as walled and gated districts segregated from its immediate surrounding and context, which has, being controlled through entrances. The development of gated communities turned into a main subject of literature with the new life-style and the new way of living by an increasing element of segregation on space. The neo-liberal urbanism, which goes together with the neo-liberal economic reformation, looks for the growth of market forces in the real estate and housing sectors to privatize of, the social and urban services for the elite groups. These new developments which are supported by the neo-liberal policies, privatized the urban environments by fortified enclaves with gates, privatized the urban services and so many other goods, created others in the public realm, in between the social classes and this exclusion of others directly created social segregation and polarization among the public (McKenzie, 2005; Webster et al., 2002). Gated communities started to develop in 1980s in Turkey by the changing of political and economic progressions under the influence of neo-liberal agenda. The overall increase on income through society have raised the potential of depletion. The new consumer culture and lifestyle, has raised with the rise of high-income groups by the influence of global consumption thus this created a new social class and social status (Erkip, 2005; Tanulku, 2012). Moreover, the neo-liberal model weakened the middleclass group. That created a huge gap in between the wealthy and the poor while the wealthy ones were enjoying the benefits of neo-liberal model. Individuality and individual benefits became more important and raised the case of gated communities, which are mainly aimed to protect lifestyles of the elites (Manzi & Smith-Bowers, 2005), (Le Goix, 2005). The fact that the residents prefer luxurious, very expensive, large houses, which are guarded and controlled instead of qualified housing that, can fulfill their needs, shows that the image of housing has become a part of consumption culture. This situation created new life styles among different income groups living in the same city and differentiated the urbanization experience of households. The fact that the new economically strengthened upper and upper-middle income groups of the society start to give importance to their private lives, responding to the socio-cultural expectations of the residents has become more significant rather than the physical properties of the housing. This new social class willing to live in residential areas where they could show their social status due to the increase in their incomes, started to abandon and change their housing areas. Intra-urban residential mobility has both reshaped the city, created some social spatial changes within the city and has brought social segregation and spatial polarization. Currently it is possible to see the effects of this transformation almost in every metropolises including İstanbul. This study examines the residential mobility and household preferences towards gated residential through a case study in İstanbul, Ataköy district. It investigates the intra-urban residential mobility, housing preferences in Ataköy region starting with the sales of the flats in Ataköy Konakları in terms of residential and neighborhood satisfaction reveals housing experiences together with demographic structure of households. Ataköy is a costal district of İstanbul having the historical heritage of Ottoman period, carries the most recent traces of this change and transformation in urban life. Ataköy, the first satellite city project in 1950s during Adnan Menderes governmental period is under the pressure of gated communities that started with Ataköy Konakları having the gated residential typology in 2005 for the first time. Nowadays Ataköy has scattered by gated communities from the coastal area and on the axis of E-5 highway. In this sense, it is very important to examine the mobility behavior of the households and to evaluate the satisfaction level about the rapid change of the neighborhood. Despite the fact that Ataköy is a regular and planned settlement close to human scale, the main scope of the study is to reveal the reasons for mobility of resident households towards the gated residential communities built in the same district. Initially dealing with the case of housing, this study is based on literature review and fieldwork study. It is a qualitative based research study. Field method contains survey and in-depth interviews, which are mostly constructed on open-ended questions with tenants, also includes participant-observation. The first part of the study includes a comprehensive literature review piled up from various resources about the approaches on residential satisfaction and mobility forming the theoretical framework of the study. The concept of residential satisfaction and its immediate surrounding with regard to residential mobility has been addressed from an interdisciplinary point of view through intra-urban residential mobility approaches. In the field study in Ataköy, a survey was conducted with 88 participants. The survey conducted between Ataköy Konakları (30 participant), which is a gated community and the first satellite city Ataköy mass housing district (58 participant), which has a structure that contains different questions within the scope of typologies. Survey questions mainly consist of four main groups. These questions are about the demographic characteristics of the households, characteristics of the old and new residence, residential satisfaction and the immediate surrounding and the residential mobility of the households in Ataköy neighborhood. In addition, in-depth interviews were held with three people, which are the members of important associations and organizations. The data obtained from in-depth interviews and surveys have been analyzed with the help of SPSS program, grouped significantly, and evaluated conceptually. The data, which were coded through interviews, divided in to themes and provides a qualitative presentation. The survey data collected on the fieldwork provides quantitative expressions like percentages, ranking and numberings. The findings obtained by literature review, survey data and in-depth interviews have been tested and confirmed the basic hypothesis of the study. This study has the feature of being one of the rare empirical studies focusing on housing preferences within the framework of limited numbers of intra-urban residential mobility. As the result of the thesis study, data have been gathered on Ataköy household housing preferences and aimed to obtain clues about the present and future housing demands of residents after making a general description of the profile of residents today. New residential settlements in Ataköy and changing social and spatial environment have been examined and some inferences have been made for the future. Keywords: Gated Communities, Housing Preferences, Residential Satisfaction, Residential Mobility