Informal urban settlements, otherwise known as slums or shanties, appeared at various moments during the twentieth century as the spatial manifestation of urban poverty. Their histories differ from one socio-geographic region to the other: the gecekondu districts in Turkey developed under different circumstances to the favelas in Brazil, and so on. However, what unites these settlements is that they make visible uneven capitalist development on an urban scale. Urban researchers have studied these districts extensively, focusing on a variety of issues. Urban planners, for example, made an effort to develop ideas about how to normalize irregular urban settlements, while sociologists have studied the structural and economic causes for the emergence of such districts. Anthropologists have focused both on questions of gender in shanties as well as on their potential for resistance in everyday life. Until twenty years ago, informal settlements were studied mainly as an urban sociological phenomenon under rubrics such as "urban poverty" or "rapid urbanization". Recently, however, they have begun to appear in very different contexts, for example in architectural/urban planning projects and debates, contemporary art and popular culture.

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At the risk of taking too big a step, I would like to address another aspect of popular culture: fashion. In her article on the new upper-class venues in Istanbul, Kübra Parmaksizoglu talks about the "poorgeoisie" movement that emerged in fashion design in 2009, taking the form of poor-looking, torn, worn-out designs (Parmaksizoglu 2011, 69-83). We learn from Parmaksizoglu that Izzet Çapa, an investor known for his avant-garde projects in Istanbul's world of entertainment, is very taken by this new movement and plans to open new venues in Istanbul based on a theme that he calls "poorism". Here, poverty is emptied of its political content completely and transformed into a style. Indeed, a similar thing happens when, in his new collection "Dolmus", the young Istanbul fashion designer Niyazi Erdogan takes his inspiration from the visual codes of the arabesque everyday cultures of the 1970s (Arna 2011). In this case, what is stripped off its social meaning is the history of immigration in Istanbul in the second half of the twentieth century and the lived experiences of the immigrants who actively made this history.

What do all these appearances signify? What is the meaning of the paradigm shift in the representation of urban poverty and its spatial counterpart, informal settlements? What are the relationships between emergent representations of slums and ongoing processes of gentrification and urban transformation? Where do we stand as academics, artists, urban researchers and activists, who often belong to the middle or upper-middle classes in economic and social terms, but most importantly in terms of cultural capital, who enjoy the amenities of the city and produce critical thinking under these very conditions? What is our contribution to the commodification and aestheticization of poverty? What roles are we playing vis-à-vis the emergence of gecekondu chic? Where do we draw the line between criticizing such transformations and contributing to them?