Becoming “Urban” or Remaining “Rural”: The Views of Turkish Rural-to-Urban Migrants on the “Integration” Question

Abstract

The mass migration from rural areas to larger cities in the Third World and the rapid social changes entailed by this transformation have attracted the attention of social and political scientists since the 1950s. The problematic issue of the “integration” of rural migrants into the urban society and the changes this transformation has brought about have long been among the most studied questions. Yet they still call for more research to increase our understanding of the phenomenon, particularly in our era, which is witnessing radical shifts from earlier times in terms of social, economic, and technological characteristics. The question of “integration to what?” becomes important in political and practical terms. In the 1950s, when mass migration to cities started, the answer to this question seemed quite clear. The cities were the places of the modernizing elites, especially in the case of Ankara, the capital of the modern Turkish Republic. As in other Third World countries, the modernizing bureaucratic and military elites of the early republic, who had assumed the role of transforming the society into a modern, Western one, regarded the city as an effective means for the acculturation of its inhabitants to modern–Western values and ways of life. The modernization theory, which maintains a dichotomy between rural and urban, supported this idea.