Adding the “New” Inhabitant to the Design of Urban Area and Social Work for Refugees

With the mass migration from Syria to Turkey in 2011, Gaziantep, the most developed city in the Syrian border, became a focal place. The high numbers of Syrian refugees led to an urban transformation, during which many international and national NGO’s started to work in the city. Both of the migrations ended up with an important raise in the rents, and created new strata. This paper, which covers the relations in 2016 and 2017 in Gaziantep, is an outcome of my own observations in the field I developed as a former NGO worker, and the findings of an independent field research I conducted in 2017. This work makes a reflexive reading of socio-spatial dynamics between locals, refugees and NGO workers to scrutinize the ways to engage socio-spatial dynamics to the social services mechanism. The reading aim is to pose the contribution of their combined value, in both implementation and evaluation processes. The presentation of the data aims to bring into discussion this power balance between the local, the refugee and the service provider over its impact on the city surface. It is believed that deciphering these paths and nodes would support a better understanding of the refugee situation and the newly developed urban dynamics.