Fired and Evicted: Istanbul Doorkeepers’ Strategies of Navigating Employment and Housing Precarity

Abstract

Considering contemporary urban contexts, where housing precarity is an eminent problem for the urban working poor, this research asks how those employed as doorkeepers navigate everyday experiences of double precarity, i.e., the risk of being simultaneously fired and evicted. Doorkeepers in Istanbul are minimum-wage workers and internal migrants. Yet, unlike other low-wage employees, they live rent-free in basement apartments in return for serving their neighbors who are also their employers. Through the earthquake risk-driven urban transformation that necessitates demolition and reconstruction of more than 2,000 multi-unit buildings in Istanbul’s upper-middle income neighborhoods, doorkeepers are replaced with informal laborers or privatized outsourced services, and hence experience simultaneous job loss and involuntary displacement. Employing an ethnographic examination of these workers and their precarity management strategies, this research suggests that studying experiences of intersecting employment and housing market precarities allows us to extend our understanding of precarity beyond the labor market. More specifically, this research suggests that precarious labor processes are integral to housing precarity and should be studied in relation to both housing and shifting urban policies.