Introduction

More than three million Syrian migrants are now living in Turkey, escaping from the harsh conditions of war in their country (Erdoğan, 2018). Many of the migrants are young people, and spatial experiences of young migrants are often different from adult experiences (Evans, 2008, p 1659). A particularly important youth group are Syrian students, who are the subject focus in this chapter. Syrian students have a visible presence in the social life of Istanbul and negotiate various forms of exclusion/inclusion in everyday geographies of the city. Therefore, in this chapter, I focus on the everyday spaces of Syrian students and examine the encounters and identity negotiations that occur in those spaces. My principal question is, ‘How do Syrian students construct and negotiate identities in their everyday geographies, and how does this impact on their sense of place in Istanbul?’

In this research, the urban spatial experiences of young refugees have a central position. And urban space is conceptualised as a ‘negotiated reality’ (Anderson, 1991, p 28). Since places are the essential creator of difference, people experience othering and difference in shared places of cities. Elias and Scotson (1994) in their study use the concepts of ‘established’ and ‘newcomers’ to articulate the logic behind the power relations constructed between residents (insiders) and newcomers (outsiders/migrants). Through stigmatising the zones of newcomers and attributing bad behaviours to them, native people exclude them from society. However, migrants also negotiate space. As a result, encountering is not fixed but open to surprise (Ahmed, 2009) and unpredictable. And it can have transformative capacity (Wilson, 2017).

I use ‘encounter’ here to mean a meeting between those with different identities (ethnicity, nationality, gender, for example) and suggest that encounters can transform the meaning and making of urban space (Wilson, 2017). Among the various populations negotiating their identities through encounters, youth identities are especially dynamic, as they are often highly adaptable to changes in the urban environment (Dwyer, 1998). I use ‘space’ and ‘place’ interchangeably as the combination of material, metaphorical, real and imagined spaces controlled, perceived, practised and created by young Syrians. Considering the dynamic and social construction of space, Massey focuses on encounters in terms of experiences, memories and associations within space.