An Analytical Study on Urbanites' Perception of Crime and Criminality

This research discusses and deals with understanding and analyzing how people living in gated communities, apartment buildings, and informal settlement (gecekondu) areas perceive crime, develop attitudes towards crime or take precautions against it, and how Istanbul's urban transformation process is shaped on that note. For this purpose, semi-structured deep interviews were conducted with individuals living in each housing type, exploring the incidents they experienced related to crime in urban space and their overall perceptions. In this study, it is aimed to understand how individuals belonging to different socio-economic classes fight against crime, how they protect themselves from crime, their experiences in daily life, and the impact of their thoughts about crime on their choice of living spaces. Following the analyses and evaluations, how Istanbul is shaped and particularly how it has transformed through the lenses of urban sociology and criminology is explained. As part of this study, interviews were conducted with a total of 15 participants-5 individuals from each housing type-and the findings were evaluated through a qualitative approach.