Sixty years of migration from Turkey: postmigrant reflections on urban development

Ten years ago, the anniversary of fifty years of migration from Turkey to Germany was marked and celebrated: conferences were organized, there were discussion rounds and exhibitions. This year we are marking sixty years of migration from Turkey, and again various events are planned. Yet one gets the impression that the relevance of Turkish migration for social transformation—and above all for urban development—is hastily added to discussions at ten-year intervals while hardly anything is actually done on the subject in between. Restrictive ways of dealing withmigrants and their descendants continue tobeperpetuated.Racismand institutional discrimination remain apart of everyday normality. Postmigrant members of the second and third migrant generations are still being confronted with negative attributions and they continue to have restricted access to social resources. This commentary seeks to set out a radical shift in perspective and to focus on the truly significant contribution of Turkish migration for urban development in Germany.1 I discuss this through the ways in which the city of Cologne experienced migration based on several qualitative studies that we have carried out over the past fifteen years. My main thesis is that cities like Cologne are hardly conceivable without migration. Turkish migrants who arrived in Cologne as so-called “guest workers” (Gastarbeiter) at the beginning of the 1960s and well into the 1970s, many of whom found employment in the Ford plants and with other firms, made a key contribution to the repopulation of Cologne, even though this is scarcely noted in public memory.