ILPC 2026

Doorkeepers, members of the probably most stigmatized occupational group in Turkey, are internal migrants and minimum-wage workers, yet unlike other members of the service employees, they live rent-free in the basement of buildings in upper middle income neighborhoods of Istanbul in return of their minimum-wage paying job serving as building superintendents. Doorkeepers provide security, cleaning and daily delivery services to their upper middle-income neighbors, with whom they share the same roof, building and neighborhood, and who are also their employers. With a new trend of urban transformation in Istanbul’s upper-middle income neighborhoods that leads to replacement of doorkeepers’ uncontracted precarious labor with privatized outsourced services, doorkeepers experience simultaneous job loss and involuntary displacement. Since doorkeepers’ residence is attached to their labor, as a result of the urban transformation, doorkeepers shift to more precarious job lines and are displaced to the peripheries to the city. While doorkeepers seek work in construction, security guarding, taxi driving or food delivery, they can no longer afford to live in upper middle-income neighborhoods they used to live in rent-free, and thus the majority move out to the peripheries of the city, or back to their villages in rural Turkey. Thus, urban workers’ shift to more precarious job lines illustrates multiple precarities cutting across different occupational sectors and the housing market in the city. Through an ethnographic examination of this invisible and puzzling occupational group, this research studies everyday experiences of double precarity in urban settings, i.e. intersecting labor market  and housing market precarities. Although precarious employment and housing conditions are analyzed independently in work & occupations and urban literatures, rarely the relationship between two forms of precarities is studied. This research suggests that precarity should be studied more than a position in the labor market and hence it links precarious workers' everyday experiences to larger processes of precariousness in urban settings, as substandard housing conditions and housing insecurity are eminent problems in cities today due to increasing costs of housing, and number of foreclosures and evictions. This research argues that studying experiences of double precarity allows us to examine politics of non-production in a post-Fordist organization of labor, in which precarity is no longer an exception, but the contemporary regime in urban settings.