Dikmen Valley in Ankara, Turkey was originally Dikmen Village. The village goes back to the 1950s, but it wasn't settled in the form of a squatter [gecekondu in Turkish] neighborhood till around 1968. The valley has five etapes. The first and second etapes were settled the earliest while the fourth and fifth etapes were first settled in the late 1970s. Before that, the area was used by the villagers for agriculture and grazing.

During the same period, an intense wave of migration from the rural parts of inner Anatolia to big cities took place. Housing was a serious problem for these rural-to-urban migrants. A handful of early migrants to Ankara were involved in leftist political and revolutionary activities. According to the spokesperson of the resistance to "urban transformation," these migrants came together to discuss what could be done to solve their housing problems. After some research they discovered Dikmen Village and decided that this might be a solution. The valley belonged to the state, and when the migrants saw that the villagers were using the land to their liking, they decided to settle there. After having done so, they began redistributing the land to other rural migrants, especially those who, in the words of the resistance's spokesperson, were "cheap labor, who had come to the city in search of work but who had the consciousness to participate in the struggle against capital and who were at least social-democrats." Migrants to Ankara in general and Dikmen Valley in particular came from all parts of Turkey, creating a mosaic of different ethnic cultures and religious beliefs.