IN-PERSON Barcelona. Section A

Abstract

One hundred years after the founding of the Turkish Republic, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has demonstrated a concerted interest in transforming cities like Istanbul and Ankara into engines for the reshaping of Turkey’s past and future through strategic historic restoration and self-described “crazy” infrastructure projects like a man made canal that will parallel the Bosporus Straight. With projects like these, Erdoğan is contributing to a national preoccupation with urbanism that extends back to the founding of the Turkish Republic, when Turkey experienced its first urbanist moment. Lacking a dedicated class of urban planners until later in the 20th century, in the 1920s and 30s, a diverse assortment of actors including medical doctors, artists and novelists adopted the moniker of “urbanist” and translated ideas emerging from Paris and Berlin while they projected their own visions for how urban space could transform society in ways befitting the new republic. During a period when criticism of the single-party government was harshly suppressed, my research shows how urbanism provided a relatively safe space to negotiate the boundaries of state and society. This, I show, had a lasting impact on Turkey’s political culture over the course of its century-long existence, during which time, the visions of Turkey’s leaders, as well as popular resistance to them, were often articulated through the medium of urban space.