VIRTUAL Lisbon Livable Cities

Abstract

Ankara, in transition during the early twentieth century from an Ottoman small town to the capital city of Republican Turkey, began to expand with new constructions. The courtyards, which had been an important part of Ottoman neighborhoods and daily domestic production practices, were intrinsic to this transition. The Ottoman domestic courtyard was a private courtyard of production, separated from public life. Due to the housing crisis in the new capital city Ankara, many housing lots were divided, and new houses were built on the disintegrated courtyards. Ottoman to Republican transition further introduced other changes in housing, such as concepts of domestic privacy, the separation of production from domesticity, and the relocation of service spaces from the courtyards to the interiors of the houses, making courtyard life redundant. Although the new housing included courtyards, these were physically changed and had new social connotations. The new inner and/or rear courtyards in the condensed areas of the historic city could only function as ventilation shafts or skylights, while the large apartment complexes outside the historic city offered a new definition for the courtyards of modernity, introducing a massive inner courtyard of socialization and consumption. Meanwhile, in the private villas of the new settlement areas, the peripheral courtyards functioned to separate the house from its surroundings with modernist discourses of privacy and health. This study investigates this transformation of the private Ottoman courtyard with its productive nature into a republican courtyard of modernity, marking Ankara’s new transformative domestic and urban character in the early twentieth century.