VIRTUAL: Prague Heritages

Abstract

After being declared the new capital of the Republic of Turkey in 1923, Ankara was considered the best representation of the new ideology and following reforms. As the young capital, Ankara started to be constructed as a modern city between the years of the 1920s and 1950s. The city was the main object of modernist urban planning and modernist architecture designed by European architects. Atatürk Orman Çiftliği (Atatürk Forest Farm), which was designed by Hermann Jansen and Ernst Egli in 1925, is both a landscape and architectural heritage and, is a particular example of modernist heritage from Ankara. The project aimed to bring agricultural activities to Ankara and to create a sociocultural area for the residents by including forests, parks, factories, pools, restaurants, and other facilities. Even though the lands of the farm and built assets were donated as the property of the state by the founder of the Republic of Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, they have been demolished starting from the 1930s due to the urban transformation strategies and privatization policies. Yet, the most drastic change happened in the last 10 years and these changes destroyed the integrity of these landscapes. This extraordinary case and its demolishment process reveals the issues about protecting landscapes of the modernist era and meaning-making processes for the landscapes. Throughout its history, the AFF has been classified as having different categories of heritage by different institutions and local administrations. In this presentation, heritage making process of the landscapes will be discussed and the significance of this heritage on the urban scale will be emphasized.