Urbanism, Modernity, and Nation-Building in Ankara: The Birth of Turkey's Capital City during the Early Republican Period (original) (raw)
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In the 1930s, the attention of Turkey' s politicians shifted back from Ankara and Anatolian cities to İstanbul. In 1932, the Governorship-Municipality of İstanbul organized an urban design competition for İstanbul, and four foreign city planners were invited. In the meantime, Martin Wagner came to İstanbul for the preparation of urban reports. In 1937, Henri Prost, the prominent urbanist of Paris, was invited to İstanbul and prepared the first master plan of the city. In Turkey and in İstanbul, town planning processes have been significantly influenced by "Western" planning principles, cultures, and experiences while gaining a local meaning in the context of Turkish politics and the state-formation process. The aim of this study is to describe the urban design competition of 1933 and the first master plan of 1937. Beyond references to Western European cities as in the "city-beautiful" planning approach, this study, based on a series of official documents, plan reports and their rhetoric, investigates in particular the role of foreign planners/urbanists in İstanbul in the context of the construction of a nation-state. The analysis of these foreign planners' work suggests that urban planning in Republican Turkey was closely linked to the construction of the nation state.
Symbolizing a modern Anatolia: Ankara as capital in Turkey's early republican landscape
Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 2008
As the forward capital of Turkey, Ankara was erected not just physically; it was a state-authored text written spatially that would form a cornerstone in nationalist constructs of Turkish identity, tradition, and territory. Though the city itself predated the republic by millennia, its conceptualization, designation, and construction as a cultural and political center imbued the location with new meanings intertwined with the parallel rise of the Kemalist nation-state. As Turkey sought to forge a homeland for peoples both Anatolian and modern, Ankara itself and its internal landscapes provided the spatial and symbolic contexts for unifying Anatolia’s cultural pasts and the Turkish nation-state’s present and future. Reflecting upon this early experience of designating and designing Ankara as Turkey’s geo-cultural/-political center, this study examines English- and Turkish-language primary, secondary, and literary sources in order to analyze the foundational writing of the initial, state-centered tradition as it was imposed in the city’s socio-cultural and built landscapes during the formative years of the Kemalist republic. Just as this combination of idealism and state authority can be read in layers of the city’s early-republican landscapes, later strata reflect the alternative perspectives and dynamics of contestations and resistance that have arisen during and since this era.
URBAN - PUBLIC AREA ARCHITECTURE AS THE OBJECT OF THE POLICITAL IDEOLOGY: ANKARA EXAMPLE
IJAUS, 2018
Ideology is accepted in many studies as a notion, which tallies one-to-one with politics. That’s because politics points out a situation that is instrumentalised by the ideology for the implementation. The governing power implements its own ideological structure with political decisions. And the objectivation of these political decisions in the public area, its transmission to the society and the individual is performed through architecture. Tanyeli (2015) explains the relation between architecture, politics and ideology as follows; ”The habitual historiographic approach is that first definitions are brought forward on the ideological and political platform and architecture establishes spaces based on these”. Considering the fact that the general fiction of architecture is built on the space; then is the space, particularly the public space, a stage, where the political ideologies of the government are presented. The government applies on this stage the architectural style it has created and supports this style with laws. In this context, when we examine the Turkish political history attract the 2000s the attention as a period, where the efficiency of political ideologies were felt intensively. That’s because the 2000s point on a period, where the modernist republican ideology was intensively criticized and a relative break from the republican ideology was experienced by time. This period has a more differentiated appearance compared with previous period in political, economic and socio-cultural aspects. These differences are lead by the policies applied since more than ten years by a political party, which describes itself as conservative democrat but is associated by some researchers with the idea of Political Islam and has an Islamic and conservative approach. And the attention attracting feature of the policies in question is that it prefers a historicist and able to be defined as Neo-Ottoman approach instead of the modernist republican ideology. These preferences, able to be seen intensively in the social and cultural area, can also clearly be seen in the architectural character of the public spaces. The policies in question are being intensively observed particularly in Ankara, which is the urban, public space of the republican ideology. Ankara is a republic city; it is planned according to the policies of the modern republican ideology. It attracts the attention with its urban-public spaces, where the reflections of the political IJAUS 3,3 – 3,4 48 ideologies of every period on architecture are intensively and primarily observed. While this trend was followed from the planning of the whole city to the design of public buildings with the modernist ideology during the first years of the republic, the construction of the first commercial skyscraper building, the Emek Building (1950), representing a Turkey with changing expectations and world-view with the transition to the multi-party period can be shown as a sample for this situation. Therefore, the study aims to examine the urban-public space architecture as an object of the political ideology specific to Ankara. It will be dealt with the evolutional process Ankara experienced from the modernist republican ideology until present and what changes the ideologies dominating the last period caused on the architecture of the public space. The study in question includes a two-dimensional assessment of the change of the urban-public space. The first of these is the examination of the architectural attitude dominating the public buildings of the last period, and the second is the assessment of the background of the destruction of modernist building, of which the most were constructed during the first years of the republic. (It will not dealt here with the central and local administration dimension of the implementations. That’s because the same conception is dominating the process in question.) It will be tried as a result of the conducted assessments to determine the changes to the architectural features of the urban-public spaces and policies in Ankara and evaluations regarding the future of the city in social, cultural, economic and political terms will be made. Keywords: Ideology, politics, architecture, Turkey, public buildings, with 2000
The Capital and Its Shadow: Ankara and Istanbul
This paper aims to delineate the relationship between Ankara, the capital of the Republic of Turkey since its foundation in 1923, and Istanbul, the capital of the late Ottoman Empire. With all the urban planning and developments initiated and encouraged by the leading figures since the 1920s as an important component of the nation-state building project after the fall of the empire, Ankara has become the second largest city after the megacity Istanbul. Despite all these fervent endeavors to make the new capital the center of new Turkey, the fact remains that Ankara has always been the second city and/or the other city under the shadow of the centuries-long imperial capital Istanbul. The center of gravity has been expeditiously changing in the favor of Istanbul in the recent years as a result of both global and local factors. Thus, the following pages reveal the intriguing question of whether a capital city can be “the second city” with an affirmative answer in the example of Ankara.
JOTSA, 2018
The nationalizing narratives of the Turkish state framed the construction of the new nation as a revolution and as a deliberate break from the socio-political practices of the theocratic and multi-ethnic Ottoman Empire. However, the positioning of the schools in the urban landscape and their spatial organization continued the socio-spacial role of the Ottoman sultans' mosques. An analysis of school buildings designed by the German émigré architect, Bruno Taut, in the nation's new capital adds new insights to the existing scholarship on the continuities from empire to republic, further complicating the foundation myths of the nation.
2009
, 117 pages The buildings of a city such as shopping malls, plazas, world trade centers, hotels or even residential complexes are not only alternative urban building typologies but they represent power in social, economical, political and even religious terms. In this sense buildings should not be seen as specific design and research areas limited with single building scale but rather should be seen as urban statements in city scale. However the eclectic existence of these buildings in urban fabric causes a series of unexpected transformations in a larger scale. The impact of a building in urban scale takes a very important place in the modern city-their architectural expression is not limited with their individual scale but rather it becomes an integrated part of the whole city which is open to transform function, infrastructure, architectural meaning, image ability and other social problems. This building behaves as a cultural and social symbol and it is inevitable to consider the design process as an urban experience. However many of the contemporary examples are designed as individual architectural buildings… The integration of Turkey, but especially the city of Ankara to the global economic network providing new cultural identities presents a transformation of the city which natures could be seen "in terms of rent theory" and makes v this city "a place of competition for profit." To better present these transformations one of the most important regions Eskişehir Highway will be analyzed for the power it reflects as the buildings are set on the two sides of the highway as a new type of urban architecture proceeding spontaneously and reconfiguring boundaries based on the limits of the capital. The limits economic power decides about social, economic and physical order of places shapes the city as an urban product to be sold.
The Making of Early Republican Ankara
Architectural Design, 2010
Zeynep Kezer outlines the ascendancy and development of Ankara from an obscure, central Anatolian town into a capital city that was to become the focus of the new nation state. Informed by German architectural and technological expertise, it was executed to rigorous Modernist planning principles and aesthetics, and came to represent in urban form the polarisation of pre-republican and republican Turkey. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.