Building Modern Turkey: State, Space And Ideology In The Early Republic

摘要

The historiography on early Republicanarchitecture in Turkey has producedan extensive literature since themid-twentieth century, examiningarchitecture in relation to the formationof a new state in the country in 1923.Early studies focused on the majorspatial interventions of the statesuch as the relocation of the capitalcity and the construction of variouspublic buildings across the country tohouse the administrative, economic,educational and cultural functions ofthe new modernizing system. Criticalapproaches towards the nation-buildingprocess are dominant in the increasingstudies of recent decades that presentmore inclusive and pluralist accounts ofthe early Republican architecture, anddiscuss its role in the very constructionof the national identity itself. ZeynepKezer’s Building Modern Turkey: State,Space and Ideology in the Early Republicmakes a significant contributionto this literature by introducing ageopolitical frame of analysis with aninterdisciplinary method benefitingfrom various fields of study fromgeography and urban planning topolitics and education. Emphasizingthat the founder Mustafa KemalAtatürk’s call for “a surface of defense ...[as] the entire country ... was proposingto bring very inch of that land into thesocial imagination as part of a collectiveresponsibility” (p.195), Kezer presentsthe formation of the Turkish state as“a good case study for exploring thespatiality of nation-building processes”(p.11). Hence, Building Modern Turkeybroadens the field of analysis beyondthe architectural products to understandthe built environment in terms of thewider frame of spatial practices in thelarger territory of the new state.