The Golden Horn: the transformation of space and the silhouettes of modernitiy

Abstract

This thesis examines the post-1980 transformation of space in the Golden Horn, through focusing on the relationship between the discourse of modernity and the urban interventions in Turkey. The demolitions on the northern shores of the region after 1980 and the museums that were built after these demolitions Koç Museum, Miniaturk and Santral Istanbul- will form the main axis of my investigation. Besides, space politics in Turkey after1980, the emergence of museumization as a form of a culture industry and the reconceptualization of modernization in this process will be examined. In this sense, while the deindustrialization experiences of the Golden Horn and the rest of the world are compared, how the industrialization based developmentalist discourse of the early republic was changed during the post-1980 urbanization projects, will be examined. As the architectural interventions, which have turned the industrial district into the “valley of culture”, have been grounded on the discourses of cleanliness and the preservation of the historical texture, the past 100 years of the region are memorized with the sins of industrialization and the annihilation of the historical texture and the cultural heritage. However, the new architectural structures not only replaced the production of hard materials with a cultural industry, but they also constitute new forms of modernity through their ways of representation and the audience they interpellate. Therefore, this thesis will also try to get insights into why and how the contemporary discourse of modernity reproduces itself over the critiques of the modernization experience of the past 50 years of the Turkish Republic.