Both the site and the stakes of social and political struggles, space is put to many uses that express and produce unequal relations of power. As territory, space is measured, divided, and named. As constructed, it operates to confine, survey, and impose. As consecrated, it assembles, reminds, and instructs. As situated, it separates, includes, and excludes. Ordering the spaces in which people live, work, and think is also structuring ways in which lives, habits, and perceptions take their shapes. But attempts to assert control over space cannot be permanently secured nor remain uncontested, and struggles against spatial order are always struggles for new spatial possibilities. The relationship between power and space is especially salient in the Middle East, a region that bears its spatial relations in its name. Its coordinates reveal a geopolitical ambiguity, an insecure status of lying "in between" other, more “certain” spaces. Its nations have been "built", demolished, and rebuilt countless times. Recent studies on the Arab uprisings have brought to our attention the ways in which national spaces can be remade from the spatial contestations of multiple actors. This panel turns to the spaces of the everyday, assuming perspectives from different historical and geographical vantage points as a way of revealing how struggles in and over space constitute the shape of power in the Middle East.
Each of the five papers on this panel addresses the question of how spaces are constructed to install social and political order, and how order becomes contested spatially. The first paper investigates the transformation of Galata and Pera in the late nineteenth-century through exploring the district’s constructed and imagined difference against the ‘Historical Peninsula.’ The second paper examines Turkey's long neglected archaeological and ethnographic museums built throughout the country during the 1960s and 70s, with respect to the troublesome relationship of the Turkish state with its past. The remaining three papers will explore how power is expressed and contested through different forms of spatial distribution in the contemporary Middle East. The third paper analyzes how spaces of consumption in contemporary Istanbul have aestheticized historical places and practices as a way of reestablishing the position of dominant actors within the city's social hierarchy. The forth paper, "Photography and Social Space at the Mausoleum of Mohammed V in Rabat" contains a brief examination of the social uses of the Mausoleum of Muhammed V complex in Rabat, Morocco today by Moroccans who visit this locale.The concluding paper links the production of power to its resistance by analyzing the construction of the West Bank Wall and the non-violent anti-wall movements shaped around it.
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Dr. Koca Mehmet Kentel
This paper attempts to analyze the urban dualities created by colonialism in a rather unusual setting: ?stanbul, which was never ‘officially’ colonized. Looking at the urban reform programs and transformation of the built environment in Galata and Pera at the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century, I try to show how a strict historical and urban duality was constructed within the larger geography of ?stanbul. I further claim that only within such a historical conjecture one can attempt to explore the place of the Allied Occupation of 1919 in the city’s history. Such a perspective, I argue, may speak to the curious amnesia in the scholarship about the Occupation, as well as to the neglect of the struggles that shaped the district, its peoples and its built environment.
The conventional historiography treats the transformation of Galata and Pera during the late nineteenth-century within a continuous narrative that ties the unique place the district had in the early years of the Ottoman rule to the later developments, reiterating the ‘non-Muslim’ and ‘European’ character which was supposedly unchanged in the previous four centuries. Rather than echoing this narrative, I look at Galata and Pera from a threefold perspective of modernity, colonialism, and capitalism; and I argue that the dichotomous positioning of the district against the Muslim, oriental, old, ‘historical peninsula’ was a late nineteenth-century imagination – a necessary discursive and spatial formation examples of which we see in other colonial cities. I also critically engage with the nostalgic accounts of the district that praise an associated multicultural environment, or even cosmopolitanism, by looking at the lower class non-Muslims and Muslims, who were not part of this ‘belle-époque’ European culture.
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Ozge Sade Mete
More than forty archaeological and ethnographic museums were built throughout Turkey between early 1960s and 1980s, a period which began with and was ended by a military coup. Given the idea of a ‘national development’ and the notion of ‘planning’ were influential during this time period, the systematic construction of these museums was linked to the state’s ambitions for the representation of a developed and unified national identity. On the other hand, the process of the construction of museums was not very smooth and the end result was very different from what was planned. While the uneven state of these museums have mostly been considered simply the failure of the state in preserving its cultural heritage, this paper shows that, beyond inadequacy, the provincial museums in Turkey reflect a fragmented memory project as indicator of the diversity of memories in the region, which were left out of modernist historiographies.
The paper problematizes the irreconciliation of the notion of regional planning with the idea of a national development in the 1960s and 70s Turkey. While rational planning methods with an emphasis on ‘independent development’ proposed by the Western powers were adopted, regional planning as part of the process was conceived as a threat to the unity of the nation. As a result, the museum project of the 1960s, which envisioned regional museums, turned out to be a contested and ambiguous one resulting in erratic structures that contain archaeological and ethnographic collections. Through the examination of the maps showing the regional distribution of the museums and analysis of museum improvement plans, tourism plans and a prototype museum project, this paper presents the ways a regionally structured museum project ended up being fragmented into provincial museums. It argues that the inadequate spaces of archaeological and ethnographic museums reflect fragmented memories and the impossibility of linear and homogeneous histories.
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Zach Richer
Recent decades have seen an immense expansion of the retail sector in Turkey, particularly in its largest cities. The rapid construction of shopping centers has reshaped urban environments, introducing new venues in and around which social life takes place. Such a reordering of space has prompted new strategies for maintaining boundaries between the country’s rich and poor and achieving socially recognizable claims of spatial belonging. This paper examines how social hierarchy is reflected in and expressed throughout Istanbul in practices of consumption. The everyday acts of shopping, browsing, selecting and displaying wares make implicit claims of belonging or exclusion that distribute inequality across the cityscape. This social topography describes a politics of who goes where, and how myriad actors shape the social contours of the city: how urban planners orchestrate movement, how prospectors design sites of privileged access, and how self-selectivity is achieved or challenged in the activity of everyday life.
This research examines one such relational space in Istanbul, where the city's most high-end shopping mall has recreated a stylized version of the neighborhood bazaars frequented by the city's middle- and working-class residents. Through aesthetic reconfigurations of products, mannered performances of service workers, and the coordination of movements within and access to this site, this elite shopping arena reappropriates a symbol of popular consumption as authentic high fashion. However, the Istinye Bazaar is something other than an homage to the vernacular or a cultural pastiche; it is a method for reinscribing social distinction into where and how people shop. Based on open-ended semi-structured interviews with 40 patrons of the Istinye Bazaar, this research examines how social actors enact hierarchies in social space with specific reference to the social contours of their city. Through privileging particular forms of consumer practice within socially and spatially exclusive venues, these elite actors remap values upon the physical shape of the city itself, providing a spatialized understanding of how inequalities are distributed.
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Dr. Colette D. Apelian
A young man pulled himself up a pillar before standing on its broad flat top. Turning to his two companions below, one with a cell phone poised for a photograph, he reached out his arm to appear as though he was holding the Tour Hassan at the Mausoleum of Mohammed V complex in Rabat. Designed by architect Vo Toan, the complex is located in the enclosure of an unfinished twelfth century mosque and is named after the resting place of the king under whose rule Morocco gained independence. The significance of the Mausoleum of Mohammed V complex in the creation, affirmation, and display of a national identity is suggested by design choices at the complex. Spatial practices of persons who visit the site also give it meaning or meanings. Though the Mausoleum is open to both Moroccan and non-Moroccan visitors, I am particularly interested in the Moroccans who use the esplanade and tomb structure to produce and establish personal and communal identities and bonds. Acts of photography are especially significant rituals through which this occurs today, and a topic less often explored in discourse on social space in Moroccan urban contexts, despite the widespread use of cell phones in this country. This paper is based upon research conducted while living and researching in downtown Rabat as a Centre Jacques Berque scholar.
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Ms. Esra Bakkalbasioglu
The ‘plan’ does not remain innocently on paper. On the ground, the bulldozers realize ‘plans’. (Henri Lefebvre, Production of Space, 1974, p.191)
Bulldozers of the Israeli Ministry of Defense (IMD) realized the plans of the West Bank Wall, a physical obstacle separating the State of Israel from the Palestinian West Bank. The barrier takes different shapes along its [distance] expanse: In some areas it is a fence, in others it is a wall. The ‘fence’ is three meters high, and equipped with electronic sensors, ditches, barbed wire and patrolling paths. This whole obstacle is called the 'buffer zone' and it is between thirty and seventy meters wide. In other places, the obstacle turns to a 'solid barrier system,' a solid wall eight meters high. The barrier’s begin called ‘security fence’ or ‘separation wall’ does not make any difference in terms of the outcome.
The West Bank Wall has changed the landscape, as well as life in Palestinian West Bank and Israel-Palestine politics. The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics estimates that nearly 14,500 persons have been displaced since 2003, in 145 localities as a result of the construction of the Wall. However, in addition to restructuring the physical landscape, the West Bank Wall reshaped social and political relations. The Wall is a means used to separate the spaces of Israeli and Palestinian communities. While at the same time the West Bank Wall has brought Israelis and Palestinians together in unexpected ways. Since the beginning of the construction of the Wall, Israeli peace activists and Palestinian villagers have started to build solidarity networks and organize non-violent anti-Wall movements.
Through an analysis of non-violent anti-wall movements, this paper will argue that despite the diverse political and social aims of its activists, the construction of the Wall has given these organizations a site around which they could cooperate. By making the materiality of the West Bank Wall an object of political science, this paper will try to advance a new approach to studying power and contestation, the ways in which separation, inclusion and exclusion are translated into politics of contestation.
