Friday, October 30th 10:45 – 12:15

Session Room: Loft 1

Lucie Drechselova​, School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS), France
Pro-Kurdish women politicians in Diyarbakir (Turkey): negotiating autonomy (not only) towards the state

Turkey is a centralized nation state with the Kurdish minority that accounts for 10-15% of its population. The denial of the existence of Kurdish inhabitants constituted the official policy until the early 1990s. Since then, the pro-Kurdish parties are regularly voted into office in the Turkey’s south-east region. Currently, the pro-Kurdish politicians are in charge of the biggest municipalities in the area, notably Diyarbakir, Tunceli, Hakkari and Van. In a centralized state, those municipalities have limited competences. However, they are still crucial local actors in terms of investment opportunities, employment and providing services.

This paper is based upon the fieldwork done in the city of Diyarbakir, focusing on the municipality’s strategies to negotiate power and autonomy not only vis-à-vis Ankara, but also vis-à-vis the Kurdish armed movement. It can be considered as an example of redefining Kurdish nationhood within contemporary Turkey. The pro-Kurdish politicians are struggling to put in place a local government model which is (at least discursively) different from what is being done in the rest of the country. One of the major innovations touches upon the gendered dimension of local politics. The pro-Kurdish party introduced a system of co-presidency having two mayors, one male and one female, in charge of the city. This system is currently invalidated at the state courts for being unconstitutional and its survival is based on informal legitimacy it is able to mobilize. The fact that “Turkish” state courts are invalidating “Kurdish” way of governing is a widely spread reading of the situation.

Repeated calls for more decentralization are a part of the effort to achieve “self-government” in the region within the Turkish state. However, this request is not officially justified on the grounds that the Kurdish inhabitants constitute a different, stateless, nation.

Özge Sezer, Berlin Technical University & Istanbul Technical University
Idealization of the Land: The New Rural Settlements during the Early Republican Period of Turkey

Early Republican Period of Turkey signifies observable social/cultural dynamism and this opens a wide perspective to paraphrase the production of built environment and reconstruction movement in modernization and nation-building process. Considerable changes in the structure of state reflect on architectural field as an important way to legitimate new republican thought. Thus early republican era, within a general conjuncture, includes a reading of ideology and its reflection on environment, by forming of a new architectural vocabulary in the cities and in the countryside.

Accordingly, the transformation of the rural areas, during this period, occurred in a specific program that involved the peasants in the nation-building and modernization acts, by providing them a new sphere. The rural people and their life style were idealized during the construction of new Turkish nation, on the other hand, their position in the development project was controlled with planned settlements, called 'ideal villages' and 'exemplary villages'. Specific architectural / urban vocabulary of the 'ideal villages' was a translation of western urban practices into new republican language by having affordable housing typologies, gridding the land and serving equal place for the inhabitants. They were not designed and built only to house the population in the countryside. They were also instrumentalized to create an attachment of this part of population to the construction of the new country.

Consequently, the paper aims to display the different dynamics of nation-building process in the countryside via the new rural settlements in Turkey. By taking the land- 'Anatolia', into the discourse, it also seeks the contradictions about the meaning of the land as the resource of being nation and the place to be modernized.