Comparative Studies of 

  

   South Asia, Afric

a and  

  

 the Middle East 

           Vol. 28, No. 2, 2008

         doi 10

.1215/1089201x-2008-009  

   © 2008 by Duke University Press 

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Symbolizing a Modern Anatolia: Ankara as Capital in Turkey’s Early Republican Landscape

Kyle T. Evered

Symbolic Landscapes and the Forward Capitals of Nation-States

or centuries, scholars have considered the symbolic dimensions of landscape rela-tive to identity formation, as was the case in some of Johann Gottfried von Herder’s eighteenth-century works. This interest continued through the twentieth century, with

notable contributions from various humanistic geographers who explored how cultural land-scapes are critical also in constructing collective historical memories. Indeed, David Lowen-thal articulated well the conceptual significance of place and history in terms of the identities both of individuals and of larger social and political entities when he observed, “The place of the past in any landscape is as much the product of present interest as of past history. . . . As individuals invent new private pasts, so nations fashion new collective histories. The tangible past is less easily fabricated. Yet landscape and townscape are full of relics made to realize historical fantasy.”1 Yi-Fu Tuan elaborated further on this theme with respect to nationalism and its manifestation: “The means to raise it are all symbolic. The nation, too large to be known personally by a majority of its citizens, is known conceptually through the flag, na-tional anthem, army uniform and ceremonial parades, ethnocentric history, and geography.”2 Subsequent outpourings of landscape studies in geography and beyond over the past two de-cades — often influenced by literary scholarship and postmodern theory — sharpened further the critical evaluation of such symbolisms in our built environments and encouraged greater analysis of the power dynamics that inevitably are at play, as well.

Though not all geographers have been eager to recognize conceptual dimensions of landscape, studies continue to evolve from humanistic, postmodern, and other geographic tra-ditions that further amplify the perspectives brought to bear in explorations into the symbolic dimensions of place in collective identity constructs — and associated dynamics of power.3 The

Initial research that contributed to this article was funded by a Fulbright scholarship. While in Ankara, Turkey, I was hosted by Middle East Technical University’s Faculty of Architecture and benefited greatly from discussions with Güven Sargın of the Ar-chitecture Department and with Murat Güvenç, Özcan Altaban, Gönül Tankut, and İlhan Tekeli of the school’s City and Regional Planning Department.

1.  David Lowenthal, “Past Time, Present Place: Landscape and Memory,” Geographical Review 65 (1975): 24, 33.

2.  Yi-Fu Tuan, “Place: An Experiential Perspective,” Geographical Review 65 (1975): 160.

3.  In what aspired to be the authoritative text on the discipline of geography, for example, Richard Hartshorne was especially rigid and uninspired regarding the idea and usage of “land-scape” — conveying a limiting and primarily physical dimen-sion in defining the term. See Richard Hartshorne, The Nature of Geography: A Critical Survey of Current Thought in the Light of the Past (Lancaster, PA: Association of American Geographers, 1939), 158 – 74.

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potential for these perspectives to be realized de-pends largely on peoples’ capacities to deal with, as Homi K. Bhabha wrote, particular “moments or processes that are produced in the articula-tion of cultural differences. These ‘in-between’ spaces provide the terrain for elaborating strate-gies of selfhood — singular or communal — that initiate new signs of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration, and contestation, in the act of defining the idea of society itself.” 4 Such height-ened awareness of politics and processes as writ-ten into places and spaces that are natural, built, and/or conceptual thus inspired the metaphor “reading landscape as text,” an idea both attrac-tive in its initial creative novelty and as a means to thinking more critically about the conduct of place and space in discourses of power, gender, race, class, identity, and other varieties of indi-vidual/social constructs.5

Looking at spatial iconographies as they are imagined, constructed, and employed in processes of self-definition demands apprecia-tions over space and through time for changes in the symbols — both in their meanings and in changes they inspire through their discursive roles. Based on recognitions of and apprecia-tions for these symbolisms, operative identity-place dialectics are apparent at all levels of societal organization. As America developed socially and spatially over time, for example, corresponding shifts in both identities and ide-als were reflected generally in moves from ini-tial notions of the family farm to later visions of suburbia.6 Constructions of nationalism and national ideals both shape places and are in turn shaped by them. It should not be at all sur-

prising, therefore, that a nation seeking to re-define its identities, histories, agendas, or other aspects integral to its projections and functions would employ new symbols — in turn reinter-preting and reinscribing landscapes within its domains.

Such reinscriptions of both territory and landscape are particularly evident when nation-states elect to construct forward capitals and embellish them with cultural and political ico-nographies. Throughout the twentieth century, there were many such examples of capital-/nation- building enterprises, including Aus-tralia’s compromise in an early 1900s rivalry between Sydney and Melbourne, an ornately designed Canberra; Brazil’s promotion of inte-rior development and postcolonial redefinition with its proposal for a new capital in its 1889 constitution and its eventual 1956 designation of Brasília; Pakistan’s 1960s construction of Is-lamabad, inspired quite broadly by a similar set of priorities; Germany’s continued assertions of reunification through its grand-scale rebuild-ing of Berlin — amid simultaneous efforts to deal with contentious aspects of its varied pasts; and Kazakhstan’s shift from Almaty to Astana, attributed variously to both its domestic and in-ternational geopolitical imperatives.7 Moreover, in the late modern era amid processes of region-alization, one may even note similar phenomena of capital construction, as in the most conspicu-ous case of promoting a “European” identity.8

For the nascent Turkish republic, Ankara’s 1923 designation was testament to a national re-definition/reorientation and to a geocultural unification of post-Ottoman Anatolia. Though

4.  Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 1 – 2.

5.  For example, see Denis E. Cosgrove, Social Forma-tion and Symbolic Landscape (London: Croom Helm, 1984); Stephen Daniels and Denis E. Cosgrove, “Spec-tacle and Text: Landscape Metaphors in Cultural Ge-ography,” in Place/Culture/Representation, ed. James Duncan and David Ley (London: Routledge, 1993), 57 – 77; Jonathan Smith, “The Lie That Blinds: Desta-bilizing the Text of Landscape,” in Duncan and Ley, Place/Culture/Representation, 78 – 92; and James Duncan and Nancy Duncan, “(Re)reading the Land-scape,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 6 (1988): 117 – 26.

6.  James E. Vance Jr., “Democratic Utopia and the American Landscape,” in The Making of the Ameri-can Landscape, ed. Michael P. Conzen (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990), 204 – 20.

7.  On Australia, see Freek Colombijn, “Canberra: A Sheep in Wolf’s Clothing,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 22 (1998): 565 – 81. For Brazil, see James Holston, The Modernist City: An An-thropological Critique of Brasília (Chicago: Univer-sity of Chicago Press, 1989); Isabel Maria Madaleno, “Brasilia: The Frontier Capital,”  Cities  13  (1996): 273 – 80; and Jorge E. Hardoy, “Two New Capital Cities: Brasília and Islamabad,” Ekistics 18 (1964): 320 – 25. On Berlin, see Hermine G. De Soto, “(Re)inventing Ber-lin: Dialectics of Power, Symbols, and Pasts,” City and Society 8 (1996): 29 – 49; Peter Marcuse, “Reflections on Berlin: The Meaning of Construction and the Con-struction of Meaning,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 22 (1998): 331 – 38; and Karen E. Till, The New Berlin: Memory, Politics, Place (Minne-apolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005). On Ka-zakhstan, see “Welcome to the Tomb, — er, the Capi-tal: The Dubious Appeal of Astana, the New Capital 

of Kazakhstan,” Economist, 6 June 1998, 40; Henry R. Huttenbach, “Whither Kazakstan? Changing Capi-tals: From Almaty to Aqmola/Astana,” Nationalities Papers 26 (1998): 581 – 87; Richard L. Wolfel, “North to Astana: Nationalistic Motives for the Movement of the Kazakh(stani) Capital,” Nationalities Papers 30 (2002): 485 – 506; Edward Schatz, “What Capital Cit-ies Say about State and Nation Building,” National-ism and Ethnic Politics 9 (2003): 111 – 40; and Shonin Anacker, “Geographies of Power in Nazarbayev’s Astana,”  Eurasian Geography and Economics  45 (2004): 515 – 33.

8.  For example, see Carola Hein, The Capital of Europe: Architecture and Urban Planning for the European Union (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004).

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developers, planners, and historians often cite the eventual course of Ankara’s development to be similar to the cases of Brasília and Islamabad, this study instead deals with the motives behind and initial construction of Ankara. In this foun-dational context, the matter of nation build-ing was far more important. In the selection of Ankara as capital, in its conceptualization and planning, and in both its designed and unfore-seen courses of development, Bhabha’s so-called moments and processes of collaboration and contestation are still very much in play. Turkey celebrates its eighty-fifth anniversary as a repub-lic in 2008, and the meanings of this anniversary continue to be a matter of public and academic discourse both at home and abroad. Likewise, meanings of Ankara — national capital, spatially expanding city, modern place in a developing country, a corporate center of industries in an agricultural region, and symbol for/against nu-merous other processes and conditions — con-tinue to be (re)written through time and from innumerable perspectives. Drawing both on conceptualizations of “inventing tradition” from Eric J. Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger and on a recognition of places as imagined, constructed, and lived-in — and hence reconfigured concep-tually and physically through time — as in Henri Lefebvre, one may understand that even those fictive pasts that are asserted through physical construction are dynamic and contentious — de-spite designers’ wishes for them to appear con-stant and universal.9

The Kemalist Landscape: Situating, Imagining, Designing, and Inscribing AnkaraSince at least as early as the seventeenth-century economic crisis, the Ottoman Empire had been in a state of serious decline, and by the late-nineteenth century, having lost much of its Eu-ropean territories to both other global empires and rebellious ethno-nationalisms and religious groups, it was regarded generally by Western powers as the so-called Sick Man of Europe. Following the empire’s defeat in World War I, foreign plans to divide the empire’s Anatolian

lands began to be put into effect, with Greek troops occupying much of western Anatolia, while a British-led Triple Entente occupation of Istanbul proceeded. With both the Ottoman sultanate and the caliphate reduced to puppets of Europe in the eyes of Turkish nationalists, due largely to Istanbul’s loss of sovereignty and subsequent pronouncements against the nation-alists’ resistance, Mustafa Kemal (1881 – 1938), later known as Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, or “fa-ther of the Turks” (hereafter simply referred to as Atatürk), led nationalist forces in the Turkish War of Independence. During this period, An-kara became the de facto center for the Turkish struggle.

With the eventual emergence of a Repub-lic of Turkey, Atatürk pursued an ambitious pro-gram of reform and modernization that closely emulated Western examples. In addition to the establishment of the republic itself, his agenda also promoted legal reform, suffrage and other rights for women, a national program for educa-tion — with associated reforms in the alphabet and the language, statist involvement in the economy, a resolute articulation of Turkish ter-ritory and a commitment to maintaining sover-eignty, and a secularization of national politics and the public sphere. “Kemalism” was thus the ideological commitment both to these ideals and to the Turkish nation of Anatolia.

For a new nation that sought to reject any imperialistic legacies of the Ottoman Empire and the caliphate, Atatürk’s new state found in Anatolia a veritable fountainhead of sym-bolisms to draw from. Not only was the recent nationalist struggle based out of Anatolia — and not Istanbul — but this region was also home to many past peoples and political powers (e.g., Hittites, Phrygians, Alexander’s armies, Seleu-cids, Galatians, Romans, Byzantines, Seljuks, and others). Just as many of Anatolia’s historic and prehistoric societies likely constructed their own images of an Anatolia to rule over, so did the fledgling state under Atatürk envision and convey particular images of the region.10 In this Kemalist Anatolia, the iconographies of all the

9.  Eric J. Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-versity Press, 1983); Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1991).

10. On Roman visions of Anatolia, as conveyed through the Res Gestae of Augustus in what would later be  Ankara, see Suna Güven, “Displaying the Res Gestae of Augustus: A Monument of Imperial Image for All,” Journal of Architectural Historians 57 (1998): 30 – 45.

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pre-Ottoman Anatolians were deployed in rep-resentations of who the modern Turks were the inheritors of.

Given Turkey’s challenges in the aftermath of World War I and the War of Independence, a great deal was achieved through an adherence to the Kemalist agenda. Indeed, many of the earliest academic sources that dealt with the republic would chronicle this struggle for mod-ernization.11 Central to even many such earlier studies was the question of how these matters of modernity, society and nation, and the conduct of the Turkish state solved — but also sometimes created — problems at hand. In more recent years, critical analysis of these issues has been heightened, at a time when many of the ideals of the Kemalist state and both its nationalist and secularist supporters are facing some of their greatest challenges.12 In many respects, this article deals with some of those symbols that the Kemalist state acquired from the Anatolian frontier in the days of its formation — symbols that are very much at the center of matters of contestation and resistance today.

Locating a Cultural/National Hearth in an Anatolian FrontierDescriptions of early-twentieth-century Ankara, like retrospective accounts of other designed capitals, emphasize prominently remote and nonurban characteristics. As in creation myths of Washington, D.C., Canberra, or Brasília, An-kara’s genesis is represented as the awesome visi-tation of modernity’s supreme expression (i.e., a nation-state’s capital city) to an indefinite space that was both rural and premodern in form and character. In Ankara’s story, as in others, there is a writing not of one national history but of two; one is that of the essential and premodern nation, and another is that of the struggle and advent of the nation into its present, modern

form. This transition is indeed one of the most common themes to be found even in the many coffee-table books that are written in Turkish and that document in words and photographs this odyssey from a pre-Kemalist hamlet to a national capital.13 Seemingly dichotomous tem-poral orientations of nationalisms both forward and backward gave rise to descriptions of the nation as, for example, “the modern Janus.”14 This duality in constructs of the Turkish nation promotes missions of today through simultane-ous projections of idealized yesterdays and to-morrows.

In republican Turkey, the past was not to be written on urban histories of Ottoman and other civilizations as located in Byzantium, Constantinople, and/or Istanbul. Rather, the narrative of the new republic idealized a unity of Turkish peoples as a whole through the foun-dation of a national capital on the soil of the Anatolian plains. As Ankara was designed to be today’s and tomorrow’s modern capital, so it was also intended to read as the hearth of the Anatolian Turks. This Anatolian (and especially not Ottoman) town arose long before an era of nation-states as a local agricultural center and as a junction of overland routes that passed through the Çubuk plain. Settlement benefited from a protective hilltop (where the old fortress now stands, not far from the aforementioned Res Gestae of Augustus, Roman baths, and other archaeological sites) surrounded by fertile lands and adequate water supplies (at least when pop-ulations were not too numerous) from the An-kara, Macunderesi, Hatıp, Çubuk, and İncesu streams.15 With its economies of wool (and espe-cially that of mohair from the Angora/Ankara goat), livestock, and traditional agriculture, An-kara was the ideal rustic place and past of a Tur-kic people that would likewise serve as the foun-dational layer of a national tableau upon which

11.  For example, see Daniel Lerner, The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East, with Lucille W. Pevsner (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1958); Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey (London: Oxford University Press, 1961); and Robert E. Ward and Dankwart A. Rustow, eds., Political Mod-ernization in Japan and Turkey (Princeton, NJ: Prince-ton University Press, 1964).

12.  Among a still growing number of works, especially noteworthy is Sibel Bozdoğan and Reşat Kasaba, eds., Rethinking Modernity and National Identity in Turkey (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997).

13.  For example, Ozan Sağdıç and Demet Börtücene, Bir zamanlar Ankara (Once upon a Time in Ankara) (Ankara: Ankara Büyükşehir Belediyesi, 1993); Burçak Evren, Ankara: 20’lı yılların bozkır kasabası (Ankara: The Steppe Town of the ’20s) (Istanbul: AD Kitapçılık, 1998); and Enis Batur, ed., Ankara, Ankara (Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 1994).

14.  See Tom Nairn, The Break-up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-nationalism (London: New Left Books, 1977); and Nairn, Faces of Nationalism: Janus Revisited (New York: Verso, 1997).

15.  On matters of prior settlement in the region, see Sevgi Aktüre, “16. yüzyıl öncesi Ankara’sı, üzerine bi-linenler” (“What We Know of Ankara prior to the Six-teenth Century”), in Tarih içinde Ankara (Ankara in History), ed. Erdal Yavuz and Ümit Nevzat Uğurel (An-kara: Orta Doğu Teknik Üniversitesi, 1984), 1 – 47; and  Sevgi Aktüre, Anadolu’da bronz çaği kentleri (Bronze-Age Cities of Anatolia) (Istanbul: Tarih Vakfı, 1997). 

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Figure 1 Depicting an idyllic, premodern, and very agrarian Anatolian town skirting its hilltop fortress, this most ubiquitous of several such images of an early Ankara is included uncritically in many popular and academic accounts of the city’s pasts alike. Appearing originally in Joseph Pitton de Tournefort’s posthumously published 1717 travel accounts, this image derived from the 1718 English-language translation of that work; Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, A voyage into the Levant: perform’d by command of the late French king. Containing the antient and modern state of the islands of the Archipelago; . . . With plans of the principal towns . . . Illustrated with full descriptions and curious copper-plates . . . By M. Tournefort, . . . To which is prefix’d, the author’s life, . . . Adorn’d with an accurate map . . . In two volumes, trans. J. Ozell (London, printed for D. Browne, A. Bell, J. Darby, A. Bettesworth, J. Pemberton, C. Rivington, J. Hooke, R. Cruttenden and T. Cox, J. Battley, E. Symon, 1718), vol. 2.

a new urban and industrial society would be en-visioned and incorporated. Just as lithographs, paintings, and daguerreotypes that reflect this rustic Anatolian hearth of a future nation-state are popular images in many official/state histo-ries of the city and the nation (see fig. 1), so too are many reminders of this idyllic past as me-morialized today in the city’s landscapes. Sym-bolic glorifications of traditional industries and lifeways abound in Ankara; statues of playful Angora goats are found in many places, large vases or pitchers celebrating the tile and ce-ramic industries of nearby centers are in several locations, monuments (e.g., as in the second-ary images on the monument in Güven Park) carry prominent images of agriculturalists, and so forth.

Imagining an Anti-imperial CityClearly, Ankara has an Ottoman history; it was an Ottoman vilayet (i.e., a local administra-tive center), its regional economies were well integrated with those of the larger empire, its populace was as ethnically and as religiously di-versified as those in many other Ottoman trad-ing centers were throughout Anatolia and the Balkans, and its commercial and military infra-structure — some of which remains today in the Ulus district near the old citadel (though itself a Byzantine structure) — was typical of many Ot-toman towns and cities.16 Despite these realities, Ankara also had an advantage over cities such as Istanbul or Izmir; it had a more malleable past that could be rewritten to yield a greater legacy of the modern Turkish nation-state. The

16.  On the integration of economies, see the rather uncritical but informative work by Rıfat Özdemir, XIX. yüzyılın ilk yarısında Ankara: Fizikî, demgrafik, idarî ve sosyo-ekonomik yapısı, 1785 – 1840 (Ankara during the

First Half of the Nineteenth Century: Physical, Demo-graphic, Administrative, and Socioeconomic Structure, 1785 – 1940), 2nd ed. (Ankara: Kültür Bakanlığı, 1998). For greater information on the population’s diversity, 

see Suraiya Faroqhi, Men of Modest Substance: House Owners and House Property in Seventeenth-Century Ankara and Kayseri (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-sity Press, 1987).

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centuries-long presence of Ottoman sultans in Istanbul at Topkapı and the role of Istanbul as the seat of the caliphate would not be easily for-gotten, and Izmir’s historic vitality as the Otto-man commercial center and principal connec-tion to global trade since 1535 was not erased even by the city’s virtual destruction in Septem-ber 1922 amid a rout of the occupying Greek army. Ankara’s histories, while infused with Ot-toman aspects, were not so inextricably tied to future remembrances of the Ottoman state or the caliphate. By placing emphasis on remote images of an Ankara in central Anatolia; on ro-manticized connections to “traditional” Turk-ish peoples, cultures, and livelihoods; and on the promise of transforming this newly imag-ined backwater into a nation’s capital, Ankara yielded the emergent nation-state with a univer-sal rallying point exclusive to the traditions of neither the elite urbanites of eastern Thrace or the peasants of eastern Anatolia. In this respect, Turkey’s discovery of Ankara was not so unique; projects of finding ideal sites for convening otherwise-distinct peoples, places, and pasts are a constant in histories of nation building and selecting capitals.17

A few histories of the emergent republic discussed Ankara as merely a more-defensible alternative to Istanbul.18 However, any employ-ment of this security rationale to the exclusion of others is flawed. It might be noted that Baron Patrick Balfour Kinross also made this char-acterization in his popular history, though he seemed to correct the exaggeration when he later indicated the significance that Ankara took on amid the struggle for independence: “Against this was set its geographical position, secure against the inroads of the foreigner and above all the fact that, as the symbol of the Na-tionalist struggle, it had acquired a mystique of its own.”19 Clearly, security considerations (e.g., the city had rail connections since 1892

and would be a good communications center) did carry weight as Ankara became the physical center of Anatolian resistance, and Atatürk even explained it in such terms as he justified Istan-bul’s abandonment as a capital when meeting with journalists in January 1923: “There can be no government center in a place that could be panicked by a ship’s incoming cannon shot.”20 However, the city’s psychological centrality — its “mystique” — became a major factor, too. In this respect, explanations of Ankara’s eventual designation as capital in some popular and aca-demic histories that attribute everything to in-ertia (i.e., leaders of the new state simply “stayed on” in Ankara rather than return to Istanbul) are also woefully flawed.

Indeed, even in the short number of years that Ankara was an administrative center for Ke-malist forces during the war of independence, it began to acquire a great deal of symbolic im-portance. Ankara’s emergence as the locus of Anatolian independence amid struggles exter-nal and internal thus became greatly enshrined in visions of the city’s past. This is evident not only in the omnipresence of numerous inde-pendence monuments in Ankara but even in representations of the city found in songs and literature; many derive from the periods of the struggle for independence (e.g., in the fictional works of Halide Edib Adıvar) or the early re-public (e.g., as in Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu’s 1930s classic novel Ankara), but also in the years following the passing of Atatürk (e.g., as in im-ages in either Mehmed Emin Yurdakul’s 1939 poems or Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’s 1940s novel Bes Sehir), and even as recent as Celâl Hafif-bilek’s quite mediocre historical novel Ankara 1920.21 It was during this period, too, that one British traveler described Ankara as “the cradle of the New Turkey.”22

While empires of Europe unquestionably sought to prey on late-Ottoman/early- republican

17.  As in the case of London; see Adrian Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion, and Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 40.

18.  For example, see Salâhi R. Sonyel, Atatürk — the Founder of Modern Turkey (Ankara: Türk Tarih Ku-rumu, 1989).

19.  Baron Patrick Balfour Kinross, Atatürk: The Re-birth of a Nation (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1964), 330.

20.  On security considerations, see İlhan Tekeli and Tarık Okyay, “Case Study of a Relocated Capital: An-kara,” in Urban Planning Practice in Developing Coun-tries, ed. John L. Taylor and David G. Williams (Oxford, UK: Pergamon, 1982), 123 – 24. Atatürk, as quoted in Seçil Akgün, “Kurtulus Savaşı’nın mekansal strate-jisi ve Ankara’nin başkent seçilmesi kararının içeriği” (“Spatial Strategies of the War of Independence and the Decision to Choose Ankara as Capital”), in Yavuz and Uğurel, Tarih içinde Ankara, 230 – 31.

21.  Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu, Ankara (1934; Istan-bul: İletişim Yayınları, 1998); Mehmed Emin Yurdakul, Ankara (Istanbul: İkbal Kitabevi, 1939); Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, Beş Şehir (Five Cities) (1946; Istanbul: Der-gah Yayınları, 2005); Celâl Hafifbilek, Ankara 1920  (Istanbul: Telos, 1998).

22.  Grace Ellison, An Englishwoman in Angora (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1923), 131.

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territories (culminating with the 1918 – 23 British- led occupation of Istanbul by the Triple Entente) and lesser forces took full advantage of this situation (e.g., the 1919 – 22 Greek occupa-tion of Izmir), the advance of Russia into Otto-man Anatolia as far as Erzincan only a few years earlier would have taught that land-as-barrier was no sound guarantee of protection amid an absence of competent military command. The idea of Ankara was thus not that of a lifeboat to save Turkey from the crashing of European im-perial waves. Rather, Ankara was more an oppor-tunity — a spatially connected “moment” — that presented the new state with an ideal founda-tion for galvanizing the constitutive elements of a young nation.

Historic meanings of London as an “im-perial city” inspired a panorama of imagery. London was at once a center of its own universe and a place and experience unto itself: “On the one hand, contemporaries often described it as a place of chaos and restless commerce, difficult to render as a whole, perhaps even incapable of representation; on the other, it was pictured as a unity, the site of imperial power, the heart of the world.”23 Within the Ottoman Turkish ec-umene, Istanbul and its many political and so-cioeconomic histories most closely resembled this urban seat of global power. For an emerging republic with an overwhelmingly introspective political philosophy — one striving to distance itself from the not-so-distant memories of being at once colonizer and colonized — the situation of the nation’s capital in Istanbul would have been anathema to all it sought to foster. The cre-ation of an anti-irredentist Ankara, by contrast, would be well ordered in every respect (at least in conceptualization) and would reconcile itself to being the center of Turkey and Anatolia — not the global pivot Ottoman Istanbul aspired to be. Ankara’s emergence in close concert with that of the Turkish nation-state was thus that of the new republic’s anti-imperial city.

Not all people — foreigners and Turk-ish — appreciated this symbolic shift. American philosopher and educator John Dewey (1859 – 1952) expressed his own misgivings, and the

resentment of many living in Istanbul, in his accounts from visiting “Angora” in 1924 — after the capital had already been declared:

It is not only in Europe that there is bewilder-ment at the decision of the new rulers of Turkey to abandon the secular capital of historic em-pires, situated as if nature herself had destined it to be queen of empires, in order to found a new capital some hundreds of miles in the interior of Asia. Astonishment and resentment are also felt in Constantinople, perhaps more in Constanti-nople than elsewhere. In addition to amazement attendant upon ceasing to be for the first time in almost fifteen centuries the mistress, spiritual and temporal, of a large part of the world, there is the disdain which the cultivated capital always feels for the rude province. That during a period of military stress and during a period of occu-pation of Constantinople by foreign forces, the country should find the seat of its recuperation in the remote interior is understandable. But that when this period was finished, the new lead-ers should continue seriously to turn their backs on a city which with Rome and Peking is one of the great capitals of the world, is incredible.24

While Dewey may have been shocked and dismayed, British traveler Grace Ellison (d. 1935) perceived astutely the symbolic signifi-cance of Ankara. Based on her 1922 observa-tions and experiences in the soon-to-be capital of the emergent republic, she reflected on both this introspective orientation of the new nation under Atatürk and the symbolic potential of Ankara:

Among other matters, I was particularly anxious to know whether Constantinople or Angora was to be the permanent capital of the new State, and to understand all the reasons that would deter-mine their choice.

I love every inch of Constantinople. There are obvious and important religious-historical as-sociations with its mosques and its public build-ings; comfort and dignity, space and beauty, are, as it were, already at hand. Yet, paradoxical as it may seem, to me it lacks, and will always lack, the marvelous atmosphere of a Great Birth that so impresses one in Angora.

The Turks, I found, were unanimous in having a similar preference and, naturally, put

23.  Felix Driver and David Gilbert, “Heart of Empire? Landscape, Space, and Performance in Imperial Lon-don,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 16 (1998): 11.

24.  John Dewey, Impressions of Soviet Russia and the Revolutionary World — Mexico, China, Turkey (New York: New Republic, 1929), 208 – 9.

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forward more precise and practical reasons for their choice. There may be occasion for a tempo-rary sojourn in Constantinople.

But they want an “Asiatic” capital; they want to govern their own country beyond the reach of possible interference from dread-noughts; they want to maintain an intimate continuity of association with the cradle of the movement that begot the State.

There is, moreover, a primitive and Asiatic charm in Angora, which should serve, as it were, to “keep them holy” from the materialisms and the intrigues of Western commerce-Empires.25

Declaring Ankara as CapitalWith the approval of a proposal presented by İsmet İnönü and fourteen others on 9 October 1923, Ankara became the official capital of Turkey following a 13 October 1923 parliamen-tary ratification — almost three months after the Treaty of Lausanne provided international recognition to most of the claims that Turkey made to its present territories (with the nota-ble exception of the then British-occupied Ot-toman vilayet of Mosul — the northern third of today’s state of Iraq) and sixteen days prior to the official declaration of the republic itself on 29 October 1923. In the same decree that made Ankara the republic’s administrative center, it was also declared that Istanbul would remain as the nation’s spiritual center with a promise that the city would “remain as the seat of the Caliph-ate into eternity.”26 The end of eternity came in 1924 for the caliphate, however, as the secular state abolished this religious institution that had been linked inextricably with the sultanate for centuries.

While Ankara was not unique in the new republic’s visions of urban modernization — Is-tanbul, Izmir, and other cities were designated for reconstruction — the political significance of Ankara as the capital was unique. Ankara of the early Turkish nation-state was compelled to seek an “architecture of centrality,” to borrow a phrase from Saskia Sassen, to fulfill both its

functional and its highly symbolic imperatives.27 Such symbolisms were very apparent in an an-them written in the early years of the republic by Aka Gündüz (d. 1941) with music composed by musicologist Halil Bedii Yönetken (1899 – 1968). Called “Ankara Marşı” (“The Ankara March”), it was sung for the city and is still sung by many Turkish children in their schools.

Ankara, Ankara, beautiful Ankara,All the unfortunate dream of seeing you,You give hope to those with troubles,For them you are enough beautiful Ankara.May those who covet your castle tower be

humbled,The power of the Turks, overcome all

hardships there,You are the city that arose from nothing,May the soil and stone of Ankara prosper.

Rescuing a Nation from a “Filthy Woman’s Perfume” — Planning a Modern AnkaraEven in just those years during the War of In-dependence, when Ankara functioned as an administrative center for Turkish forces — but prior to its official designation as a capital of the emergent republic — the city began to expe-rience rapid demographic growth and a push for expansion. While most estimates of Ankara’s population at the beginning of the twentieth century suggest that about twenty thousand peo-ple were residents in the city — mostly in those neighborhoods within the citadel’s immediate periphery — rapid wartime growth resulted from the almost overnight influx of bureaucrats, sol-diers, and their families. Despite the obvious departures of the city’s ethnic minorities (e.g., its prewar Armenians, Greeks, and others — peo-ples rarely, if ever, mentioned in subsequent of-ficial or nationalist histories of the city), Ankara would still grow to roughly seventy-five thou-sand people by 1927.28 These numerous arriv-als gave rise to a severe housing problem and uncontrolled growth and development.29 The hasty building of homes resulted in a mixture

25.  Ellison, Englishwoman in Angora, 149.

26.  Quoted  in Fehmi Yavuz, Ankara’nin imari ve sehirciligimiz (The Construction of Ankara and Our Urbanization) (Ankara: Güney Matbaacılık ve Gazete-cilik, 1952), 11, and cited by Gönül Tankut, Bir başkentin imarı, Ankara: 1929 – 1939 (The Construction of a Capi-tal, Ankara: 1929 – 1939) (Istanbul: Anahtar Kitablar, 1993), 46.

27.  Saskia Sassen, “The Topoi of E-Space: Global  Cities and Global Value Chains,” Built Environment 24 (1998): 134 – 41; see esp. 135.

28.  Ruşen Keleş, Eski Ankara’da bir şehir tipolojisi (An Urban Typology in Old Ankara) (Ankara: Sevinç Matbaası, 1971).

29.  On the housing problem, see Yıldırım Yavuz, “1923 – 1928 Ankara’sında konut sorunu ve konut gelişmesi” (“Ankara’s Housing Problem and Its De-velopment, 1923 – 1928”), in Yavuz and Uğurel, Tarih içinde Ankara, 235 – 56; note comments on 235.

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of styles, some notable for their excessive decor, towers, arches, and columns. Commenting on their appearance, Austrian architect Robert Oerley (1876 – 1945) likened their appeal to that of a “filthy woman’s perfume.”30

To help deal with the dilemma of Anka-ra’s growth — and the mounting criticism from both Turks and Europeans about the city’s lack of urban planning — leaders turned in 1924 to Carl Christoph Lörcher (1884 – 1966), a German architect who had already been working in Is-tanbul. Lörcher completed designs for the older sections of Ankara in 1924 and for what would emerge as a new Ankara by 1925. Anticipating considerable obstacles in elaborating substan-tially on the old city, it was left largely as it was following some expansions and modifications of its roads and meydans (public spaces in Ottoman urban areas). Planning the new Ankara, there-fore, became the focus of his work. However, he carefully drew on the old sections of the city as he proceeded, paying particular attention to what he described as the “beautiful castle.”31 In proceeding in this manner, the presence of the citadel was to serve as a focal point and as a basis for the city’s emergent symbolisms — both Anatolian and Kemalist.

Despite his work, Lörcher would not over-see the actual implementation of his designs, as a fairly autonomous committee of Turkish officials opened a competition for submitting a master plan for the city’s further development in 1928. In principle, competitions for planning cities in the new republic were open interna-tionally to all who would submit designs. This competition was by invitation only, however, and Lörcher was not among the invited Europeans. The committee organizing the competition did, however, “borrow” most of the nineteen key ele-ments from his design, which it stipulated must be included in any new master plan for Ankara.

Though there are various ideas concerning his exclusion — and even a later legal case that he brought against the city’s eventual plan-ner in 1930 in Berlin — there are no definitive answers.32

This lack of a “purely Turkish” design proj-ect implied by this competition was justified to critics (especially nationalists) on the grounds that it was a “scientific” endeavor, one based on “objective” principles and availing itself of the greatest planning schools of the day to be found anywhere in the world. First place for a complete city development plan was awarded to the Ger-man architect Hermann Jansen (1869 – 1945), an urban designer from the University of Ber-lin, over competitors Joseph Brix (1859 – 1943), also of Germany, and the French architect and town planner Léon Jaussely (1875 – 1932).33 While many issues surrounding the competition over Ankara’s design still remain unclear today, Gönül Tankut emphasized several times in her now classic study of the city that both the matters of invited participation and of a limited number of competitors reflected the state’s strong desires to find a most expedient solution not only to the capital’s eventual planning but also to urgent problems stemming from the increasing inci-dence of unplanned construction.34

The Anatolian and anti-imperial Ankara envisioned was to be built south of the existing settlement; the distinction between an old and a new Ankara that emerged both in practice and as a concept in Lörcher’s plan was thus pre-served. Again, the citadel of the old city — what Jansen now referred to as Ankara’s “crown” — was preserved as a reference point that would allow him to “display the old and glorious past while reflecting upon new desires” (see fig. 2).35 Also consistent with the rationale of Lörcher’s vi-sion, this southward construction was intended largely to bypass complications of building over

30.  Quoted from the newspaper Hâkimiyet-i Milliye, 3 June 1929, in Tankut, Bir başkentin imarı, Ankara, 53; Tankut contrasted this view with those of Turkish na-tionalists who wrote in less disparaging terms of the early period’s architectural diversity.

31.  Ali  Cengizkan,  Modernin saati : 20. yüzyılda modernleşme ve demokratikleşme pratiğinde mimar-lar, kamusal mekan ve konut mimarlığı (The Time of the Modern: Architects, Public Residence, and Residen-tial Architecture in Twentieth-Century Modernization and Democratization Practice) (Ankara: Mimarlar Derneği Yayını, 2002), 50; for an expanded analysis 

of the Lörcher plan and associated politics and lega-cies, see also Cengizkan, Ankara’nın ilk planı, Lörcher Planı: Kentsel mekan özellikleri, 1932 Jansen Planı’na ve bugüne katkıları, etki ve kalıntıları (Ankara’s First Plan, the Lörcher Plan: Urban Residential Charateristics, Its Impacts on the 1932 Jansen Plan, and Its Legacies for Today) (Ankara: Ankara Enstitüsü Vakfı, 2004).

32.  For greater discussion, the definitive sources on this topic are Cengizkan, Modernin saati, 37 – 59; Cen-gizkan, Ankara’nın ilk planı, Lörcher Planı; and Tankut, Bir başkentin imarı, Ankara.

33.  See Özcan Altaban and Murat Güvenç, “Urban Planning in Ankara,” Cities 7 (1990): 149 – 58.

34.  Tankut, Bir başkentin imarı, Ankara.

35.  Hermann Jansen, Ankara imar planı (Ankara’s Construction Plan) (Istanbul: Alaeddn Kıral Basımevi, 1937), 16.

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existing developed spaces, with the exceptions of several thoroughfares that would connect the older section and its hilltop citadel with the newer, planned spaces below. Such planned spaces were distinctive, and they exhibited an intentional rationale that ran consistently throughout the design, a rationale that stressed a profound spatial division of the various occu-pations and activities of citizens’ lives.36

In Jansen’s plan, the newer capital was to be a modern one that would seize a number of opportunities that would seem to arise from building in an open space. First, there was the main concern of beautifying the city with ample green spaces and boulevards — and creating a positive impression for visitors to Ankara. To this end, Gençlik Park — what Jansen referred to as the “heart of all parks in Ankara” — was de-signed to employ water, trees, and open green spaces to impress visitors as they would make their way from the nearby train station to the city, providing a “welcome” to all who entered the city (recall fig. 2 above).37 This symbolic “na-ture” for the nation was built over the lands pre-viously dominated by wetlands that surrounded the old city and that were being drained both to make space for the new and to address their perceived dangers to public health.

Second, low-density residential areas with modern amenities would be built. This most

urgent of priorities sought to address the de-sires — and very real demands — for houses that came from a new and vocal elite in Ankara that migrated recently to the city from Istanbul.38 What emerged from this effort were plans for the Bahcelievler (or “garden house”) district (see fig. 3). This was a smart and stylish neigh-borhood consisting of one- and two-story houses with all the comforts inside. By all accounts, this was a most successful endeavor in the hearts and minds of the middle- and upper-class residents who promptly took up residency, and it remains a popular residential district into the early twenty-first century.39 Though Bahcelievler was oriented toward the national capital’s new pro-fessionals, Jansen also designed a neighborhood on the outskirts of Ankara for its workers. Their homes were simple and cheaper, with a living room, a kitchen, and a bedroom. An added fea-ture of interest included the barns and garden/yard spaces, thus encouraging interests and pursuits that might incorporate the land into peoples’ perceptions of home and city.40 In an agrarian country where house-yard gardens are still common today, one can only imagine that this was an attractive consideration for some of the capital’s rural-to-urban immigrants.

Within the early Ankara that was envi-sioned, there were thus numerous spaces and symbols designed to provide both national co-

Figure 2 A view of Gençlik Park and Ankara, with the city’s fortress in the background, from an imagined perspective above the train station. This image was in Hermann Jansen’s Ankara Imar Planı, as an inset between pages 32 and 33.

36.  See also Zeynep Kezer, “Contesting Urban Space in Early Republican Ankara,” Journal of Architectural Education 52 (1998): 11 – 19.

37.  Jansen, Ankara imar planı, 18, 33.

38.  Most desired were new, Western-style buildings with elevators, tubs, toilets, and other comforts; as noted by Yavuz, “1923 – 1928 Ankara’sında konut so-runu ve konut gelişmesi,” 240.

39.  On the early residents, see Tankut, Bir başkentin imarı Ankara, 54.

40.  Jansen, Ankara imar planı, 44.

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hesion and a new distinct national culture with strong ties both to its romanticized origins and hinterlands and to the modern and Western world of the day that it aspired to be a part of. A third category of elements to be created in the open spaces available included such op-portunities, as they made room for novel civic attractions and recreation. As with the parks that were being built, there were detailed con-siderations made for features such as museums (especially several museums glorifying the na-tional struggle, the contributions of Atatürk, or the pre-Ottoman peoples of Anatolia); venues for performances; public recreational spaces; sports facilities; a hippodrome (i.e., a stadium eventually designed by Italian architect Paolo Vietti Violi in the 1930s for Republican Day cele-brations, sports, and — in keeping with Atatürk’s visions of suitable recreation for a modern so-ciety — horse races); and other sites for citizens of this new modern nation. As Jansen would remark, “It is interesting to observe how sports and an interest in sports have become so nation-alistic. . . . Once Ankara’s construction is com-plete, it will have everything for training peo-ple’s bodies.” 41 Again, with all of these intended events and performances of nationalism, the citadel functioned as the constant scenic back-drop in the architect’s vision — as conveyed not

only in his words but also in his illustrations of people swimming in pools beneath the cliffs of the citadel and of a monumental stadium with the citadel looming in the background.

Especially significant as an attraction in Ankara’s larger landscape was the inclusion of Atatürk Orman Çiftliği, the city’s so-called forest farm. This urban farm was symbolic in a number of ways. On one level, it was clearly intended to bring an agrarian Anatolia — in a truly corporatist fashion — into the otherwise modernist city. On other levels, however, it also served simultaneously as a beacon of modern agriculture and as a recreational space for a modern and secular society, featuring progres-sive agricultural practices and encouraging re-lated research, on the one hand, and various opportunities for pleasure, on the other, such as picnicking, enjoying the attractions of a zoo, and even visiting a beer garden.42

A fourth opportunity found in this new construction, and one that could also bring peoples together, involved transportation. As indicated above, the city’s plan had a profound orientation around the citadel, with complemen-tary arteries for transportation being built from it to the train station, among other planned destinations within the new city. While Jansen rejected any notion of Ankara ever becoming

Figure 3 Ankara’s Bahcelievler district — again with the citadel as a reference point. Jansen, Ankara Imar Planı, inset between pages 44 and 45.

41.  Ibid., 34, 36. 42.  As analyzed previously by Kyle T. Evered in “Past and Present Symbolisms of Ankara’s Atatürk Orman Çiftliği: A Landscape of National Corporatism” (paper presented at the Association of American Geogra-phers annual conference, New Orleans, LA, 4 – 8 March 2003).

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an “industrial city,” he did pay a great deal of at-tention to the city’s train station because of his conviction that Ankara could serve as a major transportation hub for people, connecting trav-elers from Europe with destinations like Egypt, Iraq, and Iran. To this end, he even viewed the expansion of railroad lines as critical. For those disembarking in Ankara, however, their arrival was intended to be memorable, with not only the aforementioned trip past Gençlik Park but also a hospitable receiving area as part of the station. With an eye to the future, and with these priorities of Ankara serving as an interna-tional crossroads in mind, he also promoted the development of an airport.43

A fifth opportunity that one might imag-ine in planning the city’s new section involved the most obvious, the locating of the capital’s in-stitutional buildings. As the seat of the Turkish state, Ankara would undoubtedly be filled with state offices. What Jansen felt would distinguish Ankara from other European cities, however, was the fact that in this context, he could locate all key ministries and related buildings in close proximity to one another — with the exception of military buildings, which he wanted to locate just beyond the city’s periphery. To accomplish this spatial centralization of an emergent bu-reaucracy, he designed a somewhat triangu-lar district. Within this agglomeration of state buildings, he wanted to position the parliament building in the most prominent location, visible

from all directions (see fig. 4).44 In designing the actual state buildings, the state would later turn to Austrian designer Clemens Holzmeister (1886 – 1983), though his plan for the parlia-ment would not be realized for decades.

The sixth critical element in Jansen’s plans that is conspicuous involved a location and de-sign for higher education in the national capi-tal. As with his spatial compartmentalization of other elements in the urban space, he also in-tended to create something of a neighborhood devoted to education. With the exception of buildings and grounds for a school of agricul-ture, everything was intended to be located in this district: a university, an engineering school, trade schools, a school for physical education, and so forth. To foster a sense of community within this district, surrounding buildings would be designed with space for professors’ and administrators’ homes and the necessary dormitories and apartments for students. Con-sistent with the emerging views on sports and nation building, student housing would also be in close proximity to an athletic facility.45

What may be read as the seventh and final provision in Jansen’s plan involved the size of the city. For him, the ideal population of an average large city should be between two hun-dred thousand and three hundred thousand people — in order for it to remain livable. As a concept, livability in this sense reflected, on one hand, the manageability that coherent planning

Figure 4 Jansen’s intended complex of state buildings in Ankara. Jansen, Ankara Imar Planı, inset between pages 38 and 39.

43.  Jansen, Ankara imar planı, 20 – 23.

44.  Ibid., 20, 36.

45.  Ibid., 38.

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and design might facilitate, and, on the other, both the preservation of a proximity to nature and an appreciable sense of kinship in the urban space, such that “everyone in that city can imagine themselves to be a member of the same community.” 46 If people could not share such a common bond, and if they could not access the green spaces of the city without the burden of transportation or an excessive expenditure of time, the city was no longer livable in Jansen’s view. Though Ankara’s population had already boomed from roughly twenty thousand to about seventy-five thousand in less than one decade, Jansen did not predict growth of the city be-yond three hundred thousand until as soon as the 1980s — and this was his preferred limit to the capital’s size. As he wrote, “The population of Ankara should not exceed 300,000. If neces-sary, major restrictions should be applied to pre-vent such a negative development. It is only thus that Ankara can be a livable city.” 47 Though An-kara would be a place of governance, learning, and commerce, he felt that it also needed to be accessible, social, and inclusive of nature; exces-sive growth would jeopardize these virtues and this vision of a nation’s geo-cultural/ -political hearth.48

From Plan to Practice: Limitations in Designing a National Capital — and a Nation

You became the founder of such a placeThat would leave the Augustine temple in the shadowsThis, in your exalted imagination, wasThe new mihrab for a “free people.” — Yurdakul

Praising Atatürk’s achievement in creating a modern Ankara, the above excerpted verses from a longer poem revealed the city’s signifi-cance in the new Turkish republic. Referring to Ankara as the mihrab for a “free people” in the poem, the poet also revealed the profound shift

from a religious past to a secular future. Indeed the mihrab is the niche that is placed in the walls of mosques to indicate the qibla — the direction for those devout Muslims who seek to pray facing Mecca.

It must be noted, however, that what may appear to have been described thus far as an achievement of erecting both a site and a sym-bol for the Kemalist nation-state was not without controversy or resistance; not everyone would ac-cept Ankara as their mihrab. Not only were there some initial challenges to the October 1923 proposal for the city, but in the following years there were concerted efforts to reverse the de-cree that made Ankara the new republic’s capi-tal.49 Though public expressions of such desires largely subsided once major construction and the design competition began in 1928, between 1923 and 1927, debates over this matter were not unknown even in the nation’s parliament, with challengers pointing to Ankara as a site that was “underdeveloped, lacking in urban values, and having a thin cultural foundation.”50

In Jansen’s own work on Ankara, full im-plementation of the architect’s vision for the city faced considerable challenges, too. Local speculators and developers often opposed his functional segregation of the city — and some also resented his reluctance to acquiesce to their demands or to consider a bribe, most of them hoping that a government office or other state building would be relocated nearer to their properties in order to enhance values. Taking exception to Jansen’s authority over the city’s development, the mayor sometimes did submit to those who were profiteering during the construction phase. When Jansen’s ten-year tenure was over, his appointment was not re-newed amid much local pressure. Apparently disgusted with local corruption and resistance to his design, Jansen once even suggested that the city should simply remove his name from the building plan.51

46.  Ibid., 45.

47.  Ibid.

48.  Ibid., 45 – 46.

49.  On  initial challenges, see Mehmet Sarıoğlu,  Ankara: Bir modernleşme öyküsü (1919 – 1945) (Ankara: A Story of Modernization [1919 – 1945])(Ankara: Kültür Bakanlığı, 2001), 23 – 24.

50. Falih Rıfkı Atay, Çankaya (Istanbul: Sema Matbaası, 1980), 419, cited and discussed in Tankut, Bir başkentin imarı, Ankara, 46 – 47.

51.  See Fehmi Yavuz, Kentsel topraklar (Urbanized Lands) (Ankara: SBF Basın ve Yayın Yüksek Okulu Basımevi, 1980), 5 – 13.

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Population Growth and Political ReorientationsBeyond problems related to speculators and to the divides between Jansen and city officials, the greatest challenges to face the city were as-sociated with matters of population growth in Ankara and the resulting dynamics of uncon-trolled sprawl. Given the local politics concern-ing Jansen’s work, it is perhaps understandable that he would be blamed by scholars and others for these eventual problems. Indeed, even Tan-kut indicated that the architect was shortsighted in this regard, also noting that he was too rigid in his views regarding expansion and that he lacked the foresight to take more preventative measures against speculation.52 In contrast, Fehmi Yavuz seemed to depict Jansen as an all too convenient scapegoat for subsequent devel-opments that were less than desirable.53 Rapid population growth in the city was a real predica-ment. From the 1920 estimate of 20,000 to the 1927 census figure of 75,000, the city continued to grow briskly, to 123,000 by 1935, to 750,000 by the mid-1960s, and to about 3.6 million by 1990.54 Such scales of growth led to subsequent plans for the city by the 1950s that would replace the Jansen vision with respect to the city’s future development — plans that would also be made virtually irrelevant by their lack of accounting for the city’s ongoing growth.

To explain these dynamics of growth in the city, Tuğrul Akçura presented an interesting thesis that focused on the autocratic Kemalist state as a root cause. In his study, he attributed Ankara’s population boom to Turkey’s “inter-ventionist” state (i.e., an authoritarian, modern state that relied on an expanded bureaucracy). Because of the privileges that the state extended to its bureaucratic elite and the high salaries that it paid to them up into the 1940s, Akçura

surmised that Ankara functioned as a magnet that drew in people who were searching for lu-crative jobs.55 While this situation may explain some of the dynamics at play in Ankara’s rapid growth, there were similar booms occurring in other large cities in the republic throughout the twentieth century. Much of the growth consisted of rural-to-urban migration — hardly the people most likely to be seeking top-tier bureaucratic positions.

Such dynamics of rural-to-urban migra-tion gave rise to the phenomena of gecekondu that would characterize most larger-sized cities in Turkey in the mid- to late twentieth century. Gecekondu (roughly translated as “night built”) are often defined simply as “squatter houses/communities” or as “shantytowns,” but such references are really inappropriate given the imagery that comes to mind when one speaks of squatters or shanties in English and other languages.56 Though some of the socioeco-nomic desperation that one imagines when en-visioning such “squatter” settlements was clearly apparent in Turkey in the earlier years of the republic — and still, in some cases today — the range of what has come to be implied by the term gecekondu over the past decades is so broad as to defy almost any uniform characterization. Perhaps the most broadly applicable character-ization that might be applied to all gecekondu today is that they were not planned prior to their construction — at least not by any official city planners working within city designs and/or regulations.57

For many of the gecekondu, their selection to live where they do is dictated by housing situations or economies of low salaries, partial employment or unemployment, and/or family conditions. In many other instances, however,

52.  Tankut, Bir başkentin imarı, Ankara, 31; for addi-tional analysis of this problem and associated dilem-mas in the city’s development resulting from a dis-juncture between theory and practice, see Altaban and Güvenç, “Urban Planning in Ankara.”

53.  Yavuz, Kentsel topraklar, 6.

54.  Keleş, Eski Ankara’da bir şehir tipolojisi; and Alta-ban and Güvenç, “Urban Planning in Ankara.”

55.  Tuğrul Akçura, Ankara: Türkiye Cumhuriyeti’nin başkenti hakkında monografik bir araştırma (Ankara: Monographic Research on the Capital of the Turkish Republic), Mimarlık Fakültesi, no. 16. (Ankara: Orta Doğu Teknik Üniversitesi, 1971), 56.

56.  See John Clark, “The Growth of Ankara, 1961 –  1969,” Review of the Geographical Institute of the Uni-versity of Istanbul 13 (1971): 119 – 40.

57.  Informative studies on the development and man-ifestations of gecekondu include Kemal H. Karpat, Gecekondu: Rural Migration and Urbanization (Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976); Ruşen Keleş, Türkiye’de kentlesme, konut ve gecekondu (Ur-banization, Housing, and Gecekondu in Turkey) (Istan-bul: Gerçek Yayınevi, 1978); Emre Kongar, “Kentleşen gecedondular ya da gecekondulaşan kentler sorunu” (“A Problem of Urbanized Gecekondu or of Gecekondu- ized Cities”), in Kentsel ütünleşme (Urban Integra-tion), ed. Hasan Gençağa (Ankara: Türkiye Gelişme 

Araştırmaları Vakfı, 1982), 23 – 54; Tansı Şenyapılı, Gecekondu, çevre işçilerinin Mekanı (Gecekondu, Abode of Peripheralized Workers) (Ankara: Orta Doğu Teknik Üniversitesi Mimarlık Fakültesi, 1981); and Şenyapılı, Ankara kentinde gecekondu gelişimi (1923 – 1960) (The Development of Gecekondu in Ankara [1923 – 1960]) (Ankara: Batıkent Konut Üretim Yapı Kooperatifleri Birliği, 1985).

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the decisions to live in gecekondu are neither random nor influenced by economic consider-ations. Rather, these are intentional decisions that reflect identification with particular so-cioeconomic classes and/or regions of origin from within Turkey. In Ankara and most other large cities, settlement of rural-to-urban and/or Eastern-to-Western migrants has involved a selection of housing based on ties to the city, town, or even province of origin. While many planners and developers dismiss the existence of ethnic quarters in Turkey (something that is a reality if one is talking about urban districts based on places of origin whether they are rec-ognized or not) the identification of parts of a city with former residents of Sivas, Erzurum, or Diyarbakir, for example, is quite common.58 Through such intentional selections of places to live within larger cities, migrants redefine por-tions of the cities in ways that reconstitute urban cultures and politics — resisting, intentionally or otherwise, the once-Kemalist state’s planned orderings of both cities and society and its pre-scriptions for Turkey to become a homogenous nation. To a large extent, it has been within such neighborhoods of Turkey’s large cities that much of the rise of Turkish political Islam has been seen to occur — arguably the greatest chal-lenge to the Kemalist vision of a secular nation-state. In the case of Ankara, such a political upsurge led not only to an Islamicist mayor but also to a change in the city’s emblem itself. Once symbolized by a Hittite-inspired image (one that was quite consistent with the Anatolian iconog-raphies of Kemalist civilizational expressions of Turkish nationalism), the city recently changed its coat of arms to an image that celebrates si-multaneously the increasing religious-political orientation of the city’s electorate and its leader-ship’s receptiveness to global capital (see fig. 5).

For the capital of Kemalism to have had such an image imposed on it, carried on many bus seats and on banners and signs throughout the city, clearly indicates the war at play in the

discourse of symbols of and for the urban land-scape. Such imagery in a capital of a nation that has striven to distance itself from memories of being both colonizer and colonized brings to mind an observation made by Bhabha: “Cul-tures of a postcolonial contra-modernity may be contingent to modernity, discontinuous or in contention with it, resistant to its oppressive, as-similationist technologies; but they also deploy the cultural hybridity of their borderline con-

Figure 5 Ankara’s new emblem. Adopted over the past decade, this symbol conveys not only the obvious image of a mosque but also that of Ataküle. Ankara’s equivalent of Seattle’s Space Needle, this landmark is located in the city’s fashionable Çankaya district — the home to the presidential palace, many foreign embassies, and global businesses.

58.  In 1999 Murat Güvenç presented a quantitative and cartographic approach to understanding popu-lace strata of cities, illustrating eloquently this point; Murat Güvenç, “Deciphering Social Differences in a Peripheral Metropolis” (paper presented at the World Academy for Local Government and Democ-racy conference, Istanbul Technical University, 26 – 29 May  1999).

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ditions to ‘translate,’ and therefore reinscribe, the social imaginary of both metropolis and modernity.”59

Conclusion — Ankara as a Contested SymbolRecalling Sassen’s notions of an “architecture of centrality,” what tends to gradually replace — or simply displace — the historical forms of such designs (i.e., the ceremonial, political, and re-ligious) in terms of public relevance are the economic and the commercial. As cities evolve, the iconographies of their intended functions gradually give way to newer ones, reflecting the practical functions that emerge. In the modern and postmodern cityscapes that can be observed around the world becoming increasingly cultur-ally and commercially linked, there has been a greater emphasis placed on “the hyperspace of international business, from corporate towers and corporate hotels to world class airports — a transterritorial space of centrality, a new geog-raphy of the built environment of centrality.”60 The dynamics of such phenomena are clearly at play in various parts of Ankara today, and they too are defining and redefining the city’s land-scapes. Amid these shifts, however, one also sees matters of reinvented tradition — often express-ing itself in ways that might be characterized as political Islam — playing a role in resisting the nation-state’s mihrab.61

As noted above, Ankara’s processes of selection, design, and construction were in-separable from the associated project of nation building in the period of the early republic. In this early context, the invention of both tradi-tions and symbols was largely — though not en-tirely — the domain of the Kemalist state. Just as nation-states seek to create linear histories for themselves that are free of any difference of opinion, so too do they seek to create singular geographies and spatialized iconographies.62 Symbolisms that result from such projects, whether written in books or in the landscape,

may embody and communicate a wide range of meanings both for creators and to audiences alike without necessarily specifying a singular idea or set of positions.63 However, while they can be generalized so as to include a diverse array of persons and groups that could be con-strued to figure into a particular nationality, they will also decidedly exclude others. Accord-ing to Karl W. Deutsch, other groups and per-sons become excluded minorities with options either to remain peripheral to the emergent nation or to assimilate into it.64 In Ankara and in its landscapes, however, such groups — includ-ing segments of the populace that may be char-acterized as traditional, Islamicist, capitalist, or various mixtures thereof — appear to choose for themselves a third option, as Bhabha indicated to be possible. They are reshaping the city’s landscapes — morphological, socioeconomic, political, and symbolic.

Moreover, in the study of nations, nation-states, and their capitals, examinations of land-scapes both built and experienced continue to critically inform the politics of both official authority and popular resistance. In the land-scapes of Ankara, the idealism of Kemalism, the shortcomings of the republic, Islamic alterna-tives, Turkic influences from beyond Anatolia, the forces of globalization, and the fray of local and national political struggles can be seen to all clash and coexist. As the West grapples with understanding — and categorizing — the Middle East in rather monochromatic terms (i.e., assign-ing white hats to the “good Muslims” and black to the “evildoers”), it would do well to examine the many colors and shades in the region’s var-ied landscapes that do represent conflict but that also reflect traditions of coexistence amid contestation.

59.  Bhabha, Location of Culture, 8 – 9.

60.  Sassen, “Topoi of E-Space,” 135; for an excellent discussion of such contemporary shifts in symbol-isms in Turkey, see Güven Arif Sargın, “Displaced Memories, or The Architecture of Forgetting and Re-membrance,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 22 (2004): 659 – 80.

61.  On reinvented tradition, recall Hobsbawm and Ranger, Invention of Tradition.

62.  As examined in terms of nationalist historiogra-phies by Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chi-cago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

63.  Karl W. Deutsch, Nationalism and Social Commu-nication: An Inquiry into the Foundations of National-ity, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1966), 86 – 87, 103 – 4, 159 – 62.

64.  Ibid., 162.