Re-visiting gecekondu: between habitat and habiting; learning from informal architecture and its subject since the 1960s

Date

2023-12-11

Author

Ardıç, Alp Fahri

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The undertaking of national economies is in the process of commodification by global capitalism. Within this trajectory, the use-value of the vital elements of collective life, including the urban space, is overwhelmed by the faculties of exchange-value. This results in defects in domestic social life, which is addressed in the distinction of Lefebvre between the concepts of habiting and habitat. Dwelling spaces of today, habitats, are the products of homogenizing profit-based policies that are implemented in urban spaces. Capitalist relations control the formation of habitats, and also the reproduction of ongoing daily life. Habitats restrict the right of people to participate in reproduction processes, which is the right to the city, and they serve as a commodity to be used as an investment tool. This positions the architects, the producers of habitats, as a part of the speculative financial system of properties. In this framework, gecekondu emerges as an informal construction form that potentially performs habiting practices, since its dwellers are the producers of their daily life. In its production processes, participation, as well as solidarity, appears to be a vital feature that it would rather give ways to habiting. Also, the architectural profession still has merits that collective life of habiting can benefit from in many ways. While examining gecekondu and its faculties of collective production with respect to examples in Turkish cities from the 1960s onwards, this research aims to re-locate participation as part of architectural practice; and the architect-subject as part of said practice that would produce habitings rather than habitats.

Subject Keywords

Urban architecture, Critical urban theory, Habiting, Gecekondu, Participatory architecture

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/107811

Collections

Graduate School of Natural and Applied Sciences, Thesis