City Museums in Türkiye: Representing the Local, the National and the Global

2024-4-17
Kardaş, Ayşegül
By concentrating on the first examples of City Museums in Türkiye, this study analyses the emergence of the idea of this type of museums in the country in relation to their establishment in the context of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The study discusses why and how City Museums were founded in relation to their initiating actors, the meaning and place of their buildings in urban contexts as well as the historical and contemporary representations of identities of cities in their displays. The aim is to evaluate the architectural/urban and conceptual constructions, i.e. spatial and narrative formations, and the actors involved in these formations, in order to understand the practice of establishing City Museums in Türkiye. In this regard the study focuses on the first years of City Museums in Türkiye and examines the chosen realized and unrealized examples from 1996, the date of the emergence of the idea of establishing city museums, to 2010, after which City Museums started to be widely established in the country. Following an introductory chapter on the history of City Museums and the actors in the process, the first City Museum examples of Türkiye are analysed to understand how local identity of a city is represented in the building and the display of the museum. Then, the attempts of establishing City Museums in İstanbul and Ankara are examined in order to evaluate the representation of global and national identities of these cities in comparison to the emphasis on local identity examined in early City Museums.
Citation Formats
A. Kardaş, “City Museums in Türkiye: Representing the Local, the National and the Global,” Ph.D. - Doctoral Program, Middle East Technical University, 2024.