Mining landscapes: tracing the socio-spatial transformations in rural terrains - Ovacık, Türkiye

Date

2024-7

Author

Yaraş Er, Dilara

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Mining activities are humankind’s domination of landscape through persistent and extensive transformations. Affecting atmosphere, subsurface, and in-between environment, mining introduces novel ecologies arising from political, economic, and social realms, which have direct consequences on landscape. Mining landscape, woven by diverse ecologies and occupancies, forms a thick ground consisting of multiple layers, which can be either manifest or obscure. Besides encompassing mining structures and infrastructure, chemicals, and waste that boldly mark anthropogenic intervention, mining landscape is also engaged with obscure layers such as state-adopted ideologies, conducted policies and legislations, subjective values attributed to the landscape, and human occupancies. Ovacık village, a rural settlement in the Bakırçay basin of Türkiye with fertile agricultural lands and orchards, has experienced dramatic spatial and sociocultural transformations with the arrival of a transnational gold mining company in the late 1980s. By addressing the thick ground of the mining landscape, this thesis aims to unfold the socio-spatial transformation of Ovacık’s rural terrain by examining both the manifest and obscure layers that engender it. In this study, after the comprehension of the case by digesting its manifest and obscure layers, the multidimensional narrative of the transformation of Ovacık’s landscape is studied through mapping.

Subject Keywords

Mining landscape, Layers of mining landscape, Ovacık gold mine, Bergama movement, Grassroots environmental movement

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/110486

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Graduate School of Natural and Applied Sciences, Thesis