Law, Architecture and City: Courthouses of Ankara In 2000s

Date

2025-9

Author

Yazar, Gökçenur

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As a normative field tightly interwoven with political power, law has long been institutionalized and spatialized through the courthouse, enabling judicial power to operate autonomously. The courthouse has historically embodied urban centrality, monumental representation of judicial authority, and purpose-built spatial configurations tailored to judicial requirements. Today, shifting conceptions of courthouses are reshaping the relationships between law, architecture, and the city. This transformation has reached a critical point with the unplanned fragmentation, displacement, and relocation of judicial spaces. This study positions the socio-political dimension of the evolving relationship between the courthouse and the city as an object of architectural inquiry, problematizing the haphazard relocations of Ankara’s courthouses. Since the mid-2000s, allocation policies have fragmented and relocated judicial spaces to additional service buildings, spawned from the Ankara Palace of Justice, and have generated a network of judicial spaces that are architecturally, functionally, and representationally incoherent. The proliferation of non-purpose-built service buildings has weakened the institutional and spatial unity once embodied by the main courthouse. By analyzing the process and consequences of this spatial fragmentation, this study highlights how the unplanned and inconsistent spatialization of courthouse units across Ankara’s districts undermines the judicial system’s urban presence, disrupts its public perception, and challenges the preservation of its institutional unity. Independent judiciary’s dependent spatiality should be problematized through legal, architectural, urban, social, and political discussions to reflect on the future projections for judicial spaces in general, and in Ankara.

Subject Keywords

Law and architecture, Judicial spaces, Courthouse and city, Ankara courthouses, Sociopolitics of city courthouses

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/115691

Collections

Graduate School of Natural and Applied Sciences, Thesis