Architectures of Anticipation: The Making of Wartime Spaces in Turkey, 1935-1945

Date

2025-10-14

Author

Kaymaz, Elif

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This dissertation investigates how the anticipation of a coming global conflict reshaped spatial discourses and practices in Turkey between 1935 and 1945. Although officially neutral during the Second World War, Turkey’s environments, institutions, and legislation were reorganized under the pressure of impending war. The conflict emerged as a lens through which the built environment was perceived, governed, and reconfigured in advance of its arrival. Drawing on state and military archives, daily press, and professional journals, the study problematizes the aerial threat and traces how war was envisioned, prepared for, and spatially enacted. It argues that anticipation operated as a catalyst for new modes of infrastructure, policy, and knowledge, produced through the interactions of national and international civil, legal, governmental, and militarist actors. The analysis maps how architects, planners, engineers, journalists, and municipal authorities responded to the affective and logistical demands of an approaching threat. Methodologically, the dissertation adopts a scalar framework shaped by airmindedness, where verticality, visibility, and vulnerability organize the spatial logic of military environments and wartime urbanism. It introduces frontiers as a conceptual tool for reading how defense shifted from the territorial edges of the nation to the airspace of the city, and finally to civilian bodies as both targets and agents of survival. By situating Turkey’s case within wider histories of wartime urbanism, defense infrastructure, and crisis governance, the dissertation proposes “architectures of anticipation” as a new framework for understanding the spatial politics of the future.

Subject Keywords

Wartime architecture and urbanism, defense infrastructure, air-raid preparedness, civil defense, Early Republican Period of Turkey

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/116181

Collections

Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis