On the frontier of Turkish modernization: Ceylanpınar state production farm

Date

2025-9-1

Author

Yalman, Onur Lami

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This thesis examines how modernity, as both a historical rupture and ideological project, reconfigures space, nature, and social relations. Focusing on early Republican Turkey, it investigates how state-led modernization reshaped the rural frontier through material and discursive interventions. Using the case of Ceylanpınar State Production Farm, the study analyzes the transformation of a peripheral landscape into a disciplinary and productive space aligned with the imperatives of capitalist modernity. Rather than a mere change in land ownership or agricultural technique, this shift marked a deeper spatial and epistemological rupture. Nature was redefined, from a living, historical environment into an object of intervention and optimization. Centralized planning invaded the agrarian periphery, dissolving traditional relationships to the land and replacing them with grids of technocratic control. In doing so, the state produced new separations: between regions, forms of labor, and populations, consolidating authority while embedding a modern economic rationality into the landscape. The frontier is reinterpreted not as a distant periphery, but as a spatial and ideological project, a zone where modernity’s dual logics of inclusion and domination converge. The study employs historical-archival research, discourse analysis, and spatial investigation to explore how architecture operates as a medium of state ideology. It foregrounds spatial and ecological transformation as central to struggles over sovereignty, labor, and value. Treating Ceylanpınar not as a collection of buildings but as a designed landscape of production, the thesis situates architecture within broader mechanisms of class formation and ideological reproduction.

Subject Keywords

Ceylanpınar, Frontier, Modernity, Production of nature, State production farm

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/116202

Collections

Graduate School of Natural and Applied Sciences, Thesis