Strategies for the Integration of Tekirdağ TEKEL Factory Into the City as a Memory Place

Date

2025-11-19

Author

Akti, Berçem Ilgın

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Industrialisation has been a key stage in urban history. However, over time industrial sites became abandoned urban spaces, detached from the city. A common conservation approach is adaptive reuse, transforming these sites into educational or cultural spaces. While this preserves the physical structure, it can sever the ties between the heritage and the communities originally associated with it. TEKEL factories reflect this conservation issue. The factories became landmarks, embedded in cities’ collective memory due to their contributions to economy and social life, and the TEKEL Workers Resistance, a significant working-class protest. Since then, most TEKEL structures have been demolished or repurposed. Thus, the untouched Tekirdağ TEKEL Factory offers an opportunity for integration that respects collective memory. The factory, once vital to Tekirdağ, and now abandoned and decaying, symbolises neglected industrial memory and the erasure of a shared urban past. This thesis establishes a framework, based on it, examines the spatial features of the factory and its relationship with Tekirdağ through literature review, archival, and field surveys. In-depth interviews reveal its importance to local people and workers. Ultimately, the thesis develops strategies for integrating the factory into the city as a public space, based on its place in collective memory. By exploring the importance of social narrative and the lasting impact of the factory on the city of Tekirdağ, this study enriches the ongoing discourse on heritage and identity by revealing the layers of meaning embedded in the spatial and collective memory of local people.

Subject Keywords

Tekirdağ, TEKEL, Memory Place, Integration, Industrial Heritage

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/118242

Collections

Graduate School of Natural and Applied Sciences, Thesis