Gezi movement: an analysis in the context of place/space, the discursive practices and the society

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2015
Yılmaz, Ayşenur
This study aims to analyse the Gezi Movement, emerged in the last days of May 2013 against Taksim Pedestrianization Project which is conceptualized starting in 2007 by İstanbul Metropolitan Municipality and spread to whole country in a record time in June 2013 and lasted effectively for a month and continued during and after the research time, in terms of architecture and the society together with the discourses revealed in this process. The relationships between the society, the place and the places, and the discursive statements were examined to reveal the reasons behind this intense and instant public support and to explore the spatial meaning of the Gezi Movement in detail, which has attracted attention of many disciplines besides architecture, with starting from a cemetery to the Gezi Park to Taksim Square and then to the rest of İstanbul and to a larger geographical scale. This research focuses on the reinterpretation of the Movement in terms of qualities of “place and “place-making”, evaluated as a way of being part of decision-making process about the city for the citizens, and how this social attitude reflects to the place/space. This thesis further aims to reawaken the concept of “Right to the City” and reveal the new kind of identities of citizens, emerged during the Movement. It was evaluated that the Gezi Park promoted the dissemination of the Movement with its physical properties and increasingly transportation of the similar values and the spirit to the other places which integrated the citizens and made Turkey the place of the Movement. This type of place understanding and the spirit in the Movement helped to create the urban memory as well with the public activities. Furthermore, the babbling, the irony, the self-expression, the words and the images appeared in the walls or the grounds in the demonstration places made the Movement different from the previous demonstrations, which promoted the Movement to be researched in terms of the discursive practices in this study. The method throughout the study was to find tools and examples for the dissemination of the Movement by the help of analysis, reports, written documents and daily media. On the whole, this thesis is an attempt to substantiate the Gezi as public space as to architecture, place-making and settings. It tries to reveal the citizen rights by analysing the place-based power struggle, the public space, and the daily life experiences within the limits of the Gezi Movement and provides the documentation and the examination of the experiences, the movements which happened before, and the information about the Project, which is required for better awareness of the society.

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Citation Formats
A. Yılmaz, “Gezi movement: an analysis in the context of place/space, the discursive practices and the society,” M.Arch. - Master of Architecture, Middle East Technical University, 2015.