Date

2022-7-04

Author

Onaran, Ayşenur

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While much has been written about TOKİ’s (The Housing Development Administration of Turkey) actions in cities as part of neoliberal urbanization projects, not much has been said about its practices in rural areas. This thesis examines the production of space by TOKİ in rural Turkey as a process molded by governmental spatial intervention and the inhabitants’ everyday life practices. I focus on Yukarıköy, a village in Çanakkale with a population around 700 people, which had gone through several destructive earthquakes in 2017 and was rebuilt by TOKİ. The study is an investigation of the policies of the state to create model villages so that rural citizens would be willing to stay and produce in rural areas, in juxtaposition to a discussion of the ways in which the villagers appropriate the state-made houses according to their own needs and desires. The neoliberal mode of production, in which the state governs the nation as a business, uses institutions like TOKİ to modify the citizens’ actions to be in line with its imposed social and economic order. The villagers, however, are not passive consumers, but they are active producers of space. They are capable of inventing tactics that challenge the boundaries of the strategically planned space they inhabit. Their everyday practices confirm the state’s vision of the model villager while at the same time contradicting the state’s imposed order. Consequently, Yukarıköy becomes a space shaped by practices of its inhabitants and the state that occasionally contradict with each other.

Subject Keywords

TOKİ, rural, everyday life, production of space, model villager

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/98150

Collections

Graduate School of Natural and Applied Sciences, Thesis