Browsing by Author "Erman, Tahire"

Now showing 1 - 11 of 11

Open Access
Architects and the architectural profession in the Turkish context
(Taylor & Francis Inc., 2004) Erman, Tahire; Altay, Burçak; Altay, Can
This article explores the social construction of the architectural profession in the Turkish context from a historical perspective. It investigates architects' views regarding their roles in society and their positions vis-à-vis their clients and users. The data from in-depth interviews conducted with twentyfour practicing architects demonstrate that both traces of elitism and the tendency to define their professional roles to affect people's lives through their designs have prevailed in architects' beliefs and actions to varying degrees.
Open Access
Confronting gendered constructions of refugee deservingness and representations: Syrian refugee women strategising for humanitarian aid in Turkey
(Routledge, 2022-12-12) Zadhy, Aminath Nisha; Erman, Tahire
This study shows how Syrian refugee women living in Ankara cope with their systematically enforced dependency on humanitarian aid through individual and collective agency as they negotiate their inclusion into categories of deservingness and attempt to maintain this inclusion. We argue that the gendered discourses used to delineate deservingness categories in the humanitarian field clash heavily with the portrayal of Syrian refugees in Turkish public discourse. Our qualitative data demonstrate how notions in the humanitarian field about women’s role in the family as nurturing homemakers, assumptions about their innate docility as vulnerable refugees and the contrasting portrayals in Turkish society of Syrian refugee women as sexualised threats to the Turkish family shape their agentive negotiations and subsequently lead to multiple tensions. We also highlight how the centrality of gender in the discursive framing of refugees in Turkey produces the idealised refugee in the figure of the widowed refugee mother. By problematising how refugee women’s agency play out, we intervene in the discussion about the gendered terrains of refugeehood and provide empirical weight for the exploration of the paradoxes in the humanitarian field that refugee women struggle to resolve.
Open Access
Female domestic workers strategizing via commuting long distance: new challenges and negotiations in neoliberalizing Turkey
(Elsevier, 2018) Erman, Tahire; Kara, Hilal
Open Access
From informal housing to apartment housing: exploring the ‘new social’ in a gecekondu rehousing project, Turkey
(Routledge, 2019) Erman, Tahire
This article engages with the question of the ‘new social’ that emerges in the relocation of the poor in slum renewal projects. Drawing upon both Lefebvre’s theorization of abstract space of capital and social space of people, and the neoliberal framework in which the economic dominates the social, the complex relationship between the spatial and the social embedded in political economy is demonstrated. In the Turkish context, the ‘new social’ is situated at the intersection of spatial transformations, housing representations, neoliberalism and Islam. In the housing estate of the case study, the abstract space was challenged by the bottom-up responses of some residents who tried to create their social space rooted in their previous experiences in the gecekondu; it was reacted by other residents who embraced the higher status of apartment living. The void produced by destroying the gecekondu habitus was filled by religious activities and consumption-inspired everyday practices.
Open Access
Gendering residential space: from squatter and slum housing to the apartment states in Turkish renewal projects
(Wiley-Blackwell Publishing, Inc., 2018-09) Erman, Tahire; Hatiboğlu, B.
This article argues for the need to understand gendered dimensions of space in acontextualized way. It investigates residential space in three different types of housing settings of the poor, namely, a peripheral squatter neighborhood coded by rurality, a central slum neighborhood coded by criminality, and the housing estates insquatter/slum renewal projects coded by middle-class urbanity. Based on two field studies conducted in Ankara, Turkey’s capital, it challenges the feminine–private versus masculine–public dichotomy: With women’s presence inside the neighborhood, the squatter area was a “feminine space,” whereas, with the violent control of neighborhood spaces by local men, the slum area was a “masculine space.” Through its association with urban modernity, the public/private divide was enforced in the housing estates. While in the first housing estate, women’s informal practices in its public spaces “feminized” and “ruralized” the estate, in the second housing estate, it made women feel safe inside apartments.
Open Access
"Liberated neighborhoods": reconstructing leftist activism in the urban periphery
(De Gruyter, 2020) Erman, Tahire; Pekesen, Berna
This article addresses the phenomenon of what is known as ‘liberated territory’1 in recent Turkish history (the second half of the 1970s), during which leftist activists2 entered the urban periphery for ideological purposes. Using quotations from the interviews with former leftist activists and gecekondu3 residents4 in Ankara and İzmir,5 I aim to reconstruct the past from the memories6 of my respondents, revealing the experience of leftist presence in the gecekondu as it is remembered. I focus on the experiences in gecekondu neighborhoods as leftist activists experimented, on the one hand, with transforming the urban periphery to provide housing for the poor, and, on the other hand, with the ideological training and mobilization of their inhabitants, which was contested by state authorities and towards the end by the ultranationalists. Thus, it involved violence, leftist militants fighting with the oppositional ultranationalist groups as well as with the state forces when the latter attempted to intervene in the neighborhood and to demolish the houses, with whom negotiations could be carried out otherwise. I argue, first, that leftist groups’ experimenting with the gecekondu was a decentralized endeavor led by spontaneous decisions rather than a centrally planned one, showing variations in different contexts. Secondly, it was not an inclusive project despite the original aim, mainly Alevis7 embracing and religious Sunnis opposing it. Thirdly, it was a topdown ideological project of “enlightening” the urban poor, yet in the practice of constructing houses and infrastructure, and providing services and help to gecekondu dwellers, it was a participatory process. And fourthly, although leftist groups moved into the urban periphery to bring class consciousness, they, nonetheless, became new actors in transforming peripheral land, and as such they acted against the commodification of land, prioritizing the use value against the exchange value. Accordingly, moving beyond the simplistic view of the status quo that leftist presence in gecekondu areas disrupted the social order, I show the transformative role of the left in the urban periphery, intervening in the unequal power dynamics of urban informality, which instigated violence.
Open Access
Migration from rural Anatolia to Metropolitan cities
(Routledge, 2021-07-26) Erman, Tahire; Jongerden, J.
This chapter explores migration from villages to metropolitan cities in Turkey starting in the late 1940s. It aims to reveal how this transformed cities and villages alike. First, I identify the defining features of Turkish urbanization engendered by rural-to-urban migration, namely, chain migration, spatial clustering, migrant networks and hometown associations, and the continuing relationship with the village, all function as support mechanisms in a context in which state provision and regulation are minimal. I argue that this type of urbanization challenged the idea of the transformation of society under the modernizing effects of the urbanization process identified with the Western experience, defying the project of Western modernity envisioned by the founders of the Turkish Republic. Second, I discuss the changes and challenges posed by the shift from the import-substitution model of industrialization to a neoliberal development model. I argue that the support mechanisms of earlier times are dissolving under state policies that prioritize economic gains and promote the formation of new subjectivities embedded in relations of competition and consumption, and that new support mechanisms provided by tarikats (Islamic orders) are emerging. And as the third and final point, I demonstrate the political repression in the 1990s in the Kurdish southeast as the cause of migration to cities in the region as well as to western Anatolia, producing multiple victimizations.
Open Access
Semi-public/semi-private spaces in the experiences of Turkish migrant women in a squatter settlement
(Planning Dept of City of Vienna, 1998) Erman, Tahire; Gerlich, W.
Open Access
Shifting responsibility in governing aging: municipal active aging discourses in Turkey
(Taylor & Francis, 2022-12-28) Erman, Tahire; Yazar, Damla
This article investigates active aging as a tool of governing the aging population at the municipal level. Using Foucault’s framework of governmentality, it explores the techniques of governing aging via the construction of the desirable older subjectivity, reflecting upon the role of the family in caregiving. Conducting in-depth interviews with municipal officials in charge of aging programs, we illustrated that, despite regional differences in socio-economic development levels connected to urban/modernized and rural/traditional cultural frames, all municipalities in our study embrace active aging in which older people are responsibilized for leading an active life to avoid being a burden on the family. We argue that neoliberal active aging discourses are mobilized to substitute the decreasing welfare function of conservative familialism in Turkey and the individualistic self-technologies are instrumentalized for familialist conducts. This reveals that the coexistence of multiple rationalities in the governing process can unsettle habitual consistencies between problematizations, conducts and self-technologies.
Open Access
Turkey
(Greenwood Publishing, 2003) Erman, Tahire; Walter, L.
Open Access
Urbanization and urbanism
(Routledge, 2012) Erman, Tahire; Heper, Metin; Sayarı, S.
Turkey’s urbanization started in the post-World War II era. “Over 3.3 million people were added to the urban population during the 1950s, more than twice as many as in the previous quarter century” (Danielson and Keles¸, 1985: 27). This “rapid urbanization” brought major transformations of society, challenging the ideals of the modernization project of the Republican elite; it introduced new problems and challenges prevail today, albeit changed in their nature. These challenges aﬀected various aspects of society, ranging from housing to job markets, from cultural hierarchies to politics, and from rule of law and private property to land rent. “Unregulated and unauthorized housing and job markets” and “unplanned urbanization,” along with “populist politics,” “rurality in the urban,” and “invasion of land” came to be the elements of the discursive production of urbanization in the Turkish context. Accordingly, the “integration”/“assimilation” of rural migrants into urban society, their “illegal” (yet sometimes legitimate) gecekondus, the rent appropriation from gecekondu land, the bargaining power of gecekondu residents with politicians, and their arabesk culture came to be the main problems identiﬁed in the Turkish urbanization process, reﬂecting the top-down approach of the urban elite. In the rest of the chapter, the deﬁning characteristics of urbanization in Turkey are ﬁrst described brieﬂy. Then, the urbanization experience of Turkey is introduced, divided into two periods: 1950-80, during which the national developmentalist model prevailed; and the 1980s up to today, during which time neoliberal policies have been introduced, restructuring the society and transforming its cities. Finally, “urbanism” and “urbanity” are discussed in the Turkish context, in an attempt to unravel their contested meanings.