Placemaking during the pandemic: exploring the spaces of celebrations in Turkey through twitter

Abstract

The thesis studies the recent placemaking practices that have been realized during the COVID-19 pandemic in spaces such as balconies and digital space. During the pandemic, due to measures taken to decrease the spread of the virus, citizens have been confined to their homes’ boundaries and to the interaction of their households. Consequently, there have been disruptions in citizens' collective practices within public spaces, rendering the city unclaimed. Yet, longing for community interaction and sense of community, citizens moved their interactions to the digital realm, and subsequently to balconies, to accommodate communal and social practices. Relatedly, one of the prominent collective practices in the urban context of Turkey, national holiday celebrations were also carried out in balconies and digital space. Citizens have organized through Twitter and realized celebration practices in their balconies, to compensate for the gatherings they normally held in public places such as city squared and streets. The expressions of experiences related with the celebrations were also reflected onto the digital realm. Building up on these observations, this study will explore how collective celebration practices in balconies and digital place have led to placemaking of these realms through the case study of Turkey. Based on data gathered from Twitter through specific hashtags and keywords, how the experiences of digital spaces and balconies correspond to placemaking during the pandemic will be discussed. Since official practices of placemaking, the communal place and the process of social production of place have been challenged during the pandemic, the thesis builds up on the idea that revisiting the definition of placemaking can provide new opportunities in understanding how places are made and placemaking is realized in the contemporary world. Thus, by understanding the placemaking of the pandemic the thesis aims to provide a new and revised perspective towards placemaking, by integrating the literature, findings of the thesis and the context of the pandemic to guide further studies.