The imagined community as urban reality: the making of Ankara

Abstract

This chapter examines how the making of urban space and the construction of a city lie at the center of the implementation of the modernization project in Turkey. Emerging as an idea that shaped the founding ideology of the new Turkish state, the specific conceptualization of modernity endorsed in the early years of the Republic dictated a new nation-building project which was implemented through the creation of a new capital city. In other words, the idea of modernity shaped the image of the new nation, which in turn was given material form in the construction of the capital, Ankara. This chapter also examines the making of the city of Ankara, which came into being and took on the material form that it did as a result of the central concern of constituting and institutionalizing a modernization project and establishing the state as the agent of modernity that inscribes the nation into space.