Building Modern Turkey: State, Space And Ideology In The Early Republic

architecture in Turkey has produced an extensive literature since the mid-twentieth century, examining architecture in relation to the formation of a new state in the country in 1923. Early studies focused on the major spatial interventions of the state such as the relocation of the capital city and the construction of various public buildings across the country to house the administrative, economic, educational and cultural functions of the new modernizing system. Critical approaches towards the nation-building process are dominant in the increasing studies of recent decades that present more inclusive and pluralist accounts of the early Republican architecture, and discuss its role in the very construction of the national identity itself. Zeynep Kezer’s Building Modern Turkey: State, Space and Ideology in the Early Republic makes a significant contribution to this literature by introducing a geopolitical frame of analysis with an interdisciplinary method benefiting from various fields of study from geography and urban planning to politics and education. Emphasizing that the founder Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s call for “a surface of defense ... [as] the entire country ... was proposing to bring very inch of that land into the social imagination as part of a collective responsibility” (p.195), Kezer presents the formation of the Turkish state as “a good case study for exploring the spatiality of nation-building processes” (p.11). Hence, Building Modern Turkey broadens the field of analysis beyond the architectural products to understand the built environment in terms of the wider frame of spatial practices in the larger territory of the new state.