Ankara Kent Merkezinin Siyasî Kamusallığının Dönüşümleri (1923-2022)

Abstract

Defining the public sphere solely through freedom and rational consensus is insufficient to explain the power struggles within urban space. The primary objective of this study is to analyze the transformations of the regime of publicness in the Ankara city center between the years 1923 and 2022. It is hypothesized that the regime of publicness experienced in the Ankara city center changes in parallel with the administrative and legal interventions implemented in each period, aligning with the ideologies—and consequently, the publicness imaginaries—of the groups holding political power. The research adopts a qualitative methodology, integrating Henri Lefebvre's theory of space with Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge's theory of the public sphere. During the data collection process, text mining was applied to political party programs, newspapers, and organizational archives using Voyant Tools; a rhythmanalysis of the urban space was conducted; and in-depth interviews were held with individuals who have used Kızılay and its surroundings for political activities. The analyses reveal that the ceremony-oriented publicness of the early Republican era transformed, during the 1960–1970 period, into a spatial struggle by a class-oriented oppositional publicness that sought to bring together different political subjectification tendencies, encompassed both the production and common use areas of the city, and claimed the right to administer these spaces. In the post-1980 period, as the city was transformed by neoliberal and security-oriented policies, this dynamic evolved into a form of publicness limited to protests and mourning ceremonies. During this era, the visibility of reactionary publics decreased, oppositional publics withdrew from spaces of production and education to become confined to specific parts of the city, and the class emphasis in their discourses weakened, shifting toward demands for rights founded on an abstract universality. In this century-long transformation, not only administrative and legal interventions, but also economic infrastructure and intergroup struggles have been decisive.