Kent ve Sınıfsal Yapı Üzerine Görsel Anlatılar

Abstract

The city is a space that accommodates millions of people from various backgrounds and social classes, constantly undergoing change as a result. Since people began living in permanent settlements, the city has been a deep and complex subject of discussion. Social processes play a crucial role in the spatial changes and transformations occurring within cities. With industrialization, these changes and transformations have accelerated rapidly. The emergence of factories and building settlements has led to an increasing concentration of people in urban spaces.

Leading thinkers of the Marxist school, such as David Harvey, Henri Lefebvre, and Manuel Castells, have analyzed these changes and transformations through the lens of social structures and production relations. The contradictions created by class divisions under capitalism are also evident in spatial arrangements. The ever-evolving phenomenon of the city has attracted the interest of various disciplines, including art, architecture, politics, and sociology, and has been frequently represented in artistic works.

Especially after the Industrial Revolution, certain works reflect the inequality within the city. The congestion and rush of metropolitan life manifests itself in the works of certain artists. While analyzing the works of artists such as Kazimir Malevic, Carl Grossberg, Gordon Matta-Clark, Neşet Günal, Murat Germen, who deal with the concept of the city, it proceeds in connection with the issues of capitalism, working class and mode of production.

The aim of this thesis is to show how the city, which is the most visual manifestation of distorted urbanization and class distinction, is reflected in the works of artists from different disciplines. Additionally, it seeks to analyze these artistic works within the context of Marxist philosophy and class distinctions.

The main approach targeted in the artistic works in the thesis is to show the class conflict in the city and to emphasize the conditions in which the working class lives. The study explores the process that began with workers migrating to cities following the Industrial Revolution, leading to the formation of informal settlements, followed by urban transformation with increasingly dense building structures, and finally, the displacement of the working class from city centers due to gentrification.