Public space is by no means a place for complete unity or harmony. It is always open to contradiction and struggle. It is a space in which dwellers of the city find various ways to cope with living with one another. This could be in the form of negotiation, or confrontation. Or, it could be where they avoid others, where they maintain distance. Yet, there is always the expectation of all parties, to have one’s own place in that struggle. Turkey has experienced increased social polarization in recent years, and this is reflected in its public spaces. With the ‘us’ versus ‘them’ mentality in politics being also found in everyday urban life, the gap between different lifestyles has greatened, hostility among people has intensified and urban space became a battlefield rather than a ground for commons. Hate and intolerance began to define what is public. In the meantime, a great number of high-skilled, young individuals, particularly from İstanbul and Ankara, began to leave the country to carve out a better future; and, one of the popular destinations was Berlin, Germany. This paper addresses this group of young migrants to make a comparative analysis on the definitions of public space and to rethink the social production of urban space. With thirty interviews and two focus groups, it aims to consider the reflections of social polarization on public space.
PagesFor centuries, the usage and the transformation of urban spaces has been defined as crucial in reproducing cultural codes of societies. Urban spaces did not only witness the conflicts, negotiations and dilemmas of the society; they were also shaped, transformed and produced by the people. Today, urban space is accepted as an inextricable part of the public life. It is assumed that upper-middle class has been separating itself from the rest of the society by living in enclosed and private spaces. This intentional disengagement from public life and public spaces has been studied by the gated community literature. This thesis embraces gated community beyond the debate of social segregation and includes it into the discussion of using, producing and transforming urban spaces along with isolating, privatizing and idealizing a specific place. In other words, this study departs itself from an understanding that gated community is only a new form of social segregation; it acknowledges enclosed residential areas as semi-public spaces in which the attributions of public and private spaces are merged. In doing so, the case of v Yaşamkent, Ankara is studied on the basis of a qualitative research in Yaşamkent.Through such an analysis, it is aimed to understand how the residents of gated communities evaluate private and public spaces, how they demarcate these two spheres and correspondingly how can we define the gated community as a semipublic space which functions as a buffer zone in between private and public domains.
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