ULUSLARARASI ESTETİK SEMPOZYUMU "KENT ESTETİĞİ", Antalya, Turkey, 02 November 2017
An Overview on the City Aesthetics Using the Concepts, Hegemony - Production of Space - Protection
Abstract
Understanding cities in which complex relations between aesthetics and ideology are put into practice within the context of such relations has always been a curious subject for urban planning. The processes of city, aesthetics, protection, and building of the new have always been important to understand "power-hegemony-space production" and interpret today's change in the urban environment.
This article provides an analysis based on experiences in Istanbul, a city that is constantly changing with regard to population, economy and culture and discusses city aesthetics in terms of maintenance of identity as well as management of change. While doing that, on the background the article uses the concept of Historic Urban Landscape-HUL, which is a perspective in past-present-future relationship. The article intends to examine the change in the historic urban landscape and therefore city aesthetics by comparing two main periods limiting it to the relation between hegemony and production of space. The first period is the period between 1980 to 2000 in which neoliberal politics as part of globalization has started to be seen and used in Turkey and the second one is the period after 2000 in which these politics have become stronger and established themselves deeper.
Major urban projects, which reveal space -hegemony relations based on urbanization policies and institutional arrangement of the period and allow discussion of city aesthetics according to the past-present-future perspective, are included in this article. In addition to these projects, articles about the general characteristics of these periods as published in the "Mimarlık" journal were reviewed. These reviews, which represent the urbanization practices of Istanbul in the last 40 years, show that change management and city governance are deeply interconnected. Furthermore, it should be remembered that management of urban change based on past-present-future continuum is closely related with the development level of urban democracy.