The City that Hides Itself: Movement and Meaning in Urban Form

Abstract

This dissertation explores the practice and perception of urban form in Urfa--an ethno-linguistically diverse city in southeastern Turkey, where in recent years state development and village-to-urban migration have brought rapid material change. Based on fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork and archival research, I argue for the significance of place--the material environment--in the formation, maintenance, and reorganization of communal identities. Here, urban form is not merely a neutral container for social life; it is a meaningful register of the diverse movements (personal, familial, communal) that have shaped the modern city. Each of five chapters examines the material transformation of a key locus of cultural reproduction in Urfa (ritual spaces, heritage sites, domiciles), and asks how identities associated with these loci (religious, ethnic, gendered) may become knowable, recognizable, and contestable in the process. Focusing on the politics and experience of these tense and often-disputed place-making projects, I illuminate a complexly contested hermeneutics of space, time, and social difference--which, in turn, sheds light on the ambiguities of "democratic opening" in Turkey's political present.