Vol. 18 No. 2 (2021): Emotional Design
Articles

A review on changing housing approaches and media contents in Turkey: 1930-1980 period

Pınar Şahin
Department of Architecture, Faculty of Architecture and Design, Bahçeşehir University, Istanbul, Turkey
Sinan Mert Şener
Department of Architecture, Faculty of Architecture, Istanbul Technical University, Istanbul, Turkey

Published 2021-07-01

Keywords

  • Housing,
  • Media,
  • Modernization,
  • Living culture

How to Cite

Şahin, P., & Mert Şener, S. (2021). A review on changing housing approaches and media contents in Turkey: 1930-1980 period. A|Z ITU JOURNAL OF THE FACULTY OF ARCHITECTURE, 18(2), 429–441. https://doi.org/doi: 10.5505/itujfa.2021.38243

Abstract

The change in the understanding of housing in Turkey began in the late nineteenth century within the framework of modernization movements. Along with the early Republican period, modernization was treated as a nation-state policy and housing was evaluated as a spatial expression of cultural change in the process of creating the new Turkey. This was a period of transformation in which the traditional culture of living was replaced by ‘modern housing’ discourses and ‘apartment’ buildings as new form of housing production. The integration of apartment buildings into urban space as symbols of modern life also led to a redefinition of social relations with the spatial experiences it brought. In this process, which continued from the 1930s to the 1980s, the media has attracted attention as an important tool in imposing the new housing concepts on Turkish society. Media contents, which undertook the mission of educating society during the modernization in the 1930s, was replaced by rent-oriented discourses after the populist policies, large-scale urban interventions and new housing production methods of the 1950s. In this context, the article aims to examine the change in the housing approaches in Turkey through the media contents from the 1930s to the 1980s, based on the attitude of the media to guide society, which changes parallel with the dynamics of each period.