Duality of nature and urban in socio-environmental transformations: Case of the Kemalpaşa Nation Garden

Abstract

Starting from the Industrial Era to the present, the notion of 'urban' has undergone various transformations in social-environmental field and presents itself spatially in many diversified forms. Transformations and changes in contemporary urban space depending on the rapid and intensive urbanization, has many different social dynamics performed by powerful actors. At this point, urban green spaces and their social dynamics, which are the crucial determinants of urban space, have substantial properties for curious researcher. Within the scope of this study, firstly, it is aimed to examine and criticise the spatiality of urbanization on the transformation of socio-environmental properties. One can say that through the urban processes and their prominent instruments, these transformations constitute the duality of urban and nature (environment, green, rural, etc.). At this point, while attempting to uncover the notions and physicalities of urban and nature together, the production of urban green spaces, which can be considered as a spatial medium in duality of urban and nature, is studied in the particularities of urbanization. Since the Kemalpaşa Nation Garden, which is the prominent and only case study of this study, is not functioned and articulated as an urban park conceptually, the theoretical framework of the thesis focuses on the critical studies of urban green spaces with a broader perspective; while trying to reveal the social potentials and historical venture of them. Additionally, the neoliberal policies and their power dynamics behind the recent Nation Gardens are examined with a critical lens. Kemalpaşa Nation Garden with its original and crystallized hints in power discussions on space becomes the distinguished example for understanding recent formation of urban green space in Turkey. Therefore, within the thesis, while the Kemalpaşa Nation Garden is framed and studied in social, political and spatial contexts, it is critically observed through the discussions on public space via ideological and morphological features.