“If the Municipality Cannot Do It!”: Negotiating the Boundary between State and Society in Early Republican Turkish Cities

Abstract

This article explores the ways in which debates about urban policy became a space for members of the literate Turkish public to negotiate the boundary between state and society during a period of dramatic social transformation in the 1930s. Inspired by circulating urbanist discourses, Turkish reformers reimagined society from street level up by passing a series of laws which empowered municipalities and abolished the neighborhood muhtar and council of elders, the basic units of local administration since 1829. Eleven years later, however, these offices were reconstituted and absorbed into municipal bureaucracy where they became the focus of heated party politics and struggles across Turkey. The debates which brought about this transformation, I argue, were ultimately about how far into daily life the authority of the government should extend and in what ways Turkey was able to adopt international standards of urbanism in a time of economic and political uncertainty.