Abstract
Can memory be manipulated? How far can the will to remember resist the manipulation of the hierarchy? Isolation and exclusion are still useful as disciplinary tools of power. Since this is the case, what role do so-called public spaces serve in memorializing certain isolated histories while separating and thus excluding others? If memory spaces exist in correlation with loss of memory, can searching for traces underneath the layers be the worst enemy of forgetting? How can the search for traces in official spatial histories reveal whose memory is being prioritized as truthful historical account and whose memory has been forgotten? Official spatial histories demand that certain memories are forgotten and thus delegitimized; does this render the readings of spaces as alternative memorialization meaningless? If so, does trying to create memory spaces cause monumentality independent from memory? Does the very act of formalizing spaces of memory create a certain monumentality independent from those who remember it? How will urban geographies, condemned to be symbolic spaces of politics, resist this?
Highlights
Title Power Geometry in Urban Memory: Reading Taksim Square Through the Concept of Representation of Space
In different periods of urban history worldwide, whoever controlled capital constructed the social structure depending on the type of said capital and its symbolic worth
Monumental spaces have had a very important place, in that they are the “hegemonic power, demarcating dialectical relationships between space, power and society.”[1]. This is why the analysis of socially constructed codes of the actors who participate in the power struggle over the urban space with representations of their own value system, which make up the layered urban memory, could provide the answer to the question “whose memory?”2 The present essay asks this question through a reading of Taksim Square, which is one of the most monumental spaces in Istanbul
Summary
Can memory be manipulated? How far can the will to remember resist the manipulation of the hierarchy? Isolation and exclusion are still useful as disciplinary tools of power. Hegemony over Istanbul’s past” (Fig. 7).[50] What started with the construction of a monument of the Republic on the entrance of Grand Rue de Pera, an important part of the history of minorities in Istanbul, and across the barracks, where one of the biggest riots against the westernization of the empire took place, continued with the construction of Atatürk Cultural Center, a symbol of the Republic by name and by function, and destruction of the barracks for a park, which will be part of the secularization in the urban life Today it continues with the construction of a mosque right next to the monument, in the entrance of the same street, with still-strong visual traces of nineteenth-century European architecture and lifestyle, and with plans of rebuilding the barracks to reintegrate the history of the Ottoman Empire with the square. Whether the proposals are going to overlap with the intentions of the competition committee remains to be seen, but one thing is certain: this competition is a bold step as a comprehensive plan for the square, the first one since Prost’s
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