Architectures of Domination? The Sacralisation of Modernity and the Limits of Ottoman Islamism

Debates on Neo-Ottomanism and the ‘new Turkey’ of the AKP (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, Justice and Development Party) have mostly focused on social, cultural, and political transformations and on the country’s changing place in the world. The transformation of Turkey’s representative architecture and its political implications, however, have been less examined and mostly limited to architectural history and critical architectural and memory studies (cf. Batuman 2013, 2016, 2018; Çeler 2019; Çınar 2020). Yet representative architecture is a field wherein politics, ideology, and society intersect in variegated and insightful ways that merit closer study. In this chapter, I engage with how the AKP has sought to dominate and ‘Islamicise’ the urban landscapes of Turkey through major ‘grand projects’—that is, large, government funded or supported structures—the changes these projects have brought about, and the constraints and challenges they have faced. I also examine the conflict-laden relationship between neoliberal urban development and state- and municipality-led ‘grand projects’—such as mosques, government buildings, and infrastructure projects—which stand at the core of the attempt by AKP elites to leave their mark in space and time. I further argue that the space within which these elites have sought to project their power is not only curtailed, but in most cases structured by the purposes of rent-creation. While I trace attempts to destroy, belittle, or discursively redraw the heritage of the early republic and to attach an Islamic aura to the bland visual repertoire of modern Turkish cities with ‘Ottoman-Seljuk’-style buildings, I also discuss notions of an understated ‘republicanism’—or, rather, a notion of the ‘common good’—present in some of the grand projects, where one would not necessarily expect them. The empirical basis of this chapter comprises photographic evidence, interviews, and observations collected during several fieldwork trips in the winter of 2017 and the summer and autumn of 2020 in Ankara and Istanbul, accompanied by a critical reading of speeches by President Erdoğan at the opening ceremonies of a number of structures. Most of the projects discussed here—and, thanks to neoliberal preferences to turn complex processes of transformation into easily recognisable and marketable products, all of these are indeed projects—are based in Ankara. Unlike Istanbul, where a more enduring cosmopolitanism seems to persevere (Fisher Onar et. al. 2018), Ankara was the showcase of the modern republic, with several iconic buildings and urban ensembles manifesting the early republic’s values of secular modernity (Bozdoğan 2001; Kezer 2015; Batuman 2018). Much of Ankara, extra muros, was built from the 1920s to the 1940s and, until recently, parts of the city centre were dominated by architecture of the late Ottoman and early republican eras. Under the leadership of AKP mayor, Melih Gökçek, from the late 1990s to 2019, the city turned into a battle ground over which symbols should stand for the Turkish nation, and once again attained prominence as the showcase for a ‘new Turkey’, this time represented by the Ottoman Islamist nation-building project. Attempts at spatial domination and transformation through architecture are, hence, most legible in the urban space of Ankara. The analysis of this chapter is driven by individual architectural projects and megastructures which have larger political significance, and which have been discussed controversially in public. I engage with them in two distinct but overlapping analytical exercises, discussing the specific details of each project and exploring its functions in the larger context of the AKP’s identity politics.