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Abstract
There are several ways to define urban planning and to describe the diffusion of modern urban planning throughout the world. This article proposes a further way of describing this phenomenon by discussing the development of modern urban planning in Turkey as a process of translation. Modernization in Turkey has been experienced as a process of transfer of Western European models, in which interlingual translation too has served as a tool. However, the concept of translation is used here not only due to the existence of acts of translating within this process: the conception of translation as an intricate process involving difference and transformation, as proposed by contemporary translation studies, is a valuable analytical tool to analyze the transfer of urban planning more generally into the Ottoman and Turkish context. This paper thus uses a translation studies perspective to examine some of the agents and texts that helped form the field of modern urban planning in Turkey in the second half of the nineteenth century.
Notes
1. However, the present article does not claim to discuss in detail the implications of conceptual differentiations concerning the term “translation”.
2. The operations of urban planning take place within the framework of contingent relationships of a large number of agents, which are nearly impossible to predict. The power relations involved in these operations reveal the city to be a site of conflict. Moreover, planning operations continually unfold in the likewise continual historical formation of the city. The city is a multilayered entity, which can be viewed as similar to a text and likened to translation from a planner's perspective. There are a number of studies that see the city as a text (e.g., Frisby Citation2001; Duncan Citation2004), and others which compare a planner to a translator. For example, Campbell (Citation1996, 304) argues: “The planner therefore needs to act as a translator, assisting each group to understand the priorities and reasoning of the others. Economic, ecological and social thought may at a certain level be incommensurable, yet a level may still be found where all three may be brought together”. If we consider the city to be a collective text composed by diverse groups, then we necessarily emphasize the role of the planner as a mediator amongst those groups. This emphasis foregrounds the collective production of a text (the city) by diverse groups through the mediatory role of the planner. The formation of the urban space is a comprehensive process involving a wide variety of efforts such as those of the planner; a process that can be conceived as a text whose writing and rewriting never come to an end. Urban planning is a factor in this process, but itself lasts a long time and has its own internal dynamics. When the plan is ultimately realized, it has lasting effects on the urban space and on life within that space.
3. In Itamar Even-Zohar's terms (Citation1990), at certain periods stronger, dominant systems export their models to weaker, younger systems or to systems in crisis. However, these relations or exchanges between stronger and weaker systems are not unidirectional. The desire to import from the stronger system may also be felt inside the importing party, as has been the case in Turkey's relationship with the West. I would argue that it is possible to think of Even-Zohar's theory and Bourdieu's theoretical framework as complementary. However, I focus here not on the possible criticisms of these theories but on their contribution to our understanding of the formation of modern urban planning.
4. Tekeli designates the process not as “Westernization” but as “modernization”.
5. Here and throughout, all translations from the Turkish are my own.
6. Ergin (1914/1995) gives full information on these regulations, although without a systematic presentation of their source texts. Based on his work, we can identify the following regulations in the period:
1848: Building Regulation
1848: Building Regulation II
1848: Building Proclamation
1863: Roads and Buildings “Taxes and Charges Collected For Buildings of All Kinds”
1863: Appraisal Tax Regulation
1863: Docks Regulation
1864: Regulation on the Functions and Appointments of Building Officers
1864: Building Regulation (Reorganization of the Building Administration)
1866: Statute on the Functions of the Committee for Building and Upkeep of Roads
1868: Committee for Improved Roads disbanded and its functions assumed by the Municipality
1875: Eight-article Regulation Amending the Regulations of 1280 and 1281
1882: Building Code
1892: Building Code amended