Session 1: Significance of Geographic Spaces for Creating Identities
5th Global Conference
Friday 9th March – Sunday 11th March 2012
Prague, Czech Republic
Imagining the Nation through Urban – Rural Opposition
Seher Sen
Department of Sociology, İzmir University of Economics, Turkey
Nationalism redefines a collectivity as a new community. How much different its members are, nationalism tries to unify them into one homogeneous identity, belonging to the same “national family”. Turkish nationalism was constructed on the very vulnerability of the new homogeneous community and thus, the necessity of protecting it against internal and external “hostile forces”. To create the sense of homogeneous nation, the Republican elite frequently put into words the objective of creating a kind of “classless and united nation”. Difference and diversity, which are the core elements of urban life, were seen as a threat to national unity and social cohesion.
This paper examines the city life in the Turkish capital Ankara during the 1930s, with a view to highlighting how the making of urbane-citizens became a fundamental component of the nation-building project of the early Republican period. After becoming the capital city, Ankara would be the model of the Turkish Republic, both as a city space and way of life. In this processes of production of urban space and the construction of urbanity, rural space and peasantry were the anti-models that should be eradicated.
This paper will focus on how urban space and urbanity –in opposition to rural space and peasantry- were used in the imagination of the nation in 1930s Ankara, and will try to understand how spatial practices, which were legitimized with the discourse of a unified, classless, organic society created new exclusion mechanisms within the city.
Catch + Release: Mapping Stories of Geographic and Cultural Transition
Ruth Beer
Faculty of Visual Art, Intersections Digital Studio, Emily Carr University of Art and Design, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
We will discuss Catch + Release: Mapping Stories of Geographic and Cultural Transition, an interactive new media exhibition at the Gulf of Georgia Cannery Museum National Historic Site in Steveston, a small city on Canada’s Pacific coast. The researchers’ backgrounds in visual art, education and interactive design, come together to explore how interdisciplinary research and creation contributes to informed discourse that engages with the region’s cultural history and social, cultural and ecological present.
Historically, fishing was one of the primary reasons for the multi-cultural immigration that helped to foster the settlement, economic development, and social growth on the west coast of Canada. Our project (2009-2012), funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada, is a case study of an innovative practice in community engagement and informal learning that looks at local /global environmental, socio-cultural and historical interplays related to multi-cultural community perspectives, including First Nations, on changes due to the demise of the fishing industry. Using sensor technologies, and interactivity to overlay stories from the community together with those of the museum is intended to foster a sense of belonging and regional identity. While our study is localized, these conditions and stories resonate in other coastal communities that once relied on fishing.
Impacts of the EU’s Cultural Policy on Urban Development and Transformation of City Space
Tuuli Lahdesmaki
Department of Art and Culture Studies, University of Jyväskylä, Finland
Since 1985 the European Union has nominated cities as European Capitals of Culture (ECOC ) for one year at a time, which makes it the EU´s longest running cultural programme. During the decades the programme has transformed from a cultural initiative to a significant social, political, and economical factor in the urban development. Various ECOCs have used the program as a tool to revive the city space. Declining industrial cities, in particular, have aimed to regenerate their economy through large construction projects, developing and repairing public spaces in the city, and, in general, transforming the image of the city to be more dynamic, innovative, and inviting with the help of the ECOC brand.
The cultural programs are the EU´s political instruments through which it influences on various objectives, such as the unity of the union and economic growth. These particular objectives were brought into the focus of the ECOC program during the Eastern enlargement of the Union. Since 2009, the EU has nominated at least two ECOCs – one of the old Member States and one of the Member States that joined the Union after 2004. With this policy the EU started a process of Europeanization in the new Member States: the states were put into a situation in which they got a chance (or were forced) to compete for the ECOC nomination according to the criteria determined by the EU.
The ECOC program has major influences on the nominated cities: it changes the city space and the citizens’ everyday life in various ways. On one hand investments to the cultural infrastructure, improvements of the buildings and public spaces in the city, and implementing various cultural projects which reflect the current trends in cultural policy have recreated the cities with a modern look. On the other hand the ECOC program homogenizes the city spaces due to the structure which forces the cities to follow certain criteria and obey certain cultural values and trends in the urban development. In this paper I will investigate how the EU´s cultural policy and the ECOC program in particular influences on the development and transformation of the city space in several recent ECOCs in Eastern European countries.
Entries (RSS)