I.

I would like to talk about the project and myself first. I have been working in Tepebaşı Municipality as an architect for 12 years and as an Urban Planning Manager for the last year. In addition, I conduct architectural project courses at Osmangazi University and Eskişehir Technical University. Apart from the technical and theoretical forms of architecture, I am also interested in experimental approaches. Designing a Nation of Nomads also interests me in this context.

In Seeing Like a State: Spaces of the Nation, I juxtapose nomadism and settlement, and under these categories I propose two sets of concepts. These are concepts that can sometimes be understood in opposition and sometimes not. Just as there is no sharp contrast between settlement and nomadism, the concepts under these categories, for me, melt into each other.

In the first part of my presentation, I will explain these concepts, namely place-space, space-void, grid - off- grid, order-chaos, dictation-experience, individual property-public, individual-body, residue-trace with some visual images. In the second part, I would like to have a conversation about how the space is organized in Turkey at the present, what kind of control mechanisms and rules operate on space, and how we live our social life under these circumstances.

Nomadism exists as a flow that swings by settlement, transforms into it, and then leaves it again. Therefore, it is nomadism itself that establishes settlement. We gather in certain places after migrations, stay there for a while, and establish a settled order. We know that historically settlement began with the formation of agricultural societies. Nomadic communities settled to meet many physical and social needs such as cultivating the land, obtaining its products, improving it, extending their settlements, living there, and sheltering. This process also led to an accumulation. This accumulation created a medium that can be transferred to the next generations in terms of space, constructions and culture.

I consider space as the space occupied by an object, and I try to understand it as an endless medium. I see the place as a defined area on which a cultural and social life is built. Therefore, settlement happens in place and nomadism happens in space. The distinction between void and space is similar to the former distinction. Space is an interval produced by practices such as architecture and urbanism that we can imagine in our minds. It is an area that can be constructed with dictated rules and that can appear in our minds as a result of certain conditions we are exposed to. Although the void cannot be designed, the patterns of the void can exist in various experiences; therefore it should be the subject of experience-based architecture. Space is produced, while void is organized. It is experimental and considers the relations of the body.

A square on a white space: Our bodies wandering in space in archaic times were unlikely to produce the idea of a square. There is no square, angular, orthogonal structure in nature; until we try to grasp what we see and experience it on an abstract, mathematical level. The square always describes space and its production, not the void and its organization. Architects and city planners divide the land in portions, thanks to the geometry; we encode them as roads, building blocks, public grounds and building blocks, and reproduce them by scaling them on a record, on a surface other than its own spatial existence. Of course, this is a professional progress. The idea of the square multiplies after it is formed, and forms the spatial imagination of the urban space with interrelated squares.

Our ancestors began to build on the void they had experiences in. Frames knitted from tree branches were covered with fabrics obtained from leaves, furs and threads attached to them. The spatial production became more and more abstract and geometrical. The spaces we live in today are built with a grid structure, not only on the level of bird's-eye plan, but also in three dimensions.

When we place a square over an old settlement on a map or an aerial photograph, the square and the settlement never overlap. Since there is no bird's-eye plan imagination in the old settlements, there is a non- geometric spread built with the requirements of their own experiences. In the aerial photography, no example can be found on the building scale to match the square, because they are not the product of an architectural mind; they are the outcomes of bodily experience. They do not have angular, clear, straight walls.

Let's imagine how we can build a straight wall, without today's technology, without any technical and geometric knowledge. This knowledge did not exist in the person who built his own house, his living space ages ago. The person who built it did not design it in an abstract manner. Imagine all we have in the middle of a meadow are some pieces of rocks, earth, and five or six human bodies. How can we build a straight wall without the technical and abstract knowledge? I want you to think about this until the end of my presentation.

An aerial photograph in which we can clearly see the division of agricultural land in a geometric way: These are the lines of property. We build cities on them. Cities such as Istanbul, New Delhi, and Amsterdam are difficult to distinguish from each other when viewed from aerial photographs or maps. Another photograph shows Le Corbusier's Radiant City with a grid plan, which has since become an example to many modern cities, although it was not built. This is Le Corbusier’s hand, which seems to dictate the ideal city plan to the Radiant City. For decades, international congresses of modern architecture, called CIAM, dictated this understanding of the modern city for efficient planning of cities in order to overcome economic and social crises in post-war periods. I was exposed to Le Corbusier's ideas for three semesters as a student at Faculty of Architecture in Osmangazi University. On the other hand, in the classes of Kenan Güvenç and Recep Üstün, I met with an anarchist approach, which is the opposite of such dictation. This experience makes it possible for me to contrast the architecture of dictation with the architecture of experience.

When we talk about Le Corbusier, we have to refer to the Modulor man he used as a scale. We know that Le Corbusier designed with inspiration from Vitruvius' man. Let us draw attention to the fact that the bodies taken as a scale for the ideal design of the city are male bodies. On the other hand, let's note that as we move away from the city and start to look at the city from higher and higher perspectives, the lives and bodies on the ground of the city become invisible. These bodies are now masses that need to be organized, transported from one place to another, stacked in one place, and the life they will live in the city must be planned and designed. It is clear that the imagination of Vitruvius, Leonardo Da Vinci, who drew the Vitruvian man, and Le Corbusier were all based on the golden ratio and the ideal body.

While drawing the Vitruvian man, Da Vinci locates the ideal body in a rectangle, and then that rectangle in a circle. The square is the body, the circle is the soul. Built on the golden ratio and the Fibonacci numbers, this representation of the body gives a range of proportions that can grow endlessly, and these perfect dimensions can be detected in every part of the universe. The scales in the body parts of the Modulor man also fit this perfect formula. Le Corbusier proposes to establish his buildings and cities with the same formula as this body has.

Real life, however, is not something that fits these formulas and ideal measures. There is no ideal body. Our daily lives, our bodily measurements, and our experience are far from being idealized. I suggest considering the void, instead. The void itself, the possibilities of the void, the awareness of daily life in the void seem more important to me. The way our daily experiences build the walls and shell of that void is more valuable in terms of design.

In Designing a Nation of Nomads, we will propose to prioritize the void over the spaces of the nation in the workshops.

A group of architects attending CIAM congresses presented opposing ideas at the 9th Congress. The opposition manifesto they published in that congress brought the end of CIAM. The logo of this team, which continued its experimental productions as Team Ten, also seems to express their own design understanding and their opposition to modernist design. They have an approach that prioritizes people, places and the relationships between them, just like their logo. This image, which resembles an architectural sketch and focuses on the relations between space and void, rejects Le Corbusier's orthogonality.

Our topic is nomadism and nomads. The images of nomadic structures that I got from www.nomads.org are examples of the nomad organizing the void around their own bodies, unlike the modernist spatial attitude I just described. In these examples there are no corners, no sharp edges. Their plans cannot be drawn. These can only be stained and traced. They cannot be transferred mathematically to the plan diagram.

Let's go back to the ideal body and space. The architectural team called Superstudio, which emerged in Florence, Italy in the 60s, created utopian collages with the images of grid structures and exhibited them in the art environments of the period. Some of these works are now in the Maxxi Museum in Rome. These collages presented an antithesis of modern architecture by exaggerating the use of its grid tools, locating them in spaces, questioning the relationship of human lives with these materials. If that ideal city had come true, we would probably have lived in a dystopia as in these images.

The city is not only a place of accommodation, but also a place where production and distribution take place. It is a place where capital is accumulated and spent. Capital, logistics, production, ownership, management, control, and health create and maintain spatial residues as cities stratify. The city produces products, work capacity, infrastructure, waste, garbage, buildings, transportation means, etc. At the same time, it produces the city dwellers, as the ruler, or the ruled, as marginalized identities. When activities and citizens in the city center move to peripheral areas, the central districts twilight areas. This is a phenomenon that we can make use of in our idea of a nomadic nation.

The city was always subjected to migrations, which became intense with wars and climate crisis. Popular politics have been generating discriminatory discourses on migration. Most of the citizens of the city become potential nomads due to their ethnic identity, sexual orientation, political tendency, and financial status. As nomads are in constant flux, the experience of nomadism leaves traces, not residues. Those traces can be manipulated and transformed while being transmitted. This should be considered as a transfer of experience rather than a cultural accumulation. Residues produce rules, dogmas, assumptions, and boundaries. Everyone living in the modern city can be positioned as nomads who suffer from these limits and rules. The city's culture and politics also derive from this.

I am trying to grasp this from a design perspective: Private ownership, the division and fragmentation of capital over the spatial property and its evolution towards another type of capital, for example, housing construction. Today, there is a housing supply that far exceeds demand. Regardless of the population or the needs of their owners, lands are zoned for construction. These spaces are transformed into properties by the activities of contractors, engineers and architects. The owners do not need houses, warehouses and workplaces. Land property becomes residential property under the influence of contractors. The population of Eskişehir does not need the amount of houses in the city.

While cities are constantly expanding beyond their peripheries, they leave residues in urban centers, the structures, infrastructures and services lot which cannot be restored. Rental values in these twilight zones gradually decrease, and this decrease determines the demographics there. Urbanites who are pushed out of the society economically and socially start to live in urban centers. And, on top of it all, we have the famous Housing Development Administration of Turkey (TOKİ). TOKİ constructs many buildings with almost similar designs at the far corners of any city. TOKİ projects cannot become social housing. In fact, these too turn into residues; they define the peripheries and become the support of other capitals to be articulated with them. They cause the locations outside the city to gradually become urbanized like satellite cities: Urban migration by the state’s hands. Citizens are purposefully made more vulnerable, and then exposed to housing problems, expelled from the city, and withdrawn from the social fabric.

While many technical issues such as their heights and the spaces between them can be designed in a completely different way, TOKİ buildings are planned and built with the same low quality, with the motive of inexpensive property. When I dream of a nation of nomads, I think that there is also a place for people who were driven out of the city in this way.

In a recent news Gazete Duvar, floating units built on the Adana Seyhan Dam lake were the subject. We can compare them with TOKİ houses. TOKİ is a dictator; these floating structures are an example of experience, of will. The attitude here, namely the behavior of the nomad, shows us how the urban experience, the everyday experience, and the space can be imagined in an alternative way. The state has announced that these structures will be removed by October 25. The occupation over the water, which is not dominated by the state like the land, can also inspire a nation of nomads to view space.

Another similar example emerged during the COVID pandemic. Many city dwellers started to build tiny houses on their lands outside the city, in order to get out of their apartments, do some farming, spend some time in the nature. There are a number of procedures for building structures on agricultural lands. A tiny house has become an object of consumption now. However, it offers much more possibilities than the grid structure and urban order: The opportunity to live in an “off-grid” place and to establish a spatial relationship around individuals’ own bodies.

Urban zoning and construction procedures make it so difficult to build a tiny house: Measuring wind resistance, earthquake resistance, etc. make these tiny houses to be conceived and constructed like a regular building. However, they are good when they are simple and individual. As a team working in the municipality, we thought whether we could propose some template projects or design modules based on these; but we soon realized that it was not legally possible. The rules and regulations on ground survey, drilling, construction of the building by a subcontractor and designing it with architects and engineers make it impossible bureaucratically.

These were the ideas and perceptions on which I want to focus in the workshops. Do not get me wrong: I am not in the position to affirm or reject the urban composition and its various aspects. The reason why we can imagine all the alternatives find its very source in the city itself. I just claim that we need to see the mechanism of domination in urban design. To be able to imagine a nation of nomads, I think we should reconsider the exclusionary mechanism urban life is based on.

I will refer to Stavros Strandes's concept "urban heterotopia" while contemplating and implementing the nomadic nation's approach to design. The nation of nomads can be considered together with urban thresholds that the urban outcasts can establish. I want to test them in the workshop. We can check the examples and discuss them, however the best way to get it is to exercise it: Designing the city of thresholds, or what we call a nation of nomads, as a negotiation space of different identities and bodies excluded by the city.

II.

What if we tried to build a straight wall without any advanced equipment, but only through our body's experience? What if we tried to start the design from the absolute scratch? Today, when designing and considering an existing or imaginary space, we have basic abstract materials such as meters and centimeters. Design softwares also offer us much more advanced abstract materials. What would we do if we were to build a linear wall, relying only on our body's experience, at a time when these did not exist?

It is also possible to think of this as an analogy of nomadism. Suppose we are trying to do this at a time when there is no established institution and knowledge, perhaps even at a time when we would have to come up with the idea of linearity, straightness from scratch. Just like the immigrants who escape from war and take refuge in other countries today start a life with all opportunities taken away from them. Where the nomad of thousands of years ago and that of the present had to design a space without any facilities, this is where to start. A scene where there is not even a big wheel to level the ground, maybe our designer has to level the ground with the weight of her own body, she faces another nomad, and tries to establish the route of the straight wall with items found around. Even if that line on the ground can make the first layer of the wall straight, vertical order would require a plumb line.

The scene that I want us to imagine together actually highlights how far we are from those conditions today. While imagining a spatial element or composition today, we are based on the modern gridal fiction we were born into. In the workshops, we will look for ways to get away from this fiction.

In the construction history in Turkey, the gridal and modernist attitude has not even developed. Slums at the peripheries of the cities after the migration waves to the city were included in the city plan with the zoning amnesties many times in the republican period, and we would expect that the rest would proceed in accordance with that city plan. However, once every few years, the state again approves this irregularity with zoning agreements. This fact implies that the state cannot maintain the modernist city plan. TOKİ can also be considered as one of the examples of this failure. Many social housing projects all over the world are designed in very different ways than TOKİ does. Social housing can be used to solve sheltering problems instead of proprietorship. In short, in Turkey, what is at stake is not a gridal, ideal, modernist city, but a chaotic process of property transfer. Although there are institutions advocating architectural ideals, in reality things deviate considerably from these ideal routes. Each mass housing move increases the housing prices in Turkey.

As in housing projects, preservation of industrial and civil architecture the design interventions of the state with many implications. For example, Eskişehir has been an important city for the Republic of Turkey in terms of industry. In “the factories area” in Eskişehir, we have state railways’ factories and tile factories. The urban transformation did not care so much about the industrial heritage. Offices and residences were built to generate a substantial construction capital. In the transformation plans for the future, offices, residences and shopping centers are planned to be built on the area where the old factories are now. Architects and contractors do not care about bodily or social experience, but the gridal structure and the usual flow of capital. The will and motivation to transform the area at stake does not come from the nature and history of the area itself; the capital imposes an inappropriate design on it. There, now derelict industrial buildings are surrounded by wild plants and weeds. Some trails can be traced. That area doesn't actually need to be transformed; something is being imposed there.

Another example of preservation and transformation is the Odunpazarı region. Here, however, the old building style is favored by the municipality. Preservation can also be performed in radically different design attitude. For example, the building we are in was built a few years ago. It looks like the old Odunpazarı houses. Let's imagine: What would it be like if this building was designed as a glass box and made visible both sides of the neighborhood with its transparency, and if it multiplied the images of Odunpazarı houses with the reflections on its windows? However, nostalgic and touristic imaginary of urban transformation suggests the opposite. Motives such as nostalgia, touristic gaze, and photogenic urban scene erase the traces of past experience in such places. Only what can be sold is transformed and preserved, every other trace is meticulously erased.

EŞREF TANER İLERDE

Born in 1986 in Zonguldak. He had his Bachelor’s degree in architecture at Eskişehir Osmangazi University, in 2009, and his master's degree at Anadolu University, Department of Architecture, Department of Building Science in 2019. He works for Tepebaşı Municipality since 2010. He lectures on architectural design, urban planning and strategic planning.