Ph.D. student Meltem Al receives IJURR Foundation Studentship
Ph.D. student Meltem Al has been awarded a studentship from the in the amount 12,000 pounds sterling (approx. $21,000 CDN) for her project, 鈥淪paces of capital, religion, and ideology: Fundamentalist housing enclaves in Istanbul.鈥�
The IJURR Foundation promotes urban and regional research. Within this broad field it is particularly keen to encourage an understanding of the interconnection between social, economic and political processes and of the broader causes and effects of these processes. Research which examines policies critically and focuses on their unintended as well as intended consequences is more likely to be supported than research on managerially defined questions.
Meltem Al鈥檚 project (in her own words) 鈥渨ill examine how urban space produces鈥攁nd is produced by鈥攃apital and ideology, through the investigation of fundamentalist housing projects in Turkey. I will focus on conservative residential projects constructed in Istanbul since the late聽1980s,聽when neoliberalism and political Islam started to intervene in聽the production聽of the built environment in Turkey. The majority of these projects are located in the Ba艧ak艧ehir district of the city, which originally emerged as a low-income mass-housing development area in the 1990s but soon turned into a hub of elite housing projects addressing聽upper-class聽Islamist families. I will analyze selected聽state-funded聽housing聽projects聽in Ba艧ak艧ehir,聽that increased property values in the district. I will聽investigate聽these projects鈥� architectural and social features, explore their dialogue with urban space, identify their investors and their addressed audiences, and observe the organization of the daily life there. I will clarify what makes these projects fundamentalist聽in formal, social, and economic means, and how they differ from other contemporary housing projects in Istanbul.鈥�