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  4. From State-led to Aided Self-help: Marshall Plan and Workers’ Housing Cooperatives in Turkey
 
conference paper not in proceedings

From State-led to Aided Self-help: Marshall Plan and Workers’ Housing Cooperatives in Turkey

Karatas, Sila  
September 1, 2022
15th Conference of the European Association for Urban History (EAUH 2022)

This paper aims to analyze the transnational discourse behind the programmatic shift in spatial production and layout of workers’ housing in Turkey from the state-financed model of the interwar period to the aided self-help model by the introduction of the Marshall Plan after the World War II. In particular, the paper argues that the ideological and spatial discourse of the Marshall Plan indoctrinating ‘democracy, cooperation and freedom’ instrumentalized workers’ housing cooperatives in housing production for the promotion of postwar Americanization. Turkey, like other participating countries of the Marshall Plan, witnessed domestic migration as a result of rapid urbanization due to industrial and infrastructural development as well as agricultural mechanization, which were guided by financial and technical assistance programs of the United States and the United Nations, and thus a great housing shortage and construction boom at the peripheries of cities. Cooperative housing was popularized by the state as a low-cost and efficient production model against housing shortage, but rather as an element of Fordist decentralization, and to realize the productive and affluent middle class ‘worker’ of the postwar welfare state. Based on workers’ pension funds released from the Workers’ Insurance Agency and loaned by the Mortgage Loans Bank, the legislative and institutional layout of this self-help model eliminated the state-financed technocratic practice of the interwar period for rental housing, and introduced a mortgage-based community practice of workers for homeownership, which pioneered the current private real-estate development. This housing practice also guided modern urbanization and urban sprawl by settlement morphologies and architectural typologies, which shifted from single-family detached house to multi-family housing block due to the rise of land prices and construction costs, and which made apartment block on individual parcel as the common practice of modern housing in Turkey. Official documents and reports prepared by foreign experts as well as practices of political bodies, planners, architects and workers will be referred next to exemplary settlements to reveal the role of the Marshall Plan and related transnational expertise on planning and architectural practice of workers’ housing, and on political and spatial programming of the aided self-help model for postwar Americanization.

  • Details
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Type
conference paper not in proceedings
Author(s)
Karatas, Sila  
Date Issued

2022-09-01

Subjects

Cold War

•

Marshall Plan

•

Turkey

•

transnationalism

•

welfare state

•

postwar development

•

postwar housing

•

workers' housing

•

workers' housing cooperatives

•

cooperative housing

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self-help housing

•

housing program

URL

Link to conference program

https://www.uantwerpen.be/en/conferences/eauh2022/programme/scientificprogramme/mainsessions/m34/
Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
LAB-U  
Event nameEvent placeEvent date
15th Conference of the European Association for Urban History (EAUH 2022)

Antwerp, Belgium

Aug 31-Sep 3, 2022

Available on Infoscience
February 15, 2023
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/194886
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