Paper short abstract:

This paper will demonstrate how residents are impacted by ongoing urban transformation in Bahçelievler, a neighborhood in Ankara, Turkey through the memories of local places and past times by considering residents' attachments to their neighborhood.

Paper long abstract:

This paper, a small but keystone portion of my dissertation, is an exploration of memories of the place and of the past in a neighborhood, Bahçelievler, undergoing urban transformation. It was the first modern neighborhood built after Ankara was being designated as the capital of the newly formed nation of Turkey with modernization reforms in 1923. The residents' attachments to their neighborhood have been seen in three forms: the materiality of the place; social relations such as friendship and neighborliness; and early republican values emphasizing modernization. These attachments appearing in memories gained importance when urban transformation started in the 2000s in the neighborhood. Thereby, I aim, in the paper, to understand how urban transformation taking place in the neighborhood impacts residents' memories and their attachments. The research will also demonstrate how the discontent shared among residents about the urban changes in Bahçelievler echoes Turkey's social, political, and economic change a hundred years after its establishment. With this study, I introduce critical approaches, as well as an activist research approach, to folklore studies in Turkey, which still has the tendency to glamorize the nation. Secondly, this project brings the power of narrative and place-based methods into urban studies by using walking ethnography, interviews, and participant observation to bring community voice and perspectives.