REQUERIMIENTOS MATERIALES Y FINANCIEROS

Although space might be considered as a natural given setting, it is actually permeable and consists of power relations and social interactions that coexist. Thus, the urban space becomes central as it is the visible ground of the expression of all these relations. It is because ‘space now more than time that hides things from us, that the demystification of spatiality and its veiled instrumentality of power is the key’ to understand the contemporary configuration of space and to make sense of daily

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experiences, politics and theories (Soja 1989:61 emphasis added). Similarly, Smith proposes that ‘geographical space is on the economic and political agenda as never before’ (2008: 5), and thus that what matters in the contemporary condition is not just the impacts of capitalism on geography but rather what geography can do to offer to capitalism. Here, the relation between geography and capitalism, dominated by the latter, is an important tool for urban power that produces and reproduces urban space.

Therefore, as revealed by Soja and Smith, apart from including spatial settings, space also reveals implicit consequences for physical settings, coming from the synchronisation of the explicit and implicit political and economic changes in capitalist and globalising geography.

In this regard, in the recent capitalist globalisation era, the transnational impacts of globalisation and capitalism also led to an accumulative standardisation of the neoliberal geography and there the cities have become ‘the commodity take on flesh’

resembling the capital and capitalism (Clark cited in Gregory, 1994: 211) and dressed-up version of commodity fetishism (Harvey 2012). There the urban land rent becomes the commodity of that fetishism, and thus becomes the capital of urban space: ‘a fictitious form of capital that derives from expectations of future rents’ (Harvey 2012:

28). There, urban space is affected by the relations of capital and the relations of power which are actually interrelated and dependent on each other. Harvey suggests that, urbanisation absorbs the capital, and thus is central to capital accumulation, especially through investments in the built environment, while also triggering the value and surplus value production, as the main drivers. Therefore, space is rather a lively, dynamic and interactive setting that continuously reshapes and is being reshaped via global, territorial, economic, political, societal and individual relations, including the tacit relations that emerge in between, and within temporal conditions.

Another critical concept of space is placelessness, where spaces and their spatial representatives, places, transform into a condition of placelessness through the inauthentic experience of cities ‘supported by mass communication, mass culture, big business, powerful central authority and economic structure’ (Relph, 1976: 90).

Similarly, there are some other critiques of the production of space centralising attention on postmodernity where the spatiality of space becomes blurred within the accelerated time expressions. Among them Virillio, similar to Harvey’s time-space compression, where globalisation and capitalism generates accelerated relation of time and space (Harvey 1989), suggests a speed-time concept. There, one

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participates in that space through time and virtual existence instead of physical existence¹⁰ (Virilio and Armitage 2001). Another critique with similar concern presented by Marc Auge referring to ‘non-places’¹¹ as the accelerated transformation of the contemporary world on the basis of space, ego and time as a new geography of supermodernity, where the world becomes ‘a single immense conurbation’ emerging from the intersection of consumption, communication and circulation (Auge 2008: xii) leading to sameness as the ‘globetrotting tourist’ (ibid.). There, supermarkets, shopping malls and big transport hubs like airports are given as examples of non-places and the spaces of placelessness.

However, the supermodernity argument, perceiving the metropolitan cities as the encapsulation of the globe, disregards the inherent authenticity and novel power relations of different geographies. This is because, if this perception is merely taken for granted, it undermines the diverse nature of ethnicity, culture, religion, social, political and economic dimensions. Therefore, it is important to emphasise that different societies still ‘produce their own kind of space’ through ‘social translation, transformation and experience’ and present the organisation of space as a social product (Smith 1998:54; Soja 1989: 80). Space, therefore, is being produced through purposeful social practice, where different human practices create different space conceptualisations during the process of analysis of space, rather than providing a definition prior to it (Soja 1989; Harvey 1973). Therefore, space is dynamic, conditionally fluid and contextual. It also reshapes itself in accordance with the various scales of experience (collective to individual) and various relations (social–political–

spatial and economic) and time.

With these different arguments in mind, the starting point for providing a meaningful understanding of space will also depend on the researchers’ point of view (through which lenses s/he is going to look to the subject). It would also be central to any related argument, as to claim a generalised formulation of space and its production is impossible. Therefore, although acknowledging the spatialised existence especially of metropolitan cities has been shaped and reshaped by global capitalist geographies and thus contribute to the concerns of supermodernity and placelessness,

10 Here Virillio uses the example of TV and other high-tech communication materials where one does not need to be physically involved.

11 Presenting a quite pessimistic view Auge states the places and the world of supermodernity: ‘where people are born in the clinic and die in hospital, where transit points and temporary abodes are proliferating under luxurious or inhuman conditions … where a dense network of means of transport which are also inhabited spaces is developing; where the habitué of supermarkets … credit cards communicates wordlessly ... with unmediated commerce; a world surrendered to solitary individuality’ (Auge, 2008: 63).

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concurrently their emergence and processes of production and reproduction would generate their own authenticity and their own kind of space, while simultaneously generating its own relations of power, which this research considers as the main pillar of urban space production, development and which then therefore also becomes the manipulator of the social environment. Thus, while the political, economic, spatial and social dimensions are being reformulated, with time generating a time–space relation, different cultures still would produce their kind of space; while different experiences and relations also produce their own kind of space and perceptions of space and therefore the meaning becomes contextual. Thus, this thesis has a focus on a particular context and the following chapters (Chapters 5–6) provide an investigation of the Turkish context to understand the divergences and determine the driving forces in terms of process, product and impact, which this study aims to do.