Sila Karatas Basoglu

Biography

Sıla Karataş (1987, Ankara) was graduated as architect and awarded Master’s degree with the thesis “Building Marshall Plan in Turkey: The Formation of Workers’ Housing Question, 1946-1962” at the Middle East Technical University. In her thesis, she analyzed the formation of postwar workers’ housing discourse concerning the policy, planning and architecture of workers’ housing cooperatives within the framework of the ideological and spatial programming of the Marshall Plan and Americanization in Turkey. This research received Honourable Mention in 'Young Social Scientists Awards' of the Turkish Social Sciences Association. She worked as assistant and lecturer in Turkey between 2012-2019; took part in architectural and urban design studios as tutor and reviewer, gave Case Studies in Social Housing and Community Planning among other courses. Since September 2019, she is a PhD student and doctoral assistant at EPFL. Her PhD research concerns postwar workers’ housing programs of the Mediterranean countries participated in the Marshall Plan (France, Italy, Greece, Turkey), and is a comparative analysis of local models in relation to the transnational activity by the United States and multilateral organizations on postwar development, labour affairs and housing. This research is awarded a Swiss Government Excellence Scholarship for PhD and being funded by the Swiss Federal Commission for Scholarships for Foreign Scholars and Artists (FCS).

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‘Monsieur, I have a wife and child, a house and a garden, et alors?’

Sila Karatas Basoglu

Marshall Plan, officially operated from 1948 to 1952 for reconstruction and development in Europe and non-European countries such as Turkey and Switzerland, marks the Cold War economy-political and foreign policy of the US. Referred by its bureaucrats as “the democratic way of self-help and cooperation,” the Marshall Plan publicized notions such as mutual aid, self-help, cooperation, democracy, and freedom to build the Western Bloc against the so-called “Soviet threat.” Devoting specific attention to labour affairs to prevent strikes and communist tendencies, the US engaged in workers’ housing production in Marshall Plan countries through financial and technical assistance programs. Introducing the notion of “free labor” towards “non-communism” and exporting the New Deal manner of housing through labour advisers and housing experts, the US assisted labour unions in founding housing cooperatives. Be detached, twin or row in form, a house with a garden offered an archetype for the “good life” of the “free labor.” Promoting a pre-industrial community and nuclear family life in an industrial setting for wage workers, the US instrumentalized workers’ housing as a subtle mechanism for postwar Americanization. This presentation attempts to portray Marshall Plan’s workers’ housing program put into practice in France and Turkey in a strongly similar layout. It argues that the reincarnation of garden suburb as self-built single-family housing against the state-led multi-family housing of the interwar Europe and postwar USSR led to a paradigmatic shift in housing development as well as design, construction, and domestic life. Casting an authorship to workers in not only land provision but also construction, this housing model pioneered the current real-estate development as it channelled inhabitants into informal systems of capital and property development through construction. The presentation discusses this postwar typology of house with a garden referring to housing for miners, textile workers, heavy industry workers and for construction workers built by the US-assisted labour union activity in France and Turkey.

2023

This text, accompanied by a ‘gospel’ that I made by montaging the US-recorded captions, is an attempt for re-narrating Marshall Plan’s discourse on the working class, aka the so-called ‘free labor’ of the US against the ‘communist labor’ of the “Soviet threat.” I use gospel writing as a form of critical analysis to unearth the US doctrine on the ‘good life’ of the postwar labor. My purpose is to deconstruct how the postwar economy-political and cultural imperialism of the US was embodied in time, space, body, and mind of the postwar labor reporting from her ‘peacetime’ operational field by hiring ‘independent’ reporters of the war front. On the one hand, the article attempts a forensic analysis of the US-narrated postwar documentary photography and journalism; and on the other, it aims to reveal the extent of the Cold War US practice to disseminate its anti-communist ideology on postwar labor from text to image, from time to space, and from body to mind. Visual and textual records of photographs taken in Marseille in 1952 after the official ending of the Marshall Plan , are the primary source of data analyzed in this text. This data itself serve as critique and counter-argument to reveal the postwar ‘soft power’ discourse and practice of the US in Marshall Plan countries. Yet, this text is not about visuality or photography, it is rather about textuality and text, i.e., about textual records accompanying photographs for filing and publicizing the Marshall Plan in the ‘soft’ war front and home front. For this purpose, it uses captions, referred as “picture stories” by the NARA, as evidence instead of photographs of Haas, and analyzes captions as a means of historiographical practice for deconstruction of the publicized and archived discourse of the US postwar ideology. The ‘gospel’ of the Marseille Docker - Nicholas Derybolsky from 1952, as I made and entitled, is a collage composed of these “picture stories” dating May 7th, 1952. The captions, written either for record descriptions or as propaganda guides to accompany the photos of Haas guide the decoupling. I analyze repetitive words and word groups that appear in the captions, and via rhythmic deconstruction of these, I form figurative statements in order to re-narrate the Marshall Plan’s discourse on the ‘free labor’ over the original “picture stories.” In the end, it is not the image or photo-essay but the text - caption, picture story or gospel - which tells again and again in different statements, the good day of a ‘typical Marseille docker’ of the Marshall Plan.

EPFL Press2023

Marshall Plan’s workers’ housing program and trade union cooperatives in France and Turkey

Sila Karatas Basoglu

Marshall Plan (1948-1952), introduced for postwar reconstruction in Europe, marks the Cold War economy-political and foreign policy of the US. Besides building the Western Bloc, its financial and technical assistance programs launched the self-help paradigm for housing development, design, and construction. This presentation portrays Marshall Plan’s workers’ housing program for cooperatives founded by US-assisted trade unions in France and Turkey.

2023

‘Monsieur, I have a wife and child, a house and a garden, et alors?’

Sila Karatas Basoglu

2023

EPFL Press2023