Decentralization for Productivity: The Politics of Welfare and the Introduction of Suburban Dream to Workers’ Housing in Postwar Turkey

The introduction of regional planning to Turkey dates to late 1950s in parallel to the postwar development discourse brewed under the agency of the Marshall Plan. The financial and technical assistance programs of the Marshall Plan and the United Nations promoted “development” in Turkey to build a welfare state regime in a similar manner as “reconstruction” in the other countries of the Western Bloc. The postwar development in Turkey was grounded on economy-political and spatial programming of industrialization and agricultural mechanization as well as of social welfare for the urban and rural working class. Regional planning was a central tool for development which entirely transformed the socio-spatial characteristics of urban and rural territories. Especially during the 1960s, Turkey faced the spatial conflicts of city-country dichotomy by juxtaposition of planned decentralization of industrial production by regional planning policies and uncontrolled urbanization by domestic migration, which gave birth to housing crisis and informal settlements at the outskirts of cities. Actually, the idea of decentralization was introduced as both a tool for industrial efficiency and labour productivity and a solution to uncontrolled migration based on the notion of Fordist planning. On that note, suburban settlements of single-family housing were promoted to workers as properties of domestic welfare for reproduction of labour force. This socio-spatial operation was guided by policy makers, spatial planners and architects as well as foreign experts for the sake of development and modernization. In this framework, this paper aims to analyze postwar socio-spatial scenarios on workers’ housing settlements suggested by different actors for productivity as part of the developmentalist politics in Turkey. The analysis will refer to an associative framework covering tools, procedural approaches and forms introduced by politicians, economists, public officers, planners and architects, who collectively operated in the socio-spatial production of postwar suburban ideal with a technocratic role.