Building Marshall Plan in Turkey: The formation of workers' housing question, 1946-1962

This thesis aims to analyze the formation of workers’ housing question at manpower, topographical, morphological and habitual scales with regard to the ideological, political, economical, cultural and institutional programming of Americanization in Turkey within the scope of the financial and technical assistance programs of the Marshall Plan accompanied by the praxis of the United Nations. Based on the premise that the Marshall Plan engaged in workers’ housing production and architecture culture in Turkey at institutional and communal levels because of its specific attention to labour relations in all the Marshall Plan countries, its ideological and discursive program on workers’ housing production and architecture culture in Turkey from planning to application will be examined. Within this context, the formation of workers’ housing question from labouring to housing covering the habitus and habitat of the working class in Turkey between 1946 and 1962 will be analyzed with reference to the Marshall Plan’s international program and themes on the workers’ housing question. In detail, this formation will be researched in relation to the economical planning based on rationalization and productivity, regional planning based on zoning principle and physical planning, urban planning based on slum-clearance, neighbourhood planning based on the paradigm of the garden suburb and community planning on behalf of the discourse of democracy, cooperation and self-help promoted by the Marshall Plan. In this sense, unraveling the ideological background and the discursive formations in the formation of the workers’ housing question at manpower, topographical, morphological and habitual scales for the subject period, and questioning the paradigmatic shift or continuity in the manner of workers’ housing production in Turkey by comparing the state-financed model of the interwar period and the self- help model promoted with the Marshall Plan are the main objectives of the thesis.