Intimate governing: public space, community and women in Keçiören

Abstract

This thesis is about the different ways intimacy plays role in governing, creating and experiencing the public space. It is based on an ethnographic research conducted in Keçiören, Ankara, with a focus on women who occupy the public places of the town and on the places them selves for they are the material expressions of the municipal ideology, desires and fantasies that are formulated in a dialogical relationship with the master narrative of Ankara. In Keçiören while the desires that shape the spatial strategies reflect the ideals of modernism, middle classness and nationalism, the relationship of the municipality to people is sustained with the use of the Islamic idiom. The Islamic idiom provides both the vocabulary of a common language between the governors and the inhabitants of the district and the moral framework that is based on intimate relations and a communitarian attitude. Within this context women appear on the foreground in the newly constructed public places of the town. They mediate the translation of the moral order of family into public space and act it out through various practices and stories. This moral order is also based on intimate premises, thus serves to the intimate governing of thedistrict. And finally the thesis concludes that through the use of the Islamic idiomand the inclusiveness of the intimate ways of governing, Keçiören provides an implicit critique of the dominant understandings of public space.