Production of Representational Spaces As The Political Construction of “New Turkey”: Re/Naming Public Spaces After The Coup Attempt

Abstract

This chapter deals with the historical and political recontextualization of the linguistic landscape (LL) in public spaces in Turkey after a coup attempt on July 15, 2016. This coup attempt, which was organized by the Gülen Movement in order to overthrow the political power of the AKP (the Justice and Development Party), the ruling party since 2012, failed. After this day, toponymical reinscription of public spaces with specific concepts and phrases like “July 15", “National Will”, and “Marty” paved the way of keeping the trauma of July 15 alive, constructing a new tale of national heroism narrated by the AKP. (Re)naming for codification of spaces is an interventionist practice of inscribing power into public memory, and changes in the urban texts of Turkey during the year after the coup attempt became the ground for naturalizing and legitimizing a regime change from the parliamentary system into one-man rule, which occurred in 2017. This research discusses the political motivation and the effects of these spatial interventions by mapping transformations in the urban text in Ankara and I˙stanbul, where the events of the coup took place.