"A Light Bulb in Every House": The Istanbul General Electric Factory and American Technology Transfer to Turkey

Technopolitical Construction of a River Basin: Turkey's Encounters and Adventures with the "TVA Idea"

In the postwar era, the preferred approach to harnessing rivers was through integrated river basin planning (IRBP), which required a holistic focus on the river basin for multipurpose development. While the river basin is taken for granted as the natural unit of development in the definitions of the IRBP concept, this article problematizes the river basin idea and reveals the politics behind what has been deemed natural (scientific), with a specific focus on Turkey's experience with IRBP. It explores geopolitical and national motivations and challenges in the context of the scaling of the Euphrates-Tigris basin. By approaching IRBP as a process of scale-making, it draws from discussions of the politics of scale in the literature on political ecology, but also incorporates a historical dimension to these discussions with attention to the political and environmental histories of Southeastern Turkey, which became home to Turkey's first and most extensive IRBP project, the Southeast Anatolia Project (GAP).The article stretches the chronological boundaries of GAP to the decades prior to the 1970s, when the project was initiated, by analyzing archival materials, including the proceedings of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey, the archives of a daily newspaper, and the expert reports on GAP. The analysis highlights the politics of scale as a powerful constituent of the politics of technological development, and shows the significance of historical analysis to delineate the politics of river basin planning into different layers, including the level of geopolitics, territorial disputes, and international conflicts.

Engineering the public-use reinforced concrete buildings of Ankara during the Early Republic of Turkey, 1923-1938

Today, reinforced concrete (RC) is the most commonly used construction material in Turkey. It first emerged in Europe in the 1850s and was adopted in a number of Late Ottoman period structures, mostly in İstanbul, during the first two decades of the twentieth century. During the Early Turkish Republic (1923-1938), RC appeared in public-use buildings in Ankara, such as the Ethnographic Museum, which was the first in the new capital to feature RC elements, leading the way for many more structures to come. Despite the fact that Turkish and foreign civil engineers faced a series of economic, social, cultural, political, educational and technical challenges during the transition from masonry and timber construction to RC, its adoption was facilitated by the fact that as a European building technology, it became symbolically important to the new republic. Equated with modernity, RC would allow its capital, Ankara, to construct an identity that would contrast with İstanbul, the capital of the Ottoman Empire. This transition would also be catalyzed by the rise of a professional class of Turkish civil engineers who deployed RC to reinforce their authority as trained specialists and agents of modernization.