Utilizing gis for a critical heritage mapping of urban activism in Istanbul in the 1960s

Focusing on the social activist movements that took place in the historic urban areas of İstanbul during the 1960s, the main aim of the paper is to understand how urban heritage is related to social activism. Adapting digital humanities approach, the paper presents a critical mapping of the historic spaces of urban activism and investigates how these spaces of social movements were historically formed and/or transformed. In Turkey, a new constitution was written following the 1960 coup d’etat formulating the state as a ‘social state’ and generating a liberated space for social movements. Accordingly, workers, students, and women’s movements raised especially in the multicultural urban context of İstanbul. The urban developments in the previous decade had an important role in this rise of workers movements despite the completely different contexts of two decades. In the 1950s, a populist right-wing party had won the elections and became gradually more autocratic throughout the decade. In the late 1950s, the government launched an urban project that irreversibly changed İstanbul. Accumulation of a working class in the 1950s and immense construction projects in urban historic environments generated the urban milieu for the social movements in the 1960s. Focusing on these two periods, the paper investigates the relationship between urban historic space and social activism through georeferencing the projects of the 1950s and urban social movements of the 1960s.