The Coastline, Contested: Mimarlık and Tourism Development in the 1970s Turkey

In the early 1960s, the professional organization the Chamber of Architects saw a great opportunity in tourism planning, as it would stimulate economic growth and support their vision of democratic development in Turkey after the coup d’état. This belief was well founded since the number of European tourists surged by 79 percent between 1964 and 1965, and only a small percentage of them had discovered their vacation destination through government advertisements. With the support of the Union of International Architects (UIA), one of the leading organizations of that period, the Chamber of Architects took on the responsibility of making mass tourism an integral part of economic and national development. However, in the 1970s, the government’s aggressive strategies led to the spread of hotels and holiday resorts along the Mediterranean coast, raising concerns about the preservation of natural and cultural heritage. This led to many politicized architects advocating for democratic tourism development. While the Chamber’s journal, Mimarlık, played an essential role in supporting tourism by informing professionals about new standards and exemplary national and international projects, it later switched to a publishing policy that conveyed to its colleagues the occupation of the coast with private investments and promoted a new trajectory for the profession that emphasized the mutual exercise of technical expertise and political activism. Consequently, the Mediterranean coastline became a contested territory, exposing the Chamber and Mimarlık’s contradictory approach to development discourse in architecture. This paper will explore the development of the Turkish Mediterranean coastline by looking into the content published in Mimarlık between 1968, the first issue dedicated to tourism development, and 1980, the journal closure due to the coup d’état. It will discuss how Mimarlık expanded its political activism and developmental agenda into advocacy of natural and cultural heritage through its evolution in the agenda.