The role of local governments in protecting the memory of the city: The case of Denizli

This study deals with the city of Denizli. In the study, the capacity of local governments to protect the Denizli city memory and its possible transformative effect on the Denizli city memory were revealed in the city of Denizli, which, despite having a fairly deep-rooted historical past, keeps pace with the globalizing world as quickly as possible and decrees its name among the "Anatolian Tigers" by showing rapid development with its own internal dynamics. While doing this, the effects of local governments in Denizli on the urban memory of Denizli were analyzed both in terms of chronological periods and in terms of memory elements determined in the conceptual part of the study. Collective memory is social knowledge that encodes the dynamics that determine the life of a society and make it possible to stay together. Collective memory is engraved on space in various ways through life in a city. Cities are places where the memory of a society becomes visible. This feature of the collective memory brings it to be decisive on the space. At this point, social power relations come into play. Since the transformation of social power relations means the transformation of memory in a sense, the city is also undergoing a transformation with the transformation of social power. Local governments, which is another important concept for the study, are established in almost all countries to meet the common and local needs in a region. This feature of local governments makes them the closest administrative unit to urban residents. Therefore, local governments are the administrative units that can comprehend the life on a city most closely. It is not possible to think of local governments separately from the life of a city, that is, from its memory.