Heterotopia as a space of escapism: A case study of Moda (Kadıköy)

This study is based on the processing of the concept of heterotopia, which the French philosopher Michel Foucault revealed in his space speech, on socio-spatial items in the Moda neighborhood of Istanbul's Kadıköy district. According to Foucault's concept, from the norms of utopian social processes, to radical and free places where people who deviate from a repressive plane live in a place where different structures live together. Foucault, who spoke at a seminar presented to architects, presented the dialectic of the concept in his article "Heterotopias" in 1986, published in 1986, revealing six different heterotopia characteristics of the heterotopic space. According to this, the opposing places where the alternative social order is searched, the specific resistance efforts, the things which are different from each other, are the most prominent features of the heterotopia. Foucault has pioneered heterotopia in important areas such as architecture, urban planning, human geography, sociology, art, literature, which counts places such as tranquility houses, psychiatric hospitals, prisons, cemeteries, baths, museums, theaters and cinemas within their heterotopia. Approaching heterotopia with geographical perspective sensitivity, David Harvey undermines the generality of Fouacult's view that heterotopias are viewed as static and infertile, and that they only focus on organized institutional pressures. Rather, instead of other heterotopia studies, Heterotopias have been embedded in dialectic thinking based on Henri Lefebvre's view of an alternative heterotopy, which sees the difference, the state of impermanence, the sites of potential transformation processes. At this point, Lefebvre's spatial triad is set at the core of his work, and the contradictions, oppositions, opposites, and side-by-side differences that heterotopia emphasizes that the daily life practices of a heterotopia are changed by the perception of space, It was first tried to show that it was filled with germs. A heterotopia is presented with a distribution map of the opposites in Moda neighborhood and the written and readable texts written on the street walls which are the most obvious signs of the opposite. This urban space of collapse of the public space is transformed into a different place by the opposition of the wall writings. Methodically, the method of spatial differentiation, which the American geographer Hartshorne considered as the basis for geographical research, played a key role in the extraction and presentation of heterotopias known as different and oppositional spaces. As another method, the scheme of the Swedish geographer Hagerstrand for the time geographical model of the quantitative products of the quantitative revolution is effective in depicting how the daily life of the individual evolves in space and time, but how the stations and fields formed by the interaction of the time and space in the diagram are produced and differentiated and the hegemonic order in the managerial background of the time and space systems that form as it does not disclose anything about it. Therefore, for the wider questions, the place of research space and its heterotopic place in social order by revealing the temporal intensities during the day are revealed. In this thesis, the concept of heterotopia is discussed together with the concept of "escape" that Yi-Fu Tuan gives to geography, and the reasons for the formation of heterotopic space are revealed. On this page, both the dialectic between the heterotopic and the escape topic and the identity and the qualities of the escape places are shown. During the two-year field studies conducted in the framework of the study, the organizations operating in the Moda neighborhood examined observations, photographs and interviews. Cinema readings organized by people and communities in the region during certain periods of the year were exhibited in the context of literary dialogues, festival fairs, photo exhibitions and concert activities. The wall writings were also recorded in the six-month period with the appearance and changes of the cartographic photography method. Based on the fact that everything in the feasible world coexist in an impossible space, the heterotopia has emerged as a counter-zone by considering the differences in the fashion district, where the daily life practices are grounded, based on the concepts of social theory on the basis of the contradictions and geographical perspectives. This study also shows the nature of the nightly gaze produced by using geographical concepts and methods, the first heterotopia study in which street writings were put into a urban dialectic with a representation of civil toponymy.