Türkiye'de çocuk mekânının konutta oluşum ve evrimi

This study historically examines the formation and development of children's domestic spaces in Turkey from the beginning of the twentieth century to the 1980s. As will be shown, political, cultural, economic, and social turns have influenced the formation of children's space in Turkey in this period. The changing meaning of childhood in Europe since the seventeenth century had become the central element of the construction of idealized middle-class nuclear families in the nineteenth century. In the Ottoman society, observable changes in the thoughts and practices about childhood had begun since the nineteenth century. While the shift in the childhood phenomenon in different societies contains similarities and differences, modernization is the key term that I will coin to explain this complex process. This thesis basically explores children's domestic spaces in Turkey by following the traces of the historical roots of the modern family construction and argues that the construction of a child as an individual cannot be read independently of the defined roles of the nuclear family members. In this way, it discovers the historical traces of the idea that the children should have their own living space within the home, which is one of the prominent issues while emphasizing the 'scientific' background of raising children. This thesis tries to set an original spatial reading on the changes in children's spaces by analyzing the visual materials, mainly taken from architecture magazines, home and life magazines, of the middle and upper-class houses in Istanbul and Ankara.