Neoliberal Urbanism and Commodification of Urban History as a Marketing Tool in Public Recreation

Abstract

Although neo-liberalism is not an urbanization policy, it has changed urban practices since 1970s.Neoliberal politics has started to use history, culture, identity, social status, even happiness as a commodity that can be bought and sold to ensure the sustainability of capital.Urban history and cultural heritage have been highlighted in urban spaces, themed projects, shopping malls, residents, and tourism facilities etc. Hereby, cultural heritages and culture have been faced with depreciation and conservation.Cities have transformed into a fragmented structure with replicas and city images are destroyed.In globalization process place that is a significant concept in terms of architecture and urban planning, has started to lose its distinctive character and lost its meaning.Neoliberalism has constituted "non-places" that defines as places which can be seen everywhere without socio-cultural connection.The difference of an area and space is to be identifiable not only spatial but also historical and relational.The case study area, Ecdad Park, is inspired by historical and architectural features of Ottoman and Selçuklu Empire and commodify urban history as a marketing tool.In scope of the research, the effects of commodification of urban history on users' satisfaction is evaluated with "user satisfaction survey".In the light of the results obtained from the survey, density of green areas, cleanness, proximity, security is more effective on user satisfaction rather than historical data and replicas of cultural heritage.Although, neoliberalism is not an urban policy, it is nourished by urban space and transformed urban practices.In 1970s, neoliberalism came up to reinforce the power of capitalism against the working class (Harvey, 2005).In 1980s, neoliberal urbanism has gained speed and it has reached to the top in 2000s.Urbanism has become one of the most important resources for the development of neoliberalism.Hence, the effects of neoliberalism on urban space have become one of the most important research issues for urban planning (Boland et al., 2017;Bustad & Andrews, 2020;Carraro et al., 2021;Gabriel, 2016;Güzey, 2014;Korkmaz & Alkan Meşhur, 2021;Obradovic-Wochnik, 2018;Rossi & Vanolo, 2015;Wang & Aoki, 2019).The emphasis of neoliberal urbanism has spread across the world and caused to increase of privatization of public, commodification of urban practices and entrepreneurialization of local services (Rossi & Vanolo, 2015).Urban neoliberalism is used as a basic concept related with competitiveness, economic growth, and global marketing in cities.The main target for neoliberalism is to sustain of capital.Therefore, neoliberal politics do not hesitate to use nature, history, cultural heritage, social status even happiness as a commodity (Larner, 2009).Government uses historic accumulation to expand marketing network and tourism income in cities that have cultural heritage (Xu et al., 2013).Moreover, neoliberalism offers foreign cultures or architectures in a different place, time, and culture.The cities have started to full of the many replicas of historic buildings and the Cansu

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 3 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.