From Fearscapes to Public Spaces

Abstract

Fear as one of the earliest survival mechanisms of humankind has significant effects on how people lived in cities since ancient times. Today fear is embedded in the physical characteristics of the urban space and how it is perceived by its inhabitants. It transforms the spatial behaviors of the contemporary citizens into introverted spatial biographies of fear, where the public spaces have become the ’dangerous outside world’ (De Cauter, 2004) to be avoided when possible. The most crucial outcome of this ongoing trend is the loss of any democratic public domain in contemporary cities. Departing from that, this thesis focuses on the dominant ecology of fear in the long-established central public space network of Istanbul comprising Gezi Park, Taksim Square & Istiklal Avenue where the citizens are disconnected from their democratic public domain in the last decade. The research aims to approach fear as an urban phenomena rediscovering and inventing tools to investigate fear in space, decode it in the context of Central Istanbul and discuss the role and range of influence of the urbanist in finding solutions to mitigate fear and establish a new constructive dialogue between the citizens of Istanbul and their public domain under extreme societal and political conditions that Central Istanbul exemplifies.