AS URBAN REALITY the Making of Ankara Alev Çınar
7 THE IMAGINED COMMUNITY AS URBAN REALITY The Making of Ankara Alev Çınar The relationship between modernity and the city is no doubt a complex one. Even though urban theory has been exploring this relationship thor- oughly, this investigation has been limited by a Eurocentric conceptualiza- tion of modernity, thereby producing a skewed analysis that takes the Western urban experience as the norm. This limitation is augmented with the complexities and ambiguities arising from the diverse uses of the con- cept of modernity that can take many, sometimes contradictory meanings. For example, a textbook definition takes modernity as a “distinct and unique form of social life” characterized by a cluster of institutions such as the nation-state, capitalist economic order, industrialism, or secular, materialist, rationalist, or individualist cultural values.1 Whereas for William Connolly, modernity is “an epoch in which a set of contending understand- ings of the self, responsibility, knowledge, rationality, nature, freedom, and legitimacy have established sufficient presence to shuffle other possible per- spectives out of active consideration.”2 Yet another understanding is intro- duced by Marshall Berman, who draws attention to the difference between modernism as autonomous artistic and intellectual imperatives and mod- ernization as “a complex of material structures and processes—political, economic, social—which, supposedly, once it has got under way, runs on its own momentum with little or no input from human minds and souls.”3 As these accounts suggest, modernity can have such a wide range of definition so as to include a lifestyle, an epoch, a process, a structure, an intellectual movement, a culture, an economic activity, a value system, or a cluster of institutions.
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