Scaling the Region: Visuality, Infrastructure, and the Politics of Design in Cold War Turkey

Abstract

This dissertation demonstrates that American imperialism presents a persistent design problem. At the center of this problem during the Cold War was the question of how to situate nation-states within the scale of postwar imperialism. Addressing this question was especially challenging in geopolitically contested territories like Turkey, located between the Middle East, the Soviet Union, and the Mediterranean. A group of designers combined visual techniques of topographic surveying with scientific discourses about infrastructural development to craft an American frontier on Turkish soil. I analyze this process based on fifteen months of archival research at national and local archives and the National Library in Turkey and at the World Bank and Rockefeller Archives, the Archives West-Idaho Repository, and the National Archives in the U.S. I examine negotiations, tensions, and collaborations between the Turkish state, World Bank, and various missions that administered the Marshall Plan investments in Turkey (1948-1967). My research elucidates how these actors remade Turkey’s national territory into an environmental testing ground where new regimes of financial extraction and economic warfare took root. I argue that the Turkish state effectively instrumentalized those regimes to claim militaristic authority on a regional scale by contributing to the transformation of Middle Eastern environments into theaters of war that continues to unfold.

This dissertation is structured around two interconnected design practices: the representation of soil and the engineering of river. The first part focuses on the cinematographic and photographic techniques that U.S.-sponsored experts deployed to negotiate with the local population a new developmentalist vision. I explore the visual and verbal encounters between image makers and rural subjects as well as the histories of image making and the biographies of image makers. For instance, in some cases, the representation of soil entailed the implementation of mobile cinema units—a unique media form that derived inspiration from its adventures across the colonies of the British Empire. In other cases, the U.S. mission summoned the labor of European Jewish photographers, who were mobile and/or in exile. The image of soil thus reflected a global history of (im)mobilities enmeshed in the visual cultures of imperialism.

The second part of the dissertation shifts the focus from (im)mobilities to fluidities by showing how Turkish and American engineers, businessmen, bureaucrats, and scientists instrumentalized the soil’s image to commodify waterscapes. This part unpacks the design and construction processes of a river basin engineering project that transformed the Seyhan River of the Çukurova region into an exemplary site of what I call International Style Engineering. In this case, the image of the river reflected the land’s contested histories at the nexus of agro-industrial development, property-making, and national politics, in a way allowing us to see a new dimension of the financialization of nature and related urban indebtedness in Cold War Turkey.

This dissertation contributes to the interdisciplinary study of architecture in two respects. First, through extensive archival research on environmental histories of the global Cold War, it provides insights into the ways that U.S.-sponsored development operated as a war by other means—one that capitalized, financialized, and weaponized built space. Second, it demonstrates the emergence of a new visual language from the global circulation of environmental design technologies—a language that, I argue, did not simply represent, but also reformulated American imperialism seeking to continuously rescale the Earth to render the environment fungible.