Power Geometry in Urban Memory: Reading Taksim Square Through the Concept of Representation of Space

Author(s): Goǧus, Ceren; Akgun Gultekin, Asiye | Abstract: Can memory be manipulated? How far can the will to remember resist the manipulation of the hierarchy? Isolation and exclusion are still useful as disciplinary tools of power. Since this is the case, what role do so-called public spaces serve in memorializing certain isolated histories while separating and thus excluding others? If memory spaces exist in correlation with loss of memory, can searching for traces underneath the layers be the worst enemy of forgetting? How can the search for traces in official spatial histories reveal whose memory is being prioritized as truthful historical account and whose memory has been forgotten? Official spatial histories demand that certain memories are forgotten and thus delegitimized; does this render the readings of spaces as alternative memorialization meaningless? If so, does trying to create memory spaces cause monumentality independent from memory? Does the very act of formalizing spaces of memory create a certain monumentality independent from those who remember it? How will urban geographies, condemned to be symbolic spaces of politics, resist this?

Urban space is social interaction. In different periods of urban history worldwide, whoever controlled capital constructed the social structure depending on the type of said capital and its symbolic worth. Throughout different periods, from the Middle Ages to the emergence of nation-states and through the era of increasing globalization, the dominance of differential power structures has manifested spatially in cities. Within this construction, monumental spaces have had a very important place, in that they are the "hegemonic power, demarcating dialectical relationships between space, power and society." 1 This is why the analysis of socially constructed codes of the actors who participate in the power struggle over the urban space with representations of their own value system (for instance, nationalist, secular, capitalist), which make up the layered urban memory, could provide the answer to the question "whose memory?" 2 The present essay asks this question through a reading of Taksim Square, which is one of the most monumental spaces in Istanbul. Instead of a nonlinear historical reading, our aim is to read the square through the spatial organization of its social, political, economic, and cultural layers. These layers contain the paradigms on historical thresholds generating different types of capital in the context of Pierre Bourdieu's symbolical capital concept-a form of power that is not perceived as power but as a legitimate demand for recognition, deference, obedience, or the services of others. 3 Symbolic capital is thus based on the validation and recognition of a specific value in a perceptual dimension.
Taksim Square is a controversial symbolic space, which engenders social segregation, and has historically remained closed to certain individuals throughout its long history. Therefore, reading the public square through the representation of these different types of capital will reveal the space as a record of memories.
As a web of social relationships, space is dynamic, not static. This dynamic and relational nature of space is loaded with power, meaning, and symbolism. 4 Power geometry defines the reciprocal relationships it contains. In this heterogeneous space, types of capital (political, economic, and cultural) use their own power geometries to build space by signifying it with their own chosen image. The purpose of this exclusionary approach is spatial-temporal fixation, and these semantic fixations are thus places of social struggle (in the era of nation-states, this was the reflection of objectification of cultural and political capital; in the neoliberal era, the urban space is a form of capital fixation, a secondary circuit of capitalism). 5 By associating these interpretations with historical events, a collective memory is created (just as the nation-state builds itself on historical events that sanctify it with myths, legends, and ceremonies). A cycle of power struggle and resistance takes place in symbolic spaces in a city that are charged with different meanings for its residents. Taksim Square, as we explain while recounting its history, is this kind of space. It is a public space meaningful not only for residents of Istanbul but for the whole of Turkey, as the stage of important events that defined the historical arc of the country. Thus the present essay aims to read the power geometry that takes place there in a nonlinear historical way, which would comply with the dynamism of the space. The phases, which triggered the different geometric relations throughout the history of the power struggle on the square, are examined and correlated in the framework of Bourdieu's concepts of capital.
We discuss Taksim Square's transition from one type of capital to another (specifically political capital, through its change from a cemetery to a military area and then to the official, ceremonial area of the nation-state; economic capital as seen through the construction of hotels and because of its proximity to one of the historical cultural centers of the city; cultural capital with and because of its history as a recreational and art center; and finally as a space of resistance with its adoption by the people as a public meeting area) in the ongoing relationality of the historical cycle. We use a nonlinear, cyclical historical reading to show how the state of the social construct's impact on the square changes depending on the dominant capital type. The reality is that these multiple types of capital exist together on the square all the time, but they appear and disappear according to the dominant capital of the time. In the relationship of capital and space, the power geometry is created with memory. The symbolic meaning established in the relationship of object and memory turns the space into the object of the memory construction. Depending on the strength of the capital, while one memory is brought forth to establish dominance in space, another one is forgotten.

(Whose) Memory Record or Loss of Taksim Square: Through the Urban Space and Power Geometry
There are geometric relationships between place-identity-memory-power and different aspects of capital. Just like the relationship between memory and object, the city is the locus of collective memory. 6 It can be said that urban memories exist because of a reflex of spatial fixation. There is a difference between created urban memories and the ones that spontaneously come into being. Forgetting-remembering happens spontaneously, whereas evoking-effacing are a part of created memory. The memory of the physical aspects of a place represented by urban artifacts is a tangible memory. On the other hand, the presentation of a place, where social relationships and acts take place, is an abstract or symbolic memory. This presentation can be understood through the codes and signs of the production of representations of space and spaces of representation, which are mentioned in Henri Lefebvre's urban practices trilogy. 7 The representation of space involves forms of information, planning technics, and the practices used by the state to organize and represent space. The spaces of representation include collective experiences and indicate resistances against the dominating practices of the space. That is to say, the symbolic production of meaning and the meaning developed against it define the power geometry of the production of social space. Doreen Massey develops the concept of power geometry related to globalization process. For different social groups, and different individuals, locations are placed in very distinct ways in relation to these flows. 8 In the present essay, the power geometry concept is used to define the power shift of capital types for gaining dominance in urban space through creating or selecting the memory.
Lefevbre argues that space is produced and reproduced and that is how it represents the area of struggle, like when individuals and groups use various cultural, social, and symbolic resources to protect or rise above their place in the social order. 9 Bourdieu conceptualizes these resources as "capital" when they transform to tools to be used in the struggle for social power relations. He diversifies the concept of capital to include all forms of power: financial capital (money and property), cultural capital (all cultural assets and services including education), social capital (networks of acquaintance and relations), and symbolic capital (legitimacy). 10 Anyone associated with these capital types can coexist with symbolic capital in the areas where power is being constructed. We can liken symbolic capital to the mastery of rhetoric. For example, to create legitimacy, some governments can paint their acts in search of financial capital as a "question of survival" for the country. 11 They rely on a very common tactic, using fear of an external or internal threat to create a support system in public, to legitimize their financial decisions. Language or discourse is the primary tool of legitimization. Like the signifier-signified relationship of the image, the relationship between what is said and concealed in discourse is as effective as the perception of the group. While explaining the areas of power struggle, Bourdieu talks about the "field" (champ) metaphor as structuring structure (education, religion, art, state, politic parties, unions, etc. are all fields, in which a dominant capital controls the order and rules of the field's operation to maintain its validity and clout), where a type of capital is distinctively imposed. Sites are, on the one hand, arenas, where products, services, information, or status are produced, put into circulation, and appropriated. On the other hand, they are real places of competition, which actors occupy in their struggle to accumulate and monopolize these different types of capital. 12 The present essay looks at Taksim Square, where prior conflicts turned various resources into capital to construct social power relations.
Taksim Square is a public space that has an important place in urban identity, memory, and the struggle for social power in Istanbul. It is at the intersection of İstiklal, Sıraselviler, İnönü, and Cumhuriyet Streets and Tarlabaşı Avenue, in the district of Şişli Beyoğlu (Fig. 1). It is surrounded by buildings like Maksem (a water distribution center built in the Ottoman era, 1839), the Fountain of Mahmud I next to the Maksem, Taksim Gezi Park (1940), (late) Atatürk Kültür Merkezi (Atatürk Culture Center, 1969), and the Marmara Hotel (1972), each culturally and historically significant sites. The square has always been a busy urban center-a public transportation hub with dense pedestrian and vehicular traffic. It is also a place that carries geometries of power and represents urban resistance and heterogeneity. It is a place where different political powers have constructed projects in the name of maintaining that power over time.
The history of the square is quite unique as a public space. It is next to one of the oldest residential districts of the city, Pera, on the northern end of Grand Rue de Pera. This district, along with Galata, site of the old Genovese colony and a business and trading center, acted as a city center for minorities with different ethnic backgrounds in the nineteenth century, second to the main power center of the city in the Old Peninsula.
Settlement in this area started in the seventeenth century, when wealthy Europeans began to build their houses and gardens there. 13 The construction of the water distribution building, which gave Taksim (Taksim means distribution in Turkish) its name, started in 1732 and was finished in 1839. Around this time, a cemetery for both Muslim and non-Muslim occupants of Pera was established next to the Maksem. 14 In 1806 a military barrack building, Taksim Topçu Kışlası, was built on a part of the cemetery. This was during the time of the renewal and modernization of the Ottoman military system, and the building was a part and a symbol of this change. It also defined the area as a military area. As Aylin Topal puts it, "Authority of the sacred must have exchanged its attributes with the sacred aspect of authority." 15 A conclusive modernization and westernization movement started in the empire in the nineteenth century. In 1839 these reforms were solidified with an imperial edict known as the Tanzimat Edict, which stated that every individual in the Ottoman Empire, religion and ethnicity notwithstanding, would have equal rights. The newfound privileges that came with this ruling caused the Pera area and its mostly non-Muslim residents to consolidate their wealth rapidly in this century. In 1855, when municipalities were first established as local governments, Pera was the first operating municipal district, largely due to this accumulated wealth, but also because its residents were of mostly European descent. 16 In the next twenty years the gravitational force of this young economic center caused all the empty areas in the district to be filled with residential structures. 17 In 1864 the Christian cemetery in Taksim was moved and the first public park in Istanbul designed in its place. 18 In the nineteenth century the residence of the Ottoman sultans had been relocated from the Old Peninsula to the shores of Beşiktaş, which in turn stimulated the growth of surrounding areas. The establishment of European consulates in these areas, especially Taksim, was a result of this new geographic power shift and the already European character of the area. The area also became a cultural center with cafés, carnivals, celebrations, and entertainment venues such as the Istanbul Naum Theater. This, of course, attracted foreign artists to Pera, and the number of hotels increased. Because of all this change and with the establishment of the municipality, it was decided that the cemetery would be moved to a place far away from the city and a park should be built in its place. 19 The park provided the European residents of the area a place to rest, relax, and entertain in the manner they were accustomed to. This was the period in which Pera started to be seen as an entertainment center. 20 At the beginning of the century, in 1909, Taksim Topçu Kışlası became the scene of one of the biggest riots against the empire. It was led by a part of the military that did not support the westernization of the Ottoman Army. There were rumors that old officers were going to lose their stations to new ones trained in European ways. They were joined by the conservative groups, who were displeased by the change brought by the Tanzimat Edict, especially the distancing of the state from religious rule. This riot, called the March 31 Incident, ended in the bombardment of the barracks by the "new" Ottoman Army, but it also redefined the meaning of the barracks and Taksim. 21 Until this moment, the building was identified with the modernization reforms; from this point, it would be remembered in connection with a conservative riot.
Pera and Taksim were spaces defined by Western ideas and lifestyles throughout the Ottoman era. This would continue also during the early Republic, when the state had internalized these ideals as guidelines for the reforms that would shape the "new" Turkey. The majority of urban planning and constructions focused, understandably, on Ankara, as the new capital of the Republic. Even so, we see that just five years after the establishment of the Republic, Taksim was chosen as the place of a monument, designed by Pietro Canonica, commemorating the Republic, and the name was changed to Square of the Republic (Figs. 2, 3). The monument's design encapsulated all the main ideals behind the construction of the Republic. The founders of Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, Ismet Inönü, and Fevzi Cakmak, are depicted on the monument, and they are accompanied by both soldiers and civilians. Atatürk is shown on both southern and northern sides: in military uniform, as a military leader, and in European garb, as a modern statesman. On the eastern and western sides, there are depictions of two women, one veiled, looking toward the sky and smiling; they are a clear symbol of the changing place of women in society. In the same vein, it was important that a female art student, Sabiha Ziya, was chosen to travel to Italy to help construct the monument.
The monument, and the landscape around it, was designed to become the first area in Istanbul for state ceremonies. Its large, formal inauguration ceremony in 1928 reflected this idea. 22 After the street names with foreign origins were banned, the names of the streets around the square were changed, too. Kışla Caddesi (Barracks Street) became Cumhuriyet Caddesi (Republic Street); Cadde-i Kebir (Grand Rue de Pera; Grand Street) became İstiklal Caddesi (Liberty Street). 23 The modernization project of the Republic was reflected in the urban planning projects. To this aim, Henri Prost was invited to Istanbul in 1936. He chose to design separate plans for districts, free areas according to the healthy cities principle, 24 instead of one strategic plan for the whole city; the Old Peninsula and Pera were two of these districts. 25 In his proposed plan for Beyoğlu, the whole area from the northern shores to Taksim was supposed to be demolished and rebuilt. Transportation was very important for Prost, so he planned roads to connect Taksim to Dolmabahce, to Kurtulus, and to the Old Peninsula through Halic. Beyoğlu, Taksim, Maçka, and Şişli were designated as main residential areas of the city. One of his proposals was to seize the remains of the cemetery and demolish the barracks to make room for a public park and promenade. 26 Prost's plan was closely connected with the construction of the national identity. With the appropriation of "free areas" (wide squares, parks, and open public spaces for play) and Hausmann-type avenues, this master plan was supposed to play a big role in the secularization of the urban space in Istanbul. 27 Taksim was supposed to be a public space, where women and men would freely come together to spend time and display the theoretical reforms of the Republic to conservative members of the society and to the international community, especially European nations. 28 The barracks were restored after the March 31 Incident, and its courtyard was used as a football stadium until 1940. That year it was demolished for the construction of the Inönü Promenade, today Gezi Park. The police station on the square was replaced by Istanbul Opera House, renamed the Atatürk Cultural Center in 1943 (Fig. 4). In addition, the Atatürk Library, the Istanbul Radio Broadcasting House, and the Lütfi Kirdar Sports and Exhibition Hall were built around the square; all these buildings, right in the center of Istanbul, embodied the politics and ideals of the Turkish Republic. 29 After Turkey joined NATO, in 1952 international hotel chains began to be opened around Taksim. The most prominent ones were the Hilton in 1955 and the Intercontinental Istanbul (today the Marmara Hotel) on the square in 1972. 30 The major demographic change of the area happened in 1955. The September 6-7 Incidents, which resulted in violent attacks on the houses and workplaces of the minorities living in Istanbul, forced these groups to abandon their living spaces. 31 The new occupants of the houses left empty around Taksim were the rural population from Anatolia, part of the massive immigration wave of this period.
Like almost all important central urban squares, Taksim Square was used by different social groups to make their voices heard by the ruling power. Before Taksim Square became the center for meetings and protests, the areas used by the public to show dissent (e.g., the protests against the occupation of the Ottoman Empire by the Allied Forces at the end of the First World War) were Sultanahmet Square, the Hippodrome of the Byzantine Empire (which was the traditional location for dialogue between the emperor and the public), and Beyazid Square. 32 These places are in the Old Peninsula, the governmental center of the time. After Ankara became the capital of the Republic and Taksim Square was reimagined as a centralized symbol of the state in Istanbul, the latter began to be used for public meetings. While in the 1950s political party rallies were organized in the square, in the 1960s it became a demonstration area, especially for students protesting the presence of NATO and imperialism in general. On February 16, 1969, a day known as Bloody Sunday in Turkey, students protesting the arrival of the US Sixth Fleet were attacked by right-leaning counterprotesters. In the ensuing confrontation, two students lost their lives. In the 1970s, it became the workers' movement whose turn it was to use the square. 33 In 1976 the first celebration of May Day in Turkey was held here. In the next year, half a million people are believed to have attended the celebrations, where gunfire was directed from the rooftops on the demonstrators. Through the gunfire and the panic caused by it, 34 people lost their lives and 134 people were injured. These attacks elevated Taksim Square to a kind of sacred place for the political Left in Turkey. In 1978, in spite of the attack, May Day celebrations were held in the square. In 1979 protesters were prevented from going to it, and in 1980, due to the coup, political gatherings were prohibited entirely. 34 In 2007, after clashes with the police, protestors managed to enter the square to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of the attack. When protestors tried to do the same thing again a year later, the square was opened for a limited number of organizations in 2009. In 2010 it was opened for the May 1 celebrations, and millions attended. 35 After just two years, with the beginning of the pedestrianization project, the celebrations were prohibited again. The reason given was that the constructions made a meeting that size dangerous. In 2013 public demonstrations on the square were banned indefinitely, because of the possible negative effect on traffic and local business. 36 A new, 673,000-square-meter meeting place, Yenikapı Square, on the shore of Marmara, was built on a filled-in area between Samatya and Yenikapı. In spite of this change, Taksim Square did not lose its place as an important monumental We can trace the influence of the early 1980s neoliberal politics on decisions to restructure this urban space. After the 1980s, Istanbul was seen as an object of consumption and marketed as a world city by the state and the local governments. 37 The reorganization of the space to turn Istanbul into an international marketplace started with "a production oriented structure, a financial sector, and tourism oriented urban economy, combined tourism centers, business and shopping centers provided by the Tourism Incentive Law; foreign capital investments and [a] number of foreign-owned shopping centers and hypermarkets in the city." 38 To attract the international companies' interest in addition to airports and business centers, "glamour zones" with good hotels, restaurants, and "world-class culture" were needed. 39 Beyoğlu district, a cultural center since the Ottoman era, was ready to use its varied social and economic resources for these ambitions, and Taksim, as its main square and a transportation hub, became its focal point.
The 1980s and 1990s, which Çağlar Keyder defines as the period in which informal globalization really started to evolve into the neoliberal era it became in the 2000s, were also when individual states started to put globalization-related politics into place. 40 In Turkey, from this point on, the race to become a global city was the government's main aim, and the transformation of the facades of cities was conducted through demolition and reconstruction. The cultural and architectural vocabulary used in these reconstructions was chosen with a specific cultural code in mind. In Istanbul, like in Turkey in general, this vocabulary was adapted from the architectural styles of old Turkish states like the Ottoman Empire or the Anatolian Seljuk state to create a nouveau historicist style. The renewals in the Pera area consisted of demolishing the existing residential and commercial structures and pathways-the old passages or cinemas buildings-and rebuilding them by combining their land as malls that resembled their original selves from the outside with completely new floor plans inside. 41 This move simply reproduced the European nineteenthcentury historicist architecture that already dominated the area. 42 Sharon Zukin criticizes this kind of commodifying of space as a cultural object for global capital, as turning the cultural spaces into the most effective means of profit. 43 As John Urry puts it, this transformation occurs as the result of touristic strategies of governments in the framework of cultural flows and in connection with capital. History and culture were exhibited to market local aspects and thus appeal to certain touristic expectations. 44 This causes nonofficial accounts of cultural memory to be wiped away and turns it into a place for consumption, which provokes a conflict between economic capital and cultural capital.
In the case of Taksim Square, neoliberal policies, discourse, and practices used in transforming cultural heritage to symbolic capital have all been made visible through civil initiatives, including Emek Bizim (Emek Is Ours), which attempted to stop the destruction of Cinema Emek, or Beyoğlu Kent Savunması (Beyoğlu Urban Defense) and Taksim Platformu (Taksim Platform), which attempted to organize a civil resistance against the rapid urban transformation of the area. 45 There are also the cases of demolition in the Tarlabaşı area next to the square and Emek Movie theater and many other movie theaters and booksellers on Istiklal Street; plans for construction of a mosque (Fig. 5), the demolishment of the Atatürk Cultural Center (Fig. 6), and the obstruction of LGBTQ Pride and Women Day parades fed these worries. 46 While the existence of the square as a memory space, solidified by the social actions of its past, was being erased by these demolitions and reconstructions, it was being rapidly transformed to the arena of an economy centered on tourism and consumption.
In 2011 the Taksim Project, an extensive plan to divert the vehicle traffic in the square underground, was approved. The first objections to the project came from the chambers and civil initiatives. They pointed out that the absence of roads and traffic would create an undefined area, and opposed the rebuilding of the barracks, which spelled the demolition of the park. The component of the project that included diversion of traffic underground was realized, while the demolition of the park to construct the barracks provoked an unforeseen reaction from the public. In May 2013 the news of the impending demolition of the park started to circulate, and a protest framed as a "park-watch" and occupation through tents and a concert was planned. The harsh police response to the protesters turned this small protest into a never-before-seen civil resistance that spread throughout Turkey, and for ten days Gezi Park and Taksim Square were occupied by thousands of circulating Istanbulites. The Gezi Park Incident, as it is called, ended with police intervention. 47 These protests brought the residents of Istanbul with completely different backgrounds, political, economic, ethnic and sexual identities, and grievances together. Malte Fuhrmann describes the Gezi Park Protests as the atmosphere of a genuine fête populaire, an uncensored agora, however made it possible for these different visions of the megalopolis not only to coexist, but for new ones to be created. The lack of hierarchy and oppression, the media interconnectivity, and the young age of many protesters facilitated the production of new images through which common visions could be shared, visions which no longer had to necessarily revolve around the past. 48 For the first time, in a long time, the square had given birth to a process of creation that was original, unique, and unencumbered by the expectations of capital. The municipality of Istanbul after the rule of conservative political parties for twenty-two years changed hands in 2019 to the socialist CHP (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi, Republican People's Party). In February 2020 the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality partnered with the Istanbul Research Center for an Urban Design Competition for Taksim Square. A temporary structure, named "Kavuşma Durağı" (Meeting Point), was designed and constructed in the square on February 15, but the Conservation Board decided that it had to be taken down immediately, an example of the newly established power struggle between the state and the local government over the power geometry in the square.
The architect Korhan Gümüş, comparing this project to many other realized projects allowed by the board that were much bigger in scale and damaging to the integrity of the square and included structural interventions, finds this decision political and relates it to representation politics in public space. He writes, There are two types of attitudes in this framework. First is inscribing ones own traces in a space. Taking down Topcu Barracks or building a mosque is in this manner. Second is defining the area as a transportation space, a transfer hub. Every single interference to Taksim until this day has been without an exception alienating or based upon erasing the other from the public space. 49 As Fuhrmann puts it, it is a never-ending struggle for the "discursive hegemony over Istanbul's past" (Fig. 7). 50 What started with the construction of a monument of the Republic on the entrance of Grand Rue de Pera, an important part of the history of minorities in Istanbul, and across the barracks, where one of the biggest riots against the westernization of the empire took place, continued with the construction of Atatürk Cultural Center, a symbol of the Republic by name and by function, and destruction of the barracks for a park, which will be part of the secularization in the urban life. Today it continues with the construction of a mosque right next to the monument, in the entrance of the same street, with still-strong visual traces of nineteenth-century European architecture and lifestyle, and with plans of rebuilding the barracks to reintegrate the history of the Ottoman Empire with the square. The destruction of Atatürk Cultural Center and the visual disappearance of the Monument of the Republic because of the huge, undefined space created by the pedestrianization project, on the other hand, erase the traces of the early years of the Republic. The unfortunate thing is that all through this struggle, the square is losing its place in the lives of the public. It is no longer a place to meet, but only an area of transition between others (Fig. 8). While this essay was being prepared for publication, in March 2020, the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality launched another urban design project competition for a project called "Square for Everyone and Everything." The project aims to organize the square according to contemporary principles to create an urban public space experience that embraces the sensitivities of every faction of the society. 51 The competition invites its participants to a collective thought process for proposals with an approach that is contemporary and values cultural memory. Whether the proposals are going to overlap with the intentions of the competition committee remains to be seen, but one thing is certain: this competition is a bold step as a comprehensive plan for the square, the first one since Prost's.

On the Memory of Place
The philosopher Manuel DeLanda presents a historical process through phase transitions. He likens these transitions to changes of states of matter: solid, liquid, gas. 52 Quoting the physicist, hydrodynamicist, and engineer Arthur S. Iberall, DeLanda states that the move from hunter-gatherer to agriculturalist, and from agriculturalist to city dweller, is not a linear evolution. When the concentration created by the consequences of a period "reaches a critical mass," this kind of a change of state is experienced (e.g., the transition from huntergatherer to agriculturalist was only possible with the domestication of grain). Every society has its own phases that come about in their own social construction codes and act like a catalyst, just like the phase transitions of power geometry through Taksim Square, with their economic, cultural, political, and social contexts.
Literature on this subject consists of two subcategories, individual and collective memory. In the beginning of the twentieth century, Maurice Halbwachs developed the concept of collective memory in the context of the social framework of memory. According to this concept, societies have memories like individuals, which means that they decode events in definite ways and organize them to serve defined aims. Halbwachs saw the collective memory as an appropriate concept to define a group's methods of creating a common representation of its history. 53 Paul Ricoeur, by contrast, associates the concept of collective memory with a need for others to remember. 54 Collective memory is related to positioning and describing oneself socially and defined by its connection to identity and the sense of belonging. In Halbwachs's argument, remembering in the collective memory is not restricted to individual memory; the completed or re-created recollections are either from the perspective of the society one belongs to or are adapted to this perspective. Jan Assmann states that memory is always related to other individuals, groups, and politics. 55 Paul Connerton, while examining the concept of collective memory, answers his own question about how the groups carry and protect the memory, by associating governance defining conditions of the power hierarchy with an aspect of power. 56 The continuity of the memory is established through memorials (religious rituals, political commemoration dates) and physical practices (cultural codes, manner, and attitudes). Assmann judges this creation process as the construction and enforcement of a collective memory by a group, which does not have one, through mnemonic institutions such as monuments, libraries, and archives. 57 At Taksim Square this continuity can be observed by the state ceremonies, like the celebrations for the establishment of the Republic, but also meetings organized by the public like May 1 celebrations or even the New Year's celebrations that bring people together and keep the memory of the square alive.
Pierre Nora states that what we call memory today is no longer memory and belongs to history. He claims that with archiving, the materialization of the memory has surged in a very short time, and behind the spreading of this materialization lies the sense of continuity in memory-identity relations. 58 The appearance of collective memory started with historiography, and its frame became clear during the nation-state era. 59 Hereafter, taught history is cleansed of bad memories and handpicked according to its proximity to the principle of loyalty to the nation by systems implemented by the dominant power, like educational institutions and mass media. This designed history forms the memory; its symbolic tools form the space. After history conquers memory, memory becomes an assignment, a debt to pass down. 60 Because the assignment of memory is politically legitimatized through education and historiography, it is open to exploitation. This assignment, which became one of the tools of domination for the power, can be easily and repeatedly manipulated by it. Collective memory, created by the nation-states through national historiography, ensures the continuation of the identity with invented traditions such as ceremonies and myths. 61 Michel Foucault advocates validating new forms of subjectivity, against the powers defining individuality with discursive and nondiscursive practices. There is not one objective external world but multiple socially constructed truths. Individuality, identity, and subjectivity do not belong in a natural area controlled by political organizations and strategies; they are tools, which make the operations of these kinds of organizations and strategies possible. The imperative to analyze the interference of power in body and action to take a stand against imposed subjectivity can be a guidepost in reading the historical construction in the context of the relationship between power and control. 62 The concept of memory spaces is attached to discussions of materialization of memory. Memory spaces are defined as places that intercede and help human groups to express the "collective information . . . that belongs to the past and is the basis of the sense of unity and distinctiveness of the group" in public discourse. 63 Nora says, "There are lieu de mémoire now, because there is no memory." 64 The memory spaces can be places with physical spaces like monuments, libraries, collections, archives, museums, or squares, but they also can be abstract spaces like festivals, anniversaries, memorials, ceremonies, and traditions. Diaries, autobiographies, monuments or mausoleums, testaments, dictionaries, feasts with only symbolical meanings, and pilgrimage places are memory spaces with important parts to play in creating social memory and history. 65 Obviously, Nora does not approach the idea of memory space just as a physical space; on the contrary, he defines them as places, ceremonies, and objects that have gained a symbolic meaning, just as this essay studies Taksim Square with its established physical and symbolic rituals. Memory spaces are the existence of the incarnation of a memory, a sense of a historical continuation, or embodiment, and the remains of conscious memories in a place or an object. 66 Symbolic meanings are reproduced with different contexts in the historical paradigm, which is constructed by the power in the framework of power relations. 67 Power changes the social space with the presentations of its existence and builds spaces of politics and memory, specifically to create order. 68 Michel de Certeau compares the concepts of place and space: While the place is stable, space has action; space is the place, where execution happens. For example, while a street is a geometrically defined place, it turns to a space through the people walking on it . . . what turns a place to space and space to place is the narrative. . . . Therefore, a place or a constructed space cannot contain memory without it. 69 When these narratives do not have a place in state-sanctioned historiographies, responsibility to ensure that these narratives are not forgotten falls on the shoulders of the public through civic initiatives. 70 Halbwachs states that collective memory cannot develop outside the spatial frame. 71 There are multiple overlaps and similarities between narratives and built space, and according to Ricoeur, they both create similar records: Every new structure, just like intertextual narratives tying in different texts, settles in the urban space. 72 City, as the best place to read the effect of time on space, evokes complex feelings; while a person can feel lost in a city, public space, squares with definite names, beckons him to ritualized memorials and meetings. 73 According to Aldo Rossi, the city itself is the collective memory of its residents, and, just like memory, it is connected to objects and places. 74 There are also researchers who completely reject the idea of a placecentric memory. Uğur Tanyeli, for instance, criticizes this discourse for dreaming a historicity innate to place. He claims that a city cannot have a memory, that historicity is a social construct, and defending this kind of memory would not be democratic. 75 He supports his claim by drawing on Guy Debord, who defines place, memory, and city as "prefabricated," or constantly established through images and discourses. Moreover, the impacts of globalization make the existence of spatially specific memory questionable.
What needs to be maintained and what needs to be erased from collective social memory is a crucial discussion for society. Through what means is this mutually occurring impulse to both evoke and efface public memory determined? If memory is the re-creation of the past seen through today's perspective, its editing will be done by those in power. The effacing or covering of that, the remembrance of which is not desirable, is important in the context of the construction of the social. In societies where there are different, conflicting, and competing narratives about history, imposing one narrative creates a state of stress between groups, who accept or reject the dominant narrative, while multiple realities derived from these multiple narratives clash. For the unity of the society, an approach of "democratic recollection policy" that implicitly contains differences and allows the representation of these differences would prevent the polarization. 76 Mithat Sancar explains this as "sometimes to create connections to a distant past, policies combining 'effacing' and 'evoking,' that aim to put the recent past out of the way, might be put into effect. In such cases, endeavours aimed to forget the recent past and to remind the distant past are concentrated on." 77 He places this kind of situation in the confrontations with memory in the context of transitioning from remembering without forgetting. Power is an important stimulant for remembrance. 78 The relationship power has with memory, according to Assmann, is bidirectional; because of the need for an origin, it is retrospective, because of the wish to be remembered, prospective. Everything that happened in history in search of eternity is a part of this. 79 The linear approach to history strengthens power's relation to memory. The phenomena of remembering and forgetting are related to the concepts of repeating and renewing. 80 Cities are the places that materialize symbols of power and are the site of both symbolic power and symbolic resistance. 81 That is why the city harbors the geometry of the power struggle.

Conclusion
Which memory should be protected, which one erased, and who will decide? Whose memory is worthy of representation?
The phenomenon of memory encapsulates and experiences forgetting and remembering in a frenetic state, because of changes in urban power geometries. Memory spaces are spaces of strategy, where symbolic capitals invent intentional acts of forgetting and remembering in movements, monuments, histories, rituals, and spaces. In this context, Taksim Square is a memory space containing the power struggles of social, cultural, economic, and political capitals. It is an extremely political public arena where, specifically in the political historical process, revanchist behavior was displayed through constructing and demolishing buildings and monuments, which are symbols of the past and present dominant capital, political or otherwise. In this study, while trying to compile a memory record of the square, it became apparent that it was the scene of contest for all the capital types that Bourdieu conceptualized in power relationships.
Massey defines space in a relational understanding of place as a phenomenon produced by different spatial and social relationships, and the spatialtemporal event shaped by the coming together of stories until this moment. 82 Because of this and through the construction of collective memory, the real aim is spatial fixation and an understanding that power pushes anything that does not belong to this sanctioned memory outside its spatial confines. The redefinition of Taksim Square by erasing its function as a meeting and demonstration space demonstrates this kind of a forcible intervention to the memory of a place.
Taksim Square is an important area of revelation that witnessed struggles of cultural capital in investments in interpretations of Ottoman culture and tourism, financial capital in urban transformation projects and mega projects, and political symbolic capital in the representation of religious and political ideologies, where memory was constantly constructed and erased.
When the pedestrianization project redirected Tarlabaşı Avenue and Cumhuriyet Street traffic underground, it created an undefined, big urban gap around Taksim Square (Fig. 9). One of the most important spaces of social memory became a transit area stripped of the characteristics making it a square. With the constant presence of police barricades and vehicles, the square is permanently in a state of exception that warns visitors to "be on their guard" and creates a socially dead space of heterotopia. 83 Taksim Square is the representation of social space as defined by Bourdieu's "field" not only in the context of the dominance but also the resistance, in the sense that the existence of the dominant demands the existence of a contrary resisting power in an asymmetrical relationship (when a secular history is being dictated, a more religious opposition is born; if globalization is dictated, a localist one). While conceptualizing the resources as capital when they become tools of conflict and are used as social power relations, Bourdieu states that field conflict revolves around types of capital like economic, cultural, scientific, and religious. 84 Taksim Square is the spatial arena of the confluence of different fields. It is apparent that the conflicts that took place here, in the context of the examples stated before, were conducted on symbolic and material resources. * * * Ceren Göğüş is assistant professor of architecture at the University of İstanbul Kültür University. She received her master of science and PhD degrees in the History of Architecture Program from İstanbul Technical University. Her major research interests include nineteenth-century world exhibitions, monument architecture, nineteenth-century Ottoman architecture, and the westernization period in the Ottoman Empire, with its effects on architecture.
Asiye Akgün Gültekin is assistant professor of architecture at the University of İstanbul Kültür University. She received her PhD in the Architectural Design Programme from İstanbul Technical University in 2012. Her major research interests include urban segregation, spatial exclusion, and economic policy of space, and social space issues.