Everyday urban public space : Turkish immigrant women's perspective

Abstract

This thesis examines the use, experience, and appropriation of everyday urban public spaces by Turkish immigrant women living in Enschede, the Netherlands. Based on the two premises of conceptualizing the urban public space as a social construct and of valorizing users as social actors, the main objective of this thesis is to explore and analyze the spatial practices and variety of conceptions and interpretations of everyday urban public spaces, presenting the multi-facetedness of Turkish immigrant women’s connections, orientations, and involvement with the urban space and social life. This thesis advocates a relational approach to urban public space, acknowledging everyday urban public space as a place of reciprocal dynamic relations full of symbols and power, wherein differences, like gender, class, and ethnicity are imbued in their social constructions and spatial representations. Turkish immigrant women, whose relations with space, both locational and transnational, influence the social construction of urban public spaces, are portrayed as active social actors constructing and reconstructing urban public spaces based on their own realities and meanings, derived from the conflicts, contestations, and coalitions of appropriation of urban public space. This thesis presents an in-depth analysis of Turkish immigrant women and their relational contexts, which in turn constrain, shape, or frame their spatial behavior and patterns of use and experience of public spaces, and at the same time, elaborates how different characteristics and kinds of urban public spaces condition the use and users’ spatial interactions. Publicness and privateness are interwoven in these contextual definitions in which Turkish immigrant women position themselves and others in a variety of public spaces in the city. Based on an ethnographic case study in Enschede, this thesis argues that avoidance and participation, withdrawal and placement are articulated in relational frameworks in which boundaries of use and appropriation are continuously constructed, negotiated, re-constructed, and expressed.