Özge Altin: The Production of Gendered Urban Public Spaces: Women’s Experiences of Taksim, Istanbul

Abstract

This dissertation examines how urban public spaces are produced, experienced, and contested through gendered power relations in contemporary Turkey, focusing on women’s experiences in Istanbul’s Taksim Quarter. Guided by critical feminist theory, the study employs the analytical lens of Henri Lefebvre’s conceptualisation of the production of social space, the spatial triad: perceived space, conceived space, and lived space. It explores how recent socio-political transformations have reshaped women’s visibility, safety, and belonging in the city’s most symbolically charged public space.

Adopting a feminist standpoint epistemology with a qualitative case study design, this research is based on semi-structured interviews with women from diverse backgrounds who frequent Taksim. Through their narratives, the study uncovers how patriarchal norms, conservative ideologies, and spatial design intersect to regulate women’s everyday mobility and embodied presence. Experiences of surveillance, harassment, and fear of violence emerge as key mechanisms of spatial exclusion. However, the research also equally highlights women’s resilience and agency: revealing how they develop coping strategies, reclaim visibility, and negotiate belonging through both subtle and overt practices of resistance.

The dissertation situates these micro-level encounters within macro-level structures of political control and urban design. It shows how recent conservative discourse and market-driven spatial politics have redefined public space, producing gendered hierarchies that marginalize women while setting a moralized and commodified urban order. At the same time, women’s everyday negotiations—altering routes, forming solidarities, and asserting public presence—demonstrate that space remains not only a dynamic arena of oppression but also of possibility.

The findings lead to a framework that integrates feminist perspectives with Lefebvre’s spatial triad, linking gendered spatial experience to political and ideological transformations. Thus, the study contributes to gendered space theories within feminist urban sociology by theorizing the spatial production of inequality. It advances an understanding of public space as a site where state power, authoritarian spatial politics, and patriarchal regulation converge, yet where women continuously remake the meanings of presence, freedom, citizenship, and their right to the city in everyday urban life.