Enacting cultural infrastructure in the 21st century: Konya as an urban assemblage

This thesis investigates how culture is translated into spatial ordering that configures urban form. Culture’s complexity remains legible in the city: through signifying systems and urban-architectural formation, city and culture mutually constitute lived urban reality. The study adopts the systematics of cultural infrastructure to operationalize that reciprocity—asking how cultural discourse becomes spatially articulated and assembled in urban space, and how architecture can translate cultural configurations into a governable urban order. The thesis treats culture in urban space as a carrier of continuity and change and adopts a meta-cultural perspective that moves from discursive articulation to the adaptability of urban assemblage, proposing a multi-scalar(macro–meso–micro) cultural infrastructure model and reframing cultural sustainability as a structural pillar for configuring urban form within the shifting cultural ecosystem of the 21st century. Methodologically, the model is implemented through multi-layered cultural mapping in Konya, covering the central districts of Karatay, Selçuklu, and Meram, as well as the Sillevi neighborhood. The mapping traces dominant, hegemonic, and subordinated layers by linking macro-scale cultural narratives, development axes, and mobility infrastructures; meso-scale districts, nodes, and corridors; and micro-scale everyday practices, spatial interfaces, and value systems—read through cultural planning logic. The applied methodology demonstrates how Konya’s cultural-infrastructural networks metabolize historical continuities into contemporary urban realities. Ultimately, the thesis contributes to the discipline of architecture a transferable analytical model and mapping methodology that makes cultural layers observable and comparable, and positions cultural infrastructure as a guiding metabolic system for urban cultural formation and sustainability in the urban realm.