Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
METU JOURNAL OF THE FACULTY OF ARCHITECTURE, cilt.35, ss.221-241, 2018 (AHCI)
This article discusses the concept of tolerance as an essential urban quality within the bounds of public space. The prevalent approach in urban research reveals that public spaces backdrop the level of urbanites' ability and willingness to tolerate different cultural and social clusters. As a further contribution to this observation, this study aims to develop the understanding that public spaces play a significant role in urban tolerance as geographies of encounters rather than serving as neutral settings. Within this understanding, the article explores the concept of tolerance by referring to a thought-provoking urban public area in Ankara, the Ataturk Cultural Centre, and through a discussion of this area's conflicting processes of architectural and societal production. Urban public spaces are especially intriguing when they reflect a duality, such as that of a representational character (in this case, embodying ideal and monumental gestures of a certain national or cultural virtue) and a casual social reformatting (containing everydayness and popular low culture). In Ankara this dual state initiates an examination of the Cultural Centre's status as a tolerance space within an arduous political context that generates systematic contrasts and associations.