Heritage Visibility and Politics in Contemporary İstanbul: A Qualitative Case Study of the Çamlıca Tower

Sammanfattning

The city of Istanbul has been a site of dispute between competing visions of national heritage and urban modernity since the founding of the Turkish republic in 1923. More recently, large-scale state-sponsored infrastructure projects have become increasingly prominent features of Istanbul's urban setting, functioning alongside their technical purposes as sites through which cultural narratives and national identity are officially formulated. This study focuses on one of these megaprojects: the Çamlıca Tower, a telecommunications and observation tower inaugurated in May 2021 on the Asian side of Istanbul, as a case study for examining how contemporary megaprojects function as symbolic expressions of heritage and identity in Turkey. Despite the existence of scholarly literature that has addressed Turkish megaprojects, this has been primarily done through the lens of urban governance and political economy, while the symbolic and representational dimensions of these projects remain largely underexplored, particularly in relation to the strategic usage of Ottoman heritage within the state’s contemporary republican institutions. This study attempts at addressing that specific gap by asking how the Çamlıca Tower can be analyzed as a symbolic expression of heritage and identity in contemporary Turkey, with focus on its planning, design, and urban visibility. The study employs visual monument analysis and historical contextualization to examine visual patterns, official documents, architectural statements, and media representations surrounding the tower. The analysis finds that the tower communicates state power through three interlocking dimensions: its commanding visual presence across Istanbul's historic skyline, its engagement with Ottoman aesthetic references, and its semiotic construction as a composite symbol of technological modernity and national continuity. These findings suggest that contemporary Turkish megaprojects operate both as infrastructure and as instruments of political legitimation, using urban form to anchor ideological narratives within the everyday cityscape.