Caught between Aspiration and Actuality:The Etiler Housing Cooperative and the Production of Housing in Turkey

The Turkish government promoted the building of housing cooperatives as a social housing program beginning in the second half of the 1930s. While these cooperatives received government aid, they did not produce affordable housing for lower-income groups. Instead, they provided fashionable modern houses to middle- and high-income homeowners. In architectural journals, these new houses were understood and critiqued as exemplars of a specifically Turkish modern style, rather than as pragmatic solutions to a housing crisis. Caught between Aspiration and Actuality: The Etiler Housing Cooperative and the Production of Housing in Turkey analyzes the transformation of housing cooperatives from a social housing program into a method to enable middle-class homeownership by examining the story of the Etiler Housing Cooperative, built between 1952 and 1957 in Istanbul. Gül Neşe Doğusan Alexander follows the story of Etiler through a detailed examination of laws, parliamentary minutes, popular media, professional publications on architecture, maps, and other published materials.