Commemoration at Ankara train station © Deniz Kimyon Tuna, October 2018
In this article, Deniz Kimyon Tuna, Associate Researcher at Géographie-Cités, analyses the politics of confronting atrocity and try to situate this politics within the right to memory.
On 10 October 2015, thousands of people gathered for a political rally at a public square in front of the Ankara train station in Turkey. At 10:04 a.m., two bombs planted by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) struck the demonstration area, leaving behind a space ravaged by blood, cries and pain. Following the brutal attack, the space of Ankara Train Station Square changed in profound ways for survivors. Today, nearly a decade later, people continue to gather in the square on the tenth day of every month to commemorate their comrades who were assassinated in this space.
In this article, Deniz Kimyon Tuna draws on a substantial body of literature on memorials and public spaces, as well as on urban conflicts related to the delimitation of traumatic spaces and the spatialization of memory, in order to examine the processes and experiences connected to these spaces as struggles for justice. The analysis focuses on a particular aspect of the aftermath of the attack: a design competition intended to initiate the transformation of an urban space marked by trauma and political contestation. Through this competition, the author examines the political dynamics at play in the recognition and memorialization of the atrocity, and seeks to situate this reflection within the framework of the right to memory, a crucial yet often overlooked issue in thinking and action surrounding the right to the city.
Kimyon Tuna, D. (2025), THE AFTERMATH OF THE ANKARA STATION MASSACRE: The Agency of Urban Design in the Right to Memory. Int. J. Urban Reg. Res., 49: 1356-1377. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.13362
