Property, State and Geopolitics: Re-Interpreting the Turkish Road to Modernity

This dissertation re-interprets and re-historicizes the origin and development of capitalism in the late Ottoman Empire and Turkey, and by doing so, it explores in a new light the question of multiple modernities. Contrary to the conventional wisdom in Historical Sociology and International Relations, I argue that the formation of market societies should not be considered the outcome of economic processes, but rather of systematic political and cultural interventions into existing ways of life that ensure the commodification of the means of subsistence, especially of land and labour. Departing from the evolutionary understanding of the transition of capitalism, I show that the (early) modern world did not witness a concentric extension of largely similar market-making projects following the rise of British capitalism. Instead, historically specific social and geopolitical struggles generated qualitatively different modernities within and outside Europe. In particular, the modernization associated with Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, i.e. the Jacobin model, not only proved (at least for a while) the viability of an alternative path to modernization that did not require the commodification of the means of life, but also became a model itself to be emulated and selectively adapted by others in and beyond Europe. In this context, my argument is that from 1840 to 1950 Ottoman/Turkish modernization efforts did not follow a single project of westernization; but rather, that Ottoman/Turkish elites appropriated, oscillated between and recombined with local resources two inherently contradictory development strategies originally advanced by Britain and France. Overtime, however, the reactions from below and interventions from outside increasingly forced the Ottoman/Turkish state to consolidate the Jacobin model at the expense of market society. The state, unable/unwilling to commodify land and labour, increasingly substituted the relations of market society with the Jacobin model, while repeatedly recombining the latter with domestic social and ideological resources. The cumulative result of this century-long Turkish experiment with modernity, therefore, was a historically specific Jacobinism that bypassed capitalism (and socialism) based on an alternative form of property and sociality. Relatedly, although capitalist property relations began to penetrate the social fabric from the 1950s onwards, this Jacobin legacy had a profound impact on the manner in which capitalism was instituted in Turkey. Seen from this angle, I contend that postwar modernization in Turkey cannot be understood merely as another form of capitalism, nor can Turkeys current transformation signify a mere transition to another form of modernity. Overall, then, the dissertation contributes to a deeper understanding of the social content, tempo and multi-linearity of world historical development. By departing from the evolutionary conceptions of capitalist development, it undermines the unilinear understanding of the Western path to modernity, which in turn has paradigmatic implications for the quality and manner of the arrival of modernity in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey

3D Visualization for Urban Earthquake Risk

Visualization is the graphical presentation of information, with the goal of improving the viewer’s understanding of the information contents. As today’s world is getting richer in information, visualization of the information is important for effective communication and decision making. In this study, generation of a 3D city model in CAD environment and its use in a spatial decision support system for earthquake risk in an urban area is presented. As CAD products’ quality is more enhanced than the other tools the 3D city model is generated in CAD environment. In CAD environment, a 2D building foot print vector layer is used. After extrude operations, real building textures are obtained by taking pictures from the study area. Texture mapping tools are used to cover extruded buildings with acquired building texture images. The 3D city model is used to visualize each building’s earthquake risk level. The model also serves for querying and scenario analyses in a spatial decision support system

Integrating Physical Accessibility of Emergency Establishments into Earthquake Risk Assessment

Human being has always been in a continual struggle with disasters. They are mostly sudden and unexpected and cause irreversible damages to human life and property. Disasters are facts of life, but it is always possible to decrease the effects of disasters by preparedness. In disaster case, accessibility is one of the most vital and important components of disaster preparedness and mean the difference between loosing a life or saving a life. That is why emergency accessibility, regardless if it is measured in time, distance, population or any other cost, is the most important variable that decision makers must consider in the early stages of planning for developing planning policies. In the light of the above mentioned facts this study analyzed 3 different accessibility measurement techniques (Zone Based, Isochronal Based And Raster Based Techniques) within GIS environment for more efficient modeling of physical accessibility in Eskisehir urban area and for creating an accessibility vulnerability index as an input for a higher scale earthquake risk detection process. The results can also directly be used by emergency planners/city and regional planners as a part of a GIS based DSS (Decision Support System) in accessibility measurement or can be integrated into a more comprehensive disaster risk calculation processes

The COVID-19 pandemic's impact on U.S. electricity demand and supply: an early view from the data

After the onset of the recent COVID-19 pandemic, a number of studies reported on possible changes in electricity consumption trends. The overall theme of these reports was that ``electricity use has decreased during the pandemic, but the power grid is still reliable''---mostly due to reduced economic activity. In this paper we analyze electricity data upto end of May 2020, examining both electricity demand and variables that can indicate stress on the power grid, such as peak demand and demand ramp-rate. We limit this study to three states in the USA: New York, California, and Florida. The results indicate that the effect of the pandemic on electricity demand is not a simple reduction from comparable time frames, and there are noticeable differences among regions. The variables that can indicate stress on the grid also conveyed mixed messages: some indicate an increase in stress, some indicate a decrease, and some do not indicate any clear difference. A positive message is that some of the changes that were observed around the time stay-at-home orders were issued appeared to revert back by May 2020. A key challenge in ascribing any observed change to the pandemic is correcting for weather. We provide a weather-correction method, apply it to a small city-wide area, and discuss the implications of the estimated changes in demand. The weather correction exercise underscored that weather-correction is as challenging as it is important