• 2 Interview with Yılmaz Öz, Ankara, April 15, 2016.
• 3 Ibid. See also https://www.taa-ankara.org.tr/en/cultural-programs/social-cultural-programs . Acces (...)

1In March 1953, a young Turkish lawyer named Yılmaz Öz (1930-), having recently completed his master’s degree in international law at Yale University and in connection with the Minneapolis-Moline tractor company from the United States (US), returned to his home country to start working for the company’s factory in the rural outskirts of Ankara.2 It was to be the first tractor factory in Turkey. Öz left Turkey for Yale in 1951, upon finishing his undergraduate studies in law at Ankara University, when the Turkish-American Association, of which Öz would later serve as director, was founded in Ankara as part of a bilateral agreement signed in 1949 between the two governments. This agreement to “strengthen friendship and cultural ties” and develop cultural cooperation also initiated the Fulbright Program to school the local experts to “assume important leadership positions, take part in leading science and arts developments, and serve as voluntary cultural ambassadors.”3

• 4 Hüsamettin Güz, “Meslektaş Portreleri: 1- Vecdi Diker,” Türkiye Mühendislik Haberleri, TMMOB Chamb (...)
• 5 “Tarihçe,” TürkTraktör. URL: https://www.turktraktor.com.tr/kurumsal/tarihce. Accessed 20 May 2021
• 6 Ibid.

2The tractor company in Ankara, where Öz would be employed upon his return to Turkey in 1953, was founded by an international consortium as part of the Marshall Plan agreements between the US and the Turkish Government. The consortium was piloted by Vecdi Diker (1910-1997), a civil engineer educated at the University of Missouri, and the first director of the General Directorate of Highways in Turkey.4 The company Minneapolis-Moline TürkTraktör ve Ziraat Makineleri A.Ş. was officially launched with a public investment of 20 million liras following a 1954 memorandum of understanding between the US tractor company Minneapolis-Moline Co., the Republican Agricultural Bank of Turkey [Türkiye Cumhuriyeti Ziraat Bankası], the Mechanical and Chemical Industry Incorporated Company [Makine ve Kimya Endüstrisi Kurumu], the Agricultural Equipment Institution of Turkey [Türkiye Zirai Donatım Kurumu] and two local associations of agricultural cooperatives.5 Commonly referred to as TürkTraktör, the factory planned to begin operating in 1955, with both local and foreign personnel, hired by Minneapolis-Moline Co. for a duration of 25 years according to the memorandum of understanding. The first tractor rolled off its assembly line on March 8, 1955.6

• 7 Bekir Koç and Murat Baskıcı, Bozkırdan Sanayinin Başkentine: Ankara Sanayi Tarihi, Ankara: Ankara (...)
• 8 Ibid., p. 95.
• 9 Ibid.
• 10 “History,” Koç Group. URL: https://www.koc.com.tr/about-us/history. Accessed 20 June 2021.

3The first US-made agricultural machinery of the Marshall Plan agreements had been imported to Turkey in 1949 via Koç Ticaret T.A.Ş. (Koç Trade Co. Inc.), an Ankara-based private company, which, at the time, was the official distributor in Turkey for the Oliver Farm Equipment Company.7 Vehbi Koç (1901-1996) was an Ankara-born tradesman who had started out in his business with a small grocery store in 1917 yet to be the director of one of the biggest enterprises of Turkey, the Koç Group of Companies, was already collaborating with US companies, having started the distribution of Ford automobiles in Turkey in 1928. He had foreseen the US-guided postwar free trade boom and, in 1946, had already made profitable deals with many US companies.8 Following his trip to the US after World War II, Koç opened a light bulb factory in collaboration with the General Electric company, setting up the first US-Turkish business partnership in Turkey.9 Following this, Koç played pioneering roles in founding the first automobile, truck, refrigerator, washing machine, water heater, and compressor company, and of many more, besides the Minneapolis-Moline TürkTraktör ve Ziraat Makineleri A.Ş., which would showcase the postwar cooperation between the US and Turkey in initiatives ranging from factory to home: in this case, as we will see, from TürkTraktör to Mintrak Apartmanı.10

• 11 Lewis P. Todd, The Marshall Plan: A Program for International Cooperation, The Advisory Committee (...)
• 12 Erik Jan Zürcher, Modernleşen Türkiye’nin Tarihi, Istanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 1993, p. 299-35 (...)
• 13 Oral Sander, Türk-Amerikan İlişkileri, Ankara: Ankara Üniversitesi Siyasal Bilgiler Fakültesi Yayı (...)
• 14 Ibid., p. 47. See also Burçak Keskin-Kozat, “Negotiating an Institutional Framework for Turkey’s M (...)
• 15 For a detailed discussion on the concepts of pre-industrial and non-industrial, see Gideon Sjöberg(...)
• 16 Charles P. Kindleberger, Marshall Plan Days, New York, NY: Routledge Revivals, 2010, p. 96. On the (...)

4Referred to as “the democratic way of self-help and cooperation,” the Marshall Plan remarked “self-help” and “cooperation” in launching the economic, political, ideological, and cultural integration of the Western Bloc. The Marshall Plan was advertised as a “cooperative recovery program” which would lead to “the democratic world.”11 Although not entered the war, Turkey participated in the Marshall Plan, which initiated a US-guided military, economic, and physical development in the country along with the free-market economic policies that would flourish during the Democratic Party (DP) rule of “uncomfortable democracy,” to borrow a term from Erik-Jan Zürcher.12 The Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA), set up in 1948 to administer the Marshall Plan in the participating countries, started to operate with a mission in Turkey in 1949 mostly dealing with assistance to agricultural development through mechanization and fertilization.13 The economic role that the US initially cast for Turkey was to produce agricultural foodstuff and raw materials for the European reconstruction instead of reaching to the level of industrialization planned for other countries participating in the Marshall Plan.14 However, Turkey was lacking the infrastructures to fulfill this role. Although it had progressed to a considerable level of industrial production after the First Five Year Plan of 1934, it was still a pre-industrialized or a non-industrialized country, unequipped to accommodate the physical organization of “producing, living, storing, and selling.”15 In fact, the Marshall Plan policy for Turkey was technical assistance for “development” rather than “reconstruction.”16

• 17 Quoted in Harry Bayard Price, The Marshall Plan and Its Meaning, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Pr (...)
• 18 Thornburg was also the Representative of the Twentieth Century Fund, a philanthropic organization (...)

5The US strategy for technical assistance to economically “underdeveloped areas” was further promoted through the Point Four Program, which, from the onset of the Korean War, sought to “[c]ontribute to raising standards of living, creating new sources of wealth, increasing productivity and expanding purchasing power” to counter “Communist propaganda.”17 It was in this context that Max Thornburg traveled to Turkey in May 1949 to become Turkey’s Director of the Bureau of Economic Survey, advising on the country’s development program.18

• 19 Harry Bayard Price, The Marshall Plan and Its Meaning, op. cit. (note 17), p. 125-132.
• 20 The Economy of Turkey: An Analysis and Recommendations for a Development Program, Report, Internat (...)
• 21 “Erimin İzmitteki Demeci,” Cumhuriyet, September 20, 1949.
• 22 See Begüm Adalet, Hotels and Highways, op. cit. (note 18), p. 99.
• 23 Ibid., p. 107. See also “Institutional Memory,” Mutual Memory, op. cit. (note 3). URL: https://70t (...)

6Thornburg’s report pointed out the need for a transition to a free market regime, while blaming statism for Turkey’s underdevelopment. To this end, Thornburg suggested the country’s “gradual industrial development under the leadership of the US,” and therefore, to secure new markets for American industrialists.19 In September 1949, in response to Thornburg’s report and at the request of the Turkish government, an economic mission was established for the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD). The program was led by James M. Barker, who came to Turkey in the summer of 1950, immediately after the general elections on May 14, 1950, that brought the opposition DP to power. This party’s victory placed the multi-party system in Turkey de facto under the backroom guidance of the US.20 The Barker Report suggested that Turkey should open its own factories to produce machines, whereas the Thornburg Report had suggested the use of the Marshall Plan counterpart funds to import modern tractors and other agricultural equipment, together with US-made fertilizers and chemical pesticides, to enhance agricultural productivity. Indeed, the goal was to turn Turkey into a “little America,” as stated by Nihat Erim, the Minister of Public Works in 1949, praising the Marshall Plan for its contribution to Turkey’s economic development.21 In this context, as Begüm Adalet notes, the “cooperative skills” of Turkish engineers were expected and demanded by the US officials next to “rational organization, future-orientation, and linear thinking,” as an important step towards the country’s modernization.22 Even criticized by US officials for not fully living up to the “promises made to the Marshall [Plan],” this sort of “mutual and voluntary” exchange between transnational (from the US) and local (from Turkey) experts was “characteristic of the cordiality of the Turkish technicians,” thus guaranteeing technical cooperation between the two governments to build the “little America” in Turkey.23

• 24 The AME oil and gas exploration and production company, based in Kansas, was one type of these US (...)
• 25 Interview with Yılmaz Öz, Ankara, April 15, 2016.

7Yılmaz Öz, in line with the promises of the postwar US-Turkish cultural exchange, established himself as a local expert in “international business law” during his 2-year-long research stay in the US. He promoted both cultural and business cooperation, making contacts with major US companies engaging in transnational activities.24 Nevertheless, Öz’s “cooperative skills” extended from business administration to housebuilding. Soon after starting to work at the Minneapolis-Moline TürkTraktör ve Ziraat Makineleri A.Ş. as a business lawyer and staff manager, Öz initiated a housing cooperative for the company’s executive employees, including himself, to “make the members of the cooperative low-cost and healthy homeowners” in the urbanizing green fields of the city.25

• 26 Metin Özdemir, Türk Traktör Tarihi 1954-1997, Ankara: Türk Traktör, 1998, p. 5-6. See “Tarihçe,” T (...)
• 27 In addition to being a founding executive at the transnational company TürkTraktör, Velit İsfendiy (...)
• 28 Şerafettin Yıldız, İz Bırakan Seydişehirliler, Konya: Eğitim Yayınevi, 2021, p. 56.

8The manufacturing plant TürkTraktör was located in Ankara, on the site of Atatürk Forest Farm. It occupied the former site of the state plane and motor factory established within the scope of the Early Republican policies for the production and maintenance of Turkish planes. The land was reallocated to Minneapolis-Moline TürkTraktör ve Ziraat Makineleri A.Ş. from the Mechanical and Chemical Industry Incorporated Company, which was established in 1950 to provide equipment to the Turkish Armed Forces.26 The site was far away from the city center and lacked housing facilities for the new staff of the company. The Mintrak Building Cooperative Partnership [Mintrak Yapı Kooperatifi Ortaklığı], combining part of “Minneapolis” and part of “tractor” [traktör], was officially established in 1956 for a duration of 30 years as required by the law setting the statute of cooperatives. With Öz as the President, the cooperative was made up of 28 executive engineers including 7 executive employees of TürkTraktör on the Board of Trustees—engineers, financial and legal advisers, managers, and even the company’s executive director. Like Öz, some of them had just returned from university training in the US (fig. 1). Among them, Velit İsfendiyar (1917-1980), head of the Engineering Department of TürkTraktör, held degrees from Robert College in İstanbul and from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he was trained as a mechanical engineer.27 Halil Kaya (1915-1997), who would work as the executive director at TürkTraktör from 1955 to 1977, was trained as a metallurgical engineer at the Technical University of Berlin and, like İsfendiyar, did post-graduate work as a chief engineer at the University of Michigan from 1951 to 1953, and at the Ministry of Defense in Turkey, upon returning from the US in 1954, before starting to work for TürkTraktör. 28

• 29 Hakkı Yıldırım, “Ankara Sanayiinin Gelişimi ve Mevcut Potansiyeli,” in Yıldırım Yavuz (ed.), Tarih (...)
• 30 Suavi Aydın, Kudret Emiroğlu, Ömer Türkoğlu and Ergi D. Özsoy, “Ak Devrimden Darbelere”, Küçük Asy (...)
• 31 İlhan Tekeli, Türkiye’de Yaşamda ve Yazında Konutun Öyküsü (1923-1980), Istanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yurt (...)

9The cooperative would soon buy land in the semi-rural southern part of the city, composed mainly of vineyards. Although Ankara was the capital of the Republic of Turkey since 1923, had mainly an agricultural hinterland. The industrial development in and around the city, at the moment, was a result of the Early Republican initiatives.29 However, the spatial character of the city was changed drastically following the multi-party system and liberal economic regime introduced by the newly elected DP government.30 Agricultural mechanization, suggested by the Barker Report of 1950 to provide labor force for the new urban industries, and carried out by Marshall Plan agreements, had resulted in unemployment for many farm workers. The rural population flooding into rapidly industrializing cities, like Ankara, was confronted by a severe housing shortage. In parallel, informal gecekondu settlements (shantytowns) sprang up on the urban peripheries. Due to infrastructural inadequacies and the de facto legalization of these informal settlements by local governments, urban sprawl became a common characteristic of Turkish cities in the 1950s.31

• 32 For more information on the previous master plans of Ankara including Lörcher Plan of 1924-25 and (...)
• 33 Ruşen Keleş and Bülent Duru, “Ankara’nın Ülke Kentleşmesindeki Etkilerine Tarihsel Bir Bakış,” Mül (...)

10Ankara’s master plan of 1932, drafted by the German architect and urban planner Hermann Jansen (1869-1945), had proposed the division of the city into industrial, commercial, and housing zones. However, in the face of circumstances, the land on the southern side of the city reserved for new housing development soon became inadequate.32 As a solution, Law 5218 was passed in 1948, authorizing the Municipality of Ankara to allocate vacant public property on the peripheries of the city for promoting new housing construction—including cooperative housing—to relocate gecekondu squatter settlements. Although Law 5228, the “Law Promoting Housing Construction” [Bina Yapımını Teşvik Kanunu], was passed soon after, amnesty for the shantytowns and high construction costs acted as deterrents to new housing construction.33

• 34 Sosyal Sigortalar Kurumu Konut Kredisi Mevzuatı, Ankara: Sosyal Sigortalar Kurumu, 1977, p. 10-16.
• 35 Ruşen Keleş, Türkiye’de Konut Kooperatifleri, Ankara: İmar ve İskan Bakanlığı Mesken Genel Müdürlü (...)

11It was Law 5417, the “Old Age Pension Act” passed on June 2, 1949, that offered cooperative housing as a solution to the raging housing crisis. The law was aimed at funding workers’ housing construction by enabling the release of a maximum of 20% of retirement pensions, collected at the Workers’ Insurance Agency, in return for construction loans covering 50% of the total construction cost.34 Initially, Workers’ Housing Funds Loans were provided by the Workers’ Insurance Agency itself. However, from 1952 to 1957, they were offered via the Mortgage Loans Bank [Türkiye Emlâk Kredi Bankası] covering 80% of the total construction cost. Following the Old Age Pension Act, cooperative housing became the postwar norm for mass housing construction, providing a model of intermediary homeownership in Turkey; i.e., cooperative shares rather than individual ownership. The increase was due to the promotion of cooperative housing to remedy the worsening housing crisis in larger cities and the ease of funding in cooperative housing construction.35

• 36 Interview with Yılmaz Öz, Ankara, April 15, 2016.
• 37 The institution’s name was changed in 1964 to Social Insurance Agency, which functioned from 1965 (...)
• 38 A report presented in the first Turkish Congress of Cooperativism, organized in Ankara in 1944, in (...)

12Following its founding charter, the Mintrak Building Cooperative applied to the Workers’ Insurance Agency and received loans of 83,000 liras for construction costs.36 Participation in the social security system as wage worker, represented by the Workers’ Insurance Agency, was mandatory for all shareholders in the housing cooperative, and a prerequisite for its legal existence as a workers’ housing cooperative.37 The Workers’ Insurance Agency had been founded in 1946, under the purview of the Ministry of Labor, itself founded in 1945 following the lead of the Beveridge Report, to oversee the organization and control of social security for the working masses. Until the Old Age Pension Act of 1949 and the establishment of the first workers’ housing cooperative—by blue-collar workers—in 1951, housing cooperatives were not common, and their members were mostly military and state officers, many of them belonging to the bureaucratic elite that included parliamentarians or intellectuals close to the government.38

• 39 On the US role in providing a wider access to homeownership in the US-assisted countries see Nancy (...)
• 40 Harry Bayard Price, The Marshall Plan and Its Meaning, op. cit. (note 17), p. 141-142. See also Ch (...)

13Cooperative housing built by significantly blue-collar workers in Turkey was promoted by the Marshall Plan as a sort of self-help housing model and democratic way of construction and homeownership. Policy and programming guidelines were set up by labor advisers and housing experts who visited participating countries to analyze, report on, and make recommendations about housing construction through the social security mechanism. The main goal of the US in joint action with local officers was to integrate wage workers in the postwar US phenomenon at urban, architectural, and domestic scales. It corresponded to the discourse on Americanization embedded in the doctrines of freedom to organize, freedom to build, and freedom to buy as Nancy Kwak, among other scholars on development and transnational practice, has pointed out.39 Indeed, the promotion of private initiatives in housing was instrumental not only in “underdeveloped” countries worldwide, but especially among “low-income groups, including most industrial workers” in European “urban areas” as a soothing response to growing class struggles and increasing sympathy towards communism as the officials of the Marshall Plan would often remark with regard to the Southern European countries next to Western Germany and Austria.40

• 41 For detailed information on these reports see İlhan Tekeli, Türkiye’de Yaşamda ve Yazında Konutun (...)

14In line with the US activity on cooperative housing, a series of reports were prepared, during and after the Marshall Plan, by housing experts. A significant number of these consultants came from the US, such as Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM) in 1951, Donald Monson in 1953, Charles Abrams in 1954, and Bernard Wagner in 1956. This transnational expertise on housing for the governmental institutions remarkably promoted cooperatives as a self-help model for mass housing.41

• 42 Ruşen Keleş, “Türkiye’de İşçi Konutları Sorunu,” Sosyal Siyaset Konferansları Dergisi, vol. 19, 19 (...)

15It is worth noting that, even though the postwar cooperative housing program in Turkey was conceived as an efficient means to house the working class, it failed to do so. Participation of blue-collar workers in cooperatives was little due to a number of reasons that included, but were not limited to, the high costs of land and construction, and the lack of starting capital for a down payment.42 Instead, many cooperatives were founded by members of the middle and upper-middle classes. Their professions and social status were generally on the high end, as in the case of the Mintrak Building Cooperative.

• 43 Quoted in Ruşen Keleş, Türkiye’de Konut Kooperatifleri, op. cit. (note 35), p. 41.
• 44 İlhan Tekeli and Selim İlkin, Bahçeli Evlerin Öyküsü: Bir Batı Kurumunun Yeniden Yorumlanması, An (...)

16The case of the Bahçelievler neighborhood in Ankara, where the first housing cooperative in Turkey was initiated in 1934 by government officials, including ministers and parliament members, is worth mentioning here. It illustrates the enduring economic and socio-spatial characteristics of pre- and postwar housing cooperatives in Turkey. Introduced as a response to the housing shortage of the recently founded republic and designed by Hermann Jansen as a housing district in line with the decentralization stipulated by the Jansen Plan of 1932, Bahçelievler was advertised as an effort to “make homeless people or citizens alike homeowners.”43 Besides following the garden city model, composed of low-rise single-family houses, Bahçelievler was also a counter experience to the state-financed housing model, offering a bottom-up strategy, within which the role of the bureaucracy was reduced to a minimum. In this respect, it pioneered the motives of postwar private initiative and the drive for homeownership, later embodied by Mintrak and similar cooperatives. Bahçelievler stood in contrast to the statist school of housing production and public ownership – even though the scheme was initiated and carried out by the civil servants who founded the republic.44

• 45 Interview with Yılmaz Öz, Ankara, April 15, 2016.
• 46 Ali Cengizkan, “Discursive Formations in Turkish Residential Architecture,” op. cit. (note 38), p. (...)
• 47 Ibid., p. 238.

17Mintrak Building Cooperative erected its apartment block on Esat Street, on a lot then occupied by a single-family house. The property had been purchased from a fisherman in the old marketplace of Ankara who was a relative of one of the cooperative members.45 Curiously enough, the Esat district had recently been designated for new housing construction by the Yücel-Uybadin Plan of 1955. Nihat Yücel and Raşit Uybadin had submitted the winning entry in the international master plan competition for Ankara, the jury for which included Patrick Abercrombie and Luigi Piccinato.46 Approved in 1957—the same year when construction started on the cooperative block—this new plan proposed the expansion of the city along its western axis, towards Eskişehir, by industrial decentralization, which would lead to urban sprawl. Still, the north-south axis of Ankara was set for dense construction, as stipulated in the Jansen Plan of 1932. However, the new building code allowed high-rise construction. The districts of Esat, Çankaya and Ayrancı (to the south), and Cebeci (to the north-east) were zoned for higher densities as part of the Yücel-Uybadin Plan.47 Up to 450 inhabitants per hectare were to be settled in Esat district, as compared to 100 for Keçiören, 250 for Etlik, and 160 for Aydınlıkevler (fig. 2).

• 48 Nurettin Erbir, quoted in Çılga Resuloğlu, The Tunalı Hilmi Avenue, 1950s-1980s: The Formation of (...)
• 49 Cited in Selda Tuncer, “Küçükesat: Bağevlerinden Mahalleye,” İdealkent, vol. 5, no. 11, 2014, (...)

18The southern side of the city was already growing as a modern residential area, following the zoning of the Jansen Plan. Yet Esat, located to the south-east, was still composed of meadows, vineyards, and low-rise vineyard cottages, or 2-3 story apartment blocks—there were no high-rise housing blocks. In fact, Esat Street was not even a proper street before the Yücel-Uybadin Plan, it was classified as a cropland road. By contrast, Tunalı Hilmi Street in the same district—Çankaya—was already urbanized, lined with apartment blocks with ground-floor businesses and shops. One of the inhabitants of Tunalı Hilmi Street at that time recalled Esat Street in these terms: “There used to be frame houses, vineyard houses of Ankara. They were quite a distance from each other (...), built in middle of fields. They were not clustered together. The street called Esat Caddesi used to be an unclean path. Indeed, it was not a street, it was later converted into a street.”48 But despite the lack of urban character, the district possessed prestige, because vineyard houses mainly belonged to elite, high-income families.49

• 50 Interview with Yılmaz Öz, Ankara, April 15, 2016.
• 51 Interview with Ahmet İsfendiyar, Ankara, April 3, 2016.

19In fact, the rural surroundings so close to the modern city center were crucial in the cooperative’s decision to situate the housing block there, in order to “have a healthier housing environment” (fig. 3).50 Nevertheless, the decision to locate there was criticized by certain cooperative members. Upon being informed, Peri İsfendiyar, in a private conversation with her husband Velit İsfendiyar, the head of the Engineering Department of TürkTraktör, reportedly exclaimed “Why on earth would you participate in a cooperative in the wild?” The İsfendiyars were already living in a detached cooperative house with a garden in the Bahçelievler district.51

• 52 On Emek İşhanı, see Nuray Bayraktar, “Kent ve Mimarlık Üzerine Dönemsel Okumalar: Ankara’da İki İş (...)

20Although the cooperative’s preference for the site was determined by the rural character of the area, it complied with the zoning stipulations and the building code set by the Yücel-Uybadin Plan. At the time of construction, Mintrak was the tallest building in the vicinity, rising to an impressive 24 meters. In 1965, it was outstripped by the Emek İşhanı building, Ankara’s first skyscraper, on Atatürk Boulevard.52 Other apartment blocks on Esat Street matched the height of the Mintrak only after the Flat Ownership Law [Kat Mülkiyeti Kanunu] of 1965, which would spark off a high-rise apartment block construction boom led by property developers, known as yapsat (build-sell), which has dominated housing production in Turkey ever since. Thus, in a way, the Mintrak, completed almost 10 years before this property development boom, was one of the precursors of the urban high-rise apartment block in Ankara.

• 53 Interview with Yılmaz Öz, Ankara, April 15, 2016.
• 54 Ibid. See also Tezcan Karakuş Candan, “Mintrak Yapı Kooperatifi,” Bülten, no. 104, 2013, p. 25-26.
• 55 Interview with Yılmaz Öz, Ankara, April 15, 2016.

21In his capacity as the Director of the Board of Trustees of the cooperative, Öz contacted the architects Rahmi Bediz (1916-2010) and Demirtaş Kamçıl (1916-1980). Their names had been suggested to him by his associate İrfan Tümer, the engineer who was providing piece-work services for TürkTraktör.53 The designs were finalized within months of the visit of the Board of Trustees to the Kamçıl-Bediz Architectural Office and were approved by the Municipality of Ankara on January 6, 1957.54 For the construction, a building contractor was hired on consignment under Tümer’s supervision, and the foundations were laid in the same year at a ground-breaking ceremony with cocktails (fig. 4).55 There is no record of the architects’ activity during the construction stage, since the cooperative was in communication with the engineer-supervisor Tümer during the construction process as well as for revisions of the architectural drawings.

• 56 For the building’s inventory prepared as part of the research project Sivil Mimari Bellek Ankara 1 (...)

22The building, now called Mintrak Apartmanı, was erected on a trapezoidal plot of 1,490 m² lying parallel to Esat Street using a construction area of approximately 5,500 m², with a floor area ratio of 2.5 (fig. 5).56 The construction of the block was completed in 5 years, yielding 28 identical apartments—4 apartments per floor—for all 28 members of the cooperative, and two smaller apartments for the block’s janitors. It was a 7-story reinforced concrete frame structure with brick infills. Although the building was designed as a horizontal monobloc, its spatial distribution was organized in two separate blocks, each with its own vertical circulation core servicing 14 apartments (fig. 6).

• 57 Umut Şumnu, “Demirtaş Kamçıl ve Rahmi Bediz’in az bilinen bir yapısı: (Übeyde) Elli Apartmanı,” An (...)
• 58 T. Elvan Altan, “Giriş: Demirtaş Kamçıl-Rahmi Bediz, Modern Mimarlık ve Ankara,” in Idem (ed.), An (...)
• 59 “Mintrak Apartmanı,” in Nuray Bayraktar, Bülent Batuman, Elif Selena Ayhan (eds.), Sivil Mimari Be (...)

23It is not at all surprising that the Kamçıl-Bediz Architectural Office was commissioned to design this building. The two architects had already risen to prominence, having designed many similar urban housing blocks for cooperatives in Ankara (fig. 2).57 As T. Elvan Altan has argued, their housing blocks not only represented but reshaped the modern urban character of Ankara, following the design principles of the International Style.58 They had also adopted a distinctive style for their interiors, such as the T-shaped living room of the Mintrak that was also proposed for the Üniversite Apartmanı (1954) and Yeşiltepe Blocks (1956). 59 In line with the typical mass-housing building block of the International Style, iconized by the unité d’habitation designed by Le Corbusier, the preliminary designs for Mintrak made provision for a rectangular housing block (another similarity to the Üniversite Apartmanı), raised on pilotis, and featuring a terraced roof, so that both the ground floor and the roof could be used as commons. (fig. 7). The reinforced concrete frame emphasized the horizontal structural elements (slabs) and the vertical grid framework (built partitions separating the recessed balconies) along the longitudinal façades of the building (fig. 8). This emphasis recalls the structural characteristics of the lift slab system, even though the Mintrak did not use the lift slab construction technology, also known as the Youtz-Slick method. The openings in the circulation cores were also equipped with aluminum window grills and wooden block infill. These features recalled a brise-soleil pattern, but they were designed to block the access to the private balconies on the main façade from the main staircases (fig. 9).

• 60 Şevki Vanlı, “Hiltonculuk,” Kim, 29 November 1958, p. 31-32. For further discussion see Ela Kaçel, (...)
• 61 Sibel Bozdoğan and Esra Akcan, Turkey, London: Reaktion Books, 2012 (Modern Architectures in Histo (...)

24Mintrak Apartmanı can be regarded as a clear example of what the modern architect Şevki Vanlı called “Hiltonculuk” (Hiltonism). The standardization of the building mass and the rationalization of its façades, typical of 1950s housing blocks, echoed the formal and material traits of the International Style.60 Also referred to as the “Hilton Style” and summarized by Sibel Bozdoğan and Esra Akcan as “a horizontally placed narrow, two-sided prismatic block lifted on pilotis above a transparent ground floor and finished with a rooftop terrace,” it became a “pervasive paradigm” of postwar housing in Turkey as a standardized design and construction model, also advertising the postwar US-model of domestic culture.61

• 62 For a discussion of the role of Hilton hotels in helping to construct the Americanization phenomen (...)
• 63 Annabel Jane Wharton, Building the Cold War, op. cit. (note 62), cited in Burak Erdim, “Policy reg (...)
• 64 Conrad Hilton, Be My Guest, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1957, p. 264-266., cited in Burak (...)
• 65 Sibel Bozdoğan and Esra Akcan, Turkey: Modern Architectures in History, op. cit. (note 61), p. 116
• 66 Sibel Bozdoğan, “Democracy, Development, and the Americanization of Turkish Architectural Culture (...)

25Indeed, recent scholarship has highlighted how the Hilton hotels were conduits for exporting the International Style to postwar housing design and construction in US-influenced countries.62 According to Annabel Jane Wharton, the establishment of the international Hilton hotel chain was more than a mere investment in tourism, it was rather a political project.63 It represented a “little America” in each of the countries that boasted a Hilton hotel, also provided visiting US officials, international travelers and locals alike with a point of reference, “not as a symbol of bristling power, but as a friendly center where men of many nations and of good will may speak the language of peace.”64 The Hilton Hotel in İstanbul, designed by Skidmore Owings & Merrill (SOM), with Gordon Bunshaft as the lead architect in collaboration with the Turkish architect Sedad Hakkı Eldem, was built between 1951 and 1955.65 It, too, was financed by the Marshall Plan, and served as a model of modern design and construction for the Turkish architects of the 1950s, as scholars have argued (fig. 10).66

• 67 Türkiye Ekonomisi Kalkınma Programı için Tahlil ve Tavsiyeler, op. cit. (note 20), p. 17.
• 68 Yıldız Sey, Türkiye Çimento Tarihi, İstanbul: Türkiye Ekonomik ve Toplumsal Tarih Vakfı, 2003, p.  (...)
• 69 Ayın Tarihi, 15 August 1953.
• 70 Yıldız Sey, Türkiye Çimento Tarihi, op. cit. (note 68), p. 67.

26In fact, the Barker Report had foreseen that the construction sector would become a promising industrial sector in Turkey’s economic development. The production of new building materials would, in the name of the rationalization and standardization of the building processes, redefine building construction and therefore transform the morphology of urban housing.67 In this sense, the Marshall Plan agreements not only promoted the import of cement, timber, aluminum, and other building materials from the US to Turkey. They also encouraged the establishment of new cement factories locally, with a view to rationalizing the construction process. Although there is no unearthed written proof that the Marshall Plan’s counterpart funds were channeled to the Mortgage Loans Bank, it is well known that the plan financed the establishment of private cement factories in Turkey, as well as in other participating countries. At the same time, it compelled Turkey to buy the machinery necessary for strengthening its cement industry from Germany, Denmark, and Belgium, also countries engaged in the Marshall Plan.68 Thus, both as an obligation coming through the Marshall Plan agreements and as a result of Turkey’s economic development program, which relied on infrastructural development, urbanization, and housing projects, cement production boomed in Turkey from 1950 to 1960.69 As Yıldız Sey indicated, the cement industry was privatized during this crucial decade.70

• 71 For an extensive documentation of apartment blocks of Ankara, including the Mintrak, see Sivil Mim (...)
• 72 Tezcan Karakuş Candan, “Maliye Evleri,” Bülten, no. 62, 2008, p. 2-53.

27Other cooperative housing projects, similarly built by middle and upper-middle-class cooperatives, such as the Cinnah 19 (1954-57) in Ankara, designed by Nejat Ersin (1924-2010), the 96’lar Apartmanı (1957-62) in Ankara, designed by Arman Güran (?-2013) and the Hukukçular Sitesi (1960-1967) in İstanbul, designed by Melih Birsel (1920-2003) and Haluk Baysal (1918-2002), share the common characteristics of the housing blocks of the 1950s International Style.71 Similarly to the Cinnah 19 or the 96’lar Apartmanı (the Maliye Evleri apartment block), which was also designed by Kamçıl and Bediz and, like the Mintrak, constructed in 1956 in the Esat neighborhood, even followed the duplex apartment typology, as proposed by Le Corbusier in his unité d’habitation.72

• 73 Burak Erdim, “Policy regionalism and the limits of translation in land economics,” in Aggregate Ar (...)
• 74 The lift-slab or Youtz-Slick construction system was promoted in architectural journals of Turkey, (...)

28The trend towards Hilton-like housing blocks was due not only to a fleeting stylistic fashion, but also to “land economics,” as discussed by Burak Erdim: a model of housing and construction planning based on clients’ self-financing through pension funds, and hinged on a “semi-informal” process of “land appropriation” by governmental agencies.73 Starting with the early years of the republic, Turkey’s urban fabric was characterized by the parcel-based land use scheme. However, since the late 1950s, it has been dominated by the apartment block typology, especially after the Flat Ownership Law of 1965, which was pioneered by the cooperative experiment, as we saw earlier. In addition to postwar zoning law and building codes projecting higher floor area ratios for more housing construction, the development of tunnel frame construction and the introduction of the lift slab system as “the new method in construction” helped disseminate high-rise blocks. 74

• 75 Interview with Mine Akay, Ankara, April 16, 2016.

29The Mintrak is also an example of the trend towards Hilton-like spaces and interior design. In this respect, it was a model of modern living for cooperative housing constructed by the middle class. The personal oral testimony and archival records of Mine Akay, who was one of the building’s first residents and who still lives there, are key in my reading of these model features of the building. Neither member of the cooperative nor a TürkTraktör employee, Mine was the daughter of TürkTraktör’s Executive Director Halil Kaya. She had studied interior design in the US, and settled in the Mintrak when she returned to Turkey after completing her undergraduate degree. In fact, Halil Kaya had presented Akay and her husband with the brand-new apartment as a wedding gift immediately after the construction of the block was completed in 1962.75

• 76 Another project by architects Kamçıl and Bediz, designed for a member of parliament and her family (...)

30The modern fittings in the building, such as the elevator, the central heating system, hot running water, telephone hook-ups, bathrooms, and separate rooms for toilets, were not common in other apartment blocks of the time. Each double-fronted flat featured two larger-than-average recessed balconies. The aluminum window frames were wide and fitted with flynets (fig. 11). Each apartment unit had a well-equipped built-in kitchen with wooden cupboards, a modern bathroom with a sit-down toilet instead of the alaturka squat toilet, and a larger than usual living room, furnished with built-in wooden bookshelves (figs. 12-13). Likewise, the corridor providing access to the two bedrooms was furnished with built-in wooden cupboards. The L-shaped living room had a marble fireplace, even though the apartments had central heating (fig. 14). This feature was only found in modern luxury apartments in the nearby Kavaklıdere district, in addition to the Çankaya and Ayrancı districts that housed foreign experts, civil servants, military personnel, and businessmen.76 The Mintrak interior was designed in line with the luxury of the period, usually available only to the wealthy.

• 77 See also Meltem Ö. Gürel, “Consumption of Modern Furniture as Strategy of Distinction in Turkey,” (...)
• 78 Interview with Mine Akay, Ankara, April 16, 2016.
• 79 Ibid.

31In this respect, the architectural layout and interior furnishing of the Mintrak apartments represented modern living in a high-rise multifamily housing block of the 1950s that echoed Hilton-like interiors, or the living rooms of suburban houses in the US. In fact, furniture typical of a Hilton hotel was seen as a distinguishing feature of middle- and upper-middle-class interiors of the time.77 Certain living rooms in the Mintrak boasted an armchair known to residents as the “Hilton armchair.” The furniture was designed to replicate luxury hotel furniture and, in addition to serving as a status symbol, also displayed the residents’ high standards for domestic comfort (fig. 15). It comes as no surprise that when Vehbi Koç, the entrepreneur behind the foundation of TürkTraktör, visited the Mintrak in 1960, described the building as “a model modern urban apartment block.”78 In fact, Mine Akay and her husband had received their dining room table and chairs as a wedding gift from Koç.79

• 80 Sibel Bozdoğan, “Democracy, Development, and the Americanization of Turkish Architectural Culture (...)

32In this sense, local interpretations of the high-rise urban housing block, built with modern construction methods, materials, and interior furnishings, offering a modern way of life in the cities, operated as a postwar housing prototype of the US-led development policies and practices in response to Turkey’s housing crisis. Much like the Ataköy housing project in İstanbul, noted by Bozdoğan as the iconic example of the Americanization of the Turkish architectural culture, the modern interior furnishings of the Mintrak offered a comfortable and consumable living environment representing the “American ideal of democratizing comfort.”80

• 81 Tolga Tören, Yeniden Yapılanan Dünya Ekonomisinde Marshall Planı: Türkiye Örneği, op. cit. (note 4 (...)
• 82 Interview with Yılmaz Öz and Yavuz Öz, Ankara, April 15, 2016.
• 83 Interview with Ahmet İsfendiyar, Ankara, April 3, 2016.

33This ideal was compatible with the material and social conditions reigning in postwar Ankara. Indeed, the Thornburg Report also highlighted the American lifestyle. Its author suggested promoting such ideal to attract American tourists whose presence in Turkey, along with that of US military and administrative personnel and their families, was transforming the daily life in the urban, architectural, and domestic spheres, particularly in Ankara.81 Not surprisingly, cooperative’s president Yılmaz Öz and his brother Yavuz Öz, who served on the Board of Trustees, used to rent their apartments to US military personnel and their families recently arrived in Ankara.82 The brothers would frequent the Merhaba Palas, a hotel on Esat Street where the US military personnel often booked rooms, to find tenants for their furnished apartments of which they advertised as efficiency apartments. For many years, these apartments were also rented to employees of the Ankara Mission of the Economic Cooperation Administration. To make these tenants more comfortable, the cooperative even had plans, in the preliminary designs, to install a casino with bowling alleys and a restaurant on the terraced roof. This idea was later put aside, because it would have compromised the comfort of the residents living in the apartments directly below.83 However, the abovementioned ideal also indicates how cooperatives, in addition to constituting a self-help model for low-cost housing construction, also provided up-to-date living conditions for cooperative members with the social and financial status to afford them, while also creating opportunities for making profit by renting apartments.

• 84 For more information see Elvan Altan Ergut, “96’lar Apartmanı,” Bülten, no. 42, 2006, p. 40-41. Ze (...)
• 85 Tezcan Karakuş Candan, “Mintrak Yapı Kooperatifi,” Bülten, op. cit. (note 54), p. 25-26.

34In relation to this economic feature, it is important to note how the architectural design of the Mintrak was implemented without significant changes during construction. One notable exception was the addition of partitions on the balconies, an element that strengthened the visual association with the façade of İstanbul Hilton (fig. 16). Nevertheless, some substantial revisions took place in the following years to increase land occupation. Although the building was raised on pilotis and the ground floor was a semi-open common space in the initial design, it was enclosed soon after the construction was finished in 1962. The space was divided and leased to shops and businesses, to generate an income for covering the service costs of the building, such as central heating and water supply. Interestingly, the 96’lar Apartmanı in Ankara, which was built in exactly the same period (1957-1962), also privatized its roof and ground floor, in 1962 and 1963 respectively. 84 The roof terrace had originally been planned as a children’s playground, like that of the unité d’habitation, yet the cooperative building the 96’lar Apartmanı transformed it into a penthouse apartment. The ground floor, left open in the original drawings, was also enclosed to make space for shops. Mintrak was built with 10 meters setback from the road to make room for public space—in this case a parking lot. This purportedly “peculiar” characteristic was repeated the same year in the 96’lar Apartmanı.85

• 86 Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War, London: Granta Boo (...)

35In Who Paid the Piper?, Frances Stonor Saunders discusses the role of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in funding and guiding European cultural affairs during the Cold War, for the goal of disseminating anti-Soviet ideology.86 In this sense, the Marshall Plan—although commonly known as “Marshall Aid” or “American aid,” releasing billions of US dollars for the European reconstruction—was a strategic Cold War mechanism. It was a conduit not only for money, but also for the intellectual and technical expertise needed to build the Western Bloc economy-politically, ideologically, and culturally. The so-called “humanitarian” side of the Marshall Plan and other postwar US models for development and modernization, in fact, materialized the Americanization of cultures and spaces, jointly realized by local actors.

• 87 Interview with Yılmaz Öz, Ankara, April 15, 2016.
• 88 Ibid.
• 89 Ibid.

37Because supplies of cement and steel were expensive and limited, ordinary apartment blocks of the period were usually built with brick masonry construction, and were no higher than 3-4 floors. Indeed, only the personal finances and networks of the Mintrak cooperative members made it possible to build the high-rise according to up-to-date technology, complete with modern fittings and furnishings. The construction history of the Mintrak reveals that, using only the loans provided by the Mortgage Loans Bank, it would have been almost impossible to complete the construction of such a large-scale housing block. To get through, cooperative members were asked to pay substantial amounts of money in regular installments to help defray the construction costs of the Mintrak.87 Their social status and transnational/local networks were also instrumental in the successful completion of the project. During construction, the cooperative managed to secure allocations of materials like iron, steel, and timber from state companies in other cities. According to Yılmaz Öz, he and other cooperative members had personal connections to the steel and iron company in Karabük, the gun factory in Kırıkkale, and the Directorate of Enterprises in Bolu.88 The living room bookshelves, the hallway cupboards, and the basement storage spaces were built on site, with timber allocated by Bolu.89 These special contracts between state companies and the Mintrak Housing Cooperative disclose the unique social and economic role of this cooperative in producing a modern high-rise urban housing block at the time.

• 91 İlhan Tekeli, “Bir Modernite Projesi Olarak Türkiye’de Kent Planlaması,” Ege Mimarlık, vol. 16, no (...)
• 92 Suavi Aydın, Kudret Emiroğlu, Ömer Türkoğlu and Ergi D. Özsoy, “Ak Devrimden Darbelere”, Küçük Asy (...)
• 93 T. Elvan Altan, “Modern Ankara’nın yeniden inşası başlıyor: 1950’lerde yeni yaşam, yeni kent ve Ra (...)
• 94 Şevki Vanlı, “Hiltonculuk,” Kim, op. cit. (note 60), p. 31-32. See also Ela Kaçel, “Hiltonculuk an (...)

38İlhan Tekeli argues that modernity was experienced in non-European countries like Turkey in two ways: first, as a result of the imperialist effect of capitalist development; second, via the collaboration of state elites and the commercial bourgeoisie in sustaining capitalist dynamics through institutional and educational reforms.91 The US expert Herbert Muller, who visited Ankara in 1958, commented that this rather bourgeois city imported both its needs and its solutions from abroad; it therefore lacked an original everyday life.92 Indeed, according to T. Elvan Altan, Turkish architects accepted the International Style as the preferred “manner” for housing without delving too much into potent binary oppositions, such as local/international or traditional/modern, especially in light of postwar integration to the West.93 In the years that followed, modern architects, such as Şevki Vanlı as mentioned above, and later Sedad Hakkı Eldem, criticized these high-rises as “unqualified local copies of the Hilton.”94

• 95 Esin Boyacıoğlu, “1950’ler Ankarası’nda sıradışı konut kooperatifleri,” Arredamento Mimarlık, no.  (...)
• 96 Ela Kaçel, “This is not an American House: Good Sense Modernism in 1950s Turkey,” op. cit. (note 6 (...)

40In this respect, postwar middle- and upper-middle-class housing cooperatives provided architects with chances to experiment with modern design, which was phased out by the parcel apartment block scheme after the Flat Ownership Law of 1965.95 But housing cooperatives like the Mintrak also gave members—and future occupants—a chance to claim and maintain a certain degree of authorship over the design and construction, drawing on their unique professional or individual networks. Significantly for this aspect, given that the cooperative functioned economically as a private enterprise and socially as a community working and living together, and that it granted its members the freedom to construct, buy, or sell—in other words, the freedom to commodify—their domestic comfort, the Mintrak represents par excellence the Americanization of postwar housing in Turkey. At the same time, it suggests a case of “contextualized” International Style, with reference to Ela Kaçel’s conceptualization, due to the US-related backgrounds and networks of the shareholders.96 Its common yet unique story demonstrates the privileged condition of cooperative members in allowing a certain degree of authorship and active involvement in the decision-making processes concerning the topographical, the morphological, and the material aspects of the project.

• 97 Ali Cengizkan studied 24 housing settlements in Ankara built by cooperatives between 1948 and 1962 (...)
• 98 Ruşen Keleş, Türkiye’de Konut Kooperatifleri, op. cit. (note 35), p. 226-227.
• 99 Ekmel Zadil, “Yapı Kooperatifleri ve Mesken Problemleri,” op. cit. (note 38), p. 34.

41Ali Cengizkan argues that the practice of high-income housing cooperatives made it possible to experiment with the neighborhood unit scheme and the partial allotment plan as “units of a community,” which “supported each unit parcel as a democratic entity,” and provided equal positions for “the developer,” “the administrator,” and “the architect-planner” in the building of housing.97 I suggest that the US-led promotion of cooperative housing as a self-help, low-cost housing model was, in fact, a free-market motive for providing every citizen with the necessary funds and tools to self-build and own a proper house. Despite the fact that it was based on the promotion of low-cost housing as an effective solution to a housing crisis that mainly affected workers, this so-called equal and democratic building activity was rather utilized as a means of property development for the privileged, and of investment through land speculation, as argued by Ruşen Keleş.98 It is well-documented in the relevant literature that most shareholders either sold or leased the apartments they acquired through the housing cooperatives.99 The Mintrak was no exception. Like the Bahçelievler Housing Cooperative, the Mintrak Building Cooperative, established almost 20 years later, embodied the motives of private initiative and property ownership, but this time in the context of postwar economic liberalization policies. The cooperative members, who were white-collar workers yet still wage-earners entitled to benefits from the Workers’ Insurance Agency, acted as “the developer” by establishing the cooperative, but also as a real-estate developer in advertising and renting apartments. They were “the administrator” of the cooperative and the construction process but they also financially regulated once-communal ground-floor spaces by renting to shops and businesses. Lastly, they played roles as “the architect-planner,” sharing the authorship with engineer/architects for in-situ decisions while being the owners and occupants of the block.

• 100 Konstantina Kalfa, “Antiparochì and (its) architects: Greek architectures in failure,” in Aggregat (...)

42In this regard, the Americanization of the architectural culture in the scope of urban housing in Turkey achieved its true potential by giving anyone the opportunity to become a constructor, administrator, designer, occupant, owner, or real-estate agent, whereas on the contrary, the public housing of the Early Republican Period allowed only for occupancy. This fact, that cooperative housing offered the financial and technical potential—on the one hand, to channel self-engagement into housing design and construction and, on the other hand, to engage in the purchase, sale, or rental of property as a profit-making activity—paved the way for the emergence of the private contractor in Turkey. The latter phenomenon dominated the housing market making the parcel-based mid-rise apartment block the most common housing typology. As Konstantina Kalfa argues in her essay on the Greek postwar contractor of the mid-rise polykatoikìa apartment building, which had much in common with the provision and land use model of postwar apartment block production in Turkey, the cooperative or the contractor-built apartment block was the “regional realization of the Corbusian Domino system, combining tradition and modernity, design autonomy and collective value.”100 Cooperative or contractor-built apartment blocks, in addition to going up quickly in a modern style, provided anonymous authorship and individual ownership as binding traits of the contextualized self-help development, guided by the US and US-associated transnational activity of postwar development. The self-building, in this sense, of a medium-to-high rise apartment block on a single parcel, flourished in “developing” countries as a self-urbanization model, led by the entrepreneurial initiatives of worker-to-middle class individuals, as a means to attain (aided/assisted) development and modernization.

• 101 Strikingly enough, the Greek press of the period also ran this kind of advertisement, appealing to (...)

43By allowing low-income individuals to voluntarily participate in cooperatives, this low-cost but private-led model nourished the private-led housing market, by popularizing and democratizing—as projected by the US-led modernization—property acquisition. Anyone who was entitled to social security as a “wage worker” could participate in a cooperative and own a house or a flat, without restrictions, a phenomenon that offered a primitive accumulation model, and which, nevertheless, gave the opportunity to many individuals to become real-estate developers. Advertisements in the press of the time announcing newly established cooperatives and calling for new members to become shareholders also popularized cooperative housing as a private-led investment model that gradually led to the contractor-built apartment block.101 This autonomous development—even though it was incentivized by government regulations—also re-defined the role of architects and engineers in housing production. A case in point is the revisions to the Mintrak’s original design, which was carried out by the engineer and the cooperative members, instead of the architects (fig. 17). In many cases, cooperative housing also transformed the construction process, by employing unskilled and low-cost labor instead of registered construction labor.

• 102 The National Archives, “Truman Doctrine,” in Christine Compston and Rachel Filene Seidman (eds.), (...)

44The Mintrak apartment block offers a clear illustration of the main parameters of the transliteration of a transnational process into local practice: the popularization of self-organization, the promotion of decision making at a community level, the questioning of architectural authorship, and the propagation of private-led construction and ownership. As such, the American way of life, the essence of which was encapsulated in the Truman Doctrine as “the will of the majority, distinguished by free institutions, representative government, free elections, guarantees of individual liberty, freedom of speech and religion, and freedom from political oppression,” was translated on the local scale in the creation of homogenous communities in different geographies.102