Herstory of the Periphery: Approaching Placemaking through Feminist Autoethnography

Abstract

This article elaborated on the possibilities of feminist interference to the reading of informal settlements. In so doing, we focused on a squatter settlement (Limontepe) in a metropolitan municipality (İzmir Metropolitan Municipality) in Turkey, and tried to interrogate the institutional, official history, based on city registers, parliamentary decisions and state and municipality archives. We argue that the way peripheral populations and/or marginalized groups are treated in official histories of nation-states leads to partial knowledge of the place. We propose that the knowledge collected, accumulated and exchanged through everyday lives of the inhabitants, past and present might be a viable option to check the official history writing and fill in the blanks therein. The article is an attempt to walk through feminist (auto)ethnography to tie the knowledge of the past to today’s placemaking practices. As feminist researchers we consider engaging in the everyday life practices of inhabitants as a way to participate in the dynamic knowledge production processes of the place.