Industrial heterotopias and Republican modernity: planning the Sümerbank landscape for social ordering in early Republican Türkiye

This article explores Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, first introduced in his 1967 lecture ‘Of Other Spaces’, as a theoretical lens to examine the spatial logic of modern industrial landscapes. It argues that heterotopia offers a productive framework for understanding state-planned industrial environments that emerged as ‘other spaces’ beyond the conventional urban fabric. Focusing on Sümerbank industrial campuses – a series of state-led industrial complexes founded during the Early Republican Period in Turkey (1923–1945) – the article investigates how these sites functioned not merely as zones of production, but as spatial instruments of social transformation. Conceptualized and operated as laboratories of modern life, Sümerbank factories were embedded with the utopian aspirations of the nascent Turkish Republic. They were designed to transform local communities, restructure everyday life, and enact a new mode of social ordering rooted in national modernization and industrial discipline. As such, the article contends that Sümerbank campuses can be understood as industrial heterotopias – ambiguous and transitional spaces where the Turkish Republic’s utopia of a modern, secular, and rational society was materialized. These spaces not only redefined local social structures but also embodied the spatial strategies through which a modern nation-state was imagined and inscribed onto the landscape.