Modes of Public Intimacies and Attachment to a Place

Based on an ethnographic fieldwork, this study delves into daily life on a recently transformed urban coast in Samsun, Turkey and investigates the modes of public intimacies and attachments on this brand-new public place. While Atakum Coast was a less attended beach with tobacco fields covering its hinterland around 20 years ago, it gradually became a popular socialization place firstly after the settlement of the university at this district, and the municipality project that attempted to change the coastline to a much demanded summer resort like Mediterranean coasts of the country after the gradual decline of tobacco industry within the city. As municipality covered the area with several facilities like sidewalk, bike road, etc. for the project, the population of the district and the number of places like café, bar, restaurants on the coastline has increased tremendously. While it was planned to be a tourism paradise initially, the coastline turned out to be an urban park with the surrounding of people’s daily rhythms. It became e a shiny and glamorous urban public place where recently upper middle class of city dwellers settled down and urban common attracting visitors from all over the city and cities nearby. By this, it also became a place for encounters of city dwellers from different backgrounds. The data collected through participant observation and go-alongs throughout the study shows that there are three main modes of being at the coast; aloneness, familiarity and friendship. Although seemingly it turned out to be a place for all, the coast does not promise a new form of neighborhood, a cohesive togetherness. Rather it is dissociated from the other parts of the city through abjection of other parts’ residents in daily discourses.