The European Impact on State–Religion Relations in Turkey: Political Islam,Alevis and Non-Muslim Minorities

Since Turkey's application for membership of the European Union (EU) in 1987, the EU has itself been a structural component of Turkey's political transformation. The European impact intensified after Turkey was granted the status of an official candidate at the EU's Helsinki Summit in 1999. Since then, Turkey has issued a series of reform packages with the aim of starting accession negotiations, which began in October 2005. These reforms have initiated a democratic regime that is structurally different from its predecessors in terms of its definition of political community, national identity and the territorial structure of the state. Among many other aspects of the current political transformation such as the resolution of the Kurdish problem and administrative reform, this article concentrates on how the European impact, which I label Europeanisation, has influenced state–religion relations in Turkey. Europeanisation has three major mechanisms that influence actors, institutions, ideas and interests in varying ways: institutional compliance, changing opportunity structures, and the framing of domestic beliefs and expectations. The article concentrates on how these mechanisms operate in the creation of a new regulatory framework of religion in Turkey.     

Spatial segregation and class subjectivity in Turkey

Drawing on ethnographic research in an upper-class district in Turkey, this article examines social and spatial experiences of young low-wage service workers who travel daily back and forth between their homes in low-income neighbourhoods and their jobs in gated communities, upscale shopping malls and corporate offices. The paper argues that the significance of upper class districts or gated communities for urban inequality lies not in the sites themselves, nor the lifestyles of their elite inhabitants as commonly treated in the literature, but rather in the ways in which they relate to the outside and outsiders. Within this framework, the paper analyses the district’s effect on urban spatial segregation and urbanites’ sense of place in society. While resentment and reaction to inequalities and upper class customers are prevalent in young workers’ narratives, workers’ class subjectivities are also marked by a sense of mobility and liminality between the upper middle classes in their work district and their families, friends and neighbours back home. This sense of socio-spatial ‘in-betweenness’ is reinforced by being young, hence a sense of temporal liminality between youth and adulthood. The study contributes to the understanding of urban inequality at the intersection of spatial, emotional and temporal experiences of urbanites.     

Simulation of Shake Table Tests on Out-of-Plane Masonry Buildings. Part (VI): Discrete Element Approach

ABSTRACT

Although many experimental tests and numerical models are available in the literature, the numerical simulation of the seismic response of existing masonry buildings is still a challenging problem. While the nonlinear behavior of masonry structures is reasonably predictable when the out-of-plane behavior can be considered inhibited, when the in-plane and out-of-plane responses coexist and interact, simplified models seem unable to provide reliable numerical predictions. In this article, taking advantage of the experimental tests carried out in a shaking table on two masonry prototypes at LNEC, a macro-element approach is applied for the numerical simulations of their nonlinear response. The adopted approach allows simulating the nonlinear behavior of masonry structures considering the in-plane and out-of-plane responses. Since it is based on a simple mechanical scheme, explicitly oriented to representing the main failure mechanisms of masonry, its computational cost is greatly reduced with respect to rigorous solutions, namely nonlinear FEM approaches. Two modeling strategies are adopted, namely a regular mesh independent from the real texture of the prototypes and a detailed one coherent with the units disposal. The numerical results are discussed and the correlation between the nonlinear static analyses and the dynamic response is provided.     

Methods and Approaches for Blind Test Predictions of Out-of-Plane Behavior of Masonry Walls: A Numerical Comparative Study

ABSTRACT

Earthquakes cause severe damage to masonry structures due to inertial forces acting in the normal direction to the plane of the walls. The out-of-plane behavior of masonry walls is complex and depends on several parameters, such as material and geometric properties of walls, connections between structural elements, the characteristics of the input motions, among others. Different analytical methods and advanced numerical modeling are usually used for evaluating the out-of-plane behavior of masonry structures. Furthermore, different types of structural analysis can be adopted for this complex behavior, such as limit analysis, pushover, or nonlinear dynamic analysis.

Aiming to evaluate the capabilities of different approaches to similar problems, blind predictions were made using different approaches. For this purpose, two idealized structures were tested on a shaking table and several experts on masonry structures were invited to present blind predictions on the response of the structures, aiming at evaluating the available tools for the out-of-plane assessment of masonry structures. This article presents the results of the blind test predictions and the comparison with the experimental results, namely in terms of formed collapsed mechanisms and control outputs (PGA or maximum displacements), taking into account the selected tools to perform the analysis.