Making and unmaking a mining city: The historical geography of Zonguldak, Turkey's historic center for coal extraction

Keywords: coal, neoliberalism, shrinking mining cities, labor policies, Zonguldak, Turkey
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Sunday
Session Start / End Time: 2/27/2022 11:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/27/2022 12:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 74

Abstract

The global economic trends and national economic programs, which are directly affected by these trends, shape the formation and transformation of cities. In Turkey, the city of Zonguldak is one of the places where these effects are most apparent. Zonguldak used to be a small village on the western Black Sea coast of Anatolia before coal mining started in the 1840s. With the discovery of hard coal, Zonguldak underwent a rapid spatial and social transformation and became the only hard coal basin first for the Ottoman Empire -until its dissolution in 1923- and then for the Republic of Turkey. The Zonguldak coalfield was nationalized in 1940, and the city and its surroundings were turned into the industrial center of Turkey with state investments between 1950 and the mid-1970s. However, due to the adoption of neoliberal policies since the late 1970s and early 1980s, state investments were significantly reduced in the basin. Building on this historical context, I focus on the impact of neoliberal policies in Turkey on the city of Zonguldak. More specifically, I argue that neoliberal policies in Turkey transformed Zonguldak from an industrial center into a shrinking city by causing a dramatic decrease in the number of miners, hard coal extraction, and population.