Starting from the late nineteenth century onwards, the acceptance and popularization of the germ theory of disease provoked public anxiety and impacted daily life, significantly during the interwar years. Hygienic discourses extended beyond the domain of medical practices, permeated into everyday spaces, and referred to broader notions of healthy living concerning posture, ventilation, nutrition, and sight in addition to cleanliness. While public health measures expanded into many aspects of daily life, disease prevention culture was engaged in a constant dialogue with the built environment.

In the context of a modernizing Turkish republic, and amidst the aftermath of a series of devastating wars, scientific child-rearing became a subject of debate among the ruling elite, medical experts, and the intelligentsia. Thus, the formative years of Turkey witnessed national-scale efforts to medicalize childcare practices. Raising healthy children in hygienic environments was promoted as a national duty on the grounds of scientific civilization. As the interwar mothers were exposed to almost aggressive advertising about sanitary equipment and cleaning products in a global scale, women in Turkey were no exception. The campaigns that were launched to standardize childcare practices often came with emotionally charged content, highlighting the causal/vital relationship between children’s well-being and their material surroundings. Within the debates on household management and educational architecture, sanitary equipment, anti-dust materials, proper lighting, comfortable furniture, and good ventilation gained prominence. Medical doctors wrote on school hygiene, featuring architectural details, or prescribed the ideal settlement for infants’ rooms. Along with schools and houses, spaces such as childcare facilities for the poor, and medical institutions including preventoriums for pre-tubercular children emerged as spatial manifestations of preventive health measures. These spaces were extensively featured in the popular press.

As a reaction to the population problem of early Republican Turkey, the eugenic discourse imposed the duty of decreasing the child mortality rate not only on physicians, but also on mothers and architects. In this presentation, I look at the attempts to form medicalized and rationalized links between the children’s bodies and their built environment through an analysis of sources from the domains of public health, household management, and architecture. Focusing on the Turkey of the 1930s, I further investigate the ideological connotations attached to the cultural representations of healthy spaces for children.