On İlhan Tekeli’s Book the Quotidian, Qualıty of Life, and Locality

By: Z. Aslı Gürel, Associated Professor, Urban Planner, Gazi University

Marmara Municipalities Union (MMU) republished Professor İlhan Tekeli’s book collecting his essays on topics of daily life, quality of life and locality as an advanced version in 2025. The book was first published by Tarih Vakfı as the 12nd book of İlhan Tekeli Collected Works series in 2009. The book consists in Tekeli’s essays on three fundamental subjects: primarily influenced by theoretical/practical developments and Professional experiences around the world, urban life analyses that emerged in the late 1990s/early 2000s, explaining the city through the unity of time and space; life quality framework shaped by Habitat II and the concept of liveability; and theoretical debates on locality where considered within the context of study topics such as regional planning, regional inequality and local administration.

Tekeli sees daily life not only as the totality of the individual habits but also as a holistic field where physical, social, economic, cultural and political processes intertwine. For this reason, daily life is discussed at the social-spatial plane, as a social reality shaped by spatial regulations. In the life-quality approach, Tekeli deepens his evaluations of the quality of daily life by assuming a human and relational perspective. Thus, he defines a framework for urban studies, for reading life quality over the relationship of the individual to the space, measuring and assessing it, and relating it to the policies. When understood as the concrete expression of the right to a decent life, quality of life gains critical importance in urban planning and governance.

Locality constitutes the dynamic social and spatial context where these processes materialise. Tekeli considers locality as it makes sense with daily life and forms a ground for understanding quality of life. Thinking together these three concepts by presenting a multi-dimensional framework that extends from the apparently ordinary routines of daily life to the transformative power of locality, puts forward the need to analyse the city with its social-spatial, political, cultural etc. dimensions, rather than as a physical environment lived in. These analyses put life at the centre of planning, governance and politics. Tekeli, as a social scientist, looking from the distinct windows opened by the social sciences, defines the concepts and processes by putting the human at the centre, and build them step by step without rupturing from the historical context. However, he connects and relates the concepts and processes to each other, thus enriches them by loading new meanings. Tekeli, in the book starting from three fundamental concepts articulates the concepts such as time-space, change/transformation, celebration, festive, city museum, human rights, decent life, sustainability, employment, novelty, democracy, capacity, governance, participation, urban management and urban politics, that are directly or indirectly seem related to them.

Although the book does not sufficiently address the effects of the new crises, problems and quests for solutions that emerged in the 2000s on daily life, quality of life and locality, the process of change and transformation it created, and the empirical studies, Tekeli prepares a powerful infrastructure for reading these impacts, and presents a broad framework for those to study and discuss these topics. Tekeli continues to think, produce, write and share on these topics. The three new essays that are added to the republished version, and even the essay written and shared at Academia, “The Quotidian, Quality of Life, and Locality,” after the book is published, are the products of Tekeli’s process of thinking, producing, writing and sharing on the subject Tekeli with his latest article this time relates the concepts of daily life and quality of life to place and local and contributes new awareness in the areas of urban planning, city management and urban politics.

MMU organised a library talk titled“The Quotidian, Quality of Life, and Locality”, with İlhan Tekeli, under Marmara Urban Forum, on October 1-3, 2025, within the conceptual framework, “On the Shore of All Possibilities”. In this event, Tekeli brought participants to the very shore of achieving quality of life by drawing on the city, the locality and daily life, which are shaped by the culture of people living together, in line with the main framework, to explore the opportunities and possibilities for cities that produce solutions.

I was delighted and excited to receive calls from MMU to participate in this event and to prepare a review for the book. As a student of urban and regional planning in the early 1990s, I became acquainted with Professor İlhan through his books, given the limited number of works written in Turkish on urban planning in Türkiye at the time… At the very beginning of the 2000s, I became his doctoral student at the Middle East Technical University. The discussions in that course led me to focus on quality of life, making it not just a course I took, but also a turning point in my academic life. Through the İlhan Tekeli Foundation for Urbanism Culture established in 2018, I had the opportunity to write a review for a book compiling article I had benefited from years ago as an urban planner and academic, having the chance to be in different environments with Professor İlhan in recent years, discuss scientific topics, and share my views.

The book addressing the quality of daily life, multi-dimensionality of the quality of life and the place of the concept of locality in the modern city with a theoretical and systematic debate, is a reference guide for all who live in the city, be present in the city, think the city, have a word to say about the city. Tekeli continues to deepen the concepts, discuss the theories, enlighten the road, and inspire. Enjoyable reading for all who continue to search for enabling a better urban life…

The fifth edition of Urban, the compilation issue of the magazine Kent published by Marmara Municipalities Union with the motto “Cities Developing Solutions”, is now available. 

You can download the entire magazine by clicking here.