Kültür ve İletişim

Öz

People living in İzmir’s Karşıyaka district tend to identify themselves as being from Karşıyaka, not as being from İzmir without the condition of being born and grown up in Karşıyaka. Place attachment to Karşıyaka in İzmir as a positive attribution makes us to think about the relation between space and social classes. Thereby, this study tries to reveal how the identity of “being from Karşıyaka” appears as a local attachment and transforms through a collective identity through a larger scale than neighborhood attachment but more local as an urban attachment explaining middle class’s urban practices by qualitative analysis. The subject of this study is the relationship between identity and social classes affected by social relations and life-styles in spatial context. Middle class individuals live in center and seafront areas of Karşıyaka. Nevertheless, middle class life-style is not homogenous in both economic and social sense. There are life-style practices in Bourdieu’s sense contributing to the construction of middle class’s Karşıyaka identity. Common patterns of middle class’s Karşıyaka identity are social democrat and secular identity, evaluating gender mainstreaming as life-style and fan of Karşıyaka Sport Club, which is also known widely as Kafsinkaf identified with the district. On the other hand, fan of Karşıyaka Sport Club is not limited with middle class. Middle class reveals its own identity through comparing itself with other classes. These boundaries are mentioned as life-style differences