Spatial Politics of Encounter: Erenler Coffeehouse and the Making of an Inclusive Public Sphere in 1980s Istanbul

This study examines how an inclusive public sphere was constructed at Erenler , a literary coffeehouse in 1980s Istanbul, amid Turkey's post‐coup authoritarian climate and deepening ideological fragmentation. In the aftermath of the military coup, a period marked by traumatic depoliticization and the suppression of public sphere, Erenler emerged as a vital contact zone for literati from disparate ideological backgrounds. Adopting a qualitative case study methodology, the study synthesizes 96 semi‐structured interviews with the surviving members of the Erenler literati community and a content analysis of eleven literary journals associated with the community, published between 1985 and 1993. Drawing on the notion of ecology of encounters, this study employs a multi‐scalar analytical framework across micro, meso, and macro levels. At the micro‐scale, affective encounters grounded in shared trauma established interpersonal trust among ideologically opposed literati. At the meso‐scale, these bodily proximities transformed into discursive production through collaborative journal publishing that transcended right‐left divisions. At the macro‐scale, Erenler operated as a lived space of resistance against both the state's suppression of speech and neoliberalism's commodification of public sphere. Interrogating the limitations of both Habermasian universalism and post‐Habermasian conflict‐oriented models, this study demonstrates how spatial practices of mutual recognition enabled dialog across Turkey's historical cleavages at the time. Erenler thus offers a critical counter‐narrative for political geographies of the public sphere, illustrating how embodied co‐presence and cultural production can generate inclusive publicness even within repressive political structures.