Inverted Thresholds: From the Malatya Textile and Yarn Factory to Its Successor Urban Interior in Türkiye

Research on urban interiors has concentrated on shopping malls, transport buildings, and public institutions, leaving industrial settlements, which integrate production and everyday life within a single boundary, largely outside this discussion. This study examines the Malatya Textile and Yarn Factory campus, established in Türkiye during the early Republican period, as an urban interior and compares its threshold regime with that of its successor urban interior on the same site. The threshold is operationalized as an analytical framework disaggregated into five dimensions: permeability, control regime, temporality, transformation, and exclusion. Local newspaper archives (1934–1951) were examined through qualitative content analysis, while reader comments published on a local digital platform (2002–2023) were examined through discourse analysis; the corresponding news items provided contextual material, and cartographic material enabled component-level matching across the two periods. The findings show that the settlement established a graded order of openness within a closed boundary, and that this order was reconfigured after the site was divided into two distinct ownership regimes (private capital and local government), with the most open components becoming enclosed and the most restricted ones freely accessible. Threshold regimes thus appear to be restructured by ownership arrangements rather than determined by architectural configuration alone. Openness did not disappear; it relocated, detaching from the components that carried collective urban experience.