Struggles on the Political Symbols of Istanbul: Contesting Reality and Memory

Abstract

There is a perpetual competition on the urban space as Manuel Castells once wrote. Competition is not only on the material, economic resources and on actual urban space, namely city center, neighborhoods, valuable public spaces etc. But the image and the political symbols reflecting and representing the urban space is also under continuous change and reconstruction by competing ideas, interests and efforts to shape and reshape urban reality and image. This phenomenon can be investigated in historical resources as well as contemporary and recent efforts to change and reshape urban space according to the related ideas, visions on symbolic representations.

In Turkish case, especially in Istanbul there have been efforts to modernize the city since Ottoman State, especially since the last quarter of the 19th century. In the Republican period especially after 1930s Istanbul has been a target of modernization both by the state authorities and by the needs of the capital itself. There is a huge urban change going on in the last couple of decades that alter urban space radically in parallel with the changing social relations, quality of everyday life and public places, and the image of Istanbul is changing respectively. In this paper I like to discuss on the character of the struggles going on to shape the urban space and the urban memory in physical, economic and political respects grounded on the examples of certain well known spaces and urban symbols.