From Oriental to the Cool City: Changing Imaginations of Istanbul, Cultural Production and the Production of Urban Space
Final Report Abstract
The project dealt with urban imaginations and situated these in place and time in the context of the transformation of Istanbul’s urban spaces. Coolness in relation to cities like Istanbul, Berlin or Barcelona (among others) stands for boom, creativity, diversity and subculture; as much as these much celebrated attributes often trigger and/or deepen material and social processes of gentrification, displacement and exploitation. Imagining cities as cool, slow, green etc. mostly appeal to and cater to the specific consumption trends within the city marketing industry (tourism, housing etc.). The project drew attention to the relation of these processes to the material production of space in the city, by examining the ways they result in spatial practices, are narrated by mainstream media, and pushed by public and private urban marketing practices active at local, national and global scales. As imposed by city marketing strategies in Istanbul and elsewhere, the urban imaginations tend to be transferrable through policy and entrepreneurialism within global capitalism. However, at the level of everyday life, messier imagined and actual relations to place also exist and continuously emerge from the urban milieu.
Publications
- (2011) “'Cool' İstanbul: Neoliberal Küresel Şehirde Boş Zaman Mekân ve Pratikleri” in Volkan Aytar & Kübra Parmaksızoğlu (Ed.s) İstanbul'da Eğlence Istanbul: Istanbul Bilgi University Press
Özkan, D.
- (2011) “Neither critical nor affirmative: The Eigenlogik approach as Analytics for Analytics' Sake” in Jan Kemper & Anne Vogelpohl (Ed.s) Der 'eigenlogische' Forschungsansatz in der sozialwissenschaftlichen Stadtforschung. Rekonstruktion – Kritik – Alternativen. Westfälisches Dampfboot Verlag
Özkan, D.
- (2012) “Şark Şehrinden ‘Cool’ İstanbul'a. Değişen İstanbul Tahayyülleri” Birikim, Issue 277, May 2012, pp. 76-83
Özkan, D.
- “Gecekondu Chic? Kültürel meta olarak enformel şehir ve kent yoksulluğu” in Birikim, Issue 280-281, September 2012, pp. 155-160
Özkan, D.
- (2014) “Gecekondu chic? Informal settlements and urban poverty as cultural commodity” dérive. Zeitschrift für Stadtforschung. Volume 56
Özkan, D.
- (2014) “Politics of space in the marketplace: re-placing periodic markets in Istanbul” in Seele, K., Evers, C., (Eds.), Informal Urban Street Markets: International Perspectives, Routledge: London, pp. 149-158
Duru, A.
- (2014) “Politische und Ethische Foodscapes in Istanbul” in Food Sound Underground, “Transforming Cities,” Platform3, Munich, pp 35-38
Duru, A.
- (2015) “From the Black Atlantic to Cool Istanbul. Why does coolness matter?” in Özkan, D. (Ed) Cool Istanbul. Urban Enclosures and Resistances. Transcript Verlag
Özkan, D.
- (2015) “Let them gentrify themselves! Space, Culture and Migration in Munich's Bahnhofsviertel” in Stadt - Arbeit - Mobilität. Beiträge der Münchner Europäischen Ethnologie. (Ed) Irene Götz, Johannes Moser, Moritz Ege. Waxmann Verlag
Özkan, D.
- (2015) “Lost and found in the Cueva del Manos in Argentina” GeoHumanities. 1(1), 179-184
Duru, A.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1080/2373566X.2015.1071673) - (2015) “Reflections and Tools towards a Reflexive, Bottom-up Urban Pedagogy” Urban Pamphleteer #6. Global Education for Urban Futures Special Issue, UCL
Duru, A.
- Cool Istanbul. Urban Enclosures and Resistances. Transcript Verlag, 2015
Özkan, D. (Ed)
- (2016) “The Feel-good Istanbul” in Bremm, D., Curtright, L., (Eds.), Sustainability and the City: Urban Poetics and Politics. Lexington Books
Duru, A.
