Streets of memory: the Kuzguncuk mahalle in cultural practice and imagination

The mahalle (neighborhood) was the historic space of urban culture in the Middle East. Cities in the region possessed a rich religious and linguistic diversity. The daily life of a religious community was centered in its mahalle. This cosmopolitanism was fractured with the birth of nationalism and its ethnic and linguistic claims to territory, and minorities migrated to new nations. Researchers have explored migration histories of various groups in the region, but this dissertation is the first to examine the consequences of this migration for the spaces of urban life. In this ethnography of Kuzguncuk, Istanbul, I relate narratives of place that challenge both popular discourse surrounding Istanbul’s recent history as well as nostalgic images of past cosmopolitan mahalle life. The contemporary mahalle is a Turkish, urban cultural space created by social practices of neighboring. These social practices are eroding, however, in contemporary Istanbul. The mahalle has moved into the realm of collective memory, and has come to embody familiarity in place. Historic landscapes in Istanbul signify the collective memory even as they manifest the rips of recent cultural change in the city. My work lies in the interstices of three spheres of contemporary theory in geography: the production of space; the co-constitutive nature of landscape morphology and representation; and the relationship between landscape and collective memory.