Capitalistic Urbanization in Late Ottoman Istanbul: Armenian Agencies

Authors : Ümit Fırat Açikgöz

Pages : 9-21

Doi:10.53979/yillik.2023.2

View : 213 | Download : 214

Publication Date : 2023-12-31

Article Type : Other Papers

Abstract :In lieu of an abstract: Few periods in the imperial history of Istanbul saw as spectacular a building boom as the long nineteenth century. A host of building typologies, some totally new others age-old, dotted Istanbul’s urban landscape at a pace and an intensity rarely, if ever, seen in the city’s Ottoman and Byzantine history. Their scales transgressed the classical restrictions and codes of decorum formulated in the sixteenth century. Their styles expressed diverse and conflicting identities and political aspirations. Palatial complexes and mosques; embassies, banks, and department stores; railway stations, high schools, and churches; apartment buildings and ferry stations; and various infrastructural projects marked the advent of the modern era in Istanbul with vibrancy, dynamism, and hope as well as crises, contradictions, and inequalities. Studies on the late Ottoman urban history of Istanbul have burgeoned in the past three decades. These studies have significantly expanded our knowledge on the dynamics of Istanbul’s urban modernization, demonstrating the ways in which the buildings and infrastructures crisscrossing the Ottoman capital embodied larger imperial and global transformations of the nineteenth century. We have learnt a lot about the municipal institutions, legal regulations, European inspirations and local domestications, grand plans, post-fire regulations, monumental buildings, stylistic issues, and communal and imperial agendas.1 The more we learn about late Ottoman Istanbul, however, the more pressing becomes the need to address some fundamental methodological issues and to explore some crucial but still largely uncharted territories....
Keywords : capitalism, urban history, Ottoman Armenians, modernization, urbanization