Whose City is That? shows that Istanbul is produced not only by strong and systematic efforts, corporate influences and/or marketing activities, but also by individual contributions and coincidences. As such, the primary purpose of this book is to find the answer of to whom Istanbul does belong, presenting the reader with the richness of human experience and the practice of everyday life. The chapters in this book are therefore focused on the physical and economic dimensions, as well as the imaginary, fictional and hyper-real dimensions, expressing the concern of bringing the real and imaginary borders of the city together. The book provides an understanding that for each inhabitant there is another city, another Istanbul. Each person living in the city creates or lives in another city which is made of their own personal and particular experiences. In addition, the Istanbul the authors understand and describe turns into something different moment by moment, which cannot be defined or identified because of its very nature as a megacity. However, its flow is not aimless and non-directional, and each sign is not causeless or dateless. In this context, in order to make the possibilities of the city visible, the contributors to this volume ask: “Istanbul, whose city is it?” The title of the book enables different academics to ask the same question using different methodologies and subjects. The question “Whose City is That?” and the necessity of studying Istanbul using multidisciplinary perspectives brought many researchers from different fields together, because the city is larger than one approach and the constraints of one “unique” field. Gathering researchers and academics from various disciplines, such as communication studies, cultural studies, cinema/media studies, literature, the fine arts, city and regional planning, political science, social and economic geography, anthropology, and architecture enables each to think about the city alone and together, so as to create new forms of thought and discourse about Istanbul.

Urban theory traditionally links modernity to the city, to the historical emergence of certain forms of subjectivity and the rise of important developments in culture, arts and architecture. This is often in response to technological, economic and societal transformations in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries in select Euro-American metropolises. In contrast, non-Western cities in the modern period are often considered through the lens of Westernization and development. How do we account for urban modernity in "other" cities? This book seeks to highlight cultural creativity by examining the diverse and shifting ways Istanbulites have defined themselves while they debate, imagine, build and consume their city. It focuses on a series of exhibitionary sites, from print press/photography, cinema/films, exhibitions of architectural heritage, theme parks and museums, and explores the links between these popular depictions through shared practices of representation. In doing so it argues that understanding how the future is imagined through images and interpretations of the past can broaden current theoretical thinking about Istanbul and other cities. In line with postcolonial calls for a comparative urbanism that decouples understanding of the modern from its privileged association with Western cities, this book offers a new perspective on the lens of urban modernity. It will appeal to urban geographers and historians, cultural studies scholars, art historians and anthropologists as well as planners, architects and artists.

This book details the current neoliberal restructuring of cities and its impact on the rise and spread of resistance and uprisings in different cities throughout the world. Through close ethnographic study the authors illuminate the strategies adopted for everyday life that have evolved in response to the neoliberal managing of cities, by which the city is shaped by market forces rather than by the needs of its inhabitants. In the light of many urban movements, uprisings and forms of resistance observed in such diverse countries as Brazil, Turkey, the USA, Greece and Spain since the Arab uprising of 2011, this collection makes an original contribution to urban sociology and social geography by developing a spatial approach to understanding how the city shapes identities and perceptions of (in)justice. This innovative volume will be of interest to readers across the social sciences.

‘The City on Screen: Modern Strangers of Cinematic Istanbul’ attempts to analyze how Istanbul is captured through the projector; in other words, the ontological relationship between city and film and how it is elaborated within the context of Istanbul and the sense of strangerhood. This book shifts the axis of Istanbul, typically known as a touristic city, to its underlying details through the strangers in the modern city. Five different films set in this region are analyzed in the text that help to reveal and clarify the socio-urban life of modern Istanbul. The characters and stories in these films tell how Istanbul has socially and architecturally become a city of strangers. The films analyzed include ‘A Touch of Spice’ (2004), ‘Men on the Bridge’ (2009), ‘A Run for Money’ (1999), ‘Distant’ (2002), and ‘10 to 11’ (2009). The theoretical framework of this book is based on the works of Georg Simmel, Zygmunt Bauman and Richard Sennett. These three thinkers have all attempted to look for answers to the sociological question of strangerhood in urban living. This book accomplishes this connection by discussing the similarities and differences between each of their theories regarding the city, cinema and strangerhood.

Museums, Emotion, and Memory Culture examines the politics of emotion in history museums, combining approaches and concerns from museum, heritage and memory studies, anthropology and studies of emotion. Exploring the meanings and politics of memory contests in Turkey, a site for complex negotiations of identity, the book asks what it means for museums to charge the past with political agendas through spectacular, emotive representations. Providing an in-depth examination of emotional practice in two Turkish museums that present contrasting representations of the national past, the book analyses relationships between memory, governmentality, identity, and emotion. The museums discussed celebrate Ottoman and Early Republican pasts, linking to geo- and party politics, people’s senses of who they are, popular memory culture, and competing national stories and identities vis-à-vis Europe and the wider world. Both museums use dramatic, emotive panoramas as key displays and the research at the heart of this book explores this seemingly anachronistic choice, and how it links with memory cultures to prompt visitors to engage imaginatively, socially, politically and morally with a particular version of the past. Although the book focuses on museums in Turkey, it uses this as a platform to address broader questions about memory culture, emotion, and identity. As such, Museums and Memory Culture should be of great interest to academics and students around the world who are engaged in the study of museums, heritage, culture, history, politics, anthropology, sociology, and the psychology of emotion.

This book examines the formation of urban neighbourhoods in the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia. It departs from ‘neighbourhoods’ to consider identity, coexistence, solidarity, and violence in relations to a place. Urban Neighbourhood Formations revolves around three major aspects of making and unmaking of neighbourhoods: spatial and temporal boundaries of neighbourhoods, neighbourhoods as imagined and narrated entities, and neighbourhood as social relations. With extensive case studies from Johannesburg to Istanbul and from Jerusalem to Delhi, this volume shows how spatial amenities, immaterial processes of narrating and dreaming, and the lasting effect of intimacies and violence in a neighbourhood are intertwined and negotiated over time in the construction of moral orders, urban practices, and political identities at large. This book offers insights into neighbourhood formations in an age of constant mobility and helps us understand the grassroots-level dynamics of xenophobia and hostility, as much as welcoming and openness. It would be of interest for both academics and more general audiences, as well as for students of undergraduate and postgraduate courses in Urban Studies and Anthropology.

Neighbours are a lively topic of everyday conversation and interest. Neighbours Around the World takes a comparative look around the world at our relationships and interactions with the people living next door, analysing the ways in which these relationships are changing in the face of large-scale macro social and urban processes.