Archives as Fields of Heritage-Making in Istanbul's Historic Peninsula

2020-07-01
Heritage-making is a process of valorization carried out using complex exchanges, contestations, and negotiations between various actors. State actors attempt, through various strategies, to employ heritage-making in order to construct a unified heritage discourse and avoid multivocality. One of these strategies is the control of state archives, an approach that seeks to dictate what is accessible and inaccessible and thus to dominate conceptualizations of heritage. This paper discusses how research in state archives sheds light on heritage-making in Istanbul's historic peninsula and how the state's tendency to restrain access reflects the contested nature of Istanbul's heritage. The restriction or denial of archival access becomes a significant component of heritage-making in Turkey, shaped not only by the past but also by the present. Therefore, archives and the practice of archival research become both a tool for the researcher and at the same time a subject worthy of research in and of itself. This paper argues that the attitudes of state institutions and the discourses they adopt in restraining access to archives are in fact objects of enquiry in the understanding of the precise boundaries of their scope of authority and, as such, can provide further insight into the fragmented nature of the state and state archives.
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ISLAMIC ARCHITECTURE

Suggestions

ON VARIETIES OF ARCHITECTURAL UTOPIANISM A CRITICAL READING OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY UTOPIAN ARCHITECTURE
Güneri Söğüt, Gizem Deniz (University of Zagreb, Faculty of Architecture, 2019-01-01)
This text dwells on and manifests the methodological significance of utopianism for the practices of the urban, and specifically architecture, building upon the core definitions made by Ruth Levitas in delineating utopia as method. It surveys various manners of architectural utopianisms - but not architectural utopias themselves - in their broadest sense, to identify the main tendencies of this methodology throughout the twentieth century.
Constructing co-generative search processes: Re-thinking urban planning/making urban plans actionable
Ataöv Demirkan, Anlı (Informa UK Limited, 2008-01-01)
The project discussed in this paper represents the participatory planning of Kocaeli in Turkey, which uses the "action research" approach, a more powerful approach compared to conventional approaches with respect to the value of democracy in city-wide decision-making and the actionable outcomes salient to the needs of the community. The use of action research in planning integrates research, theory, and action. It helps manage the change through action in the process of participation, while enhancing democr...
PETER COOK BEYOND ARCHIGRAM: TOWARDS A CRITICAL UTOPIANISM
Güneri Söğüt, Gizem Deniz (University of Zagreb, Faculty of Architecture, 2020-01-01)
This text visits and manifests the critical utopianism embedded in the praxis of Peter Cook, within which resides a promising mode of architectural thinking based on reflexive inquiries rather than absolute and closed utopias. It aims to revert questions that link utopia and spatial determinism towards questions that revolve around utopian methodologies that become trainings of architectural imagination.
Thinking Strategic and Acting Pragmatic The European Refugee Crisis and Turkey EU Relations
Kale Lack, Başak (null; 2016-04-30)
The relations between Turkey-EU have never been easy due to the challenges on both sides of the negotiations table that have complicated the accession process. Since the opening of accession negotiations in 2005, the EU has lost much of its leverage with Turkey as the EU itself has been forced to deal with numerous challenges including: constitutional referendums, Eurozone crises and the integration of newly joined members while defining its global role. With the lack of EU’s enthusiasm and also dramatic ch...
Discrete-time surplus process for takaful insurance with multiple threshold levels
Achlak, Arham; Kestel, Sevtap Ayşe; Tank, Fatih; Department of Actuarial Sciences (2016)
Takaful is a type of insurance system whose participants contribute a certain sum of money to a common pool in order to guarantee each other against predefined losses. Over the past few years, the global Takaful industry has maintained solid growth trajectory with significant untapped potential across several markets. For this reason, there have been numerous researches conducted on the efficiency of Takaful system, but only few of them approach its actuarial aspect. This study aims to construct a new risk ...
Citation Formats
P. Aykaç Leıdholm, “Archives as Fields of Heritage-Making in Istanbul’s Historic Peninsula,” INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ISLAMIC ARCHITECTURE, pp. 361–387, 2020, Accessed: 00, 2020. [Online]. Available: https://hdl.handle.net/11511/48354.