CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2018
| Author | Güçlü, Eda |
|---|---|
| Title | Urban Tanzimat, Morality, and Property in Nineteenth-Century Istanbul |
| Summary | The nineteenth century for Istanbul was a process in which streets increasingly gained a dominant role in the urban character of the city. It was a period of transition from passageways to streets. This dissertation examines the new immediacy of the street in the built environment of the city within the context of the spatio-temporal restructuring that the Ottoman capital went through in this period. The attempts of the government to construct wide and straight streets on a grid system were not only a matter of new urban aesthetics but also a process of value creation in the built environment. Giving a new order to the city was also an attempt to change the relational values of urban property. To moderate such a process and mediate spatial value relations was not easy; therefore, the government had to fashion a fiction of urban rent in which city dwellers could position their interests as property owners. It is this fiction of urban rent within which this study presents property as a social relation in which politics of location and value were played out around concepts like şeref that had both moral and economic meanings. This dissertation explores moments of contestation, persuasion, ambiguity, opposition, corruption as well as compliance in the space of the ‘modern’ – the street – where property owners fashioned competing notions of justice and morality in the collective and social production of urban tanzîmât. It argues that streets as commodities and şeref as an expression of value were social forms that constituted capitalist modernity with all the contradictions between experience and expectation; private and general interest; sacrifices and benefits; and between depreciation and appreciation. |
| Supervisor | Esmer, Tolga U. |
| Department | History PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2018/guclu_eda.pdf |
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