Abstract
This paper explores how residents of the historic Nişantaşı neighborhood in Istanbul have experienced, remembered, and narrated the area throughout Turkey’s modern urban history. Drawing on in-depth interviews and archival materials from newspapers and magazines, it interprets these sources as subjective memory rather than objective record. By tracing shifts in personal experiences, daily routines, and emotional geographies, the study reveals how urban change is understood beyond spatial transformation alone. Using a periodization framework aligned with Turkey’s urban transformation, it maps recurring themes and emotional tones across time. These include a persistent tension between nostalgic loss and the embrace of modernization, where nostalgia also emerges as a subtle form of resistance to urban change. This diachronic perspective highlights tensions between continuity and rupture, belonging and memory, and the interplay of material and imagined spaces. In doing so, the article emphasizes memory as a multilayered cultural construct, shaped by overlapping narratives of class, modernization, and everyday life, thereby revealing how cultural conflicts and integrations are inscribed in the urban fabric of Nişantaşı. Moreover. the study’s approach also offers a framework that future research can adapt to examine how affective attachments and classed narratives mediate processes of urban change in different cultural settings.
Keywords:
Habitus, Nişantaşı, Nostalgia, Place Attachment, Teşvikiye, Urban MemoryReferences
Issue
Copyright & License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.