Istanbul, Open City

Following recent postcolonial calls towards a comparative urbanism which decouples the understanding of the modern from its privileged association with the West, this book puts forward a detailed and original study of Istanbul in the post-war period to bring fresh insights on urban modernity more generally. Focusing on a series of exhibitionary sites, it argues that the city has been 'staged' by competing power bases and that underlying all the sites analysed is a desire to shape the public through culture and create urbanite citizens. in doing so, it proffers a couple of interwoven arguments about the relationships between urban representations, the production of subjectivity, and built form that are applicable to other cities.