Reading urban layers: transformation, memory and representation in Teşvikiye-Nişantaşı

Abstract

This thesis examines the Teşvikiye-Nişantaşı district of Istanbul over a period of roughly 150 years and argues that urban transformation is not merely a physical process, but a multi-layered one that simultaneously reshapes memory, emotions, class representations, and cultural codes. The central aim of the thesis is to understand how contemporary Nişantaşı has become both a spatial showcase of modernization and a site of social tension, and how urban form, media representations, and everyday experiences collectively produce this transformation. To this end, the thesis brings together Lefebvre's production of space and assemblage theory, approaching the district not simply as a physical location but as an urban whole shaped through historical, emotional, cultural, and symbolic ties. Guided by this motivation, the thesis is structured as an integrated study composed of three published articles. Each article adopts a distinct method and research question yet all are united under a shared theoretical umbrella. Each article examines a different layer of Nişantaşı: 1. morphological and legal transformation 2. representation in media and ideological reproduction 3. memory, affect, and class-based belonging The first article investigates the physical formation of Teşvikiye-Nişantaşıby tracing its layered morphological evolution, and the planning, legal, and economic dynamics that have shaped this process. Focusing on Lefebvre's notion of conceived space, it traces the district's trajectory from its planned establishment in the late nineteenth century to the post-2000 urban renewal legislation. It asks: which structural conditions produced today's Nişantaşı? Which planning decisions, property regimes, transformation laws, and economic motivations created both continuity and rupture in the district's built environment? The findings show that Nişantaşı's transformation cannot be explained solely through market forces and invite a turn toward other forms of production. Building on this argument, the second article examines Nişantaşı's representations in post-2000 Turkish television series and demonstrates how the district becomes a narrative device through which class and ideological positions are articulated. Using semiotic analysis, it explores series such as Avrupa Yakası, İstanbullu Gelin, Ufak Tefek Cinayetler, and Kızılcık Şerbeti, demonstrating how Nişantaşı is constructed as a symbol of class distinction, elite identity, or, at times, social decline. This article asks: How does the media reproduce Nişantaşı's classed and cultural meanings? Why does Nişantaşı become an ideological battleground in the populist climate that emerges after 2000? The findings reveal that spatial narratives in these series reframe social tensions. Space becomes not a neutral backdrop but an active agent in the production of social hierarchies. These insights underline the need to examine the neighbourhood's everyday life and memory practices. The third article takes up this task by drawing on in-depth interviews with Nişantaşı residents and an extensive survey of newspaper archives from 1923 to 2025. It reads the district as a site of emotional, historical, and class-based memory. The central question of the article is: How do residents remember the past, experience the present, and construct class boundaries through emotional and spatial attachments? The findings show that a sense of belonging in Nişantaşı is carried through intergenerational memory and that the ideal of the "old Nişantaşı" produces both narratives of distinction and feelings of loss. This memory is at once inclusive and exclusionary; it generates discourses of local rootedness and elite identity. In this sense, the district functions as an emotional geography that both exposes social tensions and holds people together. Read together, the three articles demonstrate that Nişantaşı's transformation cannot be understood through a single lens. Instead, the district operates as an assemblage in which morphological, cultural, emotional, and ideological layers are continuously reconfigured. The interplay between the concrete built environment and the symbolic realms of representation and memory shows that Nişantaşı remains one of the most powerful spatial symbols of Turkish modernization. This thesis contributes to the literature of architecture and urban studies, to multidisciplinary research that bring together spatial and social studies, and to the field of remapping in architecture.