A micro-historical narrative on housing: Istanbul, Bagdat Street

Among all other places, housing has a specific meaning, as a place where the user's socio-economic and cultural identity, changing patterns of housing and everyday life practices manifest themselves. In other words, housing is the most obvious embodiment of the modernization process. Within the process of urbanization and modernization of Istanbul, housing patterns and expectations from housing have undergone many changes, bringing also the change of the dwelling. However, research on housing and urban history, generally read the change through a general and abstract framework, and the role of the "residents" which transform the dwelling with their expectations, thus being the "real actors" that create the change seem to be ignored. Examining the change of housing, one of the most subjective spaces, and the housing patterns, without considering the residents that create change and their everyday life practices, can only offer a general and abstract framework of the change which remains insufficient to explain the real life sequences. In this context, the thesis is based on the question "how the writing of a history of housing, and therefore the history of architecture and city, based on oral history and the narratives of the actors of everyday life can be possible" and proposes a "micro-historical narrative" which investigates the spatial and semantic change of the spatial and social change of dwelling at the scale of neighbourhood and city, are explored via individual 'apartments' and the personal stories of their inhabitants. Thus, it is aimed to embody the transformation of the dwelling and the urban space, and to make a new contribution to the existing housing history accounts in a micro-scale. In addition, another important objective of the study is to reproduce the information and documents of the residential buildings, which are the unique examples of the civil architecture of a specific period, and create an inventory. In Turkey, written and visual documents about of 20th Century architecture, especially in civil architecture, are very limited. The fact that, in Turkey, 20th Century architecture, is not seen having a historical value that worth archiving reveals the importance of written and visual documentation of this period. With this study, it is aimed to document the civil architecture of the period, which is believed to be significant in terms of the urbanization history of Istanbul, and to establish an original resource about the history of civil architecture in the recent period. As one of the questions that the thesis is based on is the general praxis of historiography in Turkey, the content and the method of the historiography is problematized. For this reason, the second and third chapters of the thesis are devoted to the identification of the conceptual framework and method to be followed in the thesis, by discussing the different concepts of history and historiographical approaches. In this context, primarily, the historicalness of human existence and the significance of "historiographical" activity as a way of making sense of the world; then the importance of historical thought in the nineteenth century, and the different stages of historical consciousness that have emerged are discussed. The next section is devoted to discussing alternative and critical approaches developed against the universal and scientific understanding of history prevalent in the nineteenth century, that emerged in Twentieth Century, which are aimed to establish the relationship between historiography and everyday life and experience. Thus, the conceptual framework is aimed to establish an alternative historiography model within the scope of housing and urban history. And the fourth part – case study – of the study is devoted to the reconstruction of the housing history of the region between Kızıltoprak and Bostancı, where a rapid process of urban change is experienced through residential architecture today, from a micro-historical point of view. The area between Kızıltoprak and Bostanci, which continues along the axis of Baghdad Street, experiencing a rapid urban change through residential architecture, is chosen as the case study area. The area constitutes an important reference point in terms of, both the changing housing architecture and housing practices, and of changing urban patterns. The temporal boundaries of the study are determined from the end of the 19th century, when the urban development of the case study is started, to the present day. The thesis is aimed to illuminate some micro-sociological phenomena in Istanbul's changing housing patterns, however, it is impossible to think independently of micro-events from the macro-events in the national, even global scale. Therefore, while focusing on the change of housing patterns and housing culture at a micro-scale, it is also taken into account that it is not possible to read these changes independently of macro-scale developments, that are, socio-political and economic conditions. For this reason, the temporal boundaries of the thesis are defined as the date range from the 19th century to the present day, covering important breaks in the economic, political and cultural changes and transformations of Turkey. It is aimed to trace and read the changes of city and housing, within these breaking points. The method of the thesis is oral history research. Within the boundaries of the study area, an oral history research was conducted with residents have been living in the area for a long time and the accounts about the housing and urban environment obtained as a result of the survey were used as the main data in the study. In addition, some written data, as memories of the residents about their houses, and visual data, as maps, drawings, photographs, etc., collected from the memoirs and from the archives, and all different forms of data obtained were combined. In order for all narratives and documents to be understood in context as a whole, parallel literature readings were made and personal stories were evaluated on the context of urbanization in country and city scale. As a result of the oral history research carried out throughout the study, personal testimonies and individual stories were compared with the context of Turkey's general urbanization. Within this scope, personal testimonies and narratives, elaborated and embodied historical information contained in official and local sources; it also provided access to historical information at the micro-scale that is not included in these sources. When selecting the witnesses, it was noted that the interviewed dwellers had experienced different housing typologies and had experienced the changes in the case study area. Each interviewer has been requested to give information about their personal memories of their houses and urban environment, through the unstructured interviews. The narratives were also supported by visual materials that are significant documents of interviewers' houses and residential surroundings. These narratives, which have witnessed both the change of the physical and social geography of the housing typologies and the environment, constitute an important personal testimony to the understanding of the actual change in the region in general context. In the study, a comprehensive housing history narrative was established by evaluating these personal testimonies, mappings of change and the data obtained from the archives. The plot of the narrative follows the changes of the housing typologies and the housing culture, instead of a chronological order. The processes of change in the social life and in the city, in the daily life, and in the housing culture, are brought together, based on experiences of eighteen characters that have experienced different lifestyles. Accordingly, in the research conducted, by following the traces of the housing typologies, construction practices and the variation of the living culture, the break points of the change were revealed. Starting from the traditional housing culture, the different stages that have progressed to modernized and present-day modes of housing have been embodied. One of the most important results of the research is demonstrating that the modernization in the culture of housing does not happen at all once, but that it is realized with the change of the meaning of the house and by producing different solutions in order to adapt the housing to the changing economic and social conditions. Another significant result is that, a large part of the urban area is now seen to have been created by architects and small designer-contractors. When the change in the built environment and the housing is observed, it is seen that the actors mostly are, not the known architects, but just architects, builders and contractors, but the usual wealthy and middle-class architecture clients. As it is understood from the method used in the thesis, this narrative about the city and the housing examines the change of the city and the residence through the basic actors, the urban dwellers. The process of changing patterns of the city and the housing that realized in the case study area is demonstrated in concrete terms. Thus, this study demonstrates that micro-historical approaches, which concentrate on individual existences, may be a complement to classical histories, by making a critique in the writing of architectural history, considering everyday life, "ordinary" spaces and users of everyday life. In this context, micro-historical approaches in the context of history of architecture are gaining importance in terms of revealing the existence of subjects that are perhaps not seen worthy to historical importance until today, rather than a historiographical approach that focuses on preliminarily determined issues, through a historical fiction that is supposed to be mostly correct and provides a significant expansion for the inclusion of the "ordinary people", "memory", "everyday life and its spaces".