GlobalPrayers
2012/ 2013

Eda Ünlü-Yücesoy / Özge Aktaş

Mapping the Changing (Political—Cultural—Religious) Landscape of Istanbul

Eda Ünlü-Yücesoy, PhD, is a faculty member at the Department of Sociology and researcher at the Urban Studies Research Centre (USRC). She is an urban planner and social geographer with B. Sc. and M. Sc. degrees from Middle East Technical University and Ph. D. from Utrecht University. As a post-doc, she worked at the Graduate Program in Architectural Design at Istanbul Bilgi University, where she also co- curated the exhibition entitled “Istanbul 1910-2010: The City, Built Environment and Architectural Culture”, funded by Istanbul 2010, European Capital of Culture Agency. Her research and publications have focused on urban history, planning, public space, spatial relations, social and economic geography, and spatial transformation. 

Özge Aktaş, PhD, Sociologist, Researcher in the Urban Studies Research Centre (USRC), Istanbul Sehir University, where she has been since October 2010. From 2005-2009 she has completed her doctoral studies at the University of Sussex, Sociology Department and Sussex Centre for Migration Studies (SCMR). During her studies she worked as a research assistant at the Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU), University of Sussex in projects related to development and social networks. Previously she has completed her MA at the University of Essex, and her BA at Bogazici University sociology departments. Her research interests are on internal and international migration, poverty and social exclusion, social networks and social capital, urban sociology. Her present projects concentrate on world migration flows, Turkish migration flows and migrant profiles, and Bursa metropolitan area.

Mapping the Changing (Political—Cultural—Religious) Landscape of Istanbul

In the last two decades, the political and cultural landscape of Istanbul has considered to be transformed and become communitarized along ethnic-religious lines. Combined with technocratic, modernist and neoliberal strategies, Islamist politics pervade the urban space. This project aims at identifying the changing political, cultural, and religious landscape of İstanbul in the last two decades, locating the transformation and fragmentation processes highlighted by many researchers and intellectuals in the recent years. In order to understand the transformation, it adopts a multi-level research, mapping the political orientation and elucidating changing spatial behavior patterns. While the former represents the political change of Istanbul neighborhoods in the 2000s, the latter involves interviews with young female students from a recently established university about upward social / spatial mobility, re/production of a new middle class and re-production of everyday spaces in the city.