« Public Space and Urban Experiences in Ottoman Cities »
The European Association of Urban Historians Tenth International Conference on Urban History City & Society in European History
Ghent 1st-4th September 2010
This panel seeks to explore and relate different understandings of public space in major cities of the Ottoman empire, from the Balkans to Istanbul and the Arab lands in the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. Building on recent scholarship that critically historicizes the social production of public space, it aims to bring a comparative and transregional perspective to the processes and tensions inherent to the making of Ottoman public space. We are especially interested in exploring the continual transformations of the concept of public in reformulating the lines of public and private, both in the period preceding the centralization of urban order and in the context of the rapid urbanization and modernization of the second half of the nineteenth century.
