De-Ottomanization, Modernism, Migration: A Selective History of Istanbul, 1923–1974

As one of the great cities of the planet, Istanbul has properly been the subject of a vast body of writing. A proportion of it sits on shelves in the Greater Istanbul Municipality bookshop beside the funicular railway exit in Galata, groaning under the weight of local histories of each of the city’s older neighborhoods, supplemented by exegeses of their representations in a thousand and one novels, songs, films, and poems. More recently established suburbs are less well celebrated. Almost every issue of any Middle East journal reviews new material on Istanbul’s social history, provisioning, political institutions, labor relations, socio-spatial