THE IMPACT OF WESTERNIZATION ON ISTANBUL'S URBAN FORM, 1838-1908 (URBAN HISTORY; MIDDLE EAST, TURKEY

During the 19th century, a concerted effort was made to transform Istanbul, the capital of the Ottoman Empire into a modern, western-style city. This urbanistic strategy was part of a general struggle to salvage the declining Empire by reforming its traditional institutions according to European models. The seventy-year period from 1838 to 1908, studied in this dissertation, marks an intense and climactic phase of westernization in the history of the Empire.;The 19th century Ottoman reformers agreed that their capital had three major problems: it had an irregular street fabric, it was divided, and it was in a dilapidated state. These were not the features of contemporary European cities, which symbolized progress and refined culture to the westernized Ottoman bureaucrats. Istanbul had to be modernized by imposing an order onto the urban fabric, by providing good communication, and by improving the urban image.;The solutions to these problems went hand-in-hand. Regularization meant the replacing of the old street network, which was composed of short, crooked arteries and many dead-ends, with well-connected roads--straight, spacious, and of uniform width. New building codes that aimed at creating a homogeneous residential fabric were passed. Regularization involved, at the same time, clearing the waterfront from conglomerations of run down buildings and opening wide embankments. These efforts helped to improve accessibility to the major nodes of the capital. The introduction of modern transportation systems further enhanced good communication. The Ottoman ruling classes also associated beauty with regularity in city-building and attempted to update Istanbul's urban image by bringing an aesthetic order, modeled on major European 19th century capitals.;The outcome of these operations was not a wholesale transformation of the Ottoman capital, but an incremental one. The parts of the city that experienced radical changes were either the prestigious quarters or the neighborhoods leveled by fires. However, the westernizing trends were more apparent in Galata to the north of the Golden Horn than in the Istanbul peninsula to the south. A dual urban structure emerged with Galata as the "modern" and Istanbul as the "traditional" components of the capital.