As culture-led urban regeneration has become a widely adopted strategy for dilapidated historic cities, the museum as a concept has become a key aspect of this regeneration. With the tangible and intangible aspects of culture being presented in museums, many historic buildings are repurposed as museums, urban, or archaeological sites designated as open-air museums, and the boundaries between museums and historic cities have been dissolved. This article discusses how the museum concept expands from the boundaries of a single building into the historic city itself. Defining this expansion as musealization, this article evaluates its contribution as an urban process in the transformation of Sultanahmet in Istanbul’s historic peninsula, which has been the major subject of conservation studies from the nineteenth century until present day.
Heritage-making is a process of valorization carried out using complex exchanges, contestations, and negotiations between various actors. State actors attempt, through various strategies, to employ heritage-making in order to construct a unified heritage discourse
and avoid multivocality. One of these strategies is the control of state archives, an approach that seeks to dictate what is accessible and inaccessible and thus to dominate conceptualizations of heritage. This paper discusses how research in state archives sheds light on heritage-making in
Istanbul's historic peninsula and how the state's tendency to restrain access reflects the contested nature of Istanbul's heritage. The restriction or denial of archival access becomes a significant component of heritage-making in Turkey, shaped not only by the past but also by the present.
Therefore, archives and the practice of archival research become both a tool for the researcher and at the same time a subject worthy of research in and of itself. This paper argues that the attitudes of state institutions and the discourses they adopt in restraining access to archives are
in fact objects of enquiry in the understanding of the precise boundaries of their scope of authority and, as such, can provide further insight into the fragmented nature of the state and state archives.
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