Tarihçilikte “Mekânın Yeniden Keşfi”: Osmanlı Şehir Çalışmaları İçin Öneriler

Abstract

Almost a hundred-year ago, everybody is used to think spatially while constructing cities and any buildings as well as deciding wars and establishing trade networks. However, spatially thinking lost its priority in time in analyses of historical, socio-political, and economic issues. Nevertheless, a new approach has appeared since the 1960s, which came to be known as "the spatial turn." This led, first, to rethink the symbolic meaning of space, space politics, and production and reproduction of space in different socio-historical conditions and, second, to study daily practices and sociohistorical structures from the spatial point of view. Since then, new types of studies have affected and reconstructed many disciplines such as urban history, arts and architectural history, and historical geography. This article evaluates the trends in urban historical studies in Turkey after the 1990s considering the spatial-turn and interactions among socio-historical and geographical approaches and methods. In pursuit of interdisciplinary endeavors among these disciplines, this article suggests using socio-spatial historical approach giving some examples from the Ottoman cities-derived from Ottoman primary sources such as waqfiyas, the sijils, and the tax recordsindicating exploratory methods and analyses leading us to new questions and answers in Ottoman urban history.