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Paper short abstract

Based on an ethnography of Uncular Street’s transformation into a "Gastronomy Street," this study explores how locals conform to or resist displacement. Using Lefebvre and Halbwachs, it argues social memory acts as a social, cultural and political tool to challenge neoliberal urban interventions.

Paper long abstract

In this study, I investigate the transformation of Uncular Street and its impact on the perceptions and experiences of the street residents and shop owners in relation to production of space and social memory. Uncular street is one of the historical market streets in Istanbul in Türkiye. With urban transformation project, the street is transformed into “Gastronomy Street” by the municipality (Yaman, 2021). Stylish third-wave coffee shops and restaurants opened, while most of the old traditional shops selling household goods to the neighbors closed gradually. Reactions among shop owners varied significantly; some are displaced by implicit pressures, some adapted to the change by shifting the business, while others managed to stay by rejecting buy-out offers. Residents were largely pushed out by the excessive rents following the decline in economy in Turkey.

To uncover the strategies and tactics developed in the process of urban transformation, the study draws on four months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted on Uncular Street that involves participant observations in cafes and streets, alongside in-depth interviews with 10 inhabitants and 10 shop owners. This study uses Lefebvre’s triad of spatial production (1991), Low’s social construction and production of space (2014) and Halbwachs’ collective memory (1992). The study contributes to discussions of space, politics and memory by demonstrating how this top-down capitalist profit-centred transformation creates a fierce competitive environment triggering bottom-up resistance fueled by social memory that carries the intertwined mechanism of the street’s cultural, historical, and religious heritage through unique tactics derived from everyday life of Uncular Street.