This urban and architectural study of Aleppo reconstructs the city's evolution over the first two centuries of Ottoman rule and proposes a new model for the understanding of the reception and adaptation of imperial forms, institutions and norms in a provincial setting.

Studies of early-modern Islamic cities have stressed the atypical or the idiosyncratic. This bias derives largely from orientalist presumptions that they were in some way substandard or deviant. The first purpose of this volume is to normalize Ottoman cities, to demonstrate how, on the one hand, they resembled cities generally and how, on the other, their specific histories individualized them. The second purpose is to challenge the previous literature and to negotiate an agenda for future study. By considering the narrative histories of Aleppo, Izmir and Istanbul, the book offers a departure from the piecemeal methods of previous studies, emphasizing their importance during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and highlighting their essentially Ottoman character. While the essays provide an overall view, each can be approached separately. Their exploration of the sources and the agendas of those who have conditioned scholarly understanding of these cities will make them essential student reading.

Examines the cities of Algeria and Tunisia under French colonial rule and those of the Ottoman Arab provinces, providing a nuanced look at cross-cultural exchanges.

Architecture and urban planning have always been used by political regimes to stamp their ideologies upon cities, and this is especially the case in the modern Turkish Republic. By exploring Istanbul's modern architectural and urban history, Murat Gul highlights the dynamics of political and social change in Turkey from the late-Ottoman period until today. Looking beyond pure architectural styles or the physical manifestations of Istanbul's cultural landscape, he offers critical insight into how Turkish attempts to modernise have affected both the city and its population. Charting the diverse forces evident in Istanbul's urban fabric, the book examines late Ottoman reforms, the Turkish Republic's turn westward for inspiration, Cold War alliances and the AK Party's reaffirmation of cultural ties with the Middle East and the Balkans. Telltale signs of these moments - revivalist architecture drawing on Ottoman and Seljuk styles, 1930s Art Deco, post-war International Style buildings and the proliferation of shopping malls, luxurious gated residences and high-rise towers, for example - are analysed and illustrated in extensive detail.Connecting this rich history to present-day Istanbul, whose urban development is characterised anew by intense social stratification, the book will appeal to researchers of Turkey, its architecture and urban planning.

Zeynep elik examines the changing face of Istanbul during the period when European cultural and economic influence intensified, integrating architectural analysis with discussion of broader issues of urban design and historical change. Zeynep elik examines the changing face of Istanbul during the period when European cultural and economic influence intensified, integrating architectural analysis with discussion of broader issues of urban design and historical change.

Combining the vivid and colorful detail of a micro-history with a wider historical perspective, this groundbreaking study looks at the urban and social history of a small neighborhood community (a mahalle) of Ottoman Istanbul, the Kasap İlyas. Drawing on exceptionally rich historical documentation starting in the early sixteenth century, Cem Behar focuses on how the Kasap İlyas mahalle came to mirror some of the overarching issues of the capital city of the Ottoman Empire. Also considered are other issues central to the historiography of cities, such as rural migration and urban integration of migrants, including avenues for professional integration and the solidarity networks migrants formed, and the role of historical guilds and non-guild labor, the ancestor of the "informal" or "marginal" sector found today in less developed countries.

The City's Pleasures is the first historical investigation of the tremendous changes that affected the fabric and architecture of Istanbul in the century that followed the decisive return of the Ottoman court to the capital in 1703. These were spectacular times that witnessed the most extraordinary urban expansion and building explosion in the history of the city. Showing how architecture and urban form became involved in the representation and construction of a changing social order, Shirine Hamadeh reassesses the dominance of the paradigm of Westernization in interpretations of this period and challenges the suggestion that change in the eighteenth century could only occur by turning toward a now superior West. Drawing on a genre of Ottoman poetry written in celebration of the built environment and on a vast array of related textual and visual sources, Hamadeh demonstrates that architectural change was the result of a dynamic synthesis between internal and external factors, and closely mirrored the process of décloisonnement of the city's social landscape. Examining novel forms, spaces, and decorative vocabularies; changing patterns of patronage; and new patterns of architectural perception; The City's Pleasures shows how these exposed and reinforced the internal dynamics that were played out between a society in flux and a state anxious to recreate an ideal system of social hierarchies. Profoundly hybrid in nature, the new architectural idiom reflected a growing permeability between elite and middle-class sensibilities, an unprecedented degree of receptivity to Western and Eastern foreign traditions, and a clear departure from the parameters of the classical canon. Innovation became the new operative doctrine. As the built environment was experienced, perceived, and appreciated by contemporary observers, it increasingly revealed itself as a perpetual source of sensory pleasures.