About the Project

About the Project

Street as Archive is a web-based counter-archive and mapping prototype that reads urban space through streets, traces, absences, building fragments and everyday cultural memory.

The project begins with Kumbaracı Yokuşu in Beyoğlu, Istanbul, as its first case study. Rather than approaching the street as a neutral route, a nostalgic heritage scene or a fixed historical object, Street as Archive treats it as an active cultural document: a layered urban surface where global, local, historical, economic and everyday forces become visible.

The project asks what a street can remember when it is read through its facades, thresholds, former uses, institutional presences, erased signs, architectural fragments, cultural workers, rumours, archival records and unresolved gaps. It is built as a digital research environment where walking, mapping, archival inquiry and cultural analysis come together.

Rather than presenting Kumbaracı Yokuşu as a touristic route or a completed heritage object, this project reads the street as a living and contested cultural environment. It is a situated research tool for noticing how cultural memory survives in ordinary urban space, and how that memory becomes fragile under the pressures of real estate, tourism, redevelopment, institutional precarity and selective heritage narratives.

The website is designed as a prototype for a future community counter-archive. It imagines how residents, cultural workers, students, visitors, shopkeepers, and passers-by could contribute their own memories, images, observations, sounds, and questions connected to the street.

Course Context

This project was developed as a creative research output for CAM 524: Globalization and Culture, a graduate course in the Cultural Management MA program at Istanbul Bilgi University.

The course approaches Galata, Pera and Beyoğlu as urban laboratories for studying globalization, cultural memory, heritage, spatial transformation and everyday life. Rather than treating globalization as an abstract macro-scale process, the course invites a close reading of how global cultural, economic and political relations are materialized in specific urban sites.

Within this framework, Street as Archive uses Kumbaracı Yokuşu as a micro-scale case study. The project examines how one street can reveal the layered consequences of globalization: diplomatic histories, Ottoman urban infrastructure, multilingual commerce, apartment-han typologies, minority cultural presence, independent cultural production, tourism, creative labour and real-estate pressure.

As a creative output, the project translates academic research into a public-facing digital format. It combines theoretical reflection with archive entries, mapping, walking, source-status tagging and a micro cultural rights proposal. The aim is not only to describe Kumbaracı Yokuşu, but to test how a cultural management perspective can produce a different kind of urban archive.

Research Scope

The scope of this project is intentionally micro-scale. It focuses on Kumbaracı Yokuşu and its immediate urban connections, including its thresholds toward İstiklal, Tophane, Hacı Mimi, Camcı Fevzi Sokak, Tercüman Çıkmazı, Lüleci Hendek and Serdar-ı Ekrem.

The project looks at the street through multiple forms of evidence: buildings, facades, former uses, cultural institutions, multilingual inscriptions, historical maps, trade directories, fountains, religious structures, independent theatres, publishing spaces, design platforms, real-estate listings, field observations and archival traces.

This scope is not limited to officially recognized monuments. It also includes partial, minor and fragile traces: a faded inscription, a theatre entrance, a former workshop, a ground-floor transformation, a building name, an archival mismatch, an uncertain address, a missing story or a tension between past and present use.

The project does not aim to produce a complete architectural inventory of Kumbaracı Yokuşu. It does not claim to document every building, resolve every historical uncertainty or replace official conservation records. Instead, it proposes a partial, situated and expandable research platform. Its incompleteness is part of its method: the archive is designed to show what is known, what is uncertain and what still needs to be researched.

Why Kumbaracı Yokuşu?

Kumbaracı Yokuşu was selected because it condenses many of the contradictions of urban globalization at a walkable scale.

The street connects İstiklal and Tophane, but it also connects different historical and cultural layers: diplomatic Pera, Ottoman neighbourhood infrastructure, Anglican and Muslim religious presences, multilingual commerce, Rum and Armenian traces, apartment-han urbanism, independent theatre, publishing, design culture, tourism and real-estate speculation.

Its value does not come from a single monument or a single historical narrative. Instead, Kumbaracı Yokuşu matters because of the density of its overlaps. A fountain, a theatre, a former furniture workshop, a historical apartment, a publishing house, a church, a mosque, a real-estate listing and a cafe table can all become evidence of larger urban transformations.

This makes the street a useful site for asking broader questions: How does globalization become visible in everyday urban space? Who produces cultural value in the city? Which histories are preserved, marketed, ignored or displaced? How do creative labour and heritage become entangled with tourism and property pressure? What kinds of memory remain outside official archives?

What Is a Counter-Archive? And Why?

A counter-archive is not simply an alternative archive. It is a way of collecting, organizing and presenting materials that are often excluded from official, monumental or institutional narratives.

In this project, the counter-archive brings together fragments rather than claiming completeness. It includes confirmed historical information, field observations, uncertain traces, building details, cultural institutions, archival references, real-estate discourse, oral memory prompts and research gaps.

The aim is not to replace official heritage inventories, but to question what they tend to leave outside: everyday use, cultural labour, minor histories, multilingual traces, affective memory, disappearance, speculation, uncertainty and the lived experience of the street.

Kumbaracı Yokuşu needs a counter-archive because its cultural meaning cannot be captured only through architectural value or historical chronology. The street is also shaped by what is fading, what has been repurposed, what is being marketed, what is remembered informally and what remains undocumented.

For this reason, the archive uses source-status labels such as confirmed, field observation, discourse evidence, oral history and needs verification. These labels make the limits of the research visible. They also keep the archive open to correction, contribution and future expansion.

Method

Street as Archive combines walking, field observation, archival research, counter-mapping and cultural analysis.

Walking is used as a research method. The street is read through movement, pauses, thresholds, slopes, facades, sounds, entrances, blocked views and changes in use. This method follows the idea that urban space is not only studied from above through maps, but also encountered from the ground through embodied observation.

Archival research is used to connect present-day observations with historical records. Sources include cultural inventory entries, historical insurance maps, trade directories, academic theses, institutional histories, archival photographs, cultural organization websites and contemporary representations of the street.

Counter-mapping is used to organize the research spatially without reducing the street to coordinates. The map does not only mark buildings or landmarks. It maps traces, tensions, absences, cultural uses, uncertain histories and questions.

Each archive entry is structured through a shared format: title, location, category, historical layer, source status, short description, guiding question and related entries. This structure allows the project to move between academic research and public readability.

The method is deliberately open-ended. Street as Archive is designed as a prototype that can grow through further fieldwork, oral history, visual documentation, archival comparison and community contribution.

The project uses:

• walking as urban research
• field observation and visual documentation
• historical map and directory comparison
• building and facade analysis
• counter-mapping
• source-status tagging
• cultural policy reflection
• archive-based storytelling

Researcher Position

Researcher: Ezgi Cemre Er