ABSTRACT
My aim here is to question the political role of writing and reading city guidebooks in the production of urban topography. Traditionally, guidebooks are often conceived as observational reports, displaying urban topography; however, they may emphasize certain knowledges about places over others to be fixed as facts. Istanbul guidebooks, like other city guidebooks, have fixed certain knowledges about the city. Hence, they have been significantly used by governing bodies as strong political tools in support of their political agendas. On the contrary, there are now new Istanbul guidebooks that are emerging to shift the emphasis from dominant topographies, so the fixed knowledges of a place may be displaced to let other possible knowledges be produced. In these examples, as the authority of a single knowledge of place is broken, the issues of authorship and readership are rethought and alternative ways of writing and reading guidebooks are experimented. My intent is to highlight these different types of guidebooks produced in Istanbul for the Istanbulites before and after the 1990s, which mark the shift of understanding from informative to more performative ways of guidebook making. By focusing on representative guidebooks dealing with contemporary Istanbul, I will demonstrate how Turkish guidebook making and reading cultures illuminate the transforming understanding of place making.
