ABSTRACT
During the first decade of the twentieth century, Georg Simmel characterized the metropolis as an interrelated domain of the built environment, communal lives, technology and political institutions. Contemplating on Simmel’s theories, David Frisby (1999, p. 106) argues that spatio-temporal disruptions and transformations following the first decade of the twentieth century seriously hindered our ability to come to terms with the past and the present of the metropolis, resulting in a ‘systemic erasure of memory traces’. Istanbul, as other cities around the world, has had its share of ‘disruptive’ acts of city planning and lost, so to speak, traces of its past.
