The production of public places and spaces in late Ottoman Damascus: contesting public education.

10th International Conference on Urban History  – City & Society in European History

Ghent (Belgium), September 1-4 2010

Again, I would like to raise your attention on this another panel:

Public Space and Urban Experiences in Ottoman cities

http://www.eauh2010.ugent.be/sessions?sess_code=S33

This panel seeks to explore and relate different understandings of public space in major cities of the Ottoman empire, from the Balkans to Istanbul and the Arab lands in the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries.  Building on recent scholarship that critically historicizes the social production of public space, it aims to bring a comparative and transregional perspective to the processes and tensions inherent to the making of Ottoman public space. We are especially interested in exploring the continual transformations of the concept of public in reformulating the lines of public and private, both in the period preceding the centralization of urban order and in the context of the rapid urbanization and modernization of the second half of the nineteenth century.

We would like to invite contributions that address questions of how public space was defined, experienced, and conceptualized through legal or socio-legal norms, patterns of ownership, daily lives and practices, and inclusions and exclusions in relation to such categories as gender, age, religion, ethnicity, and resident and immigrant status. Preference will be given to papers that ground a strong theoretical framework in a critical historical analysis of particular sites and acknowledge the variegated and fluid nature of public space. Among the range of issues that submissions might address are the relationship between public order and spatial order; public space and conceptions of the public good; the nature of the public in Ottoman public space; public behavior and morality; uses of and engagements with public spaces; social and spatial delineations of public and private. Ultimately, we would like to use this session as a venue for discussing innovative methodologies and new ways for scholarly engagement with the study of cities in multicultural societies within the Ottoman context and beyond.

Session info

Papers

Neighbourhoods and Neighbourly Relations in Seventeenth-Century Istanbul

Nocturnal Security in fin de siècle Istanbul

Sailors in Space: Transformations of the Ottoman Naval Academy throughout the 19th Century

Sailors in Space: Transformations of the Ottoman Naval Academy throughout the 19th Century

The production of public places and spaces in late Ottoman Damascus: contesting public education.