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Considering the age of socio-ecological crises in which we live, the urgency of understanding the complicated relationship between society and nature is apparent. To achieve this, unfolding the urban metabolism of cities through metabolic flows from the perspective of urban political ecology will grow increasingly essential in the future. This paper aims to explore the concept of urban political ecology as a perspective for understanding emergence of a new urban metabolism in İstanbul in the nineteenth century through metabolic flows of water. The context of "metabolic" emphasizes labor as an agent for the very production of nature as urbanized nature through tap water, waste, and sanitation. It shows the transition and the conflict between the labor-intensive urban metabolism and capital-intensive urban metabolism of İstanbul, which started in the nineteenth century. The metabolic flows of water in terms of infrastructure were affected by the first impacts of foreign capital investments and capitalist relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the ways in which debates about urban policy became a space for members of the literate Turkish public to negotiate the boundary between state and society during a period of dramatic social transformation in the 1930s. Inspired by circulating urbanist discourses, Turkish reformers reimagined society from street level up by passing a series of laws which empowered municipalities and abolished the neighborhood muhtar and council of elders, the basic units of local administration since 1829. Eleven years later, however, these offices were reconstituted and absorbed into municipal bureaucracy where they became the focus of heated party politics and struggles across Turkey. The debates which brought about this transformation, I argue, were ultimately about how far into daily life the authority of the government should extend and in what ways Turkey was able to adopt international standards of urbanism in a time of economic and political uncertainty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the socio-spatial history of Sufism in Istanbul during 1880s. Drawing on a unique population registry, it reconstructs the locations of Sufi lodges and the social profiles of Sufis to question how visible Sufism was in the Ottoman capital, and what this visibility demonstrates the historical realities of Sufism. It claims that Sufism was an integral part of the Ottoman life since Sufi lodges were space of religion and spirituality, art, housing, and health. Despite their large presence in Istanbul, Sufi lodges were extensively missing in two main areas: the districts of Unkapanı-Bayezid and Galata-Pera. While the lack of lodgess in the latter area can be explained by the Western encroachment in the Ottoman capital, the explanation for the absence of Sufis in Unkapanı-Bayezid is more complex: natural disasters, two opposing views about Sufi sociability, and the locations of the central lodges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]