Entertainment & leisure consumption in Istanbul

This PhD thesis attempts to make sense of Istanbul's leisure consumption and entertainment from within a historical sociological perspective simultaneously learning from Braudel's longue durée and from Rath & Kloosterman's "embeddedness" of actors & processes. From Byzantine carnivals, via Ottoman meyhâne as well as early Republican ballroom dances, up until 1970s gazino and pavyon and finally towards 2010s chic roof-top terraces with chillout-electronica in "Istanbul the Global City" or the "Cool Metropolis"; this book aims to connect the consumers to the producers and the cultural mediators to the governmental (as well as non-governmental) regulators of entertainment and leisure consumption. It also identifies the mechanisms of socio-cultural and ethnic diversity as among the main parameters of the workings of these various actors within highly complex processes.