Relational Heritage in the Urban Core: Sensewalking, Spatial Memory, and Perceived Transformation in Istanbul’s Historical Peninsula

Source abstract

Historic urban cores are assessed as bounded ensembles of monuments and fabric, with limited attention to the relationships through which heritage is lived. This study develops an urban-core perspective on relational heritage by examining how Istanbul’s Historical Peninsula is perceived, remembered, and spatially represented. In a cross-sectional qualitative design, group sensewalks with young participants—predominantly architecture or design students familiar with the Peninsula—generated responses to guiding questions, written notes, photographs, in-walk sketches, and optional post-walk cognitive maps. The authors conducted an iterative deductive–inductive thematic analysis informed by social geography, environmental psychology, critical heritage studies, and Lynch’s spatial elements. Themes were retained when supported across data forms or when explaining meaningful contrasts among locations; contradictory accounts were preserved. Findings reveal connected spatial logics: a representational hierarchy centred on major monuments and an everyday geography structured by inherited routes, neighbourhood functions, transport, commerce, sensory atmospheres, and continuing practices. Bridges, waterfronts, views, and metropolitan mobility extended remembered space beyond the Peninsula’s geographical boundary. The study does not measure direct rural linkages, material flows, or population-level effects. The study shows how sensewalking and participant-generated mapping reveal the perceived, lived, remembered, and spatially connected relationships that constitute a historic urban core as a relational heritage territory.