2026 Spring Architectural History and Theory Talks will begin with K. Mehmet Kentel’s lecture “Building Pera, Burning Pera: The 1870 Fire and the “Imaginary Lines” of Urbanization”, in March 27, 2026, Friday, at 12:30 in FFB-05. The talk series is organized by Aslıhan Günhan (Architecture) and Semra Horuz (IAED).
On 5 June 1870, the heart of Istanbul’s capitalist urbanization, Pera, was ravaged by one of the most disastrous fires in the city’s history. Killing thousands of people (and uncounted nonhumans) and destroying large swathes of the built environment, the Great Fire of 1870 has so far not been investigated in its material complexity and its unequal and heterogeneous impact on the urban landscape. This talk, partially based on a work-in-progress article co-authored with Ahmet Ersoy, remaps the fire’s impact and demonstrates that the post-disaster expertise on the fire was shaped by and contributed to the socio-ecological inequalities in the city. It traces the “imaginary lines” of the insurance agents and mapmakers to reveal the dispossessive links between the 1870 Fire and infrastructural interventions in the city’s environment in this period. As such, it connects this episode of destruction to the speaker’s book project, Urban Elements: Assembling Infrastructure and Environment in Nineteenth-Century Istanbul.
Biography:
K. Mehmet Kentel is assistant professor at Leiden University, Institute for History. His monograph under preparation focuses on Istanbul’s environmental transformation in the nineteenth century. He has co-edited Istanbul Unbound: Environmental Approaches to the City (forthcoming from University of Utah Press), co-curated On the Spot: Panoramic Gaze on Istanbul, a History, and co-edited the eponymous edited volume (Pera Museum, 2023). He is the editor of YILLIK: Annual of Istanbul Studies. His other exhibition credits include Memories of Humankind: Stories from Ottoman Manuscripts (curator, Istanbul Research Institute, 2019) and The Characters of Yusuf Franko: An Ottoman Bureaucrat’s Caricatures (advisor and author, ANAMED, 2017).
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Image credit: London Metropolitan Archives, CLC_B_192_DC_019_Ms31522_260, 170–171, close-up.