On the title page of Cemil Topuzlu’s 1937 treatise on the future of Istanbul, the famed medical doctor and two-time Istanbul mayor, announced a grand ambition: “In order to make Istanbul a modern city, it is required that we demolish it and establish it again.” This startling assertion was rooted in a conviction that the city itself was instrumental for ushering Turkey and its people into modernity. Topuzlu was not alone: in the first half of the twentieth century, many journalists, politicians, planners, medical doctors and architects whose careers, like Topuzlu’s, spanned the late Ottoman period and early years of the Turkish Republic, believed that they could generate a healthy, modern citizenry by reconfiguring urban space in ways that would foster proper behaviors. Facing cities plagued by fire, disease, and a general lack of municipal services, a range of figures contributed to lively debates about the purview of local governments regarding issues as diverse as public hygiene, urban aesthetics, civic conduct and historical preservation. By the 1930s, this flurry of reformist discourses would increasingly cohere under the new disciplinary frameworks of “municipalism” (belediyecilik) and “urbanism” (?ehircilik) with their own dedicated experts and practitioners. Drawing from treatises and articles by this varied assortment of thinkers, newspaper debates, academic texts and municipal documents, my paper investigates the ways in which Ottoman and later Turkish cities became objects of expert knowledge through overlapping and sometimes competing visions about urban space and the management of its inhabitants, and the policies that flowed from those visions. Urbanism and municipalism, I will argue, proved to be surprisingly permeable fields of expertise that appealed to morality, aesthetics, political economy and even eugenics in order to bolster municipal authority and reform society. The political consequences of such intellectual production, I will show, were equally far-reaching including the mass expulsion of beggars and dogs from city centers, the strengthening of municipal police powers to penalize the violation of newly established norms of urban conduct, and the coherence of policies about what constituted legitimate urban labor and commerce.

Modern Masculinity on Display: City Pharmacists as Men of Science Pharmacists were the most public face of modern medicine in late-Ottoman and modern Egyptian society. While visits to the nurse or doctor were private moments behind closed doors, the new botanical and chemical compounding pharmacists were early adopters of vitrines, and put modern medicine on display for passersby in urban settings. In contrast to the old apothecaries, which displayed dried bunches of herbs on the front wall and over the doorway into fairly dark interiors, the new pharmacies showcased modern, mustachioed and jacketed men of science working with technical tools of the trade and neat rows of clearly labeled products. They were also active in treatment of refugee populations in the cities, work that continued into WWI and post-war refugee camps throughout the empire and Turkish Republic, and in that setting were many villagers’ first encounters with urban medical practice. As well, advertising in the serial press was used to teach readers names and properties of such new treatments as aspirin, while creating product and pricing lists that combined new and traditional remedies supported by laboratory work in the Istanbul branch of Bayer and the botanical gardens and laboratories of the medical schools. Ottoman and Egyptian pharmacology training had been generously funded since the early 1800s, and by the late 19th century had gone through two generations of increasingly confident translations and locally written texts on pharmacology. These pharmacists presented their work at conferences throughout Europe and saw their work reported in The Lancet such that, when Cincinnati pharmacist and entrepreneur John Uri Lloyd arrived in Izmir on a Smithsonian mission to study Anatolian licorice in 1906, he found himself among equals, not imitators. The paper draws on pharmacology textbook translations, the Egyptian, Ottoman, and foreign serial press, memoir, and photography to document and analyze Ottoman pharmacists as creators of a new urban masculine identity: the modern man of laboratory science and public medical practice. The analysis brings urban history into engagement with Marwa el-Shakry’s exploration of a universal language of science expressed in local vernaculars, and with work on masculinities by Chacko Jacob, Ryzova, Y?ld?z, Wishnitzer, and others.

During his short tenure in Baghdad (1869-72), Ottoman governor Midhat Pasha oversaw diverse urban reforms, including widening streets, building more roads connecting Baghdad to other cities, constructing bridges, and introducing public works such as public fountains and gas lamps. However, Midhat Pasha’s reforms were not limited to the built environment of the city. Seeking to address Baghdad’s urban poverty, Midhat Pasha introduced a major innovation that he had already successfully implemented in the Balkan provinces, the ?slahhane. This was a boarding and vocational school for children and young teenagers who were orphans, poor, or considered delinquent, where students could be reformed through education and work. Through reading, writing, and arithmetic courses, and vocational training in areas like carpentry, leather-working, or running a printing press, students were shaped into ideal subjects who could become self-sufficient and support the troubled Ottoman economy. Examining sources such as photographs, architectural plans, provincial almanacs, memoirs, Ministry of Education registers, and building endowment deeds, my paper argues that reformers saw this school as an urban engine for holistic social reform as it was tasked with clearing the streets of imperfect children, creating a clean and safe public space, promoting a modern curriculum, and improving the economy. My paper considers the history and design of the ?slahhane in Baghdad from the Tanzimat reform period (1839-1876) to the First World War. I expand scholarship on Late Ottoman architecture and urbanism, which has focused largely on Istanbul, Anatolia, and the Balkans, to Baghdad to demonstrate how educational and social reforms affected this peripheral city and how governors and architects realized reforms through institutional buildings. I ask how the plan, form, and style of this institution demonstrate differences between architecture of the center and periphery of the empire and to what extent such differences were determined by Ottoman and Arab nationalisms and local building culture. My paper considers the relationship of the ?slahhane to emerging technologies in the Arab provinces, as well as the relationship of morality, public health, and education, evident in the preoccupation with removing urchins from the street and maintaining religion as one foundation of the school’s curriculum. Efforts to standardize the ?slahhane across the empire, such as maintaining a constantly migrating network of teachers and students between each school, while leaving flexibility for local needs, demonstrate that despite political upheaval and economic duress, late Ottoman reformers achieved some success in administrative and educational change.

Following the First World War and the social destruction it wrought, the problem of national degeneration became a major concern for Ottoman-Turkish physicians, especially psychiatrists who were major proponents of policies to improve the health of the population as a basis of economic and political strength. During the 1920s and 1930s, alcohol and drug addiction was a major target of their efforts to improve public health in Istanbul, where they viewed an increase in taverns and drunkenness as an assault on the city’s neighborhoods. I explore how the urban environment served as both a pressure cooker for addiction and setting for public outreach by psychiatrists to remedy this social problem. Their concern with addiction as a major threat to the nation’s mental health reflects a concept of Turkishness perceived as a shared biological essence that symbolized national potential. This essence, or sum of racial qualities, was also represented in an individual’s mental capacity to be conscious of them. The desire to work towards the perfection of one’s race was not only a matter of consciousness, but a moral duty of conscience as well. Following this logic, suffering from addiction could prevent someone from ever becoming a proper national subject, just as lacking a sense of Turkishness or national duty could potentially indicate that someone was mentally ill. At a time when nation-building was conceived as dependent on the vitality of the Turkish race, many physicians saw preventing degeneration as the main solution to the nation’s problems. As one of the major signs of degeneration, addiction was rendered all the more visible by city life in Istanbul where psychiatrists formed organizations like the Green Crescent Society and Society for Mental Hygiene to warn the public about the harm intoxicants posed to the future of the nation. Drawing on the publications of such organizations, I trace how new ideas about mental pathology were racialized and intertwined with the project of nation-building as well as how the urban public may have encountered them.

Given the Orientalist and romantic allure of the city, almost all descriptions of Istanbul contain relevant sensory (sonic, olfactory, tactile, and gustatory) information. This paper is interested in the sonic information that Istanbul writings – if we can think of a genre as such – provide. In this paper, I intend to give a sense as to how Istanbul’s soundscape was shaped by ezan, street vendors, dogs, night watchmen, fires, and new infrastructural technologies (telegram, steamships, trams, trains, electricity) in the turn of the century. Despite the novelty of only the latter, most of these sounds were interpreted as “noise” in the beginning of twentieth century and a new scientific discussion started regarding anti-noise regulations. Those who followed the discussions in other European capitals embraced the idea that noise was an unhealthy reality of the modern city life that is threatening the psychological well-being of its inhabitants. A number of articles that appeared in the famous literary and scientific magazine of the period, Servet-i Fünun (Wealth of Sciences) introduced the reader to these discussions, together with the new technological developments regarding noise research and regulations in New York, Berlin, and Munich. Focusing on the preoccupation of urban administrators, city dwellers, and scientists on the impacts (and nuisance) of new (mostly infrastructural) city sounds/noises, this paper approaches the history of urban infrastructure from a social perspective.