Spatial Reflections of Social Change: The Change of Urban Pattern in the Ottoman Era

Cities established thousands of years ago reach our day as products of continuous development in the historical process. While cities are reshaped under new governments every time in the vicious cycle of establishment, expansion, destruction and reestablishment, this process is accompanied by changes in physical appearance. In this sense, there is a rich context in terms of social and structural-spatial change in the establishment of an Ottoman urban texture with its genuine characteristics, meeting of a city with the Ottoman factor, and the qualities of the changes in the previously owned heritage. Undeniably, the gaining of this shape by the Ottoman city that is described as genuine, was affected by the Byzantium and Seljuk urban culture as well as the Arabic-Islamic urban culture. Ottoman cities were formed and organized over this historical background. This study aims to explain which changes/transformations took place in the Anatolian cities with more than three millennia of settlement tradition due to practices known as “the Ottoman tradition” by presenting the spatial structure of the AnatolianOttoman city and elements forming the urban texture. Thus, it is important to reveal the acquired heritage first. The reshaping of cities that were shaped based on Byzantium and/or Seljuk cultures in the light of political, economic, demographic and other social changes with the Ottoman conquest, especially continuities, are discussed in the context of transformation. However, considering the long time period when the empire was in power and its broad area of land that is distributed in three continents; the study covers the process that started in the era of conquest where cities met Ottoman elements for the first time, and reaching the Tanzimat reformation that represents something other than the traditional Ottoman city concept, where new reforms were applied.