@article{article_954581, title={“For Thousands of Years, Waters Delineated the Destiny of This City and Its People”: A Material Cartography of the Coastlines and the Shaping of Istanbul’s Port Geography}, journal={YILLIK: Annual of Istanbul Studies}, volume={3}, pages={93–121}, year={2021}, DOI={10.53979/yillik.2021.5}, url={https://izlik.org/JA24DJ82SJ}, author={Erkılıç, Gökçen}, keywords={coastline, port geography, material cartography, planetary urbanization, political ecology}, abstract={The planetary scale of urbanization and shifting scales of ecological devastation have recently brought new forms of attention to the conditions of the urban edge. Preconceived temporal frameworks, scales, and agents fail to decipher histories. This paper introduces a conceptual and a cartographic methodology to study the material history of Istanbul’s urban edge by the water through the “critical delineation” of its coastline. In a city whose process of urbanization has been predominantly defined by the colonization of land, this methodology aims to shift attention to the waterward space, to the production of port geography. It follows material dispositions between land and sea, focusing on the organization of port logistics, dislocation, and discharge of coastal sediments. By landing and production of urban debris, the coastal geography of the city was made and remade as a place of human engagement with nature. A longue durée take on this material disposition provides over a hundred years of historic processes to delineate a cartography of fluctuations of the changing coastlines on this shifting landscape. The coastline of Istanbul becomes the body of research, and therefore, the production of port geography initiates a production of meaning. As an urban edge, it unfolds nonhuman agency and human engagement with the planetary, as much as it unfolds the everyday production of political discourse and its discrepancies.}