IN-PERSON ISTANBUL HERITAGE(S)

Abstract

Heritage walking tours are a commonplace medium for visitors and local residents to experience cities with complex, layered histories. Beyond their function in the urban tourism complex, or as public education and outreach for the established heritage sector, walking tours have also long been used as tools for marginalized cultural communities to contest the colonial heritage landscape, combat erasure, and assert belonging. By subverting universalizing memorial forms, and providing new narratives for the built environment, what we might call “critical heritage” walking tours have the potential to serve as particularly powerful activist mobilizations for (re-)claiming space in the city. In this presentation, drawn from ongoing research into critical urban heritage, I focus on a particular vector of activist mobilizations, Indigenous-led walking tours that operate with the intentional goals of advancing cultural rights. I center my comparative discussion on four specific tours in/of cities that can be aptly characterised as “deeply colonised places” – two based in Aotearoa/New Zealand and two from the unceded territories of Coast Salish peoples (British Columbia), Turtle Island/Canada. Through an analysis of their unique features, and recognizing the ambivalent potential of any kind of Indigenous ‘tourism’ as activism, this discussion highlights how Indigenous-led walking tours offer a powerful space to experiment with decolonial practice and promote more equitable, decolonial urban futures.