VIRTUAL ISTANBUL HERITAGE(S)

Abstract

This paper argues that heritage is shaped not only by the material preservation of sites or the narration of cultural memory, but by the sensory training that conditions how people learn to notice, ignore, or interpret the environments they inhabit. I propose that this sensory conditioning forms an overlooked mechanism through which urban development, environmental degradation, and infrastructural injury influence cultural pasts and limit possible futures. These pressures reorganize what communities can perceive as culturally significant, often making certain histories, ecologies, and relations difficult to register as part of a shared inheritance. Through examples involving toxic landscapes, extraction pressured waterways, and historic districts redesigned for economic gain, I show how sensory habits are reshaped long before physical erasure becomes visible. Residents respond with practices that redirect attention toward overlooked memory, craft, ecological knowledge, and forms of care that official narratives sideline. These practices reveal that heritage is not secured only through conservation or storytelling, but through the capacity to sustain perceptual contact with what dominant systems encourage people to disregard. I argue that heritage studies must account for this perceptual dimension because it determines how cultural meaning attaches to place and how communities protect the presence of histories that contemporary urban pressures push toward disappearance.