VIRTUAL ISTANBUL HERITAGE(S)

Abstract

This paper approaches urban vandalism not simply as damage to the city, but as a collection of small, informal traces through which people mark presence, emotion, and memory in historic urban spaces. Through the figure of the flâneur, attention shifts away from officially recognised heritage sites toward the overlooked surfaces of the city—walls, corners, inscriptions, and marks encountered while walking. Moving slowly through the city, the flâneur notices graffiti, handwritten names, scratches, and other minor interventions that are often removed, ignored, or dismissed as visual noise. Yet these fleeting traces tell stories of attachment, frustration, resistance, and everyday life. Even when excluded from institutional heritage frameworks, they shape how urban pasts are experienced, remembered, and negotiated in the present. These observations emerge from attentive walking through historic neighbourhoods, where such traces are encountered as part of everyday urban experience. The paper suggests that vandalism occupies an ambiguous space between destruction and expression, as well as between legality and visibility. When approached through walking and embodied observation, such acts reveal heritage not as something fixed or fully preserved, but as something lived, fragile, and continually reshaped through everyday practices. This discussion is situated within the urban context of Istanbul, a city where layered histories and contemporary transformations intensify the visibility of informal urban traces. By rethinking vandalism as part of informal heritage-making, this research challenges top-down approaches to preservation and proposes a more inclusive understanding of heritage by recognising friction, interruption, and transient urban traces as integral elements in the ongoing formation of historic cities.