Urban Talk: Tracing Urban Memory

What does it mean to preserve a city’s memory? Through which practices is this memory constructed, transmitted, or effaced? In a city as stratified and multilayered as Istanbul, why does tracing urban memory matter, and what kinds of continuities and ruptures does it reveal? This Urban Talk engages with these questions by framing urban memory not merely as the archival residue of the past, but as an evolving and contested field of relations between history, the present urban condition, and possible futures. Merin Sever and Ceren Sungur invite participants to reflect on how continuities persist through transformation, in which contexts ruptures materialize, and how the absences they create might be read. The conversation aims to move beyond diagnosis toward a collective inquiry into practices that can sustain the vitality of urban memory as a living dimension of city-making.