On 5 June 1870, the heart of Istanbul’s capitalist urbanization was ravaged by one of the most disastrous fires in the city’s history. Killing thousands of people and destroying large swaths of the built environment, the Great Fire of 1870 has conventionally been studied as a turning point in the modernization of the city, prompting changes to building codes, the widespread adoption of insurance, and overall, more rational management of fire risk. It has not, however, been investigated in its material complexity and its unequal and heterogeneous impact on the urban landscape.

This talk, specifically through a close scrutiny of the insurance photography, remaps the fire’s impact, and demonstrates that the post-disaster expertise on the fire was shaped by and contributed to the socio-ecological inequalities in the city. It traces the “imaginary lines” of the insurance agents and mapmakers to reveal the dispossessive links between the 1870 fire and infrastructural interventions in the city’s environment in this period.

This talk is partially based on a work-in-progress article co-authored with Ahmet Ersoy (Boğaziçi University).