Photographs: Informal Academy Archive

Craft neighborhoods in Istanbul are under threat from top-down urban transformation processes and the urban policies and implementations that are part of them. This threat affects not only the built environment but also the city’s social, economic, and cultural structure. One of the important issues on the city’s agenda is whether, or how, the dynamic and distinctive practices of the centrally located craft neighborhoods will be carried into the future. At this point, it is urgent to create new and sustainable bottom-up arguments and visions. The craft network in the Galata and Şişhane Area, which is also on the agenda to be replaced by tourism- and consumption-oriented uses, shares a similar fate and threat under the influence of these processes.

At this point we can ask the following question: Is it possible to redefine and invert existing tourism visions and habits in terms of the sustainability of the craft district?

Starting from the tense relationship created between the craft workshops in the Galata Area and tourism, the “Design Guide for Tourists” Workshop brought to the agenda an imagination of a new future that accommodates the coexistence of both. The workshop includes the discovery of the colorful and rich craft tradition and network in the Galata area together with tourists, and the sharing of various souvenirs, routes, and maps produced for this purpose. The aim is to reveal the creative and original relationship that can be established between the craft workshops in the area and tourism. Can the production process and product manufacturing in the area create a new field of experience for tourism? Can tourists become a new actor for the craft workshops?

While these questions were being asked within the scope of the workshop, the production capacities of the workshops were evaluated, and the first steps of a new understanding of tourism, more production-based, were tested for the sustainability of the craft network in the area.

Within the scope of the workshop, work was carried out for 4 days together with students from different universities and design departments in Istanbul, and “design guides” containing different experiences and stories were produced. In this context, while the role of design as an instrument was being discussed, the guides produced with an open-source approach were distributed in the Galata-Şişhane area and were attempted to be put into use and interaction. A joint performance with ABC Manifesto was carried out in Galata Square and its streets through a mobile exhibition system. It was intended that the guides produced within the scope of the workshop would serve as a kind of communication and connective medium between tourism and the craft workshops in the area.

Following interviews and observations made with both tourism actors and craft actors in the area, the first design guides emerged. These guides will make it possible for local and foreign tourists coming to the area to produce their own souvenir-touristic memory objects. Not only souvenirs, but also the opportunity to have a different experience will be proposed on this occasion. Handcrafted souvenir objects reflecting the cultural richness of the area will also have details and memories that tourists can personalize themselves, and they will have returned to their own countries or cities with new experiences they had not had before. At this point, as a result of evaluating the production capacities of the craft workshops, a new tourism experience and its products were also put forward.

In this context, the guides and products that emerged as a result of the workshop were brought together with the target audience, tourists, in Galata Square on Saturday, 22 November. Thus, it was aimed to invite tourists to different experiences and to organize short and small tours in the area.

Postcards produced in the Design Workshop:

Photographs from the Galata Field Tour:

Photographs: Informal Academy Archive

Presentation regarding the process of the design workshop:

This workshop is an IN.FORMAL academy event.

It was carried out in collaboration with the 2nd Istanbul Design Biennial.

Workshop Participants: Serkan Ateş, Büşra Aksoy, Hazal Başarır, Carlota Stuermer, Merve Gezgin, Yağmur Kocaman, Nur Seda Şahin, Derya Bayar, Pelin Yanaz, Alhosin Shaar; Ufuk Baycan, Mina Yancı, Esra Tokat

Thanks for their contributions: Artin Aharon, Nilüfer Sönmez, Ayşenaz Toker