In the nineteenth century, the Pera (Beyoğlu) district of Istanbul, the capital of the Ottoman
Empire, became an internationally recognized center of commerce, finance, culture, art, and
recreation, in the context of the empire’s rapid integration into world capitalism. The district’s
built environment changed radically, manifested in the newly erected apartment buildings,
arcades, gardens, and monumental hotels and embassies. This transformation was dependent on
largescale destruction of the previous spatial order of the district, as well as on environmental
connections to distant and nearby peripheries of Pera, such as Terkos and Kasımpaşa. This
dissertation examines this process by locating infrastructure as an integral part of ‘assembling’
Pera in the late nineteenth century.

Pera’s rise to prominence has been studied as an experiment in municipal governance,
modernization in urban space, and cosmopolitan sociability. This dissertation shows that it was
first and foremost a material process, which remade a complex and extended geography within
and beyond Pera’s boundaries in fundamentally unequal ways. The critical study of
infrastructures reveals the complex encounters forged in this process between different regions,
humans and animals, the past and the present, and the living and the dead.