Changing Urban Cultural Governance in Istanbul: The Beyoğlu Plan

„The atmosphere of a city is simply the way that life takes place in it ‟ (Böhme 2006: 132). A productive metaphor: the atmosphere of a city, the changing atmosphere of an urban culture. Atmospheres are phenomena that we commonly – and spontaneously, inescapably even – associate with our experience of a place, or of a situation, or an encounter. „You sense an atmosphere, on the one hand, ‟ says Gernot Böhme, „only by way of your own feelings, and yet, at the same time, as what emanates from another person, from objects, or from the environment (2006: 132). ‟ Atmospheres concern the everyday lived relation to one‟s surroundings, and they translate into the complex array of moods, tones of feeling, emotions – and also mindful awareness – associated with this always ongoing situated and implicated relation. Atmospheres are „affective powers of feeling, spatial bearers of moods ‟ (Böhme 1993: 119). In an important sense, one knows the city by way of the moods that it evokes, through an „awareness of my state of being in an environment, how I feel here ‟ (120). Strange as it may seem, we want to argue that urban governance can only work effectively when it entails an awareness of how policy-making is, as much as anything, about the production of atmospheres. Urban democrac