Living Istanbul: Experiences from Metropolitan Everydayness

Based on the field research, this chapter provides an in-depth analysis of everyday experiences of Istanbul through three significant findings: rationalization, homogenization, and abstraction of the lived experience. Interviews revealed that inhabitants’ temporal and spatial relationship in Istanbul displayed premises of rationalization through the enclosing routines of the everyday. Rather than establishing a constitutive experience practiced with others, inhabitants growingly consume the spatial and temporal. Due to this fixation, interlocutors reflected growing homogenization in their experience of everyday life in Istanbul. Finally, as an overall outcome of these two aspects, this chapter questions the abstract ion of everyday for the inhabitants and alienation as an everyday phenomenon. Everyday life in Istanbul reveals the rationalized and consumerist essence that dominates inhabitants’ relationships with themselves, others, and the things surrounding them.