From Kundura to Cinema

The Beykoz Sümerbank Industrial Campus in Istanbul represents an emblematic project which permits to retrace different drivers of change in the Turkish cultural context including formal, ideological, economic, social and cultural. The former industrial site is an appropriate tool for learning from existing conditions, from projects and from experiences.
This research is derived from the author’s doctoral dissertation, and it seeks to understand how the transformation process was generated for the Beykoz Kundura Film Plateau from shoes kundura to culture. It aims to discuss the ex-post phase of the project including the privatisation and heritagisation stage and reindustrialisation stages from the standpoints of different experts who are differentiated as insiders and outsiders to understand the whole process.

In Turkey, urban transformation processes of heritage sites and structures are controversial politically, and are economically contested due to the complex dynamics of the cultural context
and society that originate from the actors’ path-dependence and attitudes in decision-making. Despite its extremely centralised cultural context, Beykoz Kundura shows varied number of success stories on how to apply bottom-up strategies while it offers diverse alternative decisions during the conflictual moments.

Gozde Yildiz, architect, specialist in conservation of cultural and urban heritage. She obtained her PhD in Architectural and Landscape Heritage, at Polytechnic University Turin, Department of Architecture and Design, with a thesis, titled as Time Relational Process Reading Between Culture and Form: Transformation Process of Privately Owned Industrial Heritage sites and Actor Roles. She completed her doctoral research under the supervision of Prof. Silvia Gron and Prof. Cristina Coscia with a multi-disciplinary perspective on heritage studies. Her field of interests focus on the industrial heritage sites’ transformation via the contemporary culture. She has worked with various stakeholders for developing new strategies in how to use new and digital culture in these heritage sites as a new representative of industrial culture for future.