NIT Urban Heritage Lab is an initiative of the Netherlands Institute in Turkey that investigates the role of tangible and intangible cultural heritage in achieving inclusive, circular, and sustainable cities.
NIT Urban Heritage Lab aims to address contemporary issues at the intersections of urban life, heritage and sustainability. It starts from the notion that tangible and intangible cultural heritage is critical in maintaining the livability of cities and the sustainability of urban life. It is also convinced that cultural heritage is not a straightforward stock of historic buildings, landscapes and traditions. Cultural heritage is in a constant state of creation, selective preservation and change. It is constructed in a dialogue between past and present, and in ongoing discussions between different interests and discourses.NIT Urban Heritage Lab initiates and facilitates several interdisciplinary projects.
Every autumn, NIT organizes a hybrid course on a topic related to a specific aspect of urban heritage. Please check Industrial Heritage for Sustainable Cities Course (2021) and Water Heritage for Sustainable Cities Course (2022) for further information about the previous courses. The topic of the 2023 course has been set as Archaeological Heritage for Liveable Cities.
A one-day symposium, Adaptive Reuse: Perspectives and Strategies for Sustainable Architectural Transformations Symposium, brought together practitioners and academicians from the Netherlands and Turkey to discuss the current state of the art of adaptive reuse practices on 16 June 2022 at METU Faculty of Architecture Amphitheater in Ankara. The symposium was organized by the Netherlands Institute in Turkey (NIT) and the Middle East Technical University Graduate Program in Conservation of Cultural Heritage in partnership with the Netherlands Diplomatic Mission to Turkey, the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands, and the Association of Conservation and Restoration Specialists in Turkey (KORDER). The symposium was followed by the opening of the Old Buildings, New Uses Exhibition, which showcases adaptive reuse projects in the Netherlands and Turkey. You can read the details about the symposium and the exhibition here.
Dr. Mariëtte Verhoeven, a research fellow and lecturer at Radboud Institute for Culture and History (RICH), received an Embassy Science Fellowship from NWO - in cooperation with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. For three months, Dr. Verhoeven worked at the Dutch Consulate General in Istanbul and the Netherlands Institute in Turkey to develop an integrated model for increasing public awareness and preserving Istanbul's water heritage. We co-organized a workshop with Mariëtte Verhoeven and the Dutch Consulate General in Istanbul entitled Engaging with Istanbul's Water Heritage: Exploring Sustainable Ways to Create Public Awareness Workshop on 22 September 2022 to discuss and formulate solutions to raise awareness of Istanbul's water issues by engaging with its heritage with specialists from diverse backgrounds.
The Cultural Heritage Technologies for Sustainable Cities Project (2020-2021) builds an interdisciplinary network to address contemporary challenges for urban cultural heritage in fast-developing cities like Istanbul.
In collaboration with Istanbul Technical University, NIT has created a survey to understand people's perceptions of Istanbul's historical monuments.
Istanbul’s religious cultural heritage includes the material remains of some thirty former Byzantine churches and chapels, which have survived in different conditions, forms and functions. The building that is called Fethiye Camii, which is located on the fifth hill of the city’s historic peninsula in the neighbourhood of Çarşamba, was built in the 12th Century as the Church of the Pammakaristos and was transformed into a mosque in the late 16th Century. While the main building is still in use as a mosque, the side chapel (beginning 14th Century), and a part of the ambulatory that enveloped the church have been restored between 1949 and 1963 and now function as a museum showing Byzantine mosaics. See the project here.
The Tophane Heritage Project investigates urban change in the Tophane neighborhood of Istanbul and the role of cultural heritage – material as well as immaterial – in processes of social, economic and physical change. The project was started by the NIT in 2012, directed by Karin Schuitema.