Making place otherwise: Everyday interventions and informal placemaking in Istanbul

This study explores informal placemaking through everyday human interventions in urban space by focusing on the traces left behind in the Caferağa neighborhood of Istanbul. Using an observational walking methodology supported by unstructured, spontaneous interviews, the study examines the acts of waiting, socializing, sheltering, and self-expression as fundamental, informal placemaking activities. The findings reveal how individuals make places for themselves despite opposing strategies such as physical deterrents and control elements. The study emphasizes the role of informal interventions in shaping public space and highlights the ongoing negotiation between bottom-up spatial practices and top-down regulatory measures. Informal placemaking constitutes a dynamic and ongoing negotiation of urban space, where everyday practices blur boundaries between regulation and improvisation, permanence and ephemerality. This study examines informal placemaking through embodied and transient interventions in Istanbul’s Caferağa neighborhood, focusing on the traces produced through acts of waiting, socializing, sheltering, and self-expression. Drawing on an observational walking methodology and spontaneous, unstructured interviews, the research reveals how these modest yet persistent gestures quietly sustain and remake place within the constraints of urban control. These practices make visible changing socio-material relations over time. They remind us that discussions of placemaking must encompass not only material transformations and emergent social performativities but also the temporal processes through which these occur, shaped by the everyday actions of ordinary people, often without explicit intent. Through these subtle and iterative acts, individuals continuously renew and reinterpret their surroundings. By foregrounding the temporal and contingent qualities of these spatial practices, the study argues that informal placemaking is not a fixed outcome but an ongoing process of negotiation that continually reshapes public space and makes visible how people relate to, inhabit, and make meaning in the social life of the city.