Building a Capital City in the Balkans
Building a Capital City in the Balkans

Spatial Transformation and Urban Morphology of Ottoman Edirne (Adrianople) in the 14th and 15th Centuries

Summary/Abstract: Cities in the world of Islam have long attracted scholarly attention because their emergence and development were the subject of debate beginning from the earliest works of the “French Orientalist school”, published in the first decades of the twentieth century. Historians used a variety of methods to study urban centers in the territories that were once controlled by Muslim rulers. Some studies emphasized the irregularity of planning and structure in the urban fabric of the “classical” Islamic cities, and attributed it to a gradual, but progressive degradation of an earlier grid plan inherited from the Antiquity. Others examined the geographic, social, and economic factors in Islamic cities’ development and underlined the unique identity of each urban center, which was naturally also influenced by varying historical circumstances.

• Details
• Contents