Contemporary Istanbul and Post-industrial landscapes in cultural triangle

City branding and contemporary urban development strategies have become one of the popular urban phenomena in many places and geographies which made the former industrial districts as the main sources of the (peri)-urban redevelopment towards cultural and creative quarters. The city branding and place-making efforts have been quite varied from city to city, and represent one of the contested issues depending on the cultural and socio-political contexts due to its link to the ‘heritage’, urban transformation process and related actors involved. In fact, city-branding is not only a tool for new urban strategies, but also an instrument to define the contemporary culture and present sense of the place constituting the current zeitgeist of the cities and places. The aim of this paper is to investigate the relationship between the creative city discourse as a key driver of new culture-making process and heritage-led urban redevelopment focusing on Istanbul’s transformed industrial heritage places to better understand the continuity of the local character and identity of the heritage itself in relation to the contemporaneity. Although a number of such industrial heritage areas exist in Istanbul which have already been transformed, they have generally been subject of identity loss and destruction depending on their place-branding processes. More specifically, place and city branding operations which are categorized as culture-led regeneration, cultural regeneration, and culture and regeneration to trigger the cultural economy of the cities, are significantly influenced the industrial heritage sites’ indigenous characteristics in their urban environment. Within this regard, the sense of place becomes one of the primary qualities of the former industrial quarters in relation with the continuity of the past, present and future which is the sole communication of the current zeitgeist. In this presented paper, Istanbul’s industrial heritage sites, which have been transformed and re-adapted as cultural quarters will be revisited to assess the sense of the heritage places in relation with contemporary Istanbul and place-making processes.