Journeys through deathscapes in the contemporary city: exploring urban interiority in New York City and Istanbul

Historically, death was an intrinsic part of daily life, but the growth and modernisation of cities prompted the relocation of most cemeteries to urban outskirts owing to population expansion, rising mortality rates and fear of disease. Today, only a few cemeteries remain inside, yet they exist as often ignored ‘negative spaces’, invisible to most people’s eyes. Starting with the argument that these places provide us (individuals or collective) with an unexpected possibility – of preparing for a transition from the mundane to the sacred – we raise timely questions about their sustained presence in the contemporary city. We examine eight burial sites (of various scales, typologies and histories) found in Istanbul and New York City. These sites range from well-preserved to semi-obliterated; some are active and others closed, often physically bounded with understated gates or walls, sometimes disguised as neighbourhood parks or largely overlooked, wild remnants. We map the anatomy of each cemetery visit, gathered cumulatively via several journeys from the street, and then into, around and through, to expose the most fundamental spatial elements, characteristics, qualities and conditions of these ‘rites of passage’. Our framework is composed of four observational themes that we call markers (linguistic, temporal, experiential and contextual) to pinpoint the complexities we encountered during our study. We align our approach and findings with the growing field of urban interiority, not currently part of ‘deathscape’ studies. Thus, we expand both of these domains with our methodology that combines sensibilities drawn from gathering, walking, sensing, visualising and heuristics. Purposefully dialogic, we alternate between the perspectives of two authors/professors and two global cities, prioritising an interplay between text and image. Ultimately, presented in the form of an archetypal journey structured around nine zones of experience, our insights frame the urban cemetery not only as a liminal site constituting an urban interior but also as a site fostering the establishment of a complex relationship between a visitor’s physical being and layers of interiority.