This water, for thousands of years,
has shaped the fate of this city and its people.
Beneath this water lie drowned children,
poets stuffed into sacks and cast away.
Beneath this water are sunken carriages,
cannons overgrown with moss.
Beneath this water, like our reflection in a mirror,
lies a world like ours, but reversed—
a world where time flows backward,
where the leaves of plane trees brush the seabed.
[…]
A marvelous world.
Is there no passage to it?
— From Tekerleme [Tongue Twister] (1985), a film by Merlyn Solakhan
After Ece Ayhan’s poem “Zambaklı Padişah” (1981)
Bring the atlases! The atlases of history!
We are going to write a poem that spans the widest of times.
— Excerpt from Ece Ayhan’s poem “Yort Savul!” (1977)
Making a Coastline Atlas, Why?
Water has a marvelous capacity to take the shape of whatever contains it. It creates borders. It penetrates through them. It is a form of power. It gives life and heals; it also hides, drowns, attacks, and destroys.
The moment you attempt to define where water begins and land ends along a coast, you violate an existential truth about water: that it is everywhere. In the atmosphere, in our veins, in our tears and sweat, in the pipes that bring freshwater to our taps, in the clouds, and in the dew. Dilip da Cunha describes this as wetness, present in the atmosphere, beneath the earth, in rivers, and across floodplains.1 Astrida Neimanis explains this ever-presence as the hydro-commons: the borderless, fluid nature of watery bodies, such as the placenta in the womb, blood in the veins, streams and rivers, and waters filling the seas.2 I approach the coastlines as traces we leave behind, delineating land and water, the dry and wet, and everything in between. This is a coming together of land and sea, mystically marked as the arrival of spring, when the waters of Al-Khidr (Hızır) and Ilias (İlyas) begin to flow faster as land and water conjoin.3
Coastlines are invented borders on moving water. They don’t truly exist—yet they structure how we measure, own, and exploit. Coastliner Lab, the project I initiated in 2020, turns that fiction into a tool for reclaiming knowledge, approaching coastlines as a means of collecting data and translating that data into action. It aims to repair our relationship with water in critical and conflicted situations along coastlines—the border conditions of water created by systems of power. In this practice, we refer to decolonial, feminist, and spiritual lenses that offer marginal perspectives on these borders. Here, the celebration of the selective boundlessness and sensitive chaos between water and land serves as a counteraction to the cartographies, governance, and colonization of water that have mapped it as a controlled body.4
Charting deltas as territories for conquest, seas as infinite resources for landfilling, rivers as freshwater sources for data centers, straits as maritime economic zones for statehood, seabeds as extractive zones, water infrastructures as displacement tools, river crossings as cultural borders, and coastal areas as private property blocks… Coastlines have long been mapped within these human constructs, invented to grasp the territorial geometry and control it.
In Coastliner Lab, we interrogate such conflicted situations, translate them into creative actions of collective repair, and live with waters that are vital to us, otherwise. We redraw coastlines through our data, our matters of care, and our senses.
Istanbul: An Archive of Lost and Found Coastlines
Istanbul, a city marked by thousands of years of struggle and beauty, owes much of its liveliness, dread, and magic to the waters that surround it. Its coastlines formed port geographies across three seas and innumerable riverways, stretching as far as the Danube in Europe, the Black Sea, the Mediterranean, the Nile, the Red Sea, and beyond. The essence of its economy and its urban growth, as much as its sustenance, lies in its waters: waters that wash away, nourish vegetable gardens, cisterns, aqueducts, and hammams, while concealing and archiving the fate and life of the city and its people.
In Istanbul, we inhabit a region that has been mapped more extensively and for a longer time than many other places in history.5 I set out the “Istanbul Coastline Atlas” as a collective mapping project that seeks to populate the waterward space of the city, which has been mostly charted as empty. Over the past three-plus years, my efforts, fortunately joined by numerous others, have evolved around questions such as: How does the waterward space shape the city’s inhabitants? Who gets to shape the coastlines, and who gets to live by them? What kinds of interactive and cartographic tools can we develop to chart these waters? And how can we code, trace, and sustain these collective efforts together?
Illustration: Arel Siviş
Every Istanbulite has a different relationship with the waters surrounding the city. In the Atlas, we approach coastlines as characters shaped by the mapmakers. The Atlas is first and foremost a way of claiming both rights to and rights of these waters.
One particularly moving example of how the Atlas traces personal geographies that intersect with everyday, lived struggles appears in Özlem Kahveci’s auto-ethnographic article, which asks a simple but political question: Why do women not feel equally free to swim along the city’s coastlines? She reflects on how intense construction pressure along the shore, together with persistent social norms and expectations around women’s bodies and their visibility in public space, quietly shapes who feels welcome in Istanbul’s waters. Özlem, who also participated in our 2024 workshops, concludes her article with a map she made to reclaim the presence of women at the shore.6
The Atlas has effectively mapped a dozen critical coastline situations so far, including cases from the coasts of the Sea of Marmara and the Black Sea, as well as the inland regions of Thrace. Six of these cases, seeded with support from Salt Research Funds in 2024 and based on my previous research,7 brought together critical stories emerging from divergent coastal formations: 1. The Island — Yassıada’s transformation from a former political prison and the transplantation of the corals on its shore before the island was restructured into a luxury hotel and renamed as the “Island of Democracy and Freedom.” 2. The Mud (The Estuary) — the Golden Horn’s long-standing problem of sedimentary mud beneath its waters, the successive cleaning attempts, and the dredged material’s relocation into a former stone quarry later converted into a theme park in Eyüp. 3. The River — the lost streams, springs, bostans, and creek network of the Alibeyköy–Kâğıthane rivershed, including the disappearance of streams bearing uncanny names associated with death and cemeteries. 4. The Lake — Kulakçayırı Lake, once a wetland sustaining the now-disappearing agricultural fringe, buried beneath the new airport aprons. 5. The Landfill — the construction of the largest landfill on the historic peninsula, built offshore as a controlled mass meeting area and resting atop the Byzantine archaeological remains of the Theodosian Harbor. 6. The Quays — the unrealized master plan of finger piers, once symbols of American intervention in Istanbul’s urban modernization struggles, materialized in the Port of Galata and later transformed through port modernization and the development of a cruise ship terminal. Each coastline tracing these stories is now mapped on the Atlas as a character.
Photo: Mustafa Hazneci
Photo: Mustafa Hazneci
We already knew that Istanbul has no shortage of critical or lost coastlines, yet our workshops still offered a space for shared grief over the disappearance of such waterscapes, along with the joy of finding out witty details. The search for lost coastlines fostered joyful moments of discovery within the community of mapmakers—or “coastliners”—gathered around the maps. In addition to the six cases we retraced through close inspection of archival materials, six more grew out of the workshops we led during the first year of Water Assemblies and were shaped by the creative input of participants.
Cartographic Layers: Deep Mapping
The Atlas works with an open-ended system of delineations that are simultaneously digital and situated, materialized and abstracted, computed and de-computed.
The digital work involves a laborious collection and sorting of data that builds the online platform mapping collective investigations of coastlines. This is a meticulous, slow, and detailed phase in which each map is first manually drawn and then transferred into the geospatial realm through careful categorization and georeferencing. The resulting research library now archives 135 cartographic fragments of coastlines we are investigating. During this stage, I identified and organized map documents that reveal traces of the city’s coastal transformations, drawing from various sources such as Salt’s archival collections, the Erkân-ı Harbiye maps, the Harvard Map Collection, British Army maps, and numerous others.8
In the co-mapping workshops, through synchronous acts of tracing, annotating, and reimagining the coastline, we ask and discuss: Who drew these lines, and what do they reveal or erase? How can we read the coastal transformations through them? What is our own relationship to this body of water? How might we represent what remains invisible in these cartographies, such as underwater currents, seasonal flows, sediment drifts, or disappearing wetlands?9 We mark our findings as data points on the maps.
Each act of delineation becomes an invitation to slow down, to notice what lies beneath the surface, and to question how maps shape dispossession, belonging, and hydrological relations within the geography and the public interfaces of this city.
The Sound of Water: Deep Listening
This project has flooded itself numerous times over the years. In one of these floods, the data-driven practice of co-mapping called for a more situated approach—one that would allow us to truly immerse ourselves in the waters, perhaps even swim in them, and attune to the sound of water.
When Merve (Yücel) reached out to me with an invitation to contribute to the Water Assemblies project, I had Pauline Oliveros’s Quantum Listening by my side and was thinking about how deep listening to the sound of water could influence our way of making maps, collecting data, and designing waterborne rituals.
As Oliveros writes, deep listening is “listening in every possible way, to everything it’s possible to hear, no matter what you are doing.”10 Such attentive and expansive listening encompasses the sounds of daily life, nature, and even one’s own thoughts. This was the missing link in the Atlas, which had so far focused on tracing watery bodies geographically. Merve’s invitation finally connected the dots of getting the Atlas wet! We quickly agreed to incorporate deep listening, and deep mapping emerged as a beautiful plot twist—a dive into the depths of water. This gave the edition of the project its name: “Istanbul Coastline Atlas Vol. X: Deep Listening/Deep Mapping.”
Deep listening to the depths of water connected us to the world of marine science and oceanography, which uses underwater sounds as a key method of scientific observation. I reached out to Prof. Nazlı Demirel from Istanbul University, who has spent years studying marine ecosystems and has led numerous expeditions in the Sea of Marmara, the Black Sea, and the Mediterranean. Immediately matching our enthusiasm for the Coastline Atlas, she shared her extensive knowledge in the field. We organized a public talk unpacking how scientists continuously collect data over decades to observe water pollutants, shifting ecosystems, and fish migrations in the Sea of Marmara. Her presentation demonstrated a single day in the life of a marine biologist on a research expedition, illustrating how findings collected over many subsequent days are sorted and analyzed to track environmental changes. We also discussed the work of Italian oceanographer and cartographer Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli, who discovered the double-layered sea currents of the Bosphorus over three hundred years ago.11 What I found out was that there is no publicly available oceanographic map showing what occurs beneath the surface around Istanbul. That absence strengthened the Atlas’s motivation. How could we populate the Atlas with more situated and precise data about the waterward space?
Read an excerpt from the conversation with Nazlı Demirel here.
The Urbonas Studio shared the wondrous and down-to-earth methodologies of The Swamp School, a long-term project evolving since 2017 to build systems of skill-sharing among scientists, artists, and citizens. Our conversations with them opened new ways of combining scientific observation, technology, and artistic approaches: how might high-tech tools and sensing devices be meaningfully coupled with the slow, tactile, and muddy practices of attending to the swampy leaks?12 Listening to the water, the mud, and the life forms inhabiting these wet ecologies became a shared point of curiosity across science and art—one that continues to shape how we imagine the Atlas today.
Read an excerpt from the conversation with Nomeda & Gediminas Urbonas here.
The Collective Delineations
The first three mapping workshops in March 2025 were led by talented fellows of the Atlas—participants from the very first gathering held a year earlier. Among them was Vardal Caniş, a multidisciplinary artist who captures the street culture and vivid characters of Istanbul; Feyza Çınar, an architect by practice and feminist by heart and soul, working on situated practices and queer theory; and Evin Kaçar, a ceramic artist whose installations explore the qualities of water and the deep blues that the Atlas also identifies with. All led workshops on collaborative mapping, integrating their unique methods into the Atlas’s explorations.
Photos: Metean Bars
Read about the workshops from the perspective of Feyza Çınar here.
In March 2025, the walls and floors of Salt Beyoğlu’s ground floor were transformed into fragmented maps, where participants drew, traced, and conversed on projects carrying depth and personality. These exchanges and explorations sparked ideas worth dedicating more time and attention.
Photo: Metean Bars
Group 1: Burcu Ustabaş, Ayşenaz Ayral, Zehra Ayben Tümer, Arda Aslan, Sevinç Sena Öztürk
This group mapped the archaeological history of the Yenikapı shoreline, tracing how land reclamation reshaped the coast. Marine archaeology, archival maps, aerial imagery, and media documentation were incorporated into fabric maps, opening discussions on the politicization of landfills. The group also envisioned developing a collaborative map-sewing practice.
Group 2: Arel Siviş, Muaz Özden, Destan Öztürk, Şebnem Kayhan
This group focused on Sarayburnu and the Çemberlitaş Hammam. The participants explored dolphins’ movements in the Bosporus and offshore Sarayburnu, and discussed how the underwater acoustics of the dolphins and sound recordings from the Çemberlitaş Hamam could come together in a future work.
Group 3: Melsa Beyaz, Elif Çelik, Ceysu Uçan
This group mapped Büyükada’s swimmable and restricted coastlines, investigating summer swimming practices, women’s bodies, seagrass ecologies, underwater debris, and shoreline constructions. The resulting map charted the locals and tourist destinations, revealing the tensions around the shifting identities and demographics of the island.
Group 4: Melike Yürekli, İrem İnanlı, Özlem Kahveci, İdil Atasoy
This group mapped the Karaköy-Kadıköy ferry route as a cultural, ecological, and political crossing space, layering fish and human migrations, current and depth maps, harbor histories, and personal reflections to reveal both underwater and surface forms of feminist resistance. The myths of Gugas Vartabed İnciciyan on the Bosphorus were integrated into the maps they created.
The Sea Drifts
Bardia Hafizi joined the tribe like someone who knows how to place an ear against sound inside the water. The idea was to use a hydrophone—a device that records sound underwater—together with a set of headphones to simultaneously amplify the captured sounds.
I was not able to travel in the summer of 2025, which led us to come up with a workaround: letting only the hydrophone travel from the other side of the world—where I live, Boston—to Istanbul, carried by my traveling friend Pınar. With a Zoom recorder to capture the sounds and several headphones, the team was ready to embark on the boat. Thanks to Merve (Yücel) and Eylül (Şenses), we were fortunate to arrange the boat tour—which I call the “Situated Flotilla” or the “Coastline Drifter”—departing from Fenerbahçe Marina and traveling to Büyükada and Neandros in June 2025. Aycan (Gelekçi), one of our talented participants, wrote about the intimate experience of deep listening, reflecting on how we can practice participatory listening.
Read about the “Deep Listening” workshop from the perspective of Kübra Aycan Gelekçi here.
While how site-specific underwater sound can generate data for embodied meditation remains on the Atlas’s agenda, this boat drift successfully experimented with an embodied, situated, almost ritual-like workshop. The team collectively mapped how sound travels underwater—a kind of telephone game in which we listened to the sounds while doodling on maps.
Read about the workshop from the perspective of Bardia Hafizi here.
To complement our hands-on exploration of underwater sound, we also turned to historical materials. Ahmet Rasim’s coastal guidebooks are a true gem, particularly in how they map the coasts from the perspective of the marine space. Türkiye coğrafyayı sahilisi: Karadeniz sevahili, a pamphlet published in 1930,13 brings the world of mariners to life, recounting observations along the coast and drawing panoramic maps that chart the entire navigational routes of the Black Sea, including the entrance to the Bosphorus. Rasim’s work is remarkable not only for its detailed topographic cartography but also for its vivid depiction of the panoramic coastal view from the sea, offering the deep listening workshops a base map to organize data while drifting on the boat.
Over twenty sound recordings have been collected during these drifts. The Atlas processes these recordings into audio-reactive data visualizations, aiming to record underwater sounds along the coastal areas and translate them into responsive visual forms. Through comparative analysis, we hope to find answers to questions like: How does the sound at Akıntıburnu differ from that around the Princes’ Islands? How does the sound of the Kâğıthane Creek compare to the waters beneath the Haliç Bridge—and what do these differences reveal about each watery environment? Further drifts, visits, and situated deep listening to the other watery bodies charted in the Atlas continue to expand this inquiry. The chorus of urban noise also prompts me to ask how the sonic thresholds of silence and noise redraw the urban edge conditions of the underwater.
This experience expanded our horizon about how our future co-mapping workshops will be designed—not just as exercises in observation, but as shared acts of sensing, attuning, and being with the water, claiming it as a more accessible body of knowledge for citizens and non-data-literate participants.
Coastline Is a Network of Data, After All
These days, the Atlas continues to be rigorously developed into an online platform shaped by layers of contribution, situated knowledge, and ongoing information design. The platform functions both as an interactive map—where viewers can navigate the coastlines I have focused on in my research and those we have traced in the participatory workshops—and as a living database open to anyone who has a word to add: a note, a line, a memory, an observation, a problem, or a situation related to the city’s waters and the people who live by them. The Atlas is envisioned as an online map focusing on the margins of the city, where public access is often uneven, blocked, sometimes dangerous, uncharted, or impossible. It gathers dispersed knowledge into a shared space that ultimately tells complex, layered stories about Istanbul and its waters.
This work is evolving into an ambitious map with a vast body of data, where the data is never separate from the community or the water that generates it. It is coextensive with the workshops, swimming and deep listening sessions, conversations, and encounters that take place along the shorelines themselves. Here, the coastline becomes a network of relations among diverse watery bodies. Sounds, GPS traces, hand-drawn coastlines, political histories, personal testimonies, and historical fragments coexist with geospatial coordinates and code.
Watch the Coastliner Lab presentation “Deep Sea Literacy: Cartographic Activations for Planetary Hydro-Commons,” presented at the Information+ conference in November 2025, here.
The platform offers navigation across the coastlines of Istanbul—and the world beyond—through interactive tools that allow users to: add a new contribution by placing geolocated text or notes; use the drawing tool to trace lines or coastal forms; switch between layers (Coastline Atlas view, satellite imagery, and archival view); explore historical documents in detail; upload media, including sound recordings and video; enter 3D mode to view topographic relief and the water basins that shape the city.
Towards a Collective Coastline Literacy
The boldest argument of the Atlas is that coastlines bear witness to the complexity of health, energy, political, social, collective, climatic, and planetary systems, as much as they are deeply personal. These are the lines it attempts to archive: an atlas of water, border conditions, edges, canals, collective memories, shared griefs, as well as acts of finding joy and healing in a city that is often self-censored, materially erased, or reshaped. The Atlas holds space for these connections, bringing together questions of public health, planetary commons, women’s rights, and everyday freedoms while reminding us that the coastline is not an abstract edge, but a lived and negotiated place. It is a space of political engagement that can persist even under authoritarianization, uneven development, and overarching infrastructural pressures.
How can this practice become deeply inclusive and reach a crowdsourced profile of participants? How might we evolve the Atlas further into a practice of the right to the city, and of spatial and environmental justice? What real-world implications can we envision? The Atlas has only scratched the surface, and we look forward to being joined by new, diverse voices, skills, and coastlines in the near future.
The atlas is an open OPEN CALL. Join our mailing list!
I want to express my sincere gratitude to all participants and organizers who contributed to this project. This could only be possible with the contributions of these wonderful Istanbulites, who continue to thrive despite all the pressures and daily struggles of the city and the globe. I dedicate the past eight-plus months of collective effort to a future where we learn to live together.
***
Water Assemblies Program
Co-Mapping Workshop Leaders: Vardal Caniş, Feyza Çınar, Evin Kaçar
Deep Listening Workshop Leader: Bardia Hafizi
Guest Speakers, Art & Technology: Nomeda & Gediminas Urbonas
Guest Speaker, Marine Biology: Nazlı Demirel
Istanbul Coastline Atlas Online Platform
Back-end & Front-end Platform Developer: Gibrann Morgado
Project Illustrations: Arel Siviş
Graphics Assistant (2024): Arda Rutkay Var
Web Development (2024): Raph Laude
Workshop Participants (July 2024): Hatice Kübra Ayvalı, Zeynep Gül Bağan, Deniz Çevik, Gökçe Çakır, Feyza Çınar, Elmas Eliçe Çetinöz, Ezgi Cemre Er, Elmas Eliçe Çetinöz, Ekin Girgin, Gizem Dursun, Özlem Kahveci, Evin Kaçar, İlhan Zeynep Karakılıç, Şeyma Kocadağıstan, Deyvi Papo, Arda Rutkay Var, Vardal Caniş, Zeynep Gül Bağan, Sena Sevinç Öztürk, Yasemin Özarslan, Tuğçe Naz Demir, İlhan Zeynep Karakılıç, Ekin Girgin, Buse Yıldırım, Deniz Yeni, Ceylan Şentürk, İlayda Tunca
Workshop Participants (March 2025): İdil Atasoy, Ayşenaz Ayral, Zeynep Gül Bağan, Melsa Beyaz, Elif Çelik Tangör, Kübra Aycan Gelekçi, Buse Gumusturkmen, İrem İnanlı, Özlem Kahveci, Fırat Karaman, Şebnem Kayhan, Muaz Özden, İ. Destan Öztürk, Sena Sevinç Öztürk, Arel Siviş, Zehra Ayben Tümer, Ceysu Ucan, Burcu Ustabaş, Begüm Yamanlar, Yurdanur Melike Yürekli
Workshop Participants (July 2025): Melsa Beyaz, Elif Çelik Tangör, Feyza Çınar, Kübra Aycan Gelekçi, İlksen Mavituna, Muaz Özden, Sena Sevinç Öztürk, Arel Siviş, Zehra Ayben Tümer, Ceysu Ucan, Yağmur Yıldırım