URBAN IDENTITIES AND CATASTROPHE: IZMIR AND SALONICA AT THE END OF THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE* EMILIANO BUGATTI ABSTRACT. Two huge fires dramatically influenced the urban development of Salonica and Izmir, in 1917 and in 1922, respectively. These catastrophes occurred after the Ottoman Empire fell, and Salonica and Izmir had shifted into new national contexts. The fires mainly destroyed the districts that were transformed during the late-Ottoman period. These districts became the cosmopolitan fac ßades of modern Izmir and Salonica. The post-fires’ tabula rasa provided an opportunity for Greek and Turkish politicians and European planners to change the urban identity of both cities. Moreover, the Lausanne Treaty of 1923 transformed their multicultural societies also. Reconstruction plans had been thought to de-Ottomanize and remove the previous idea of the towns and their multiplicity, interpreting new cultural and nationalist feeling. Here, I empha- size how modernity was interpreted before and after the fires, and point out contradic- tions between ideological aspects of planning and how the first urban districts were built during the 1920s. Keywords: Ottoman Empire, catastrophe, fire, Izmir, Salonica, Turkey, Greece. Izmir and Salonica, important port cities of Turkey and Greece respectively, have been subjected to several similar events within the scope of urbanism, architecture, and social change. In the last few decades, similar processes of urban rehabilitation have improved waterfronts, and leisure facilities have been introduced. Izmir and Salonica are entering the competition for tourism among Mediterranean coastal cities. Their extraordinary bays, as well as their water- fronts and hill districts, resemble each other and their central areas’ public spaces, when carefully observed, reveal another similar feature: a conflicting mingling of different urban concepts. Fragments of cities with various character- istics and sequences of public spaces are connected to each other without any continuity. Moreover, within certain areas, streets, or squares, can be distin- guished buildings radically heterogeneous in terms of size, scale, and typology. Monumental Ottoman buildings, traditional wooden single-family houses, and Roman-Byzantine structures are like “found objects” within a newly urbanized landscape. Why this sense of fragmentation and loss of meaning? Two catastrophes dramatically marked Salonica and Izmir: Almost two-thirds of the urban fabric was destroyed by huge fires, respectively in 1917 and 1922. These catastrophic events strongly influenced the histories of the two cities; after centuries of consolidation, social and physical structures changed *This article is a product of my Ph.D. dissertation. I wish to thank Turkish and Greek colleagues I have met during these years, my tutors at University of Genoa, Faculty of Architecture, and my mentor Maurice Cerasi. Moreover, I deeply appreciated the advice of my colleague Paolo Girardelli when I started to write this article, the excellent job of anonymous reviewers with editors Henry Sivak and Thomas Puleo, the support of the Yeditepe Writing Center, and close friends who helped me. k DR.BUGATTI is an assistant professor in the department of architecture at Yeditepe Univer- sity, Istanbul, Turkey; [emiliano.bugatti@gmail.com]. The Geographical Review 103 (4): 498–516, October 2013 Copyright © 2013 by the American Geographical Society of New York