What happens when two urban walkers (and interior design professors) – one in Istanbul, one in New York City – start visiting cemeteries, not to mourn but simply to walk, observe, and listen? Our awareness and approaches began to shift as we studied our interests. As designers, we pushed ourselves to consider the subject of death and burial well beyond typical aspects of mourning or visiting the dead. We also suddenly realized we had entered deathscape studies, or necrogeography. Yet, we asked, how might we merge our spatial leanings and perceptions about being around and inside urban cemeteries, to reinterpret these exterior environments as crystalized forms of interior-making?

Cemeteries, often perceived as empty or forgotten “non-places,” revealed themselves to us as something far more alive and complex. Especially in global megacities like ours, they occupy liminal ground – physically bounded by walls or fences yet emotionally and perceptively expansive – a step away from the mundane yet sacred, and simultaneously public and private, open and interior. We see cemeteries of all sizes as “urban interiors”: a mixture of open-air rooms connected by a myriad of artery forms that encourage turning inward. Whether pausing at the gated Marble Cemetery in New York City’s East Village or stepping into Istanbul’s tree-covered Alibeyköy Cemetery, we experience subtle but also unmistakable shifts – from city noise to contemplative stillness, from movement to reflection.

To better understand these transitions, we mapped our visits/journeys through nine archetypal “zones” of experience – from indifference (passing by, unaware) to noticing, stepping in, transitioning, deepening, immersing, and finally re-emerging (returning to the city transformed). The cemetery unfolds not as spaces of death, but as places of interior resonance – sites of “interiority” where imagination, memory, and the senses continuously shift and intertwine.

Our article, Journeys through Deathscapes in the Contemporary City, grew from such encounters and subsequent realizations. What began as a series of parallel wanderings soon evolved into joint research and a dialogic process together and across continents. We alternated constantly between our voices, cities, and perspectives – and developed visualizations through drawings, prints and collage – noticing the boundaries had blurred. We frequently lost track of which wording, idea or argument originated with whom, leading us to abandon the conventional distinction between first and second authors – a process that echoes Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of collaboration as becoming “a multiplicity.”

Our research is ultimately less about burial grounds than about how the living might move through urban spaces that blur the boundaries between life and death, presence and absence. We invite the readers to reconsider what it means to be outside and inside a city – like New York City’s or Istanbul’s burial grounds – asking not for answers, but for attentiveness, wonder, and pause.

Journeys through deathscapes in the contemporary city: exploring urban interiority in New York City and Istanbul by Alison B Snyder (Pratt Institute, USA) and V Şafak Uysal (TED University, Türkiye) is part of the AMPS series Socio-Cultural Theory and published in Architecture_MPS, volume 32.

Alison B. Snyder is an architect and professor at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY (MARCH, Columbia University, USA). Her interests and pedagogy are informed by an interdisciplinary overlap between architecture, interiors, art practice. Drawing upon interior/architectural and phenomenological theory, alongside archaeological-anthropological methods, she interprets and visualizes how contexts, streets, buildings, interiors, and people transform over time. Conducting fieldwork in urban/rural Turkey and New York City, overlooked conditions of monumental and mundane settings are revealed. Snyder has directed the Interior Architecture Program, University of Oregon, and chaired Pratt’s Department of Interior Design.

V. Şafak Uysal studied city planning (at METU) and interior architecture (at Bilkent University). He has been teaching basic design and architectural/interior design studios at various levels as well as various theoretical courses on vision & visuality, theories of interiority, spatial narratives, and the history of ideas. His research interests cover a wide spectrum, including critical theory, architectural phenomenology, design education, body-space relationship, and the role of architecture in framing historical knowledge and experience. Previously having chaired Istanbul Beykent University’s Department of Industrial Design and Istanbul Bilgi University’s Department of Interior Design, he is currently a faculty member at TED University.

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