In cities, existing boundaries can be architectural, such as streets or other urban details, whereas sociologically, these boundaries manifest in socio-economic levels, and ethnic and cultural differences. These differences have remained permeable throughout the Ottoman urban experience and tend to maintain that permeability, even if it is diminishing. The neighborhood is the primary source and fundamental nurturer of this permeability. While it is possible to utilize these solidarity-based characteristics of the neighborhood to prevent social conflicts, the damage done to the natural fabric of neighborhoods within the framework of urban transformation projects, and the conversion of neighborhoods into single-class gated communities, increase the potential for existing economic/class or ethnic tensions to trigger conflict, turning differences into a cause for exclusion. In this book, I attempt to demonstrate what some fundamental concepts—such as the relationship between Islam and the city, the preservation of tangible and intangible cultural heritage, urban renewal, segregation, ghettoization, urban poverty, underclass status, discourses of decay, gentrification, the right to the city, and urban justice—correspond to within the context of the Historical Peninsula. In short, the texts here concern how the issues that have been debated in the West for some time should be understood and interpreted in the context of preserving cultural heritage and combating poverty.