Which district hosts a cluster is a contingent outcome, not geographic destiny

Evidence

By the end of the 1930s, film business in Istanbul had clustered considerably in the Pera district, especially on and around the district’s Grand Avenue, where offices of most of the film businesses came to be situated. This is probably not surprising since, in the words of Scognamillo (1991, p. 9), ‘cinema chooses a city as its center in every country, be it a major city or the capital city. It develops and spreads by vitally connecting to that city. In Turkey, cinema has chosen Istanbul and an appropriate zone of that city, Beyoglu (Pera), as its center. … There were, for instance, without doubt candidates other than Pera (e.g., Sirkeci, a commercial center, or Sehzadebasi, the traditional entertainment center for the Muslim population) that might have hosted Istanbul’s film cluster. Events, however, unfolded in such a way that Pera was, at the end, the location that began to show signs of endogenous development, and the reasons for ‘cinema’s choosing’ Pera merits some further scrutiny. — Georg Schreyögg and Jörg Sydow, The Hidden Dynamics of Path Dependence, 818

Categorization

• QUESTION: What tipped Pera over Sirkeci or Sehzadebasi? The chapter flags this as unexplained, making it a genuine open question.
• SHARE: A tidbit for someone into Istanbul cinema history: the film trade clustered on the Grand Avenue of Pera by the 1930s, not in the Muslim entertainment quarter.