Leyla Turanalp, Urban Designer

 

"Try, only then you will know!"

 

  As an urban designer, planner, writer, photographer, activist, and artist being a part of nature gives me an enthusiasm for the world, in its many aspects. This feeling is always accompanied by a critical mind, and an eagerness to change it for the better. Therefore my theoretical interests are strongly linked to practical issues. For instance, I worked as volunteer in the permaculture village in the town of Izmir in Turkey, and I then visited the kibbutz and permaculture villages in Israel, where I had the opportunity to observe the effects of an arid climate on the flora.

I have served on the organization committee of the GreenAge and ECOWEEK, and hence visited many countries such as Brasil, Argentina, Uruguay, Japan, Singapore, Palestine, Israel, Europe and the US, and met people from even more; took part in many seminars and conferences on urbanism, planning, and design; contributed to the weekly seminars of my department, Urban Studies at Mimar Sinan University. I worked in Istanbul with different groups of international researchers, whom I helped to explore and study the city, especially neighborhoods such as Tarlabaşı marked by forced migration, underclass poverty and displacement. Outside professional life I did volunteer work in feminist and disability associations/centers across Turkey.

Despite this variety of life experiences, my main research interest remain, and can in fact be traced through them, the development of a critical urban perspective, which rethinks planning and design in terms of ecology, environmental and public health, and is ready to pay greater attention to natural phenomena. This also means a reconsideration of nature itself and the role humans have been granted in the last couple of centuries as part of it.