Faculty

Profile

Evren Uzer is a NYC based educator, urban planner and community practitioner working on civic engagement in planning and design and her current research focuses on activism, critical heritage studies and feminist spatial practices. She is Assistant Professor of Urban Planning at School of Design Strategies and she mainly teaches at Graduate Urban Programs, Transdisciplinary Design MFA and Integrated Design BFA programs at Parsons.

She has a PhD and BSc in Urban and Regional Planning, and MSc in Urban Design, from Istanbul Technical University. Her PhD thesis (2010) is on cultural heritage at risk. Evren joined Parsons in 2015 from University of Gothenburg in Sweden where she was a postdoctoral research fellow between 2013-2015 in the School of Design and Crafts where she worked on her project focusing on Heritage activism. She has previously taught at Pratt Institute in NYC, and her prior teaching also includes ITU Faculty of Architecture in Istanbul- Turkey, Auckland University of Technology in Auckland New Zealand, and Bergen School of Architecture in Norway.

Evren is also affiliated with University of Gothenburg, School of Design and Crafts (HDK) in Sweden through her research project "Reconciliatory Heritage: Reconstructing Heritage in a Time of Violent Fragmentations" funded by Vetenskapsradet (VR), Swedish Research Council (2017-2020). Her NYC based ongoing research focuses on “Manipulating Dissent: Exploration of activism in NYC” funded by The New School which explores activism and feminist spatial practices in NYC and “Decolonizing Urbanism” project in collaboration with Prof Jilly Traganou which looks into decolonizing curricular and pedagogical practices in education of urbanism. 

Evren’s practice is currently split between community engagement, planning and design work at Collective for Community, Culture and Environment-CCCE  and her artistic practice at roomservices. Through these two initiatives, she works on advocacy planning, artistic research, co-design and non-academic and non-conventional forms of publishing. CCCE is a NYC based, an interdisciplinary collective of women and women identified individuals, working on projects that further economic resilience, cultural diversity, public health, social justice, and environmental sustainability especially focusing on engaging low- and moderate-income residents and communities to shape decisions about their environment and everyday life. Roomservices is an artistic research collaboration for practice-based and experimental design projects, dealing with issues such as DIY urbanism, artistic research and collaborative practices.