Guzin Yeliz Kahya is an urban designer and landscape architect, and currently full-time working as a research associate at the Department of City and Regional Planning, Faculty of Architecture in Erciyes University (Kayseri, Turkey). At the same time, she is a visitor researcher at Istanbul Studies Center at Kadir Has University. She is currently one of visitor researchers of 2018-19 year at LATTS.
She completed her PhD in City and Regional Planning at Middle East Technical University with her Ph.D. dissertation entitled ‘Spatio-temporal Structuration of Art and Cultural Events Mediated Urban Experience in Beyoğlu, Istanbul’. She affiliated Georgia Institute of Technology, Faculty of Architecture as a visitor researcher during her PhD and worked on spatial analysis methods, including Space Syntax and ArcGis based methods in order to question the social role of urban space network in the context of Beyoğlu urban area. In her Ph.D. dissertation, she examined the structural role of contemporary art scene on the spatial and temporal organization of urban social life in Istanbul.
Her research interests are urban focused. It covers the interdisciplinary terrain of social and space oriented fields of urban research with a particular interest in the role of urban space in the mediation of urban sociability in cities. Her current research is on spatial aggregation of creative-industry businesses in Istanbul and examining the differences and the intersections between the creative industry clusters and the clusters of non-commercial art and cultural spaces. By her research visit to LATTS, she aims to extend the scope of her research project with new questions on the mobilization of bottom-up urban practices in the culturally based urban policies and actions. More specifically, she aims to ask if the currently implemented urban policies and actions contribute to the emergence and survival of bottom-up urban creativity in Istanbul and what trajectories the bottom-up cultural agencies encountered in their efforts of being present and survive in urban civil life.