Guzin Yeliz Kahya is an urban designer and landscape architect, and currently works full-time as a research associate at the Department of City and Regional Planning, Faculty of Architecture at Erciyes University (Kayseri, Turkey). At the same time, she is a visiting researcher at the Istanbul Studies Center at Kadir Has University. She is currently one of the visiting researchers for the 2018-19 academic 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 with the Georgia Institute of Technology, Faculty of Architecture as a visiting 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 networks in the context of the Beyoğlu urban area. In her PhD dissertation, she examined the structural role of the 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. Through 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 culturally based urban policies and actions. More specifically, she aims to ask whether the urban policies and actions currently being implemented contribute to the emergence and survival of bottom-up urban creativity in Istanbul and what trajectories bottom-up cultural agencies have encountered in their efforts to be present and survive in urban civil life.