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 Associate Professor of  Streteguc Design and Urban Practice at Parsons School of Design, The New School. Her current research focuses on community engagement in collaborative processes, critical heritage and resistance studies and feminist spatial practices. For education-focused partnerships and co-design projects, she regularly collaborates with NYC based community organizations and public agencies for co-design and community engagement-focused projects. She is currently PI for Community Engagement 101 curricular research project and Foundations: Teaching and Learning Frameworks for Equitable Community Engagement course for Faculty, together with Cynthia Lawson-Jaramillo and Michele Kahane.

Evren 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 and 2016-2021 on "Reconciliatory Heritage: Reconstructing Heritage in a Time of Violent Fragmentations" funded by Vetenskapsradet (VR), Swedish Research Council . 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’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.