Water Knowledge Project Team: Urban.Koop
Urban.koop is a collaborative, participatory and interdisciplinary participation of research, academic studies and publications on urban components, planning and architectural proposals on different scales, urban and cultural guides on changing themes, workshops focused on social benefits, participatory and interdisciplinary projects. The team contributes to the Water Knowledge project with their urban design expertise in spatial intervention and placemaking.
Alp Arısoy
Co-Investigator
After graduating from MSGSU architecture department, he had his master degree in urban landscape in Politecnico di Milano and his Phd in ITU. He has been the coordinator of the Urban Studies Department of CEKUL Foundation from 2010 to 2020 and conducted urban scale conservation, revitalisation and strategic planning projects in Anatolian cities. His research and publications are focused on the cultural policies, urban life and social structure of the city. He is a lecturer at the architecture department of İstanbul Topkapi University and one of the co-founders of Urban.koop (Urban Studies Cooperative). He is currently managing the field and research projects of the cooperative.
Liana Kuyumcuyan
Social Designer
Liana Kuyumcuyan is a social designer and editor based in Istanbul, Turkey. She studied Industrial Design (BA) at Istanbul Bilgi University and Social Design (MA) at Design Academy Eindhoven. She graduated from Architecture and Urban Studies (MA) at Istanbul Kadir Has University. Currently, she is a doctoral candidate at the National Technical University of Athens in the Department of Architectural Language, Communication, and Design. She has been the Executive Editor of “Design Unlimited” magazine since 2019. As a designer and researcher, she collaborates with several institutions, including the Center for Spatial Justice (MAD), Postane, Urban.Koop, and the Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul (SRII).
Onur Atay
Urban Practitioner
Onur Atay is an architect and an urban practitioner. He has been supervising participatory architecture projects with workshops and programming creative spaces for the public good since 2013. He designed and managed creative hubs and programs, aimed to empower collective decision making processes on national and international scale. Onur is pursuing to balance his professional work between researching urban history and experimenting on social and digital tools to enrich the built environment. He is currently working with Urban.Koop that he co-founded; which is an urban studies cooperative focusing on social impact through urban innovation.
Elif Soylu
Urban Researcher
Elif Soylu (1995, Istanbul) is an urbanist and researcher based in Rotterdam. Her research focuses on urban transformations through water infrastructure, urban production, and energy landscapes, experimenting with oral histories, mappings, archival research, and storytelling. She has contributed to various projects for international exhibitions like BOZAR 2019, IABR 2020, and the Venice Architecture Biennale 2021. She holds bachelor’s degrees in Architecture and Interior Design from Istanbul Bilgi University and an MSc in Urban Design from TU Berlin. Her thesis, “Cartographies of Flow: Entangled Stories of Istanbul’s Waters,” explored Istanbul’s water infrastructure transformation, highlighting cultural, urban, and everyday entanglements of water.