Emre Abkil

MA in Urban Design co-leader

Year 2 Studio Tutor

e.akbil@sheffield.ac.uk

I am an architect and urbanist working on building speculative relations with social, political, and ecological thresholds of architecture and urbanism to enact minoritarian and commons-based political creations. In my teaching at Sheffield School of Architecture I explore decolonial, feminist and ecological tactics in critical spatial pedagogies. I am currently the co-leader of the MA in Urban Design programme and postgraduate module leader at MA in Architectural Design and studio tutor in the second-year Architecture undergraduate programme.

After training as an architect at Eastern Mediterranean University in Cyprus in 2000 (BA) and 2002 (MArch) and as an urbanist at Bauhaus-Dessau Kolleg, Germany, in 2007 I co-founded Etika Studio - an architectural practice awarded in several architectural and urban design competitions and including the Europa Nostra Award in 2016 as one of the partners of Home for Cooperation project. Together with a group of architects and planners, I have initiated ‘Imaginary Famagusta,’ (IF) an urban practice that navigates the ethnocratic urbanism of Cyprus and produces spatial imaginaries for reconciliation through urban commoning. Our collaborative work formed the Cyprus Pavilion at Venice Biannial of Architecture in 2016.

I had taken an active role in UCTEA Chamber of Architects as an executive board member from 2012-2016. As part of this role, I edited several copies of the architecture journal MIMARCA and co-organised a conference on architectural education.

I continue to engage with practices on the ground that span across geographies co-producing outcomes that support their particular contexts as well as my thinking and teaching in architecture and urbanism. My experience in profession allows me to support students of architecture on professional aspects of the practice in line with the current ecological emergencies surrounding the profession.

Castlegate Common Manifesto - November, 2021

Castlegate Common Manifesto - reduced.pdf
Live Works was commissioned by Sheffield City Council to deliver a series of workshops with local stakeholders to inform and enhance the regeneration of the Castle Site in Castlegate, building on 8 years of research, visioning and engagement by the School of Architecture in the area. This co-production process aimed to support the development of the new public realm so that it benefits as much as possible from the extraordinary potential of this unique site and its rich community context. The workshops engaged existing members of the Castlegate Partnership and other local stakeholders to ensure representation of the diversity of the area's population and grassroots activities. The workshop themes were:• Revealing the Outdoor City• Revealing Innovation• Revealing Arts and Culture• Revealing Heritage
The award of Levelling Up funding required meaningful community engagement to inform directly the project design. 13 co-produced recommendations from the workshops were presented in the 'Castlegate Common Manifesto' and these recommendations informed directly the planning application that was submitted by Sheffield City Council in February 2023. Beyond the stakeholder workshops, Live Works ran the 'Castlegate Futures Urban Room' in November 2022 that gathered public feedback on the Manifesto recommendations, further informing the Council's plans. 
EDI, Participation, Placemaking, Carolyn Butterworth and Emre Akbil

Image Equality Project and Associated Field Journal Article - 2020-ongoing

(Not Just) A Skin-deep Image Problem.pdf
Field-8-Not-just-a-skin-deep-image-problem.pdf
The Image Equality Project has the simple aim of creating a more diverse range of source images of people, for students to use in their design work. The initiative was established in 2020, to create an open access resource for the School that offers png and CAD/vector line images of people that are more diverse in their: ethnicity, ability, activity and social grouping. It is hoped that this will enable students to inhabit their work with people that are more specific and relevant to context, programme, location, brief, agenda and approach. ‘intersectionality’ was used as a critical framework to develop the inclusive archive of bodies that could otherwise disappear in intersectional margins. Intersectionality is a Black feminist concept introduced by Kimberle Crenshaw and was initially used for critiquing discrimination and/or exclusion of black women in feminist and anti-racist politics. Thus it is important to produce embodied representations at different intersections: black+women, asian+disabled, non-binary+white. By introducing 2nd Year undergraduate students to Crenshaw's work and in enabling them to reconsider how we categorise and discriminate by the representation of peoples in their design work, students started to collect a more diverse set of representative people and consider in more depth the implications of their decisions. It also provoked students to consider how the representation of people in their work conveyed a socio-ethical position about their values as an architect. The archive of source images is a live resource that students are encouraged to contribute to, in order to keep it diverse, relevant and useful.
Journal Article, EDI, History and Representation, Pedagogy, Emre Akbil and Leo Care