Emre Akbil

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.

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Urban rooms as a methodology

Urban rooms and the expanded ecology of urban living labs, August 2025

This paper is for a 'Living Labs: Agents for Change' special issue of the Buildings and Cities journal. It draws on a decade of 'live' work developed using the urban room methodology to foster co-production in Castlegate, Sheffield. The ‘urban room’ (UR) is an embryonic spatial typology for diverse actors and citizens to co-create city futures. This paper examines how the situated, hybrid and participatory methods of the URs compare with the 'laboratisation' of the world by the more established methodology of Urban Living Labs. This reveals similarities and differences in building community and civic resilience. URs are positioned as place-based infrastructures and active sites of multiplicity, where diverse communities can transform the city, decentring experts in urban transformations. A UR case study of collaborative civic regeneration in Castlegate, Sheffield, UK, is explored through a situated and diffractive analysis, revealing how the UR provides new tactics that engage diverse actors and give voice to marginalised people. This long-term, situated and additive practice can transform the diversity of engagement, foster a plurality of urban futures and create novel forms of hybrid governance.Urban rooms and the expanded ecology of urban living labs - Buildings and Cities JournalJournal Article, Design, Inclusivity , Participation, Placeshaping, Carolyn Butterworth, Emre Akbil

AdvancedHE teaching award

Collaborative Award for Teaching Excellence, August 2025

The AdvanceHE Collaborative Award for Teaching Excellence (CATE) is a national award that recognises and rewards collaborative work that has had a demonstrable impact on teaching and learning and highlights the key role of teamwork in UK higher education. The winning teams demonstrate innovative approaches to collaborative teaching that have transformed student experiences and outcomes.The winning ELSSA (Engaged Learning at Sheffield School of Architecture) team comprises staff and students who have made substantial contributions to 'live' pedagogy over the last 10 years at Sheffield School of Architecture; Carolyn Butterworth (Team Leader), Leo Care (Deputy Team Leader), Sam Brown, Emre Akbil, Maša Šorn, Tom Moore, Claire Tymon and Rowan Mackay.ELSSA at the University of Sheffield transforms architecture education through engaged learning. Students collaborate with communities on real projects, building vital skills in leadership, communication, and problem-solving. This comprehensive programme of curricular and extra-curricular ‘Liveness’ creates confident, socially conscious architects, impacting both professional practice and global higher education.AdvanceHE Announcement, Sheffield University Announcement (requires Staff login)Accreditation, Event, Inclusivity , Participation, Pedagogy, Carolyn Butterworth, Emre Akbil, Leo Care and Sam Brown

“ELSSA has made a profound impact on the education culture at our University. We are immensely proud of the impact our students, staff and graduates have on their communities and professions; ELSSA typifies this commitment to civic engagement and is a beacon initiative for our university."

Dave Forrest, Deputy Vice-President for Education, The University of Sheffield

Design research tools

Sheffield DesignLAB, 2025

Welcome to DesignLAB!An interdisciplinary platform for researchers, educators, and practitioners who use design as a way of thinking, making, and collaborating. Based at the School of Architecture and Landscape at the University of Sheffield, DesignLAB brings together those exploring design as a methodology in research and teaching. It’s a space to share ideas, challenge perspectives, and build connections across the built environment disciplines. Join us in shaping new ways of seeing, questioning, and creating through design! Feel free to explore the design tools in our library, add one of yours or engage with our media content.Website, Design, Participation, Design, Carolyn Butterworth, Dan Jary, Emre Akbil and Leo Care

Citizens' Assemblies

Climate Re-assemblies, 2023 - Ongoing

The project aims to rethink how citizen participation is conceived in relation to the formulation, documentation, and continuity of Climate Assemblies. Between October-December 2023, The South Yorkshire Mayoral Combined Authority (SYMCA) is holding a Citizens’ Assembly involving 100 citizens on climate futures, asking participants the following questions: “The way our climate is changing will impact us all. How should we respond, to build a thriving and sustainable future for South Yorkshire?”Climate Assemblies are an emerging form of deliberative democracy employed to provoke conversations around the issues and impacts of climate change within communities. However, there tends to be limited engagement with participants and communities following an assembly, and it is not evident how their recommendations are acted on. For this project, we will specifically explore the potential for innovation in pre event collective agenda-setting, in-event (inclusive, visible, interactive) documentary, and post-event evaluation and progression – and how that, in turn, impacts shared climate future imaginaries, the types of solutions being put forward, and who participates in assemblies. These questions will be explored through a series of workshops on Climate Assemblies and the co-creation of an interactive documentary (idoc) with a diverse range of stakeholders as citizen-researchers, including both academics (from the fields of communication, politics, architecture and art practice) and non-academics from local authorities, community climate-focused organisations as well as communities underrepresented in the climate discourse. Event, Presentation, Climate Emergency, EDI, Placemaking, Participation, Material Cultures, Emre Akbil and Carolyn Butterworth

Stories-of-Situated-Pedagogies-Proceedings-Book.pdf

Workshop

Stories of Situated Pedagogies in Architecture and ..., 3rd - 4th October 2023

This international workshop, which was held in Istanbul on 3-4 October 2023, gathered educators and learners to share their stories of situated pedagogies in architecture and other fields with an interest in critical spatial practices. The open call to the workshop was announced in April 2023 for applicants to respond with their stories of personal experiences in education, together with critical responses to themselves. This call was intended to be the beginning of a playful and productive platform for communication, through pre-workshop peer-to-peer reviews, round-table sessions and post-workshop collaborations for publication. As such, the workshop is envisioned as a manifestation of slow and caring connectivity among educators and learners who have experimented with and experienced transformative pedagogies.Workshop reportBook, Workshop, Climate Emergency, EDI, Pedagogy, Emre Akbil

Perspectives on teaching architecture and urbanism

Urban Design Pedagogies for Staying With a Broken Planet, 2023

The book chapter aims to position the Masters in Urban Design programme of University of Sheffield School of Architecture, within the broken world pedagogies and reflect on the thematic framework that nurtures common tools and methods to endure, encounter, and co-exist with emerging uncertainties facing urban environments on a broken planet. We use ‘Ecologies of Care’ as a reflexive framework that critically repositions urban design pedagogies within three theoretical registers – the planetary as an image of interdependent worlds and source of disruption for the image of the globe as a colonial artefact; radical unknowability as a process-oriented approach to knowledge co-production that embraces incompleteness of urban life with gaps, margins, and interstices as central to knowledge resources; and cosmopolitical localism that reimagines urban ecologies as real-life laboratories for prefiguring just urban transitions that pays attention to shared vulnerabilities through mutual care amongst urban actors.Book, Climate Emergency, EDI, Pedagogy, Placemaking, Design, Emre Akbil

Co-design workshop

Harnessing the Elements: Towards Zero-carbon Neighbourhoods, March 2021

This online publicly accessible event sought to explore the potential for online platforms as tools for community-led design. In collaboration with The Glass-House Charity, the workshop used the universal elements of earth, air, fire and water as themes for creative co-design activities to explore how we can activate both citizens and the different sectors as collaborative placemakers. Using the area around London Road in Sheffield as a starting point for discussion, we explored how local placemaking can be informed by and drive forward the zero-carbon agenda. This was an active space, where students, practitioners, policymakers and citizens worked together with The Glass-House and with Year 2 students and tutors from The University of Sheffield School of Architecture to explore and co-design creative methods of engagement around the zero-carbon agenda.Designing Sustainable Places - The Glass-House 2020/21 Event SeriesEvent, Digital Learning, Climate Emergency, Participation, Placemaking, Emre Akbil, Ian Hicklin and Leo Care

Image Equality Project Introduction and Links.docx

Student resource and research

Image Equality Project, 2020 - ongoing

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 Theory, Pedagogy, Critical pedagogy, Emre Akbil and Leo Care

Live Works Screen Rights Report_v250923.pdf

Equal access to the screen industry

Screen Rights, 2019 - 2023

Screen Rights is a research project by Live Works. It is funded by SIGN (Screen Industries Growth Network) and is exploring spatial and urban barriers to a diverse screen industry in the South Yorkshire region. Currently UK screen industries are less diverse on average than the total UK workforce. This contributes to reduced creative control over narratives, less meaningful representation and exclusion from cultural production and economic opportunities. This project focuses on a placed-based approach to investigate spatial barriers to a diverse screen industry in South Yorkshire and sets the groundwork for inclusive and collaborative place-making strategies for initiating community-led creative clusters.https://screen-network.org.uk/publication/screen-rights-report/Report, Book, Event, EDI, Material Cultures, Placemaking, Participation, Emre Akbil and Carolyn Butterworth

Urban Commons - HandbookUrban Commons Research Collective presents the Urban Commons Handbook The commons are regarded as a means to generate social processes that can maintain, reproduce, and reinvent our lives in times of uncertainty. This handbook is a compilation of definitions, experiences and references around some

Co-production resource

Urban Commons Handbook, 2019 - 2022

The commons are regarded as a means to generate social processes that can maintain, reproduce, and reinvent our lives in times of uncertainty. This handbook is a compilation of definitions, experiences and references around some of the key questions that arise when thinking about commoning the city. It aims to contribute to an emerging field of practice, help to recognise the work of existing experiences, and provide material to support a variety of learning environments that operate between practice and research, dissemination and pedagogy, production and reproduction, concepts and artefacts, resources and desires, present possibilities and future needs. The handbook was curated by the Urban Commons Research Collective comprised of Emre Akbil, Alex Axinte, Esra Can, Beatrice De Carli, Melissa Harrison, Ana Mendez De Andes Aldama, Katharina Moebus, Thomas Moore and Doina Petrescu, with the contribution of Eleni Katrini and Julia Udall.The handbook was made possible with support and funding from institutions sharing the ambitions of the group. We acknowledge the generous support from the Sheffield School of Architecture for providing the space for gatherings of such diverse people and practices and for their research support that funded the design and copy-editing of the handbook. We also acknowledge contributions from the School of Art, Architecture and Design of London Metropolitan University for hosting the research seminar On the Commons and contributing with funding to the publication.https://dpr-barcelona.com/urban-commons-handbook/Book, Event, EDI, Placemaking, Pedagogy, Participation, Emre Akbil

field-108-akbil.pdf

Image equality project

(Not Just) A Skin-Deep Image Problem, 2019

This provocation asks, in this age of image saturation: how can we represent people in our architectural designs that are specific, appropriate, representative and diverse? Using Kimberlé Crenshaw’s notion of intersectionality, the paper explores the potential of an ‘image equality archive’ created in The University of Sheffield's School of Architecture, to act as an interactive resource for students to question, examine and evaluate the representation of peoples in their design projects. The paper explores the minefields that reside in architectural representation of human figures due to colonial structures that remain untouched. The archive then is proposed as a tool to open conversations around these structures that tend to make figures at categorical intersections invisible. Finally the paper ends with future uses of the archive and a speculative institutional framework that could grow around it in order to ensure that conversations remain open and sustainable in terms of its capacity to make structural changes within the architectural pedagogy of design projects across the school. Journal Article Website: https://www.field-journal.org/article/id/108/ Journal Article, EDI, History and Representation, Pedagogy, Emre Akbil and Leo Care

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