2026




NEWS


IPA Urban Agenda Research January report

30 January 2026

Istanbul Planning Agency’s Urban Agenda Research January report, “Blue Publicness in Istanbul: Encounters with the Sea in Everyday Life,” has now been published. This comprehensive study explores how Istanbul residents engage with the sea in their everyday lives. My contribution focuses on social life aboard ferries in the 19th and 20th centuries, examining how ferries functioned as a key stage for Istanbul’s process of modernisation (pp. 56-62).

See the report

Tactical Urbanism Now!

1 December 2025

Our project From Soil to Soil: Stitching the Food Cycle through Landscapes and Cultures, with Fernando Sanchez for the Tactical Urbanism Now! competition by TerraViva, won the Community’s Choice Award!

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Anatomy of Inspiration

15 November 2025
I was a keynote speaker at the 18th Istanbul Biennale (2025) for the Anatomy of Inspiration talk series!

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The Bartlett Autumn Show Book 2025

4 October 2025

My master’s dissertation was among the few fully featured in The Bartlett Autumn Show Book 2025 (page 18)!
See the book

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ABOUT
Zeynep Igmen is an architect and researcher specializing in sustainable and socially just architectural and urban practices, based in London and Istanbul. Her work engages with cultural discourses, environmental history, territorial conflicts across land- and waterscapes, and their intersections with material and immaterial cultures. She also explores spatial tectonics and hands-on, low-tech making. In parallel, she contributes to the Latinization of Ottoman Turkish documents and literature.

The Bartlett School of Architecture UCL 2024-2025
MA Architecture and Historic Urban Environments 

          thesis titled “A Practice of Fishing along the Bosphorus: Mapping Dalyans as Sites of Collective Making and Memory”

Uskudar University 2024-2025
MA Sufi Culture and Literature

           final project titled “Tawakkul, Vigour, and Building in the Narrative of Prophet Noah”

Istanbul Bilgi University 2019-2023
BArch Architecture (High Honours)

London College of Music 2007-2022
Classical Piano, Grade 8
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2026


Type: Workshop, individual
Date: 2022 Fall
Study: Furniture

The Introduction to Carpentry Workshop was to gain experience and knowledge about wood materials and their processes with a small scale wooden furniture output of participants selection. In the workshop, I have explored the design criterias, joining methods and appropriate trees in wood processing. It was an insipiring experience to learn the basic carpentry hand tools, dimensioning and reinforceing of the wood. As the output, I have constructed a cabinet out of the tree pinus brutia, which is a common material in Türkiye when manufacturing furniture because of its locality and accessibility. When composing the cabinet, I have used different techniques such as rasping, wedging or adhesived squeeze. After the workshop I have added a strip light under the cabinet and am still using my hand-made cabinet besides my bed in my bedroom.