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


Location: Bloomsbury, London
Type: Exhibition, group
Role: Co-coordinator (with Luzan Munayer)
Date: 2025 Fall

Institution: The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL

The Autumn Show Exhibition of MA Architecture and Historic Urban Environments (MAHUE) was on display for two weeks and did invite all into the expanded universe of architectural research and design through the global lens of its 2024-2025 cohort. The exhibition showcased key preoccupations of concepts, themes and issues dissolves the taxonomical boundaries between outputs produced across six academic modules - essays, design briefs, spatial propositions, screenplays, interviews, critical fabulations - and foregrounds the richness of experimental spatial practices that are being forged over the course of the 12-month postgraduate programme. The body of work reflected the individual subjectivities of each student, their contexts, histories and cultural milieu, and simultaneously the global backdrop of concerns in the age of climate emergency, geopolitical turmoil and the erosion of checks and balances across scales and location. I coordinated the Autumn Show, managing timelines, logistics, and installations while liaising between students, staff, and external partners to ensure a professional and collaborative exhibition. I also organised a guided tour of our programme’s Autumn Show display, where I curated the tour content and delivered information to a diverse audience, ranging from practitioners to academics.