Burcu Yigit Turan

My research and teaching have developed across critical and cultural geography, urban and environmental sociology, cultural studies, and planning and design. Together these form a critical theory approach to the history, theory, practice and criticism of planning and landscape architecture, centred on social, spatial and environmental justice and on the politics of place and space.

My current work cuts across climate change, green gentrification, racialization, socio-spatial epistemologies of whiteness, socio-spatial inequality and segregation, environmental racism, migration, cultural heritage, visible and invisible borders, border making, coloniality, place-making, public space, and spatial and environmental justice. I am also concerned with critical, insurgent and transformative planning and design practices, urban and environmental movements, and subaltern knowledges.

My central interest lies in uncovering narratives and epistemologies that are overlooked in planning and landscape architecture discourses, and in exploring how they can become part of planning and design practice. In doing so I draw on research traditions such as urban political ecology, and I work with creative research methods that make these narratives visible, critical and counter-mapping among them.

I am editor of the forthcoming Routledge Handbook of Landscape and Decolonisation, which brings together international contributions on the history and theory of landscape, its entanglements with coloniality, decolonial movements and the methodologies of decolonial practice. I am also preparing several research funding applications.

Past Projects

Urban Planning/Design and Social Sustainability 

In between 2020 and 2024, I worked in FORMAS project ‘Norra Sorgenfri planned, populated and problematised: the role of social sustainability in urban renewal’ in collaboration with Erik Jönsson, Uppsala University, Geography Department, Johan Pries and Mattias Qviström, SLU, Department of Urban and Rural Development, Division of Landscape Architecture, and Guy Beaten and Carina Listerborn, Malmö University, Urban Studies Department. See https://www.iuresearch.se/norrasorgenfri-past-and-future/

Socio-Spatial Segregation, Racialization, Socio-spatial Epistemology of Whiteness and Social Justice

I have been working on a research theme 'Segregation and Landscapes', which questions the role of urban and landscape planning and design in (re)production of racialization and segregation. The theme development was funded by SLU, Urban Futures Seed Funding (lead applicant) (2019).

Borders, Borderlands in Urban Areas, Public Space and Landscape Planning and Design

I worked as part of MISTRA URBAN FUTURES SKLIP – Skåne Local Interactive Platform IMUD – International Migration and Urban Development Panel led by Malmö University (2018-2019) in a research project on migration, formation of social borders and boundaries in public spaces in socially diverse urban landscapes.

I am the Director of Studies for the Masters in Landscape Architecture for Sustainable Urbanisation.

The courses I teach:

LK0313 Landscape Architecture: History, Theory, and Practice (course leader)

EX0945 Independent Project in Landscape Architecture, A2E – Landscape Architecture for Sustainable Urbanisation – Master’s Programme (course leader)

PhD Course - Creative research methodologies for urban contexts (PNG0097) (course leader)

Supervision:

I would welcome master and PhD students with research interests in any of the topics I listed.

I have degrees in landscape architecture, and PhD in urban planning. I worked in different geographic contexts (i.e. Turkey, The Netherlands, Austria, United States) before Sweden, as practitioner, educator, and researcher. 

I obtained my Ph.D. (2009) degree in Urban Planning and Design from Vienna University of Technology with dissertation titled “Complexity of Meanings in Urban Landscapes: between the imagined and the real” that I defended with honor degree. My Ph.D. dissertation was a cross between urban and landscape studies and social theory and cultural studies, with a particular focus on semiotics exploring the effects of political ideologies on urban landscape production in Ankara, Turkey and everyday experiences and meanings that resemble the social and political fractures in the society.

During my doctoral studies, I was also a Marie Curie Doctoral Fellow in the Transdisciplinary Research Urban Future Program (Culture and the City), Non- degree Diploma, 2007 (June-December), Bauhaus University, Institute of Globalization and Sociology, Weimar, Germany- Blekinge Institute of Technology Karlskrona, Sweden

Yiğit-Turan, B. (2026) Countermapping planetary urbanization(s): socio-spatial ontologies of hegemonic whiteness, sustainability narratives, and grassroots solidarity praxis in Malmö. Fennia, 204(1). https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.152546

Yiğit-Turan, B., Fadel, A., Keravel, S., Leger-Smith, A., Lima, F., Ruiz Arana, U. and Wieser Benedetti, U. (2025) ‘Rethinking the agency of landscape imaginaries amid planetary crises’, Journal of Landscape Architecture, 20(3), pp. 4–7.
https://doi.org/10.1080/18626033.2025.2643075

Yiğit Turan, B., Christ, M. C. and Cerulli, C. (eds.) (2025) Getting Political in the Neoliberal City: Planning and Design for Social and Environmental Justice. New York and Abingdon: Routledge. [Included: editors’ introduction, ‘Why Getting Political, Why Now?’]

Yiğit-Turan, B. (2025). Is Landscape Colonial?, in Doherty, G. and Waldheim, C. (eds.) Landscape Is…! Abingdon and New York: Routledge, pp. 42–65.

Yigit-Turan, B., Keravel, S., Hellström-Reimer, M., Leger-Smith, A., Lima, F., Arana, U. R., & Benedetti, U. W. (2024). The politics of landscape narratives. Journal of Landscape Architecture, 19(1), 4–5. https://doi.org/10.1080/18626033.2024.2408905

Yiğit-Turan, B. and Ågren, M. (2024) ‘Green and Socially Sustainable City Discourse, White Spatial Epistemology: The Reproduction of Racial Landscape Injustice and Segregation in Swedish Planning’, Planning Theory & Practice, 25(5), pp. 632–659.
https://doi.org/10.1080/14649357.2024.2449265

Yiğit-Turan, B. Maria Hellström-Reimer, Sonia Keravel, Anaïs Leger-Smith, Francisca Lima, Usue Ruiz Arana, & Ursula Wieser Benedetti (2022) Landscape architecture criticism in the Anthropocene, Journal of Landscape Architecture, 17:3, 4-5, DOI: 10.1080/18626033.2022.2195222

Yiğit-Turan, B. and Ågren, M. (2022), Segregation and Landscape Injustice in the Shadows of White Planning and Green Exceptionalism in Sweden, Urban Matters Journal, Issue: Dislocating Urban Studies

https://urbanmattersjournal.com/segregation-and-landscape-injustice-in-the-shadows-of-white-planning-and-green-exceptionalism-in-sweden/  

Yiğit Turan, B. (2021) ‘Superkilen: coloniality, citizenship, and border politics’, in
Waterman, T., Wolff, J. and Wall, E. (eds.) Landscape Citizenships. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, pp. 56–78.

Yigit Turan, B. (2018a) Learning from Occupy Gezi Park: Redefining landscape democracy in an age of ‘planetary urbanism’. In Defining Landscape Democracy: A Path to Spatial Justice Edited by Shelley Egoz, Karsten Jørgensen and Deni Ruggeri. Pp: 210-221. Edward Elgard Publishing, Cheltenham
 
Yigit Turan, B. (2018b) Revitalizing Yeldeğirmeni Neighbourhood in Istanbul: Towards an Emancipatory Urban Design in the Landscapes of Neoliberal Urbanism. In Public Space Unbound: Urban Emancipation and the Post-Political Condition. Edited by Sabine Knierbein, Tihomir Viderman. Pp: 158-172. Routledge, New York

Yiğit-Turan, B. (2017) ‘Occupy Gezi Park: The Never-Ending Search for Democracy, Public Space, and Alternative City-Making’, in Hou, J. and Knierbein, S. (eds.) City Unsilenced: Urban Resistance and Public Space in the Age of Shrinking Democracy. New York and Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 83–94.

Yigit Turan, B.  (2016) Modernist Landscapes of Ankara. JOLA Journal of Landscape Architecture, Vol. 12, Issue 2, p. 14-25 Routledge DOI: 10.1080/18626033.2016.1185230

Yigit-Turan, B. (2012). “Dönüşen İstanbul’un Yeni Peyzajlarında Tasarımın Politik Ekolojisi”(Political Ecology of Design in the New Landscapes of Transforming Istanbul). Mimarlık (Architecture), Dosya 28 Kentsel Dönüşüm Özel Sayısı (Dossier 28 Special Issue: Urban Transformation) Edited by Ipek Yada Akpinar