Esra Can

School of Architecture

PhD Research Student

Profile picture of Esra Can
Profile picture of Profile picture of Esra Can
ecan1@sheffield.ac.uk

Full contact details

Esra Can
School of Architecture
Arts Tower
Western Bank
Sheffield
S10 2TN
Profile

Esra Can is an architect, activist and researcher focusing on politicising the production of space, community empowerment, inclusivity, and urban commons. She holds B.Arch and M.Arch degrees from Eastern Mediterranean University (EMU), Cyprus and completed Urban Design Postgraduate program, Transnational Spaces, at Bauhaus-Kolleg, Germany. In 2007, she co-founded Etika Architecture and Design Studio where their collaborative work with Emre Akbil was awarded at several competitions and exhibited locally and at international venues.

Her current work is shaped by an ongoing engagement with grassroots urban activism challenging the urban enclosures and territorial divisions in the divided context of Cyprus. She co-initiated transborder urban collectives, such as Archis Interventions_Cy and Imaginary Famagusta Initiatives, that aim at imagining and supporting possibilities of coexistence for communities divided by colonial/ethnocratic narratives. The two main outcomes of these collaborations are Mapping Karpas (mappingkarpas.org) and Hands-on Famagusta (handsonfamagusta.org) projects. The projects developed urban tools and tactics to support practices of commoning as a transformative framework in negotiating urban contestations. The outcomes and framework of Hands-on Famagusta project provided the basis for the Contested Fronts exhibition representing the Cyprus Pavilion at the Venice Biennial of Architecture in 2016. Her current PhD studies at Sheffield School of Architecture (SSoA) is based on her situated positioning in such practice, developing a feminist and decolonial framework to study the transformative role of urban activism in the contested contexts.

Her teaching at SSoA include tutoring Year2 Design Studio (2017-2021) at undergraduate program, co-tutoring Urban Design Thesis Studio, Coexistence, with Beatrice de Carli and Catherine Klasto (2019), and Graduate Teaching Associate at Urban Design project Food and the City (2020-2021) at Master of Urban Design program at Sheffield School of Architecture. Her research activities include several engagements to share her work including conferences and workshops. She co-initiated Urban Commons Collective at school together with collaborators across different geographies. She also co-initiated of SSoA Manifestos conference series and organised seminars within school.

Research interests

Project title: 
Disruptive Care: Urban Becomings in Contested Territories

Project outline:
This research is situated in the de-facto territorial division of Cyprus that continue to violently dismantle the relations between cultures, communities, and ecologies across the island. The hegemonic structures that maintain the conditions of frozen conflict tend to become invisible under ethnocratic spatial narratives that are rooted in the colonial histories. The project develops a feminist and decolonial methodology to unpack these power structures that define the social and material contestations by focusing on a particular city at the margins, Famagusta. This is a context where normalisation of the urban stasis stimulated grassroots urban activism that continue challenge authoritarianism by producing alternative spatial narratives. Their imaginaries of care and disruption derive from the precarious conditions of the city, and they create entanglements that can act across border(s).

The project uses cartographic methods to claim a critical positioning through making visible the colonial processes of territorialization, as well as situated activist practices of disruptive care. It builds on my positioning as an engaged urban activist/spatial practitioner/researcher to ask the question: What are the transformative relations/processes that emerge at the intersection of spatial practice and urban activism in contested spaces such as Famagusta Cyprus? Can they act collaboratively to demand alternative processes for production of space in similar contexts? A diary of spatial activism will be the scaffolding documenting the entanglements of the human and non-human actors and processes including my shifting position on the ground to develop a collaborative response to the question.

Primary supervisor: 
Professor Doina Petrescu

Co-supervisor: 
Professor Karim Hadjri

Date started: 01/10/2017

Publications

(upcoming 2022) Can, Esra. ‘Practice of/with Generosity in the Contested Space of Cyprus’. In Architecture and Generosity, edited by Mhairi McVicar, Charles Drozynski, and Stephen Kite. Routledge.

Research group

Design, Engagement and Practice