Dr. Öğr. Üyesi Emrah Altınok
Emrah Altınok [September 22, 1980. Ağrı, Turkey] is an artist, author, and professor at Istanbul Bilgi University department of architecture. He received his Ph.D. in January 2012 from Yildiz Technical University, for a thesis entitled "The Political Economy of Reorganization of Urban Space and Interventions on Urban Land Tenure, the Case of Istanbul & Mass Housing Administration of Turkey (TOKI) in the Post-2000 Era". He instructs graduate and undergraduate courses in history and political economy of capitalist development, urbanization and urban design. The transformation of state, capital flows, new social movements, migration, urban poverty, housing policies, participatory planning and design, community engagement, history of cities, critical urban theory and epistemology are among his research interests.
Altınok has so far presented papers in various academic events of international institutions such as ISoCaRP, AESOP, ERSA; and contributed as an organizing committee member to some of the events. He has collaborated with architecture and planning schools such as Aalto, Cardiff and ETH Zurich, and participated as an invited lecturer in various international academic events. In 2006, he took part in the team that developed a neighborhood renewal model for Küçükbakkalköy, İstanbul. In 2008, he conducted research (with Prof. Ayşe Nur Ökten) concerning levels of 'place attachment' and 'urban poverty' in the historic Yalı neighborhood of Yenikapı district in Istanbul. In 2013, he carried out the field study for the Istanbul Tourism Master Plan.
In 2015, one of his latest research projects entitled State-led Fragmentation: 'TOKİ' as an Ideological Apparatus for Spatial Reorganization of Social Classes was exhibited in MAXXI, Rome as part of the exhibition İstanbul: Passion, Joy, Fury curated by Hou Hanru. For this exhibition, he showcased the outskirts of overurbanizing Istanbul with a 340 x 250 cm. panoramic photograph accompanied by the outcomes of a field study, mappings and data visualizations. Altınok’s photographs have also been featured in several worldwide magazines & newspapers such as Financial Times, Where Magazine, Wired, Zeit, etc., and on the book covers of many leading publishing houses including Random House, Penguin & De Geus. His work 'Metis' was featured in Luciano Benetton’s collection of Imago Mundi, one of the most extensive collections of the international contemporary art scene in 2016. He has three books of poetry published and has received three poetry awards. In 2010, one of the most distinguished publishing companies of Turkey, Norgunk published his writings, poems and stencils in his third book, “çöt mendime görsektimi vuru?”. He attended MQ Quartier21 Artists-in-Residence Program in Vienna, in the summer of 2013, as the guest of the Austrian Foreign Ministry. During his stay, he wrote a short story A truth in Karlsplatz which later was published in German within the book Aus allen Richtungen: Karlsplatzierungen by Sonderzahl in 2014. Altınok is also a musician. He is the founder of etreh, an improvisational psychedelic rock band, since 2005.