When Repair Isn’t Enough: Architecture and the Right to Heal | Architecture Symposium

Free and open to the public

Akcan will be joined in conversation by Christine Philliou, professor of history and chair of the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures; Deniz Göktürk, professor of German; Diana Martinez, assistant professor of architecture; and Shiben Banerji, associate professor of history of art. William W. Wurster Dean of the College of Environmental Design Renee Y. Chow will deliver opening remarks.

In Architecture and the Right to Heal, Esra Akcan calls for architecture to take an active role in healing communities affected by socioeconomic, political, and environmental disasters. Akcan frames these processes by discussing buildings and spaces in relation to climate change mitigation and transitional justice. Focusing on lands held by the former Ottoman Empire, Akcan highlights the ongoing struggle to heal after internal social, state, and business-led violence ranging from forced disappearance to mass extinction. Putting forth the concept of resettler nationalism as a source of displacement and partition, she argues that while architecture and urban planning have been weaponized to segregate and subjugate minorities throughout history, they could instead confront systemic violence and make accountability and reparations possible. For Akcan, healing constitutes a matter of rights as well as a holistic notion of justice that addresses the intersections of social, global, and environmental issues and one can be achieved through architecture. By locating spaces of political and ecological harm, Akcan advocates for healing on individual, communal, and planetary levels.

Esra Akcan is a professor and the director of graduate studies in the Department of Architecture and board member at the Institute for Comparative Modernities at Cornell University. She completed her architecture degree at the Middle East Technical University in Turkey, and her PhD and postdoctoral degrees at Columbia University. Akcan is currently a senior fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center and has previously received awards and fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard University, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the American Academy in Berlin, and the Getty Research Institute, among others. Her previous publications include Architecture in Translation (Duke, 2012) and Art and Architecture of Migration and Discrimination (edited with Iftikhar Dadi, Routledge, 2023).

Christine Philliou is professor of history and chair of the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures at UC Berkeley. Philliou specializes in the connected histories of the Balkans and Middle East since the 17th century, focusing particularly on the emergence of the Greek and Turkish nation-states out of the Ottoman Empire in the 19th and 20th centuries. She is the author of Biography of an Empire (University of California Press, 2011) and Turkey (University of California Press, 2021) and is currently developing a collaborative digital/public humanities project to develop granular reconstruction and analysis of the Greek Orthodox communities in the larger context of late Ottoman Istanbul/Constantinople (1821–1923).

Deniz Göktürk is professor of German and a faculty affiliate in the Department of Film and Media, the Berkeley Center for New Media, Digital Humanities, the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, the Center for Race and Gender, the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, and the Program in Critical Theory at UC Berkeley. Göktürk earned her Dr.phil. at Freie Universität in 1995, with a dissertation on literary and cinematic imaginations of America in early 20th-century German culture. Her publications include Orienting Istanbul (edited with Levent Soysal and Ipek Tureli, Routledge, 2010), Komik der Intergration (Aisthesis, 2019), and The German Cinema Book (Bloomsbury, 2020). 

Diana Martinez is assistant professor of architecture at UC Berkeley. She earned her BA in architecture from UC Berkeley and a MArch and a PhD from Columbia University. Her book Concrete Colonialism (Duke, 2025) exposes the immense impact of a single (hybrid) material on the United States colonial venture, linking the history of U.S. empire to political, social, economic, and environmental transformations that simultaneously took place in the colony and the metropole. She is currently working on a second book examining plans for U.S. and Philippine cities to re-read large-scale urban renewal projects of the 1950s and 1960s as  the direct legacy of U.S. colonial practice.

Shiben Banerji is associate professor of history of Art at UC Berkeley. His research and teaching bring histories of architectural, landscape, and urban design across colonized peripheries and imperial centers into conversation with histories and theories of rhetoric in the early modern and modern periods. His publications include Lineages of the Global City (University of Texas Press, 2025) and In the Shadows of Democracy (edited with Rubén Casas, Intermezzo, 2025). His next book is a conceptual history of arguments in the United States from the 1930s through the 1960s on the need to transform the social from a realm of technocratic oversight into a site of active political engagement.

Renee Y. Chow is William W. Wurster Dean of the College of Environmental Design and professor of architecture and urban design at UC Berkeley. Chow was named an ACSA Distinguished Professor in 2021. Between 2005 and 2010, she held the Eva Li Chair in Design Ethics. She has been honored by Architecture Magazine as one of the “Ten Top Architectural Educators” and by the AIA California Council with a Research and Technology Honor Award. In her publications, Suburban Space (University of California Press, 2002) and Changing Chinese Cities (University of Hawai’i Press, 2015), Chow argues that the urban challenges of the 21st century require solutions that are locally rooted.

This symposium is co-sponsored by the Departments of Architecture, German, History of Art, and Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures. It has been made possible in part by a Townsend Center Conference & Lecture Grant Award.

If you require accommodations to fully participate, please contact Diana Martinez at least 10 days prior to the event.