Evren Uzer is an NYC-based educator, urban planner, and community practitioner who focuses on civic engagement in planning and design. She is an associate professor of strategic design and urban practice at Parsons School of Design. Her research deals with community engagement in collaborative processes, critical heritage and resistance studies, and feminist spatial practices. She regularly collaborates with NYC community organizations and public agencies on education, co-design, and community engagement projects. Evren is the principal investigator for the Community Engagement 101 curricular research project and, with with Cynthia Lawson-Jaramillo and Michele Kahane, teaches Foundations: Teaching and Learning Frameworks for Equitable Community Engagement, a course aimed at faculty.

Evren has a PhD and a BSc in Urban and Regional Planning and an MSc in Urban Design from Istanbul Technical University. Her PhD thesis (2010) is on cultural heritage at risk. Evren joined Parsons in 2015 from the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, where she was a postdoctoral research fellow in the School of Design and Crafts. From 2013 to 2015, she worked on a project dealing with heritage activism; from 2016 to 2021, she worked on Reconciliatory Heritage: Reconstructing Heritage in a Time of Violent Fragmentations, a project funded by Vetenskapsradet, the Swedish Research Council. Evren has taught at Pratt Institute in NYC, in the Faculty of Architecture at Istanbul Technical University, at Auckland University of Technology, and at the Bergen School of Architecture. 

Evren’s practice is divided between community engagement, planning, and design work at Collective for Community, Culture and Environment (CCCE) and her artistic practice at roomservices. Through these two initiatives she works on advocacy planning, artistic research, co-design, and non-academic and nonconventional forms of publishing. CCCE is an NYC-based interdisciplinary collective of women and women-identified individuals, working on projects that involve low-and moderate-income residents and communities in shaping decisions about their environment and everyday lives by promoting economic resilience, cultural diversity, public health, social justice, and environmental sustainability. Roomservices is an artistic research collaboration that works on practice-based and experimental design projects dealing with issues such as DIY urbanism, artistic research, and collaborative practices.