Scholarship and Biography
Muna Güvenç (Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley, 2014) is an architect and an architectural and urban historian whose work lies at the intersection of spatial justice, minority politics, and the built environment in the Middle East and beyond. Her research explores how architecture and urban form can both empower and constrain marginalized communities, particularly in contexts of state repression and political struggle. Trained as an architect in Istanbul before transitioning to academia, Güvenç brings a critical and grounded perspective to the study of cities, drawing from extensive fieldwork, ethnographic methods, and spatial analysis.
She is the author of The City is Ours: Spaces of Political Mobilization and Imaginaries of Nationhood in Turkey (Cornell University Press, 2024), which examines how Kurdish political movements have used urban planning and architecture to foster resilience, dissent, and collective identity in the face of state violence. Her scholarship engages deeply with contemporary social theory, highlighting the entanglements between space-making, power, and political mobilization.
In her current research, Güvenç investigates the spatial politics of centralization in contemporary Turkey, with particular attention to housing and local governance. She explores how the state consolidates authority through the restructuring of municipal institutions, the appointment of regime-loyal trustees (kayyumlar), and the deliberate weakening of local autonomy and professional chambers (meslek odaları).By continuously altering urban legislation to serve its interests, the central government effectively constructs a fourth, invisible layer of authority—one that operates alongside and often supersedes municipalities, ministries, and provincial governorships. Her work reveals how state power is enacted not only through legal mechanisms, but also through the material and symbolic regulation of space. This includes strategic interventions into the politics of construction and demolition—determining what is built, what is erased, and where development unfolds—enabling a broader project of spatial domination that reshapes both the physical and symbolic contours of the city in service of centralized political authority.