Biography

Sıla Karataş (1987, Ankara) is an architect and awarded Master’s degree with the thesis “Building Marshall Plan in Turkey: The Formation of Workers’ Housing Question, 1946-1962” at the Middle East Technical University. In her thesis, she analyzed the formation of postwar workers’ housing discourse concerning the policy, planning and architecture of workers’ housing cooperatives within the framework of the ideological and spatial programming of the Marshall Plan and Americanization in Turkey. This research received Honourable Mention in 'Young Social Scientists Awards' of the Turkish Social Sciences Association. 

She worked as assistant and lecturer in Turkey between 2012-2019; took part in architectural and urban design studios as tutor and reviewer, prepared and gave Case Studies in Social Housing and Community Planning among other courses in undergraduate level. 

Her research interest is mainly history and theory of housing and settlement, and in detail, postwar architecture and urbanism of housing. She conducts research on postwar housing investigating forms of transnational activity by the Marshall Plan and agencies of policymaker, planner, architect and labour community in housing production.

Since September 2019, she is a PhD student and doctoral assistant at EPFL. Her PhD research concerns Marshall Plan's workers’ housing program against communist tendencies in the participating countries, and is a comparative analysis of local cooperative models in the Mediterranean countries (France, Italy, Greece, Turkey) in relation to the transnational activity by the United States and multilateral organizations on postwar development, labour affairs and housing. This research is awarded a Swiss Government Excellence Scholarship for PhD and supported by the Swiss Confederation Federal Commission for Scholarships for Foreign Scholars and Artists (FCS).

Current work

The Golden Age of Capitalism in Northern Mediterranean: Marshall Plan’s labour and postwar workers’ housing programs