Biography

Sıla Karataş (Ankara, 1987) studied architecture and received 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 (METU). She worked as assistant and lecturer in Turkey between 2012 and 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 main research interest is history and theory of housing and settlement. More specifically, she investigates forms of transnational practice and intricate agencies of policymaker, planner, architect, contractor, and labour in postwar housing production from policy and program to design, construction and inhabiting.

In her M.Arch. thesis at METU, she analyzed the postwar workers’ housing discourse on cooperatives as part of the ideological, institutional, social 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. 

Her Ph.D. dissertation at EPFL concerns Marshall Plan's workers’ housing program against communist tendencies and strikes in the participating countries, and comparatively analyzes cooperative models by local labour unions in the participating countries in relation to the transnational activity by the United States and US-led international organizations on postwar development, labour affairs and housing. This research is awarded the Swiss Government Excellence Scholarship for PhD and supported by the Swiss Confederation Federal Commission for Scholarships for Foreign Students (FCS).