Ela Alanyalı Aral is an Associate Professor of Architecture at Middle East Technical University, Ankara. After receiving her Ms.Science degree in Architecture on the Visual Structuring of Ankara, she studied the Potentialities of Leftover Spaces for the Public Realm in her Ph.D. (METU) and Creative Mapping in Architecture in her post-doc studies (TUDelft). Ela Alanyalı Aral has several printed articles in international journals such as Landscape Research and METU Journal of Faculty of Architecture. She is the editor of the book ‘Mapping Syrian Migration –Migrant Spaces in Ankara’ (2018, Ankara: METU Faculty of Architecture Press). She has continued her research on creative mapping techniques, displacement in the urban context, and possible contributions of leftover spaces to the city and the Ankara tumuli. Özlem Erdogdu Erkarslan obtained her undergraduate, master's, and doctoral degrees from the Department of Architecture at Dokuz Eylül University. She started her research on gender and space issues related to her previous research areas in the early 2000s. In 2002, she was awarded the Milka Bliznakov Joint Fellowship Award for her article that investigated the role of Turkish women architects in the cultural development of modernity during the early Republic period. Erkarslan played an active role in the preparation of the project titled ""2017: Cities in transition: locality, identity, and experience of place: issues for migrant and minority ethnic groups in rapidly emerging urban developments and typologies together."" This project formed the first step of the book and was funded by the Newton Fund in 2017, and she remained actively involved until its realization. Since 2021, she has also been publishing on United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and teaching at the Faculty of Architecture and Design of Istanbul Aydin University, in addition to numerous book chapters and articles on gender and space.
""This set of essays demonstrates the socio-spatial and urban aspects of Turkey's unfortunately rich ""displacement narratives"" through cases mainly on residential neighborhoods and households. The originality of the book is to present the recent forced displacement of Syrians and their ""transient"" habitats in Turkey within a wider historical panorama of resettlements from the foundation of the nation-state and forced relocations in the 1920s to squatters and their transformations, trans-national immigrants to Western Europe after 1950s and forced migrations caused by internal conflicts in 1990s."" - Namık Erkal, TED University, Turkey ""This book is a potent multidisciplinary exploration of settlement and displacement which does not only involve the geographical/physical relocation of people but also translocalization of cultural practices and hybridization of key references of belonging. Each of the individual contributions, based on meticulous research, attempts to challenge readers to confront different facades of the phenomenon in the case of Turkey which is a country witnessing various forms of displacement since its establishment in 1923. In doing so, the book turns into an invitation to consider settlement and displacement as a double-sided phenomenon that simultaneously involves both exclusion and counter-political strategies to develop resilience against this direct outcome of being displaced."" - Besim Can Zırh, Middle East Technical University, Turkey