Sevin Yildiz
Assistant Professor
Urban Planning and Policy
Contact
Building & Room:
239 CUPPA Hall, MC 348
Address:
412 S. Peoria St., Suite 215
Office Phone:
Email:
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About
Şevin Yıldız is an assistant professor in the Urban Planning and Policy Department at the University of Illinois Chicago. She researches ecological, spatial, and urban design in the context of cities and climate change. She is the author of Neither Land nor Water: Planning through Fringe Ecologies in the Meadowlands (1896-2026), a forthcoming book with the University of Chicago Press in 2026. The book examines how the planning field's understanding of fringe ecologies has evolved in the New Jersey Meadowlands, a sub-region within the New York metropolitan area.
Her publications investigate how ecological design and planning ideas conceptualize and negotiate values, new tools, and norms in metropolitan areas that have expanded into their neighboring ecosystems. She leads an ecological design studio for the Master of City Design program, focusing on climate adaptation, urban environmental planning, and infrastructure retrofitting, and is a member of CECHE, an NIH-funded cross-disciplinary center at UIC.
She has served on the Chicago Department of Planning's River Ecology Task Force since 2020 and is an advisor to the Urban Wildlife Information Network, an interdisciplinary initiative of Lincoln Park Zoo. She is also a member of the Chicago multidisciplinary team of academics and practitioners in UNESCO's Mega Cities Water Alliance, which organized workshops in New York in 2023 and London in 2024.
Research Interests:
- Environmental planning and land use conflicts
- Genealogy of ecological thought in planning theory
- Multi-species entanglements & rewilding
- Climate adaptation planning and geographies of climate regionalisms
- Longitudinal and archival methodologies in planning history
- Ecological design and spatial planning
- Infrastructural repurposing and design
Research Currently in Progress
Multiple Temporalities of Climate Adaptation Planning
Urban Transformation of the Calumet Region, Chicago