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IASTE 2027 – ISTANBUL, TÜRKIYE
The International Association for the Study of Traditional Environments (IASTE) invites scholars, designers, practitioners, and graduate students from around the world to submit abstracts for the Twentieth IASTE Conference, to be held in Istanbul, Türkiye, 23-26 July 2027.

IASTE, Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, and the Architecture and Urbanism Research Academy Istanbul (AURA Istanbul), organized this conference to bring together IASTE’s international community with two of Türkiye’s leading institutions dedicated to architectural education, research, and urban studies. The conference aims to foster interdisciplinary dialogue on the dynamic relationships among tradition, culture, and the built environment while providing participants with opportunities to engage directly with Istanbul’s rich architectural, urban, and cultural heritage.

For more than three decades, IASTE members have advanced interdisciplinary research and dialogue on the relationships among culture, society, and the built environment. By bringing together architects, planners, landscape architects, anthropologists, historians, geographers, archaeologists, preservationists, and scholars from related fields, IASTE encourages critical inquiry into how people create, interpret, transform, sustain, and negotiate traditional environments across diverse cultural contexts.

THEME
Tradition is often understood as a legacy inherited from the past. Yet traditions are never static. They evolve through continuous negotiation as societies respond to shifting cultural values, environmental conditions, political systems, technological innovations, and economic realities. Rather than existing outside change, tradition endures by adapting to it.

The built environment offers one of the clearest expressions of this process. Buildings, streets, neighborhoods, landscapes, and settlements emerge through ongoing negotiations among preservation and transformation, continuity and innovation, local identity and global influence. These negotiations unfold across the physical, cultural, social, ecological, political, and temporal boundaries that shape how people create, inhabit, interpret, and remember places.

Today, these negotiations have grown increasingly complex. Climate change, demographic shifts, urban expansion, digital political demands, emerging technologies, heritage conservation, resource scarcity, tourism, and new forms of mobility reshape traditional environments at unprecedented speed. In response, designers, planners, policymakers, community leaders, and citizens must continually negotiate where tradition ends, where innovation begins, and how the two can coexist. These questions become especially urgent during periods of overlapping crises, when recovery requires more than physical reconstruction. Recovery also depends on restoring social, cultural, economic, and spatial continuity. In such circumstances, traditional environments, local practices, and inherited spatial structures become active resources for adaptation, resilience, and renewal. Understanding how communities reinterpret these assets, rather than simply preserve or replace them, is therefore essential for developing strategies that address immediate challenges while sustaining identity, continuity, and long-term adaptability.

For more than two millennia, Istanbul has occupied a unique position at the crossroads of continents, civilizations, religions, and political systems. This layered history makes the city an ideal setting for examining the evolving relationship between tradition and change. Istanbul’s urban fabric reflects centuries of negotiation, where successive historical layers coexist with contemporary development and where monuments, neighborhoods, waterfronts, markets, and public spaces continually reinterpret inherited traditions. Today, the city faces rapid urban redevelopment, migration, demographic change, and the persistent threat of natural disasters. These challenges demand approaches that view the relationship between tradition and modernity not simply as a matter of architectural or heritage conservation, but as a broader social and urban imperative. The city’s future depends on its ability to foster productive urban collaboration that integrates inherited spatial practices, emerging patterns of living, diverse communities, and new forms of infrastructure without erasing the cultural and spatial continuity that, in part, defines its identity. Rather than resolving differences through replacement or homogenization, Istanbul demonstrates how thresholds, overlaps, and encounters can generate resilience, adaptability, and coexistence. In doing so, it offers an exceptional laboratory for exploring how boundaries shape the built environment and how tradition continues to evolve as a living and dynamic process.

We invite contributions that examine how people, communities, institutions, and governments negotiate traditions across the boundaries that shape the built environment. We welcome theoretical, historical, empirical, comparative, and practice-based research that advances new perspectives on the role of tradition in shaping contemporary place.

CONFERENCE TRACKS
Track 1: Boundaries and Thresholds
Visible and invisible boundaries shape space, identity, and belonging across places of all sizes and scales. Administrative borders, natural landscapes, waterfronts, neighborhoods, districts, and regions influence how traditions emerge, evolve, and persist over time. This track examines the relationship between territory, landscape, and the production of place across diverse geographical and environmental contexts. Topics may address cultural landscapes, urban morphology, regional identities, waterfronts and coastal settlements, rural and urban transitions, border regions, landscape transformation, environmental adaptation, place identity, and spatial continuity and change.

Track 2: Negotiating Cultural Heritage
Communities, institutions, and governments continuously negotiate cultural heritage as historic environments respond to new technologies, tourism, economic pressures, changing regulations, and evolving public values. This track explores how individuals, advocacy groups, and societies preserve, adapt, reconstruct, and reimagine heritage while balancing cultural continuity with contemporary needs. Who makes decisions regarding cultural heritage, and why? Who benefits from these decisions, and how? Papers in this track should lift the veil on the many actors who negotiate between conservation and change. Topics may address historic preservation, adaptive reuse, archaeological landscapes, living heritage in urban recovery, cultural memory, conservation policy, intangible heritage, heritage and sustainability, digital documentation, and community-based conservation.

Track 3: Blurring the Lines Between Theory and Practice

Architects, builders, artisans, politicians, planners, policymakers, communities, and many other stakeholders collaboratively create and steward traditional environments. As new technologies, interdisciplinary approaches, and participatory processes reshape the design, construction, and management of the built environment, professional roles and practices continue to evolve. This track examines these changing relationships and the knowledge systems that inform them. Topics may include design methodologies, traditional building knowledge, craftsmanship, material culture, participatory design, professional practice, Indigenous knowledge systems, construction technologies, education and pedagogy, and innovation in traditional environments.

Open Track: Future Directions, Emerging Perspectives
This open track invites contributions that explore emerging perspectives on traditional environments and the built environment, particularly research that crosses disciplinary boundaries, introduces new theoretical or methodological approaches, or addresses issues not fully encompassed by the other conference tracks and related to the conference. Rather than understanding tradition solely as an inheritance from the past, the track encourages participants to consider how traditions may be reinterpreted, transformed, or newly produced in response to future challenges.

SPECIAL SESSIONS/PANELS
Over the past few years, IASTE conferences have included special sessions and panels related to conference themes, collectively organized or sponsored by specific groups or institutions. Such proposals are welcome again to facilitate outreach to researchers from disciplines not normally engaged with IASTE or to introduce new topics or debates.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
Please refer to our website (iaste.org) for detailed instructions on abstract submissions. A 500-word abstract and a one-page CV are required. For further inquiries, please email coordinator@iaste.org.

Proposals for complete panels of four to five papers are also welcome. Please indicate the track in which the panel fits. Panel submissions must include an overall abstract, as well as abstracts and CVs for all proposed speakers. IASTE may accept the panel as a whole or only accept individual abstracts and place them in appropriate tracks. All papers must be written and presented in English.

Contributors whose abstracts are accepted must preregister for the conference, pay the $450 registration fee (which includes a one-year IASTE Ltd membership), and prepare a full-length paper of 16-25 double-spaced pages. Registered students and spouses may qualify for a reduced registration fee of $250 (which also includes a one-year IASTE Ltd membership).
Please note that the registration fee does not cover expenses for hotel accommodations, travel, or additional excursions; these must be paid directly to the hotel or a designated travel agent. The registration fee covers the conference program, conference abstracts, and access to all conference activities, theme sessions, keynote plenary talks, receptions, and a walking/bus tour of the city.

CONFERENCE SCHEDULE
Deadline for abstract submission: November 15, 2026
Notification of acceptance of abstracts: January 1, 2027
Deadline for revised Abstracts: January 25, 2027
Deadline for early bird registration: February 15, 2027
Deadline for presenters’ registration: March 15, 2027
Deadline for WPS paper submission: June 1, 2027
Deadline for presentation submission: July 15, 2027
Conference activities: July 23-26, 2027
Post-conference tour: July 27-28, 2027

CONFERENCE ORGANIZING COMMITTEE
Mark Gillem, University of Oregon, IASTE President and Conference Director, USA
Nezih Aysel, Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, Local Conference Director, Türkiye
Hesham Issa, University of Oregon, IASTE Secretary, Conference Co-Director, USA
Güldehan Fatma Atay, Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, Local Conference Co- Director, Türkiye
Ikbal Ece Postalci, Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, Local Conference Co-Director, Türkiye  
Feni Kurniati, University of Oregon, Conference Coordinator, USA
Kurtulus Atasever, Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, Local Conference Coordinator, Türkiye
Adnya Sarsmita, IASTE, IASTE Coordinator, USA
Sinan Izgi, AURA-Istanbul, Senior Conference Advisor 
Yilmaz Deger, AURA-Istanbul, Senior Conference Advisor 
Lyndsey Deaton, Clemson University, Conference Advisor 

Scientific Committee
Carles Crosas, Barcelona School of Architecture, Spain
Deniz Incedayi, Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, Türkiye
Giulio Verdini, Westminster University , UK
Hayriye Esbah Tunçay, Istanbul Technical University, Türkiye
Murat Gül, Istanbul Technical University, Türkiye
Neslihan Dostoglu, Kültür University, Türkiye
Rachid Allilouch, Ecole National d’Architecture de Fes , Morocco
Senem Kaymaz, Yildiz Technical University, Türkiye
Teresa Marat Mendes, Lisbon University, Portugal
Ümran Topçu, Yildiz Technical University, Türkiye
Victoria Jimenez, Union for Mediterranean, Spain

Local Organizing Committee
Kurtulus Atasever, Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, Türkiye
Sinan Izgi, AURA Istanbul, Türkiye
Seda Altan, AURA Istanbul, Türkiye
Gökhan Koçyigit, Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, Türkiye
Tigin Töre, Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, Türkiye
Gülce G.Okyay Bayazit, Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, Türkiye
Dilvin Hazal Akkaya, Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, Türkiye

CONFERENCE SESSIONS COMMITTEE
Sebnem Yücel, MEF University, Türkiye
Güldehan Atay, Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, Türkiye
Hesham Issa, University of Oregon, USA

IASTE PAPER AWARDS
The IASTE Best Paper Award recognizes an exceptional scholarly contribution to the study of traditional dwellings and settlements that challenges conventional scholarship and engages the built environment from an interdisciplinary perspective. The IASTE Prize for the Best Paper recognizes the best paper submitted to the conference by a student or a junior scholar (who graduated in the previous year). Winners may receive a modest monetary stipend.

CONFERENCE VENUE
Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, Findikli Campus, is housed in a beautiful historic building directly on the Bosphorus waterfront, offering exceptional views across one of Istanbul’s most iconic settings. Centrally located in the heart of the city, the campus provides a distinctive setting where architectural heritage, the waterfront, and contemporary academic life come together.

CONFERENCE HOTEL
A conference hotel offering a special negotiated rate for participants will be announced soon.

CONFERENCE WALKING TOUR
WALKING TOUR 01
GALATA: NEGOTIATING URBAN LAYERS.
TOPHANE – KARAKÖY – PERSEMBEPAZARI – GALATA
This walking tour explores Istanbul’s layered urban landscape, where Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman, modern, and contemporary interventions coexist. Moving from Tophane through Karaköy and Persembepazari to Galata, the tour reveals how tradition is continually negotiated through preservation, adaptation, and transformation, reflecting the evolving relationship between past and present.

WALKING TOUR 02
HAYDARPASA: NEGOTIATING HERITAGE AND ADAPTIVE REUSE
HAYDARPASA TRAIN STATION – ARCHAEOLOGICAL SITE – HAYDARPASA PORT: Beginning with a boat ride from Karaköy to Kadiköy, this tour explores Haydarpasa as a site where archaeological heritage, transportation infrastructure, and contemporary urban life intersect. The tour highlights the ongoing adaptive reuse of the historic train station as a museum and public building, illustrating how heritage and new uses are negotiated within Istanbul’s changing urban landscape. Project architect Han Tümertekin or a member of his team will provide an expert briefing.

POST CONFERENCE TRIPS
GÖBEKLITEPE
This three-day trip, scheduled for July 27–29, 2027, offers an immersive exploration of the extraordinary archaeological and cultural heritage of the Sanliurfa region. The program includes visits to Göbeklitepe, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and several significant Neolithic excavation sites, including Sayburç, Çakmaktepe, Gürcütepe, Sefertepe, and Karahantepe, with expert briefings by members of the excavation teams. The itinerary also includes the Sanliurfa Archaeology Museum, Haleplibahçe Mosaic Museum, Kizilkoyun Roman Necropolis, and Balikligöl, giving participants a broader understanding of the region’s remarkable archaeological, cultural, and religious heritage.

MAILING ADDRESS AND INQUIRIES
IASTE Ltd
207 East 5th Avenue, #258, Eugene, OR 97401
Phone: (+1) 541-712-7832
Email: coordinator@iaste.org
https://iaste.org