Ece Beyza Özdemir Wins an Award at the GYODER Competition

Organized by GYODER Genç and the GYODER Design Committee, with ENVOY as main sponsor and Kuzu Grup as special category sponsor, the "Designs That Touch the City" student competition invited proposals that reconnect people, nature and the urban environment. Submissions closed on 30 June 2024, and the awards were presented on 6 November 2024 at the 19th GYODER Real Estate Summit, held at Rixos Tersane İstanbul.

Ece Beyza Özdemir was awarded for her second-year spring studio project, "Reuniting Nature and the City," developed for Famagusta in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus.

Since the beginning of human life on Earth, there has been a constant interaction with nature. Over time this interaction intensified to the point where human activity began destroying nature, creating a duality between the urban and the natural. This duality stems from the fragmentation of natural habitats caused by human activity in the urban environment: rapid urban development expands land use, compressing lakes, mountains, forests and the sea, and fragmenting the natural environment.

This fragmentation is clearly observed in the development of Famagusta, one of the important port cities of Northern Cyprus. The project works to bring these contradictions back together in a way that lets them complete one another. Through nature-based design solutions, it aims to dissolve the duality between the urban and the natural, and to raise the quality of life of all living beings through hybrid places that carry the traces of both the city and nature.