Onur Tümtürk

Onur Tümtürk is an urban scientist and an Assistant Professor of Urban Design and Morphology at Bilkent University. His research examines the formation and transformation of cities, and the ways in which urban form conditions movement, perception and everyday life in the built environment. Methodologically, his work draws on morphometrics, spatial analytics, computer vision and machine learning, moving beyond the description of existing conditions towards explanatory and design-oriented accounts of how urban form performs. As a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellow (2025–2026) he carried out research at the MIT Senseable City Lab on the morphometric exploration of UNESCO World Heritage Cities, addressing what renders them outstanding and universal in morphological terms. This line of inquiry continues at Bilkent LAUD through a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Fellowship (2026–2028), which examines public open space accessibility and pedestrians' perception of safety through computer vision, generative AI and machine learning. His work has been published in leading journals, including Cities, Urban Studies, Environment and Planning B, Urban Design International and Urban Morphology.

He studied urban planning and urban design at Middle East Technical University (METU), where his master's thesis addressed urban complexity, emergence and incremental design through responsive condition-making. He completed his doctorate at the University of Melbourne with a dissertation on urban form evolution through data-driven methods, developing a quantitative framework to test the capacity of morphometrics to explain change and persistence in cities as they transform over decades and centuries. The research was recognised with the Melbourne Centre for Data Science Doctoral Academy Fellowship (2022), the Bharat Dave Prize for Novel Approaches in Design Research (2023) and the Dean's Publication Prize for Research Excellence (2023). At the Melbourne School of Design he taught and coordinated Master of Urban Design and Master of Architecture studios, together with several courses in urban design and morphological mapping. At Bilkent LAUD, alongside his research, he teaches urban design studios and two courses central to his aim of developing an evidence-based understanding of urban design practice: Measuring Urban Form and Introduction to Urban Design.