Anna Zadrożna is a socio-cultural anthropologist who received her PhD from the University of Oslo in 2021. A graduate of the University of Warsaw and the Warsaw University of Life Sciences, she has a background in ethnology (BA) and environmental protection (BA and MSc degree). Her doctoral research was based on extensive fieldwork carried out in Turkey and North Macedonia. Her work developed the notion of familiarity that directs attention to the importance of the encounters between people and the environments they inhabit, with their social and political history, geomorphology, climate, affective qualities, and non-human inhabitants. Her research and teaching interests include environmental humanities, migration, memory and “identity,” political anthropology, spirituality, and health.

Previously, she was an affiliate visiting researcher at the University of Toronto, University College London, and the University of Ss. Cyril and Methodius in Skopje. She held a Tübitak-Bideb fellowship at Yeditepe University in Istanbul and worked at the University of Graz. Her writings have been published in book chapters and articles in Nationalities Papers and the Anthropological Journal of European Cultures. Alongside her academic career, Anna has worked and volunteered in NGOs in Macedonia and Poland and has actively participated in a civil society organization in Turkey.

Project: “Green Spaces for Cities Survival: Use and Perception of Green Spaces in Istanbul and Strategies for their Sustainable Governance”

The new vision for Istanbul is to make the city “green.” In this respect, strategic plans for municipalities put increasing the number of green spaces (henceforth GS) and trees among their prioritized actions, and sustainable governance of GS is presented as crucial for mitigation of and adaptation to climate change. Nevertheless, it is not clear how decisions regarding GS governance are being made, whether and how citizens are involved in this process, and how crucial concepts such as sustainable governance and GS are actually understood. As the effects of climate change unfold, Istanbul is experiencing heat waves, water shortages, and air pollution, and the forests surrounding the city are shrinking; but “green” goals are often compromised for the sake of developmental policy preference.

This project aims to intervene in these problems. It asserts a bottom-up approach to the challenges of sustainable governance of GS by examining GS as socio-natures; by bringing together the voices of citizens with those of decision-makers, NGOs, and experts; and by offering a socio-ecological assessment of selected GS. Knowledge produced throughout this research will generate practical guidelines for the governance of Istanbul’s green spaces and will contribute to the field of climate change within the social sciences.