Yaser Abunnasr is an Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning in the Department of Landscape Design and Ecosystem Management (LDEM), Faculty of Agricultural and Food Sciences (FAFS) at the American University of Beirut (AUB). He is Department Head, Associate Dean, and Program Director of the Bachelor of Landscape Architecture. He established the Metropolitan Landscape Research Lab in 2018 as a platform for his research and outreach activities. His research and consulting work is centered on environmental planning focused on climate change adaptation using green infrastructure and nature-based solutions in cities and natural landscapes with special focus on large-scale frameworks and methodologies. He is the author of many journal publications including a co-authored book titled Planning for Climate Change: A Reader in Green infrastructure and Sustainable Design for Resilient Cities (2018). In addition to his academic work, he is also an independent consultant/expert on projects related to the research topic above and landscape strategic plans for natural landscape protection. Dr. Abunnasr received his PhD in Regional Planning and Master’s in Landscape Architecture from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA and his Bachelor of Architecture from the American University of Beirut.
Nadi Abusaada is an architect and a writer. He is currently a Senior Lecturer at ETH Zurich. He was previously the Aga Khan Postdoctoral Fellow in Architecture at MIT. Nadi earned his PhD and MPhil degrees in architecture from the University of Cambridge. He is the co-editor of the forthcoming book “Arab Modern: Architecture and the Project of Independence” (gta Verlag, 2024) and has written extensively on the modern histories of architecture and the architectural profession in the Arab world. His writings have been featured in various academic journals including Architectural Theory Review, Architecture and Culture, and the International Journal for Islamic Architecture, among others. He is also the co-founder of Arab Urbanism, an editorial contributor at The Architectural Review, and a contributing editor at the Jerusalem Quarterly.
Ümit Fırat Açıkgöz is an architectural and urban historian specializing in the late Ottoman and post-Ottoman Middle East and the Balkans, and the global urban history of the interwar period. His interests include urban planning, architecture, historic preservation, and representations of urban space, broadly defined, in visual and written media. Açıkgöz’s current book project explores urban transformations of Istanbul in the post-Ottoman/early republican period (1923-1949) at the intersection of local, national, and global dynamics. Drawing on research in various archives, contemporary publications, and literary pieces, his book project demonstrates the crucial role of local actors and institutions in shaping the trajectory of Istanbul’s urban modernization, from architectural projects and preservation efforts to urban planning and domestication of global theories and practices. Açıkgöz received his BA in History from Boğaziçi University; his MA in Architectural History from Middle East Technical University; and his PhD in Art History from Rice University. In Spring 2022, he was a postdoctoral fellow in Agha Khan Program in Islamic Architecture in Harvard University. Açıkgöz is an Assistant Professor in the American University of Beirut, School of Architecture and Design.
Howayda Al-Harithy is a Professor of Architecture and Urban Design at the School of Architecture and Design and a research director at the Beirut Urban Lab at the American University of Beirut. Her research focuses on urban heritage and contemporary interventions in historic cities.Her early research engaged theoretical models of interpretation, particularly post-structuralist models, as analytic tools of the production of architectural and urban space in medieval cities. Her current research focuses on urban heritage with emphasis on the theoretical debate on heritage construction and consumption related to identity building and post-war reconstruction in the Arab world. It conceptualizes urban recovery in relation to processes of historical editing, urban trauma, and protracted displacement.
She is widely published with over 50 articles, book chapters, and reports in leading journals and refereed books. She is the editor of and contributor to Lessons in Post-War Reconstruction: Case Studies from Lebanon in the Aftermath of the 2006 War (Routledge, 2010) and Urban Recovery: Intersecting Displacement with Reconstruction (Routledge 2021)
Asseel Al-Ragam is an Associate Professor and the Director of the Design Development and Research Lab at Kuwait University’s College of Architecture. Until recently, she held the positions of Vice Dean for Academic Affairs, Research and Graduate Studies and Director of the Graduate Program in Architecture. She is currently on a two-year sabbatical as a Visiting Research Fellow at CERI-Sciences Po, in Paris, France, where her research focuses on material and immaterial circulation of goods, services and knowledge to and from the Gulf. Her published research explores the legacies of historical urban planning processes on Kuwait’s built environment. She is an urban and architectural planning consultant for state institutions and is the co-author of the card game Kuwaitscapes designed to raise awareness on public space use.
María José (Majo) Álvarez Rivadulla is Full Professor of Sociology at the Universidad de los Andes, where she actually created the Sociology Area, 8 years ago, with a minor in Sociology and a MA program she directed since its creation until recently. She studies social inequality using mixed-methods. She is the Author of Squatters and the Politics of Marginality (Springer, 2017), about the political history of the informal city in Montevideo. She has also worked and published on residential segregation, popular neighborhoods and urban interventions, social housing, tolerance to inequality, middle classes, gated communities, and, more recently, on interclass relations in college, after more working class students entered higher education with a condonable loan/scholarship program in Colombia (2015-2019) that dramatically changed the class composition of elite colleges, students’ social mobility experiences and the visible and invisible barriers they face. She is currently writing a book on this experience and also starting to study a local policy to reduce gender inequalities in care work in the city of Bogotá.
Maryame Amarouche is Associate Professor of spatial planning and urban development at the University Jean Moulin Lyon 3. Her research focuses on planning and urban policies in peripheral areas. Using a comparative approach between the North and South and a multidisciplinary approach involving geography, urban planning and political science, she examines the urban fabric from the angle of social and spatial issues, metropolisation, housing production, segregation and access to public services. Maryame holds a PhD in geography and urban planning.
Hiba Bou Akar is an Associate Professor in the Urban Planning program at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at Columbia University. Her research focuses on planning in conflict and post-conflict cities, the question of urban violence, and the role of religious political organizations in the making of cities. She is the founder and director of the Post-Conflict Cities Lab which focuses on developing theoretical, methodological, and empirical approaches to studying and practicing urban planning towards social change in cities in conflict. Bou Akar’s award-winning book, For the War Yet to Come: Planning Beirut’s Frontiers (2018), examined how Beirut’s post-civil war peripheries have been transformed through multiple planning exercises into contested frontiers that are mired in new forms of conflict. She received her PhD in City and Regional Planning from the University of California at Berkeley. She holds a Bachelor of Architecture from the American University of Beirut, and a Master in Urban Studies and Planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Muna Dajani is an action researcher with a background in critical political ecology. Her work aims to understand environmental and water governance through decolonial and critical lenses. She holds a PhD from the Department of Geography and Environment at the London School of Economics (LSE). Her doctoral research focused on examining community struggles for rights to water and land resources in settler colonial contexts in Palestine and the occupied Syrian Golan Heights, with special attention to how farming practices acquire political subjectivity. Dajani is currently a Fellow in Environment at the Geography and Environment Department at LSE. Previously, she held the position of Senior Research Associate at the Lancaster Environment Centre, Lancaster University where she worked on enhancing joint learning on the project entitled, “Transformations to Groundwater Sustainability”, which explored promising grassroots initiatives of holistic groundwater governance, shedding light on traditional and intergenerational skills and knowledge(s). Her work at the University of East Anglia’s Water Security Research Centre (2016-2021) focused on their Upper Jordan and Yarmouk Hydropolitical Baseline reports, both exploring highly contested and politicised transboundary river basins. Her work helped unpack the complexities of water governance and development in contexts of climate uncertainty and rising political insecurity.
Ayham Dalal is an architect and urban planner whose work seeks to amplify the voices of displaced communities, and document and visualize their experiences and agency through space. He is the author of the book From Shelters to Dwellings: The Zaatari Refugee Camp (Transcript Verlag 2022), and the co-editor of the book Tempohomes (TU Berlin University Press 2022). He has co-directed an award-winning film and co-curated two exhibitions on refugee camps in Germany and the Levant. He was a research fellow at the Refugee Studies Center at the University of Oxford (2018), at the Collaborative Research Center “Re-Figurations of Space” in TU Berlin (2018-2021), and a postdoctoral fellow at the CNRS-MIGRINTER at University of Poitiers, and Ifpo in Amman (2021 -2022). Currently, he serves as a Lecturer in the Department of Architecture and Urban Design at the German University in Cairo (GUC), exploring the impact of forced displacement on Egyptian cities.
Jens-Peter Hanssen is the director of the Orient-Institut Beirut (OIB) and Professor of Arab Civilization, Middle Eastern, and Mediterranean History at the University of Toronto. He has held a SSHRC Insight Grant on “German-Jewish Echoes in 20th-century Arab Thought (2014-19);” and is author of Fin de Siècle Beirut (Oxford, 2005); co-editor (with Max Weiss) of Arabic Thought beyond the Liberal Age and Arabic Thought against the Authoritarian Age (CUP, 2016 & 2018), and co-author (with H. Safieddine) of A Clarion for Syria: A Patriot’s Call Against the Civil War of 1860 (Berkeley, 2019).
Mona Harb is a Professor of Urban Studies and Politics at the American University of Beirut where she is also Co-founder and Research Lead at the Beirut Urban Lab. Her research investigates governance and territoriality in contexts of contested sovereignty; urban activism and oppositional politics and how people make collective life in fragmented cities. She is the author of Le Hezbollah à Beirut: de la banlieue à la ville, co-author of Leisurely Islam: Negotiating Geography and Morality in Shi’i South Beirut (with Lara Deeb), co-editor of Local Governments and Public Goods: Assessing Decentralization in the Arab World (with Sami Atallah), and co-editor of Refugees as City-Makers (with Mona Fawaz et al.). She serves on the editorial boards of MELG, IJMES, EPC, and CSSAME.
Sandi Hilal is an architect, artist, and educator who has developed a research and project-based artistic practice that is both theoretically ambitious and practically engaged in the struggle for justice and equality. Together with Alessandro Petti, she founded Campus in Camps (www.campusincamps.ps), an experimental educational program in the Dheisheh refugee camp in Bethlehem. Currently, she holds the position of Lise Meitner Visiting Professor at Lund University Department of Architecture and the Built Environment. Additionally, she serves as the Co-Director of DAAR, Decolonizing Architecture Art Research (www.decolonizing.ps), an architectural and art collective co-founded by her in 2007 with Alessandro Petti and Eyal Weizman in Beit Sahour, Palestine. Her work with DAAR earned her the prestigious Golden Lion for Best Participation at the 18th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia in 2023.
Momen El-Husseiny is an Assistant Professor of Architecture and Urban Design at the American University in Cairo. He holds a PhD in Architecture from the University of California, Berkeley with a designated emphasis in Global Metropolitan Studies. He is an urbanist, ethnographer and registered architect in Egypt. As a practitioner, he worked on the masterplan of the American University in Cairo’s campus and the Performance and Visual Arts building. As a researcher, his work explores the historical genealogy of compounds of modernity, otherness, and politics of space until the present moment of sub/urban condition with their linkages to revamping the inner urban core and remaking Cairo’s extended urbanization.
Sarah El-Kazaz is Associate Professor in the politics department at SOAS, University of London and author of Politics in the Crevices: Urban Design and the Making of Property Markets in Cairo and Istanbul (Duke UP, 2023). Her research interests include: critical political economy, urbanism, infrastructure and digital politics, and her new book project investigates the politics of digital infrastructures by following “Cloud” technologies across the Global South. Her work appears in peer-reviewed journals including: Comparative Studies in Society and History, and City and Society. She previously taught at Oberlin College, and completed a PhD at Princeton University.
Gökçe Günel is Associate Professor in Anthropology at Rice University. Her latest book Spaceship in the Desert: Energy, Climate Change and Urban Design in Abu Dhabi (Duke University Press, 2019) focuses on the construction of renewable energy and clean technology infrastructures in the United Arab Emirates, more specifically concentrating on the Masdar City project. Currently, she is at work on a second book project provisionally titled Energy Accumulation. Dr. Günel co-authored A Manifesto for Patchwork Ethnography (2020), and co-leads Patchwork Ethnography.
Nour Joudah is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Asian American Studies at UCLA and a former President’s and Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Geography at UC-Berkeley (2022-23). Dr. Joudah completed her PhD in Geography at UCLA (2022), and wrote her dissertation Mapping Decolonized Futures: Indigenous Visions for Hawaii and Palestine on the efforts by Palestinian and native Hawaiian communities to imagine and work toward liberated futures while centering indigenous duration as a non-linear temporality. Her work examines mapping practices and indigenous survival and futures in settler states, highlighting how indigenous countermapping is a both cartographic and decolonial praxis. She also has a MA in Arab Studies from Georgetown University, and wrote her MA thesis on the role and perception of exile politics within the Palestinian liberation struggle, in particular among politically active Palestinian youth living in the United States and occupied Palestine.
Ozan Karaman is a CNRS researcher in urban geography, based in LATTS (Research Centre on Technologies, Territories and Societies) in France. He was previously a lecturer in human geography at the University of Glasgow, and a researcher in urban sociology at the Singapore-ETH Centre. His work has been in urban political economy, urban theory, and comparative urbanism, with a particular focus on Istanbul. He’s been the PI of an EU funded research project on uneven globalization of real estate markets, exploitation of urban land rent, and the ways in which these are contested at different scales.
Zhigang Li is a professor of urban studies and planning at the School of Urban Design, Wuhan University, China. He also serves as the dean of this school. Before 2015, Prof Li worked at the School of Geography and Planning, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China. As an urban scholar, geographer and planner, Professor Li works on the urban transformation of China, with a focus on such topics as neighbourhoods, migration, health and related planning issues. His recent work concentrates on the effects of human settlements and related planning as well as governance issues. Professor Li is serving as the editor of some top journals such as International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Urban Studies, etc. He has been the principal investigator of 5 research project funded by China’s NFC, including one Excellent Youth Foundation. Prof Li has been awarded China’s ‘National Award for Young Geographers’ and ‘National Award for Young Planners.’
Rima Majed is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the Sociology, Anthropology and Media Studies Department at the American University of Beirut (AUB). Her work focuses on the fields of social movements, uprisings, sectarianism, conflict and violence, with a focus on the Middle East. She was a visiting fellow at Princeton University in 2018/19, and a research fellow at the Middle East Initiative at Harvard University in 2022/23. Her work has appeared in several journals, books and media platforms such as American Political Science Review, Social Forces, British Journal of Sociology, Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of the Middle East, Middle East Law and Governance Journal, Routledge Handbook on the Politics of the Middle East, Global Dialogue, Idafat: The Arab Journal of Sociology, OpenDemocracy, Middle East Eye, CNN and Al Jazeera English. She is also the co-editor of The Lebanon Uprising of 2019: Voices from the Revolution (I.B. Tauris, 2022), and the Principal Investigator on the “Critical Approaches to Development Studies in the Middle East and North Africa” project at the American University of Beirut (Lebanon).
Eduardo Marques is professor at the Department of Political Science at the University of São Paulo (USP) and director and researcher at the Center for Metropolitan Studies. He holds a degree in civil/hydraulic engineering, specialization in public health, a master’s degree in urban and regional planning, PhD in social sciences, post-doctorate at Cebrap, and periods of study at Sciences Po Paris , University College London, and the University of Berkeley. Presently, he is an editor of the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research (IJURR) and a member of the editorial board of the Urban Affairs Review, as well as Brazilian journals. He is a Fapesp principal investigation and a CNPq-Level 1B Scholar. Has published extensively about urban politics, policies and inequalities, including The Politics of Incremental Progressivism Governments, Governances and Urban Policy Changes in São Paulo.
Azadeh Mashayekhi is a Lecturer at the Bartlett Development Planning Unit (DPU) where she convenes the DPU Research Cluster on Urban Transformations. She originally trained as an architect in Iran, and later as an urban planner in the Netherlands at the Technical University of Delft (TUDelft). Her doctoral research focused on the politics of urban development in Tehran and explored the political and institutional dynamics of city-making in Iran during the 20th century. Her ongoing research investigates the political economy of urban change and the role of the state in urban development in the context of Middle Eastern cities. Recently she received the Urban Studies Foundation seminar series award to develop a research project on the role of religious actors in shaping urban planning in Middle Eastern and Latin American cities. She serves on the editorial board of the journal Planning, Practice and Research.
Walter J. Nicholls is Professor of Urban Planning and Public Policy at the University of California, Irvine. He is also Chair of the same department. His research examines how cities incubate the activism of marginalized groups. He has written extensively on immigrant rights activism and local immigration policies in the United States and Europe. His first book, The DREAMers: How the Undocumented Youth Movement Transformed the Immigrant Rights Debate, examined the growth and political power of the undocumented immigrant youth movement. His second book, Cities and Social Movements: Immigrant Rights Activism in the United States, France, and the Netherlands, 1970-2015, analyzed immigrant worker movements in Europe and the United States. His most recent book, The Immigrant Rights Movement: The Battle over National Citizenship, examined the how local grassroots immigrant rights activism scaled up into a coherent national-level social movement.
Kareem Rabie is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Illinois, Chicago. His work focuses on privatization, urban development, and the state-building project in the West Bank and he is the author of Palestine is Throwing a Party and the Whole World is Invited, published by Duke University Press in 2021. Previously he was Assistant Professor of Anthropology at American University in Washington, DC; visiting fellow at CUNY’s Center for Place, Culture, and Politics and Committee on Globalization and Social Change; Harper-Schmidt Fellow at the University of Chicago; and Marie Curie Fellow/Senior Researcher at the University of Oxford Centre on Migration, Policy, and Society (COMPAS). His current research focuses on the new economic and human geographies between Palestine and China.
Salim Rouhana is a Program Leader for Sustainable Development Sectors covering MENA Mashreq Countries at the World Bank Group. Currently Based in Beirut, Salim coordinates Water, Agriculture, Urban and Resilience, Environment and Social Development sectors. Salim is also the Mashreq focal point on Climate Change and is working on the broader whole-economy Green-Recovery efforts. Prior at the World Bank, Salim worked as a Senior Urban Governance and Resilience and Task Team Leader covering Africa, East-Asia, and Middle-East and North Africa Regions, focusing on areas related to Decentralization and Urban/Local Governance, City Competitiveness, Territorial and Spatial Development, Urban Resilience and Disaster Risk Management and Slum Upgrading. Prior to joining the World Bank Group, Salim worked for numerous private sector consulting firms as an Urban Planner and Architect. Salim Holds a BA in Architecture, and Master Degrees in Architecture, Political Science focused on International Affairs and Diplomacy, Urban Planning and Development, and an Executive Master in Business Administration.
Omar Jabary Salamanca is a research fellow and co-director of the Observatory of the Arab and Muslim Worlds at the Université libre de Bruxelles. His research and teaching focus on development, urban studies, political ecology and settler colonial studies. He is also interested in global histories and archival practices of anti-colonial solidarity movements. Omar is currently completing a book on the political lives of infrastructures in Palestine to be published by Verso Books. He serves on the editorial board of Arab Urbanism and Jadaliyya Cities and is a leading steering committee member of the International Critical Geography Group. He is also a part of the arts based research collective The Kitchen.
Maha Samman is author of Trans-Colonial Urban Space in Palestine: Politics and Development (Routledge 2013). She is Associate Professor at the Architecture Department and Editor-in-Chief of Al-Quds Journal for Academic Research- Humanities and Social Science, published by the Deanship of Research at Al-Quds University (AQU). Dr. Samman holds a BSc in Architecture (Birzeit University), MSc in Urban Planning (TU Delft, the Netherlands), and a PhD in Political Geography/ Urban Politics (University of Exeter, UK). She also lectures in the MA program of Jerusalem Studies at AQU. She won the Palestine Islamic Bank Research Award of distinctive researcher in Palestine 2019, and American University distinctive researcher in Palestine, 2022. She received the Arab Council for the Social Sciences (ACSS) Research Grant (2018), and PARC research fellowship of 2018. She has several published articles in pronounced journals on architecture, urban and political issues, cultural heritage and especially about the city of Jerusalem.
Seteney Shami is founding Director-General of the Arab Council for the Social Sciences (ACSS) since 2012. She is an anthropologist from Jordan and obtained her BA from the American University of Beirut and her MA and PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. She has conducted fieldwork in Jordan, Egypt, Turkey, and the North Caucasus. After teaching at Yarmouk University, Jordan, she moved in 1996 to the Population Council in Cairo. In 1999, she joined the SSRC in New York as program director for the programs on the Middle East and North Africa and Eurasia. She also developed the InterAsia Partnership program hosted by the SSRC until 2021 and currently hosted by the ACSS. Her latest book is Seeing the World: How US Universities make knowledge in a Global Era (co-authored with Mitchell Stephens and Cynthia Miller-Idriss) Princeton University Press 2018.
Zeinab Shuker is a fellow at Century International and an assistant professor of sociology at Sam Houston State University in Texas. Her work explores the theoretical and policy implications of the impact of oil dependency on the Middle East and North Africa region’s economic, political, social, and environmental development, emphasizing Iraq’s past and present. She examines the interplay of oil dependency, state capacity, conflict induced by climate change, and the region’s destabilization.
Omar Sirri is a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Institute of Islamic Studies at the University of Toronto, and a Research Associate in the Department of Politics and International Studies at SOAS University of London. He holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of Toronto. His current book project is an ethnography of security checkpoints in contemporary Baghdad.
Rana Sukarieh is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Media Studies at the American University of Beirut. Her research focuses on solidarity relations at multiscalar and multidimensional levels. She is currently working on two projects. Her book project, tentatively titled Theorizing Sustained Transnational Political Solidarity explores the interplay between endogenous and exogenous dynamics that shape the trajectory of building sustained solidarity with the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement in Toronto. Her new research project, tentatively titled Solidarity Economy Initiatives and Social Imaginaries at Times of Severe Crisis: An Arab Regional Perspective is a comparative research project that analyzes the various facets of solidarity economy initiatives in Lebanon and Tunisia during times of ongoing crisis. She published in the Journal of Social Movement Studies, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, The Conversation, among others.
Tuna Taşan-Kok currently holds the Chair of Urban Governance and Planning and serves as the Research Group Leader of the Urban Planning Group within the Department of Geography, Planning, and International Development Studies at the University of Amsterdam. Her extensive expertise in urban planning, geography, and governance studies is widely acknowledged, as reflected in her substantial publication record. Throughout her career, Prof. Dr. Taşan-Kok has held prestigious positions within international organizations, fostering valuable connections within global research networks. Her research primarily delves into the ever-evolving realm of urban governance, with a particular focus on the dynamics of property-led urban planning. Her objective is to explore innovative approaches to policy-making, urban planning, and urban development from a critical standpoint. In addition to her academic roles, Prof. Dr. Taşan-Kok holds an honorary professorship at UCL Bartlett School of Planning. She is also the visionary founder and chair of UGoveRN (Urban Governance Research Network) and serves as the Chair of the IJURR Foundation. Prof. Dr. Taşan-Kok actively contributes to the editorial boards of several esteemed academic journals, further cementing her impact on the field.
Rami Zurayk, a professor at the American University of Beirut (AUB), holds positions in the Faculty of Agricultural and Food Sciences and the Maroun Semaan Faculty of Engineering and Architecture, specifically in the Department of Landscape Design and Ecosystem Management. He serves as the Interim Director of the Palestine Land Studies Center since 2022. He was a member of the steering committee of the high-level panel of experts on food security and nutrition (HLPE) of the Committee of World Food Security (CFS) from 2015-19 and a commissioner on the EAT-Lancet commission on sustainable diets from sustainable food systems. Additionally, he served as a commissioner on the EAT-Lancet Commission on Sustainable Diets from Sustainable Food Systems. Zurayk co-founded the Arab Food Sovereignty Network and advises SEAL (Social and Economic Action for Lebanon). His research focuses on the political ecology of Arab food security and its ties to the agrarian question. Notable works include Crisis and Conflict in Agriculture (2018), The Agrarian Roots of the Arab Uprisings (2014), and Control Food, Control People (2013). Zurayk earned his BSc and MSc from AUB and his DPhil from Oxford University.