Nour Abuzaid is an architect, researcher, and computational designer. She is a Senior Researcher at Forensic Architecture, where she leads the web development team, conducts spatial investigations, and develops computational research methods. As a MENA liaison, Nour teaches Forensic Architecture’s investigative methodologies to regional collaborators. She is committed to creating publicly accessible, web-based research tools aimed at supporting grassroots activism, particularly for non-expert actors on the ground in Palestine. Since October 2023, Nour has led and contributed to multiple investigations into Gaza, including Cartography of Genocide—a comprehensive cartographic analysis published as both a web platform and an in-depth report. The investigation reveals patterns of Israeli violence that indicate a systematic and organized campaign to destroy life, the conditions necessary for life, and life-sustaining infrastructure.
Iconoclasistas: Founded in 2006 by Julia Risler and Pablo Ares, Iconoclasistas merges graphic art, collaborative research, and participatory methodologies. Their work focuses on critical cartography and collective mapping to explore social, territorial, and political issues. Through workshops across Latin America and Europe, they promote knowledge exchange and critical analysis of power structures. Their open-access materials, including templates and methodological guides, allow communities to adapt their tools to different contexts. By combining theory with creative practice, Iconoclasistas transforms research into a tool for collective reflection, resistance, and social transformation.
Nishat Awan’s research focuses on the intersection of geopolitics and space, including questions related to diasporas, migration, and border regimes. She is interested in modes of spatial representation, particularly in relation to the digital and the limits of witnessing as a form of ethical engagement with distant places. Her book Diasporic Agencies (Routledge, 2016) addressed the subject of how architecture and urbanism can respond to the consequences of increasing migration. She has also addressed alternative modes of architectural production in the co-authored book Spatial Agency (Routledge, 2011) and the co-edited book Trans-Local-Act (aaa-peprav, 2011). Her work has been exhibited at Nieuwe Instituut, Istanbul Biennale, Busan Museum of Modern Art, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, amongst others. She is Professor of Architecture and Visual Culture at UCL Urban Lab.
Ahmad Barclay is an architect, UX designer, and coder who currently heads the Advanced Data Formats team at the Office for National Statistics (ONS). Previously, he led award winning infographics and visual storytelling projects as a founding partner with Visualizing Impact, and initiated Palestine Open Maps, an open data project supported by Mozilla and Creative Commons. Ahmad has contributed to a variety of publications, and facilitated courses and workshops based on his projects and practices in Beirut, London, Lisbon, Amman and Bangalore.
Nadine Bekdache is a practicing designer, urbanist, and co-founder of Public Works Studio. She researches socio-spatial phenomena through multidisciplinary methods; including mapping, imagery, and film as both processes of investigation and representation. She currently co-directs Public Works Studio and heads its Communication and Design Unit. The studio leads on investigative action research and politically engaged forms of representation, to address and actively respond to the chronic challenges facing just cities and equitable development in Lebanon. Nadine is also a graphic design instructor at the Lebanese University.
Gautam Bhan is Associate Dean of the School of Human Development as well as Head of Human Development at the School of Human Development at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements, Bangalore. He holds a PhD in City and Regional Planning from the University of California, Berkeley. At IIHS, Gautam teaches, researches and writes on the politics of urban poverty and inequality, urban and planning theory, housing, and identity and social practice. He also leads work on urban welfare regimes, social protection, and informal work. New projects include work on child health outcomes for the children of informal workers in domestic work and construction, design and delivery of urban social protection regimes, and work on climate change’s impact on health and livelihood outcomes for urban workers. He is the author of In the Public’s Interest: Evictions, Citizenship and Inequality in Contemporary Delhi (University of Georgia Press 2017; Orient Blackswan 2017) and co-editor (with Smita Srinivasan and Vanessa Watson) of the Routledge Companion to Planning in the Global South (Routledge 2018). Most recently, he is co-author with Edgar Pieterse, Susan Parnell, and Michael Keith of Cities Rethought: A New Urban Disposition (Polity/Context Westland 2024).
Martina Bovo is a postdoc research fellow at the Università Iuav di Venezia (IUAV)/University of Venice, Dipartimento di Culture del Progetto and contract professor at Politecnico di Milano, Italy. With an architecture background, she obtained a PhD in Urban Planning, Design and Policy and worked as postdoc research fellow at KU Leuven, Belgium. Her research focuses on the migration-city nexus, particularly on the territorial dimension of migration and arrival processes, and on arrival spaces and infrastructures; on this topic, she recently published Landing spaces, processes and infrastructures in Italy (Routledge, 2024). She collaborates on teaching and research activities in the fields of urban and welfare policies and institutional learning. Along her research, she has developed an interest in mapping and counter-mapping approaches, as well as in ethnographic approaches to urban analysis.
Imani Jacqueline Brown is an artist, activist, and architectural researcher from New Orleans, based in London. Her work investigates the “continuum of extractivism,” which spans from settler-colonial genocide and slavery to fossil fuel production and climate change. In exposing the layers of violence and resistance that form the foundations of settler-colonial society, she opens space to imagine paths to ecological reparations. Imani’s practice combines photography, videography, archival research, ecological philosophy, legal theory, people’s history, remote and local sensing, and counter-cartographic strategies to disentangle the spatial logics that make geographies, unmake communities, and break Earth’s geology. Her research is disseminated internationally through art installations, public actions, reports, and testimony delivered to courts and organs of the United Nations. Among other things, Imani is a PhD candidate in Geography at Queen Mary, University of London, a research fellow with Forensic Architecture, and a member of the Rise St. James Louisiana Historic Committee.
Joelle Deeb is an architect and researcher focused on the intersection of water systems, urban development, and cultural heritage. In 2024, she founded and now leads The Water Commons Archives-Syria, a research initiative dedicated to documenting Syria’s water-bordering systems and supporting urban studies and educational outreach. Her work sheds light on the evolving spatial dynamics of water systems and their deep impact on the sociocultural fabric of the Middle East. Since 2023, Joelle has spearheaded the development of the Orontes River Repository, an archive that explores the socio-environmental challenges facing the Orontes River basin. Through innovative cartographic mapping and experimental documentation, her research uncovers the erosion of collective memory and reimagines spatial practices as acts of cultural reflection and continuity. Joelle’s work has been selected for the Venice Biennale Architettura 2025 and honored with the prestigious Biennale College Architettura grant. Featured in several influential platforms and writings, including Afikra, Daftar Journal, and MIT Thresholds 50, her research on water knowledge earned her the 2023 International Tamayouz Excellence Award for her thesis and the 2024 Ettijahat Research Grant. Through her work, she remains dedicated to bridging community-driven research, documentation, and design to shed light on the evolving relationship between water and the built environment.
Catherine D’Ignazio is a hacker mama, scholar, and artist/designer who focuses on feminist technology, data justice, and civic engagement. She has run women’s health hackathons, designed global news recommendation systems, created talking and tweeting water quality sculptures, and led walking data visualizations to envision the future of sea level rise. Her 2020 book from MIT Press, Data Feminism, co-authored with Lauren Klein, charts a course for more ethical and empowering data science practices. Her second book, Counting Feminicide: Data Feminism in Action (MIT Press, 2024) is an extended case study about grassroots data activism to end gender-related violence. D’Ignazio is an Associate Professor of Urban Science and Planning in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT where she is the Director of the Data + Feminism Lab.
Lauren Klein is Winship Distinguished Research Professor and Associate Professor in the departments of Quantitative Theory & Methods and English at Emory University. She directs the Emory Digital Humanities Lab and the Atlanta Interdisciplinary AI Network. Klein’s research brings together computational and critical methods in order to explore questions of gender, race, and justice. She is author (with Catherine D’Ignazio) of the award-winning Data Feminism (MIT Press, 2020), and editor (with Matthew K. Gold) of Debates in the Digital Humanities (Univ. of Minnesota Press), among other publications. She is currently completing Data by Design: A History in Five Charts, forthcoming from the MIT Press in 2025.
Open-weather is a feminist experiment in imaging and imagining the earth and its weather systems using DIY tools. We weave speculative storytelling with low-cost hardware and open-source software to transform our relations to a planet in a climate crisis. Co-led by designer Soph Dyer and geographer Sasha Engelmann since 2020, open-weather makes artworks, leads inclusive workshops, and develops resources on satellite imagery reception and reading.
Jadd Hallaj is an architect, researcher, and urban planner from Aleppo with a focus on spatial data and Geographic Information Systems. He earned his master’s degree in architecture from the ENSA Paris la Villette in 2020. Currently, he is a member of LUGARIT – a think-and-do tank that produces knowledge to support communities and institutions in leveraging their resources and ingenuity to consolidate “real” development on the ground. His work merges digital technologies and participatory approaches to promote territorial innovation. In 2021, he co-founded the Living Summer School, an Erasmus+ informal education initiative and member of the LINA network for European architecture. In 2023, his team was the recipient of the EUROPAN Prize for the development of Rouen’s Eastern Seine river banks.
Nityanand Jayaraman is an engineer-turned journalist and social activist until recently based in Chennai, India. Over the last three decades, he has worked alongside coastal communities fighting against destructive and land-degrading activities in the name of development and conservation. In 2002, he co-founded the Vettiver Collective that mobilises science, law, arts and media-based solidarity for social and environmental justice struggles of the marginalised. He is currently pursuing a PhD in political science at the University of Waikato in Aotearoa-New Zealand.
Omar Khaled, a visual artist and multidisciplinary architect at CLUSTER – Cairo Lab for Urban Studies Training and Environmental Research, obtained his Bachelor’s Degree in Architectural Engineering from the American University in Cairo in 2023. Believing in the duty towards the city and its inhabitants, he recognizes the power of individual and collective creativity in spatial praxis, making his inquiries grounded in socio-political and economic mechanisms along with environmental matters in the built environment. During his time at CLUSTER he participated in a number of local and international discussions, one of which was a panel discussion on the design-build project “Community Care Vehicle” during the World Urban Forum 12, held in Cairo in 2024. He also led a tour and talk as part of the CLUSTER Talks series titled: “Paradoxical Union: the Meeting of the ‘Less’ and the ‘More’ in Nasr City”, attempting to contextualize the discourse on Modernism and Postmodernism.
Nikolas Kosmatopoulos is Associate Professor of Politics and Anthropology at the American University of Beirut, author of Master Peace: Lebanon’s Violence and the Politics of Expertise (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024), and PI for the URB-funded FAIRSHIPs research project (Floating Activism & Insurgency Research). Further team members include Roua Chakaroun (PPIA-GRA), Dina Al Amood (ECON – URVP), Christopher Kabakian (ECON – URVP).
Laura Kurgan is a Professor at the Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation at Columbia University, where she directs the Master of Science in Computational Design Practices, and the Center for Spatial Research (CSR). She is the author of Close Up at a Distance: Mapping, Technology, and Politics (Zone Books, 2013) and Co-Editor of Ways of Knowing Cities (Columbia Books on Architecture, 2019). She is working on a book on Conflict Urbanism presenting and reflecting upon ten years of collaborative work at CSR. Her work has been exhibited internationally, most recently at the Chicago Architecture Biennial (2019), at the Palais De Tokyo in Paris (2016), and at the Biennale Architettura di Venezia 2018 and 2025.
Ana Méndez de Andés is an urban researcher and practitioner with more than two decades of experience in the analysis of urban transformations, new institutions, and democratic governance. Ana graduated as an architect and urban planner from the Escuela Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid and completed her PhD on urban commons and municipalism at the University of Sheffield. She is a founding member of the Observatorio Metropolitano de Madrid and the Urban Commons Research Collective. As part of the municipalist movement, she has worked as a strategic planning consultant for Madrid City Council and as a coordinator of the European Municipalist Network. As part of her commitment to mapping processes, Ana co-founded the Car_Tac collective in 2004 and has recently analysed the relational aspects of urban commoning processes in Barcelona, co-produced a mapping of the municipalist ecosystem, and participated in the Critical Mapping for Municipalist Movements research project.
Batoul Yassine is a research coordinator at the Beirut Urban Lab at the American University of Beirut. With extensive experience in architecture and urban design, her research explores urban recovery in areas impacted by crises, war, and displacement. Her recent work focuses on developing inclusive and participatory recovery strategies for post-conflict and post-war contexts in Lebanon and across the Arab world. She holds a Master’s in Urban Design from the American University of Beirut and a Master’s in Architecture from the Lebanese University.
Discussants’ Bios
Nadi Abu Saada is a Visiting Assistant Professor at the School of Architecture and Design at the American University of Beirut (AUB). His work focuses on the material histories and visual cultures of the modern Arab world. Nadi has earned his Ph.D. and M.Phil. degrees in architecture at the University of Cambridge and his B.A. in architecture at the University of Toronto. He was previously an Aga Khan Postdoctoral Fellow in Islamic Architecture at MIT and an ETH Zürich Postdoctoral Fellow at ETH Zürich. He is the co-editor of Arab Modern: Architecture and the Project of Independence (gta Verlag, 2025) and editor of Resurgent Nahda: The Arab Exhibitions in Mandate Jerusalem (Kaph Books, 2024). Besides his writings, Nadi has also been involved in research-based curatorial work. He has curated and participated in a number of exhibitions around the world including in Ramallah, Amman, Zurich, Venice, Dubai, and Montreal.
Monica Basbous is a multi-disciplinary researcher and educator trained in architecture and critical media studies. Using various forms and media, her work is concerned with how power is negotiated through the production of space, time, knowledge, bodies, and their representations. She has taught at the Lebanese American University and at the American University of Beirut, and has a decade-long research experience around questions of urban planning and informality, mobility and public space, housing rights, and environmental justice in Lebanon. Her recent writings were published in the Architectural Review (2021), Journal Makan (2023), Middle-East Critique (2023), Jeem (2024), and Weird Economies (2024). She is currently a doctoral researcher at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona.
Mona Fawaz is a Professor in Urban Studies and Planning at the American University of Beirut and co-founder of the Beirut Urban Lab. She writes about urban history and historiography, social and spatial justice, informality and the law, property and space, as well as planning practice, theory, and pedagogy. She researches, teaches, and advocates strategies for more inclusive cities. Mona was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Studies at Harvard University during the 2014/15 academic year and in Summer 2017.
Mariangela Gasparotto is a researcher in anthropology at Ifpo (Amman). After completing a PhD dissertation on sociability practices, norms, internal migrations, and consumption behaviors of youth in Ramallah (Palestine), she undertook a new project focused on infrastructures and their use in the city of Zarqa (Jordan). She is also currently involved in several collective projects that explore, through alternative methods and writings, futures and memories of cities, as well as urban waste in both times of war and non-war. Positioned at the intersection of urban and political anthropology, her research explores daily forms of violence, hierarchies, mobility patterns, and the ways in which spaces are appropriated, subverted, renegotiated, and adapted through various forms of solidarity, internal and external borders, and local knowledge.
Ahmad Gharbieh is Associate Professor and Convener of the Graphic Design Program at the School of Architecture and Design, American University of Beirut. He is co-founder of the Beirut Urban Lab, an interdisciplinary research space where he leads the critical mapping research/design track. His scholarly work in critical cartography explores mapping and data visualization as methods of studying, representing, and analyzing a wide range of urban issues and socio-spatial phenomena: security and militarization, territorial geographies, place-making, building development, displacement, conflict, and political violence, among others. His work has been exhibited at and published in multiple academic and public venues. He is the curator of City Debates 2025.
Mona Harb is 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.
Elizabeth Saleh is an assistant professor in sociocultural anthropology in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Media Studies at the American University of Beirut. She works at the intersection of political and economic anthropology. Her first long-term ethnographic fieldwork was based in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley and culminated in 2014, in her doctoral thesis about the Lebanese wine industry. Elizabeth’s current ethnographic research began in 2015 and is about the lives of underage Syrian waste pickers growing up at a small scrapyard located in a run-down building in Beirut.
Jana Traboulsi is a visual artist, designer and academic. She is Assistant Professor of Graphic Design at the American University of Beirut (AUB). She holds a BFA in Graphic design from AUB, and an MA in Media and Communication Studies from Goldsmiths College, London. She is the co-founder and art director of Bidayat pan-arab quarterly, and of Snoubar Bayrout publishing house. In 2019, she founded the LAAB, a collective initiative interested in exploring creatively and critically the relationship of media and the arts to politics. Her artist book The Book of Margins, shortlisted for the Jameel Prize 2021, has been exhibited at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London.
Rami Zurayk is a professor at the Maroun Semaan Faculty of Engineering and Architecture at the American University of Beirut, Landscape Design and Ecosystem Management Department. 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. He is a founding member of the Arab Food Sovereignty Network and an advisory board member of SEAL (Social and Economic Action for Lebanon), and an advisory board member for the Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems and Community Development. He has worked extensively on the political ecology of Arab food security and its linkages with the agrarian question. He obtained his BSc and MSc from the American University of Beirut and his DPhil from Oxford University.