Biographies

Nick Blomley is Professor of Geography at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. Since the early 1990s, he has sought to reveal the centrality of property to a diversity of lived conflicts and social relations through a series of empirical case-studies, including the analysis of gentrification, urban gardening, the municipal regulation of panhandling and, most recently, indigenous-state treaties. This work continues to evolve: Blomley is recently bringing together philosophical pragmatism and performativity theory to take seriously the enactments of property.

David Correia is an Assistant Professor in the department of American Studies at the University of New Mexico. His research interests focus on environmental politics, violence and its relation to law & property, critical human geography and political economy. Correia has a regional focus on New Mexico and the wider U.S. Southwest. His recent book, Properties of Violence: Law and Land Grant Struggle in Northern New Mexico (University of Georgia Press, 2013) traces Spanish colonial histories and contemporary struggles over property in what is today northern New Mexico. His scholarly work has appeared in journals such as Antipode, Geoforum, The Journal of Historical Geography, Radical History Review and many others. He also writes essays and articles for a variety of popular outlets, including CounterPunch, the Weekly Alibi and La Jicarita.

Ayona Datta is Senior Lecturer in Citizenship and Belonging in the University of Leeds, UK. Her research and writing focuses broadly on the gendered processes of citizenship and belonging and the politics of urbanization across the global north and south. Her teaching and research uses interdisciplinary approaches from urban sociology, feminist and critical geography, focussing broadly on the connections between social, political, and gendered geographies of cities and urban spaces. She uses qualitative and visual methodologies to pursue her research interests combining film-making, participant sketches, participant photography, and mapping, alongside semi-structured interviews and participant observations. She is author of ‘The Illegal City: Space, law and gender in a Delhi squatter settlement’, co-editor of ‘Translocal geographies: Spaces, places, connections’ and working on a manuscript (under contract with Routledge) titled ‘Mega-urbanization in the global south: Fast cities and new urban utopias of the postcolonial state’. She has also produced two short documentaries titled City Bypassed (13 mins) and City Forgotten (15 mins) exploring the impacts of urbanization and urban development on citizenship and belonging in India’s small and mega-cities.

Eric Denis has a PhD in urban and economic geography from the University of Caen, France (1993). He is a senior research fellow affiliated with the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). He was based for ten years in Cairo, Egypt, and Khartoum, Sudan. He was the in charge of the social sciences department at the Institut Français de Pondichéry (India www.ifpindia.org 2009 to 2013). He is the author of some fifty papers and books, on Middle Eastern geography and urban studies. He is the editor of several volumes including Popular Housing and Urban Land Tenure in the Middle East (2012, OUP, with Ababsa & Dupret eds.), Villes et urbanisation des provinces égyptiennes (2007), Atlas of Cairo (2000). He has been involved in several applied researches on urbanisation in Middle East, land access and security of tenure. He contributes to e-Geopolis program on world urbanization monitoring supported by the Agence Française de Développement and the World Bank. Currently he leads a research on India’s small cities and development beyond the metropolis (SUBURBIN, Subaltern Urbanization in India www.suburbin.hypotheses.org). Beside this, he conducted recently an experimental applied and comparative research in Pondicherry (India) with the Global Urban Research Centre (University of Manchester, A. Stein & C. Moser) based on the Participatory Urban Assets Appraisal methodology and looking at health and environmental issues. He is also contributing to a comparative study of land titling policy practices and effects (India, Ethiopia and Mauritania) and a European program, Chance2Sustain, which compares the development model of metrocities in the BRIC countries and looks at spatial knowledge development in urban governance www.chance2sustain.eu. He analyses more precisely the implementation and use of GIS for land property management and slum redevelopment.

Saker El Nour received a BA in agricultural production from the Faculty of Agriculture of Sohag (Upper-Egypt) (class of 2000). In 2003 he received a diploma in human development from the Institute of National Planning in Cairo. Then he joined the agriculture department at Minya University (Upper-Egypt) from which he received an MSc in Rural Sociology in 2005. His Master’s thesis was entitled “Rural youth’s participation in development”. From 2008 to 2010 he has been a junior scholar at the American University of Cairo (AUC) in a research project dealing with the dynamics of rural poverty and social change in the MENA region. In 2010 he conducted research funded by the Population Council entitled “Women’s work in the agricultural sector: between prosperity and marginalization in the MENA region”. Saker completed his PhD in sociology from Université Paris Ouest – Nanterre in 2013. His doctoral thesis is entitled “Poverty dynamics in rural Egypt: case study of Nazlet Salman”. Currently, he is employed as a post-doctoral follow at LSE/AUB in a research project entitled “The palimpsest of agrarian change”. Among Saker’s major research interests are rural poverty dynamics, access to natural resources, agrarian transformations, and peasant’s movements. He conducted fieldwork in rural Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia and Lebanon

Mona Fawaz is Associate Professor of Urban Planning and Studies and the Coordinator of the Masters in Urban Design, Planning and Policy programs in the Department of Architecture and Design at the American University of Beirut. I was trained as an architect (BArch, 1995, American University of Beirut) and an urban planner (MCP in 1998, PhD in 2004, Massachusetts Institute of Technology). My research stems from the imperative of making cities more inclusive, particularly from the perspective of enabling low-income dwellers to take part in their making. I have researched informal settlements, large-scale planning projects, and public regulations of the built environment from the critical perspectives of inclusion and enabling. More recently, I have become interested in property conceptions and property regimes as key determinants of the outcome of planning projects. Recent publications include: “The Politics of Property in Planning: Hezbollah’s Reconstruction of Haret Hreik as Case Study” in: International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, manuscript accepted, 2013; “Towards the Right to the City in Informal Settlements,” in T. Samara, S. He and G. Chen (ed.), Locating the Right to the City in the Global South, London, Routledge, 2013; “Living Beirut’s Security Zones: An Investigation of the Modalities and Practice of Urban Security”, City and Society 24(2): 173–195., 2012 (with Mona Harb and Ahmad Gharbieh), and “Exception as the Rule: High-End Developments in Neoliberal Beirut,” Built Environment 36(2): 245-259, 2010 (with M. Krijnen).

Edesio FernandesLL.B., Minas Gerais Federal University, Brazil; Dip. Urb. Plan., MGFU; LL.M. in Law in Development, Warwick University, UK; Ph.D., Warwick University. Fernandes is a dual Brazilian/British national based in the UK, and works as a lecturer, researcher, writer and legal consultant. He is currently a member of DPU Associates (London, UK) and of the Teaching Faculty of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy (Cambridge MA, US). Before moving to the UK in 1988, Fernandes worked as a lawyer, city planner and as a lecturer in Brazil (1980-86), as well as a legal advisor during the national Constitution-making process (1986-88). His main teaching and research interests include land, urban and environmental law; land and urban planning, policy and management; informal land markets, urban land regularisation and land registration; local government and metropolitan administration; protection of cultural heritage; and constitutional law and human rights in developing and transitional countries. For over 20 years, he has also been a consultant to many governmental and national/international non-governmental organisations, such as UN-HABITAT, UNDP, Unesco, OSCE, World Bank, FAO, DfID, IHS, WYG and Urbaplan, having regularly worked in Brazil and most of Latin America, South Africa, Kosovo, Albania, Bulgaria, Syria, Russia, Cape Verde, and elsewhere. In 2003, Fernandes was Director of Land Affairs at the Ministry of Cities in Brazil, and in that capacity he co-ordinated the formulation of the National Programme to Support Sustainable Land Regularisation in Urban Areas. He has published several articles in academic and technical journals, as well as contributed chapters to several books in English, Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian. Most recently, he authored a book entitled “Regularization of Informal Settlements in Latin America” (2011, Lincoln Institute of Land Policy).

Samer Ghamroun is a PhD candidate in Political Science at the “Institut des Sciences Sociales du Politique” (ISP) at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Cachan, France. He is also currently a fellow at the Orient-Institut in Beirut. His research focuses on the politicization of sharia courts and law in Lebanon, between women’s mobilization and the civil courts’ competition, within the field of legal sociology. More generally, Ghamroun works on judicial policies and judges’ mobilizations in Egypt and Tunisia. He is also a member of an international research program in legal anthropology (PROMETEE), studying law and property issues in various Muslim contexts. Ghamroun has taught legal and political sociology in several universities in Paris, and is a founding member of the Legal Agenda Center in Beirut where he regularly publishes articles and contributes to discussions about Law and Society in Arab contexts. Ghamroun is the author of several chapters published in collective books. Among his recent publications, Ghamroun is the author of “Le droit de la communauté sunnite libanaise saisi par les femmes”, in Florence Rochefort et Maria Eleonora Sanna (dir.), Normes religieuses et Genre: Mutations, Résistances et Reconfiguration XIXème-XXIème siècle, Paris: Armand Colin.

Cynthia Gharios studied landscape design and ecological management at AUB (class of 2010). She obtained an MSc in landscape architecture with a specialization in cultural geography from the University of Wageningen, the Netherlands in 2012. In her master thesis she looked at monumentality in divided cities, focusing on the case of the Martyrs’ Square in Beirut. In 2013 she joined the project: the palimpsest of agrarian changes as a research assistant. Her interests include rural development, landscape studies, space and place transformation, perception of space, and cartography.

Omar Abdulaziz Hallaj is an independent architect and development consultant. Mr. Hallaj has served in the past as the CEO of the Syria Trust for Development, a non-governmental foundation providing a framework for a variety of community based developmental initiatives in Syria. Previously, he worked as the Team Leader for the German Technical Cooperation Project for the Development of Historic Cities in Yemen (GIZ). Also, he was a partner in Suradec, a consortium for urban development and urban heritage planning in Aleppo, Syria. His professional work closely concentrated on linking institutional, social and economic development concerns to the production of the built environment. He graduated from the University of Texas in 1989 and obtained a Masters of Architecture from the same university in 1992. Mr. Hallaj has researched, published and lectured on a variety of issues related to the history, economics and development policies in the Muslim world and Arab region. His professional experience includes serving on commissions and management boards for a variety of public and private bodies dealing with urban development, developing administrative and legal frameworks for heritage conservation, microfinance, and involving private and civil society efforts in urban and local governance. In 2007 Mr. Hallaj was a recipient of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture for his role as Team Leader for the Yemeni-German Shibam Urban Development Project. Subsequently, he served as a member of the Award’s Master Jury in its 2010 cycle, and is currently serving on the Award’s Steering Committee.

Mona Harb is Associate Professor of Urban Studies and Politics at the American University of Beirut. She has a bachelor degree in Architecture (AUB, 1993), two masters degrees in Urbanism (ALBA, 1995) and Urban Geography (University of Tours, 1996), and a PhD in Political Science(Institut d’Etudes Politiques, Aix-en-Provence, 2005). She is the author of Le Hezbollah à Beyrouth (1985-2005): de la banlieue à la ville (Karthala-IFPO, 2010), and the co-author of Leisurely Islam: Negotiating Geography and Morality in Shi’ite South Beirut (with Lara Deeb, Princeton University Press, 2013). She is currently working on decentralization, local governments and city development strategies in the Arab world, as well as on public space practices and urban politics in Beirut. Harb is the recipient of grants from the EU-FP7, Wenner-Gren, ACLS, and Middle-East Awards. She serves on the editorial boards of IJURR and CSSAAME, and is a trustee of the Arab Council of Social Sciences. She is also the founder and co-editor of the Cities Page on Jadaliyya e-zine.

Ozan Karaman is Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Glasgow. He studied Architecture at the Middle East Technical University, Ankara. He received his Ph.D. in Geography from the University of Minnesota in 2010 with specializations in urban political economy, economic geography, and critical social theory. He has published research papers on neoliberal urban renewal, urban poverty, housing, and social justice in Istanbul. As an advisor to the Urban Sociology Research Module at the Singapore ETH Centre for Global Environmental Sustainability (SEC), he is currently co-supervising a project on global comparative urbanism engaging with debates on – among other themes – urban informality, gentrification, housing, and suburbanization, with case studies from eight large metropolitan regions across the world. Ozan is also a co-editor of Jadaliyya’s Cities Page.

Alp Yücel Kaya teaches at Ege University in Izmir. He is graduated from Middle East Technical University in Ankara with BSc and MSc degrees in economics. He obtained his PhD from École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris with an, as yet, unpublished thesis: “Politique de l’enregistrement de la richesse économique: Les enquêtes fiscales et agricoles de l’Empire ottoman et de la France au milieu du XIXe siècle,” (2005). His research focuses on the conflictual world of property relations and agrarian transformation in France and the Eastern Mediterranean from 18th to 21st centuries. He is the author of “Les villes ottomanes sous tension fiscale: les enjeux de l’évaluation cadastrale au XIXe siecle”, Florence Bourillon et Nadine Vivier (éds.), La mesure cadastrale, Estimer la valeur du foncier en Europe aux XIXe et XXe siècles, Rennes, Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2012; “In the Hinterland of Izmir: Mid-nineteenth Century Traders Facing a New Type of Fiscal Practice”, Suraiya Faroqhi and Gilles Veinstein (eds.), Merchants in the Ottoman Empire, Leuven, Peeters, 2008; “Epilogue: « la Ville te suivra »” in Smyrne 1830-1930, de la fortune à l’oubli (ed. by Marie-Carmen Smyrnelis), Collections Mémoires of Autrement, 2006. He recently published “Neoliberal Mülkiyet ya da “Acele Kamulaştırma” Nedir? (Neoliberal Property or What is Urgent Expropriation)”, Toplum ve Bilim (Society and Science), 2011, no 122, p. 194-236, in which he discussed Turkish Republic’s Council of Minister’s decisions of “urgent expropriation”, facilitating and accelerating economic investments, as the concept of property has been changing in the neoliberal era.

Nada Moumtaz is an Assistant Professor in the department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at the Ohio State University, having completed a PhD in Cultural Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, with a dissertation entitled “Modernizing Charity: Remaking Islamic Law”. She is interested in property, charity, religion, capitalism, and law.

Dr. Mounir Rached is the vice president and a founding member of the Lebanese Economic Association. His primary professional experience was at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) between 1983 and 2007. His career at the IMF covered the Middle Eastern Region, Africa and the Caribbean; and served as IMF Resident Representative. He is currently a consultant for regional and international financial institutions, primarily in public financial management, policy evaluation, and financial programming.

Martha Mundy taught anthropology at Yarmouk University, the American University of Beirut, and the London School of Economics and held visiting teaching appointments at UCLA and Lyon 2 Lumière University. At Yarmouk University she helped to found the Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology and to publish work produced there: The Village between Growth and Planning: Studies from the Jordan Valley [in Arabic] (1990) and, with Richard Saumarez Smith (eds.), Part time Farming: Agricultural development in the Zarqa River Basin (1990). At LSE she developed teaching in legal anthropology and published with colleagues edited collections: with Tobias Kelly, Law and Anthropology (2002) and with Alain Pottage, Law, Anthropology, and the Constitution of the Social: Making persons and things (2004). Her major works are Domestic Government: Kinship, community and polity in North Yemen (1995) and, with Richard Saumarez Smith, Governing Property, Making the Modern State: Law, administration and production in Ottoman Syria (2007). Mundy is presently Professor Emerita of Anthropology at the LSE and Research Associate with the Interfaculty Graduate Environmental Sciences Program at AUB. Beyond her academic work, she has been a founding member of LSEStaffagainstWar, BRICUP (British Committee for the Universities of Palestine), Naftana (the UK support committee for the Iraqi Federation of Oil Unions), and Thimar (a research collective on agriculture, environment and labour in the Arab World).

Charbel Nahas studied engineering and planning at Ecole Polytechnique and Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées in Paris as well as economy and social anthropology. After returning to Lebanon, in 1979, he taught at the Lebanese University for 12 years. He has been in charge of the reconstruction of Beirut Central District (1982-1986). Between 1986 and 1998, he worked in the banking sector and was involved in several project financing namely in telecoms and housing operations and in the pos-war modernization of the Lebanese banking sector. In 1998-1999, he presented a “Financial Correction Program” to the Lebanese Government and since then works as a consultant and economic researcher. His main fields of intervention are; (1) Planning and spatial economy: he was the coordinator on “Economy” and “Public Policies” in the team that produced the “Schéma Directeur d’Aménagement du Territoire au Liban” (national Physical master Plan), in 2002-2004 and led the Project team for the design of the “Public Investment Program” for Lebanon, in 2005-2006, along with various contributions on domestic and regional issues (Relations with Syria, Euro-Mediterranean Partenrship and Neighbourhood policies, etc.), (2) Fiscal and financial issues, in relation with development: he drew up a “Social Development Strategy for Lebanon”, he drafted a proposal for the pension system reform and has been involved in the discussion of the successive “fiscal reform” programs and conferences held in the past years, and (3) Social analysis and political economy with several publications namely on education, migration and labour. Nahas served as Minister of Telecom (2009-2011) and Minister of Labour (2011-2012) in the Lebanese Government. He is presently teaching at the Lebanese University and at the American University in Beirut. “www.charbelnahas.org

Vijay Prashad is the Edward Said Chair at the AUB. His most recent book is The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South (New Delhi: LeftWord and New York: Verso, 2013).

Dr. Omar Razzaz is Chair of the Board of Trustees, King Abdullah II Fund for Development (KAFD) and Chair of the Jordan Strategy Forum (JSF). He is currently heading the International Commission for Evaluating Privatization in Jordan (2013-2014). He also led the national team responsible for preparing the National Employment Strategy for Jordan in (2011-2012). He was the Director General of Jordan’s Social Security Corporation (2006-2010). Prior to his return to Jordan, he served as Country Manager of the World Bank’s Lebanon Country Office (2002-2006). Dr. Razzaz was Assistant Professor at MIT in the International Development and Regional Planning (IDRP) Program. He holds a PhD from Harvard University in Planning with a minor in Economics, and a post-Doctorate from the Harvard Law School. He is a member of several boards of private and not for profit organizations. He has a number of publications in refereed journals.

Vincent Renard is an economist, director of research at CNRS (Lab Econometrics Polytechnic) and senior adviser at the Iddri-Sciences Po, where he coordinates the Urban Fabric program. He specializes in issues of land and real economy in a comparative perspective (European Union, Latin America, East Asia, countries “in transition”). He teaches at the National School of Bridges and Roads (Master AMUR) and the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris (Higher Planning and Development Cycle). He has led or participated in many activities such as teaching, consulting, or cooperation in various developing countries. He co-led the interdisciplinary research program at the CNRS and the French Ministry of Research on Sustainable Urban Development (PIDUD).

Abir Saksouk-Sassois an architect and an urbanist. She has been involved in several research projects, including the history of spatial production of the informal suburbs of Beirut, and more recently that of the neighborhoods surrounding Ein el-Helwe refugee camp. In 2006 she was directly involved in the reconstruction efforts in Aita el-Chaab in South Lebanon. She recently produced a collaborative project about public space on the coast of Beirut entitled “This Sea Is Mine”. Her interests include multi-disciplinary research on space, exploring tools of urban change, as well as blogging.

Richard Saumarez Smith is Professor of Anthropology at the American University of Beirut. He obtained his doctorate from the University of Cambridge in 1989 after doing a B.A. in Maths and Social Anthropology at Cambridge and an M.Litt. at the University of Delhi. His Ph.D. thesis, published in 1996 as Rule by Records: Land registration and village custom in early British Panjab, critiqued the colonial construction of knowledge about Indian society by analysing a central institution of British rule in India, the registration of land. He subsequently joined Martha Mundy in research on land registration under Ottoman rule and the British Mandate in villages of northern Jordan, which resulted in a joint monograph published in 2007, Governing property, making the modern state: Law, administration and production in Ottoman Syria.

Fawwaz Traboulsi is associate professor of Political Science and History at the American University of Beirut. Dr. Traboulsi has been a visiting professor at New York University, the University of Michigan, Columbia University, New York, and Vienna University. He is a fellow of St. Antony’s College, Oxford and the Wissenshaftskolleg, Berlin. His twenty books and numerous lectures, papers and articles have dealt with history, politics, liberation and social movements, political philosophy, memoirs, folklore and art in the Arab World. Dr. Traboulsi’s latest translations include Edward Said’s Out of Place and Humanism and Democratic Critique. His latest publications are A History of Modern Lebanon (Second Edition, Pluto Books, London, 2012, Fourth Edition, Arabic, Riad Rayess Books, Third Edition, 2012) Al-Dimoqratiyah Thawra (Democracy is a Revolution, 2011) and Hareer wa Hadeed. Minn Jabal Lubnan ila Qanat al-Suweiss (Silk and Iron, Chronicles of the Nineteenth Century Around the Mediterranean, 2013). Fawwaz Traboulsi, a long time journalist, is the editor of Bidayat journal.

Ann Varley is Professor in Human Geography at UCL (University College London). Her research lies within the fields of urban land and housing; informality and formalisation; gender, families and households; ageing; family law and the home; and law and urban governance. Her books include: Decoding Gender: Law and Practice in Contemporary Mexico (edited with Helga Baitenmann and Victoria Chenaut, Rutgers University Press, 2007; revised and translated, with support from UNIFEM, as Los códigos del género: Prácticas del derecho en el México contemporáneo, 2010, UNAM, Mexico); Illegal Cities: Law and Urban Change in Developing Countries (edited with Edésio Fernandes, Zed Books, 1998, and published in Bolivia with the support of PROMESHA, the Programme for Training in Socio-Environmental Improvement, as Ciudades Ilegales: la Ley y el Urbanismo en Países en Vías de Desarrollo in 2004); and Landlord and Tenant: Housing the Poor in Urban Mexico (with Alan Gilbert, Routledge, 1991), the first book in English on rental housing in a developing country. Her research is interdisciplinary: it falls within geography, development studies and Latin American studies, but she also receives invitations to speak and teach from architects and urbanists, legal scholars, historians and anthropologists in countries including Mexico, Brazil, the USA, Canada, Norway, Denmark, France, Spain, Lebanon, Egypt and Lesotho. Ann has held an individual residency at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Study Center at Bellagio, Italy, and in 2009 the Royal Geographical Society awarded her the Busk Medal, one of its senior awards, in recognition of her geographical fieldwork in urban Mexico. She is co-editor of the Bulletin of Latin American Research.

Dr Nadia von Maltzahn is Research Associate at the Orient-Institut Beirut (OIB), a German academic research institute supporting historical and contemporary research on the Middle East. Nadia is the author of The Syria-Iran Axis. Cultural Diplomacy and International Relations in the Middle East (London, 2013), and holds a DPhil in Modern Middle Eastern Studies from St Antony’s College, University of Oxford. Her research interests revolve around cultural policies and cultural diplomacy, urban governance and state-society relations in the Middle East. Her current research project on “Governance of Culture and Space” deals with the question of how cultural policies and cultural actors contribute to the creation of a public sphere, by examining the role of different types of spaces and institutions involved in cultural and knowledge production in selected cities of the region, taking Beirut as a starting point.