PhD in Urban Planning Lecture: Faranak Miraftab

The 2026 PhD in Urban Planning Lecture, “Planning Education, and Promise of Humane Urbanism” will be delivered by Faranak Miraftab (RMIT), with a response by Hiba Bou Akar (GSAPP).

This lecture will be hosted in Avery 113 at Columbia GSAPP

Recognizing the darkness of this historical moment and corporatized universities, I stress the potential for imagining and building a new world, a new pedagogy, a new planning. I build on prior research among immigrants and displaced workers in central Illinois to make a case for a relational approach in teaching overcoming the dominant “American exceptionalism”; and on my ongoing research and reflection on everyday practices of “radical care” and grassroots resistance in Iran, Brazil, and South Africa to make a case for situated knowledges co-produced beyond the walls of academia. Learning from the insurgent work of the grassroots with women at their center, what I call “termite work,” may guide us to anticolonial planning that is not centered on profit but on life—a humane urbanism.

Professor Faranak Miraftab is a Professor of Urban and Regional Planning at University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign with courtesy appointments at the departments of Gender and Women Studies and Geography. She is an urban scholar of globalization whose work bridges sociology, geography, planning, and feminist studies. Using ethnographic methodology, she explores how marginalized groups mobilize for housing, infrastructure, and urban justice across the globe. In 2025 she received the ACSP’s Distinguished Educator Award (2025). Her book Global Heartland: Displaced Labor Transnational Lives and Local Placemaking (2015), which carefully reveals transnational ties of care and displacement linking communities from Mexico to the U.S. Rustbelt, received multiple awards including ACSP’s Davidoff book award and ASA’s Global & Transnational Sociology section book award. Using an anti-colonial feminist lens her work uncovers the everyday practices of resistance by marginalized communities at their center the work of women she calls “termite work” that while often un-noticed, they bring down oppressive structures of patriarchal-racial-capitalism. A native of Iran, she has conducted research in Latin America, Africa, and North America.