Hiba Bou Akar

Hiba Bou Akar is Associate Professor of Urban Planning at Columbia GSAPP, where she founded and directs the Post-Conflict Cities Lab. Her scholarship examines how cities are imagined, governed, inhabited, and contested amid war, displacement, sectarian conflict, and political uncertainty. Working across critical planning theory, urban studies, political geography, and Middle East urbanism, Bou Akar asks how planning operates when the future itself is unstable: when cities are rebuilt after violence, prepared for violence yet to come, or suspended in the long aftermath of shattered political projects.

Her award-winning book, For the War Yet to Come: Planning Beirut’s Frontiers (Stanford University Press, 2018), traces how urban planning in Beirut became entangled with the anticipation of future war. The book shows how zoning, infrastructure, land markets, religious institutions, and everyday fears helped produce Beirut’s sectarian frontiers. It received the Anthony Leeds Prize in Urban Anthropology and the Nikki Keddie Book Award from the Middle East Studies Association, and was also recognized by the Lebanese Studies Association. In 2022, it was translated into Arabic as Li-Harbin Muntazara: Takhtit Hudud Bayrut.

Bou Akar’s current work expands this inquiry into the afterlives of political and urban futures that have been interrupted, exhausted, or violently foreclosed. Her forthcoming book, The Afterlives of Dead Futures, due out in 2027, explores how people continue to live among the remains of promises that once organized collective life. A parallel book project, Sedimentary Urbanization, examines how histories of refuge, displacement, war, and rebuilding accumulate in urban landscapes. Across these projects, she develops concepts and methods for studying cities where violence is less an exceptional event than a condition through which space, memory, infrastructure, and political imagination are continually remade.

Alongside her writing, Bou Akar is invested in public scholarship and collective pedagogy. At GSAPP, she has created spaces for research, teaching, and collaboration on urbanism in conditions of crises. Her pedagogical projects often move beyond the classroom, inviting students to work with urgent political questions, public archives, collective bibliographies, and experimental forms of urban knowledge. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she worked with Columbia GSAPP students to create Pandemic Urbanism: Praxis in the Time of COVID-19, an open-source annotated bibliography that circulated internationally and has been downloaded thousands of times.

Her work also enters the public sphere through policy, media, and cultural intervention. She has contributed to research and policy reports and has been interviewed and featured in academic, news, and documentary venues. These interventions extend her scholarship into wider debates on reconstruction, urban violence, cultural survival, displacement, and the politics of home.

Bou Akar’s intellectual practice also crosses into art and installation. Her collaborative projects explore how urban violence, memory, and displacement can be sensed, staged, and made public through spatial and visual forms. In 2023, she collaborated on On Rooftops and Under the Ground, an installation and neighborhood-based artistic intervention in Ain Mraiseh, Beirut, developed with artists, scholar/artist Mohamad Hafeda, and curator Amanda Abi Khalil. In 2025, she produced Sedimentary Urbanization, a short documentary connected to her ongoing field research. In 2026, she participated in the Sharjah Architecture Triennale with Patch-Time, an installation developed with Nathalie Harb and Mohamad Hafeda. Her painting practice has also become part of this larger inquiry into cities, memory, and affect, including the exhibitions Echoes of a City at Columbia Global Center, Reid Hall, and Maison Suger in Paris.

Bou Akar serves as editor of Environment and Planning D: Society and Space and sits on the editorial boards of the Journal of Urban Affairs and the Journal of Planning History. Her editorial work reflects a broader commitment to expanding the geographies, methods, and political vocabularies of urban theory. She has organized major conferences and public conversations on postcolonial, decolonial, and abolitionist planning; Middle East urbanism; migration and housing; Beirut’s reconstruction; and urbanism in times of genocide and crisis.

Across scholarship, teaching, editing, public writing, film, installation, and painting, Bou Akar’s work asks what it means to plan, teach, and imagine cities when inherited futures have failed. Her research insists that urban planning is never only technical. It is also a struggle over history, fear, belonging, repair, and the possibility of life otherwise.