A

AIA CES Credits
AV Office
Abstract Publication
Academic Affairs
Academic Calendar, Columbia University
Academic Calendar, GSAPP
Admissions Office
Advanced Standing Waiver Form
Alumni Board
Alumni Office
Anti-Racism Curriculum Development Award
Architecture Studio Lottery
Assistantships
Avery Library
Avery Review
Avery Shorts

S

STEM Designation
Satisfactory Academic Progress
Scholarships
Skill Trails
Student Affairs
Student Awards
Student Conduct
Student Council (All Programs)
Student Financial Services
Student Health Services at Columbia
Student Organization Handbook
Student Organizations
Student Services Center
Student Services Online (SSOL)
Student Work Online
Studio Culture Policy
Studio Procedures
Summer Workshops
Support GSAPP
Close
This website uses cookies as well as similar tools and technologies to understand visitors' experiences. By continuing to use this website, you consent to Columbia University's usage of cookies and similar technologies, in accordance with the Columbia University Website Cookie Notice Group 6

Hiba Bou Akar

Hiba Bou Akar is an Associate Professor in the Urban Planning program at Columbia GSAPP. Her research focuses on planning in conflict and post-conflict cities, the question of urban security and violence, and the role of religious political organizations in the making of cities. Bou Akar’s book, For the War Yet to Come: Planning Beirut’s Frontiers, published by Stanford University Press in 2018, examines 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. It contributes to planning thought by studying planning practice within a framework of past and anticipated violence. The book won the 2019 Nikki Keddie Book Award from the Middle East Studies Association, and the 2019 Anthony Leeds Prize from American Anthropological Association’s Society for Urban, National, and Transnational / Global Anthropology (SUNTA) section. Currently, Bou Akar is working on a new project entitled “Sedimentary Urbanization,” for which she received the the 2019 Rockefeller Foundation Academic Writing fellowship.

Her first co-edited book, Narrating Beirut from its Borderlines, published by Heinrich Böll in 2011, incorporated ethnographic and archival research with art installations, architecture, graphic design, and photography to explore Beirut’s segregated geographies. Bou Akar’s research has been supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), the Wenner- Gren Foundation, and the Arab Council for the Social Sciences (ACSS).

Bou Akar is leading the newly-established Post-Conflict Cities Lab at GSAPP. The Lab will focus on post-conflict urban planning and will engage in research on the ways in which planning practice in contested cities has been simultaneously a tool of pacification, conflict, and development. The Post-Conflict Cities Lab’s inaugural project is funded by a grant from the Ford Foundation that Professor Bou Akar received to study “Urban Research and Practice in Post Conflict Settings in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) Region.”

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Bou Akar worked with PhD and masters student enrolled in her spring 2020 courses on “Advanced Planning Theory” and “Planning and Spatial Exclusion,” to develop an open source annotated reading list on the pandemic as it relates to urbanism, urban planning, architecture, and the built environment. Conceived as a living document, "Pandemic Urbanism: Praxis in the time of COVID-19,” has been developed through a method of collaborative co-writing bringing together in one document materials that students, scholars, practitioners and activists would find useful to think about the pandemic as it relates to cities, spatial inequalities, and social change.

Bou Akar received her Ph.D. in City and Regional Planning with a designated emphasis in Global Metropolitan Studies from the University of California at Berkeley. She holds a Bachelor of Architecture from the American University of Beirut (AUB) and Master in Urban Studies and Planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Before joining Columbia GSAPP, Bou Akar taught at Hampshire College and the American University of Beirut and was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University’s Mahindra Humanities Center. She has also worked as an architect and planner and as a research consultant with local NGOs and international UN organizations in the Middle East. She is the co-editor of Jadaliyya Cities, an online electronic journal addressing urban issues in the Middle East region.

A full CV is available here.

The Migrant “Crisis” in NYC: Immigration, Asylum, and The Right to the City
This one-day conference in November 2023 brought a diverse array of academics, experts, activists, urban stakeholders, and individuals with personal experiences and knowledge to discuss the current dynamics of immigrants arriving in New York City.

Courses

Course Semester Title Student Work Instructor Syllabus Requirements & Sequence Location & Time Session & Points Call No.
Pla6067‑1 Spring 2024
On Spatial Exclusion and Planning
Hiba Bou Akar
408 AVERY
TU 11 AM - 1 PM
FULL SEMESTER
3 Points
11346
Pla8929‑1 Spring 2024
Advanced Planning Theory (Ph.D Only)
Hiba Bou Akar
204 FAYERWEATHER
TH 1 PM - 3 PM
FULL SEMESTER
3 Points
11659
Pla4008‑1 Fall 2023
History and Theory of Planning
Hiba Bou Akar
209 FAYERWEATHER (12 - 1: 504 + 505)
TH 10 AM - 1 PM
FULL SEMESTER
3 Points
10132
Recent News