Hiba Bou Akar, Director

Hiba Bou Akar is an Assistant 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 recent 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. 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 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.


Nora Akawi

Nora Akawi, ‘11 MSCCCP, is an architect, curator, and researcher working in New York and Amman. She joined Columbia University’s GSAPP in 2012 as director of Studio-X Amman, a platform for public discussions and collective study of architecture in the Arab region operating out of Columbia’s Global Center in Amman.
Since 2014, she has been teaching graduate history/theory and visualization courses on borderlands, forced displacements, and counter-narratives at Columbia University’s GSAPP. She also joined the urban design faculty in 2017, teaching the Water Urbanism studio on water infrastructures and inequalities along the Jordan valley.
Akawi is also a member of the Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia University, and serves on the steering committee of the Sijal Institute for Arabic Language and Culture. She has co-edited, together with Amale Andraos and Caitlin Blanchfield, the book The Arab City: Architecture and Representation (Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2016). She completed her professional degree in architecture in Jerusalem (B.Arch 2009). In 2011, she received her MS in Critical, Curatorial and Conceptual Practices in Architecture from Columbia University’s GSAPP, where she received the CCCP Thesis Award. Her thesis investigates the role of the archive in the formation of alternative political and spatial imaginaries in Palestine.


Ziad Jamaleddine

Ziad Jamaleddine is Assistant Professor at Columbia GSAPP and co-founder and partner of L.E.FT Architects based in Brooklyn and Beirut. He has been teaching Advanced Architecture and Urban Design Studios, seminars in the History & Theory sequence, and summer workshops at GSAPP since 2014.
Jamaleddine is a practitioner and scholar with a particular research focus on architecture in the Middle East—rigorously interrogating topics such as religious architecture and religiosity in public space, affordable housing in conservative societies, urbanism and infrastructure in relation to water resources and scarcity, and the question of reconstruction in post-war cities. His writings have been published in Climates: Architecture and the Planetary Imaginary (Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2016), After Belonging (Lars Müller Publishers, 2016), and The Arab City: Architecture and Representation (Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2016). His historical research on the architectural typology of the mosque was presented at the Oslo Architecture Triennale (2016) and at Studio-X Istanbul (2017). Among the built projects by L.E.FT is the award-winning Amir Shakib Arslan Mosque in Moukhtara, Lebanon (2017), the Beirut Exhibition Center (2011), and a new residential development in Saudi Arabia, currently under construction.


Maureen Abi Ghanem

Maureen Abi Ghanem is a PhD student in the Urban Planning program at Columbia GSAPP. As an architect and urban designer trained in a post-conflict city, Beirut, Lebanon, her research focuses on how planning can promote equitable, inclusive and socially-cohesive environments in cities affected by conflict.
As a former shelter coordinator at the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Lebanon at the height of the Syrian crisis between 2014 and 2016, she was part of a team devising policies and implementing projects to manage the urban challenges of refugees and vulnerable communities. This included negotiating guidelines and securing tenure to ensure access to affordable housing, managing the adaptive reuse of sub-standard residential buildings and schools, and coordinating neighborhood and water infrastructure upgrades to mitigate social tensions in areas affected by displacement. Abi Ghanem’s career objective is to continue working on development and humanitarian projects that respond to urban crises as well as to contribute to research on the central role planning should play in conflict cities.
Abi Ghanem holds a Bachelor of Architecture from the American University of Beirut (AUB) and Master in Urban Design through a joint program between AUB and the Brandenburg University of Technology in Germany (BTU). She has also worked as an architect and urban designer with architecture and real estate firms in the Middle East. Since relocating to New York in 2016, she has been a research consultant with different NGOs and UN agencies, and is now Director of Operations at the Consortium for Sustainable Urbanization (CSU).


Magda Maaoui

Magda Maaoui is a PhD Student in Urban Planning at Columbia GSAPP. Her current focus is on the evaluation and comparison of housing policy programs in American and French metropolitan areas, in how they perpetuate - even exacerbate - existing logics of inequality and poverty.
She will be a participant-observer in a practice-based initiative in parallel with the development of the Algiers 2030 Master Plan. The initiative has experience holding participatory workshops, anchored in the historic district of the Casbah, and the popular neighborhood of Bab-el-Oued.
The two areas are both characterized by a very strong neighborhood culture, and the fact that they concentrated violence during conflicts that tore the city in the 1990s, and are still neighborhoods where violence is strong. Workshops have the following goal: to collectively re-imagine aspects of the everyday functioning of these neighborhoods, through residents’ eyes. In the long run, the project aims at becoming a catalyst for the voices of Algiers, by organizing a forum where city-dwellers, artists and intellectuals are gathered in one single physical and symbolic space to discuss the future of housing.


Bernadette Baird-Zars

Bernadette Baird-Zars is a PhD candidate in urban planning at Columbia University where she works on local implementation of land use and housing initiatives. Her current research traces how informal rules of municipal land practices shift over transitions in Mexico and Syria. This project receives funding support from the Lincoln Institute for Land Policy and USAID-OCHA. Bernadette is a partner at Alarife Urban Associates where she has worked on urban development projects and analyses of affordable housing, land and governance for over a decade across Latin America and the Middle East. She has recently co-authored articles published in the Journal of Planning Education and Research and Middle East Law and Governance, and is an editor of a forthcoming textbook: Zoning: Planning for the 21st Century (Routledge 2019).
At the post-conflict cities lab, Bernadette will connect several components of her dissertation research to broader inquires of their post-conflict contexts. In her examination of the shifting practices regulating construction during Aleppo’s armed conflict, she will build on computer vision analyses of building activity with narratives from interviewed planners and officials, both in Aleppo and those displaced to neighboring countries. By detailing how practices develop and institutionalize during active conflict, she hopes to identify pragmatic arenas for more equitable land planning and housing schemes in Syria’s reconstruction. In the outskirts of Guadalajara, Mexico, her research engages with large territories historically enmeshed in criminal and narco-violence; her analysis of the development of municipal land regulation practices suggests ways in which the ‘back offices’ of city hall can help engender post-conflict safety and regeneration.


Gizem Karagoz

Gizem Karagoz is a dual degree candidate pursuing Masters of Architecture and Masters of Science in Urban Planning at Columbia University GSAPP. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Architecture and Environmental Science from Barnard College. Her interdisciplinary background facilitated an interest in developing participatory design and planning practices. Her research explores questions of informality, equity and resiliency in the built environment, with a focus on cities experiencing environmental and political conflict. Her most recent work traces the geo-spatial implications of exclusion in Istanbul’s urban development sites. Aside from research, Gizem has experience as an architectural designer working on housing and urban design projects. She currently serves as coordinator of the Post-Conflict Cities Lab.


Jacey Chon

Jeeyoung “Jacey” Chon is a first year candidate for Masters in Urban Planning at GSAPP. Her research interests include refugees and sustainable development in African cities. Most recently, she worked on a research paper exploring the paths of Yemeni asylum seekers in South Korea, and their transition into the new society against the odds of cultural differences. With a passion to serve vulnerable and marginalized communities, she has spent much of her personal time overseas in between her academic and professional career. Among many summers spent in the Dominican Republic, Honduras, Guatemala, China and Kenya, the time spent in Nairobi remains most memorable. There, she built an affordable, eco-friendly and sustainable housing prototype for the Maasai tribe alongside its locals. Registered architect with a decade of professional experience, Jacey’s expertise spans over transportation, aviation and institutional sectors of New York City. She holds a Bachelor of Architecture from Pennsylvania State University.


Maya Ephrem

Maya Ephrem is a first year candidate for Masters in Urban Planning at GSAPP with an intended concentration in Community and Economic Development and International Development Planning. She holds a B.A. in Public Policy from NYU, where she was a Development Impact Research Fellow at Africa House, NYU’s leading interdisciplinary institute devoted to the study of contemporary Africa. Her research focused on a low-income housing scheme commissioned by the Ethiopian Ministry of Urban Development and Construction. This experience encouraged Maya to pursue study in planning with broad interests in housing and resiliency in post-conflict African cities. Aside from research, she also has experience working for nonprofits based in San Francisco and New York City that focus on uplifting vulnerable communities. She is a current FCNY Community Planning Fellow for Brooklyn Community Board 13.


Laura Postarini

Laura Postarini, MSUP ‘19, worked as a summer intern fellow at Public Works Studio based in Beirut, Lebanon. Public Works is an organization dedicated to structure and implement community centered design solutions at an architectural and urban level, primarily for informal settings in Lebanon and the region. She contributed in designing a process of participatory planning for refugee camps; the work involved research and fieldwork in Mar–Elias, a Palestinian refugee camp in Beirut. The aim of the project was to implement the participatory practices and transform an informal football field used by young dwellers into a formal public space. This project later developed into her thesis research where she analyzed a case study in order to inform how to better develop the planning, implementation, operation and maintenance process for the Mar Elias field. This case study was based in an informal peripheral settlement in Bogotá, Colombia, where an internally displaced population has had experience with public space improvement and participatory training programs with positive effects for the community. This analysis concentrated on the importance of developing multi-sectoral partnerships with well-founded participation from every stakeholder through the various stages of the planning process, which ensures long term sustainability for the project. The research focused as well in the importance of providing refugees and displaced populations a right to the city which they now inhabit but are not recognized as citizens.