Mona Fawaz
Member of the Master Jury 2019

Mona Fawaz is Professor in Urban Studies and Planning and the coordinator of graduate programmes in Urban Planning, Policy and Design at the American University of Beirut (AUB). She is also director of the Social Justice and the City research programme at the Issam Fares Institute of Public Policy at AUB. The research programme, which focuses on making Lebanon’s cities more inclusive, aims to formulate an agenda for research, mobilisation and policy advocacy between scholars, policymakers and activists.

Ms. Fawaz’s own scholarly interests include methods to make cities more inclusive. Her research spans urban history and historiography, social and spatial justice, informality and the law, property and space, as well as planning practice, theory and pedagogy.

Professor Fawaz was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Studies at Harvard University and an affiliated fellow in the Lebanese Center for Policy Studies. She served as a member of the Affordable Housing Institute MENA Research Advisory Board and a member of the scientific committee of the Order of Engineers and Architects in Lebanon in 2017/18.

She is the author of over 40 scholarly articles, book sections and reports in Arabic, French and English, and has edited several collections of essays. In addition, Ms. Fawaz is intimately involved in Beirut’s ongoing transformations, publishing in the local press and advocating for upgrading informal settlements, protecting the urban commons, improving liveability, adopting inclusive planning standards, and defending the right to the city.

After earning a bachelor of architecture at the American University of Beirut, Professor Fawaz completed a Masters in City Planning and a PhD in City Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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