User:Wikilabne/Mona Fawaz

Mona Fawaz (Arabic: منى فواز) is a professor in Urban studies and Planning and the coordinator of the Graduate Programs in Urban Planning, Policy and Design in the department of Architecture and Design at the American University of Beirut (AUB). She is the co-founder of the Beirut Urban Lab, an interdisciplinary research space which promotes scholarships on urbanisation and the improvement of cities. Fawaz is also the director of the Social Justice and the City research program based at the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at AUB. She was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies during the 2014-2015 academic year and the Summer of 2017. She was often assigned as regional, national and international juror, which includes the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 2019.

Early life and education
Born in Lebanon, Fawaz studied at the American University of Beirut where she earned a bachelor's degree in Architecture in 1995. She grew up in Lebanon where she went to school and soon joined the Mouwaten (Arabic: مواطن) movement which aimed at discussing the contrast between South African and Lebanese politics. During her senior year at the American University of Beirut, she was accepted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States for her graduate studies and earned her master’s degree in City and Regional Planning in 1998 which was a deviation from her former path of Lebanese architecture practices studies that she considered too confining and later obtained her PhD from the Department of Urban Studies and Planning in 2004 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to focus on building better city life by focusing on designing socially inclusive and ecologically and environmentally responsible city plans.

Scope and approach
Fawaz’s research focuses on the improvement of cities through better inclusivity and viable public spaces. Her main interests span across multi-disciplinary subjects. Amongst them are urban history, historiography, social and spatial justice, informality and the law, poverty and space, in addition to planning practice, theory and pedagogy.

In her writing, Fawaz opts for an interdisciplinary approach considering actor strategies, legal/informal regulatory frameworks, and property regimes. Her focus is on social production of city spaces as demonstrated in her empirical case studies stemming from informal settlements and large-scale public and private urban developments. Fawaz has published over 50 scholarly articles in the span of 33 years which have gathered recognition and merit from her peers and institutions such as the American University of Beirut.

Findings and impact
Fawaz investigates informal settlements and works towards upgrading them. She explains how urban laws adopted in Lebanon tend to criminalize the poor while completely disregarding the structural inequity that generates impoverishment. She was involved in the 2018 launch of the Beirut Urban Lab at the American University of Beirut in a researching capacity, along with 3 members of faculty. The Lab is home to 25 researchers today and is responsible for various publications about Lebanon’s urban development. These include city governance, post-disaster recovery and public spaces. The Beirut Urban Lab aims to catalyze data-driven research and thinking in its area of operation. The most important research conducted so far has been a comprehensive map of Beirut including architectural information such as infrastructure layers, as well as cadaster limits. The Beirut Urban Lab played an important role during the Lebanese liquidity crisis by tackling housing challenges such as investigating mortgage’s impact on low-income households and creating a user-fed platform called “A City of Tenants” which gathers data on rentals. Fawaz also promotes the use of renewable energy and the green program. One of her projects with a lab at MIT aimed at exploring urban and housing regulations while advocating for the use of solar energy. In 2017, Fawaz 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.

During the last 20 years, she has been working on theories of change and sharing her knowledge with activist groups working on urbanism in the city. Part of her research investigates the privatization of the Beirut coast which is lawfully considered as a public space.

Fawaz was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies during the 2014-2015 academic year and the Summer of 2017. During her fellowship year, she was writing a book titled "When the Plan Fails and Urban Regulations Are Bypassed: Narrating Beirut from its Peripheries". Her work sheds light on the various narratives that took part in Beirut’s development: from informal settlements, refugee camps, and old villages, especially during the period between 1950 and 1975. She tells an alternative history of Beirut by looking at the city’s history and its post in-dependnace period and by laying out an alternative narrative derived from the standpoint of urban peripheries.

Fawaz is also the founder and coordinator of the Social Justice and the City Program at Issam Fares Institute, a research-based platform which aims at redirecting public policy making through various advocacy works.

Published work

 * The Politics of Property in Planning: Hezbollah's Reconstruction of Haret Hreik (Beirut, Lebanon) as Case Study


 * Towards the Right to the City in Informal Settlements, in Locating Right to the City in the Global South
 * Neoliberal Urbanity and the Right to the City: A View from Beirut's Periphery 
 * Planning and the refugee crisis: Informality as a framework of analysis and reflection 
 * Living Beirut's security zones: An investigation of the modalities and practice of urban security 
 * Hezbollah as urban planner? Questions to and from planning theory