RGP Cycle One Grantees and Projects
Luna Khirfan, Eliana Abu Hamdi: A Contested Public Realm: Development, Inequality and Mobility in Amman and Beirut
This regional comparative study of Amman and Beirut will analyze the official and public narratives of participatory planning within city developmental policies. Specifically, we will contrast the (official)stated intentions with the resultant products of these development strategies. Theoretically, this study will contribute to the on-going debate on the conditions of development in Arab cities through analyzing the push and pull (economic and political) factors as they contribute to the realization of neo-liberal modes of development. It will also contribute to the inequality discourse in Arab cities through assessing the (inclusionary/exclusionary) processes of place making practices, and also, their impacts on the (spatial/social) urban mobility. Methodologically, this study will deploy a nested, multi-scaled approach that combines content analysis, in-depth interviews, on-line survey questionnaire, and focus groups. Such strategies facilitate a comparative analysis between Amman and Beirut, while simultaneously allowing for a tailored approach that accounts for each city’s distinctive conditions. Empirically, this study will yield outcomes that are directly relevant to the policies and practices of urban planning in Amman and Beirut.
Luna Khirfan is Associate Professor at the School of Planning, the University of Waterloo, in Ontario, Canada. She received her PhD in Urban and Regional Planning from the University of Michigan in 2007 and since then, her research has focused on urban planning and urban design in the context of Middle Eastern cities. She investigates the cross-national transfer of planning knowledge particularly, the transfer of sustainability concepts from Toronto to Amman and from Vancouver to Abu Dhabi. She also investigates urban governance in Middle Eastern cities especially, in Egypt, Lebanon, and Jordan with particular emphasis on mega developments, inequality, and mobility. Additionally, her research addresses the challenges that face historic cities as they adapt to meet the needs of their residents and to mitigate the pressures of tourism. In that regard, Luna’s more recent interests address issues related to climate change in coastal regions particularly, with regards to urban design. Luna was a Visiting Fellow at Columbia University Middle East Research Center in Amman during 2011-2012, a Visiting Scholar at the Amman Institute for Urban Development during 2010-2011, and a Fulbright Scholar between 2007-2009.
http://uwaterloo.academia.edu/LunaKhirfan
Eliana Abu-Hamdi is a PhD Candidate in the department of architecture at the University of California at Berkeley focused on Environmental Design and Urbanism in Developing Countries, and a designated emphasis in Global Metropolitan Studies. Prior to pursuing her PhD she earned a Master of Science degree in Architecture at UC Berkeley in 2009. In 2002 she earned a BA in Architecture, also from UC Berkeley and continued on to pursue a Master of Architecture degree the following year, eventually earning her MARCH in 2005 from the Newschool of Architecture and Design. Her research focuses predominantly on Amman, Jordan where she is most interested in issue of moderated forms of urban governance and the surplus of abandoned Neo-Liberal projects in the city. Eliana was a Foreign Language Area Studies Fellow in 2010 and 2011 and the recipient of the Spiro Kostof Fellowship for study in Architectural History, as well as a Mellon Grant for Research, and a fellowship for Arab Studies from the Al-Falah Program of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.
