About this Site

Research in Architecture and Urbanism

Architecture and urbanism are not simply professional disciplines, they are fields of knowledge production that shape how people live, move, gather, and belong. My research has operated consistently at this intersection of scholarship and spatial reality, examining how cities are experienced by their inhabitants, how housing typologies transform under pressure of economic and cultural change, and how urban qualities are produced (and withheld) in rapidly growing and often underrepresented contexts. 

Conducted across Gulf cities, North African urban environments, European city centres, and cities of the Global South, and attracting more than £2.7 million in competitive research funding from bodies including the Qatar National Research Fund, the UK Research Councils, the Scottish Funding Council, and the European Commission, this is research that takes seriously the complexity of the built environment and the responsibility of those who study it. The full scope is documented across the Research Expertise, Funded Research, and Research Contexts and Methods pages, with outputs recorded across the Publications section.

The decade-long programme of research on Doha, funded by the Qatar National Research Fund and producing two major Routledge monographs, numerous journal articles, and a series of special issues, examined Doha as an emerging global metropolis, interrogating its housing transformations, migrant communities, architectural identity, and place within the broader dynamics of Gulf urbanisation. It established a research agenda that others have since built upon. Equally significant is the recent YouWalk — YourVoice, YourCity project, which produced a freely available mobile application enabling citizens to co-assess the quality of their urban open spaces, tested and validated in Newcastle upon Tyne and generating publications in the Journal of Urban Design and Smart and Sustainable Built Environment. Both projects exemplify the conviction that rigorous research should produce knowledge and tools that communities can actually use.

• Negotiating a Cosmopolitan Urban Hub: Policy Implications for Migration, Housing, and Sustainability in Metropolitan Doha — International Planning Studies, 31(2), 2026

• A Mobile Application Tool for Co-Assessing Urban Open Spaces — Journal of Urban Design, 30(4), 2025

• Urban Resilience and Sustainability Through and Beyond Crisis — Smart and Sustainable Built Environment, 13(2), 2024

• People–Place Narratives as Knowledge Typologies for Social Sustainability — Buildings, 14(4), 2024

• A Multimodal Appraisal of Zaha Hadid's Glasgow Riverside Museum — Buildings, 13(1), 2023

Architectural Education and Design Pedagogy

Few questions in architecture are more consequential than how the discipline is taught. The values embedded in architectural education, about what counts as knowledge, whose experiences are emphasized, what relationship exists between design and society, shape the profession for generations. My engagement with architectural education has never been peripheral to my research identity; it has been a primary field of scholarly inquiry, sustained across more than 30 years of teaching, writing, editing, and institution-building in schools of architecture on three continents. This work encompasses six books devoted specifically to pedagogy, more than 30 peer-reviewed journal papers on design teaching and educational theory, four guest-edited special issues, and an international network of collaborators across schools of architecture worldwide, documented across the Pedagogy section, including dedicated pages on Pedagogical Publications, Transformative Pedagogy in Architecture and Urbanism, Spatial Design Education, Design Studio Pedagogy, and Architectural Pedagogies of the Global South.

Spatial Design Education: New Directions for Pedagogy in Architecture and Beyond (Ashgate/Routledge, 2015/2016), drawing on 25 years of research and surveys of architectural schools internationally, proposes a theory of trans-critical pedagogy and has been described by reviewers from Oslo, Toronto, Washington, and Oxford as indispensable reading for every design educator worldwide. The Routledge Companion to Architectural Pedagogies of the Global South (2022), co-edited with Harriet Harriss and Ane Gonzalez Lara, brings together 55 authors from across Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and beyond to systematically challenge the dominance of Western pedagogical frameworks, a landmark contribution to the decolonisation of architectural knowledge. Running through this entire pedagogical body of work is the relationship with Henry Sanoff, one of the most influential figures in participatory design, whose foreword to Transformative Pedagogy in Architecture and Urbanism cemented a long intellectual exchange and friendship, honoured and extended in The Participatory Design Legacy of Henry Sanoff: Co-Creation and Community-Based Design Learning (Routledge, 2026), co-authored with Celen Pasalar and Zeynep Toker.

• The Participatory Design Legacy of Henry Sanoff — Routledge, 2026

• Global Patterns of Navigating Uncertainty in Architectural Education — Architecture, 6(1), 2026

• ADAPT2SDG: A Decolonised Pedagogical Typology in Architecture — The Journal of Architecture, 30(1), 2025

• The Socius in Architectural Pedagogy: Transformative Design Studio Teaching Models — Architecture, 5(3), 2025

• The Routledge Companion to Architectural Pedagogies of the Global South — Routledge, 2022

Books, Research Outputs, and Critical Writing

The published record of this work is substantial by any measure. It includes more than 20 authored and edited books, over 170 peer-reviewed journal articles, more than 45 book chapters, and a sustained series of critical essays published in architectural and design magazines across the Arab world, the United Kingdom, and the United States. This is a body of writing that reflects the breadth of the intellectual project and the conviction that scholarship must be communicated clearly, critically, and accessibly. The full record is available across the Books, Book Chapters, Peer-Reviewed Articles, and Critical Essays pages of this site, with direct links to publishers and open-access versions wherever available.

Demystifying Doha: On Architecture and Urbanism in an Emerging City (Ashgate/Routledge, 2013/2016), co-authored with Florian Wiedmann, was among the earliest and most rigorous scholarly examinations of Doha as an emerging global metropolis, establishing a framework for understanding Gulf urbanisation that has informed a generation of researchers and practitioners. Its companion volume, Building Migrant Cities in the Gulf: Urban Transformations in the Middle East (Bloomsbury, 2019), extended that inquiry to the wider Gulf region, examining how cities built largely by migrant labour are reshaping questions of identity, belonging, and architectural production across the Arabian Peninsula. 

At the other end of the chronological arc, two 2026 Routledge books mark the continued reach and relevance of this output: Algorithmic Colonialism in Architecture: Decolonising AI for Pedagogy, Research, and Practice, co-authored with Madhavi P. Patil, confronts the uncritical adoption of artificial intelligence tools that encode Global North assumptions into design, practice, and education; and The Participatory Design Legacy of Henry Sanoff, co-authored with Celen Pasalar and Zeynep Toker, recovers and critically examines the enduring relevance of community-centred, co-creation approaches to design and planning learning. Between these landmarks lie books and publications on architectural excellence in Islamic societies, on the quality of urban life, on housing in emerging economies, and on the decolonisation of knowledge, a body of work whose coherence lies in the persistent question of how architecture and urbanism can be made more responsive to the people and places they serve. These books and publications, spanning more than three decades,  demonstrate the continued urgency of this scholarly project.

• Algorithmic Colonialism in Architecture: Decolonising AI for Pedagogy, Research, and Practice — Routledge, 2026

• Extending the Epistemic Foundations of Housing Knowledge — in Transdisciplinarity for Affordable and Sustainable Housing, Edicions La Salle, 2026

• Between the 'Other' and the 'Same': The Alterity of the Alternative Economies in Sustainability Transitions — Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions, 2025

• Influence and Resistance in Post-Independence Egyptian Architecture — Routledge, 2022/2024

• Architectural Excellence in Islamic Societies: Distinction through the Aga Khan Award for Architecture — Routledge, 2020/2024

• Building Migrant Cities in the Gulf — Bloomsbury, 2019

Scholarly Publishing and Editorial Leadership

Building the infrastructure of a scholarly field, including the journals, the editorial standards, the networks of reviewers and contributors, is slow, unglamorous, and some sometime tedious work, but It is essential. Without rigorous, accessible, well-edited journals, research cannot circulate; without editorial leadership that opens doors to new voices and new questions, disciplines calcify. 

Since 2007, I have served as Chief Editor of Archnet-IJAR: International Journal of Architectural Research, building it from a small open-access platform into a Q1-ranked journal in Architecture, Urban Studies, Cultural Studies, and Visual and Performing Arts, in the Scopus and Web of Science databases,  the only architectural research journal to hold that ranking in four categories. I have also served as Guest Editor, International Collaborator, and Honorary Editor of Open House International across more than a decade of special issues, and since 2025 as Co-Chief Editor of ABC2: Journal of Architecture, Building, Construction, and Cities, launched in partnership with Professor Farzad Rahimian of Loughborough University. The full editorial record is documented on the Editorials & Reviews and in the three journal pages.

Over more than 20 years of thematic special issues, Archnet-IJAR has addressed emerging research agendas that other outlets were slow to recognise: sustainable urbanism in rapidly growing cities and the role of women, the architecture of migrant communities, the built environment implications of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the decolonisation of architectural knowledge. The journal's trajectory, from a modest open-access initiative to a dual Q1-ranked publication with a global editorial board and a Web of Science Impact Factor, reflects what sustained, principled editorial leadership can achieve. ABC2, launched in 2025, carries that ambition forward into a new interdisciplinary platform that integrates and extends the editorial trajectories of two established journals, Archnet-IJAR: International Journal of Architectural Research and Smart and Sustainable Built Environment, and that is committed from its inception to open access, rigorous peer review, and the widest possible geographical representation among its authors and readers.

• Archnet-IJAR: International Journal of Architectural Research — Chief Editor since 2007

• Open House International — International Collaborator and Editor 2006–2017; Chief Editor 2017–2022; Honorary Editor 2022–present

• ABC2: Journal of Architecture, Building, Construction, and Cities — Co-Chief Editor since 2025

Doctoral Supervision, Research Development and Mentorship

The most lasting contribution any academic can make is to the researchers they help develop. Over many years and across four institutions, in Egypt, Qatar, Scotland, and England, I have served as primary supervisor to 22 doctoral researchers who have completed their PhDs, and as second supervisor to a further 9 doctoral researchers. These researchers have gone on to academic positions, professional practices, and policy roles across the world. The topics of their research reflect the full breadth of the intellectual agenda documented on this site, inlcuding urban fragmentation and spatial continuity in Saudi Arabian cities; informal settlements and social innovation in Greater Cairo; quality of urban life in Lilongwe, Malawi; spatial justice in Accra, Ghana; housing and urban transformations in Egypt, Libya, Iraq,  Botswana; inclusivity in public open spaces in Newcastle; challenges of post industrial cities in Europe; housing production and cultural identity in Gulf cities; post-war urban development and social cohesion. This supervisory record is documented on the Research Collaborators and Funding Organizations page, alongside a broader international network of more than 70 research collaborators across more than 20 countries.

For example, Laura MacLean's PhD at the University of Strathclyde (2021) examined quality of urban life in Lilongwe, Malawi — one of Sub-Saharan Africa's fastest-growing cities and among the least studied in the built environment literature. Her research produced not only a completed thesis but a series of co-authored journal publications that have placed Lilongwe on the map of international urban scholarship. Preeti Pansare's PhD at Northumbria University (2025) developed an Inclusivity Index for assessing urban public open spaces, a rigorous, practical tool grounded in people-environment research with direct applications for planners and designers. Her findings were published in the ABC2 journal and presented at the UIA World Congress of Architects in Copenhagen, bringing this work to an international professional audience from the moment of its inception and each development. These two examples stand for a much larger record of investment in researchers whose work is now shaping the field.

• 100+ Books That Shaped Our Understanding of People–Place Dialectics — ABC2 Publishing, Glasgow, 2025

• Urban Form as a Driver for Inclusivity in Public Open Spaces: A Case from Glasgow — in Design for Inclusivity, Springer, 2023

• Including Local Actors' Perspective in Neighbourhood Sustainability Assessment — Smart and Sustainable Built Environment, 2023

• Sustainable Development Goals and the Future of Architectural Education — Archnet-IJAR, 17(3), 2023

• The Five Controversies of Market-Driven Sustainable Neighbourhoods — Social Sciences, 12(7), 2023

• Assessing the Quality of Urban Life in Three Neighbourhoods, Lilongwe, Malawi — Urban Design and Planning, 174(3), 2021

Research-Based Consulting

Scholarship that cannot inform practice is incomplete. Throughout my career, the boundary between academic research and professional engagement has been deliberately permeable because the questions that drive the research are the same questions that practitioners, policymakers, and communities face in the real world. Research-based consulting has therefore been a consistent thread running alongside the academic record, demonstrated through technical review assignments, commissioned urban assessments, design charrettes, and strategic advisory work across Egypt, the Gulf, Europe, and the United States. This dimension of the work is documented within the Research Expertise and Funded Research pages.

The Aga Khan Award for Architecture commissioned on-site technical review assignments for housing projects in El Oued and Wilad Djallal in Algeria, requiring independent expert assessment of built projects against criteria of architectural quality, cultural responsiveness, social impact, and technical performance, exactly the kind of evaluative framework that research in people-environment studies makes possible. In the Gulf region, consulting on neighbourhood sustainability assessment brought systematic research-based methodologies to bear on the practical challenge of measuring and improving urban quality in rapidly developing contexts. In the United States, work with Adams Group Architects in Charlotte, North Carolina, on strategising workplaces and learning environments translated research insights directly into design decisions. In Egypt's Red Sea region, charrette processes for ecolodge design engaged local communities and environmental constraints within a structured participatory framework. 

At the policy level, a commissioned evidence review for the World Health Organization Regional Office for Europe examined how European cities have responded to crisis conditions, from natural hazards to pandemic disruption, and how urban resilience strategies, environment and health priorities, and place-based governance are being shaped in response; this work sits at the intersection of research, public health, and urban policy in a distinctive manner. 

Advisory and consultancy work has also extended into architectural governance; as Advisor and Consultant to the Architecture and Design Commission of the Saudi Ministry of Culture, contributions to the development of guidance for architecture schools on Excellence in Architectural and Design Education have brought research-informed perspectives directly to bear on the standards and frameworks that shape how the next generation of architects and designers is trained. Across each of these engagements, the contribution of academic research to real-world decisions has been concrete, documented, and significant.

• Excellence in Architecture and Design Education: Guidance and Strategic Framework — Commissioned by the Architecture and Design Commission, Ministry of Culture, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, 2023

• UNESCO-UIA Architectural Education Commission — Co-Director, appointed by the International Union of Architects, Paris, France, since 2021

• UIA Award for Innovation in Architectural Education — Director and Curator, three editions, International Union of Architects, Paris, France, since 2016 (three editions in 2021, 2023, and 2026)

• Digital Built Environment and Data Science — Commissioned by the Council of the Heads of Built Environment, United Kingdom, 2023

• Resilient by Design: Building Cities to Adapt Through Crisis — Commissioned by the WHO Regional Office for Europe, Copenhagen, Denmark, 2022/2023

Talks, Interviews and Public Engagement 

Research finds its full life not only in publications but in conversation — in the lecture halls, conference rooms, podcast studios, and online platforms where ideas are tested, challenged, and extended across disciplinary and cultural boundaries. A substantial record of public engagement has accompanied this body of work throughout, reaching audiences of practitioners, students, policymakers, and members of the public who would never encounter a journal article but who are nonetheless shaped by the questions it addresses. Keynote addresses, invited lectures, panel discussions, podcasts, and media interviews have taken this work to audiences across four continents — and the full record is documented on the Talks, Videos, and Interviews page.

The series of coffee interviews with Professor Attilio Petruccioli of the Bibliotheca Orientalis in Bari, exploring emerging cities, Islamic architecture, the Aga Khan Award, and the urban implications of COVID-19, exemplifies what public scholarly conversation can be at its best: rigorous but accessible, reaching audiences in Italy, the Arab world, and beyond long after the original conversations took place. Keynote addresses at IASTE - International Association for the Study of Traditional Environments on evolving traditions; Royal Institute of Technology - Stockholm, Sweden on unlearning and emancipating pedagogies; Ozyegin University in Istanbul on post-pandemic urbanism, at the University of Naples Federico II on decolonising architectural knowledge, and at the Kuala Lumpur Architectural Festival on the future of design pedagogy,  have brought these ideas into live, cross-cultural debate before hundreds of architects, educators, and researchers. The Emerald podcast series, the Sharjah Architecture Triennial podcast, and interviews with Common Edge and the Qatar National Research Fund newsletter have extended this reach further still, into formats that meet audience learning expectations where they are.

• Talks, Videos and Interviews — a record of keynote addresses, invited lectures, panel contributions, recorded interviews, and video conversations from 2007 to 2023, covering architecture, urbanism, pedagogy, and the built environment across four continents

• Covid-19, Architecture, the City, Urban Life — a dedicated record of keynote lectures, podcast interviews, and recorded panel discussions on post-pandemic urbanism and the built environment, 2020–2022

• Dissemination — a record of conference papers, presentations, and public lectures linked to funded research projects and scholarly outputs

• News: Architecture and Urbanism — a personal blog covering selected academic news, publications, talks, interviews, and announcements, since 2007

Awards and Recognition

The work documented on this site has attracted recognition from some of the most respected institutions in international architecture and higher education, recognition that is not incidental to the scholarly record but part of it, reflecting the judgements of international peers and juries about the significance and impact of this contribution across research, education, and professional engagement. The full record is available on the Awards page, alongside a record of visiting professorships at ETH Zurich, the Technical University of Munich, the University of Maryland, Bilkent University, the University of Belgrade, and University of Malaya, the University Putra Malaysia, among others.

• The UIA 2017 Jean Tschumi Prize for Excellence in Architectural Education and Criticism, awarded by the International Union of Architects at its World Congress in Seoul and previously given to Kenneth Frampton, Juhani Pallasmaa, Joseph Rykwert, and Peter Cook, recognised the cumulative contribution to architectural education and criticism which I have developed through books, editorials, international networks, and sustained scholarly engagement with the discipline's most urgent questions. The jury citation described the work as having influenced generations of architects worldwide and commended the founding of schools of architecture in two countries. The designation and affiliation with several professional and research organizations, the Fellowship of the Royal Society of Arts, and the Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy together reflect recognition across scholarship, civic life, and the advancement of learning, a breadth that echoes the breadth of the work itself.

  • • • Awards — including the UIA Jean Tschumi Prize for Excellence in Architectural Education and Criticism — International Union of Architects, Paris, France, 2017

      • UIA Award for Innovation in Architectural Education — Director and Curator, three editions, International Union of Architects, Paris, France: 2021, 2023, and 2026

      • RIBA President's Medal 2025 — Jury Member — Royal Institute of British Architects, London, United Kingdom; jury chaired by Professor Elena Marco, University of the West of England, Bristol, United Kingdom — Jury Chair Endorsement, 2025

      • Supervision of students receiving the RIBA President's Medal for Best Dissertation (2020), a Commendation Award in Architecture and Environmental Psychology (2017), a Shortlisted Award in Architecture and Environmental Psychology (2016), and a Shortlisted RIBA PhD Thesis Award (2012) — Royal Institute of British Architects and Environmental Design Research Association, United Kingdom

      • Supervision of students receiving the UIA International Confrontation of Projects — Aga Khan Award for Architecture Prize and AIA Prize (1999), and the Award of the French Institute of Architects (1999) — International Union of Architects, Paris, France