Researcher in residence at the Maison Suger | September 2024 - May 2025
Hiba Bou Akar is an Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at Columbia University. She is also the founder and director of the Post-Conflict Cities Lab at Columbia University. She received her Ph.D. in City and Regional Planning 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 Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The project
Title: Sedimentary Urbanization: Displacement, Refugeeness, and the New Geographies of Dead Futures
"Sedimentary Urbanization is an ethnographic and archival book project investigating how lowincome Lebanese families and Syrian refugees access affordable housing in Beirut’s peripheries. These refugees, the book shows, occupy geographies that I call “dead futures,” planned futures interrupted by war, economic crisis, or environmental collapse. Following the way low-income refugee families and Syrian refugees inhabit the geographies of these dead futures, I uncover the possibilities for new modes of urban inhabitation and existence to emerge— especially for those who would not otherwise have access to shelter, in the context of state abandonment for the urban poor."
Hosting institution: Institute for Ideas and Imagination part of Columbia University center at Paris, Reid Hall
Selective bibliography
Bou Akar, Hiba. 2018. For the War Yet to Come: Planning Beirut’s Frontiers. Stanford University Press. (Winner of two Best Book Awards and one honorable mention)