Inclusive Spaces: Religious Infrastructure in the City

Dr Ala’a Shehabi is a lecturer in Middle East Politics at EISPS and a Senior Research Fellow at The Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment. Previously, she was the deputy director of the Institute for Global Prosperity at UCL. Trained in economics, she is now a transdisciplinary and mixed methods researcher focusing on public goods; infrastructure and development; energy justice; participatory action methods and citizen-scholarship through citizen science and citizen assemblies with a Middle East area focus. Through her experience in large scale research projects, she is interested in decolonial knowledge production and ethical international collaboration. She sits on conference planning committee at the ACSS and an ethics working group at the Social Science Research Council.

Said Mahathir is a PhD candidate at the Development Planning Unit (DPU) of UCL working under Professor Haim Yacobi supervision. His thesis “Religious Infrastructure of Muslims in London: A Study of the Production of 'Lived Space'” focuses on understanding the interconnection between the production of religious 'lived space' and 'religious ecology' and how these interconnections turn into a platform providing for and reproducing religious life in the city in the context of London. He holds a BSc in architecture from the Islamic University of Indonesia and an MSc in urban planning from National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan. His research is sponsored by The Ministry of Religious Affairs of Indonesia.

Hanadi Samhan is an urban practitioner and a PhD candidate at The Bartlett, UCL’s Faculty of the Build Environment. She has extensive experience in urban development projects in the MENA region, leading and delivering urban planning schemes and design solutions for clients in both the private and public sectors. Hanadi’s PhD research investigates Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon through their volumetric dimension. She is also co-leading a research project called ‘Yawmiyat’ that aims to archive daily life spatial violence in Lebanese.