Luna Khirfan is Associate Professor at the School of Planning, the University of Waterloo, in Ontario, Canada. Her research underscores community engagement in urban planning and design, especially in Middle Eastern cities. Her first book “World Heritage, Urban Design and Tourism: Three Cities in the Middle East” (Routledge, 2014) explores the relationship between public engagement, place making, and place experience in the urban rehabilitation of Aleppo, Acre, and al-Salt, which are inscribed on UNESCO’s World Heritage List. Her recently published edited volume “Order and Disorder: Urban Governance and the Making of Middle Eastern Cities” (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017) highlights the dynamics between civil society, the state, and the market in shaping Amman’s and Cairo’s urban landscapes. Dr. Khirfan has also researched and published on the cross-national transfer of planning knowledge from Toronto to Amman and from Vancouver to Abu Dhabi. More recently, she has been focusing her attention on the involvement of local communities in climate change adaptation through deploying the charrette as a participatory tactic, a data collection method, and a knowledge exchange mechanism. Dr. Khirfan’s current research project explores the potential of de-culverting/daylighting urban streams for place-making and for climate change adaptation and mitigation.
