A Dying Empire, Planning Education, and Promise of Humane Urbanism: Faranak Miraftab
Feminist urban scholar Faranak Miraftab examines planning education's constraints and envisions anticolonial, relational pedagogy for building a more humane world.
Why we picked this
Miraftab's work sits at the intersection of feminist theory and urban planning practice. She argues that the discipline itself needs decolonizing before it can build cities that serve everyone, not just capital.
Faranak Miraftab, Professor of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, delivers the PhD in Urban Planning Annual Lecture at Columbia GSAPP. Her talk contends that imagining and building a new world requires recognizing the institutional constraints of planning education while pursuing collaborative, anticolonial scholarship grounded in grassroots movements led by women.
Miraftab’s research bridges feminist theory and planning practice, examining how urban development perpetuates or challenges structures of inequality. The conversation with Tom Slater of GSAPP explores what a genuinely humane urbanism might look like, and what stands in its way.
Free and open to the public.