Nida Rehman
Assistant Professor, Architecture
- MMCH 412A
Architecture
5000 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
Bio
Nida Rehman is a Pakistani-born urban geographer and architect, and Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon University, where she serves as Track Chair for the PhD in Architecture program. As an interdisciplinary scholar and educator, Nida examines histories, politics and ecologies of urban landscapes and infrastructures. Working at the intersection of urban political ecology, environmental humanities and post/de-colonial studies, her work explores how discourses, governance and experiences of urban nature are shaped by processes of colonialism and uneven development, as well as how people engage with urban nature to create possibilities for change.
Nida explores these issues through her research on cultural landscapes and political ecologies in Lahore, Pakistan; through collaborative and public-facing work as co-founder of the South Asia Urban Climates collective; and community-centered approaches to environmental and spatial justice in the Mon Valley. She is currently working on a book, The Intractable Garden: Improvement and unruliness in Lahore’s landscapes, which offers a historically situated reading of the garden as an expansive conceptual category to trace ongoing legacies of colonial improvement as they reverberate in contemporary urban landscapes, as well as grounded practices and alternative visions for just socio-ecological futures. Her recent publications include articles in International Journal of Urban and Regional Studies, Antipode, Planning Perspectives, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, and The Botanical City (2021). She is co-editor of the book Crowdsourcing, Constructing, and Collaborating: Methods and Social Impacts of Mapping the World Today (Bloomsbury 2020).
She is the recipient of the 2022 SOM Foundation Research Prize, the 2019 Urban Studies Foundation seminar series award, as well as grants and awards from Imagining America, Leading and Learning Initiative, The Royal Geographical Society, the European Research Council project Rethinking Urban Nature, The Foundation for Urban and Regional Studies (now IJURR Foundation) and others. From 2020 to 2023 she directed Spaces for Containment and Care, supported by the CMU Center for Arts in Society, with leading conversations, research and student work on the social and spatial production of the built environment and collective life during epidemics.
Education
- Ph.D. Cultural Geography, University of Cambridge 2020
- SMArchS. Architecture and Urbanism, Massachusetts Institute of Technology 2009
- BArch. Architecture, Cornell University 2002