Nida Rehman

Lucian & Rita Caste Assistant Professor, School of Architecture

Bio

Nida Rehman is an urban geographer and architect interested in the politics, processes, and aesthetics of urban environments. Her interdisciplinary scholarship and teaching builds critical and contextual perspectives on urban nature. Bringing frameworks and methods from urban and architectural studies of the global South, critical geography, and environmental humanities her work asks how ecological change, environmental governance, and imaginaries of landscape are rooted in ongoing histories of colonialism, how they shape uneven development, and how people engage with urban nature to create possibilities for change.

Dr. Rehman’s research has been published in Planning Perspectives, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes, MONU, and The Botanical City (Jovis 2020); and she is the co-editor of Crowdsourcing, Constructing, and Collaborating: Methods and Social Impacts of Mapping the World Today (Bloomsbury 2020). She has received grants and awards from the Urban Studies Foundation, The Foundation for Urban and Regional Studies, The Royal Geographical Society, and the European Research Council project Rethinking Urban Nature, and Imagining America, Leading and Learning Initiative. In 2019 she co-organized the USF funded international seminar series Urban Climates: Power, Development, and Environment in South Asia. She directs Spaces for Containment and Care, at the CMU Center for Arts in Society, to develop public conversations and research on the social and spatial production of the built environment and collective life during epidemics. My teaching focuses on critical interpretation of and considered intervention within the urban realm.

Education

Ph.D. Cultural Geography, University of Cambridge 2020

BArch. Architecture, Cornell University 2002