Ghazal Jafari

Education

Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), Doctor of Design (DDes)
University of Toronto, Master of Urban Design (MUD)
Shahid Beheshti University (Tehran), Bachelor of Architecture (BArch)

Biography

Dr. Ghazal Jafari is an environmental justice scholar, ecological urbanist, and weaver of Persian and Azeri descent. Her creative work and scholarship intersect multispecies environmental justice, non-Western landscape epistemologies, feminist liberation, Infrastructural geographies, displacements, and political self-determination in conflict zones and constructed peripheries. Her current book project investigates the clash between landscapes of coercion and ecologies of survival in Iran-Iraq borderlands. As part of this endeavor, Ghazal has elucidated the entanglements of women’s liberation and environmental justice in “Woman, Water, Freedom,” Journal of Architectural Education 78: Infidelities (2024), and invisible landscapes of economic sanctions in “Silent Siege: In the Shadow Landscapes of Sanctions” in Constructing Invisibility: Infrastructure, Militarization, and the Extreme Environment (ORO Editions, 2025). She is a coauthor of A Botany of Violence (ORO Editions, 2022). Accompanying this publication was a traveling multimedia exhibition first displayed at the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale (2021), as The Quino Treaty / El Tratado Del Quino, and later at the Elmaleh Gallery, UVA School of Architecture (2022) as La Flora Del Futuro. As part of this broader initiative, Ghazal organized a symposium titled Towards a Flora of the Future: An Initiative on Plants, Climate Activism, Territorial Justice, & Liberatory Feminism (Feb 2022) at UVA School of Architecture. Ghazal is a cofounder of Open Systems, a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization dedicated to public education and opening systemic knowledge. The organization’s collective work amounted in a series of printed and open-source online publications, including “No Design on Stolen Land: Dismantling Design’s Dehumanizing White Supremacy,” Architectural Design 90 (2020), Landscape as Resistance: Pretexts, Subtexts, Contexts In Struggles For Environmental Justice, an edited open-source reader (2016-2021), Confronting Columbus, an open-Source education guide and archive (2019-20); The Missing 400: On The Erasure Of Women From The Urban Environment, book and videographic essay (2016-18). Further publications include coedited book New Geographies: Posthuman (Actar, 2018), “Expulsion by Design,” in Margin and Text: Amplifying Diverse Voices in Architecture (Princeton Architecture Press, 2024), Grounding UPS: An Infrastructural Ethnography of a Logistics Corporation (doctoral dissertation, Harvard GSD, 2018), and “Tehran: Planning the Unpredictable,” Manu 17: Next Urbanism (2012) among others.

Ghazal has been an Aga Khan doctoral fellow and a research fellow at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University. She has received multiple design competition awards and recognitions, including the One Prize Award: Water as the Sixth Borough first prize (2011), Azure Magazine’s Annual Award (2012), YUL/MTL: Moving Landscapes Competition honorable mention (2011), and 6970 - The Spaces in Between Competition honorable mention (2013). 

She currently teaches courses related to urban design, environmental planning, and representational politics. Ghazal’s multidimensional work and teaching show a long-term commitment to cross-cultural dialogue and active solidarity on shared matters of justice and self-determination.

Research Interests

Urban Design, Environmental justice, urban equity, infrastructural ecologies, landscape, Indigenous epistemologies, geopolitics, conflict zones, spaces of resistance, art, cultural heritage, more than human worlds, political self-determination