Rasha Arous

Having worked on the rehabilitation of my old town in Syria upon graduating from civil engineering with AKTC gave me a chance to re-direct my interest to a more appealing area. I thus embarked on a journey to understand the relationship between people and the built environment and gained a masters degree in urban planning in developing countries from Oxford Brookes and another double masters in Integrated Urbansim and Sustainable Design from Stuttgart and Ain Shams. Through these degrees and in between, I had the opportunity to study and work on aspects of urban informality, housing, and on urban development in culture and heritage-based approaches. Later to the Syria crisis, I started looking at these aspects through the lens of the "displaced" and mapped out the dispersion of refugees in Egypt layered with urban forms, governance and self-organized social structures. Through that, I rolled an Urban Development Strategy for UNHCR, Egypt and managed the programme for 7 years. In my PhD, I want to try to bring these contrasted experiences into conjunction altering my understanding of everyday urbanism, placemaking , multicultural urban settlements, and the heritage in flight.