Magda Maaoui is Assistant Professor of urban planning at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and a Researcher affiliated with the Joint Center for Housing Studies, the Healthy Places Design Lab, the Harvard Data Science Initiative, and the Bloomberg Center for Cities. Prior to that, she was an Urban Planner and Research Associate at the Atelier Parisien d’Urbanisme (APUR), acted as an external expert consultant for the OECD, and was an Adjunct Professor at the University of Paris Cité.
She explores the housing production cycle from start to finish: as the consequence of regulation and policy, an act of design and construction, and a catalyst for neighborhood health and environmental outcomes. In her research, she contrasts this long-exposure housing study between neighborhoods of the Global North and South, comparing coalitions and results. In her work as a planner, she puts this scholarship into practice, engaging community groups and political leaders to respond to the global housing crisis, one roof at a time.
Maaoui is a member of the APA, ACSP and Urban Affairs Association networks and a reviewer for Housing Studies and the Revue Urbanités. She has written or co-written peer-reviewed articles for the Journal of Urban Affairs, Journal of Planning Education and Research, Housing Studies, Urban Studies and the Berkeley Planning Journal. She also cofounded the participatory design practice Ateliers d’Alger, a collective focusing on urban planning solutions for neighborhoods in Algeria and in France, based on local participatory workshops, civic engagement and the curation of expertise from local and transnational professionals, which has received several awards and grants from the Mairie de Paris, the Davis Foundation and the Ford Foundation.
