Publications
Cairo’s Plaster Casts
Cairo’s Plaster Casts (2025, ed. Luc Merx) documents Cairo’s vanished stucco workshops, where craft, display, and cultural expression converge. Through photographs and essays, the book traces their distinctive aesthetics and links to Egypt’s colonial history, modernity, and identity.
Notes from the Land of Forgetting
Notes from the Land of Forgetting reflects on Cairo’s urban transformation through a 16th-century map, contrasting a once-balanced city–landscape relationship with today’s expansive, infrastructure-led urbanism, and questioning what has been lost along the way.
Tales of the TREM
Tales of the TREM is a publication documenting 26 international design-led projects developed under the Creative Industries Fund NL’s TREM program. Through storytelling, interviews, and visual narratives, it explores how designers across Turkey, Egypt, Russia, and Morocco engage with urban challenges, inclusivity, and cross-cultural collaboration to imagine more equitable futures.
Common Sense Is Not So Common
This publication examines the neighborhood as a contested and underdefined scale within urban planning. Through reflections on international summer schools, it critiques top-down planning models and questions consensus-driven participation. The text advocates for critical, conflict-based engagement and bottom-up practices as tools to rethink spatial production and collective urban life.
The Coloniality of Infrastructure
This research examines self-colonization in African cities through urban planning, infrastructure, and design practices in Cairo and Accra, revealing how imported models of modernity continue to shape everyday life while also generating forms of resistance and insurgent urban subjectivities.
Left in Limbo: Unanswered Questions and Unquestioned Answers
A critical reflection on an international student competition in Rio’s Complexo da Maré, arguing for dignity, historical awareness, and urban design that challenges power, inequality, and simplistic ideas of “integration.”
Don’t Trust the Idyll: Meritorious Objectives and Arguable Substance in Dutch Suburbia
This essay critically examines Dutch suburban development under the Vinex policy, exposing the gap between planning ideals and lived reality. It questions the production of large-scale suburbia, arguing that despite claims of compact urbanism, these landscapes reinforced sprawl, spatial monotony, and the loss of urban and rural qualities alike.
This publication reflects on how the European City is taught across architecture and urban design schools, presenting diverse pedagogical approaches through student projects and teaching methodologies. It highlights the plurality of urban thinking—from social relationships and governance to form, heritage, and experimentation—arguing against a single model of the city and embracing heterogeneity as a strength of urban education.