Our team
Bureau Gladys is a multidisciplinary team of researchers, designers, and urban practitioners bridging academia and practice to explore space, culture, and society across the Global South.
Dalia Wahdan
Anthropologist
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Associate Professor (adjunct) at the School of Global Affairs and Public Policy of the American University in Cairo and Co-founder of Bureau Gladys for Urban Studies. Dalia held post-doctoral research fellowships at Freiburg University, Germany, and Jawaharlal Nehru University, India after a Ph.D. in comparative urban sociology from the University of Pune, India and master’s and bachelor’s degrees of Anthropology from the American University in Cairo. She is the winner of the research grant of the Middle East Research Competition in 2009, the Tricontinental Scholarship Grant (CODESRIA, CLASCO, IDEA) in 2013, and the Arab Council for the Social Sciences Research Grant in 2018-19. She worked as a consultant to the governments of Egypt, India, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and South Africa. She published three books on privatization, spatial politics, and urban development in addition to multiple peer-reviewed articles on urban planning, heritage, and transport infrastructure in the Global South. Her latest publications are a chapter on land, infrastructure and finance in Infrastructural Times by Bristol University Press and a co-edited book on mass transit in Cairo by Dar el-Maraya titled We Cross the Road.
Lamia Bulbul
Social Development and Gender Specialist
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Lamia is a social development and gender specialist with over 20 years of academic and professional experience in the area of gender and development in Egypt and the Middle East. Her professional experience has been versatile and prolific in terms of positions held, projects conducted, and countries involved. In addition, she has a strong academic foundation in Sociology and social development. She has a long academic experience as an assistant professor of sociology at the American University in Cairo. During her eight years of teaching, she taught several sociology courses, community development, and development studies courses both at the undergraduate and the graduate levels. Lamia is a co-founder and partner in Bureau Gladys for urban and architectural studies in Cairo. Lamia obtained her PhD in Development Studies and planning from University College London (UCL) in 1999, MA in Sociology from the American University in Cairo in 1993.
Yomna El Gendy
Architect and Urban Researcher
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Yomna is an architect and urban researcher with a master’s degree in Architectural Engineering from the German University in Cairo. Since 2015, she has taught and researched architecture and urban design at leading institutions in Egypt, mentoring students in international design competitions where her teams earned top recognitions, and co-leading collaborative studios. As a Co-Founder at Bureau Gladys for Urban Studies, she has curated and coordinated exhibitions, research projects, and events that connect academic inquiry with urban practice. Her work centers on an interdisciplinary approach that links the built environment with social and cultural studies, aiming to challenge the status quo and open new perspectives on contemporary and future urban development.