A Personal and Professional Website
I love to understand how people interact with space. The question fascinates me on scales both large – the movement of populations due to geographical characteristics – and small – the way individuals settle within rooms. I find it most relevant, though, at the level of the city.
This is the subject field I intend to spend my career in.
Lyon’s Legacy is an essay I wrote and serialized for ARLnow.com in early-mid 2021. It uses the story of Frank Lyon to say something about the history of housing and racism in Arlington County, and to suggest a reform to our zoning code that would make housing more affordable and undo some of the exclusion that Lyon and his peers left us with.
I used Erin Davis’ code to make pretty maps of parts of the DC area. You can buy prints here, but the host website will get 90% of the money, so I encourage you to just download the files and print them yourself at Staples or wherever.
As part of my research with the Center for the Study of the Built Environment in Jordan, I used the Global Walkability index to assess a number of neighborhoods and generate a measurement for the entire city. Here is my report, and here is the presentation I gave at the Congress for the New Urbanism.
I’m the Youth Advocacy Representative for Arlington’s Plan Lee Highway Community Forum, and so I recently worked with Mireya Vitela, Coordinator of the Buckingham Youth Brigade, to organize an activity involving the Youth Brigadiers in Plan Lee Highway. Here’s my report, which I sent to Arlington staff and to others involved in the PLH process, and here are a few other documents related to the activity:
Since the end of 2018, I have been working as a freelance journalist, writing about urban design, planning, and development, mostly in the DC area. My articles cover a range of topics, from mobility planning to gender inclusivity to development explainers.
Riding public transit in Jordan can be very confusing. Although buses run fixed routes, it is hard to learn what those routes are. Unlike in the US, the government does not publish official maps of the various bus routes, and almost no marking exists at street level. The clearest indication of where a bus might be headed is usually a young man, leaning out of its door, hollering the name of the destination – but even then, intermediate stops are ignored. Ma’an Nasel, a local nonprofit, has helped solved this problem by publishing خطوطنا / Our Lines, an unofficial map. Volunteers rode buses, figuring out where they went, and the data was gathered and publicized.
Although Ma’an Nasel addressed this issue, to an extent, within Amman, the intercity Jordanian lines can still be quite mysterious to outsiders, particularly those who do not speak Arabic. Seeing this opportunity to contribute, I collaborated with Ma’an Nasel and led a group of volunteers to gather information and produce maps of Amman’s major intercity stations. I indexed the various lines radiating from the capital, gathering information on fares and hours of operation, and began synthesizing the information into user-friendly maps to assist Ammanis and visitors in making use of the country’s extensive intercity network.
To view a draft of the map of North Station (the final versions will be produced in collaboration with an Amman-based graphic design firm), see this link.
As part of my work with Armory Development in Providence, I explored the post-industrial neighborhood along the banks of the Woonasquatucket River and developed a set of maps to help with placemaking in this unique urban environment. Please take a look at the maps at This Link
This quotation, which I found attributed to Henry David Thoreau in the writings of Aldo Leopold, is the name of the anthology I assembled. This anthology is a collection of some of my favorite passages, and the passages that have most influenced me, from my readings on urbanism and geography in the past year. It’s released Creative Commons, so please print copies as much as you’d like. I’d rather not say more, though, and let the collection speak for itself at this link.
In the fall of 2016, I worked Professor Yesim Sungu-Eryilmaz at Brown University, along with data provided by the City of Providence and assistance from Professor Rachel Franklin, to analyze the spatial properties of recorded housing code violations in Providence, RI.
I hope that this will become an ongoing project, but at the end of last semester I assembled a finished product, or at least a draft of one: a poster and academic write-up for submission as part of my introductory GIS class with Prof. Franklin. The poster is available here and the essay is available here. Please contact me if you’re interested in any further details!
In the fall of 2016, I wrote an essay for my Modern Arabic Poetry class about the city of New York in the work of Arab poets. I discuss how Sa’adi Youssef, Adonis, and Amjed Nasser use New York metonymically to criticize the United States, relying on its concrete physical and social features to discuss abstract elements of American society. Read the essay here (Arabic only).
