Guest Researcher
Nida Rehman is a Pakistani-born urban geographer and architect, and Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon University, where she serves as Track Chair for the PhD in Architecture program. As an interdisciplinary scholar and educator, Nida works at the intersection of urban political ecology, environmental humanities, and post/de-colonial studies, her work explores how discourses, governance, and experiences of urban nature are shaped by processes of colonialism and uneven development, as well as how people engage with urban nature to create possibilities for change. Nida explores these issues through her research on cultural landscapes and political ecologies in Lahore, Pakistan; through collaborative and public-facing work as co-founder of the South Asia Urban Climates collective; and community-centred approaches to environmental and spatial justice in Pittsburgh and the Mon Valley region.
During her one-year research stay at IRI-THESys, Nida will work on her book, The Intractable Garden: Improvement and Unruliness in Lahore’s Landscapes. The book proposes the garden as an expansive lens to examine the histories of colonial agricultural and horticultural improvement that continue to play out in the city and the practices, ecologies, and imaginings of landscape that run up against prescriptions of colonial design, revealing its partiality and unevenness. She is also working on a related project, Mitti, Mazdoori, Mahaul (soil, labour, atmosphere), a collaboration with artist Hira Nabi which was exhibited at the 2024 Lahore Biennale. The project looks at soils as primary materials that speak to the afterlives of colonial violence and erasure, but also of care, resistance, and making new urban futures from the ground up.
Research Interests
- Urban history and contemporary urbanization in South Asia
- Urban political ecology, critical studies of landscape and infrastructure
- Environmental justice and collaborative design
Social Media
Twitter/X: @ndrm
