Mona El Khafif, an architect, urban designer, and dedicated educator, currently holds the position of Associate Professor at the University of Virginia School of Architecture (UVA). El Khafif is the co-author of the award-winning publication ‘URBANbuild: Local/Global’ (2009), has published ‘Staged Urbanism’ (German edition 2009), and most recently co-edited ‘Next New York’ (2022).
El Khafif’s expertise extends across multiple scales in both her writing and design endeavours, exploring temporal, typological, and collaborative strategies within urban design and architecture. These elements are synthesized in her current book project, “On Urban Prototyping.”
El Khafif obtained her professional degree in Architecture from RWTH Aachen and her doctoral degree in Urban Design from TU Vienna. She was a faculty member at UT Vienna’s Institute for Urban Design and Landscape Architecture from 2000 to 2005. In 2006, she participated in the URBANbuild HUD grant at Tulane University in New Orleans, focusing on post-Hurricane Katrina rehabilitation efforts. Her contributions as Associate Professor at CCA California College of the Arts in San Francisco from 2008 to 2013 saw her leadership of the division’s URBANlab. Subsequently, from 2013 to 2016, El Khafif taught at the University of Waterloo School of Architecture, where she co-founded the school’s DATAlab. In fall 2016, she joined UVA as a tenured professor where she currently serves as the Graduate Program Director for Urban Design and spearheads various funded research projects.
Since 2013, El Khafif has partnered with Ila Berman in SCALESHIFT, a design research firm based in Toronto and Virginia. Her design practice has contributed to numerous temporary urban art interventions and exhibitions, including projects such as ‘10×10 Cities: Green Facts Challenges’, and ‘OPspace’, an installation aimed at reactivating empty storefronts presented at the 2010 ZERO1 Biennial. Additionally, she co-designed iLOUNGE, a temporary public space commissioned by ZERO1 and Northern Spark Minneapolis in 2012. During her time at Waterloo’s DATAlab, El Khafif worked on ’On The Line’ (OTL), a project presenting a transit-oriented cultural guide along the 200 iXpress bus route connecting Waterloo, Cambridge, and Kitchener and ‘Urban Syncopation’, an interactive installation visualizing urban sounds featured at the Gardener Museum in Toronto and the 2018 Venice Biennale Data Matter exhibition.
Most recently, El Khafif has developed a series of smart city design tools through multiple research grants. These include ‘We Are Martinsville’ (WAM), an app-based placemaking and game strategy, ‘Community Center Urban Sensing’ (CCUS), a web-based light sensing platform, and ‘Networked Public Space’ (NPS), an ongoing open-source project investigating environmental sensing and placemaking, which was featured at the 2023 Venice Biennale.