Rania Ghosn is Assistant Professor in the School of Architecture & Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, MA, USA.

She is also a Partner of Design Earth. Her work examines the urban condition at the scale of the territory to open up a range of aesthetic and political concerns for design research, and her current project focuses on technological systems such as those of energy, trash, and agriculture as objects of inquiry into our ideas and practices of the urban environment.

She holds a Doctor of Design from Harvard University, a Master in Geography from University College London, and a Bachelor of Architecture from American University of Beirut, Lebanon.

She is editor of New Geographies 2: Landscapes of Energy (Harvard GSD, 2010), which spatializes the relations of energy and space mapping in particular the physical, social, and representational geographies of oil. Her current book project, Geographies of Oil across the Middle East: The Trans-Arabian Pipeline, traces the biography of a transnational oil transport infrastructure to document territorial transformations associated with the region’s incorporation into a global fossil fuel economy.

With the support of a University of Michigan OVPR grant (2012-2014), Rania Ghosn has lead a research project on Landscapes of Ethanol and run Masters thesis unit on the American Corn Belt. She is also co-author of Geographies of Trash (Actar, 2015), for which she received with partner El Hadi Jazairy a 2014 ACSA Faculty Design Award. The book charts the geographies of trash in Michigan across scales to propose five speculative projects that reclaim the forms, technologies, economies and logistics of the waste system in the production of new aesthetics and politics of urbanism.

Her essays have appeared in publications such as San Rocco, Journal of Architectural Education, MONU, Bracket, Thresholds, and Perspecta. Her most recent publications include: 8Mile Baseline: A Dialectical Image of The Urban Crisis (2015); Airpocalypse: A Short Geostory (2014); Energy Regions: Production without Representation (2014) and Move Along There is Nothing to See (2012).

Prior to joining MIT, she was Assistant Professor at University of Michigan and Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Boston University, where she organized a yearlong seminar series on energy and society.

Rania Ghosn was a workshop expert on the Trans-Arabian Pipeline in the Middle East at the 5th International Forum for Sustainable Construction dedicated to “Infrastructure Space” held April 7-9, 2016 in Detroit, USA.