Jala Makhzoumi

Iraq

Dr Jala Makhzoumi is an Iraqi architect and academic who specialises in landscape design, she taught architecture and landscape at the University of Technology in Baghdad for 15 years. Jala studied architecture in the University of Baghdad from 1971. She received her Master in Environmental Design from Yale University and a PhD in landscape architecture from Sheffield University. Her expertise is in ecological landscape design and planning where she applies a holistic, developmental approach to mediate community needs with ecosystem health, biodiversity protection and landscape heritage conservation. Her professional and academic expertise includes postwar recovery, energy efficient site planning and sustainable urban greening. She has served as landscape planning consultant to the Damascus master plan 2030, Saida Urban Sustainable Development Strategy 2015, Baghdad Comprehensive City Development Plan 2030 and the conservation and revitalization of the historic holy towns of Kadhimia and Najaf. In 2013 Jala co-established UNIT44, a Lebanon based design and planning practice offering a wide range of services in architecture, landscape architecture, ecological planning and urban design.

In 2001 she co-founded the BS in Landscape Design and Ecosystem Managment. She has many research publications and books in the field of landscape. In 2007 she co-founded the Cambridge Centre for Landscape and People in Cambridge. Jala serves on the editorial board of Landscape Research and the Journal for Marine and Island Culture. Her publications include Ecological Landscape Design and Planning: the Mediterranean Context, co-author Pungetti (Spon, 1999) and The Right to Landscape, contesting landscape and human rights, co-editors Egoz and Pungetti (Ashgate, 2012) and Horizon 101 (Dar Qonboz, 2010) a reflective collection of paintings and prose on landscape and identity. 

Jala was the recipient of the first Tamayouz Women in Architecture and Construction Award. An interview of Jala Makhzoumi by Ricardo Karam conducted in 2012 can be viewed here.