Pegah Behroozi-Nobar

Visiting Scholar

Pegah Behroozi-Nobar holds a PhD in Urban Studies from the University of British Columbia (UBC), a Master’s degree in Urban and Regional Planning from Heriot-Watt University, and a Bachelor’s degree in Architecture from the Baha’i Institute for Higher Education (BIHE). Her interdisciplinary research, writing, and activism center on urban inequalities, the political economy of the urban commons, housing justice, and alternative models of social housing in the Middle East. Her work also critically engages with themes of urban informality and self-built settlements.Currently, Pegah is examining the dynamics of the elimination of urban commons and the role of state-led urban governance in this process. She investigates how the privatization of common spaces—such as waterfronts and shorelines—under accelerated urbanization affects marginalized communities’ access to these spaces, shaping their sense of belonging and deepening social and spatial exclusion in the city. She is the co-founder of Diyar Common Matters Society, a British Columbia–based nonprofit organization dedicated to exploring and advocating for the preservation and creation of common urban spaces. The organization conducts community-engaged research aimed at fostering more equitable and just cities across the province. Pegah is also working on her forthcoming book manuscript, titled Squatter Government, which explores how modern governments systematically engage in the confiscation of common and private spaces, specifically targeting marginalized groups.

Participating Years

2026–2027

Radical Imagination: Temporalities and Geographies of Struggle

In a world of deepening crises, of socioeconomic inequities, of environmental collapse, of resurgent fascism and institutionalized authoritarianism, what is the place of radical imagination in creating more just worlds? While some think of the work of imagination as being outside of—at a distance to, or even in a different temporality than—everyday struggle, we want to shine a light on the work of radical practice as a form of imagination. We look to anticapitalist and antiracist organizing and thought, and the complex practices in time and place through which change is not only presented and represented but produced.

2025–2026

Mobility: Transit and Transformation

Crises of mobility have become a key integer of social struggle in the world system. Whether one considers the explosion of different forms of movement or the production of immobility, in carcerality, wagelessness, enclosure, or via the securitization of borders, mobility and its discontents are central to radical activism across local and transnational communities.