Jala Makhzoumi

Jala Makhzoumi (Arabic: جالا مخزومي; born 1949) is an Iraqi landscape architect, currently serving as an adjunct professor at the American University of Beirut. She researches subjects within landscape design, including sustainable urban greening and postwar recovery strategies. Makhzoumi has co-authored books such as Ecological Landscape Design and Planning: The Mediterranean Context and The Right to Landscape. In 2023, she was elected Vice President of the International Federation of Landscape Architects. She is the Middle East Chapter President of the IFLA. Makhzoumi's also co-founded "UNIT44", a Lebanon-based design and planning practice of landscape and urban design, and landscape architecture.

Early life and education

Born in Iraq in 1949 to a Kurdish mother and Lebanese father, Makhzoumi grew up in Baghdad and spent most of her summers in Lebanon, specifically Dhour El Choueir. She joined the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Baghdad in 1971, where she studied architecture. While studying, Makhzoumi took interest in the relationship between ecology and design. Upon graduation, she moved to the United States to attend Yale University, where she received a master's degree in Environmental Design.

During her upbringing in Baghdad, Makhzoumi mentions how authoritarian rule in Iraq steered her away from political issues; it was only until she moved to Beirut in 2001 where she became interested in the intersection between politics and landscape architecture, particularly due to the existence of a more vocal political community and freedom of press in Lebanon.

Research, career, and activism

After graduating from Yale, Jala returned to Baghdad where she taught environmental sciences at the University of Technology for fifteen years. During this period, Makhzoumi researched the intersectionality of ecology and landscape, with a primary focus on vernacular settlements and practices invoked by local Iraqi communities. However, Iraq witnessed two substantial wars:  the Iraq-Iran war, which severely influenced Makhzoumi's ability to travel, and the first Gulf war of 1990, which forced her to relocate from Iraq. This was when she decided to pursue a PhD at the University of Sheffield and complete her dissertation in landscape architecture.

Whilst in the United Kingdom, Makhzoumi developed a ecological landscape methodology and applyed it to the context of Northern Cyprus. Her work intersected heavily with that of Gloria Pungetti, an Italian scholar and landscape architect, which eventually led them to publish two books: Ecological Landscape Design and Planning (1999) –  and later on, The Right to Landscape (2016). In 2001, Makhzoumi joined the American University of Beirut where she co-founded the BS in Landscape Design and Ecosystem Management, where she worked as both a professor and program coordinator from Fall of 2001 to Spring of 2007.

Makhzoumi was involved with the "AREC Rural Technology Park: Climate Change and Sustainable Livelihoods in Lebanon" project. and worked with a team from AUB to revive the Erbil Inner Green Project after being neglected due to security reasons. The proposal for the Erbil Inner Greenbelt aimed to curb the expansion of the city and unchecked urban development, enhance the local microclimate, and provide a recreational landscape for residents.

Her work as an activist includes advocating for Dalieh of Raouche to be a public space for local communities in Beirut in the post-Civil War era of Lebanon, and protesting against other types of private development.