Rania Ghosn is Assistant Professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of Architecture + Planning and 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.

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. Ghosn is a recognized scholar on the relations of energy and space. She is editor of New Geographies 2: Landscapes of Energy (Cambridge: 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), she has lead a research project on Landscapes of Ethanol and run a Project Territory M.Arch. Thesis Unit on the American Corn Belt. Ghosn is also co-author of the forthcoming Geographies of Trash (New York: 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.

On matters of urban infrastructures, Ghosn has participated in symposia and lectured in various venues, including Harvard GSD, Penn Design, Columbia GSAPP, Princeton School of Architecture, Architecture League New York. Her essays have appeared in publications such as San Rocco, Journal of Architectural Education, MONU, Bracket, Thresholds, and Perspecta. Ghosn’s 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), Hassi Messaoud Oil Urbanism (2014), A Geographic Stroll Around the Horizon (2014), Where Are the Missing Spaces (2012), Move Along There is Nothing to See (2012), Soft Energy Controversy (2012). She was also recognized with honorable mentions for competition entries in Fairy Tales: When Architecture Tells a Story (2014) and Rio Cityvision (2013).

Prior to joining MIT, Ghosn 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. 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.