Muhammad Mashhood Arif is a professional Urban Planner, Transportation Planner, and Architect. At present, he is based in Belgium.

Currently, he is a doctoral candidate in the Faculty of Architecture at the KU Leuven, Belgium. He received a Master’s Degree in Transportation Sciences and specialized in “mobility Management” from the University of Hasselt (2015-2017), Belgium. He has done his undergrad in City & Regional Planning (2010-2014) at the University of Engineering and Technology, Pakistan.

He initiated his research on the two most significant issues in Pakistan, housing and transportation planning. During his undergrad, he wrote his thesis and published an article on Improving the bidding power of poor through low-cost housing: Case of Lahore, Pakistan. His Master’s research at UHasselt aimed at achieving the learning from the Seoul, which is undoubtedly one of the world’s best transportation systems. He went to South Korea for data collection. He presented his Master’s Thesis on the topic: Comparison of Mode Choice Behavior for the towns of Bundang and Ilsan, South Korea, and graduated with his Master’s with great distinction.

In his professional experience, he worked at national & international urban planning and transport organizations for up to three years. He has worked as a researcher at the Korea Institute of Science & Technology (KIST), where he conducted Agent-Based Modelling to develop and forecast transportation needs and demand at the city scale. He also worked as a Senior Transportation Analyst at Urban Unit Pakistan. In collaboration with World Bank, he developed the framework for new connectivity corridors in relation to CPEC (China–Pakistan Economic Corridor. Moreover, he worked as an Assistant Director in Lahore Development Authority, Urban Planning Public Organization, where he planned, designed, developed, and executed city-level policies.

Motivated by every day dealing and experiencing the life of informal dwellers as a part of his professional job, he got entirely submerged by the thinking that these settlements could be more of a solution than a problem. In the wake of this, he initiated his Ph.D. research on exploring the insights into the public spaces in informal settlements that eventually led to their improvement.

 

His Ph.D. research “Multilayered Public Spaces as Productive Assets towards more Sustainable Informal Settlements: The case study of Lahore, Pakistan” explores the relationship between people and public spaces in the informal settlements of Lahore. His research attempts to understand how public spaces in informal settlements are appropriated and the ways in which the people of settlement produce, consume, transform, express, and give meaning to those spaces. His research proposed that public spaces, when seen as a rich and layered concept, can create an incremental urban change in such neighbourhoods towards greater sustainability.

His research is being supervised under the supervision of Prof. dr. Yves Schoonjans (Dean of the Faculty of Architecture, KU Leuven) and co-supervision of Prof. dr. Oswald Devisch (UHasselt).

You can follow Mashhood on these links:

www.linkedin.com/in/drmashhood

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Muhammad-Arif-113

https://www.kuleuven.be/wieiswie/en/person/00126861

http://lirias.kuleuven.be/cv?Username=U0126861