Dr Irit Katz

I am an Associate Professor of Architecture and Urban Studies at Cambridge's Department of Architecture, and a Fellow of Christ’s College. My work focuses on built environments shaped in extreme conditions, with a particular emphasis on spaces of displacement, conflict, spatial injustice, and environmental changes. It builds on my experience as a practicing architect and incorporates a variety of methods including spatial ethnography, participatory and visual methods, policy analysis, archival research, and a strong engagement with cultural and political theories. My research covers historic and contemporary contexts, looking at various forms of human settlement and inhabitation – including urban, rural, camps, and other environments – as ever-changing spatial constellations through which political negotiations and cultural transformations are staged and reworked.

My work has won numerous academic awards including the John Urry Article Prize, the Mellon/SAH Author Award and the RIBA President’s Award for Research. My monograph, The Common Camp: Architecture of Power and Resistance in Israel-Palestine (University of Minnesota Press, 2022), focuses on Israel-Palestine as an extensive laboratory of camps and examines how camps, whether employed by colonial, national and global powers as instruments of control or constructed ad hoc as makeshift spaces of resistance and refuge, are used as versatile mechanisms by which modern societies and territories are administered, negotiated and reorganised. In my co-edited volume Camps Revisited (Rowman & Littlefield’s series Geopolitical Bodies, Material Worlds, 2018), examines the multifaceted spatial forms and meanings of the camp are examined in multiple geopolitical contexts. I am also the cofounder of UNFOLD, Cambridge's decolonising architecture group.

I hold a PhD in Architecture from the University of Cambridge, MA (Magna Cum Laude) in Hermeneutics and Cultural Studies and a B.Arch (Cum Laude) in Architecture from Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem. My career as a practicing architect in Tel Aviv and in London includes work on large scale housing projects such as Peabody Avenue social housing in Pimlico, London (for Haworth Tompkins) and the design of the winning entry for the English Partnerships bid for the housing scheme of the Victorian Stonehouse Hospital in Dartford, Kent (for HTA Architects).

Besides academia, I have published three poetry collections (Hakibbutz Hameuchad, in Hebrew) and enjoy long distance running.

Co-founder of UNFOLD: Towards inclusive, just, and plural environments