Hello,

My name is Majd Al-Shihabi 🏴.

I am a technologist, turned urban planner, turned technologisturbanplanner. I am a PhD student at the University of Toronto in the Geography and Planning department. My research is around the energy modelling that the City of Toronto uses to decide policy for its climate action plan, TransformTO. I am exploring how I can use participatory modelling to understand the ontology of models, but also the ontology of modelling as a method. I think about how epistemic communitiea are formed, and how they become a part of the right to the city.

Previously, I did my undergrad in systems design engineering at the University of Waterloo, in Canada. I also applied systems thinking to the city, when I did a master’s degree in urban planning at the American University of Beirut. In 2018, I was the inaugural Bassel Khartabil Free Culture Fellow, with the support of Creative Commons, Mozilla, and Wikimedia foundations. The fellowship enabled my journey with Palestine Open Maps, and a few other archival projects.

You can reach me by email, or can follow me on Twitter Mastodon (but also reluctantly Bluesky, I usually cross-post using openvibe), or view some of the code I wrote on GitHub or GitLab.