About Luna Khirfan
I am an architect-turned-urban planner focused on climate justice and heritage. With graduate degrees in archaeology and planning, I research co-design, daylighting urban streams, and equitable adaptation. I’ve authored two books, 27 journal articles, and contributed to IPCC and UN reports. I co-lead research on African informal settlements.
Areas of Expertise
Urban Design; Climate Change AdaptationSelected Publications
a) Books
1) Luna Khirfan, editor (2017). Order and disorder: urban governance and the making of Middle Eastern cities. McGill-Queens University Press: Montreal.
2) Luna Khirfan (December 2014). World Heritage, Urban Design and Tourism: Three Cities in the Middle East. Routledge: London.
b) Articles in refereed journals
1) Shahad Kashmiri and Luna Khirfan (2025). Cultural ecosystem services and sense of place: post-rehabilitation assessment of Wadi Hanifah’s performance from a socio-cultural lens. Journal of Urbanism: International Research on Placemaking and Urban Sustainability, 1–23.
2) Luna Khirfan (2025). Urban stream daylighting as a nature-based solution: Transformative or incremental? A scaffolded review of Seoul’s Cheonggyecheon and Zürich’s Bächkonzept. The Journal of Environmental Planning and Management. 1-34
3) Tapan Dhar and Luna Khirfan (2023). A Sixfold Urban Design Framework to Assess Climate Resilience: Generative Transformation in Negril, Jamaica. PLOS One, 18(6): e0287364 (27 pages).
4) Niloofar Mohtat and Luna Khirfan (2023). Epistemic justice in flood-adaptive green infrastructure planning: The recognition of local experiential knowledge in Thorncliffe Park, Toronto Landscape and Urban Planning, Vol. 238, October 2023, 104834 (14 pages).
5) Zachary Lamb and Luna Khirfan (2022). Against Climate Haussmannization: Transformation Through and in Urban Design. Journal of Planning Literature, Volume 38, Issue 3 (10 pages).
6) Niloofar Mohtat and Luna Khirfan (2022). Distributive justice and urban form adaptation to flood risks: a GIS-based study for the identification of priority neighborhoods in Toronto. Frontiers in Sustainable Cities, Vol 4:919724 (20 pages).
7) Luna Khirfan, Niloofar Mohtat, and Ben Daub (2021). Reading an Urban Palimpsest: How the Gradual Loss of an Urban Stream Impacts Urban Form's Connections and Ecosystem Functions. Frontiers in Water, 3:754679 (23 pages).
8) Luna Khirfan and Megan Peck (2021). Deliberative Q-method: A combined method for understanding the ecological value of urban ecosystem services and disservices. MethodsX, Volume 8: 101547 (17 pages).
9) Luna Khirfan (2021). Arab Middle Eastern Urbanization. Oxford Bibliographies.
10) Mark Pelling, Winston T. L. Chow, Eric Chu, Richard Dawson, David Dodman, Arabella Fraser, Bronwyn Hayward, Luna Khirfan, Timon McPhearson, Anjal Prakash & Gina Ziervogel (2021): A climate resilience research renewal agenda: learning lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic for urban climate resilience, Climate and Development, 14:7, 617-624
11) Niloofar Mohtat and Luna Khirfan (2021). The climate justice pillars vis-à-vis urban form adaptation to climate change: A review. Urban Climate 39, 100951 (16 pages).
12) 10) Megan Peck and Luna Khirfan (2021). Improving the validity and credibility of sociocultural valuation of ecosystem services in Amman, Jordan. Ecological Economics, Vol. 189: 107111 (17 pages).
13) Luna Khirfan, Niloofar Mohtat, Megan Peck, Andrew Chan, and Lucas Ma (2020). Dataset for assessing the scope and nature of global stream daylighting practices. Data in Brief, Volume 33, 106366 (22 pages).
14) Luna Khirfan, Megan Peck, and Niloofar Mohtat (2020). Digging for the Truth: A Combined Method to Analyze the Literature on Stream Daylighting. Sustainable Cities and Society. Volume 59, August 2020, 102225 (12 pages).
15) Luna Khirfan, Megan Peck, and Niloofar Mohtat (2020). Systematic content analysis: A combined method to analyze the literature on stream daylighting (de-culverting). MethodsX 7 (2020) 100984 (14 pages).
16) Luna Khirfan, Niloofar Mohtat, and Megan Peck (2020). A Systematic Literature Review and Content Analysis Combination to "Shed Some Light" on Stream Daylighting (Deculverting). Water Security 10 (2020) 100067 (10 pages).
17) Luna Khirfan and Hadi El-Shayeb (2019). Urban Climate Resilience through Socio-Ecological Planning: A Case Study in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island. Journal of Urbanism. Volume 13, Issue 2, Pages: 187-212.
a) Chapters in books
1) Luna Khirfan (2025). Deliberative methods for cultural ecosystem services: Lessons from the field. Chapter 24 in “The Routledge Handbook of Cultural Ecosystem Services”, edited by: Pamela D. McElwee, Karen Allen, Rachelle K. Gould, Minna Hsu, and Jun He. Pages: 310-326
2) Luna Khirfan and Hadi El-Shayeb (2021). Charlottetown’s climate adaptation: reclaiming land ‘from’ or ‘for’ water? In Terra, Sorta, Firma: Developing the Littoral Gradient, edited by Fadi Masoud with Brent D. Ryan. ACTAR: Barcelona, Spain. Pages 246-257
3) Luna Khirfan (2020). The new climate urbanism: a physical, social, and behavioural framework. Chapter 11 in Climate urbanism: towards a critical research agenda, edited by Vanesa Castán Broto, Enora Robin, Aidan While. Palgrave MacMillan: London, UK. Pages: 171-193.
4) Luna Khirfan (2019). Planning and unplanning Amman: Between formal planning and non-traditional agency. In The Palgrave Handbook of Bottom-Up Urbanism, edited by Konrad Kickert and Mahyar Arefi. Palgrave McMillan: Cham. Pages: 201-2018.
5) H. Brown, R. Angus, D. Armitage, S. Brown, A. Charles, L. Khirfan and J. MacFadyen (2017). Building Resilient Coastal Communities in the Context of Climate Change. In Building Community Resilience: From Dark Horses to White Steeds. Edited by: L. Brinklow and R. Gibson. Island Studies Press, Charlottetown, PEI. Pages: 169-190.
6) Luna Khirfan (2017). Introduction to Order and Disorder: Urban Governance and the Making of Middle Eastern Cities. Edited by Luna Khirfan. McGill-Queens University Press: Montreal. Pages: 3-31.
7) Luna Khirfan and Bessma Momani (2017). Tracing Participatory Planning In Amman. In Order and Disorder: Urban Governance and the Making of Middle Eastern Cities. Edited by Luna Khirfan. McGill-Queens University Press: Montreal. Pages: 79-102.
8) Luna Khirfan (2017). Suburban Redesign, Human Scale. Essay in: Still Detached and Subdivided? Suburban Ways of Living in North America, edited by Markus Moos and Robert Walter-Joseph. Jovis, Berlin. Pages: 123-127.
b) Reports
1) Luna Khirfan (2024). Mapping the Solution Space for Climate Action: The Role of Urban Planning and Design, Chapter 5 in the World Cities Report 2024: Cities and Climate Action. UN-HABITAT, Nairobi, Kenya. Pages 125-156.
2) David Dodman (Jamaica/United Kingdom); Bronwyn Hayward (New Zealand); Mark Pelling (United Kingdom), Vanesa Castán Broto (United Kingdom/Spain); Winston Chow (Singapore); Eric Chu (USA/Hong Kong, Special Administrative Region, China); Richard Dawson (United Kingdom); Luna Khirfan (Canada); Timon McPhearson (USA); Anjal Prakash (India); Yan Zheng (China); Gina Ziervogel (South Africa) (2022). Cities, Settlements and Key Infrastructure in: Impacts, Vulnerability, and Adaptation. The Sixth Assessment Report by Working Group II of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
Recent Courses Taught
PLAN 309: Site Planning and Design, PLAN 409: Community Design Studio, PLAN 346: Public Participation and Mediation, PLAN 408/648: Seminar on Urban Design
Associate Professor