Yazid Ninsalam

Yazid's research adapts established ground–air–space sensing approaches to landscape architecture, integrating close-range and drone photogrammetry, aerial LiDAR and satellite remote sensing to read landscapes across varying intensities of urbanisation.

While these technologies emerge from traditions of surveying, mapping and remote observation that have often served colonial forms of territorial knowledge and control, his work asks how sensing might be practised differently. Rather than treating landscapes as abstract surfaces to be measured from a distance, he positions sensing as a situated and relational practice, attentive to local knowledge systems, lived experience, and the ways communities understand and inhabit land and water.

Across metropolitan river corridors, rapidly urbanising valley settlements and arid wadi systems, this ground–air–space approach brings multiple scales and forms of knowledge into dialogue. In doing so, it reveals how human actions become spatially legible while questioning who observes, what is made visible, and whose knowledge shapes the interpretation of landscape.

Yazid’s approach is inherently collaborative, working with international organisations, local governments, and communities to ensure that research outcomes are grounded, actionable, and sensitive to place. His work often bridges theory and practice, contributing to both academic knowledge and real-world planning and design strategies.

At its core, his research asks how to reposition ground-air-space sensing into dialogue with situated observation, local knowledge and lived experience so that the map no longer claims to be a complete or singular account of landscape. It is a practice of attention: learning to read the signs within land, water and living systems, while recognising that such knowledge carries responsibility.