In this series of interviews, we meet the shortlisted candidates for the 2026 Women in Architecture and Construction Award. These women have made outstanding contributions to architecture and the built environment across the Near East and North Africa. The award features two categories: Rising Star and Woman of Outstanding Achievement.
Dr Hiba Alkhalaf is an architect, heritage specialist and researcher working across architectural conservation, cultural heritage management, digital heritage and post-conflict recovery.
Her career spans teaching, research, consultancy and applied heritage practice in Damascus, Homs, Cairo, Tunisia, Libya and the United Kingdom.
In this interview, Dr Hiba Alkhalaf discusses her professional background and her work in heritage conservation across Syria, Libya, Tunisia and Egypt, exploring her role in the MaLiCH project and the rehabilitation of Ghadames Old Town.
She reflects on the importance of integrating traditional women’s crafts into heritage interpretation, connecting academic research with fieldwork, and addressing the challenges of working in post-conflict contexts.
Tell us about your background, and what took you from lecturing in Damascus to co-directing MaLiCH across several of Libya’s World Heritage sites.
My journey began in Damascus, where I trained as an architect and later taught architectural history and theory at Damascus University, while also working professionally in Damascus, Homs and Cairo.
Moving between the classroom and design studios, professional practice and historic cities made me increasingly interested in the relationship between buildings, people and place — and in who gets to shape the future of heritage.
A Damascus University scholarship then took me to the UK for my master’s and PhD, where I developed a deeper research focus on urban heritage and architectural conservation.
The next turning point came in London, through a postdoctoral role at King’s College London on a Cultural Protection Fund project working in Tunisia and Libya.
That experience led to the co-development of MaLiCH project, funded by ALIPH, which works across three of Libya’s World Heritage sites and brings together conservation, research, capacity building and, crucially, local engagement.
My first capacity-building programme, designed and delivered for heritage professionals from Tunisia and Libya as part of a three-year project (Tunisia, 2017).
What are the visions, goals or principles behind the Ghadames project? How does your work at the Ghadames Women’s Training Centre reflect them?
Ghadames is a remarkable mud-brick town in the desert heart of southern Libya, shaped by a close relationship between architecture, climate, craft, and community.
Our vision was to safeguard that relationship as a living system, while contributing to the wider efforts that ultimately supported Ghadames’ removal from UNESCO’s List of World Heritage in Danger.
A central part of the project was rehabilitating a partially demolished historic house and transforming it into the city’s first visitor centre.
The process became an opportunity to document and transmit traditional building knowledge, from mud-brick making and palm-trunk preparation to limewash and Zanjafoor interior wall art.
Our guiding principle was simple: conserve historic cities with communities, not around them, recognising local knowledge as part of the heritage itself.
The project was recognised with the 2024 ICCROM–Sharjah Award for Good Practices in Cultural Heritage Conservation and Management.
Ghadames Old Town rooftops, historically used as interconnected routes between houses, particularly by women (May 2025, © Hiba Alkhalaf).
Your work has brought traditional Zanjafoor wall art, made by women for generations, into the public interpretation of a rehabilitated Old Town building. Can you expand on why that mattered to you?
What mattered to me about Zanjafoor was not simply its aesthetic value, but the knowledge and social history embedded within it. It is a practice developed and passed between women over generations, closely connected to domestic space, memory and the identity of Ghadames.
Yet this kind of heritage can easily remain invisible within formal interpretation, where attention often falls on monuments, architecture and physical conservation.
Bringing Zanjafoor into the visitor centre changed that balance. It made women’s knowledge part of the Old Town’s public story, rather than something confined to private interiors.
Equally important, the women themselves shaped how the tradition was presented. For me, that was crucial: heritage interpretation should not simply speak about communities. It should create space for people to represent their own knowledge, skills and relationship to place.
May 2025, Ghadames Visitor Centre: local craftswomen explaining the motifs and meanings of traditional wall decoration, including “Waraqat Misr” / “Takarda n Misr” — “the paper of Egypt”, a manuscript-like decorative sheet historically displayed in Ghadamesi homes.
What are some of the challenges you’ve faced working across Syria, Libya, Tunisia and Egypt, often in the aftermath of conflict or crisis, and how have you overcome them?
Working across Syria, Libya, Tunisia and Egypt often means working with uncertainty: changing institutions, restricted access, limited resources and the long-term effects of conflict on professional networks and local capacity.
Funding is also a major challenge, particularly as the landscape becomes more competitive and short-term, while heritage recovery requires continuity and sustained investment.
Women in the architecture and heritage sector face additional barriers, including unequal access to leadership, professional networks, fieldwork and visibility.
I have responded by building strong local partnerships, investing in multidisciplinary teams, supporting training and knowledge exchange, and adapting projects to changing conditions.
For me, the most sustainable approach is to strengthen local capacity and create more opportunities for women and younger professionals to shape heritage practice themselves.
Sabratha, Libya, May 2025 — with the team after completing the reburial of the mosaic at the Baths of Regio VII.
Tell us about your role at Birkbeck, University of London, and how your research there connects to your fieldwork.
I joined Birkbeck in January 2026 as the first Research Fellow at the newly established Carena Institute of Sustainable Archaeologies, whose emphasis on collaborative archaeology, social value and just futures closely aligns with my work on heritage in conflict and protracted crisis.
Working closely with the Institute Director, I have developed research, fieldwork and teaching that connect heritage, conflict and community.
Through an MoU with Syria’s Directorate-General of Antiquities and Museums, Recovering Dura supports emergency safeguarding, site protection and risk documentation at Dura-Europos.
At the same time, Faces of Dura reconnects historic excavation archives with local communities, bringing forward names, memories and stories often absent from formal records.
Together, these projects connect urgent protection with longer-term questions of participation, memory and locally led stewardship.
Faces of Dura: reconnecting archival photographs from the 1930s excavations with descendants of the local workers pictured, through a public digital platform where these histories can be accessed, identified and annotated by local communities.
What are you working on now?
At the moment, my work spans Syria, Libya and a wider regional research agenda.
In Syria, I am developing heritage recovery, documentation, and community-engagement projects through Birkbeck, including the touring Faces of Dura exhibition with the National Museum of Damascus, which reconnects archival material with local people, families, and memories.
I also collaborate with organisations such as Ettijahat, working with craftspeople in Aleppo and through forums across four Syrian cities to explore how culture and heritage can contribute to recovery.
In Libya, I continue to support work in Lepcis Magna and Ghadames and, as a board member of the Ghadames Visitor Centre, contribute to its future programming and activation.
Alongside this, I am co-developing a regional study across Syria, Turkey, Jordan, Iraq, and Libya, focusing particularly on academic institutions’ capacity to sustain expertise, train practitioners, and support heritage recovery.
Working with craftspeople in Aleppo, Syria, through Ettijahat’s NAQSH programme (May 2025).
You founded Voices of Heritage specifically because something wasn’t available to women in this field elsewhere. What is the actual obstacle that platform exists to solve, in your own words, not the mission-statement version?
Voices of Heritage is still a young platform, but it grew directly from my experience working across Syria, Libya, Tunisia, Iraq and the UK.
In very different contexts, I kept seeing the same pattern: women made substantial contributions across heritage, architecture, and design, yet their work was not always equally visible, recognised, or connected to decision-making.
I also saw capacity-building and training programmes intended to include women, but that did not always succeed because the conditions were not designed around their needs, responsibilities, or circumstances. The opportunity existed on paper, but access did not always exist in practice.
The platform grew from that frustration. It is still evolving, but I want it to be a space that makes women’s expertise more visible, strengthens networks and helps us test practical responses to the barriers we have already encountered in previous projects, rather than simply describing them again.
Of everywhere you’ve worked — Damascus, Homs, Cairo, Tunisia, Libya — which place still has unfinished business for you, and what is it?
I feel connected to every place I have worked, especially where the work has grown through close relationships with local communities. Those relationships rarely end when a project formally finishes.
But Syria is where I feel the unfinished business most deeply. After 14 years away, returning after the regime’s fall was profoundly personal.
Walking again through cities where I had lived, studied, and worked, I thought not only about what had been lost, but about whose voices, memories, and rights must shape what comes next.
For me, recovery cannot be reduced to reconstruction, investment or growth. It must restore dignity, support livelihoods, reconnect displaced communities, and protect people’s right to return, belong and participate in shaping their cities.
As an architect, I now feel a particular responsibility to ask how rebuilding can support justice and recovery without allowing profit alone to determine the future of place.
Aleppo, May 2026 — a reminder, as an architect, that rebuilding a city means rebuilding communities too.
Meet the Shortlist series is a compilation of interviews with those who have been shortlisted for our awards. Saliha Benmessaoud is on the shortlist for the Women in Architecture and Construction Award, which recognises women who have made outstanding contributions to architecture and the built environment across the Near East and North Africa.
Meet the Shortlist: Hadeel Ayed Mohammad, Jomana Baddad, Meisa Batayneh, Nuha Dandis, Ronak Roshan Gilvaei, Saliha Benmessaoud, Salima Naji, Salwa and Selma Mikoü, and Dr Zahra Hussain.
Tamayouz Excellence Award is sponsored by 99 Properties Development, Coventry University, Dewan Architects + Engineers, the Mohamed Makiya Foundation, Bonair Ltd, Aji Group, and Round City Magazine.