Baladi
An Arabic term meaning “local” or “native,” often used to describe village-grown food, practices, and ways of life. For many refugees and migrants, it evokes nostalgia and longing for village roots and land-based traditions, as well as the grief of disconnection. In diaspora, this loss often transforms into living memory through food, craft, land rituals, music, and community practices.
Lama Hasan
A Palestinian landscape architect and creative researcher working across Mediterranean and diasporic contexts. Her work explores home and belonging in a world shaped by borders, migration, and climate change through long-term, place-based inquiry.
Working through interdisciplinary design and research, she collaborates with artisans, researchers, designers, and communities to engage agricultural heritage, ancestral knowledge, and cultural resilience. These collaborations unfold through spatial research, storytelling, pedagogy, and experimental projects examining how landscapes carry memory, loss, and continuity.
Born to a family with deep agricultural roots in Battir, a terraced village in Palestine recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, Lama’s relationship to land is shaped by farming lineages and practices of stewardship passed down over generations. Raised between Saudi Arabia and the United States, she studied public and urban affairs and later landscape architecture, grounding her work in questions of land governance, infrastructure, and spatial justice. She has since worked on cultural and ecological projects within large interdisciplinary practices and currently teaches collaborative studios in landscape architecture and design in New York, alongside her research-based practice in the Mediterranean.
Her practice considers how individuals and communities reclaim narrative and relationship to land, and how inherited practices such as agricultural, craft-based, and collective traditions persist and adapt across displacement. Projects are developed through residencies, teaching, and public engagement across Palestine, Spain, Turkey, and the broader Mediterranean.
Baladi Creative
An interdisciplinary framework for creative research that brings together land, memory, and cross-cultural collaboration to reimagine home as a lived, evolving condition rather than a fixed place.
Selected CV.