UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — The Environmental Design Research Association (EDRA) has awarded the Michael Brill Research Grant in Urban Communication and Community Design to Sana Ahrar, who recently graduated from the Penn State College of Arts and Architecture’s Stuckeman School with a doctorate in architecture.
The grant supports projects that explore how design and communication shape community life, looking at how people connect through both the spaces they use and the technology around them.
“I am interested in how people use everyday communication technologies to shape their environments and social relationships, especially in settings that are often overlooked in design and communication studies,” Ahrar said. “This grant offers the chance to support fieldwork that centers on the experiences of communities in informal settlements and to connect that work with broader discussions about space, technology and public life.”
Originally from India, Ahrar completed her work as a researcher with the Hamer Center for Community Design at Penn State. Her dissertation, which she successfully defended in May, explores middle-class informality and the emergence of mixed-income informal settlements in the Global South. The work investigates how urban residents in the “missing middle” navigate both formal and informal housing markets and how these interactions influence neighborhood form and community dynamics.
Her new Brill-funded project expands on her previous research by examining how residents of informal settlements use mobile communication tools to coordinate daily community life.
“My research examines the disconnect between the everyday functioning of informal neighborhoods and their representation and engagement within urban planning discourse and practice,” Ahrar said.
The $3,000 award will support Ahrar’s additional fieldwork in India.
“Receiving this grant is a meaningful milestone as I transition from dissertation research to new directions in my scholarly work,” Ahrar said. “This research builds on the fieldwork and community relationships developed through my dissertation, and it extends those questions into new terrain by focusing on how digital tools influence the shared use of space and community interaction in urban informal settings.”
Throughout her time at Penn State, Ahrar was deeply involved in campus and academic initiatives. She served as a member of the Indian Graduate Student Association, the Graduate Research and Innovative Design group and as editor of Hyphen, the Department of Architecture’s student-run journal. These experiences, she said, helped her bridge her research, teaching and community engagement on campus.
Ahrar expressed gratitude for the mentorship and support that made her work possible, including the Waddell Biggart Graduate Fellowship, Graduate School Awards and research funding from the Stuckeman School, the Stuckeman Center for Design Computing and the Hamer Center for Community Design.
“My work highlights how design research can learn from community practices that often go unnoticed,” Ahrar said. “I hope this work encourages more conversations between urban planners, designers and communication scholars about how people actually live and interact in rapidly changing cities.”
Ahrar is now an assistant professor of architecture at the North Carolina State University College of Design.