Mai Al-Battat is an architect, urban researcher, and PhD fellow at SashaLab, Faculty of Architecture La Cambre Horta, Université libre de Bruxelles, Belgium. Her doctoral research, titled “Imaginative Geographies that Defy Erasure: Infrastructures of Violence, Memory, and the Politics of Imagination,” investigates radical imagination practices within Palestinian movements in Belgium in relation to the question of Palestine. Positioned at the intersection of urban studies, decolonial research, and participatory methodologies, her work explores how communities produce counterimaginaries that challenge conditions of erasure and domination. Mai is co-applicant and co-organizer of the seminar series “Geographies of Carcerality and the City: From Palestine to Latin America,” funded by the Urban Studies Foundation. Between Ramallah and Berlin, she conducted research stays connected to projects on urban mobility, ecological and community-based spatial practices, and visual research and communication. She worked with UR°bana studio on Takhayali Ein Qiniya (2018–2025), within the international research project “Urbanization, Gender and the Global South” (GenUrb). Her work combines architectural thinking with ethnographic and visual research practices, including participatory design, countermapping, workshops, and public programming. She has organized and participated in several exhibitions, including The Great Repair (ARCH+). Mai has contributed to the forthcoming book “Palestine Is Not a Garden » (Sternberg Press), as well as “Doing Feminist Urban Research: Insights from the GenUrb Project” (Routledge, 2024). She is also the author of the forthcoming peer-reviewed article “Once upon a Future: Counterimaginaries from Ein Qiniya,” to be published by Leuven University Press, and co-author of “Infrastructures of Resistance: Anticolonial Education and Practices,” published in scene48 (2025). For more information about her work on the Takhayali Ein Qiniya project: takhayali.net.