Kawthar Alrayyan

Kawthar Alrayyan is a Jordanian PhD candidate in the landscape architecture department at Virginia Tech University. She holds a Master of Landscape from the University of Arizona and a bachelor’s degree in architectural engineering from the University of Jordan. Her journey into landscape architecture started while working on landscape-focused projects during her architectural practice. This hands-on experience, coupled with her scientific knowledge, allowed her to adeptly navigate the Jordanian cultural, contextual, and environmental landscape, Focusing on desert and semi-arid landscapes. Subsequently, she dedicated seven years to teaching at the German Jordanian University, establishing an academic foundation focused on interpreting, designing, and exploring the cultural landscapes of Jordan, and collaborated on various projects with both Jordanian and German universities. Her research centers on the issue of transformation of the post-industrial sites through human-driven manipulation and processes. Kawthar is particularly interested in understanding the impact of these transformations on cultural landscapes and exploring ways to preserve them. Her dissertation delves into the parkification processes of post-industrial sites in Jordan using sites from Ruseifa City.