Sohrob Aslamy
Ph.D. Candidate

I study how states and capital shape urbanization and urban life in contexts of reconstruction in the Global South. My current project on “Kabul New City” examines how bureaucrats, investors, and residents negotiate development through cycles of foreign intervention, regime collapse, and persistent political uncertainty. Supported by the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, this work situates Afghanistan’s urban transformation within debates on the political economy of state-building and capitalist development under external dependency. Building on this foundation, my next project turns to the ecological afterlives of war, tracing how environmental damage and reconstruction efforts remake urban ecologies.

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In the classroom, I treat geography as a way of thinking that links structure to experience. Students learn how abstract processes—investment, policy, migration—take form in the spaces they inhabit. Moving from observation to analysis in this way, my coursework enables students to connect geographical claims to evidence, and articulate why those claims matter. The aim is a form of critical inquiry that explains clearly and takes responsibility for its implications—a geography that makes the world more legible and, in doing so, more open to change.