Arfakshad Munaim is a practicing land use planner and a published author. He works on engaging communities through ‘place-making’ principles and tactical urbanism for sustainable and equitable solutions. He works in land use planning for commercial and residential development at Schmitz & Associates, Inc. He is also a guest lecturer on topics of research practice and urban planning at the UCLA School of Architecture and Urban Design and the Institute of Digital Research and Education. Arfakshad is a graduate of the Urban and Regional Planning program at UCLA. In the department, he concentrated on Design and Development, which explores the way communities engage, negotiate and embrace the extant planning and policy regimes of their respective cities. Arfakshad is a fellow of the Urban Humanities Initiative, which focuses on the urban development of countries on the Pacific Rim, specifically, Nishi-Shinjuku, Tokyo, Japan. He was also nominated a Sasakawa Fellowship at the UCLA Terasaki Center for Japanese Studies for his contributions in research of the March 2011 disasters in Fukushima, Japan. Arfakhashad also studied architecture at Harvard University Graduate School of Design and the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom.Arfakshad's notable contributions range from master planning neighborhoods in Southern California; research of ancient Egyptian and Islamic architecture in Cairo; the al-Jamea-tus-Saifiyah in Nairobi, Kenya; and involvement in the design of the Anjuman-e-Burhanee Masjid complex in Woodland Hills, CA and Anjuman-e-Najmi in Fremont, CA. Arfakhashad is also a contributing author to several publications for My Liveable City magazine, which focuses on water and sanitation, affordable and clean energy, climate action, innovation, affordable housing, sustainable cities, communities, and equitable societies. He is also a contributing author to BISHAMON II, which focuses on mapping disaster spaces in Fukushima, Japan, and co-authored Sensing Space: Augmenting Scientific Data with Spatial Ethnography which describes the research in irradiated areas in post-Fukushima Japan which was published with the Journal of GeoHumanities by the American Association of Geographers. He recently published Streets For All: 50 Ideas for Shaping Resilient Cities, which examines streetscape designs throughout the world, including the Middle East, Europe, the Far East, and the Americas. He offers strategies on how cities can design better communities and neighborhoods.