Lizzie Yarina

Lizzie Yarina is an Assistant Professor in the School of Architecture with affiliate appointments in the School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs and Global Asian Studies. She works in the area of regional planning and resilience. Her research reveals how large-scale resilience projects are underpinned by the technocratic norms of the climate change planning industry. These norms, in turn, shape the ways our world is being reshaped in light of environmental crises.

Lizzie’s current book project “Plans that Leak” investigates the design politics of climate change adaptation in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta through the lens of representation. She is co-editor of the interdisciplinary volume “Building Models, Changing Climates” (Columbia University Press, 2025). Her research on the relationships among design thinking, territorial politics, and climate risk has been published in both public scholarship and peer-reviewed venues including Places Journal, Log, Arch+, Architecture & Culture, and Global Environmental Change. Her teaching brings this scholarship into architecture and urban design, working within and beyond academia to ask how we should design in a hotter, wetter, and riskier world.

Lizzie completed a PhD in the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning, where was both a Martin Sustainability fellow and Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism fellow. Her doctoral fieldwork was supported by a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Award. She also holds a joint Masters of Architecture and Masters in City Planning from MIT, and a B.S. Arch from the University of Michigan.