Building Belonging: How Kurdish-American Designers Are Leaving Their Mark on the American Cityscape

The blueprint on the drafting table looks, at first glance, like any other proposal for a mixed-use community center in a mid-sized American city. But look more carefully, and something else begins to emerge. The courtyard is oriented to maximize communal gathering in the late afternoon, when the light softens and neighbors are most likely to linger. The entryway is wide and sheltered, designed not merely for pedestrian flow but for the kind of unhurried welcome that transforms a building into a meeting place. The geometric motifs etched into the facade draw, almost imperceptibly, from patterns found on centuries-old Kurdish kilims.

This is the work of Sirwan Azizi, a Kurdish-American urban designer based in Nashville, Tennessee, whose practice has spent the past decade threading cultural memory into the fabric of contemporary American public space. He is not alone.

Across the United States, a cohort of Kurdish-American professionals in architecture, urban planning, and landscape design is doing work that is at once deeply personal and profoundly civic. They are shaping the environments where Americans live, gather, and move — and they are doing so with a cultural inheritance that most of their clients cannot name but often instinctively respond to.

From the Mountain Village to the Municipal Blueprint

Many Kurdish-American designers came to their professions through circuitous paths shaped by displacement. Families who fled conflict in Iraq, Turkey, Iran, and Syria arrived in American cities — Nashville, Lincoln, San Diego, Columbus — and found themselves navigating urban environments that bore no resemblance to the landscapes they had left behind. For some of the children and grandchildren of those arrivals, the experience of inhabiting spaces that did not reflect their existence became a professional calling.

"I grew up watching my mother try to make our apartment feel like home — textiles on the walls, the smell of cardamom, the way she arranged furniture so people could sit together properly," says Leyla Mahmoud, a landscape architect practicing in the greater Columbus, Ohio area. "She was doing design work every single day, just without the credentials. I wanted to take what she understood intuitively and apply it at a larger scale."

Mahmoud's firm has been involved in the redesign of several public parks in central Ohio, advocating for features that serve multigenerational use — covered seating areas that accommodate extended family gatherings, walking paths wide enough for groups rather than individuals, garden plots that communities can tend collectively. These are not exotic features. They are, in fact, what urban planners increasingly recognize as best practices for inclusive design. But for Mahmoud, they are also an inheritance.

Design as Cultural Argument

The relationship between Kurdish cultural values and progressive urban design principles is not accidental. Kurdish communities have historically organized around the concept of shared space — the village square, the communal hearth, the open threshold. These spatial values, born from centuries of mountain living and collective survival, translate with surprising elegance into the language of contemporary placemaking.

"Kurdish architecture has always been about the relationship between inside and outside, between the private household and the public world," explains Diyar Rashid, an architect and adjunct professor at a university in San Diego whose research focuses on diasporic design identity. "There is a permeability in traditional Kurdish domestic space — rooms that open onto courtyards, courtyards that open onto streets — that I find myself returning to constantly in my work here."

Rashid's most recent project, a community health and cultural center serving a diverse immigrant population in San Diego County, incorporates a central atrium modeled loosely on the concept of the Kurdish mala, or communal gathering room. The space is deliberately unprogrammed — neither auditorium nor cafeteria nor waiting room, but something more fluid, capable of becoming whatever the community requires it to be on a given day. City officials who initially questioned the design have since pointed to the atrium as one of the building's most successful features, consistently occupied and consistently repurposed by the people who use it.

Navigating Invisibility in a Credentialed World

For all the richness of their contributions, Kurdish-American design professionals frequently find themselves navigating a professional landscape that does not recognize their cultural background as a relevant credential. Architecture and urban planning in the United States operate within institutional frameworks that tend to celebrate certain design traditions — Scandinavian minimalism, Japanese spatial philosophy, Mediterranean civic form — while remaining largely unaware that Kurdish design sensibility exists as a distinct and historically rich tradition.

"I have had clients respond to something I've proposed and say, 'This feels very Mediterranean,' or 'This reminds me of something Moroccan,' " says Azizi. "They are reaching for a reference point. They sense something, but they don't have the vocabulary for it. That is not their fault — Kurdish culture has been systematically erased from the global design conversation, just as it has been erased from so many other conversations."

This invisibility has practical consequences. Kurdish-American designers who wish to draw explicitly on their heritage must often do so quietly, translating cultural principles into the neutral language of user-centered design or environmental psychology, where those principles are more likely to receive a hearing. The result is work that is culturally informed but rarely culturally credited — a kind of professional code-switching that mirrors the broader experience of the Kurdish diaspora in America.

Building Community, Literally

Perhaps the most direct expression of Kurdish-American design influence can be found in the community centers and cultural spaces that serve Kurdish and broader Middle Eastern populations across the United States. These buildings — often modest in budget, ambitious in purpose — represent the most legible intersection of cultural identity and professional practice.

In Lincoln, Nebraska, one of the largest per-capita Kurdish communities in the country, local designers have been involved in planning community spaces that serve both as cultural anchors and as bridges to the wider city. The challenge, as those designers describe it, is to create spaces that feel genuinely Kurdish without becoming insular — environments that welcome the community's own members while remaining open and legible to neighbors who may know nothing of Kurdish history or culture.

"A community center is not a museum," says one Lincoln-based planner who asked to be identified only by her first name, Shirin. "It is a living space. It has to work for the people who are most at home in it, but it also has to invite people in. Design can do that — it can create curiosity without demanding explanation."

A Profession Still Being Built

The Kurdish-American presence in architecture and urban planning remains relatively small, a reflection of both the community's comparatively recent large-scale arrival in the United States and the significant barriers — financial, linguistic, institutional — that stand between refugee and immigrant families and the credentialed design professions. Organizations working on workforce development within Kurdish-American communities have begun to identify architecture and urban planning as fields that deserve targeted mentorship and scholarship support, recognizing that the built environment is one of the most durable ways a community can inscribe itself into the life of a city.

For the designers already working in this space, the stakes feel both professional and deeply personal. They are, in the most literal sense, building the world their communities will inhabit. Every courtyard oriented toward gathering, every threshold widened for welcome, every geometric pattern drawn from a tradition that most Americans cannot name — these are acts of cultural persistence, rendered in concrete and steel and glass.

"When I walk through a space I have helped design and I see people using it the way I hoped they would," says Mahmoud, "I think about my mother rearranging the furniture. I think about what she was trying to do. And I think: we are still doing it. We are still making home."