Meaningful Change: WXY's Majed Abdulsamad on Long-Term Objectives and Impacting Lives
By Julia Gamolina
Majed Abdulsamad is a senior associate at WXY, a multi-disciplinary practice specializing in urban planning, urban design and architecture projects. He has extensive experience working locally with different New York City agencies, and nationally with the cities of Rochester, NY and Dallas, TX. Prior to WXY, Majed worked on public realm and street design initiatives globally at the Global Designing Cities Initiative under the Bloomberg Initiative for Global Road Safety in São Paulo and Fortaleza in Brazil, Mumbai, India, and Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Majed is the Chair of Land Use and Waterfront at Manhattan’s Community Board Six (MN CB6), and the co-founder of SYE Initiative, a non-profit organization supporting higher education access for refugees and students impacted by the war in Syria.
JG: In the last few years, you've been at WXY and also you're Chair of the Land Use & Waterfront Committee for Manhattan Community Board 6. What have you learned about urban design, planning, and architecture in these contexts in these last two years? What are your goals for 2025?
MA: I’ve learned the importance of asking better questions when tackling large challenges. At WXY, what I value the most is the opportunity to work on projects at the heart of American cities — places are recovering, growing, and at times struggling to fulfill their promises to millions of residents.
In all of WXY’s work with city agencies in New York, Boston, Washington, Newark, and beyond, I’ve come to deeply appreciate the importance of starting with stakeholder engagement. Understanding the problems we’re attempting to solve from the perspective of those most impacted is essential before diving into the universe of technical solutions. I have also come to appreciate diverse perspectives thanks to many conversations at Manhattan’s Community Board Six. There, I’ve seen how views on local governance issues, often rooted in shared values, can lead to very contradicting conclusions. I genuinely believe that engaging at this hyper-local level of governance offers valuable insights into some of the most divisive and controversial topics the country is grappling with at this unique and pivotal moment in its history.
Speaking at the American Planning Association New York Metro Chapter (APANY) conference on WXY’s work on affordable housing (NYCHA, 2024).
Now let's go back a little bit — you studied architecture and construction management at Illinois Tech, and then went on to a Masters in Urban Design at Columbia. What were you hoping to do with both degrees?
My parents owned an architecture and interior design firm and I shadowed them on construction sites around Damascus, Syria, where I was born and raised. Coming from a family of architects—where I was the 16th architectural engineer—it felt like a natural path for my career. At Illinois Tech, I developed a strong interest in the practical application of architecture — understanding how designs are built.
By 2015 however, the war in Syria had taken a devastating turn. The destruction had reached catastrophic levels—entire cities were being reduced to rubble. Syrian and Russian government forces were committing domicide, deliberately targeting the infrastructure and built environment of rebelling regions. This new reality shifted my focus from architecture to urban design and planning.
I chose Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation (GSAPP) after being inspired by Professor Laura Kurgan’s Conflict Urbanism work at the Center for Spatial Research and reading Dean Amale Andraos and Professor Nora Akkawi’s studies on the past, present, and future of the Arab city. At Columbia, I was privileged to deepen my understanding of urbanism, community planning, and the many forms of resiliency.
“Understanding the problems we’re attempting to solve from the perspective of those most impacted is essential before diving into the universe of technical solutions.”
You interned at NYC Department of City Planning, were a program associate at the Global Designing Cities Initiative, taught at Columbia — what have you learned from these roles that you bring to your work today?
A recurring theme has been that meaningful change takes time. Whether at a community board, a city planning agency, a global nonprofit leveraging tactical urbanism to drive transformation, or through my personal initiative focused on refugee education, progress is almost always incremental. It requires months, and often years, of careful groundwork before the vision begins to take shape. While this can sound discouraging, I find this perspective grounding—it sharpens the focus on long-term objectives, especially when working on large-scale infrastructure or community development projects that impact countless lives.
I also really admire the Syrian Youth Empowerment non-profit initiative that you co-founded. Tell me more about this — how you started, what you're trying to do, and how this informs your work in urban design.
SYE, short for Syrian Youth Empowerment, is an initiative that a group of friends and I started in Chicago nearly a decade ago to help Syrian and Palestinian-Syrian refugee students—and those impacted by the war—pursue higher education. My co-founders and I were fortunate to receive scholarships to Illinois Tech (IIT) through a nonprofit called Jusoor, which enabled us to continue our education at a time when the war threatened to upend our lives entirely. Access to higher education was transformative in every way imaginable, and we felt compelled to extend that same opportunity to others affected.
To date, our team of more than one hundred volunteers has worked with over three thousand students, helping them secure upwards of $40 million in financial aid at top universities in the U.S. and around the world. The impact of SYE’s work may seem small in the face of such an overwhelming crisis, but for the students now enrolled at institutions like MIT, Stanford, Columbia, and Harvard, it represents the exact chance they dreamed of to shape a better future through their careers.
While refugee education is fundamentally different from urban design or infrastructure planning, the incremental nature of change in the face of immense challenges feels strikingly similar.
Facilitating a community engagement event for a NYCHA development in the Bronx (WXY, 2022).
Looking back at it all, what have been the biggest challenges for you? How did you both manage through perceived disappointments or setbacks?
Moving to the U.S. twelve years ago and navigating entirely new systems was a challenge I’m sure many immigrants, asylees, and refugees can relate to. Working in the public sector and later at a multinational NGO operating in global contexts brought its own complexities, and learning opportunities, requiring me to adapt to diverse environments and navigate rigid, bureaucratic systems.
The greatest challenge I continue to face, however, as a planner and on a personal level, is reconciling the reality of my work on the built environment in New York and beyond with the ongoing war and devastation in Syria and Palestine, where friends and family endure daily hardship. Like many in the U.S. and around the world, I know this will remain a source of reflection and struggle for years to come.
“While refugee education is fundamentally different from urban design or infrastructure planning, the incremental nature of change in the face of immense challenges feels strikingly similar.”
Who are you admiring now and why?
Laura Kurgan’s Conflict Urbanism work and her book Ways of Knowing Cities, co-authored with Dare Brawley, is a compelling exploration of how we map, represent, understand, and engage with urban spaces. Eyal Weizman’s work at Forensic Architecture is equally inspiring, investigating human rights violations, migration, ecocide, the environmental impact of wars, chemical attacks on cities, and other forms of systemic violence in the built environment across places like Syria, Yemen, Namibia, and Palestine, and beyond.
On a personal note, I greatly respect Ta-Nehisi Coates and his eloquence, especially in his most recent book, The Message. It beautifully illuminates the complexities of our world, the narratives we construct about our lives, and the challenge of navigating the dual realities of multiple places we call home.
SYE Initiative volunteers at a MET-sponsored workshop in New York (SYE, 2019).
What is the impact you’d like to have on the world? What is your core mission? And, what does success in that look like to you?
Initially, success meant gaining admission to a graduate program to study post-conflict urbanism. Later, it became about helping one hundred students secure admissions and financial aid to pursue their own paths toward rebuilding their country. Now, the closer I come to making a meaningful impact on my community's future—whether through my work on housing, urban design, and sustainable mobility issues at WXY, addressing land use and waterfront issues at Community Board 6, or expanding access to higher education through SYE—the closer I’ll be to achieving the kind of impact I aspire to have on the world around me.
Finally, what advice do you have for those starting their career?
Stay open, curious, and patient. The fields of architecture, urban design, and urban planning are vast, with far-reaching impacts on people’s lives. With that scope comes a significant responsibility to ask tough questions, challenge the status quo, and commit to playing the long game.