Bara Safarova
About
Degrees
Introduction
Bára Šafářová joined the School of Urban Studies in 2019. She earned her Ph.D. in Architecture at Texas A&M in 2019. She also holds a Master of Urban Planning from Texas A&M, a Profession Diploma in Architecture from London Metropolitan University. Bára is originally from the Czech Republic where she started her studies in architecture and urbanism.
Prior to her academic career, she worked in the architecture industry in London for 7 years on residential, commercial, and master planning projects in the United Kingdom and internationally.
At UWT, Bára teaches urban design studios focusing on visual communication, the design process, and a variety of software (Adobe Creative Suite, AutoCAD, SketchUp). In advanced studios, she runs community-engaged design projects focusing on equity, climate, and housing justice. At Texas A&M, she organized several years of Diversity Hackathons—rapid competition for interdisciplinary student teams. Each hackathon was conceived as a platform for students to work with campus organizations that serve underrepresented students such as persons with disabilities or LGBTQIA+ students, to imagine how barriers could be overcome in the future.
In research, Bára’s overall interest is in the role of architecture and urbanism in spatial discrimination of historically marginalized groups. In her dissertation, she analyzed the role of housing production in segregation by income on the U.S.-Mexico border. She used geospatial analyses of house value patterns in combination with interviewing local developers to identify mechanisms used in building segregated patterns of housing. Her work incorporates aspects of housing studies, infrastructure studies, theories of justice in the city, and urban sociology.