Michael Al-Rashid is a journalist and urban planner whose reporting and fiction chart how infrastructure exposes private lives in public. Raised in Dearborn, he studied engineering at Wayne State, earned a master's in urban planning from Columbia, and completed a journalism degree at NYU. His work on housing, public space, and civic conflict has appeared in City Limits, The Atlantic, and The Guardian, and he consults on community engagement for small cities across the Northeast.
He is the recipient of an Urban Reporting Fellowship from the Metro Policy Lab and a Front Page Award for feature writing. His nonfiction includes Sidewalk Atlas, Metered, and Last Rites for Bleecker; his fiction—most often thrillers like Lantern: An Inventory—turns maps, sensors, and maintenance logs into human pressure cookers. Michael Al-Rashid teaches participatory planning at Pratt Institute and lives in Brooklyn with his partner and an elderly rescue mutt who insists on the long way home.
