Hanae Soma

Hanae Soma is a doctoral candidate in Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Michigan. Her dissertation, tentatively titled Gendered Land Tenure: A Feminist Reading of Colonial Histories, Legal Pluralism, and Informality in Ghana, examines gendered land tenure in Ghana’s informal settlements. Through a feminist and historical lens, the project aims to explore how colonial legacies, legal pluralism, and informal land governance have shaped contemporary patterns of access and exclusion of land and housing, producing gendered socio-spatial outcomes in Accra and Tema.

Hanae holds an M.A. in Urban Design and Planning from the University of Sheffield with Distinction, where she was also awarded the ADH Crook Prize for Contributions Towards Social Justice in Planning. Hanae is also a member of the Informal Sustainability Lab at the School for Environment and Sustainability.

Key areas of interest: urban informality, gender and planning, gender and development, everyday politics, feminist methods, qualitative methods

Publications

Soma, H. (2026). Gendered Informality: Feminist Perspectives on Subaltern Surveillance. Dialogues in Human Geography. https://doi.org/10.1177/20438206261479820

Soma, H. (2025). Under construction: socio-material assemblage of informal housing in Dhaka. International Development Planning Review, 1–27. https://doi.org/10.3828/idpr.2025.21

Soma, H., Sukhwani, V. & Shaw, R. (2022). An Approach to Determining the Linkage Between Livelihood Assets and the Housing Conditions in Urban Slums of Dhaka. Journal of Urban Management, 11(1), 23-36, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jum.2021.08.006