Fabrice SOBCZAK
Fabrice Sobczak is an architect and a lecturer at the Faculty of Architecture and Urban Planning of the University of Mons (UMONS) in Belgium, where he teaches in the "Resilience and Climate Action" studio. He contributes to the training of future architects and urban planners by promoting a critical and engaged approach to territorial issues, in connection with climate, social, and environmental challenges.
Since 2018, he has been a member of the URBATeR Master's program team (Resilient Urban Planning and Risk-Prone Territorial Development), a partnership between UMONS, ULiège, and the State University of Haiti (UEH), which aims to train Haitian professionals—in both French and Creole—in land-use planning and risk integration within highly vulnerable contexts. Since 2024, he has also been involved in Belgium in the Interuniversity Certificate in Anticipatory and Interdisciplinary Risk and Crisis Management – Planicrise, where he contributes to reflection and training on systemic and territorial approaches to resilience. A doctoral researcher since 2019, he is conducting research focused on the Commons and dynamics of territorial co-construction in marginalized areas, whether located on the urban fringes or in rural environments exposed to risk. His main fieldwork is situated in the urbanized ravines of the southern part of the metropolitan area of Port-au-Prince (Haiti), but he is now extending his research to other Caribbean contexts affected by hydrological and climate-related risks, notably in Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Cuba. His work follows a comparative and collaborative perspective, aiming to understand how local forms of solidarity, shared governance, and resilience can emerge in contexts marked by recurrent socio-environmental disasters and structural vulnerability in inhabited environments.