Teaching
Fabrice Sobczak is an architect and 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.
Research
Since 2018, he has been a member of the URBATeR Master’s program (Resilient Urbanism and Planning for Risk-Prone Territories), a partnership between UMONS, the University of Liège (ULiège), and the State University of Haiti (UEH). This program aims to train Haitian professionals, in both French and Creole, in spatial planning and risk integration within highly vulnerable contexts.
Since 2024, he has also been involved in Belgium in the inter-university certificate in anticipatory and interdisciplinary risk and crisis management – Planicrise, where he contributes to research and training on systemic and territorial approaches to resilience.
A doctoral researcher since 2019, he is conducting research focused on the Commons and the dynamics of territorial co-construction in marginal spaces, whether located on the urban fringes or in rural areas exposed to risks. His main fieldwork takes place in the urbanized ravines in the southern part of the metropolitan area of Port-au-Prince (Haiti), but he is now expanding his research to other Caribbean contexts affected by hydrological and climate-related risks, notably in Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Cuba. His work is situated within 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 the structural vulnerability of inhabited environments.