He is a licensed architect and a founding partner of DESIGN EARTH, a research-based practice engaged in the relationships between design and geography. His research addresses the agency of design in re-qualifying the urban question at a territorial scale. At the intersection of mapping, technology and politics, he investigates in particular spaces of exception –such as camps, campuses, free zones, and city-states – as significant forms of contemporary urbanization. El Hadi is co-author of the book Geographies of Trash (New York: Actar, 2015), reclaiming the role of forms, technologies, economies and logistics of the waste system disposal in the production of new aesthetics and politics of urbanism.