Mohammad is an urban planner and housing researcher in The Urbanist's urban intelligence team. He works in GIS, Python and spatial data analysis, turning research and large datasets into evidence that planning decisions can rest on.

At The Urbanist, Mohammad Ali supports planning work across the project portfolio and builds the geospatial pipelines and analytical tools behind our evidence base.

His PhD at the University of Auckland looks at upzoning, redevelopment and housing prices under the Auckland Unitary Plan. Using more than 830,000 property transactions from 1990 to 2024, it measures how development rights show up in land values and what kind of housing gets built once redevelopment happens. The findings bear directly on how councils judge whether intensification policy is working.

He is also an organiser of the University of Auckland's Postgraduate Research Colloquium 2026 on urban transformation, recognised by UN-Habitat as part of Urban October.