Forging Pathways for Urban Resilience in the MENA Region

Editor’s Note

The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region is rapidly urbanising. It faces compounding vulnerabilities including extreme heat, water scarcity, geopolitical instability, and infrastructural and demographic pressures. Cities remain at the forefront of these converging challenges, tasked with conceptualising systems that ensure that infrastructure design, public services, and governance remain modern and locally rooted, to enforce circularity, resilience, and liveability for years to come.

Forging Pathways for Urban Resilience in the MENA Region convenes diverse perspectives from scholars, practitioners, and city leaders to unpack the structural, technological, and institutional mechanisms required to navigate this transition. Across 11 essays, the authors present compelling frameworks on how to leverage human-centred planning approaches, large-scale infrastructure pursuits, nature-based solutions, circular water systems, and clean transport networks alongside coordinated governance to safeguard sustainable urban transformation.

The report also highlights how, despite increasing global emphasis on adopting technological innovation, inclusive and integrated governance remains necessary. The contributors underline the importance of simultaneously retaining traditional knowledge systems, encouraging enhanced vertical and horizontal coordination, and enforcing South–South learning exchanges to scale actionable solutions across the region.

Sukaina Abdul Ilah Al-Nasrawi sets the stage, underscoring how cities represent microcosms of humanity. Building liveable cities requires paying close attention to the preservation of human dignity and social equity. She argues for the development of a new urban planning paradigm that encompasses integrated planning, human-centred digital approaches, and economic resilience, all of which address the region’s rapid urbanisation, high youth unemployment, displacement, and fragile infrastructure.

As countries within the region increasingly pursue mega-development, Mannat Jaspal and Leigh Mante interrogate the risks associated with such ambitious endeavours. Evaluating both the rationale and realities of mega-projects, they call for national-subnational governance coordination and financial and environmental guardrails to prevent cost overruns and socio-environmental damage. Victoria Lee offers a complementary perspective on mega-events, demonstrating how context-driven planning can transform temporary event infrastructure into long-term community benefits.

As extreme heat engulfs the MENA region, Basit Khan, Olivier Pauluis, and Francesco Paparella emphasise the severity of the issue, pointing to the resulting exacerbation of health, occupational, and economic risks. They also present layered strategies to temper the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect intensification through a combination of passive cooling, district cooling expansion, and transit-oriented development.

Building circular systems by developing infrastructure that integrates key resources helps improve efficiency, reduce climate vulnerabilities, and foster sustainable economic growth. Heiko Seitz explores the largely unharnessed potential of synchronising electric vehicle charging infrastructure with solar power and battery storage across the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries to decarbonise transportation and enhance grid resilience. Maha Al-Zu’bi advocates for the expansion of wastewater reuse to diversify water supply and reduce over-reliance on desalination, which poses long-term environmental and energy challenges. Dikshu C. Kukreja offers lessons from India to minimise waste loss, leverage low-carbon materials, and develop circular value chains and climate-responsive design. By applying lessons from other countries, GCC cities can scale nascent technologies to build resource-efficient and resilient urban centres.

Beyond the proposed technological solutions, the remaining chapters offer case studies from MENA cities to highlight the importance of engaging the youth and vulnerable populations through integrated governance frameworks. Oumaima El Idrissi demonstrates how youth participation serves as a strategic lever to implement climate projects, acting as a trust-building network between institutions and communities in Casablanca. Leigh Mante and Reem Sagahyroon showcase how formalising a clear framework for internal climate migration would minimise negative health impacts and facilitate safe and inclusive migratory movements in Iraq. Montaser Hiyari doubles down on how resilience is fundamentally a governance challenge, requiring stable institutions and synergised policies to safeguard urban cities, using Jordan as a case study. Nour-Dine Salimi and Idar Hidi emphasise how traditional oasis models and local knowledge systems in Ouarzazate remain core pillars of sustainability that should not be disregarded as technology evolves.

As cities in the MENA region rapidly urbanise and digitise, this compendium offers balanced and practical perspectives to help city leaders pursue integrated pathways towards urban resilience. Through context-specific case studies, it aims to inform policymakers, urban planners, private actors, and grassroot and academic organisations on ways to conceptualise smart, regenerative, and locally relevant city solutions. 

Read the monograph here.

All views expressed in this publication are solely those of the authors, and do not represent the Observer Research Foundation, either in its entirety or its officials and personnel.

Leigh Mante is Junior Fellow, Climate and Energy, ORF Middle East.