Search

Introduction Human-powered mobility (walking and cycling) is a basic mode of mobility that has been long overlooked in favour of motorized modes. However, after years of cities around the world being planned around the needs of private car owners, the downsides of this extreme motorization of cities are presenting themselves: a fragmented urban fabric, reduced quality of life and increasing levels of air and noise pollution. This, paired with the growing awareness of climate change, has cause...

Introduction France, June 2022. Like every year during this season, the Roland Garros international tennis competition is being broadcast live on television. In the middle of the semi-final match, a young woman, barely in her twenties, enters the centre court, runs towards the net and ties her neck to it. The picture made the rounds in the press. She is seen sitting on her heels, knees on the ground, chest out, chin up, staring into the distance. On her white T-shirt, it says: ‘We have 1028 d...

Introduction Megacities are facing major contemporary challenges, including climate change, migration, health crises, the energy transition, disruptive technologies, socio-spatial segregation, socio-economic inequalities and territorial governance crises. Climate change adds difficulties to tackling these challenges in a context of unprecedented levels of institutional complexity. Vulnerabilities related to climate change, such as flooding, sea submersion, landslides, soil movements, water sc...

Introduction The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) identified deltas as being among the areas most vulnerable to climate change (IPCC 2022). Indeed, low-lying deltaic coasts are particularly vulnerable to flooding. The coast of the Nile Delta in Egypt extends over 225 kilometres between Port Said and Alexandria. It is bordered by four lakes, ‘the four sisters’, which form lagoons: Lake Manzala, Lake Borollus, Lake Edku and Lake Mariout. Since the construction of the Aswan High ...

Introduction As the urban population continues to grow, understanding ecosystems in the city has become increasingly important and is now a rallying cry for action to respond to and mitigate the repercussions of growing urban sprawl. Urban areas echo a rather harsh image of concrete jungles with impoverished ecosystems and a disconnection between the built and natural environments. Although the current trend towards urbanization repeatedly manifests this visual image – putting the viability o...

Introduction Some of the most radical urban struggles we have witnessed in Lebanon arose in the face of urban projects or buildings that had not yet been implemented. These struggles were informed by people’s knowledge of these projects’ devastating environmental, social, economic and psychological consequences. It is not surprising that a lot of discussion and movements are built around future constructions and that objections to these projects and attempts to prevent them become aggressive,...

Cars have done more to damage our cities than wars.—J. H. Crawford, Carfree Cities Saudi Cars and the Ecological Crisis What can we learn from Riyadh that might reduce our dependency on the car? We know that cars contribute a great deal to the current ecological crisis. This crisis is a consequence of what some authors call the Anthropocene while others, pointing to the specific responsibilities of capitalism, colonialism and imperialism, use the terms Capitalocene, Plantationocene or Secular...

An Indispensable But Unrecognized Community Called the ‘Zabbaleen’ in Egypt, the waste pickers of Cairo are located in ‘garbage zones’ that occupy some of the deepest and least accessible recesses of the city’s extensive outer fringes, although some neighbourhoods are now integrated into the city due to urban sprawl. Despite the Zabbaleen’s enormous historical – and discreet –contribution to the everyday functioning of the city since the 1930s, they are frequently threatened with eviction bec...

In 2005, a report on disaster reduction warned of the increased risk for flash floods around the Red Sea and Southern Sinai (Government of Egypt 2005, 3). There was, however, no mention of cities. In October 2015, unpredicted and devastating floods in Alexandria killed six people. In the winter of 2020, floods across Egypt affected 20,000 families and killed forty, with ten victims in Cairo alone (Reliefweb 2020); other informal sources mention even greater fatalities. In 2021, three people d...

Introduction This chapter is about climate change and sustainable cities. Its title is ‘air pollution and climate change’ because air pollution and climate change are two sides of the same coin. They have the same source, namely the burning of fossil fuels, whether in transportation, in factories, to heat homes or for any other activities which use fossil fuels as sources of energy. The majority of these activities is concentrated in cities. Figure 1. Sources of outdoor air pollution. Source...

Introduction Garbage accumulating on the streets in Egypt’s urban and rural areas creates serious problems in terms of hygiene and creates a sense of chaos. One often hears complaints from locals as well as visitors, and these lead to recurrent attempts by the government to address the garbage problem. This is not a new phenomenon (Fahmy 2022). In his book In Quest of Justice, Khaled Fahmy writes about the time of Muhammed Ali, when garbage full of organic waste was associated with bad air an...

Introduction Cities have always played a role in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change’s (UNFCCC) process and meetings. A key actor in facilitating their input and engagement is ICLEI – Local Governments for Sustainability, a city network that acts as the official focal point of the Local Governments and Municipal Authorities (LGMA) observer group to the UNFCCC. This text will shed light on the history of this engagement and will outline the prospects for the topic of sust...

The climate crisis is hitting around the world, including in the Middle East and its cities. Urban regions are exposed to increasingly frequent heat waves and floods that leave decision makers without immediate answers. In the context of this global crisis, this book addresses the need for a better understanding of the current model of urban expansion. Cities are major sources of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions but they are also celebrated for their contribution to economic growth. The current moment is one of a large paradigm shift as climate change is now recognized as a legitimate public problem. This is especially true for city dwellers, who are increasingly exposed to climate change, the loss of biodiversity and heavy pollution while natural breathing spaces continue to shrink around them. The sixteen chapters of this book do not offer any off-the-rack or technical solutions, but they analyze the urban conundrum and the contribution of cities to the climate crisis. Some chapters focus on individual car ownership, land privatization, waste management and land use changes under the guise of development. Others explore local and contextual answers to urban governance issues. With the support of CEDEJ and the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, researchers, experts and civil society actors explore the ongoing transformations of Middle Eastern urban environments and mobilities and question them in relation to the climate crisis. The contributions are based on empirical knowledge gathered in the Nile Delta, the Greater Cairo Region, Riyadh and Beirut. Without concessions to mainstream thinking, this book contributes to a better understanding of urban challenges, climate threats and policy responses in contexts marked by growing environmental inequalities.

A Global Trend Climate change compounds existing vulnerabilities that are produced by a continual interaction of political, economic and social processes (Hassanain and Martina 2021). The forces of capital constantly reconfigure city spaces to maximize the value of assets and resources. The conversion of city spaces into separate archipelagos for investment – rather than parts of a social and natural ecosystem – forces the city’s users to accept the production of an urbanization surplus, whic...

Introduction Cities in the Global South have been grappling with how to address the proliferation of informal settlements. They need to apply solutions to contexts that are extremely diverse with regard to location, size, density, building quality, illegality and risk. Their approaches are primarily based on spatial, financial and infrastructure considerations and seldom on economic, social and occupational factors. Tailoring upgrading solutions has become a daunting task for cities. Gases em...

Egypt has taken the threats of global climate change seriously. It has adopted all of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change’s (UNFCCC) protocols relating to global warming (in 1994, 2015, 2016 and 2017) and has incorporated global warming concerns in a range of national plans and visions, particularly Egypt’s Vision 2030, the Long-Term Low Emission Development Strategy 2050 and the National Climate Change Strategy 2050 (UNFCCC 2022, 3). It has also taken a number of very v...

I'll be talking about the heat island effect (HIE) and the impact it has and how this is related to climate change but also what we can do to address this. When I was on my way over here today, I saw something interesting. I saw a bird gliding, not fluttering its wings, but gliding for about two or three minutes as we moved along, and it was completely stationary while it was moving. And as someone who was going to talk about the HIE, I was aware of what was happening. This bird was moving ov...

Nature-based solutions have recently been embraced as one route towards simultaneously addressing urban environmental and social problems, but an emerging agenda has sought to ask whether and how the ‘greening’ of cities may actually reinforce inequalities or lead to new forms of social exclusion. Using comparative case-study analysis, this paper examines the extent to which nature-driven stewardship initiatives recognize and redress inequalities. We compare two urban contexts that have undergone significant societal transformations over the last two to three decades: Sofia and Cape Town. The comparison shows how nature-driven stewardship initiatives differentially address deeper roots of environmental, social and racial privilege shaped significantly by post-socialist and post-apartheid transition contexts. Instead of assuming a homogenous ideal of urban nature and focusing on questions of the distribution of urban nature and its access, this paper finds it is important to consider the kinds of social relations that are required to both shape decision-making processes and generate meaningful and diverse values and ways of relating to nature in the city. Furthermore, it finds that inclusive nature-based solution governance recognizes and redresses both inequalities in access and inequalities that perpetuate dominant views about what nature is and for whom nature is produced and maintained. © 2020 Elsevier Ltd