CITY-RIVER COLLABORATIVE

Cities have often grown beside rivers while gradually turning their backs on them. The City–River Collaborative seeks to restore this relationship by exploring how waterfronts can become places where urban life, natural systems, and local communities meet. It continues the academic and professional work of Amir Gohar, previously expressed through proposals to reconnect Cairo with the Nile, and extends this thinking towards healthier, more accessible, and environmentally responsive relationships between cities, rivers, and landscapes.

WOMEN LEADING SUSTAINABLE URBANISM

Across cities and communities, women have long contributed to shaping more sustainable places, although much of their work remains overlooked or unrecognised. Women Leading Sustainable Urbanism brings these experiences into view, building on professional work that empowered women in Ismailia, the southern Red Sea, and Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province. It creates space for women’s knowledge, leadership, and lived experience to influence how communities respond to environmental challenges and shape their own futures.

SPATIALISING TOURISM

Tourism is often reduced to destinations, visitor numbers, and economic growth. Spatialising Tourism pauses to question these definitions and classifications and examine tourism as a spatial force reshaping landscapes, infrastructure, settlements, access, and everyday life. Through academic research and community work, it asks what kinds of places tourism creates, who benefits from them, and what consequences they hold for the people and environments that sustain them.

PLACEMAKING IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH

Dominant narratives of placemaking are often rooted in the Global North, while the everyday ways people shape and activate places across the Global South are frequently dismissed as informal, random, or problematic. Yet these spaces often grow from local knowledge, necessity, social relationships, and collective adaptation. Placemaking in the Global South recognises these practices and explores inclusive, enduring, and environmentally sustainable alternatives that respond to community needs and everyday life.

TRAINING AND CAPACITY BUILDING

Sustainable change depends on knowledge being shared, tested, and adapted by the people closest to the challenges. Through workshops, collaborative research, and practical learning, Urbanics works with mid-career professionals, early-career researchers, local communities, and nomadic groups. The aim is to strengthen existing knowledge, develop locally relevant tools, and support people in making informed decisions about their environments, livelihoods, and future development.