Intended as a contribution to the debate on inclusive cities, this paper proposes that the re-imagination of new city landscapes lies on the integrative sum of its parts. Considering that knowledge about infor- mal systems continues to be a challenge in achieving integrated land- scapes, this study explores how the linking of the fields of urban ecol- ogy and urban informality can lead to systematic approaches towards understanding urban informal ecosystems. In that way, this think- piece theorises on alternatives to approach the socio-natural processes taking place in informal settlements to demonstrate their capacity to adapt to prescribed ecological frameworks and ease their way into ecological scrutiny. Using a mixed-method approach in which the the- oretical framework and the empirical work functioned in a cyclical manner, the city of Caracas, Venezuela, was investigated. The analy- sis led to the discovery of ties and processes that navigate in and out of the informal city, and revealed that informal areas can be scaled, inventoried, and re-imagined from a systems perspective. The paper therefore recommends a rethinking of the two intersections that play a role in most of the new scenarios of change seen in the contemporary urban hybrids of developing countries. Specifically, the intersection that concerns the formal vs informal dichotomy, exploring the spatial and virtual role of the urban informal in the city, and the one concern- ing the city vs nature dichotomy, and the assumption that as part of the city, the informal is also a constituent of a greater urban ecosystem with impacts and evolutionary capacities.

Sustainability in urban development is considered as a main concrete stone that effect directly the quality of life for its users. Land Suitability Analysis (LSA) using GIS as a multi criteria support tool reveals the best alternatives for the suitability of sustainable land development. Urban planners working under the umbrella of sustainability using recent technology should contribute their work directly to LSA. This paper aims to develop a new technique to be used by planner to reach best alternative for five main urban sectors (agriculture, Industry, Trade, Tourism, & Residential) using GIS as a multi criteria decision support tool (MCDS), accordingly choosing best city location will be accurately and analyzed upon LSA studies. LSA and MCDS are going to be applied on one survey unit map called Monof along Cairo – Alexandria Road. Results showed that different alternatives could be applied on the area of interest, and all of them are sustainable, but choosing the best deepened on the priority of querying the development sector. The paper suggests a pilot method for land development planning and choosing best city location that would be a guide for the governmental planning organization to support in taking right and analyzed planning decisions.

Urban poverty areas (UPA) in the main cities of the emerging and developing countries are representing the product of a chaotic urban-isation process. This process started through the recent decades as a result of the economic reform in many Emerging countries, mainly in Asia, South America, and some cases in Africa such as Egypt and South Africa. Under the umbrella of the term UPA, there are many other terms such as slums, shantytowns and informal urbanism. In this study, the focus is on a special case of UPA which exist in the main cities of the emerging countries and some cases of developing countries. These UPA have some of the slums characteristics, which indicate the low quality of the urban life such as the pollution of the urban environment, the high density of built up area and the lack of social spaces. However, these areas mainly consist of permanent buildings which were built in most cases by the dwellers themselves due to their basic socio-economic needs, also in most of the cases the basic infrastructure are available. The study hypothesis is discussing the possibility of enhancing the quality of urban life in those UPA through a strategy of integral mul-ti approaches based on the potential opportunities of public spaces. In other words, the key to a successful strategy is “integration”, meaning that all approaches, policies, and projects are considered in relation to one another. This includes the using of new approaches such as green infrastructure (GI) through an integration framework with the other prevalent urban approaches such as participatory, towards innova-tively interactive urban communities. An analytical comparative study was done based on qualitative methods by studying various case studies of UPA in main cities of emerging and developing countries that were up-graded through a strategy of integral multi approaches. These rely on the public spaces as a medium for change, as well the using of quantitative and qualitative methods through actual case studies. The results represent lessons from practice. Based on actual cases, the cumulative urban experiences through various selected cases of upgrading UPA showed that the success depends on the using of an integral approach (multi-disciplinary) that relies on livable innovative public spaces. The new approaches such as GI cannot stand alone, but the strategies can be efficient by using integral an multi approach strategy. The cases also showed that public spaces in UPA are cen-ters of the daily socioeconomic activities, which is why these areas can act as arenas for change, towards better quality of urban life.

Architectural education has great potential to moving the entire in-dustry towards sustainability within buildings and cities. Having the fundamental knowledge to apply the sustainable strategies can help solving different environmental challenges being faced today. Sus-tainability is then recognized as a core topic in architecture and to re-flect this recognition, it is crucial to integrate it into the architectural education curriculum. Many approaches are used to introduce the concept of sustainability into the architectural programs ranging from integrating the concept into existing modules to adding new mod-ules that are entirely dedicated towards this subject. The design stu-dio is the most dominant module in architectural education having the highest credit hours per week; and being a pool within which all subjects dissolve. The studio is characterized by creating a unique learning environment modelled around a problem solving practice. Introducing sustainability into design studio was then found to be a key potential that enable graduate architects to make sustainable de-cisions within their design process rather than handling it separately. Realizing that potential; architectural educational institutions used different approaches in order to include sustainability within their curricula. This paper sheds lights on the education of sustainability within the architectural curricula in a number of Egyptian universities. It dis-cusses the teaching and learning of sustainable design then, identi-fies and analyses different approaches used in integrating the con-cept of sustainability into the curriculum. Follows, a qualitative anal-ysis takes place from semi structured interview conducted to practi-tioners and educators from various universities in order to stand on methods used to integrate sustainability into their architectural cur-ricula. The findings are to develop recommendations that could help discovering the best practices that could enhance the learning experi-ence for integrating sustainability in design studio modules.

This paper discusses various formal solutions adopted by the Indian official bodies to deal with the Indian informal settlements “the slums”. It focuses on Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (PMAY) or the “Housing for All by 2022” as an essential housing act toward improv-ing the living conditions of the informal settlements, and to achieve cities and housing for all. According to the Indian 2011 censes, 66% of formal towns and cities in India have informal areas. Nearly one in every six urban Indian res-idents lives in a slum. Poor and rural immigrants find in the slums a physical shelter, but they lack quality of living and basic social-economic infrastructure. Bringing formal solution to the informal set-tlements is a challenge that requires deep understanding of the Indian heterogeneous population. This paper starts with the main housing policies that were launched in India during the 2000s, and extend to cover several case studies in In-dian cities based on a field visit conducted in India. It discusses sever-al concepts applied such as in-situ and relocation alternatives; possible improvements for the local communities by promoting livelihood re-sources; the concepts of using land as a resource, land pooling and public private partnership in developing the slums. This paper aims to understand the notion of risks and uncertainty in these solutions as constraints in improving the informal settlements in India for a better urbanism future.

Natural world is one of the most important context of children’s maturation. However, the result of a latest survey that was conduct- ed on 12,000 parents from 10 different countries, showed that one- third of children in the age of 5 to 12 years old spend less than 30 minutes outside every day. This survey and other relevant studies have brought evident to the problem of the lack of children interac- tion with their surrounding environment and nature in general. One of the major role players who can make a difference in resolving children-environment interaction is the architecture designer, who is the one responsible for creating physical spaces for children. The ob- jective of this paper is thus to investigate the role of architecture in the creation of spaces for children that can act as a tool in itself, and which could promote both tangible and intangible sustainability concepts. A literature review was conducted in order to study the principles of sustainability and how to integrate nature into a physi- cal space for children through a number of analyzed case studies. Findings of this paper were based on a double perception including literature and designers. It was indicated that children are generally interested in the idea of integrating nature to their physical space. The results of this study are expected to influence the architects through presenting guidelines that guides decision throughout the design of spaces for children. It is recommended that such spaces should enhance understanding of the concept of sustainability, and could sustain sustainability in the mind set of young children, who represent in turn environmentally aware future generation.

Rapid urbanization is considered today as complex combinations of what we have at the present and the shift that will happen in the future with many other social and economic forces. The mid-20th century and contemporary urban development create the new expanded urban areas that have the characteristics of fragmented integration cores to-wards the emergence of new centralities. The new built environment should have an intelligible special configuration to adapt with human agents, and based on this insight, it is important to explore these prop-ositions further and examine different ways to investigate the domain of urban spaces in new communities and its related social properties as urban spaces shouldn’t compiling one dimensional demand. This paper introduces some examples of open spaces in new commu-nities low -middle income housing that could be used to investigate in which manner, spatial patterns can influence the social contribution, and analyzing the social factors which have an impact on the physical properties of the open spaces in these segregated urban pattern. The aim from this paper is to reach a multi-dimensional assessment meth-od that could recover the open spaces s that suffered from the absence of policies and regulations of urban planning and development. The study is introducing a methodology for empirically exploring and clas-sifying the variables and attributes that define the physical and non-physical dimensions in open spaces by qualitative case study analysis to facilitate the social cohesion and integration in the community. By comparing the results from the spatial and physical perspective; an assessment method will be reached at the end to for-mulate the new community potentials and to overcome the problems for more social integration.

Sustainable development has become a significant worldwide concern. The past few years have seen a lot of changes. Some of these affect how we do approach - and how we should approach - environmental issues. Because of their adverse impacts to sustainability, knowledge about building materials became a crucial dimension of green change in building and design. The problem is that in Egypt there is still no database for green building ma-terials. In spite that there are currently over 120 international green labelling programs for building materials worldwide, they cannot be locally used. This is because building materials and the way they are extracted, manufactured, used, transported, recycled or disposed differ from country to country. All these factors result in insufficiency of data & information on green building materials and those who are involved in the design, construction & man-agement of building materials are acutely lacking the basic information on materials that would allow them to make constructive changes. That’s why the introduction of a system for specification, assessment & se-lection of green building materials is considered to be one of the corner-stones of promoting sustainable green building development in Egypt as an attempt to fulfil Goal 11 of the Sustainable Development Goals developed by the United Nations to make cities inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable by 2030. The aim of the research is to develop a framework for a system for evaluat-ing sustainability of building materials in Egypt to achieve greener steps to-wards sustainability with a new way of scoring sustainability of building materials that evaluates both positive & negative ecological, social & health and economic impacts through the whole life cycle. This system could be applied in the development of the New Cites that considers the unique chal-lenges of the region and the local market and could be applied all over the country taking into consideration the nature of each region with its available building materials and specific climatic conditions and the different regional priorities and requirements. The research was based on an inductive approach through studying & analy-sis of the life cycle of the building materials, the different aspects and crite-ria for the evaluation of green building materials, currently available re-sources of information about building materials in Egypt and the interna-tional & national reference values & benchmarks that could be used as a base for the new system. Findings will lead to a proposed framework of a system for specification and assessment of green building materials in Egypt. This framework de-scribes all the kind of information required and the procedures that should be taken for the development of the system from collecting data till the es-tablishment of online guide for green building materials and a digital library for accessible and reliable information on green building materials that ena-bles building designers, constructors and developers to make reasoned choices based upon the health & environmental impacts of their decisions and eases the use & selection of Green Building materials in Egypt over the coming years.

The elements and means affecting the formulation and structure of the architectural buildings have been greatly developed by man throughout different ages according to the development of technology, so the dimensions and specifications of configuring dynamic buildings can be designed and controlled in order to leave the required effects on the environment and the user to serve certain purpose or function. But it seems that the process of formulating any architectural vocabulary acting on the dynamic aspect goes beyond the boundaries of the perceived dimensions and the included unperceived one; as the first dimensions may be considered namely the aesthetic aspect in architectural work, while the included unperceived dimensions may display efficiency in work which is greatly influenced by the personality and the formative attitudes of the architect, the site style and the surrounded environment, as well as the economic efficiency of the building. However, the liability issue seems to be the absence of the criterion of forming efficient dynamic configurations in architecture. Accordingly this research aims to reach this criterion as identifying the architectural attitudes; as a decisive in shaping the building as its facades, envelopes, sections or plans. Additionally, it attempts to explain the reciprocal relation between the architectural vocabulary (perceived aspects of configuration) and the unperceived one which is distinguishing the valuable architectural works. The research will attempt to analyze the elements included and the aesthetic and formative considerations while configuring the dynamic building to determine the important role played by such formation in reaching the psychological and physiological effect on the user in turn to maximize its utilization of such architectural work.