Picture a bustling urban marketplace in Alexandria or Tunis. Traders in stalls haggling and adapting to each customer’s demands. Constantly making on-the-spot decisions, they shift positions to create new, natural pathways that wax and wane like the tides.
Such markets mirror the vibrancy and spontaneity of life in most Tunisian and Egyptian neighbourhoods: places where inhabitants’ labours, tenacity, and adaptability unfold in a series of complex layers. Dynamic urban systems that have no overseer dictating the location and display of stalls, the markets thrive despite, not because of, any top-down directives from policymakers or contributions from elite built-environment professionals like planners or architects. Living, evolving, real-time demonstrations of what French sociologist Angès Deboulet calls “urbanisme d’émanation populaire” (popular urban planning), their logic clashes with traditional urban planning norms, which tend to sideline them, labelling such spaces as “spontaneous,” “informal”, or “unplanned”.
As formally trained built-environment professionals who were born and raised in these cities, we are constantly struck by how our lived experiences starkly contrast with dominant architectural and planning models. Our deep connection to the life and vibrancy of markets and neighbourhoods from Tunis to Alexandria has profoundly influenced the work of our transdisciplinary organisation—Oecumene Studio.
Working across the African continent and the Middle East, Oecumene Studio is a melting pot of artists, architects, planners, engineers, builders, scientists, and researchers. Seeking to build bridges between traditional planning and architecture practice with organic, culturally rooted, and community-driven bottom-up practices, we test and implement projects that range from design and construction to community development and conflict resolution. It’s an endless juggling act that tries to bring residents, urban planners, and governmental entities together as stakeholders and co-creators.
In 2015, as war ravaged Syria, an unprecedented influx of Syrian refugees and asylum seekers made up nearly half of the arrivals to Egypt’s borders. Rather than confine them to camps, the Egyptian government—in contrast to other host nations—elected to allow asylum seekers and refugees to reside in urban communities across the country. This posed significant challenges as locals and refugees found themselves vying for the same limited pool of resources.
It quickly became apparent that a series of strategies and interventions to enhance public facilities serving both the incoming refugees and host communities was needed. Y’AHL El HAY (Architecture for Coexistence), a UNHCR-initiated project to alleviate tensions and promote coexistence between locals and new arrivals, became one of our studio’s first projects.
We began by co-creating community nodes in El Hay El Awal District in El Obour City (about 35 km northeast of Cairo). In 2015, about 13,000 Syrian refugees joined El Obour’s estimated population of 550,000, which has since risen to about 700,000. An area whose high concentration of Syrians outnumbers the local population, El Hay El Awal District proved ideal for an endeavour focusing on upgrading the central “District Services Complex”—host to a busy clinic, kindergarten, and various public spaces. The project demanded tinkering and experimentation with comprehensive participatory processes involving stakeholders ranging from city officials and medical professionals to local NGOs and users.
A project originally intended to enhance a health center and its internal courtyard for the community’s benefit ultimately evolved into the collaborative creation of a community node. This transformation was achieved through ongoing negotiation, community engagement, and careful consideration of the existing site dynamics. During the initial site visit, it became clear that the disconnect between the health center and its surroundings was primarily conceptual rather than physical. Boundaries between the health center, kindergarten, and shared public spaces were blurred by overlapping uses. This fact was evident to the staff of both governmental buildings, who disregarded the spatial remit of their responsibility, and proactively contributed their time, views, and ideas to the project, in a series of individual and collective workshops.
Broadening the project’s brief inevitably introduced the challenge of navigating triple the number of government entities responsible for each of the three spaces, along with their associated procedural obstacles.Furthermore, given the prevailing top-down approach and the challenging intergovernmental dialogue, our role was to act as intermediaries between the local community and administrative bodies. Negotiations encompassed a range of topics, with particular emphasis on ensuring the ‘’public space’’ remained ‘’ public’’ and accessible. Despite the inclination of local authorities to enclose the upgraded area with rigid boundaries and implement a ticketing system to minimise vandalism and reduce maintenance costs, such measures would impede the fluidity and permeability of the community hub. A concern that was addressed through the design of bespoke playscape and hardscape from local materials and construction techniques to underscore their durability and facilitate their maintenance by local craftsmen. Furthermore, officials were reassured during the opening event as they observed the unity of the local community and their willingness to participate in upholding the upgraded space.
In terms of our own practice, projects like these, deliberately distancing themselves from a high-end landscape product, serve to humble our ego as designers and highlight the multifaceted skills required to intervene in such contexts. Going beyond mere infrastructural improvements, Y’AHL El HAY underscored the importance of community members participating as decision-makers. The initiative’s impact was significant, serving as a template methodology for multi-stakeholder projects in urban communities in greater Cairo. One such project was implemented in a similar health center and its adjoining public space in 6th of October City in 2016.
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In terms of our own practice, projects like these, deliberately distancing themselves from a high-end landscape product, serve to humble our ego as designers and highlight the multifaceted skills required to intervene in such contexts. Going beyond mere infrastructural improvements, Y’AHL El HAY underscored the importance of community members participating as decision-makers.
Akin to the Y’AHL El HAY, Another project came into being in Tunisia, in the aftermath of the 2011 revolution, which saw the Tunisian legislature adopt a new Constitution and introduce a series of laws aimed at decentralisation and improving public participation in governance and decision-making processes. The new Constitution encouraged initiatives and projects championing grassroots actors and collaboration with communities. Given public spaces’s pivotal role in the revolution, The new law opened up possibilities to reimagine Tunisia’s public spaces. What would spaces that were the fruit of a co-production between its users and the designers / planners look like? How would this new process be instilled in the Tunisian context?
The “El Houma Khir Project” in the old Medina of Tunis, was Oecumene’s experimental response to
these questions. The project sought to collectively reappropriate the Medina’s inherited urban structures to meet the evolving needs of its current population, specifically its youth, through a pilot participatory co-design workshop that brought together civil society actors, municipality officials, experts, youthful academics, local business owners and inhabitants. Oecumene designed and moderated collective workshop activities ranging from urban safaris to round table discussions and ideation sessions. These activities provided an inclusive social space that offered the opportunity to discuss, dismantle and reconstruct the idea of the public space to include contemporary needs and values.
In terms of immediate outcomes, the project established two urban initiatives within the Medina. Firstly, it established pop-up reading spaces on the steps of Al Zaytuna Mosque, where children could engage in reading activities and subsequently share their perspectives and experiences of the city. Secondly, it introduced “Jenina Fel Medina”, a rooftop farming initiative providing opportunities for urban agriculture within an otherwise dense urban fabric. Over the long term, the project contributed to the emergence of a new cohort of urban practitioners who launched their own participatory initiatives and cooperatives focusing on enhancing the public realm within the Medina.
Egypt’s Y’AHL El HAY and Tunisia’s “El Houma Khir Project” exemplify the transformative power of collaborative design. Beyond their bricks-and-mortar legacies, these initiatives highlight how melding local expertise, cultural traditions, and aspirations—harnessing the collective intelligence of communities—can enrich creative processes that can in turn be potent catalysts for coexistence.
These projects have shifted how we understand our role as planners and designers. That is, we now understand that role as one of conceiving of and designing not only spaces, but also collaborative frameworks and mediation and negotiation processes. In other words, the built environment not only as infrastructure, but also as a site of values, memories and a place to foster a sense of belonging for communities.
We are reimagining and building an inclusive urban practice that, at its core, embraces the concept of urban tinkering and the skills and insights of residents that professionals often pay piecemeal attention to or outright ignore. In the process, we are learning that humility is paramount to reimagine and contribute to the transformative change our cities and the spaces we inhabit desperately need. We can learn so much from those who live and breathe the daily hustle and bustle of the marketplaces, alleyways, and streets of MENA cities and beyond.
