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4.5 Urban Exclusion in the City
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In the final episode of this season, Ahmad Abu Hussien, an urban sociologist from Jordan, brings together academics and practitioners to explore theories of urban planning and design through case studies of Jordan and Dubai.
This episode explores the concept of infrastructural citizenship, a framework that helps us understand infrastructure not simply as roads, public spaces, water or sewage networks, but as a political and social system that shapes belonging in the city. In this way, Ahmad and his guests look at how certain communities are excluded from the city, and how theory can inform practice in building apps, policies and physical spaces for the better.
Ahmad Abu Hussien is an Atlantic Fellow for Social and Economic Equity and a sociologist specialising in urban inequalities. He is also the co-founder of AZHJ, a research consultancy focused on reducing disparities in cities and between cities, which works at the intersection of urban policy, governance, and research, with a focus on the Global South.
Deyala Tarawneh is Assistant Professor of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Jordan, and Deputy Dean of Training and Alumni Affairs. She is deeply engaged in professional and institutional planning practice, including in roles with the Jordanian Engineering Institution, as well as supporting women in engineering and urban development.
Harun Jweinat is Co-Founder and Director of Design and Logistics at AZHJ. His work bridges art and spatial justice with a strong focus on translating complex urban ideas through practice and community facing work.
Huda Shaka is a chartered urban planner and a chartered environmentalist. Her work involves advising on city and regional plans, master plans and mega infrastructure projects as well as strategic policy frameworks for future-ready cities.
https://afsee.atlanticfellows.lse.ac.uk/en-gb/fellows/2023/ahmad-zeyad-abu-hussien
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Transcript
Introduction to Season 4 and Collaborations
00:00:04
Speaker
Welcome to Season 4 of Instant Coffee. I'm Nadine Almanasfi and this season we're very excited to be collaborating with our colleagues at the Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity, based at the LSE International Inequalities Institute.
00:00:17
Speaker
This season's focus is a question. What does it take to affect meaningful social change in the Middle East? We thought what better way of exploring this question than by speaking with Atlantic Fellows past and present who are from the Middle East. These activists and practitioners from the region have come to the LSE to dedicate a year to academic research, thinking through how they can find sustainable strategies for social change.
00:00:39
Speaker
All episodes have been co-curated with Atlantic Fellows Past and Present based on their spheres of activism and thinking. They have invited friends, colleagues and guests to highlight the challenges facing their communities the work being done, and future thinking.
Inclusive Cities and Infrastructural Citizenship
00:00:53
Speaker
Based at the LSE International Inequalities Institute, the Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity is a fellowship programme for mid-career social change leaders who are working to tackle inequality.
00:01:03
Speaker
This week's episode is led by Ahmed Abu Hussein, an urban sociologist from Jordan, who brought together three guests to explore how cities can be made more inclusive through the concept of infrastructural citizenship.
00:01:15
Speaker
His three guests, Dr. Dialla Trauné, Harun Juainad and Huda Shakar, each bring differing insights into theories of urban planning and design, as well as the practicalities of space planning, with a particular focus on sustainability.
00:01:30
Speaker
Welcome to this episode of Instant Coffee, a space where we reflect on cities, how they are built, who they serve, and who they systematically exclude. My name is Ahmed. I am an urban sociologist trained at LSE, working at the intersection of city advisory and urban policy on infrastructure and inequality. I'm also an Atlantic Fellow for Social and Economic Equity with the Atlantic Institute in Oxford.
00:01:56
Speaker
In this episode, we explore the concept of infrastructural citizenship, a framework that helps us understand infrastructure not simply as roads, public spaces, water, or sewage networks, but as a political and social system that shapes belonging in the city.
00:02:13
Speaker
This episode asks a fundamental question. Who is recognized by urban systems and who remains invisible or excluded through them? I want to start with a simple but powerful idea.
00:02:26
Speaker
Infrastructure is not neutral. It operates as a form of everyday governance. Roads, sidewalks, lighting, water networks and public spaces do more than just deliver services. They communicate recognition. They tell people whether they are seen, valued and expected to belong in the city.
00:02:49
Speaker
I often think of infrastructure as a kind of social contract. Access to it reflects how the state recognizes certain populations and withholds recognition from others.
Spatial Justice and Inequality
00:03:02
Speaker
My first question I asked to Dialla, Haroon and Huda was, as planners, urban planners, when they hear the term infrastructural citizenship, what resonates with them the most from their own research and work?
00:03:19
Speaker
Hello, Ahmed, and thank you for having me. Pleasure to be on the podcast today. Diya Latarawna is an assistant professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Jordan and deputy dean of training and alumni affairs. She is deeply engaged in professional and institutional planning practice, including roles with the Jordanian Engineering Association, as well as supporting women in engineering and urban development.
00:03:46
Speaker
The closest probably thing that I understood infrastructural citizenship through was the framework of of spatial justice, which is the manifestation of social justice into the urban space and the right to the city. So people having right to not only to access the city, but actually to feel comfortable in it, to feel welcomed in it and to feel that they are allowed to make change. While researching concepts of spatial justice and the right to the city, I came across term called soft infrastructure. So normally this refers to the non-physical elements that are in the physical environment that supports the infrastructure as we know it. So basically, if we are citizens, we have official paperwork, licenses, permits to build or to own in the city. But does that mean that we experience our citizenships the same? So I'm a citizen, you're a citizen. But you are a man, I'm a woman. You have sort of disability, maybe a mental one or something related to well-being. Do you practice the space the same as I do? So there are different tiers where I think inequality may happen within the same infrastructural systems as we traditionally understand them.
00:05:03
Speaker
Haroun Jouinat is a co-founder and director of design and logistics at Azhaj. His work bridges art and spatial justice with a strong focus on translating complex urban ideas through practice and community-facing work. I think the idea that infrastructure is everyday governance resonates deeply. My work, for example, on urban mobility and spatial justice in Amman explores how the physical city, its roads and transit system functions as a form of recognition. If the infrastructure doesn't account for
00:05:43
Speaker
your specific needs, it is essentially telling you that you don't belong. Diala and Haroon's responses focused on the differences between citizens' experiences of the city, taking the concept of citizenship for granted, whereas engineer Huda, a chartered urban planner and environmentalist, had an interesting take on the way infrastructure and citizenship interact in her specific context of Dubai, for example.
Complexities of Urban Infrastructure in Middle Eastern Cities
00:06:14
Speaker
So I'm originally Palestinian. born and raised in the UAE and pretty much all of my built environment experience is in the Gulf, between the UAE, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states. So it's a very specific context and citizenship is not the only way to be here. So there, if you take the UAE, for example, only 10% of the population roughly are citizens.
00:06:42
Speaker
So to me, when I think about it, maybe I think more broadly around citizens, but also residents and who gets what infrastructure, when and how. It's complex. So I'll talk about the UAE, for example, because the the region is actually very big and very diverse. If I take the example of the UAE, only 10% of the population are Emirati citizens. If you're an Emirati citizen, male above a certain age the age of marriage, there is a social contract. The government provides you with either a plot of land and a loan-free interest,
00:07:14
Speaker
to build a house on the land or they build a house for you and you just move in. Non-citizen residents, so the expats, the 90% of the remain remaining people have no such entitlement at all.
00:07:27
Speaker
So it's a purely market housing for the rest of the people. If we discount the blue-collar laborers for a second, because they typically, their employers provide accommodation and lot of times it's in labor accommodation. So it's not exactly market-based. We look at the people who are not blueco workers not construction workers and not Emiratis, the other expat residents.
00:07:49
Speaker
They basically look for houses to rent. In the UAE since about 2001, they now have access also to certain, the ability to buy certain property in particular areas.
00:08:01
Speaker
So there's so many ways to look at this. And you have a point raised by some of the Emiratis while the government is building housing and infrastructure and services for them. So their whole communities, and it's not just a single house, of course, it's the whole community that comes with that.
00:08:16
Speaker
The feedback is, well, what we're getting is less than what the expats are getting when they buy into a community that's developed by a private real estate developer in Amar or Damak, etc. They get better services, they're in a better location, they have better infrastructure. It is an interesting take because as you pointed out, and maybe the the norm or the stereotype is the citizens are privileged, they get the best. the expats then kind of have to deal with what's left. But actually it's it's not quite like that. And it's the the delivery mechanism is different. Obviously you can make all sorts of arguments around, okay, well, you're getting this for free. They're having to pay for this. You're only looking at the certain, you know, crème de la crème of the expats who can afford to be in this luxury communities. But it's so it's the point I'm trying to make is it's in the GCC. It's not just about citizens, it's citizens and residents. And it's not as simple as saying the citizens have better infrastructure and the expats have less. Again, it's different delivery mechanisms, different operation mechanisms. different entitlements, different expectations.
00:09:25
Speaker
What Huda is describing in Dubai also resonates with Amman's context, the city in which I work and live. Much of the scholarly work has outlined that West and East Amman, for example, receive services in a way that separates them geo-socially.
00:09:42
Speaker
West Amman has better infrastructure, more public spaces, whereas East Amman is congested with poor infrastructure. Some of the services delivered in Amman, particularly in the displaced communities areas, are co-managed between municipality and the UNRWA, for example.
Colonial Legacies and Urban Planning
00:10:01
Speaker
Sometimes these services can be enhanced by international agencies. Other times, With fragmented services and the way they are delivered to the public, this can also play a role in reinforcing marginalization.
00:10:17
Speaker
In addition, our cities are layered with colonial legacies. They also suffer from informal growth and highly centralized systems of governance.
00:10:27
Speaker
Yet, despite all these nuances and histories, urban planning is often still treated as a technocratic exercise rather than a political or social one.
00:10:41
Speaker
It's still as if we are in crisis mode, and technical expertise are still needed to try to design cities in a top-down approach, rather than thinking with the people about how we can design our cities from the ground up.
00:10:59
Speaker
I asked my guests where they saw the biggest disconnect between planning intentions and everyday urban life in Arab cities. When I teach urban planning, normally for architecture students, we start with brief history and then we mention like the terminologies and we go through the different geographies and how they practice making cities. We understand from the exercise that the whole purpose of urban planning is arranging the elements of the city in ways that can work.
00:11:27
Speaker
guarantee the best lived experience. But when we skim through the history of urban planning, we find that it's highly formal, as you said, and this is a resonance from the colonial thinking and schools of thought. For example, when we look at the grid model, we think that it's highly engineered. It's the easiest way to arrange elements in any spatial organization. But then we understand that the grid was made for the purposes of war, for having the generals directing the different soldier group. It was made for invasion, not for living in cities. Your life, your needs, the services that you acquire in your everyday life. You're talking about the legacy, inherited legacy of colonial planning and where did the disconnection happen? A lot of the urbanists that came up with urban planning frameworks and models built the relationships between the elements of the city based on their economic values.
00:12:29
Speaker
So we understand, for example, that the city center's lands are higher in prices and therefore they're more condensed. We understand that if the economy is based on agricultural activities, we expand horizontally. We understand that if there is industrial activity happening in the city, then i need to house workers as close as possible to the these factories.
00:12:54
Speaker
However, today, disconnect is when you look at contemporary urban planning theories, they are not necessarily as formal, as highly formal. So they do not discuss the urban form.
00:13:04
Speaker
Rather, they discuss the humanitarian concepts. So instead of talking about the grid and the centers and the concentrics and the realms and the satellites and the multi-nuclei models and all the spatial descriptions of the city,
00:13:22
Speaker
We're looking at principles. So we're looking at justice. We're looking at equity. We're looking at tacticality. We're looking at strategies that we can implement the city no matter how formally they look like.
00:13:35
Speaker
And I think today this is even more manifesting with less formal shapes of the city, especially that we're highly depending on technology. And the relationship between work and home is no longer sole magnitude that the city While mentioned many ideas for people no longer need to live close to where they work example what we're doing today in this podcast so now understanding the space ethereal space so i think
00:14:06
Speaker
while diaalla mentioned many ideas for people to think about when it comes to planning and how we design cities I wanted to investigate more about what is happening in our region today.
00:14:18
Speaker
I can see a shift of systems where people are being included more in the planning process. Sometimes it does create chaos, maybe because populations are not used to be asked for their
Participatory Design and Technology's Role
00:14:32
Speaker
opinion.
00:14:32
Speaker
We are still in the early stages of opening cities for participatory design. But I wanted to know whether my guests see a future where we can work together with citizens in this way, or do we still need more time?
00:14:51
Speaker
I think the disconnect is most visible in unspoken community, which is informal economy in the cities.
00:15:04
Speaker
They need services. They need the cleaning services. Through my experience, we conducted over 300 interviews with informal, let's say, homes, kitchens, different kinds of activities.
00:15:20
Speaker
They share the same ah services with and with the formal economy. And they are not represented. We can't hear them. We don't know about their...
00:15:31
Speaker
activity unless it's a Facebook page. Haroon raised a valid point. There is a huge segment of society that practices informal economic activity within the city.
00:15:45
Speaker
This activity requires services that are not even highlighted because we do not know about these activities and also the people associated with them.
00:15:57
Speaker
But battery planning is not a new concept. has been ah yeah It has been there for a while, but it's the understanding the ladder of participation maybe is the more significant highlight that we should emphasize here. So basically informing citizens about what's happening is not participation.
00:16:16
Speaker
We're speaking here about real participation with involvement and with decision making, like thinking about the planning of the city until the execution and even post-partition. the production and with the maintenance and the operation and administration and everything in between. So if you have the channels, you have the results. But at the end of the day, it's not feasible to put everyone in one room.
00:16:39
Speaker
So it is an issue of representation and the selection of the representatives so that you would have a comprehensive view on things and so that you would have a representative view. If we should focus, we should focus on creating the channels and and and the tools for this. And I think that we are closer than before to bottom-up planning than top-down ones.
00:17:01
Speaker
Maybe Haroon was making a joke about the the Facebook post, but the level of engagement on social media across platforms, whether it is Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, it is a core a form of of of participation. It's about creating the mechanisms. So I think in urban planning, this is not as easy.
00:17:23
Speaker
to to to have come to reality as much as it is in urban design. So if we're speaking about the smaller scale, the human level, the neighborhood, this is more doable. So it's about scale. It's about the having the channels and the mechanisms. It's also about having the technology because and now we're talking about, for example, open source information. So this is also a form of participation where people can input their their their data about how they move in the city, what sort of interventions do they need around, how do they feel about their experiences in the spaces.
00:18:00
Speaker
Speaking of technology and planning, Huda shared with us an exciting approach using tech to include people from the beginning of the planning process.
00:18:10
Speaker
I think technology and big data and thick data can help us a lot with this. really First of all, understanding what do people need, what do they want. um from currently a director at a company called Gale.
00:18:25
Speaker
And what this company focuses on is really understanding people's lived experience. and then using that to advise on policies, to develop designs for streets and neighborhoods and parks. But it all starts and ends with people and what they want and how they live. And collecting this data by observing people, by asking them. It's very important the questions we ask them because it's you can ask somebody questions that are actually very technical in a language that they don't really understand. But we ask people about the
00:19:00
Speaker
things that they are experts on. So what is your favorite place in the city and why? So things that they really mean to them, what connects them, what where do they feel belonging? We give people a and an app on their phone and say, go please, can you go around and take a picture of spaces that make you feel like you belong?
00:19:16
Speaker
So suddenly these very intangible topics, like belonging, like identity, like, you know, safety, livability, we have photos and quotes and sentiments to go with them from the people. That really makes ah makes a difference and and changes the way we think about spaces. And no matter, you know, how good we are at what we do, we can't come in from the outside and claim to know what the people of a particular area or city need.
Sustainability in Middle Eastern Contexts
00:19:43
Speaker
I wanted to ask my guests about one of the most important and complicated topics in the global south. Sustainability. It is a hot topic nowadays as the world deals with the climate crisis and it is it is a term that came to us with its own baggages.
00:20:04
Speaker
The terminology itself can be alien to Middle Eastern cities, and we definitely are still trying to find ways to localize it. I asked Huda if she has seen a genuine shift toward more inclusive sustainability in the Middle East context. So I have two kind of lines of thought on this. One, generally,
00:20:27
Speaker
the discussion around sustainability has been very focused on the environmental sustainability side and typically when we're talking about sustainability in the built environment we're typically typically talking to engineers and architects and planners who are used to physical aspects are used to numbers to calculations it's a lot easier for them to understand the data and the tools and the strategies related to environmental sustainability When we look at social sustainability, thinking about what data do we collect and how do we collect it and what does it mean? And it's a very, it's a complete paradigm shift. We're not talking about black and white. We're not necessarily even talking about numbers. It's a different way of looking at things. It becomes a lot more politically sensitive. So it's a whole different ballgame. And I think we need the right skills and mindsets around the table for that.
00:21:15
Speaker
That's a general comment around environmental environmental versus social. So most of the right most of my the work I've done has had some some sustainability theme either very central to it or at least as part of it.
00:21:27
Speaker
More and more now I'm trying to push for the social sustainability angles to also be included. What I found helpful... to bring in this understanding of the inequalities, the the the social side is to talk about resilience. As a sustained ah sustainability specialist, when I first heard about resilience and city resilience and resilience strategies, my kind of first thought was, okay, this is like sustainability rebranded. This is just another trendy word, but it covers the same topics. It's not really that different.
00:22:00
Speaker
But actually when I looked lived into it more and tried to really forced myself to open my mind and think outside the sustainability world, there's a few key differences. And it's not either or. it's I think it would it's really helpful to look at both the sustainability lens and the resilience lens. And then together, a more a more equal or more nuanced picture starts to form.
00:22:22
Speaker
So to me, one of the biggest weaknesses of the sustainability lens And look at ah you see a lot of the KPIs where you look at the, you know, we're talking about city level. I'm talking about specific buildings, overall city strategies or nation country strategies. If you look at the SDGs, for example, or any other sustainability metric at that scale, it's typically talking about averages.
00:22:43
Speaker
On average, how many meters squared of open space or green space in the city? How many miles does a resident drive, et cetera, et cetera. So that completely misses vulnerable people or the extremes in either way, right? It gives you an average picture, which says something, but you could also say misses a lot. Whereas there is the resilience angle specifically looks at the weakest link, specifically looks at vulnerable groups. So when we're talking about resilience to heat, for example, we're talking about not just what percentage of population has an AC in their home, or what is the average temperature in a typical room in the city. We're talking about, out of the vulnerable population, how many of them don't have a comfortable space to be in.
00:23:26
Speaker
So the average is almost meaningless. it's We need to look at the most vulnerable people, and are they able to survive in the case of a shock to the system? And that and that changes the discussion completely.
00:23:40
Speaker
The other thing that resilience allows you to do is provide options. So it's very easy in a sustainability discussion to say, okay, we've looked at all the options and let's say we're looking at carbon. This is the most carbon efficient way of getting around or of doing this particular industry or whatever it is. And okay, let's all do that. What resilience is tells you to think about is redundancy and giving people options because not everybody might, that mode of transport or this particular technology might not work for everybody. So instead of saying, you know, do you have park outside of your house or do you have a walking
00:24:12
Speaker
path outside of your house the question is can you as an individual get to that park okay maybe you can't walk so is there another way is it accessible for people maybe people need to drive because you know they can't walk or cycle or they have big family or they need to carry things with them so it's just it gives a lot more flexibility and really thinking about options and the people's different abilities and needs and wants I mean, if if anyone speaks about sustainability in the Arab world, they're going to come up with very similar search results.
00:24:46
Speaker
They're going to see what's happening in in the region, especially in terms of mega projects that claim that they are sustainable. But then with with further research, we find that they are actually anti-sustainable.
00:24:59
Speaker
NEOM, for example, and the Lion Project that was promised to be 170 kilometers and out of a sudden now it's 1.7 kilometer because it's not sustainable. It's not doable.
00:25:09
Speaker
So when we're promoting these big ideas, these mega projects on the principle of sustainable practices, so for example, the nature-based solutions and the green infrastructure and the water harvesting and the solar energy harvesting and and and the wind energy harvesting and all of that,
00:25:28
Speaker
In theory and on paper, it may look feasible, but again, in application, there are so many barriers that are also quote unquote infrastructural that are stopping these sustainable endeavors from actually being realized. So for example, there are so many administrative tools, there are so many legislative tools, there are so many financial tools to understand how we can finance these projects and how can we make sure that this does not have a negative impact on the livelihood of the people.
00:26:00
Speaker
So if it's not sustainable, it does not equal that it's not producing energy because the end result of sustainability is not only a surplus or a minus in and an energy or or whatever dimension of sustainability, water or energy or what whatever, because there's also livelihood attached and there's also people and there's also costs that are embedded in, for example, the shipping, the manufacturing and and so on.
00:26:26
Speaker
But in terms of infrastructural citizenship and and that sustainability, we also need to look at the human sustainability and the human resources and how they are being used and abused and ah the decent living work conditions, human rights and how they are being catered in these quote unquote sustainable projects. We've seen so many mega projects that claim to be sustainable, but then again, hundreds and thousands of of of workers are not being treated properly, for example. Is this still being considered sustainable. So there are so many things that we should we could consider. And you used the word sustainable terms and and concepts that we use. I don't think that we use them. We actually abuse them. And the fact that they are borrowed from Western contexts makes them so alien to to our contexts in ways that we cannot even fathom. Because They do not cater for our context specifics like the climate, the social structures, the culture and all of that. ah all of that So sustainability is also a concept that should be inclusive or thought about from the the the just lens.
00:27:34
Speaker
Harun and I worked on sustainability projects that developed climate resilient master plans and it was also migrant responsive in two tier two cities, Irbed and Mufrag.
00:27:48
Speaker
These cities are in Northern Jordan. UN Habitat gave the opportunity for local experts to carry out the research the way it should be done. Not depending on the Global North scholarship from the ground up, we found that people didn't care much about the environment as much as they cared about well-being and social economic status first.
00:28:10
Speaker
This links back to both Diyala and Huda's point about the importance of social sustainability, the alien concepts introduced, and the importance of meeting basic human needs first.
Future of Equitable Infrastructural Citizenship
00:28:23
Speaker
My last question to our guests was about the future. With everything we have discussed, If we wanted to imagine the future of citizenship in our countries and cities with proper infrastructural citizenship, proper access to urban services that can give us dignity and recognition, what would it look like 10 years from now?
00:28:47
Speaker
Probably a space that you feel entitled to. And here I want to bring attention to entitlement in the just city. So for example, i used to tell this story where there are two boys, they're in the bus. One of them is occupying the whole seat and the other one is like sitting on the edge.
00:29:09
Speaker
No one told them how much of the seat they should occupy, but their sense of entitlement is what dictated how they... function and how do they carry themselves in that space. So I think a city that has good infrastructural citizenship is a city that I should not negotiate my presence in.
00:29:29
Speaker
Diala's answer was very powerful and speaks to the importance of everyone being present naturally. Everyone having the same kind of access with no exclusion or restricted zones for certain family types or groups of people or gender, regardless of their background or citizenship status.
00:29:48
Speaker
Harun and Huda also gave us some interesting solutions for the future. Well, I've seen a promise in multi-sectoral stakeholder engagement sessions we've done before, where communities, organizations and civic groups are given the tools to influence municipal policy directly, as we did the with the Climate Resilient Urban Master Plans later lately.
00:30:17
Speaker
But also, I think infrastructure is a language. If you are not mapped, seen, or valued in the city's physical and digital data, you cannot fully exercise your citizenship.
00:30:31
Speaker
Therefore, I am optimistic about the power of visual data synthesis, let's say, and creative formats to bridge the gap between technical experts and public.
00:30:44
Speaker
when we When we make ah research accessible, we empower i i think we are we can empower communities to claim their right to the city. We have many and examples, unfortunately, of huge monuments, big spaces, very expensive, very luxurious, but completely empty.
00:31:05
Speaker
because nobody really thought about the user users of those spaces and what it would feel like to be in that space and whether that space is even usable or how to get to that space. And it's all been designed kind of with a helicopter view, not with an eye level view.
00:31:18
Speaker
So if we could redirect the investment in public space, because there is a lot of investment in the UAE at least, redirected to projects that, first of all, understand what the people want and need. So I think generally in the Arab world, we're lacking in that first research investigation step.
00:31:37
Speaker
And then provide that in a way that is inclusive, in a way that also engages the users in what is being designed and what is being developed. We don't have time to get this wrong.
00:31:49
Speaker
we don't We also don't have time to solve the climate crisis and then solve the, you know, whether it's the food crisis of having not enough healthy food or physical health crisis. Like we have to do it all at the same time.
00:32:03
Speaker
It's a, multiple challenges we're dealing with. So I'd love it if we put more thought into what are the projects that people need today and in the future, and then developing them, implementing in a way that also meets the people's people's needs to get to kind of thriving cities where the the starting point and ending point is people's lives and what their experience is in the city.
00:32:27
Speaker
So we've come to the end of the episode. I really want to thank all three of my guests, for joining. The conversation opened up so many other topics for discussion.
00:32:39
Speaker
A lot of people go and visit European cities because of how they look on the outside. We go there and experience the cities. We also have fun.
00:32:51
Speaker
But then we come back and we see that we have identity in our own cities. That's the difference. We also see that we have issues despite this beautiful identity.
00:33:05
Speaker
We have so many issues to tackle to become on par with European cities or American cities or even Far East cities. But I believe we can do it step by step with data collection, digital mainstreaming of complex ideas, localizing our terms, coming up with our own scholarship on sustainability,
00:33:31
Speaker
and also trying to imagine our cities away from colonial legacies. But with inspiring guests such as those that joined us for this episode today, we are in good hands.
00:33:45
Speaker
Thank you all for joining us, and we hope to connect with you again in the future.
00:33:54
Speaker
Thank you for listening to the final episode of this season of Instant Coffee. To find out more about Ahmed, Dialla, Haroon and Huda's work, follow the links in the podcast description.