Desertification and city resilience in Siwa, Egypt

Kenawy, I; Al-Hegazi, S

Abstract

Insufficient landuse planning has accelerated the impact of desertification disasters. By 2050 desertification will lead over 700 million people to migrate from rural areas to crowded cities (UNUESH, 2014). In context, Siwa oasis is one of the threatened cities in Egypt. Urban ecology is a one of the recent approaches in city planning, using ecological science perception, methodology and applications that could help understand cities' behaviour under any environmental shocks.
This paper highlights the role of urban ecology in the maintenance of lands facing natural disasters including degradation taking into consideration the communities' perspective. It sheds light to the vulnerability status of land degradation hazard of Siwian communities in the Egyptian desert. This approach focuses on exploring and evaluating the citizens' awareness of their dynamic nature and the role of individuals to maximise their resilience,
and their adaptive capacity towards desertification. Observations and questionnaires were designed in order to examine the severity of negative effect from desertification using the adaptive capacity and vulnerability variables. The data generated from the fieldwork showed a power struggle between education, culture and communication. Involving the community in urban solutions can minimise the effect of desertification and increase their resilience mechanism to land degradation regime.

Citation

Kenawy, I., & Al-Hegazi, S. (2017, July). Desertification and city resilience in Siwa, Egypt. Presented at Passive Low Energy Architecture - Design to Thrive, Edinburgh, UK

• Presentation Conference Type: Other
• Conference Name: Passive Low Energy Architecture - Design to Thrive
• Conference Location: Edinburgh, UK
• Start Date: Jul 3, 2017
• End Date: Jul 5, 2017
• Publication Date: Jan 1, 2017
• Deposit Date: Sep 19, 2017
• Book Title: PLEA 2017 Design to Thrive Proceedings
• ISBN: 9780992895754
• Publisher URL: https://plea2017.net/
• Additional Information: Additional Information : Proceedings ISBN: 978-0-9928957-5-4; Access Information : The full proceedings, including this paper, are available to download at https://plea2017.net/ This paper appears in Volume 2.; Event Type : Conference