1. Introduction: Between Forgetting and Possibility

After more than four decades of war, displacement, and institutional disconnection, cities like Kabul have lost their social and spatial coordination mechanisms. Instead of rooted systems, what remains is fragmented administration, external projections, and informal power structures. In places where the state is overwhelmed and self-organization no longer practiced, a dangerous vacuum emerges—a space without responsibility.

URBAN STEPS does not call for romanticized participation. It calls for the reactivation of shared urban responsibility. And for places where Ground and Grid—lived reality and formal planning—can once again intersect productively.

 

2. Ground Is Not Chaos

In many international programs, the urban ground was seen as a neutral field, a staging area for externally designed pilot projects. NGOs, development agencies, and donors arrived with budgets, frameworks, and “bottom-up” (grassroots) intentions. But most initiatives failed to generate sustainable impact. When the money dried up, so did the momentum. Local actors—residents and administrations alike—rarely felt a sense of ownership.

Responsibility was either pushed upwards or outsourced. Planning was delegated. Governance became either too weak or too controlling. Citizens, in turn, withdrew into self-interest. But a city without a sense of responsibility is no longer a city. It becomes an urban shell.

 

3. Why the Grid Is Not Enough

The reaction to this urban vacuum was often a bureaucratic overcompensation: more regulations, tighter controls, rigid master plans. Yet planning institutions remained underfunded, technically overstrained, and blind to context. Projects like Kabul New City demonstrated that large-scale grids cannot build livable cities if they ignore urban memory and daily life.

Outsourcing, misreading scale, and designing without understanding led to structures without resonance. Space became grid, not ground.

 

4. What We Need: Ground-Grid Hybrids

URBAN STEPS proposes a third path: strategic places where Ground and Grid intersect productively. We call these Common Ground Spaces—urban micro-systems where new forms of cooperation emerge.

 

These spaces are:

• neither open participatory utopias nor closed planning offices
• neither purely experimental nor overly formalized
• but rather structured spaces of possibility, where learning, negotiation, and co-creation take place.

 

5. From Workshop to Framework

URBAN STEPS is not an institution, it is a learning action model. A framework that combines:

 

• methodological clarity with contextual sensitivity
• academic research with hands-on training
• cultural self-organization with strategic governance.

 

Concretely, this means:

• pilot projects that are not one-off interventions but systemically connected
• peer-learning environments for administration, residents, students, and planners
• mapping and morphology tools that make urban memory legible again
• cross-sectoral translation of lived knowledge and technical plans.

 

6. Case in Point: Self-Contained Neighborhoods

We are developing models that embody this intersection: the self-contained neighborhood—formally structured, yet socially anchored. These units draw inspiration from Kabul’s traditional urban fabric: collective courtyards, integrated uses, walkable scales, spatial hierarchy.

 

Infrastructure placement follows not just engineering logic but also cultural meaning. The aim is not to recreate the past but to generate structured openness—enabling continuity through modern tools.

 

7. Call to Action

Cities cannot be built by administration alone—nor by community activism alone. What we need are bridges. And places where urban responsibility is shared, not displaced.

 

URBAN STEPS invites you to help shape such places. Not as a fixed model, but as a growing platform. Not as a utopia, but as a pragmatic methodology.