Framework Formation
The timeline below traces major responsibilities, contexts, observations, patterns, and tensions that gradually shaped the Urban STEPS framework.
Synthesizing Practice into an Operational Framework
Urban realities continue to evolve beyond the responsiveness of isolated planning systems and sector-based interventions.
Urban STEPS synthesizes two decades of observations into an operational framework for reading complexity, strengthening continuity, and navigating relationships between planning, governance, territorial systems, and lived urban reality. Rather than replacing planning, it expands its capacity to engage with the dynamics that shape cities over time.
Focus Fields and Key Question
How can planning learn to read and navigate complex systems and relationships that shape current urban environments?
Preserving Continuity under Change
Safeguarding a unique archive of Afghan modern art, architecture and cultural history in diaspora.
Displacement threatens not only people but also memory, knowledge and cultural continuity.
Focus Fields and Key Question
How can cultural memory remain active, accessible, and meaningful across generations and places?
How can we preserve continuity while enabling adaptation.
Institutional Drift
Institutional Complexity & Operational Fragmentation
Working between Afghanistan and Germany across governments, international organizations, academia and private actors revealed a recurring pattern: institutional sophistication increased while operational coherence often declined.
Insight
Planning loses transformative capacity when realities become disconnected from institutional assumptions.
Key Question
How can planning remain adaptive and accountable across increasingly fragmented implementation systems and institutional layers?
Leading strategic planning for a metropolitan-scale project.
Limits of Metropolitan Planning
Metropolitan expansion beyond operational capacity
This period challenged many previously held assumptions about planning, governance, and development.
The growing gap between institutional and donor agendas and evolving urban realities raised fundamental questions about how governance and planning systems could encountering transforming metropolitan environment.
Observation
Despite significant resources and international engagement, many actors operated within separate frameworks. Projects were often evaluated through procedures, visibility, and delivery mechanisms, while underlying urban realities and long-term structural conditions remained insufficiently addressed.
Insight
Metropolitan planning succeeds only when strategic visions remain connected to evolving realities, institutional capacities, and implementation dynamics.
Key Question
Can planning become adaptive rather than merely predictive?
How can planning engage complex realities rather than operate alongside them?
Negotiating Continuity
Continuity as Governance Resource
Building Afghanistan's first national urban safeguarding program under post-conflict conditions
Observation
Urban continuity depended on negotiated relationships between communities, institutions, and evolving urban pressures.
Insight
Continuity emerges through embedded relationships rather than institutional control alone.
Key Question
How can continuity become an active governance resource rather than merely a heritage concern.
Reading Between Morphology & Governance
The relationship between institutional governance (Grid) and embedded self-organization (Ground)
Observation
The research revealed that the revitalization of the historic fabric is linked with the re-activation of interrelated embedded governance systems.
Insight
Cities remember through structure as much as through memory and everyday practices.
Key Question
How to re-activate embedded self-organization mechanisms to serve as engines for sustainable redevelopment?
Coordination & Implementation
Institutional planning and operational implementation
Participation in highly coordinated architectural and infrastructural implementation environments, including large-scale public projects, project-management systems, and international competitions.
Observation
Large scale project implementation depended on operational continuity, coordination and management across institutions, actors, and scales.
Insight
Planning becomes effective when responsibilities, coordination, and implementation remain aligned.
Key Question
What could enable urban planning systems to operate reliably and translate decisions into complex-built realities?
Continuity Across Displacement
Cross-cultural formation and identity
Following displacement from Afghanistan in 1980, education and professional formation in Germany.
Adapting to the new environment proved straightforward, maintaining continuity with cultural origins became a more enduring challenge.
Observation
Continuity is not preserved through place alone. It depends on active relationships to memory, culture, language, and shared narratives.
Insight
Cultural identity can adapt and incorporate new aspects, increasing diversity while preserving core values.
Key Question
What allows continuity to survive displacement and persist disruption?
How can diaspora expertise be leveraged effectively to advance the development of the country of origin?