Extreme Urbanism: A View on Afghanistan, Session 1Session 1: Planning for Urban Afghanistan

Seminar Transcript

Until recently, Afghanistan was omnipresent in global news for the past two decades for all of the wrong reasons. As part of the Option studio, Extreme Urbanism VII: Imagining an Urban Future for Ishkashim,

offered at the Harvard GSD in the fall of 2020, this workshop/lecture series aims to propose to interested audiences the opportunity to get an updated, informed view on the country.

Addressing primarily architectural, urban, and territorial aspects of Afghanistan, this cycle of talks aims to create a platform where varied topics ranging from vernacular architecture and building traditions to

infrastructure and cultural specificities are discussed in conjunction with issues related to historic settlements and contemporary planning in Afghanistan. The speakers will include academics from Harvard University

and Kabul University, in addition to global experts, and practitioners working in or on Afghanistan.

Chair Rahul Mehrotra, Professor of Urban Design and Planning, Harvard Graduate School of Design

Speakers Onno Rühl, General Manager, Aga Khan Agency for Habitat Dennis Pieprz, Principal, Sasaki Research Victor Eskinazi, Senior Associate, Urban Designer, Sasaki Research Alykhan Mohamed, Associate, Planner, Sasaki Research Thomas Nideorest, Professional Staff, Landscape Designer, Sasaki Research Einat Rosenkrantz, Senior Associate, Urban Designer, Sasaki Research

TRANSCRIPT BEGINS:Meena Hewett: I'm delighted to welcome you all on behalf of the sponsors of today’s workshop, which is a series of three workshops that will be hosted on Saturdays from 10:30 to 11:45 on September 12, which is today, October 3 and October 24. Our sponsors are Aga Khan Agency for Habitat, Kabul University, the Graduate School of Design at Harvard, and the Mittal Institute, and today ’s topic is ‘Extreme Urbanism: A View on Afghanistan,’ and it's broken up into three series, as I mentioned. It’s a very unique time, not just because we are in this pandemic and we are all on Zoom, I think we've all have gotten used to now communicating with each other and continuing our work. But what's truly unique about today's workshop or the series that Rahul and his team have designed is that it's on Afghanistan and, particularly, they are looking at interesting urban issues on the border of Tajikistan and the province of Badakhshan, and you'll hear more about it during the course of these series.

This workshop is also truly unique because it's opened up to a broader audience, which is what again this pandemic has brought as an opportunity for us is to involve people who otherwise would have been difficult to bring to the US. Because of this broad audience and the larger participation, the topic is going to be able to cover very complex issues related to contemporary architecture as well as juxtaposing it with historical settlements in urban environments in Afghanistan. It's also going to look at infrastructure, it’s going to look at public policy, it’s going to look at cultural reflections and how that's reflected in the built environment. So, as you can see it is going to be rich with all kinds of complex issues in an area that often, I don't think we've ever Rahul can attest to that, covered this area in the studio. So, these series are also going to inform the studio, the design studio that is being offered this fall at the design school, and it'll allow us to bring experience and information from again practitioners, faculty members from Kabul University, academics across Harvard, and also, students are involved from Afghanistan in this particular project. So again, in many ways, it's truly a unique opportunity.

So very quickly, I'd like to introduce Rahul, who has been the mastermind behind this series of workshops, as well as the studio. Rahul has over 30, maybe 40 years, depending on if he started as a teenager, experience in Architecture and Planning. He's done a lot of writing and teaching on issues in architectural urban design, as well as conservation. He's an educator, as well as a practicing architect, and an urban designer, has offices in Boston and in Mumbai. Some of his interesting projects, and actually they straddle both contemporary as well as conservation work that he has done, for example, the master plan for the Taj Mahal, or the restoration of several heritage buildings in India. And his more recent projects include a library for the School of Architecture at CEPT in Ahmedabad, the School of Public Policy at IIM Ahmedabad, and

they’re building on faculty in arts and sciences. So with that, I'm going to hand over to Rahul to open the session. Thank you.

Rahul Mehrotra: Thank you very much. Meena. Thanks very much for those kind words and the introduction, and thank you to the Lakshmi Mittal South Asia Institute, to yourself, Chelsea and Rafi for supporting this. Really, it is unique because both within the South Asia Institute and the GSD, we have not looked at Afghanistan and learned from Afghanistan. So thank you for your support. Thank you also to everyone for being part of this, to logging in. It's just really nice to have a broader conversation on Afghanistan and as Meena said that this is a three-part series on architecture and urbanism in Afghanistan, and we are starting today with very broad issues of planning and then we’ll look at traditional architecture and urbanism and then finally, we'll look at contemporary architecture and urbanism in Afghanistan.

This idea actually originated because it's part of an Option Studio that my colleague, Charlotte Malterre-Barthes, who is with us and will also moderate the second session on traditional architecture and urbanism, the two of us as we were planning the studio in Afghanistan, which itself was a challenge, we were going to have a number of lecturers embedded just for the students to be exposed to much broader issues. But then, I think in conversations we decided that it would make sense to aggregate these in these workshops on Saturday mornings, so that a much broader audience could avail of this conversation on Afghanistan. And therefore, the series were born, in a sense that with the support of the South Asia Institute. The studio itself, as Meena has pointed out, is in the northeastern corner of Afghanistan, which is on the border of Tajikistan and what we are going to discuss in this series is much more abroad and looking at Afghanistan more holistically, I hope. And it's been fantastic because we've been supported, in this case, by the Aga Khan Agency for Habitat, who are working on the ground there, but also the Aga Khan Trust for Culture, Kabul University through the Aga Khan Agency for Habitat has become a partner and what is very interesting is we also have in parallel eight or ten students at Kabul University partnering with our students to work on the ground. So, it also becomes an exposure to both sets of students as collaborations, and I hope some of them are also logged in. The second session, many professors from Kabul university will also participate in these proceedings.

In Afghanistan, for the last four or five decades, the condition has been really challenging. I don't need to frame that, it might emerge in the discussion, but in this process of rebuilding, reconstructing, upgrading, it's been a whole range of actors that have been involved in partnership with the government. And these are of course external agencies like the World Bank, USAID from different countries, I think there's lots of ties with Japan, there are NGOs both national and international, or rather internal and external. And then there's civil society, which is citizens, the university, which plays a big role. And I think what is fascinating about Afghanistan and this whole process of rebuilding, upgrading, developing is that these partnerships are setting up interesting new models by rich capacity know-how, but also looking at the locality more rigorously can occur. And so what we're trying to do in this series is represent people from all those areas so that we get voices that speak to looking at the problems and solutions from these different perspectives. Not only do we think it would be a great exposure for our students to be able to listen to those voices to understand this, but these become ideal forums and platforms where often these disparate agencies don't have a framework to have these discussions. So for us, I think this is a very important beginning and thank you again to the Institute for supporting this.

Today, we have two sets of presentations. The first one is going to be from Onno Rühl, who is the general manager of the Aga Khan Agency for Habitat. He’s going to start off and what's interesting is that his background has been with the World Bank and I just highlight that only because our next presentation is going to be a World Bank sponsored presentation, but Onno now wears another hat, which is, he is helping establish a very young part of the Aga Khan network, which is the Aga Khan Agency for Habitat, which was expressively set up to look at broader planning questions, to look at rural habitats, to look at the relationship between planning processes and protocols, both in the urban and the rural. So, therefore, to look nationally more holistically. And so, he has been setting up this effort and work on the ground there and has amazing experience in doing this through his experience in the World Bank, where he was based in India, he was heading the portfolio there, so it's very familiar with South Asia. And so, we'll start with Onno's presentation and our next presenter or presenters is actually a team from Sasaki, many of whom well they're based in Boston, so, and they have great intersections with the GSD, where we are doing the studio. Many of them were students in both, in the urban design landscape programs, planning programs, but Dennis Pieprz, who leads this team, has also been a graduate from the School of Design and is engaged with the School of Design and teaching there periodically.

Dennis has about forty years of experience, he was the youngest partner at Sasaki, a firm again based here in Boston, and has been for the last four or five years with the team that we see here, leading an initiative in Afghanistan to not only plan for Kabul, but also look at other five other towns around the ring road so to

speak. And Dennis's experience, over these years, I think will be incredibly valuable, so will the rest of his team. I will leave it to Dennis to introduce the teammates as they come on. And with that, I'm going to invite Onno to share with us what they're thinking about planning in Afghanistan. Thank you.

Onno Rühl: Thank you very much, Rahul. Well, it's really a great pleasure to be at this end of the seminar, which, from our perspective couldn't be more beautifully named. Just checking if you guys can see my screen.

Rahul Mehrotra: Yes.

Onno Rühl: Okay, that works. So, why is the Aga Khan Institute for Habitat… thank you, first of all, to Lakshmi Mittal Institute, Harvard, Kabul University, our colleagues from the Trust for Culture. Why is a new agency from the Aga Khan network working on extreme urbanism? Well first, a little bit of context on this is where we work, so it looks pretty extreme if you try to fit urbanism to the pictures that that you see there. The Aga Khan developing network, first very briefly, is a network that was created by His Highness the Aga Khan 50 years ago, more than 50 years ago. Has 96 thousand staff members, employees, not counting volunteers, mainly working in South and Central Asia and Africa, also in Europe and presence in North America. And it is not a denominational institution. It's based on the principles of pluralism, solidarity, consultation, self-reliance, and human dignity and that is why people like me who are not at all from the Ismaili community can be agency heads in this in this network. It is a truly nondenominational, very visionary network, and I have to say it was great to work at the World Bank, but it's fantastic to work in a network that aims to be much closer to people. In the World Bank, I often felt it was closer to governments. It's a network, also, that doesn't just have development, which is in the middle of this slider, social development institutions, where you see at the right bottom our Agency for Habitat.

It also was an economic development, which basically means businesses and then it has the Trust for Culture. What is especially exciting to many of us is to work in a network that combines social development and business because we often struggle just doing business in developing countries because it's difficult to do this in a way that makes one feel that there is participation and true improvements of the quality of life for the people who work in those businesses. Yet, when we work on social development, we often struggle realizing that our efforts can’t be sustainable because the only truly sustainable forms of activity are those that are in revenue, our network combines these two. Now, the Aga Khan Agency for Habitat as Rahul mentioned is a completely new agency, it is however not new in the sense that it is a startup. It's actually a merger of two parts of the network that existed before. One is an agency that was called and still is called in North America ‘Focus Humanitarian,’ which essentially focused on community-based disaster resilience in a fairly advanced way, which is where the link to planning will come in. And the other is the Aga Khan Planning and Building Services, which worked exclusively in India and Pakistan, which were an incarnation of the Ismaili housing boards there, and their mandate traditionally was to think about housing for communities, how to build that, how to provide for it, and ultimately, that rolled into thinking about how to plan for housing.

Now His Highness realized that in the areas where we work, in the core areas where the Aga Khan Institute for Habitat works, South and Central Asia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Tajikistan, India primarily, and since a short while ago also, Syria, we will roll out operations also in East Africa with time. He realized that the approach of community-based disaster resilience was still very necessary, but that the risk the communities faced was exacerbating, getting worse quite rapidly, and this, of course, is significantly being as a consequence of the risk profile changing due to climate change, particularly in high mountain areas, which are quite prevalent in the geographies that we're talking about. And he, therefore, thought that it was no longer going to be possible to keep people safe, trying to do the same things as we'd done before, simply by mobilizing communities and have them understand their localized risks because those risks themselves are changing.

He also felt that other than having more technologically advanced solutions to risk mitigation, it was really important that the understanding of risk, which had been going on for 25 years. For 25 years, focus had been mapping the actual, direct hazard risk in more than two thousand communities in the geographies that I'm talking about, which literally means going there every three years, sending geologists, working with the communities, looking at every hill slope, using satellite data, and understanding how this works, and building out into a very big GIS database with detailed risk mapping. That an intellectual capital had been created that might be part of the solution to the problem of how you deal with the risk profile changing due to climate change, because, in effect, the people in the high mountains of the Himalayas, the Karakoram Mountains are living at the frontier, the battle front of climate change, just as much as the people of Maldives, or the people in low-lying coastal areas in Bangladesh. They are threatened actively and directly by climate change impact on their habitat and they are right there, they live right at the edge. People live almost as far up as virtually every animal, with the exception of snow leopards and, therefore, they're right there. So, the logic of

combining the planning engineering capacity of the Aga Khan Planning and Building services and a humanitarian and disaster resilience capacity of Focus Humanitarian was that by using the data in this GIS database, by understanding the risk and mapping it, it should be possible, not just to plan for survival, as we did in the past, but actually plan for populations to thrive. And, His Highness put this in a very beautiful way, he said that planning shouldn't be about what things are, it should be about what things ought to be, and therefore, he exhorted us to go to a much more ambitious approach, a much more radical approach, not just thinking about how to help community survive.

And here are some of the things we do in terms of numbers, glacier-monitoring, community-based weather monitoring post 30,000 volunteers on the ground who are the first responders when there is a disaster. We build water and sanitation systems for well over half a million people, we build more than 50,000 homes and 5,000 schools, hospitals and community centers. Now what do you do with all that knowledge, with the database that has the risk mapping? You can use that to combine our ability to engage with the community. And this is really important for those of us, I lived in North America for a long time, when a hurricane comes, typically, the biggest challenge that authorities have is not to predict the hurricane, it is to convince people to respond to the hurricane, and to heed the warnings that are given. Countless times I've seen people on the outer banks in the Carolinas on TV, saying, ‘I’ll ride out the storm with a six pack.’ Our agency engages with every community on a regular basis, at least twice a year, to talk about their understanding of risks. This allows these people in the community who are first responders to engage with individuals in that community about how they should respond to any risk materialize, and the next step, where they might build their homes, where they might build their community centers, where they might build their schools, how they might maintain the infrastructure. In other words, how they plan for their community.

Now, today we're talking about Afghanistan and this for me is truly exciting because we've been trying to do knowledge collaboration with institutions like Harvard for a long time and we've been, by and large, successful, but we've never been successful to work in places like Afghanistan. There's a very simple reason for that. The classic model of working in studios is that students and faculty need to go to the country where they work to actually be exposed to and interact with the community and understand what's going on. And that's of course a great model, but it's unfortunately not a viable model for Afghanistan. So, when our head for Habitat Planning was reaching out to Rahul about wanting to work now, we suddenly realized that Covid, bad as it is, provided a tremendous opportunity for us to use a different way we're now working to work in areas where we could normally not work because suddenly, it became acceptable to work purely virtually, purely remote. Typically, we would work with the university only in Tajikistan or India, and we have worked with Rahul in India actually before, but not in Pakistan, because most university faculty and students are not allowed to go, definitely not in Afghanistan and Syria. And now we've actually decided to focus on first Afghanistan and hopefully next year, Syria. What's our challenge in Afghanistan? Well, Afghanistan is as at risk from natural disaster and climate change as any high mountain area and Afghanistan is largely a high mountain area and the northeastern corner of Afghanistan Badhakshan, Baghlan are very, very mountainous areas. They're very far away, far flung and the communities there really struggle to survive on the battle fronts of climate change. These people get displaced by floods, rock slides, mudslides, avalanches on a regular basis. On top of that, they get displaced by violence, man made risks, and therefore in Afghanistan, we see even more issues with people being either temporarily or for the long term displaced, and then as all of you, no doubt, know there's a large number of people who have fled Afghanistan over the years, who eventually inshallah, as we would say, at some point might want to come home.

Now, when you think about that, you actually realize that Afghanistan is a place where extreme urbanism is extremely necessary. First of all, we need to help those high mountain communities plan for what ought to be, plan for an opportunity to thrive, not just be marginal and just manage to scrape by and survive. This requires a totally different outlook. An outlook that Switzerland took on its mountains a very, very long time ago, thinking not how do I just manage, but how do I actually do well in mountains. And that may sound ambitions, but I want to point out that any European you asked 200 years ago if Switzerland would be rich would laugh at you because Switzerland was extremely marginal by virtue of the fact that it was a mountainous and still is a mountainous country. So when you have a long term horizon on development, planning for communities in high mountains of Afghanistan to actually thrive and have opportunities for the next generation is a long term investment that will pay off. It will not pay off next year, immediately, but it will pay off, bit by bit by bit. And division behind our agency is that we use the knowledge of engaging with these communities and the technical geological knowledge and the GIS database. We have to do exactly that.

Then obviously, not everybody stays in these high mountain villages, people go to urban centers, essentially down the valley. In those urban centers, there’s a tremendous need for looking at planning again, demographies have really changed. They’ve changed as a consequence of conflict, people move in, they tend to want to move closer to urban areas, some people have moved out all together. There are temporary residents, who become long term, these communities have really changed because of what happened on the

ground in Afghanistan. And Afghanistan is the kind of country where for at least 20 years, nobody has thought about how you solve a problem like that because everybody's focused on the short term. What we are trying to do with the Trust for Culture, our partners from Kabul University and now hopefully, certainly the knowledge input from the wherewithal that Harvard and other academic partners might bring to us, is to start thinking about how you can actually rebuild these communities, plan for their new demography, their new role in the economy and do that ambitiously. But, of course, with an implementation on the ground that matches the ground reality, also in terms of security.

And then there is in Afghanistan, the big prize, which is Kabul. Kabul has become much bigger because, strange as it may sound for all of us who read about bomb blasts in Kabul on a regular basis, for many people in Afghanistan, Kabul is still the safest place where they can be, actually for most people. So Kabul has seen great influx of people, and at the same time, of course, many people have left because of the combination between local migration and refugee movements. Now, we don't know what will happen on the refugee side but certainly the aspiration of everybody Who has good intentions for Afghanistan, including the government of Afghanistan for sure, is that some of the refugees who left Afghanistan will come back to help build a better country. But even before that is the case, we need to start thinking about urban planning for Kabul that actually helps Kabul become a much better place where people have a much better life, which we believe will help stabilizing the community and lowering the risk of what we call manmade disasters. So, that is a big issue in working there, we would like to learn from our extensive experience in India and Pakistan working in urban environments, truly urban environments, building housing that isn't just a roof over the head, but actually to kind of housing that allows people to build a better life, be ambitious, but also do it, as one says in India, with a healthy dose of jugaad, not in the sense of engineering but in the sense of putting it together in a way that doesn't cost an absolute fortune for each house because that won't be possible, and therefore we need to innovate.

We need to innovate in Kabul, we need to innovate in district centers and we need to innovate in the places that are at the beginning of my presentation that don't look like urbanism at all. In fact, they look like almost empty space with a bit of infrastructure, but a girl who gets born in those places should have the same opportunities in our life as a girl who was born anywhere in the world and technology actually makes that possible. So, our dream and our ambition and our job is to work to bring to bear the knowledge that allows us to develop urbanism in the most extreme locations in the world. When we think of urbanism and planning as that's what makes the better environment, not just safe, but supportive of opportunity for the people who live there, and that is why we are so excited to be in this series. That we're so excited to participate with Rahul and the other partners in workshops. We really look forward to what we’ll all learn from it and hopefully many more times to come because there'll be years of work and learning to find a way to meet this challenge. Let me stop there, and if I can find a way to unshare my screen then I'd like to hand the floor back to I guess Rahul. Somebody unshared my screen for me, thank you very much.

Rahul Mehrotra: Thank you very much, Onno. Thank you very much for actually stating the challenges in their broader sense, and I think the idea of planning serving, not just survival but how people can thrive is, I think, a very well articulated challenge and a mission, in a sense. So thank you very much for that. We'll come back to the questions but before we go to Dennis, there was one question that came on the screen, which I just want to address before we move on, which was in the context of the studio we're doing is, what is the connection we have to the district and Badhakshan, and how will we get that data. And I just want to, whoever asked that question, there are two or three levels we are doing, one is we're working through the Agency for Habitat, who have people on the ground. We’ve already, through the summer, had many meetings with stakeholders which are even government and district officials to understand their perspective. And now with the help of Kabul University, Kabul University students, we are going to actually reach out at other kinds of stakeholders, so that we get a much finer grain of feedback to the extent we can using the virtual mode. And we are confident that with all the partners in place, which is why the collaboration is so important, that we get as good a pulse as we possibly can with the limitations we have. So with that, I'm going to hand it over to Dennis and the team from Sasaki, who will now respond to some of the things that Onno has bought up through their own experiences. So with that, Dennis over to you.

Dennis Pieprz: Okay, thank you. Alykhan will share our screen. Thank you Rahul, thank you Onno. Thank you for including us in this exciting studio with the GSD, and the institute. Let's make sure my — Okay.

Okay. Let me introduce the team here, we will talk primarily about our experience in five provincial cities that we worked on with the World Bank. And I will do a brief introduction that will show a bit about our work in Kabul but my colleagues Alykhan, Thomas, Einat and Victor will talk about these themes and primarily focused on our work on the five cities. We first became involved in Afghanistan through a recommendation from a colleague in the Philippines to a senior advisor to President Ghani and out of that came a discussion

with the president directly and he said that he wanted to improve the lives of ordinary citizens that the wars, and obviously, presented a gigantic distraction from just how people cope with life in the city. And, he asked us to develop a framework for the city and he articulated a bold vision that he had, a kind of a way of thinking, and this is one of our framework drawings that came out of that process. But we had many engagements with various entities, including President Ghani himself, bi-monthly besides our weekly Skype calls with a range of city and institutional partners. His contributions were incredibly inspiring and engaging. We as Onno noted, very difficult to travel there although one of our colleagues did travel there. One of our infrastructure experts based in New York, but we formed a broad coalition of partners, everything from Kabul University, various ministries, the Aga Khan Trust for Culture Turquoise Mountain, and various individuals based in Kabul and beyond. And that was incredibly helpful. We had a series of workshops, many via Zoom, but also in person in Dubai. The work began looking at a broad array of issues and these evolved as we did our work. We've looked through many lenses at the city trying to understand that it was a huge learning experience, and out of that we developed a series of key drivers dealing with big issues that we felt working with the partners to address. And you can see, I'm not going to go through them, but they became major ways for us of thinking about the city and it’s urban form. We also took a very systematic approach, it was, as you can imagine, very complex to find data and then to use that data to map information in easily accessible ways. It was clear that we had this was a project about regeneration, about building on the existing city and guiding investment in a strategic way.

We developed a series of design-led concepts that would address the issues developed in the drivers and they cover a wide range of issues, as you can see here. And, one of the critical approaches we did was to work with the existing structure of the city. This wasn't about cutting new boulevards through urban fabric, it was to work with what was there. And these corridors of commercial and civic life became drivers for a big bus transit system and economic investment. We were asked to focus on two particular ones: Dar-ul-Aman Boulevard and Masood Boulevard, which you can see here, and we drilled into them both focusing on the transit investment, focusing on public land that could become catalyst for development and investment. This is just one diagram that represents some of the infrastructure work that was constantly being addressed not only for the specific corridors, but the city as a whole, water, energy, all of the elements that one needs to think about.

The transit idea was focused on creating catalysts for investment. So, on this publicly-owned very large parcel, we proposed a mixed use development that connected a neighborhood to Dar-ul-Aman and the transit, and we tried to show how one might build in this scenario in a way that was appropriate for the city that was forward looking in defining that future that I think the Aga Khan stated so well. Another district building on Bagh-e-Babur, which was a major initiative of the Aga Khan Trust for Culture to restore that garden on publicly-owned land near the Kabul Zoo. We created a whole array of community places, recreational sports, and other elements that would provide places for people to live a better life in the city. On Massoud, we again focused on publicly-owned land and the development of transit and other infrastructure. On the hillside, next to Massoud, another large area of our activity on the informal housing sector. I'm not going to go into that too much, but other than to say we developed strategies to invest in infrastructure and community facilities. And you can see in this diagram, how we started to integrate the hillside development with new transitional housing, affordable housing, public markets right on Massoud, which you see on the bottom right. Here you see in front of one of the transit stations, a new market, a mosque, and the hillside housing connected to this new public space with higher densities among the Boulevard.

All of this led to our work with the World Bank and the focus on five cities, five regional provincial capitals, this was a very different process for us and a very exciting evolution of our work in Afghanistan and Kabul. And here you see a map of the country and just the basic structure of the team. This time, the team became much more broad, we had a number of partners who worked with us on the ground, number of them were based in Kabul and in terms of engagement, in terms of social development, engineering infrastructure, and our main client contact by the World Bank was the Ministry of Urban Development, IDLG, and the various entities in each city.

We were charged with developing strategic frameworks for each city. These are not master plans, they are really about prioritizing development, creating broad strategies for investment and then identifying specific opportunities for implementation. We had a long and carefully fine-tuned process that was iterative and built on insights and input. A key aspect of this work was the outreach and the engagement on the ground through surveys, focus groups, cutting across a broad aspect of society interviews, and we were very much a part of that, but also many individually held in each city by members of MUDL and other Afghan entities. We also had an in-person workshop with key leaders from each city and this was in Istanbul with the World Bank's participation. While that was going on, in parallel, we had a very deep level of data-driven analysis, mapping, looking at data, gathering data as a way to advance our understanding and knowledge of the five cities and their regions. We developed critical themes that were informed by the data and the engagement

process and these themes were these that you see there, I won’t go through them, but you can see that we drilled into each one to address the issues that came out of those themes and into more specifics, in more detail. We developed a series of principles that that came out of all of this engagement as well as our experience and I won’t describe these but my colleagues will elaborate a bit on these as we show you more detail. So you can see the fairly broad areas of thought that went into this work.

The plan was very action oriented and implementation oriented, so it was not only to develop the frameworks are to identify opportunities for investment, whether through the World Bank, the Afghan government or other entities to help improve the lives of Afghan citizens in these settings. And my last image here is just from one of our calls with President Ghani and you can see the kind of issues he was focused on, the long term vision, the rules of the game. He constantly said zoom in and zoom out, always look at the two, the context and the city itself, look at the city as a system, look for opportunities to leverage the advantages of each city. He wanted to unlock investment and generate jobs and employment and he always emphasized the sense of urgency and the need to coordinate across sectors. So with that, I will pass it on to Ali Khan, who will talk about his piece.

Alykhan Mohamed: Thanks, Dennis. From the beginning, from our work in Kabul, all the way through our work on the five cities. The notion of Afghanistan as a historic and a contemporary crossroads of culture, of language, of economic and politics has been central to our understanding of the country and its people. As we know too well the strategic location of Afghanistan on the front lines of geopolitics has meant decades of instability, but at the same time its strategic location has been a huge strength. For thousands of years, cities like Balkh have been hubs of international trade and culture, whether Persian or Pashto, Muslim or Buddhist, each of Afghanistan's major cities has been the seat of Empire at some stage of history. And what we, I think really saw at every level was that these layers of history and culture have contributed to the country's incredibly diverse society, as well as economic potential and a wealth in terms of built environment.

And this idea of Afghan cities as hubs of international commerce and culture was one that President Ghani emphasized to us and what was especially inspiring and rewarding was the opportunity to dig between the challenges of conflict and instability and growth and infrastructure and really focus on the incredible foundation that Afghanistan has. At the same time, with the strategic development frameworks in particular, we were tasked at looking at the nuts and bolts of economic development and infrastructure as well. And so, while we were specifically looking at five of the country's largest cities, the emphasis was always on these cities as hubs of economic growth and culture, and their position in the larger network of transportation and a system of cities and towns that are all interlinked. Our focus was really on not just planning for the people in these cities, but also understanding how are the investments and the systems that we looked at were part of really a broader vision of economic development and nation building.

So today, Afghanistan is still at the center of regional trade, and one thing, especially given the location of Ishkashim, that I think would be great to focus on, and to do some background research on is understanding all of the different investments, whether those are pipelines, rail lines, connections. Every country around Afghanistan, from China to India to Turkmenistan, sees an opportunity and sees a potential connection to global trade and I think understanding and leveraging this infrastructure is not only a way for Afghanistan to start to lead on the regional stage, but also a way to start building investment. Right, so transitioning from international aid that is, of course, meant to build the country but starting to look at investments that that actually are made on Afghanistan's own terms and help the country have a place on the stage of international commerce.

We also looked at the national network of cities and economic regions, each of the five cities that we looked at are linked by a national ring road. This chart shows essentially all of the regions that are within an hour and two-hour travel times at the major cities. And what is interesting is that In many cases, if you look at Herat, if you look at Mazar, if you look at Jalalabad, the connections with cities in neighboring countries are often just as strong as the connections or the transit connectivity to other cities within Afghanistan. And so, this tells us two things. One is that creating synergies and links and thinking about those cross border cities is very important, but also strengthening those internal connections is key because each of these cities, as Thomas will speak to later, is in a different ecological setting. They have different natural resources, different specialties and by connecting them, there’s a lot to gain. We also drill down into the region around each city and the five cities that we looked at are, I think, representative of the fact that even though Afghanistan is known for rugged and in some cases, harsh climate, many of its cities are in lush, agricultural valleys and they are the center of networks of smaller towns and villages and making sure that there are connections, both in terms of transporting people but also transporting goods, looking at the water networks where the rivers that flow through these valleys feed the agriculture, as well as the urban population is incredibly important.

And then finally, we looked at connectivity on the city scale and we looked at how industry is structured around major highways, where this industry is in relation to the city's historic core and how the location and the influence of all of this economic development is influencing new growth. And so often you see, from this example in Herat, industry and customs outside the historical or the older city fueling urban growth and logistics, and so I won't go into the details, but again, another example of how we tried to look at economics, industry, urban growth, quality of life, history in the same view. And, I think the connectivity was one way we looked at it, understanding what is being traded, what is being produced was another aspect. And so, one of the things that we focused on was the idea of value chains. The idea of taking raw products, whether agriculture or minerals and thinking about how to build the infrastructure and the industrial assets to convert them into packaged goods clothes, textiles, etc. and then even further on complex products.

So, going back to international trade, one of the things that we were made aware of very early on is that Afghanistan imports much more than it exports. It buys goods from its neighbors, and this is a trend that has actually been increasing in relative in recent years. And I apologize for putting a bunch of graphs and stats in front of you on a Saturday morning, but one of the really interesting things for me was actually being able to work with trained economists on this project and understanding the implications of this. So, one major point is that you can see the volume of imports is huge compared to the volume of exports. And so that means Afghans are spending a lot more money importing products, even basic products like agriculture, even though Afghanistan has done a good job of focusing on fruit, grapes, processed food, some of the specialties that are unique around the world. The country is still importing basic goods like wheat, flour, rice, potatoes, and so you may encounter opportunities for agricultural processing and while it is important to focus on the exports, thinking about supporting local businesses and producing goods that Afghans will use is also important.

Investing in infrastructure is important but investing in human capital is also really important. And one another trend recently is that the value added per worker has gone down. So, training is very important to equip people to participate in these industries. Another key factor, key insight that we noticed was that if you look at the gender distribution of workers by sector, there’s actually a very high proportion of women in manufacturing and this is right now, driven by textiles by weaving and manufacturing, but I think it's important to note that is potential opportunity whether you're thinking about equity or economic development.

And then finally, education is important and creating jobs is important. Afghanistan has an incredibly young population and the country will need to create almost 4 million new jobs by 2026 as today's youth enter the market. So, the challenge is finding the resources for education, for healthcare and opportunities, but the upside is that if this is done well, there will be a young workforce in the future. And then finally, in terms of people in human capital, security and stability is key. One clear trend is that out of almost half of the population that has been displaced, almost everybody goes to the larger cities, whether they are coming back from Europe or other countries in the region or whether they're migrating from villages. And so our focus has been to anticipate and accommodate this population growth, but especially looking at some of the smaller towns and villages, an area of focus that will really help mitigate the challenges and build on the work in the largest cities, is trying to understand how to create the economic opportunity and the stability to encourage people to stay to return to and to invest in those smaller towns and cities.

And so, I'm going to transition quickly to some of the principles and ideas that we worked through. Again, one key principle is really connecting rural and urban cities. The second was thinking about a 21st century economy, and I think, the fact that we're all here from across the globe online is indicative of the fact that whether you're in a small town or a major city, having access to ICT, having good internet, can connect you with the whole world. So, focus on the basics, agricultural processing but also, why not connect everybody in every town and village to high speed internet and give them opportunities. So, for each city we focused on district and city level plans, trying to align future urban growth with existing and propose industrial centers. We looked to create catalytic regional economic anchors, such as an exchange and convention center in Kabul, where regional producers and farmers can come and display their goods, find merchants and opportunities for export. We also look to create smaller replicable and scalable opportunities in neighborhoods. So, for example, vocational training, agriculture research and development, libraries, women's centers to really try and invest in human capital, not just at universities, but for even the most vulnerable and marginalized communities. And then finally, we look to create urban, rural gateways. So these could be agro-processing centers or smaller nodes at the outskirts of towns that interface with the outlying villages and towns that give people from towns the ability to come in to trade, to sell their wares, but also to build some capacity while they're there perhaps see a clinic, learn something new, etc.

And I think, to kind of close with this, we went from the international scale down to the scale of the site and we proposed very specific projects and a big takeaway is that many of these projects, some of them came from us, many of them were result of the stakeholder consultation, many of them have already been

proposed by other ministries and government organizations or international organizations. And I think as you start to think about concrete proposals, it would be really important to look around to see what other ministries other stakeholders are proposing. And as designers and planners to try and be the glue that coordinates all of these investments and puts them in a larger system. So with that, I think, again, emphasizing that connection with the urban and the rural I'll turn it over to Thomas, who's going to speak to landscape and ecology.

Thomas Nideroest: Aghanistan’s population is rapidly growing and with it, its agricultural and industrial economy. A major challenge in sustaining this growth is still increasing demand for natural resources, such as portable water, the production of energy and food. This in return, increases lab requirements to accommodate the anticipated growth. Cities and city regions are confronted with a task to carefully and strategically plan for this urban expansion in order to not compromise the natural environment. To guide the government to what's this complex and interdisciplinary task, we introduced landscaping ecology as an integral part of city planning and urban development.

See this event. In this presentation, oh it accidentally cut, maybe you’ll have to go up to the second slide and guide me.

Alykhan Mohamed: Sure.

Thomas Nideroest: In this presentation, I'm going to frame the story of Afghanistan through the lens of landscape in ecology and discuss the five cities initiatives through the notion of resilience, to create connections between this project and the planning and the design studio. I want to lead with the question, why does the landscape approach in Afghanistan city planning matter? I will try to answer this question by discussing the fundamental challenges and opportunities in Jalalabad, the capital city of Nangarhar province.

Next slide.The initial phase of the five cities project involves the gathering analysis and interpretation of environmental data. Afghanistan’s complex tectonic history belongs to one of the world's most diverse geology. These geologic processes, in return, tell us a great deal about the country's climate, its hydrological river system that shaped the land and explains how the position of a loop allows different cultural society is to establish a variety of livelihoods. Perhaps the most critical resource is water.

Next slide. Afghanistan is situated at a relatively high elevation, which means it does not receive water from neighboring countries. Next slide. The provinces depend on water supply from seasonal precipitation in the form of rain and snow fall. However, due to a changing climate, Afghanistan has seen a change in annual precipitation in recent years with less snow cover. There's the famous saying that captures the true value of water, let Kabul be without gold, but not without snow. The flow of water also identifies the country’s terrestrial ecoregions. Ecoregions offer a framework to determine the existing biodiversity, identify families of plant species that might be considered for afforestation efforts, and recognize historic patterns of vegetation. This is critical in promoting natural resource management that supply livelihoods.

Next slide. Agriculture plays an important role in Afghan livelihoods, while agriculture occupies more than 80% of the country's population, agriculture itself is at a crossroad. Next slide. The rural population has doubled, access to arable land is shrinking, and the younger generation is less inclined to stay on the farm and move to nearby cities. Livelihoods zoning, that is a concept that offers an alternative analytical unit that considers labor's livelihood and market dynamics beyond provinces or districts. Each zone is linked to a specific livelihood profile, providing a better understanding of income across regions and the seasonality of agricultural production. Livelihood profiles also provide an understanding of how climate change will affect different societies. Next slide. Effects of climate change influence the growth of urban agglomerations while a big influx of people associated associated with returnees, from national and international movement, many rural communities move into cities as the urban, rural network does not provide access to markets or environmental disasters, like drought effect agricultural livelihoods in the more rural areas. The link between livelihoods any regions can be understood as a potential for economic opportunities with an alternative resource management regime.

Next slide. In some uncoordinated rapid growth puts a strain on the natural environment through an increase in demand for natural resources on the one hand, but also higher outputs on effluents with the risk of contamination. This metabolic process results in increasing health threats, and the city's ability to react to shock. Next slide. Afghanistan is prone to natural disasters because if it's rugged terrain and arid climate, most major cities are located along snow-filled rivers and valleys surrounded by steep hills. Most cities are exposed and vulnerable to four major natural hazards, including floods, earthquakes, landslides and

droughts. The maps here illustrate a matrix describing the potential of social and economic impacts on either spectrum.

Next slide. Disaster prevention and building resilience requires a combination of structural and non-structural solutions. Structural strategies include infrastructural physical solutions, non structural on the other hand, involve strategies for social solutions such as early warning systems or disaster preparedness. Through the lens of landscape in ecology, resilience in the context of Afghanistan primarily addresses environmental resource management, and risk mitigation, with the goal to a) reduce the actual hazard b) reduce the exposure to hazard and c) reduce the vulnerability and increase people's adaptive capacity.

Next slide. The first approach to guide urban growth was established with the development of a rapid landscape assessment model. This high level tool computes landscape values, environmental risk and sensitivity to water resources against the likeliness of future expansion based on expected population growth statistics. The result is a map that identifies areas of high ecological sensitivity that should be preserved or protected. Developmental areas with high risk exposure that can be mitigated and areas with the potential for actual urban development.

The second approach would result in the development of a landscape and ecology toolkit that would address specific conditions identified in the rapid landscape assessment. Each toolkit identifies a set of landscape strategies that are particularly relevant to urban issues found within the city regions of the five provincial capital cities that intensifies opportunistic design strategies to also strengthen the metropolitan park and open space system. Next slide. Before widespread improvements can be implemented to improve the management of natural resources, standards based on the best practices must be adapted for the Afghan context and translate into policies, regulations and permitting. Furthermore, assist in government agencies to build capacity and establish mechanisms to plan and implement. Implementations are critical next steps. Next slide. Jalalabad lies at the confluence of the Kunar and the Kabul River valley, and it's influenced by the region's abundant ridges and valleys. The city is an important regional food basket and economic hub between Kabul and Pakistan, for many of the nearby agricultural valley towns. Jalalabad is relatively water and drought secure, but it's exposed to higher degrees of flood and landslide risk. This diagram summarizes four main growth strategy that aim to accommodate and expected urban growth of 145% which is equal to 200 to 350,000 people over the next 20 years. The four strategies includes the development of a clear strategy, to assess and manage, to development pressure of new charades, guide urban growth towards the south, incorporate remote residential settlements into the existing urban fabric and reinvest it into the city center to promote sustainable development along the Kabul River.

Next slide.The core of the city is located along the southern Kabul River bank. This area is of great cultural significance because of the historic gardens and monuments, the commercial center, government facilities and Abdul Haq. The major component lays in changing the city's relationship with the river. This diagram visualizes the potential for a landscape approach that connects ecology and culture into a vision that incrementally transcends down the river.

Next slide. Abdul Haq is an important public space that is under pressure from informal settlements. To preserve this cultural heritage as an open space and adapt to the exposure of higher water volumes during the spring in the future, the SDF proposes to redevelop Abdul Haq into a multifunctional riverfront park. The focus here though is the transformation of the existing floodwall into a multi dimensional open space that responds to varying water levels and strengthens the relationship to the river by allowing specific access points, for example, people today are already swimming near but Behsud bridge, which is seen in the background of this image.

Next slide. This here is an image of Behsud bridge that connects the city center across Kabul River with the agricultural districts in the north and District 8. Next slide. District 8 is recognized as a pre-urban conglomerate consisting of incremental low rise and low density development clusters with a high influx of returnees. Today residents migrate into the city center to pursue jobs, which can be very time consuming during rush hour. The municipality reviewed intentions to develop a new public airport, just north of District 8. This is an opportunity positioned to the district as a new gateway into the city and improve its resilience by providing better access to all sectors. A particular focus is given to the corridor where the development nodes act as a catalyst to provide strategic anchor facilities. Next slide. But providing access to social infrastructures and to the labor market per byte one form of resilience transforming the central drainage corridor as seeing here on the right hand side into a shared green infrastructure mitigates the exposure to environmental risk.

Next slide. The envisioned drainage corridor as part of the district's blue-green network provides residents with more recreational opportunities during dry season and protects them from flooding during heavy spring

rains. Planting at the lower elevations of the hillside in the back protects settlements from landslide and allows for future recreational opportunities linking the district with the Tanghi-ye-Shaikhan regional park.Next slide.This image here just looks beyond the hills of District 8 into the Tanghi-ye-Shaikhan regional park, where municipality considers the development of new shards to accommodate future population growth.

Last slide. Our work in Afghanistan is not meant to develop a static master plan, but to build on the idea of flexible and dynamic planning tools that help municipalities to make informed decisions. Tools like the rapid landscape assessment, which is underlined here with the government's expansion plan is an initial planning tool meant to raise red flags when important ecosystems are being threatened by development and vice versa. Approaching planning in Afghanistan from a landscape perspective is crucial in how cities evaluate their carrying capacity, define mechanisms to sustain themselves and adapt to the environmental change. Thank you. I believe next Einat will be talking about the accessibility city.

Einat Rosenkrantz: Yes. Hi everybody, my name is Einat Rosenkrantz and I’m an urban designer in Sasaki. Next slide please. The strategic frameworks for Afghan cities made clear from the beginning, the importance of designing the cities for all residents where access to opportunities available for everyone.

This ‘city for all’ approach is essential for Afghanistan’s success, ensuring that residents will have the economic opportunity, location and quality of life necessary for a thriving city, women are the center of this approach. This instruction that you see in the screen came directly from President Ghani, and even though it wasn't part of the brief of the project, we made it a central piece of it. And while the strategies for women empowerment well integrated in all aspects of our project, this section is intended to highlight just how critical it is to deliberately design for women in Kabul.

I'm sure that many of you know the history of Afghanistan but I just wanted to highlight some moments in the timeline regarding women. In the decades following Afghanistan independence, Kabul was a vibrant cosmopolitan capital where women participating equal economically, socially and politically. In the 1920s Afghanistan’s first women’s magazine was founded by Queen Soraya Tarzi, which I will be talking about in a second. In the 1950s, gender segregation was abolished and by the 1960s, women were becoming more active in civil society. Women helped draft Afghanistan third constitution, and gain the vote, the right to vote, and the freedom to work. In the 1965, Afghans elected four women representatives to Parliament, one of whom served as Afghanistan’s first Vice President in the 1980s. All of this era is a known as a golden age for women. Up until the early 90s, women were teachers, government workers and medical doctors, unfortunately, after the Taliban’s rise to power, women and girls were systematically discriminated against and marginalized and their human rights were violated. Today, the place of women in society has improved in some areas of the country and the First Lady Rula Ghani inaugurated the first university for women and has been pushing to empower all women in all aspects of society. Next, please.

As I mentioned in the beginning of the timeline that Queen Soraya Tarzi was Afghanistan’s first lady from 1919 to 1926 and remains a symbol for the modern Afghan women till this day. Born into a family of Afghan intellectuals in Damascus, Syria, she founded Afghanistan’s first school of girls and published the country's first magazine for women. As the face of many modernizing reforms during Amanullah’s regime, Queen Soraya became one of the most influential women in Afghanistan and encouraged women to become active participants in nation building, as you can see from her quote. She contributed to the rising status of women in Afghanistan in various ways during her rule. Her powerful vision paved the way for progressive Afghanistan through most of the 20th century. Next. These are some pictures of what this golden age that I was talking about looked like, this is the campus of Kabul University, where you can see women being half or even more than half the population and being well integrated. Next please.

Today, things are very different, and since we couldn't go to Afghanistan to take a look ourselves and research ourselves, we relied on a series of photo essays taken by the great photographer Kiana Hayari, who also did service to 30 plus women in all aspects of society activities and more. And we interviewed almost 100 people in every city that we studied, with all of this information and with the photos, we were able to understand how women exercise in the city, how do women come together, how do they get educated, how they socialize and more. Next, please. With all this research in our hands, we divided the research into four focus areas: education, health care, economic development and accessibility, because we believe that given the opportunity, women will become key catalyst for innovation and economic growth and leaders in the neighborhoods regeneration and anchors in the communities.

Next, please. So I'll go one by one. In the education area, as we all know, education is an essential part of providing access to opportunity, too often however, girls in Afghanistan are not given the same access to school and training. This lack of education stems from several causes, including the inability to move freely

around the city, a lack of emphasis on female education in schools, and a lack of facilities for women. You can see from this chart, women are better represented in primary and secondary school and high school, however, when it comes to higher education and technical vocational training, they’re very badly represented, even though women in general represent almost 50% of the population in Afghanistan today. There’s a clear gap in access to education, especially in rural cities. Next, literacy levels in all five cities also tell us a similar story where Kandahar, Jalalabad and Khost really suffer from low literacy levels, while Mazar and Herat are a little bit better in terms of women versus men. Next. And in higher education, some of the cities are overcoming this challenge, as you can see Mazar-e-Sharif and Herat are almost 50-50 when it comes to women attendance but cities like Jalalabad, Kandahar and Khost really, there's a real gap in attendance from moment as you can see from the charts.

Regarding health care and wellness, you know, health care and wellness is a cornerstone of any woman ’s quality of life. Given the volatility of recent decades, medical care and mental support services are highly needed in Afghanistan. These issues further exacerbated the limitations placed on woman's accessibility to healthcare and recreational facilities. Therefore, as you can see from the chart, most of the women give birth at home, 90% which is very risky. Next. Also, access to clinics is even more challenging for displaced women. Next please. Regarding economy, women represent a significant untapped potential to country’s economy, while an increasing amount of woman are contributing to household incomes, only 20% of women in Afghanistan are in the workforce.

In their interviews revealed to us, there is a need for women employees in sectors such as medicine, engineering and location. However, access to training facilities inhibits women's economic ability. Key barriers to economic opportunities include basic infrastructure, training, and access to credit. High living costs, particularly housing and transportation create significant barriers for entrepreneurship and savings. The creation of jobs in all sectors of society will empower entrepreneurs and small businesses and will create not only a better quality for women’s life, but also will be a necessary step to improving the country's economy, bringing it to the 21st economy.

Next. And lastly, safety and accessibility to public realm is critical for urban quality of life. It ensures access to amenities, promotes social cohesion, and allows economic activity to thrive. Today, the cities in Afghanistan public realm can be a difficult place for women. Interviews and additional research yield frequent complains of physical and verbal harassment, the sense of perceived vulnerability can restrict the movement around the city and participation in professional, social, and cultural activities. Next, please.

You know, it's important to promote gender inclusive public realm. Right now you see all parks and plazas mostly filled with men. And an important part of urban society is the spaces for worship, which women are not allowed in inside the buildings. Next. We also took a look at city initiatives that are already doing some efforts to change this reality in Afghanistan, you know, like groups for athletic programming, public art, economic empowerment, performances, street names, educating the women, awareness campaigns that we also researched. Next. And with all that in mind, we created the same concepts and toolkits for women for three different areas: urban amenities, open spaces and mobilities, and the idea of all of these strategies in general was to create dedicated spaces for women, and this idea is not new, it comes from the traditional concept of the ‘Zanana’, which refers to spaces reserved for women and managed by women.

As Kabul evolves, there are opportunities to implement this concept of dedicated spaces and, you know, in the future, this could also be incorporated into the larger spaces of the city. Next. So, we’ll have to take care of these three toolkits, for the parks and open space, as we all know, Kabul should develop a cultural network of parks and open spaces where women and families feel comfortable, but today protected and demarcated areas for women is also a key need to make parks accessible. In order to incorporate the immediate need, parks should include similar, smaller spaces like I was talking about before or rooms and as you can see here from the diagram inspired by traditional gardens, where the entrances of these rooms can be combined to create spaces that feel very intimate and protected, while also remaining connected to the larger parks and surroundings.

These spaces should provide all types of programs, you know, the things that are provided in the rest of the parks and in the toolkit, this approach of the toolkit is, the idea is to create generic solution that can be incorporated into different parks and open spaces of the city. Like, for example, integrating the entrance to a park within a community center or simply providing a guard allows access to be safer well-lit spaces, discreetly located in like emergency boxes, design should incorporate warm seating, signage, bathrooms, water to ensure access to all women. And finally, defining edges with trees, screens and lanterns could create secure, private spaces, not creating a feeling of confinement. Next. In terms of mobility, the country’s rapid growth and the accompanying congestion has made transportation a significant challenge across the city, and particularly for a woman is more vulnerable. Women are very vulnerable to crime and violence in

the public transportation and or in the streets. The lack of safe and adequate transportation reduces the amount of trips women make inhibiting their access to opportunities in many parts of the city and their ability to earn income.

Next please. Mobility, in the mobility toolkit, I’m about I'm about to be done, you know, all the different strategies that were designed for the urban design framework, we incorporate spaces for women in the buses while they wait for the bus, many buses operate by women, for women and dedicated taxi spaces. Next. And let’s redesign a network of women centers that could provide basic services like clinics and baker, as well as opportunities for arts, culture and education. That can be tapped into the existing infrastructure of the city and some of the toolkits range from public to private, like for example, pavilions in public parks, pavilions in school parcels, or the reuse of the school classrooms in the weekends and at night. Also, to all the way to private to the creation of recreational spaces in rooftops, where women can feel safe or just one floors of commercial buildings of office workers, where they could be like daycare for women to be allowed to work.

Next. And this is my last image, all of these toolkits that were generic, well contextualized in each of the cities and this is for example, a women’s center in Kandahar that was quite private to the street, but the interior that's completely providing open space that felt safe, spaces for education, for the creation of arts and crafts, and it's very well articulated with the mosque and the plaza of the mosque.

Just want to end up by saying that the entire section was done in blue, just to emphasize the garments of women. And just to give these fields of the section a difference in color and we were very deliberate in putting women in all of the renders and perspectives, just to change the collective imaginary and the brighter vision for a better future. Thank you.

The next one is ‘culture and society,’ Victor will speak about it.

Victor Eskinazi: Sorry, I was trying to unmute my phone and advance the slides. Alykhan, could you go back to the first slide, please.

Thank you. Thanks Einat. I am the last presenter of the Sasaki group, and I'm going to give a very brief, actually for the purpose of time, because I think we're a bit behind schedule, on culture and society and how this impacts how we intervene in the built environment, particularly in the context of these five cities. So, if we go to the next slide please. I think this, my colleague Alykhan has touched upon this before, you know, Afghanistan has always been seen by us as this crossroads of civilizations all these different layers create a very rich, cultural environment. It is definitely not a very, it's not a monolithic culture environments, it ’s very diverse depending on region, depending on the cities and depending obviously on the neighboring countries. All these cultural forces are huge driving elements in each of the cities that we've worked on, in Kabul and the five provincial capitals. Next slide.

We worked very closely with partners to establish a major inventory of cultural and heritage sites in all of these cities. This, working with partners like the Aga Khan Development Network, local partners on the ground, and a lot of our work in these cities relates to cultural heritage sites, where one wants to increase access, expand access to some of these remarkable places. Next slide please. I think another important aspect of our work is really to understand not only specific sites as heritage and cultural sites, but also cities as an expression of culture. This is a photo of Kabul and in the beginning of our work in Afghanistan, we tried to challenge the bias around informality and organic development without necessarily romanticizing it but thinking that these are very culturally rich urban areas that require investment and to improve quality of life of residents. If you go to the next slide. Because of migration and also because of just the local culture, a lot of the cities that we’ve been working on in Afghanistan are very dense human settlements. This means that they're very complex to intervene upon, it also means that you have all these different layers of heritage, culture, mobility all on top of each other.

If you go to the next slide. As an example, this is Herat, the richness of fabric that you see in the historic core, where you have very tight knit, coexisting with markets, with cultural sites, archaeological sites that need to be protected, they are very vulnerable. And if you go to the next slide, we'll just see some images of these heritage sites that are a testament of the importance of Afghanistan’s trade routes. This is the citadel of Herat, a beautiful structure. If you go to the next slide. Some of these heritage sites are populated by retail that need to be protected, but also leveraged as key assets in very dense living quarters. If you go to the next slide. This is another remarkable heritage site in Herat, Masjid Jame. Sometimes these beautiful sites lack access and our work, if you go to the next slide, looking at some of these heritage areas, was to engage with our local partners, look at previous studies and integrate a lot of existing initiatives into a framework that establishes key interventions, particularly in the public realm that focus on providing basic infrastructure,

allowing existing commercial establishments to invest in their properties and also make these neighborhoods more resilient and livable in the future.

So the next slide. As an example, this is a site that we identified right next to the citadel, a very small open space where a visitor center can provide bathrooms, facilities for women, and can be a catalyst for revitalization not only of these historic assets, but also a community regeneration factor as well. Next slide. Beyond the old city and all of these cities that we’ve addressed have a strong historic core. These are also cities that are growing quite rapidly, in the case of Herat, pictured here, it's a city that is going to grow by 1 million inhabitants in the next 20 years. So, a lot of our work is really focused on how do you structure that expansion, how do you based on a lot of the landscape analysis that my colleague Thomas presented is, how do you protect critical ecological assets, direct growth and coordinate this growth with mobility and infrastructure to create resilient communities. And so, you'll see in this map areas of protection, a focus on a quarter to the north with the introduction of bus rapid transit lines and trying to push growth towards the west of Herat, where he established a series of toolkits for neighborhood upgrades, but also toolkits to create a framework that will transition what are currently agricultural plots to sustainable resilient communities in the future.

Next slide. So this is a view of the western head out. This is an area that we ’ve focused on as a pilot area, you'll see this is just showcasing some of the toolkits that I've mentioned around upgrading and around structuring you'll see the establishment of community spines that are based on existing roads. So, trying to stay away from very invasive and aggressive infrastructure investments, but rather really working with the existing city and the existing fabric. Making sure that as the city expands to the west that we integrate critical social infrastructure, new anchors that will support that growth. So in this case, investments in the in the Herat University and in training facilities and working with our stakeholders to understand what are the future uses that the city needs for just conventional exhibition areas that strengthen that urban, rural synergies that my colleague Alykhan was mentioning as well. You'll see highlighted right at the center of this image, the Musalla minaret, the archaeological complex, that is also a very important archaeological site in Herat that is very vulnerable and it's next to a pilot neighborhood, the Charsoonak neighborhood that we ’ve went into a bit more detail to test these toolkits around neighborhood upgrade and protection of heritage sites. So, the next slide please. So, this is just an image of this district, you'll see the minarets towards the back and some of the hustle and bustle that is associated with this area of Herat in the foreground.

Next slide please. And one thing that I think is critical to understand just culturally in Afghanistan is as we started to work with these pilot projects is the importance of the gozars. Gozars, which are units of local governance, they usually are composed of around a 1000 households and they are led by a Wakil, which is a community leader, usually someone who is very respected in the community. So, when we started to work on these pilots, we made sure to respect some of the physical boundaries of these gozars so that they can be partners in the implementation of some of these projects. These are projects that are very sensitive to the context, they establish some of these community spines and some of the community amenities that support growth and investment in these neighborhoods.

Next slide please. And this is an example of a public space and one of these interventions in Charsoonak, where we’re integrating affordable housing, community facilities and public space with a bold vision that really looks into the future and seeks to create a very resilient livable community. Beyond the urban centers, we also focused on expanding access to cultural sites in the larger city regions of the five cities we addressed. So this is in Kandahar, which is in Southwest Afghanistan, and I'm focusing on the Wali Baba shrine, which is a very important shrine in Kandahar that today is very popular, attracts a lot of visitors but lacks the infrastructure to receive these visitors.

So if you go to the next slide. This is just a view of the shrine and and how popular it is and part of our work. If you go to the next slide. Was to really establish a preservation economy around some of these heritage sites, looking at regenerating landscape, cultural landscapes, and adding facilities, visitor centers and trying to leverage these as future employment hubs to support a heritage livelihood In Kandahar.

Next slide. Another important aspect of intervening in the built environment is really understanding vulnerability and the importance of social infrastructure. This is the Eid Gah Alif community in Kandahar, this is an area that is in high risk of flooding, and we focused on this area because we wanted to reconnect this to the fabric and improve livability in general for people in this area. This is just a view of this neighborhood, you'll see a very challenging environment to operate in. A lot of areas that are already privatized, very small open spaces or public spaces that as urban designers, we can directly shape. If we go to the next slide. So, I think as a focus, I mean, one thing that we try to do in all of our proposals, particularly in neighborhood regeneration and adopting some of these toolkits that I described earlier, is really investing in the public space and trying to connect the community to either existing facilities or new facilities that are being

proposed. So, you'll see at the center of this image, a large open space that is public but underutilized and can serve as a connector from the community to the university on the West to a new urban corridor tied to transit to the Uruzgan Road to the East.

So, if you go to the next slide. So in this case, in this neighborhood, we propose a series of catalytic investments, particularly in the public realm and around new community facilities, mosques, markets, investments in infrastructure to prevent flooding, and also to improve connectivity to jobs along the Uruzgan Road back to the city core. And if you go to the next slide. And I think a great lesson and you'll recognize this image from what Einat was proposing and discussing before me is this notion of integration, of thinking about how your intervention can be bigger than the sum of its parts. So, you’ll see here no investment in the public realm with plazas, a women’s center to empower women and give them economic opportunity, neighborhood markets, also affordable housing. And this idea of even integrating affordable housing with facilities that can potentially serve the surrounding neighborhoods as well, and that can be managed by the community. So with that, I believe we end our presentation, and thanks, everyone for listening in.

Rahul Mehrotra: Thank you very much. Thanks to the Sasaki team. Thank you, Onno. That was really fascinating. I know Onno has another commitments, so I'm going to kind of just jump into a question for him, and then I'd like to address some questions to the Sasaki group. There were questions on the chat, which kind of got answered, there was some for Onno on data and other clarification, so I don't need to repeat any of those. But, you know, Onno, it was interesting Sasaki has, of course, as part of their mandate, rightly so focused on these five towns. And I have a number of questions there, which I'll get to it to the Sasaki team, but in the context of our studio, in the context of I know what your agency is aiming at, I think the discussion on Afghanistan will actually by extension the discussion for most parts of South Asia, about what even the urban and rural as a binary and a divide mean today is an interesting question. Of course, I think there were very interesting graphics about the attraction of the main big cities, but for example, the area we're looking at in Afghanistan is a 15,000 person town with a network of 20 villages and so the addressal of the urban, rural divide and imagination for it is also going to become part of the future and I understand that something you guys are concerned with. So I would love to hear your thoughts on that.

Onno Rühl: Thanks Rahul, thanks very much. You know, when I was country director for India for the World Bank, I talked a lot about urbanization and how it was such an important phenomenon in India. And I actually had a story about Little Rahul and I'm not making that name up, that’s the name I used, it was of course a little play on a famous politician by that name.

And Little Rahul was, it was a young guy who got married, he was somewhere in a village in UP and he moved to the city and he went on his own, left his wife behind, and struggled to make a life. And two years later, he called his wife, and he said, I've made it and I've got a job. It wasn’t a big job, but he could afford to have his wife. He said, come to the city and his wife said, I don't need to do that, the city has already come to the village. And this is a really important story because people think urbanization is people moving to Bombay and Delhi and Kabul and Karachi and places like that, much of urbanization is simply congregation and agglomeration at the very urban level town, the villages becoming towns, towns becoming centers, centers becoming cities, etc. So, that's the first thing is that the rural-urban divide significantly is a fading concept, of course not a totally fading concept when you talk about high mountain villages.

Now, and that's interesting because many people asked me, how can you have an agency that focuses a lot on mountains and mountain communities and then does the rest of its work, literally in Kabul, Karachi, Bombay, and places like that. And to me, there's two answers to that. One is, there is actually something that is very similar to a mountain village and a big city, and it is the scarcity of good habitable land because contrary to what you think when you see a mountain area, which looks very spacious, there's actually precious little land, you can use for habitat and built environment purposes because of the ruggedness of the environment. And therefore, one needs to be very economical and thoughtful about how to use space, which makes planning important.

Now, the second thing really His Highness Aga Khan’s vision, which is he then says, well, if we have the same problem, why should we be less ambitious about how we are efficient in villages than we are in cities. It just doesn't make any conceptual sense, why shouldn't we invest in using planning techniques in communities where there previously wasn't the case and all you had was essentially, the kind of development that people did on their own, not thinking about where to build so that you get organic growth. And not always efficient outcomes and very often high risk exposure. So that's the challenge of the work we do. It's quite a deliberate attempt to work in both places, but then to transport the knowledge from the work in the high end cities where you can do fancy work, fantastic work. And great work from the Sasaki team, they're looking at all the aspects were trying to look at, it’s really impressive. But why not, then use that in a small community that needs to relocate because it's in a hazardous spot and do good design and planning

for them and that's therefore ambition. Our ambition is frankly to bridge that rural, urban divide. So, I hope that's a bit of a helpful perspective. I’m, my other commitment is I need to cook for my daughter, given her age, I can't ask her to wait with our food. So I'm going to sign off, thank you so much for having me and great work from the Sasaki team, I was very impressed.

Rahul Mehrotra: Thank you, Onno. Thank you very much and I'm going to actually pick up on the point that Onno made about these regions. And I think one of the things in the Sasaki plan that is quite unusual and brilliant in some ways is, is the fact that you have that whole section on landscape ecology, and in identifying the export-import imbalance, your emphasis on agriculture, your emphasis on fruit and, you know, adding value through growing, which is already something that's happening in Afghanistan opens up that discussion also in terms of creating this urban and rural divide. So I think that dimension in your plan, in a sense, makes that bridge to what Onno is talking about.

The other thing that was very interesting, and these are two observations before I ask a question or two, is including the last conversation, where we talked about heritage, you emphasized Dennis, these were strategic plans frameworks but you also implied and emphasize really that they were integrative plans, which means whether it was recognizing the gozars and the wakeel as the leader of the gozars and integrating spatially those communities, but also recognizing other projects that governments might have in place and making them part of givens almost in your plan makes the plan also integrated, which is of course linked then to the question of implementation and I hope we'll have another forum where we can discuss some of those questions because right now you're at the stage where you've made these frameworks and it would be interesting, from your experience, but also in our discussion for the studio to talk about what it means for implementation. And so I think that was also something that struck me as a very robust kind of approach.

The two questions that I have, and I’ll put both the questions and you can decide how you want to feel them. One is it's really striking that the five towns that you did and what we're looking at as a town are all border towns. So therefore, the growth of urbanism has occurred across along the borders really of Afghanistan, and I think the Ring Road will accelerate it as that gets its improvements. Border towns are interesting places because they are drawing internally, whether it's from the countryside or distributing wealth and resources and capital within, but they also dealing with an externality, which is the border and what's outside the border and how it is regulated. And so, I was just on that question, I was wondering if you had thoughts about what those challenges would be, because I think the town that we're looking at is exactly the same kind of situation. I mean, are you talking about border posts which have to do with security and regulation, are they to do with flows and markets which become moments and nodes of exchange and allow kind of porosity and osmosis with what's outside and what's inside. I was wondering if there was any discussion and imagination around that. The second question I had, and you kind of brought it up when you talked about how you all purposefully even represented women in the renderings just to shift the imagination. Right. And so I was also struck besides the fact that you had a lot of birds in your rendering and I texted Dennis about that to check why that was the case because in every real image you showed me, I saw no birds. But that's just a part, just a joke, but I think like the way you rendered women to change that imagination, I also noticed that you rendered a lot of informal economy, perhaps to also change that imagination. And in one or two slides, I noticed a pop up market in the background, so the renderings for the women, you explained to us how you are going to integrate them in society, but I didn't hear about the marketplaces. The informal transactions that appeared in the images, were they purposefully built into the design strategy. So those are the two questions I had.

Dennis Pieprz: Yeah, I think I’ll let Alykhan and maybe Thomas talk about the border issue. In the time of the pandemic, this body issue is really significant because people are leaving and coming into the country in ways that are a bit unpredictable and have an impact. But the border locations also present huge opportunities I think for these cities. Alykhan, do you want to pick up on some of that and then maybe Victor and Einat on the second question?

Alykhan Mohamed: Sure. It is a really interesting point about the the impact of being close to a border, especially for a small town where you know most smaller towns and villages, you have an isolation that also comes with a sense of agency. And so while there may be negatives, the positive is that you can operate in a closed loop and you can have agency over your domain. And I think that being a border town being the site of much larger infrastructures and flows, whether it's politics, commerce that presents a tremendous opportunity for growth to leverage those assets and opportunities, but it also means that as a resident, as a local official, as any stakeholder, you do have to navigate those and to make sure that on the one hand, you can keep your distance or access it, and I think some of our work on both of these projects as well as on I think some ongoing communications we've had that institutional disconnect is not just in Afghanistan, but all over the world, an issue. And so I wouldn't encourage the students, but anyone who's working in this kind of context to really think about how both physically and spatially and institutionally, how do these small villages

and towns interact with these large infrastructures, are they isolated, are there negative externalities, are there impacts and also what are the common things that both of them need that you can build constituencies. Right. So whether it's a border crossing post or a small village, resilience and risk is very important. Right. And so that is a point of commonality. So finding places where whatever scale you are, whatever your reason for being in this location is, there is a common goal to build around in pulling resources. So I'll turn it over to Thomas now.

Thomas Nideroest: Maybe an additional thought for you to think about is like when we think of the system again, going back to the idea of the system is then, it's like 80% of the workforce today is in agriculture and that might shift in the long-term future, but the near term reality is still that agricultural livelihoods are front and center. And so the question then goes back to the idea of value chains and this issue of Afghanistan importing much more even from their basic dietary products like flour and so on, to this question of what can be done in terms of agro-processing whether this is like a primary processing where it's about dehusking, where it's about the notion of producing products that can be bought within the country with the currency and the financial strength that they have, and then be what kinds of processing could you do to then strengthen international markets. When you look much more broadly into what is being produced around, Afghanistan does not have the capacity, like you know water-rich Pakistan, or what's some of the things that are happening in Iran and other places. But then, how could you position Afghanistan in a way in a specific value chain that starts to leverage some of the things that do really grow well. For example, we have in Herat, I think we have saffron, one of the things that are really thriving and it provides a market for women to enter the labor force. It is also an opportunity to then really shift the story from, let's say, producing opium and we haven't talked about opium as something that is this rabbit hole that you might be entering into, but it's also a means to an end to say like, look, if you're providing alternative agricultural products that can be processed in a way that is good for national product, but also for the exports, then the system again, from the town to your outpost, to your border town where perhaps some of not only some of the processing happens but this chain, this system can really start to catalyze the agricultural economy and lift up the majority of our agricultural labor force is an important step, I think.

Rahul Mehrotra: Thank you, and therefore, but I think the implication of that would be then more mindfully one makes the spaces for that to happen. Correct. And I think that's part of what, there were indications and I mean I know we can have a whole discussion about this in detail. Just to end, there was a question that did surface up from the chat, but a question and a comment, which was about implementation, because one had mentioned it, and the question was, how much can we rely on municipalities and local level for the implementation or what might be complex and ambitious plans, and I think that's not an answer, one can have, and I think that's why it's so interesting what is happening in a place like Afghanistan, very quickly, where multiple agencies, both from externally and internally, are coming are coming together and the government is being very proactive about this. And I think to watch how this coalesces into implementation and hits the ground would be really an interesting thing to observe and hopefully, you know, we're going to do two more sessions. Maybe we'll dedicate in the last session a little longer time where we can have much more of a broader discussion picking up on some of these issues and we do hope all of you will attend some of these. The next one will be really looking at traditional architecture and urbanism and my colleague, Charlotte, will moderate that and you know we'd be really happy if many of you join us again. So with that, I really want to thank the Sasaki group for sharing this wonderful work that you've done over these many years, and sharing it so generously. I hope we can involve you in more discussions through the semester in the studio and that you would participate in also these public forums, it would enrich it considerably. So thanks very much. Thank you all.

Dennis Pieprz: Thank you. Thank you.

Einat Rosenkrantz: Thanks.

Victor Eskinazi: Thanks everyone.

Alykhan Mohamed: Thanks.