Prof. Dr. Yehya Serag is a professor of urban and regional planning in Ain Shams University in Cairo. He is also a regional and urban planning consultant with about 20 years of academic and professional experience. Since the beginning of the so called ” Arab Spring revolutions”, Prof. Serag has been interested in studying and analyzing the impacts of politics on urbanism and the built environment. Among his interests in this field: city transformation as a result of war or revolutions, urbicide: the deliberate destruction of cities and its causes, and post war/conflict reconstruction strategies. He academically worked with several students from Syria, Iraq, Egypt and Palestine in research topics related to the previous field. Professionally, Prof. Serag is a partner in the Engineering Consultant Office for Planning and Architecture, through which he was involved in the regional planning of one of the Egyptian border regions with Sudan, setting a proposal for regional development to the Darfur region in Sudan, as well as many strategic and structural city planning projects. He is also a member of the Regional Studies Association in the United Kingdom, as well as being one of its representatives in Egypt.
Most recently Prof. Serag co-founded together with a group of consultant offices and individual consultants the “Alliance for Post-Conflict Reconstruction (APOCOR)”. The members of APOCOR are of different nationalities including Egypt, Lebanon, Iraq and Germany; and with different backgrounds and specializations including urban planning, Architecture, Remote Sensing, Civil Engineering and Finance. The group has adopted a methodology for post-conflict reconstruction and aims to apply it in actual project in the post-conflict cities of the Middle East.
Prof. Yehya Serag is also a member at the Academic & Research Board of the Institute of Global Security & Defense Affairs (IGSDA)
Educational Background
- BSc. Of Architecture and Urban Design: 1999 – Faculty of Engineering – Ain Shams University – Egypt
- MSc. Of Architecture in Human Settlements: 2002 – Post Graduate Center for Human Settlements – Catholic University of Leuven (KULeuven) – Belgium
- Post Graduate Certificate of the European Module for Spatial Development and Planning : 2003 – University of NewCastle Upon Tyne – United Kingdom
- PhD in Regional Planning and Development: 2008 – Faculty of Engineering – Catholic University of Leuven (KULeuven) – Belgium
Highlights on the most recent Related Activities
- September 2019 : Forthcoming: Post-Conflict Reconstruction Workshop with a focus on the selected cities in the Middle East- APOCOR- Cairo, approved by the Regional Studies Association.
- December 2018 Participating in the Urban Thinkers Campus organized by TUBerlin in El Gouna Egypt, to discuss the challenges of development and planning in the cities of the Middle East including Post Conflict Reconstruction.
- December 2018 Participating in Post Conflict Reconstruction for Iraq and Syria Conference in Baghdad – Iraq
- November 2018 Panelist in the Round table discussion on Post Conflict Reconstruction held in the World Youth Forum in Sharm El Sheikh – Egypt
- September 2018 International co-organizer of “The City Reshaped Conference” in the University of Leeds – United Kingdom
- August 2017 Visiting Research Fellow in the Technical University of Berlin (TUBerlin) – Germany working on a research related to city transformation.
- November 2016 Co-organizer of a Special Session on “External and Internal Displacement: Impacts and Lessons Learned from Resettlement Processes” in the Regional Studies Association Winter Conference in London – United Kingdom.
- Since 2012: Course holder of “Selected Topics of Urbansim”, where the course discussed the political and socio-economic factors on the different urban settings, in terms of space adjustments, spatial impacts of political actions, etc… The course discusses different issues such as , planning for control, divided cities, border settlements, walling and barricading in cities, forced displacement, etc… This course is hosted in the International Master Program of Integrated Urbanism and Sustainable Design (IUSD), which is a joint master program between Ain Shams University in Egypt and Stuttgart University in Germany.
Most Relevant Research Work
2018- Urban Planner on the move: Lessons learned from cities of post war reconstruction, (coauthor), paper published in the proceedings of the Post War Reconstruction of Iraq and Syria conference, Baghdad, Iraq.
2018- Towards an appropriate regional development approach for developing the Halayeb – Shalateen border region in the South East of Egypt, paper published in the proceedings of the Urbanism at the Borders conference, Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen – Scotland – UK
2016- Waves of displacement in Egypt: Impacts of the internal and external displacement waves on the Egyptian cities, presentation published in the proceedings of the Regional Studies Association Annual winter Conference, London – UK, November 2016.
2016- Waves of displacement in Egypt: Impacts of the internal and external displacement waves on the Egyptian cities, presentation published in the proceedings of the Regional Studies Association Annual winter Conference, London – UK, November 2016. – Impacts of politics on the development of non-core regions in Egypt, presentation published in the proceedings of the Regional Studies Association Annual Conference, Graz – Austria, April 2016.
2016 – The Blessings of „Non-planning‟ in Egypt, Serag, Y. And AbdelWahab, M. in Strategic Planning: an international perspective, eds: Albrechts, L, Hillier, J and Balducci, A. , Taylor and Francis.
2015 – Impact of Politics on the Planning of the new city of Toshka in Egypt, paper published in the proceedings of the AESOP 2015 conference, Prague, July 2015.
2013 – Nubian Resettlement Challenges Between past memories and present settings, paper published in the proceedings of the SB13, Cairo, November 2013.
2013 – The Haussmanization approach From a counter revolution urban fabric to a success factor for the Egyptian revolution in Cairo , paper published in the proceedings of the SB13, Cairo, November 2013.
2012 – blind regional planning in Darfour , paper published in the proceedings of the Azhar international engineering conference December 2012
2011- From Social Networking to Political and Physical Impacts: Some Lessons from the Egyptian Lotus Revolution, paper published in the proceedings of the Regional Studies Association Annual Conference, New Castle– United Kingdom, April 2011.
2010- Border settlements in Egypt, between trans-border cooperation and defending the sovereignty of the country, paper published in the proceedings of the Regional Studies Association Annual Conference, Pecs – Hungary, May 2010.
Contacts: Email: Yehya_serag@eng.asu.edu.eg , yehyaserag@gmail.com pr.yehyaserag@igsda.org