Omar Nagati

Omar Nagati is a practicing architect and urban planner, and the co-founder of CLUSTER, an urban design and research platform downtown Cairo. A graduate of Cairo University, he studied at UBC, Vancouver and UC Berkeley with a specific focus on informal urbanism, and taught at a number local and international universities, most recently as a visiting professor at the University of Sheffield, UK. Nagati adopts an interdisciplinary approach to questions of urban history and design, and engages in a comparative analysis of urbanization processes in the Global South. His work at CLUSTER has been the recipient of a number of awards including Cairo Design Award and Curry Stone Design Prize, representing Egypt in a number of architecture and urban biennials in Venice, Lisbon, and Seoul.

Nagati is co-author with Beth Stryker of “Archiving the City in Flux” (2013) and “Street Vendors and the Contestation of Public Space” (2017), and co-editor of “Learning from Cairo” (2013), and “Creative Cities: Reframing Downtown Cairo” (2016), in addition to numerous research papers on Cairo and African cities. His most recent publications are “Grounded Urban Practices (GUPs) in Cairo and Amsterdam/Rotterdam” (2018) and “Grounded Urban Practices (GUPs) in Berlin” (2020).