Collaborative Infrastructures · Nisba Framework
A four-year doctoral programme producing the Nisba framework — a participatory tool for designing just, ecological and transformative urban infrastructures with the communities that live alongside them.
Context
Urban infrastructure — water, waste, energy, food — is usually designed by experts and delivered to residents. The question of who decides what good infrastructure looks like is rarely asked, and even more rarely answered together.
This research investigated whether place-based, community-led methods could generate genuinely transformative urban infrastructures, and what kind of framework would be needed to support that work across very different settings.
Methods
- Participatory action research with neighbourhood communities in Budapest and Beirut.
- Co-design of physical urban games as research instruments and engagement formats.
- Mixed methods spanning ethnographic observation, gamification and nature-based-solutions assessment.
- Iterative development of the Nisba framework across the two field sites.
Outputs
- The Nisba framework — a structured approach to collaborative infrastructure design.
- Doctoral thesis: Collaborative infrastructures for just, ecological and transformative urban design (UCL, 2024).
- Peer-reviewed journal article on participation levels in nature-based solutions (Puskás, Abunnasr, Naalbandian, 2021, Landscape and Urban Planning).
- Conference papers at the Fábos Conference on Landscape and Greenway Planning.
- Two complete urban-game prototypes deployed in field sites.
Evidence & impact
- Informed subsequent academic and practitioner-facing work on participatory infrastructure.
- Provided a methodological foundation for follow-on engagements (including The Good Life Game and GRAINS).
- Linked to ongoing collaborations with the KNOW network, the Bartlett Community of Engagers and the Humanitarian Landscape Collective.
Relevance
For roles in research impact, urban policy, NGO programming and consultancy, this work offers both a tested method and a vocabulary — Nisba — for moving infrastructural decisions out of the technical silo and into community deliberation.