Ali Naddeh's Recent LinkedIn Posts

10 days in Baku. More than 57,000 participants. 176 countries. One theme: Housing the World. The largest World Urban Forum in history, and I was in the room. I came as an urban planner from Al Ain. I left with one clear thought: When 176 countries gather around one urban challenge, you don’t get one answer. You get the full range of what’s possible. The world talks cities. So do we, every day. Now back to the streets. #WUF13 #UNHabitat #HousingTheWorld

I applied to volunteer at WUF13 not knowing if I’d be selected. When the confirmation came, it wasn’t just excitement. It was the beginning of a journey I hadn’t expected. On day one, I put on this uniform and walked into the accreditation area. Around me, people were already in motion. Each one knowing what to do. Each one contributing to something that had to work, for more than 57,000 participants, from 176 countries, across 6 days. That’s what stayed with me. Not only the scale of the event. But the invisible effort behind it, the coordination that makes something this large feel effortless. The team was exceptional. The people I met made it more than a professional experience. Being part of WUF13 not just as a participant, but as someone who helped make it happen, is a different kind of milestone. WUF13 has ended. But the experience stays with me. Have you ever been part of the team behind something bigger than yourself? What did it feel like? #WUF13 #Volunteering #UNHabitat

A city does not only host a forum. It becomes part of the conversation. Last week, I was in Baku for WUF13, as a participant and as a volunteer. Two ways of seeing the same event. One from inside the forum, where the theme says it all: 𝗛𝗼𝘂𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗪𝗼𝗿𝗹𝗱: 𝗦𝗮𝗳𝗲 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗥𝗲𝘀𝗶𝗹𝗶𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗖𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗲𝘀 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗖𝗼𝗺𝗺𝘂𝗻𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗲𝘀. One from the streets, where Baku itself became a living urban classroom. Days walking this city left me with more questions than answers, the good kind. The sessions shape the thinking. The streets test it. Over the coming days, field notes from both sides. #WUF13 #UrbanPlanning #HousingTheWorld

Everyone photographed Dubai’s Flame Tree season. Almost no one read it the way urban planners do. From street level, you see the colour. The branch. The single frame. From above, you see something else entirely. One tree becomes a pattern. A recurring burst of red and orange woven into the urban fabric, not scattered, but structured. Not one landmark, but a seasonal layer the city grew into over decades. Dubai’s streets already carry more than 51,000 Flame Trees. And 1,200 more are now being planted across the emirate. That canopy you admire from below? It can reduce ground temperatures underneath it by up to 5°C. This is no longer just a beautiful tree. It is climate infrastructure, shade engineered by nature, scaled by a city that understood its value. And unlike most urban interventions, this one blooms on its own. Every city has a seasonal identity. Cherry blossoms in Tokyo. Jacaranda in Johannesburg. Flame Trees in Dubai. And from above, they sign the city from the sky. What tree defines your city’s season? #UrbanPlanning #Dubai #NatureBasedSolutions

You’ve heard the numbers. Here’s what WUF13 actually looked like from inside the forum. Sessions running across 6 days.
Pavilions from different regions.
Countries bringing their cities, solutions, and challenges into one place. Urban planners sitting next to mayors.
Researchers next to community advocates.
Ministers next to students. All part of the same conversation. For me, the most memorable part was not only the sessions.
It was the conversations in between, specialists from cities across the world, each bringing a different lens to the same urban challenges. The topics ranged from housing informality to smart city technology.
From nature-based urbanism to urban finance.
From small island states to megacities. The World Urban Forum is where urban challenges stop feeling like separate national problems, and start becoming shared ones. WUF13.
Baku.
May 2026. What would you bring to this conversation? #WUF13 #UNHabitat #HousingTheWorld

I didn’t expect Baku to teach me anything. I came for the forum. But the city had its own agenda. It showed me streets made for walking. An old city still alive, not frozen in time. Public spaces full of people who actually use them. That’s rarer than it sounds. Baku doesn’t perform for visitors. It just lives and lets you watch. Which city has ever made you feel this way? #Baku #PublicRealm #UrbanPlanning

This is not old Baku versus new Baku. This is simply Baku. A city cannot be reduced to only one version of itself. Not the historic street. Not the glass tower. Not the cobblestones below or the skyline above. All of it together is what makes the city real. Walking here, I saw the historic fabric welcoming the modern. Not competing with it. Not erasing it. Completing it. Because a city is a living creature. It has a past that shaped it, a present it is learning from, and a future it is still becoming. The cities that honor where they came from carry that confidence into everything they build next. In the cities that do not, you can feel the emptiness, even when the towers are tall. Baku does not have that emptiness. #UrbanPlanning #CityIdentity #Baku

A balcony tells you more than a floor plan ever will. A plant corner. Two chairs. A curtain pulled halfway. Warm light behind glass. An empty edge. Each one is a small broadcast, private life quietly spilling into public space. That is what makes balconies one of the most honest elements in any city. They’re not designed for performance. But somehow, they perform anyway. Look at any street long enough and you stop seeing facades. You start reading people. One word, what’s the strongest signal on balconies where you live? Plants · Light · Curtains · Silence · Chairs #UrbanDesign #PublicRealm #CityLife

A city has a rhythm. Sheikh Zayed Road shows you exactly how it changes. Same road. Same towers. Same metro line. Three different times of day. Three completely different cities. Early morning: Soft light, calm towers, the city preparing itself. Noon: Full exposure, heat, speed, and scale in operation. Midnight: The same corridor becomes a river of light. This is the daily rhythm of a city made visible in one frame. In planning, this is the temporal dimension of the city. The infrastructure never changes. The city never stops changing. Morning, noon, or midnight? #UrbanPlanning #Dubai #PublicRealm

Nearly 3 billion people face some form of “housing inadequacy.” But what does inadequate actually mean? For some, it means a roof that collapses in rain. For others, it means no legal right to stay, you live there, but you can be removed tomorrow. For others, it means 90 minutes from work every day, because the only affordable option exists at the edge of everything. For others, it means eight people, one room, one window. Same word. Completely different realities. One word is covering too many different urban failures. And as long as we keep treating them as one problem, we keep designing the wrong solutions. This is one of the questions behind WUF13’s theme this year, the UN World Urban Forum happening next week: “Housing the World: Safe and Resilient Cities and Communities.” In your city, what does inadequate look like? #UrbanPlanning #Housing #WUF13