Omar Nagati is a practicing architect and urban planner, and the co-founder of CLUSTER, an urban design and research platform in downtown Cairo. A graduate of Cairo University, he studied at UBC, Vancouver, and UC Berkeley with a specific focus on informal urbanism. He has taught at a number of local and international universities, most recently as a visiting professor at the University of Sheffield, UK. He is currently a member of the International Council for Creative Industries at the Policy and Evidence Centre, UK. His work at CLUSTER has won a number of awards including the Cairo Design Award and the Curry Stone Design Prize; it has also represented Egypt in a number of architecture and urban biennales including Venice, Lisbon and Seoul. Nagati is co-author with Beth Stryker of “Archiving the City in Flux” (2013). He has been co-editor of “Learning from Cairo” (2013), and “Creative Cities: Reframing Downtown Cairo” (2016), and has published numerous research papers on Cairo and African cities. His most recent publications are “Grounded Urban Practices (GUPs) in Cairo and Amsterdam/Rotterdam” (2018) and “GUPs in Berlin” (2020). clustercairo.org