How can systems thinking help us to understand the challenges and opportunities in taking forward urban climate change mitigation or adaptation? A discussion based on New Gourna and the case of Dakar

This paper examines how systems thinking helps to better understand the challenges and opportunities of urban climate change mitigation and adaptation. Rather than treating climate risks as isolated technical problems, it approaches cities as socio-ecological systems shaped by interactions between infrastructure, materials, governance structures and everyday practices. Through this lens, recurrent failures of urban climate policies appear not as a lack of solutions, but as the result of structural misalignments within urban systems. The argument is explored through a comparative analysis of two contrasting cases: Hassan Fathy’s New Gourna project in Egypt based on ancient Nubian architecture and contemporary flooding in Dakar, Senegal. New Gourna illustrates an integrated approach in which housing functions as a climatic infrastructure, combining passive design, local materials and knowledge transfer to simultaneously address mitigation and adaptation. However, the project’s partial failure highlights the importance of social and institutional appropriation in sustaining environmental performance. Dakar, by contrast, demonstrates how fragmented interventions and downstream infrastructure responses can generate maladaptation, redistributing risk along existing socio-spatial inequalities despite significant investment.

By comparing these cases, the essay identifies transferable systemic principles: upstream integration of climate constraints into urban form, alignment between infrastructure and social practices, and the central role of maintenance and governance capacity over time. It concludes that effective urban climate action depends less on technological sophistication than on transforming relationships within the urban system. Systems thinking therefore serves not only as an analytical framework but as a guide to identifying leverage points capable of producing durable and socially equitable climate resilience.