Mohamed Gohar

I’m an architect, urban heritage strategist, researcher, and visual storyteller interested in the life of Mediterranean cities beyond their monuments and official narratives. My research explores a simple question: what do we overlook when we look at a city? I’m drawn to the ordinary spaces that shape the city, the place where people instinctively stop to connect. These spaces may seem insignificant, but they often carry memories, relationships, habits, emotions, and stories that tell us far more about a living city than its celebrated landmarks.

This work has grown from a long relationship with Alexandria, my home city, and from years of observing, documenting, and interpreting its changing urban landscape. In 2013, I founded Description of Alexandria, a project exploring the city through its architecture, everyday practices, cultural memories, and people. Since then, I have increasingly worked across Alexandria and Marseille, two Mediterranean port cities that are very different yet connected by layers of migration, exchange, transformation, and cultural encounter.

Currently, I’m developing research around what I call “Everyday Urban Heritage”: how ordinary spaces and everyday forms of sociability can be recognised as cultural heritage, and how we might document them without freezing them into something static. The research brings together heritage studies, urban studies, emotional geography, the concept of the “third place,” and Art-Based Research. I use drawing, photography, mapping, observation, writing, and oral documentation as methodology of understanding how memory and cultural identity are produced through everyday urban life. I’m particularly interested in the space between disciplines. I move quite naturally between architecture, research, art, writing, heritage practice, and urban sociology. I see these activities as connected ways of paying attention, observing details that have survived almost unnoticed, collecting fragments of urban stories, making miniature cities, drawing by hand, and trying to understand why certain places stay with us long after we leave them. My work revolves around how people appropriate space, create their own meeting places, and quietly reshape the cities they inhabit.