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Abstract

Security-oriented urban design at strategic national gateways often restricts spatial openness, cultural identity, and social inclusion, all essential to functional public spaces. This study develops a multi-criteria framework for security-inclusive urban design at East Qantara, the primary vehicular gateway between continental Egypt and the Sinai Peninsula. This study employed a sequential quantitative–interpretive design approach. In the quantitative phase, 51 criteria were identified from Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) principles, Hostile Vehicle Mitigation (HVM) guidance, publicness theory, and context-specific desert and socio-cultural literature, and subsequently revised to 37 criteria through expert panel validation. A structured expert questionnaire with a five-point Likert scale for importance was distributed to 64 professionals across six stakeholder groups, yielding 54 valid responses. One-way ANOVA was performed for each criterion, with stakeholder group as the independent variable. Statistical analysis revealed that 29 criteria were classified as high priority (RII > 0.80), and no criterion scored below 3.0, indicating strong professional support for the framework. The most significant inter-group contrast was between civil defense and safety consultants and landscape architects and socio-cultural experts, with C22 (tree and planting barriers) showing the largest pairwise divergence. The findings indicate broad expert support for integrating physical protection with urban functionality, environmental adaptation, and socio-cultural responsiveness. The study therefore proposes an expert-reviewed and empirically weighted decision-support framework for arid, security-sensitive MENA gateway contexts. The framework is intended to guide context-sensitive design and governance decisions; its transferability and performance require testing through participatory, post-occupancy, and site-based validation in future applications.

Keywords

Defensive urban design, CPTED, Hostile vehicle mitigation (HVM), Publicness theory, ANOVA, East qantara, Sinai gateway, Multi-layered framework

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