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Site selection for location of a hospital is one of the crucial policy-related decisions taken by the government. In upper Egypt, the cities suffer from a shortage and bad distribution of hospital site. The selection of the appropriate hospital site requires consideration of multiple alternative solutions and evaluation factor. We develop a Multi-Criteria Decision Support System (MCDSS) process that combines Geographical Information System (GIS) analysis with Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) and use this process to determine the optimum site for a new hospital in the Aswan urban area. Based on actual conditions Aswan city, we used three main factors and seven sub-factors. The main factors are urban, environmental and economic factors. An application adopting AHP process was developed to calculate weights of every factor. Spatial analysis in GIS was used to overlay and generate factors maps and suitability evaluation map. All maps are classified from 1 (low suitable) to 5 (high suitable) using spatial information technologies. The candidate sites are divided by best, good and unsuitable hospital areas. Best hospital site represents optimal sites; good hospital site can be used as back-up candidate sites. The study was found that best area (S3) is about 30%, and most of these are located in the south part of the study area; good area (S2) is about 58%, and most of these are located in the central part of the study area; unsuitable area (S1) is about 12%, and most of these are located in the Eastern and Western parts of the study area. Finally, the study ends with an assessment of proposed sites.

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Since the mid-1970s, urban development in Egypt has sprawled far from the distinguished compact arid built environment, as the court-yarded housing typologies that completed the vernacular picture of desert architecture have been discarded in the early 20th century. This has motivated urban microclimate research in Egypt. The main objective was initially to improve outdoor thermal comfort. Therefore, Egyptian research started with assessing different existing patterns for the sake of climate responsive and sustainable urban design practice characterized with low carbon, thermal comfort and energy efficiency in such a hot arid conditions. That is why the review workflow of this article has followed a design progress workflow that led to solving design complexities with regard to generating housing urban forms on a microclimate basis rather than an article regular review workflow in order to extract the research gaps and conclude insights. After discussing a general framework for generating housing sustainable design identified from the concluded gaps, the main conclusion is a vision and a call to integrate the Urban microclimate-Building passiveness-Renewables design dimensions, UBR, towards the evolution of a new era of energy efficient housing typologies and a 5th generation of Egyptian sustainable cities where the 1st generation of new Egyptian cities started 1970s.