Cultural heritage plays an important role in reshaping cities’ current morphologies, reinforcing public sense of belonging, cultural identity, and place authenticity. Port Said, the research case study, a former colonial city located at the edge of the Mediterranean Sea and the Suez Canal at the north east Egyptian coast, is struggling between new urban sprawl that obliterates its identity and urban heritage preservation. Port Said is an important logistic city distinguished by its unique urban heritage, facing a real threat of heritage obliteration. There is a continuous fight between nostalgic memories, modern life style dreams, and aimed economic benefit. Although there is an international developing agenda for the preservation of tangible urban heritage, the local community can barely interfere with reshaping of urban heritage in the modern society. It is urgent to create public awareness and heritage guardians in developing countries as the economic benefits strongly demolish heritage, ignoring their significance and peculiarity. This research aims to investigate the city’s historical and urban development with special emphasis on buildings’ visual characteristics and architectural features. Visual preference survey research methodology is used to study public perception influence toward reshaping city historical image. The current study employs both qualitative and quantitative tactics in data collection to examine the research hypotheses and to achieve organized and rational local perception about Egyptian building heritage development. Finally, conclusions are drawn about the joining of current public perception of the Port Said heritages, urban identity and city unique reshaping and development.

The low‐lying, arid coastal regions of the Southern Mediterranean Basin, extending over 4,600 km, face daunting sea level rise and hydroclimatic changes due to shifting weather patterns. The impact of these factors on coastal urban buildings and infrastructure must be better understood. Alexandria, a historic and densely populated port city in Egypt representative of several coastal towns in the Southern Mediterranean, has experienced over 280 building collapses along its shorelines over the past two decades, and the root causes are still under investigation. We examine the decadal changes in coastal and hydroclimatic drivers along the city's coastline using photogrammetric satellite images from 1974 to 2021. We explore the interconnectivity between shoreline retreat, ground subsidence, and building collapses. Our results suggest that collapses are correlated with severe coastal erosion driven by sediment imbalances resulting from decades of inefficient landscape management and urban expansion along the city's waterfront. This severe erosion, combined with sea level rise, increases seawater intrusion, raising groundwater levels in coastal aquifers. Degrading ground stability and accelerating corrosion in building foundations ultimately culminating in collapses. We identified a coastal area of high vulnerability with over 7,000 buildings at risk, surpassing any other vulnerable zone in the Mediterranean Basin. We propose cost‐effective and nature‐based techniques for coastal landscape adaptation to alleviate these dangers in Alexandria and other Southern Mediterranean cities facing similar climatic challenges.

The low-lying, arid coastal regions of the Southern Mediterranean basin, extending over 4600 km, face daunting sea level rise and hydroclimatic changes due to shifting weather patterns. The impacts of the above on coastal urban buildings and infrastructure still need to be more qualified and understood. Alexandria, a historic and densely populated port city representative of several coastal cities in the Southern Mediterranean, has experienced over 280 building collapses near its shorelines over the past two decades, with the root causes still being investigated. We explore the decadal changes in coastal and hydroclimatic drivers along the city's coastline using a GIS-based multi-criteria analysis in the areas where buildings collapsed from 1974 to 2021. Our results suggest that collapses are correlated to severe coastal erosion due to sediment imbalance caused by the decades-long inefficient landscape and urban expansion along the historic city's waterfront. This severe erosion, combined with sea level rise, upsurges seawater intrusion, which raises the groundwater levels in coastal aquifers, disrupting soil stability and accelerating corrosion in building foundations until they collapse. We identified a coastal area of high vulnerability with over 7,000 buildings at risk, surpassing any other vulnerable zone in the Mediterranean Basin. We conclude that several coastal and densely urbanized areas in the Southern Mediterranean are at greater risk of building collapses due to similar hydroclimatic changes. Therefore, we propose a landscape-based coastal mitigation approach to implement adaptive transformations to curb these risks that apply to Alexandria and other southern Mediterranean cities facing the same challenges.

We are grateful for Darwish's interest in our paper, Fouad et al. (2025, https://doi.org/10.1029/2024EF004883 ). In this reply, we show that Fouad et al. (2025, https://doi.org/10.1029/2024EF004883 ) did not attribute building collapses in Alexandria solely to hydroclimatic factors, as stated in the comment. Instead, we emphasize that hydroclimatic drivers are presented as accelerators, with other anthropogenic influences explicitly stated in the original paper. Moreover, our response proves that Darwish (2026, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025ef006885 )'s simplistic statistical approach is physically incorrect and obscures absolute risk by normalizing actual building collapse rates to the total number of buildings within a city. Furthermore, our reply shows that the comment conflates the distinct measurement of soil relaxation using shallow isotope mapping at the city scale, as conducted in Fouad et al. (2025, https://doi.org/10.1029/2024EF004883 ), with deep structural geotechnical assessments for foundation design of individual buildings. The utility and complementarity of both methods are already discussed in Fouad et al. (2025, https://doi.org/10.1029/2024EF004883 ). We acknowledge that the statement on the “7,000 at‐risk buildings” is only mentioned in the abstract and is inadvertently missed in the main text; however, the calculation leading to this result is detailed in our supplementary data set and methods. Accordingly, Darwish (2026, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025ef006885 )'s comment, while appreciated, misinterprets Fouad et al. (2025, https://doi.org/10.1029/2024EF004883 ) and overlooks the contemporary literature on Alexandria's hydrogeological and coastal dynamic contexts and their implications for infrastructure instability.