Agile methodology as a transdisciplinary retrofitting approach for built environment in traditional settlements in mediterranean region

Traditional settlements are societies and villages that emerged vernacularly; they have a distinct architectural typology and urban tissue, transferring knowledge between generations is a significant character. Their inhabitants have significant levels of agreement about their social qualities, homogeneity, solving any problem in their ways. They use the available resources, local materials, and the available technologies to form their shelters concerning the climate, security, political and religious precepts, and aesthetic values. Their buildings achieve cultural, anthropological, social, and economic needs. Several studies found common ground between Egypt and Italy regarding the impact of Arab and Roman cultures and the influence of the Mediterranean climate. This research has chosen a common traditional settlement pattern to foster a new approach. Based on several factors, namely, adjacent to the Mediterranean sea, Mediterranean climate, population density, buildings number, predominately rural, land use is dominated by agriculture, and they have the same small-dimension economy of agricultural activities, and finally, it makes sense the author is Egyptian, and he studies in Itlay. Moreover, the comparative analysis between contexts enriches the findings, and otherwise, they could represent the Mediterranean Region. Many studies highlighted the transformation of these traditional settlements in Egypt and Italy because of several causes, such as the socio-economic transformations that led to emerging newly built environment patterns facing environmental challenges and led to more energy consumption which contributes significantly to climate change. That requires transdisciplinary retrofitting interventions in these traditional contexts, considering evolving all stakeholders who have the interest, influence, and power of implementation, namely, the technical experts like (architects, urban planners, culture experts, and sociologists), the local community, decision-makers, and the facilitators. Thus, this study aims to provide a transdisciplinary framework to organize the collaborative work among the stakeholders to enable to implementation of efficient strategies to retrofit the built environment. The conceptual framework was developed by the integration of the relevant theoretical concepts in three domains (software development, project management, and energy retrofitting practices). The transdisciplinary framework will employ Agile Methodology (Agile Manifesto, 2001), which originated in 2001 under the software development domain. It efficiently organizes and manages the relations between teamwork, producing the highest-value products (services), achieving client satisfaction, and continuous acclimatization due to fluctuations and variations. Likewise, this study argues that it can provide the optimum framework to mitigate conflict, enhance communication maximize relations efficiency between the stakeholders, and provide criteria to select the teams under different circumstances and various projects. The framework has been implemented in two similar traditional settlement case studies, Lasaifar Albalad in the Delta Region in Egypt and Pontinia in the Lazio region in Italy. It was validated using focus group techniques. The results showed that the framework had improved the participatory approach, enhanced communication, mitigated team conflict problems, supported decision-making, and it led to engaging top-down stakeholders, and it led to versatile juxtapositioning (bottom-up with top-down) stakeholders on the same influence and interest zone. Moreover, the framework led to implementing an actual retrofitting case study that benefits the local community and supports the national policies.