The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region is rapidly urbanising. It faces compounding vulnerabilities including extreme heat, water scarcity, geopolitical instability, and infrastructural and demographic pressures. Cities remain at the forefront of these converging challenges, tasked with conceptualising systems that ensure that infrastructure design, public services, and governance remain modern and locally rooted, to enforce circularity, resilience, and liveability for years to come. Forging Pathways for Urban Resilience in the MENA Region convenes diverse perspectives from scholars, practitioners, and city leaders to unpack the structural, technological, and institutional mechanisms required to navigate this transition. Across 11 essays, the authors present compelling frameworks on how to leverage human-centred planning approaches, large-scale infrastructure pursuits, nature-based solutions, circular water systems, and clean transport networks alongside coordinated governance to safeguard sustainable urban transformation. The report also highlights how, despite increasing global emphasis on adopting technological innovation, inclusive and integrated governance remains necessary. The contributors underline the importance of simultaneously retaining traditional knowledge systems, encouraging enhanced vertical and horizontal coordination, and enforcing South–South learning exchanges to scale actionable solutions across the region. Sukaina Abdul Ilah Al-Nasrawi sets the stage, underscoring how cities represent microcosms of humanity. Building liveable cities requires paying close attention to the preservation of human dignity and social equity. She argues for the development of a new urban planning paradigm that encompasses integrated planning, human-centred digital approaches, and economic resilience, all of which address the region’s rapid urbanisation, high youth unemployment, displacement, and fragile infrastructure. As countries within the region increasingly pursue mega-development, Mannat Jaspal and Leigh Mante interrogate the risks associated with such ambitious endeavours. Evaluating both the rationale and realities of mega-projects, they call for national-subnational governance coordination and financial and environmental guardrails to prevent cost overruns and socio-environmental damage. Victoria Lee offers a complementary perspective on mega-events, demonstrating