Sustainable urban planning in conflict-affected cities: Governance, displacement, and hierarchical sustainability in Marib, Yemen

Sustainable urban planning frameworks presuppose institutional stability and regulated development, yet their applicability to conflict-affected cities remains theoretically underexamined. This qualitative case study examines how sustainability is interpreted and prioritised in Marib city, Yemen, an urban centre experiencing rapid growth amid armed conflict and mass internal displacement. Drawing on a framing analysis of global sustainability frameworks, semi-structured interviews with 16 city stakeholders, and structured observations in seven neighbourhoods, the study identifies a structural mismatch between global sustainability paradigms and local planning practice. Whereas international models assume balanced domain integration, the evidence from Marib reveals a context-conditioned hierarchy in which governance capacity and essential service provision operate as preconditions structuring environmental management, economic activity, and technological uptake. Locally, environmental sustainability is reduced to basic service continuity; social sustainability is dominated by displacement-driven absorptive pressures; economic sustainability narrows to livelihood survival; and technological adoption is fragmented and institutionally constrained. The paper advances a context-conditioned, hierarchical model of urban sustainability that challenges the implicit universality of parallel-domain planning approaches and calls for planning paradigms that recognise institutional capacity as foundational in fragile urban contexts.