Abstract
Urban planning’s fragmented approaches—across disciplines, institutions, and ways of knowing—fail to address the intertwined challenges of spatial injustice, mental health disparities, and stigma in informal settlements. In order to incorporate lived experience, well-being, and spatial equity into planning practice, this article presents psychosocial urbanism as a transformative framework. This study looks at how planning practices reinforce exclusion: housing strategies ignore local knowledge, governance mechanisms solidify spatial stigmatization, and infrastructure initiatives ignore the psychological toll. Using Ezbet Khairallah as an example, locals' daily activities—from makeshift playgrounds to group economies—display grassroots models of resilience and healing that go against prevailing planning paradigms.Building on these findings, the study creates an interdisciplinary model that is healing-centered and distills five guiding principles as a road map for equitable urban transformation. These principles range from valuing community expertise to incorporating trauma-informed design. By doing this, it shows that psychosocial urbanism is a useful tool for creating cities that foster social justice and a sense of belonging in addition to being an ethical requirement. Accordingly, the aim of this study is to develop and articulate a healing-centered, interdisciplinary planning model—termed psychosocial urbanism—that integrates lived experience, mental well-being, and spatial justice, grounded in empirical insights from Ezbet Khairallah.