Revitalizing City Districts

Whosoever strolls along the streets of old Port Said cannot help but be struck by the omnipresence of a very specific type of buildings which combine high timber verandas and Haussmannian arcades.

The origin of Port Said as a city is unique in the Egyptian condition at that time. It was the first city to be planned and constructed on an idle soil. The Suez Canal Company (SCC), mainly French and British, determined the planning concept and the architectural style of the city, which followed the character given to the French colonies, especially in India and Senegal.

This paper is based on preliminary research on the building typology of Port Said. The city was built in a very particular way as the northern entrance to the Suez Canal, which is unique until today, but highly endangered.

Waterfront revitalization began as a wave in North America in the 1960s from Boston, Baltimore and San Francisco, it then spread to European port cities and namely to London in the 1970s and 1980s as well as to Australia and to Japan. Scholars have related this to technological improvements and demands of post-industrial ecological cities, which resulted in moving all industrial activities form city centres. Global transformation of maritime technology from the 1960s required more extensive land and deeper water, thus old ports became unused. Therefore, the idea of revitalizing port areas and their surrounding historical city centres became a prominent approach dealing with their unique architectural elements i.e. warehouses and docks that needed development and revitalization while keeping their identity. The map represented by Bob Smith for the global diffusion of waterfront revitalization, which was also supported by other scholars draws a wave of waterfront revitalization throughout the globe. This map actually poses the research question; “Has this waterfront revitalization wave reached the MENA region and specifically the port areas?” The paper tracks this wave, analyzing why and how it started and the factors that lead to its emergence in different countries and to its spreading in different continents. Then the paper explores port revitalization in the Mena region in search for an answer to the research question.

The unique historic urban landscape of Old Cairo is after decades of decline in danger. Even after first projects and measures for the rehabilitation of the last years an intensive, complex and comprehensive strategy, including bottom up approaches to integrate the inhabitants, entrepreneurs, traders and initiatives of today is needed to keep Old Cairo as the most important core of the rapid growing mega city Cairo. The revitalization of downtown and historic Cairo should get the highest priority on the urban development agenda of the whole inner city of Cairo and is also a task for the international community to preserve one of its most unique world heritage cities, to maintain and enhance the long lasting coexistence between the medieval Arabic urban structure and the modern urban structure of the 19th century as an unique urban ensemble of the collision of orient and occident.

Galata Greek School is both, a heritage site, representing the Greek [Rum] history of Istanbul.

Public realm development in many cities around the world suffers from being under a dyadic design process that keeps the public as “users” and not as “participants” and that keeps formal design control over the public realm. In addition, this research considers another important factor that shapes Egypt’s public realm; the existence of informal user groups and informal public realm behavior as the city poor and the discouraged user groups adapt the public realm features to fit their needs. This research paper considers informality in the public realm of Egyptian cities after January 2011 as a protest against formal control and its dyadic image. The public revolution of January 2011 in Egypt was a cry for more democracy that touched on the main two features of public realm: it encouraged more democracy in the public realm design process and at the same time allowed more informal public realm behavior by almost all the user groups. This research paper analyzes the current situation of the public realm in Cairo and explores the theoretical base for a solid understanding of the user group behavior and their possible public realm code of conduct.

The concept of “densification” has emerged in the last decade as a concept embodying aspects of sustainability, urban form, and quality of life. The concept to date has not been precisely defined as a model that can be shared globally.

By the year 2050, the population in Egypt is expected to reach around 160 million people.

Even though it has been 20 years since the apartheid was officially lifted, Cape Town is still the symbolic capital city of segregation.

The intention of this paper is to explore the challenges in the Greater Cairo area for a more sustainable urban development, focusing on the two extreme forms of urban production in Cairo: the informal settlements and the desert new towns.

The city of Cairo, Egypt, currently experiences rapid urban growth. Large parts of the city expand without formal urban planning. This results in large-scale informal and unplanned development. In addition, the resulting urban fabric and individual buildings feature severe deficiencies when it comes to the basic quality of urban space, ventilation and daylight. While retrofitting already built-up areas would be a huge challenge, some minor improvements might be possible in future development even within the current mode of production of these spaces. In recent years, parametric design tools have opened up new possibilities for modelling in urban design. By way of a parametric design approach, different urban design parameters can be modified and new urban space scenarios can be rendered three dimensionally in almost real time. In short, this is parametric urban design. It opens up completely new possibilities for analysing and designing urban space and individual buildings, and thus to evaluate the architectural, spatial and technical aspects of literally hundreds of different designs. In combination with environmental simulation technology, parametric design forms a powerful duo in order not only to evaluate qualitative aspects of design but also quantitative aspects of particular environmental conditions relating to specific designs. In principle, every design scenario of a parametric urban design model can be evaluated against its environmental performance. The El-Marg El-Gedida area is located at the northern edge of the Cairo metropolitan area and comprises one of the largest areas of informal settlement in the city. In recent years, development in this area has accelerated due to the construction of Line 1 of the metro, and the area’s connection to the northern part of the Cairo ring road. A large patch of predominantly agricultural land is still undeveloped yet under increasing pressure for development, making it a relevant case for parametric urban design scenario building for future development. Using the El-Marg El-Gedida area as a demonstration case, this paper aims to investigate the potential for the application of a parametric urban design approach to urban space design in Cairo in combination with daylight analysis. The paper presents a discussion of what parameters are feasible to include in this particular urban setting, and an analysis of indoor daylight quality for a number of different design scenarios.