Conference Proceedings
CITIES TO BE TAMED?
Section 4 | Shifting paradigms
in design and planning. Focus: Cairo

The new urban landscape which the Revolution of 2011 initiated and rendered fluid with the breaking of that age-old balance between space, society and power, has brought up a thousand considerations on how to reinvent Cairo’s city planning and its contrasting “globalized” urban condition.

The impressive informal processes that led to the urban growth of recent decades, and have made of Cairo a megalopolis of 18 million inhabitants, are focused in this multidisciplinary investigation that explores the shapes and significance of this multifaceted urban space, its relations with the formal city, and the enormous contrasts it has generated between modernity and tradition, between “modernistic” and neo-liberal urban policies and a society that on its own has built its living environment, and is now claiming new urban citizenship rights and participation in urban policy-making.

The papers explore this conflicting urban landscape from different points of view: the morphology of informal settlements and the language of self-built architecture imbued with 'local knowledge' and vernacular tradition; the processes of spatial segregation and social exclusion and the informal practices of re-appropriation of public spaces; the institutional definitions of informal settlements and related policies for their up-grading; the new informal urban practices generated by the Revolution that spread in the formal city. They all share the objective of reframing Cairo’s informal features and the search for innovative design and planning paradigms as well as practices in order to acknowledge and promote the City’s vast marginalized areas and their communities. 
by Paola Bellaviti

Chair: Paola Bellaviti
Discussants: Omar Nagati, UC Berkeley;
Antonio Tosi, Politecnico di Milano

• Insurgent Spatiality in Informal Cairo. Recovering Vernacular Patterns in the Contested Metropolis
Elisa Bertagnini, Michele Morbidoni
• Can Vernacular Help Urban Poor? Dimensions of Urban Poverty and Future Directions Using Vernacular Solutions
Marwa Dabaieh
• Urban Form Rehabilitation of the Informal Settlements in Egypt
Essam Abdel-Salam Gouda
• Brownfields in G.C.R. A Neglected Potential for Re-Development the Old City
Samah M. El-Khateeb, Ahmed Sami Abd Elrahman
• Cairo the Combat Land. The City Layered
Mohamed Alaa Mandour
• Ard Al-Liwa Park Project: Towards a New Urban Order and Mode of Professional Practice
Omar Nagati, Noheir Elgendy
• Empowering People in Egyptian Informal Areas by Planning. Towards an Intelligent Model of Participatory Planning
Manal M.F. El-Shahat, Samah M. El Khateeb