Lessons from Cairo: How Small Scale Urban Initiatives can Improve a City

The following is an excerpt from Abdelbaseer Mohamed’s “Lessons from Cairo: How Small Scale Urban Initiatives can Improve a City” article. Follow the link below the text for the full article.

Cairo, like many cities, is deeply wounded by fragmentation and heterogeneity. It is a complex city with a broken public realm. And while policymakers use lack of money as an excuse for not making substantial improvements, money has no relation with innovation and creativity. Inexpensive, short-term actions can give people the confidence that something is taking place.  

Imagine a city as an urban envelope made up of floors, walls, roofs, and dwellers. How can these simple components, with limited capacity, make change?

Some recent small-scale Egyptian urban initiatives, when compared with the government’s expensive plans, are powerful in drawing people into spaces. These following initiatives are good ‘urban acupunctures’ that might heal Cairo. 

Click here for the full article: http://thisbigcity.net/lessons-from-cairo-how-small-scale-urban-initiatives-can-improve-a-city/

Abdelbaseer A. Mohamed is an architect and urban planner. Mohamed received his MSc in Urban planning and Design from Ain Shams University, where he is currently working on his PhD. He is mainly interested in studying the influence of urban space on society adopting a configurational approach, space syntax. Mohamed is currently a Carnegie fellow at American University in Washington.