NY Times

Michael Slackman of the New York Times pens a nice piece about public spaces in Cairo.

Cairo is a city with a lot of people, a lot of tightly packed houses and buildings, a lot of traffic — and very little open space. There are some parks, but they tend to be fenced off and charge admission. So Egyptians grab what public space there is and make it their own. Bridges are a favorite, but nearly any open space will do. Even a patch of grass in the middle of a traffic circle.

Residents flock to the city’s major open open space, the Nile River:

At night the Nile goes black, the murky waters providing the only chance for residents of this crowded city to stare into wide open space, offering a spiritual tonic for those whose lives are defined by the harsh borders, small apartments, low pay and little opportunity.

“I feel suffocated, of course,” said Nourelhoda Mohammed, 18, as she described her life in Waraq, a poor, crowded neighborhood. She has graduated from high school but has no job and is hoping to marry. She passes the time on the Rhode al-Farag Bridge, an imposing span of concrete, traffic and picnickers on the northern end of the city.

“This is a place where there are not a lot of people and you can breathe,” she said. Ms. Mohammed dressed up for the outing, wrapping her head in a gold and red head scarf and applying a flowery perfume.

We covered the creation and revitalization of the Al Azhar Park. The article raises the question: in a city as dense as Cairo, how can public space be provided that can improve quality of life and generally make the city a more pleasurable place?

A former dumping ground in Cairo becomes a park.

The story of Al-Azhar Park in Cairo, Egypt offers an interesting case study into how improving quality of life through parks  and green spaces can lead to positive impacts in cultural and community development. Back in the mid-1990s, the Aga Khan Trust for Culture started construction on turning a derelict space in the middle of one of the densest and most open space deprived cities in the world into a central public space. From the Trust’s overview of the project (pdf):

…..the city was confronted by the array of contemporary development challenges faced by many cities, not least population pressures, a decline in the quality of housing and the attendant problems these conditions create…….. It was clear that Cairo needed more green space. One study found that the amount of green space per inhabitant was roughly equivalent to the size of a footprint. It is one of the lowest proportions in the world.

It was on the occasion of the conference that His Highness the Aga Khan announced his decision to finance the creation of a park for the citizens of the Egyptian capital. The only central location which was of suitable scale and which lent itself to rehabilitation was the derelict Darassa site, a 30-hectare (74 acre), 500-year-old mound of rubble in the inner city.

The now-completed park has spurred reinvestment in housing and buildings in the surrounding neighborhood, and is now considered a key cultural and public space in the city. The project has shown how well such places can contribute to an improved quality of life, especially in the developing world where urban greening has not been a priority in many places. The PBS series E-squared produced a whole episode on the park. (A video podcast and trailer of the episode can be seen here.)