The Justice of Public Spaces: A Dialogue About Accessibility and Traffic in al-Khalifa

The urban fabric of Historic Cairo is registered as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, but some parts of the Old City suffer from deteriorating quality of life and living conditions. With the rigidity and inflexibility of the laws governing new developments in Historic Cairo and their lack of recognition of any informal practices, we see that justice in public spaces is often the result of dialogue and informal interaction between different stakeholders and has a great impact on the quality of the urban product. The direct changes that residents make to the streets are a de facto example of community participation in organizing its built environment.

Social conditions, especially the equity of urban spaces, are severely affected by development projects that are not interconnected or integrated. While the study of justice often comes from the political or legal aspects, the impact of urban projects on spatial inequality is often neglected. Often only the positive aspects of development projects are considered on the physical built environment, the impacts on tourism activities and traffic flow.

The research aims to document and study changes in the permeability of the urban fabric and the residents’ interference on the streets and their impact on the interrelated interrelation with traffic changes, in addition to studying the fairness of public spaces in Historic Cairo and exploring its mediating role between these changes. The research is based on comparing the effects of previous changes in the study area (al-Khalifa) and extrapolating the expected effects of the proposed changes from the urban conservation plan for the area prepared within the framework of the popular participation project in Historic Cairo.

The lecture will present and discuss the preliminary results of the researchers: Omar El-Kousy – Ahmed Al-Ahwal – Zeina Ghonam.

The research was carried out in cooperation with the Built Environment Collective through the support of the Arab Council for the Social Sciences, the Small Grants Program 2019, funded by the Swedish International Development Agency (Sida).

The lecture will be broadcast on Facebook. You can follow the live broadcast of the lecture on Megawra’s Facebook page.