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The Garden Suburbs of Cairo. A morphological urban analysis of Zamālik, Ma‘ādī, and Heliopolis
(2019)
During the British occupation of Egypt in the beginning of the 20th century, several suburban developments were established on the periphery of the city of Cairo. These initially attracted the small British community and later foreigners and Egyptians, mainly from the elite community. These suburban developments, including Ma‘ādī, Zamālik, Heliopolis, Qubbah-Gardens, and Garden City, became the fashionable residential quarters of Cairo. Until now, some of these areas still represent the distinguishable residential settlements of the city. Ma‘ādī, Zamālik, and Heliopolis specifically are nostalgically appropriated in the design of recent suburban developments around Greater Cairo.
Some of the 20th century suburban developments around Cairo are labeled or described as “garden cities.” During the early 20th century, two thriving British town planning movements emerged, namely, the garden city movement and the garden suburb movement. This study investigates the hypothesis that these suburban developments, are indeed “garden suburbs” like the British movement, despite that few are labeled or described as “garden cities,”. Although several studies have examined the historical development of such settlements, their relation, however, to the British planning movements and their transfer process received little attention from planning historians. Few studies also analyze the urban design aspects that made these suburban developments distinguishable since their foundation and until today.
To guide the validity of this study’s hypothesis, a set of research questions are formulated: (1) What is the difference between the garden city and the garden suburb movements? (2) How were the British planning movements transferred to Egypt? (3) What are the urban design aspects that makes these suburban developments distinguishable as garden suburbs? To answer these research questions, a historical morphological urban analysis is conducted through case studies.
The study first studies the difference between the garden city and the garden suburb movements, mainly in Britain, through the analysis of publications on the promoter of both movements: for the garden city, E. Howards’ book “The Garden City of Tomorrow,” published in 1902, and for the garden suburb, R. Unwin’s books “Town Planning in Practice,” published in 1909, and “Nothing Gained from Overcrowding,” published in 1912. Then a morphological urban analysis of Letchworth Garden City and Brentham Garden Suburb, considered the first examples of each movement, is conducted. In order to analyze the transfer process, the study adopts M. Volait and J. Nasr’s theory on transporting planning, through investigating the authority in power responsible for the establishment of these suburban developments. This is followed by the morphological urban analysis of three suburban developments around Cairo, namely, Zamālik, Ma‘ādī, and Heliopolis. The morphological analysis focuses on the background of their establishment, authority in power responsible for the development, design principles, urban context, street typology, residential block typology, social infrastructure, and social target group.
Finally, the study compares between Brentham, Letchworth, Zamālik, Ma‘ādī, and Heliopolis. The comparative analysis aims to highlight the differences between the studied cases of Cairo and how they are different from or alike the British movements. This study concludes that the suburban developments around Cairo during the British occupation, are in fact garden suburbs, despite that some are being described or labeled as garden city. This movement was exported via urban land development companies with foreign European capital, rather than via colonial dominance. It finally highlights a set of urban design aspects that distinguish them as garden suburbs of Cairo. This study hopes to support future conservation plan of these areas and the design of future suburban developments.
This dissertation concerns the changing role of fashion in the context of modern cities. In approaching this process, the research investigates the media discourse based on representations of fashion by cities and of cities by fashion. Moreover, this research focuses on fashion understood as a multidimensional phenomenon that aims to provide an explanation of urban spaces through fashion terms, actions, and garments. Additionally, cities are considered from the cultural geography approach that highlights the cultural component of urban spaces expressed in social and cultural practices in physical reality. Following this idea, it is suggested here that fashion today not only participates in the urban life as its significant component but also creates city images and representations of urban lifestyle through the fashion paradigm. In other words, fashion redefines urban spaces; at the same time, urban spaces are interpreted as a stage for fashion processes.
By integrating in social research the fields of urban studies and fashion studies, this dissertation offers the discussion considering the fashion phenomenon not only as an urban phenomenon of modern reality. On the one hand, such discussion concerns the re-conceptualization of urban phenomena by the fashion influence; on the other hand, it relates the re-contextualization of fashion in a city. The empirical focus is based on the media context of fashion magazines in which variety of possibilities to represent fashion and cities lead to promising interpretations and analysis. The idea of representation specifies the ways of constructing the notion of urban space as fashionable space and the notion of fashion as placed in the urban context.
The Local Governance of Arrival in Leipzig: Housing of Asylum-Seeking Persons as a Contested Field
(2018)
The article examines how the German city of Leipzig governs the housing of asylum seekers. Leipzig was a frontrunner in organizing the decentralized accommodation of asylum seekers when adopting its accommodation concept in 2012. This concept aimed at integrating asylum-seeking persons in the regular housing market at an early stage of arrival. However, since then, the city of Leipzig faces more and more challenges in implementing the concept. This is particularly due to the increasingly tight situation on the housing market while the number of people seeking protection increased and partly due to discriminating and xenophobic attitudes on the side of house owners and managers. Therefore, we argue that the so-called refugee crisis of 2015–2016 has to be seen in close interaction with a growing general housing shortage in Leipzig like in many other large European cities. Furthermore, we understand the municipal governing of housing as a contested field regarding its entanglement of diverse federal levels and policy scales, the diversity of stakeholders involved, and its dynamic change over the last years. We analyze this contested field set against the current context of arrival and dynamic urban growth on a local level. Based on empirical qualitative research that was conducted by us in 2016, Leipzig’s local specifics will be investigated under the umbrella of our conceptual framework of Governance of Arrival. The issues of a strained housing market and the integration of asylum seekers in it do not apply only to Leipzig, but shed light on similar developments in other European Cities.
Despite the high priority refugees are given in the public and political discussion, urban planning has not yet started to systematically consider the role of planning in asylum policy. Mostly, the subject of refugees’ arrival is addressed in local projects and housing without framing challenges and opportunities in the national and European context. A wider discussion on the used terminology of “integration” is missing just as much as a self-critical reflection on the orientation of planning discourses on the issue of housing only. In this editorial our thematic issue “European Cities Planning for Asylum” is introduced andresented.
This research addresses the discourse of tourism as a tool for place-making of urban destination. Relevant to the study of place-making is the analysis of the commoditization and localization process dependent upon the appropriation of urban landscape and local cultures. In the research, localization is interpreted as the act of determining the attributes of locality, while commoditization is defined as the process by which local attributes that have commercial potential end up in becoming tourism commodity. Following this, the commoditization of intrinsic cultural value is disseminated within a branding strategy and intervention reflecting social and political relations. Therefore, the research suggests that tourism place-making has not only been constructed through the top-down regulatory body, but has been also generated through the attributes of its locality. By utilizing the critical and constructivist paradigm, the research depicts the conditions of the localization and commoditization process in establishing the base line of its realization within the symbolic economy. Thus, a qualitative case study approach was adopted. The study area of this dissertation is Palembang, as one of the capital cities in Indonesia advancing in its overall urban development. To investigate urban tourism as a tool for development strategy, it is useful to investigate the role of tourism which embodies (1) spatial transformation; how tourism gives significant impacts on urban form, and (2) the socio-cultural aspect; how neighbourhood is related to tourism industry. The findings suggest that tourism place-making involves the reciprocity of urban dynamics: cities take on tourism as a reference model of development, and tourist areas adopt the proliferation of cultural lifestyle to meet the industry’s demands.
Das rezensierte Buch stellt die zweite Publikation von Jörg Friedrich und seinem Team zum Thema Architektur und Flüchtlinge dar. Darin werden vor allem Entwurfsvorschläge für eine hybride Stadt vorgestellt, für die eine multifunktionale Nutzung von Raum als Grundidee vorgeschlagen wird. Zudem diskutieren konzeptionelle Beiträge des Bandes, wie nach der ‚Willkommenskultur’ im Jahr 2015 eine längerfristige Perspektive für Integration eingenommen werden kann. Der Band fordert ein größeres Engagement der Architektur und einen interdisziplinären Diskurs ein, der sich der vielfältigen Aufgaben der Flüchtlingsintegration annimmt.
Dieser Artikel analysiert, in welcher Weise sich die Weltkunstausstellung documenta 14 mit dem öffentlichen Raum in Kassel auseinandersetzte. Als Kritik an globalen Unrechtszuständen konzipiert, ging die diesjährige Documenta nicht auf die lokalen Umstände in Kassel ein und benutzte die Stadt stattdessen als Bühne. Statt sich mit den konkreten Prozessen vor Ort auseinanderzusetzen, wie die Ausstellung dies in Athen getan hat, wird die Tradition der Documenta gebrochen, einen Beitrag zur gesellschaftlichen Stadtentwicklung leisten zu wollen.
Communities in discourse and space. Towards a spatial dialectic in gated residential developments
(2015)
This research projects deals with the discoursivity of spatial production.
By looking at contemporary residential development in the city of Istanbul, I will examine the reciprocity of the material production of space on one hand, and social discourses on the other, in order to make a contribution to how physical space can be used as a source of research in urban studies. In real estate marketing social discourses are used as a source of reference for place branding or identity design. Branding concepts therefore relate to how social groups imagine their position or future position in society, imaginaries that are continuously influenced and changed by social dynamics within the city but also from the outside. How such urban identities are formed and it what way they relate to the urban environment is crucial to a wide spectrum of social and cultural science. The constitutive role urban space attains has been described and analysed in much detail. Such scrutiny however has yet to be applied to the visual and communicative forms of engagement, the build environment partakes in the formation and change of social discourses.
This research represents an effort made towards contribute to the critical thinking from an analysis of the hegemonic neoliberal ideology, which supports the idea of the end of history and the technocratic universalism which in turn implies the imposition of a single model of life, denying, in the name of realism and the end of utopias, any other alternative possibility.
This makes it necessary to recover the critical thinking to analyze and understand the reality, thus overcoming the ideological barrier towards claiming that things can be otherwise.
It is clear from this research that the discourse of sustainable development has unquestionably transformed the context and content of political activity in Europe. This discourse has exercised and obvious influence in the Governance processes, mainly because it has contributed to the introduction of a new political field, which was then promoted, either explicitly or implicitly by policy-makers, researchers on the field and practitioners during the last three decades. Though it may be bold to affirm that the discourse of sustainable development is the sole driver of these whole set of changes, there is no doubt that it has played a key part in the way in which the governance priorities have been handled in the European continent.