Towards Sustainable New Settlements in Egypt: Lessons Learned from a Comparison between Traditional and Modern Settlements in Greater Cairo Region - Egypt

Abstract

The last few decades, Egypt drawn into a dramatic socio-economic change that causes a relative change in adopted development patterns. Different typologies of new residential districts have turned from globalized westernized world into Egyptian context. Planners and authority thought that changing adopted development patterns from traditional to modern neighborhood could provide solutions for old town's problems. On the other hand, different scholars have emphasized that traditional compact, mixed use, high-density urban forms are important for reaching sustainability goals in term of environmental, economic and social advantages. Based on a comparison of the sustainability of three case studies Shubra, Heliopolis, and new Cairo city; this research examine analyze the sustainability of New Egyptian Settlements. The analysis depends on observation and spatial analysis to investigate the variations of performances between the three case studies in terms of urban, social, environmental, and economic sustainability indicators. The research aims to assess the sustainability of moving from traditional to modern urban form in GCR' new towns and to extract development criteria and lessons learned from traditional urban form to enhance the sustainability of modern settlements. The research concluded that both traditional early developed settlements like Shubra and new planned settlements like new Cairo recorded low performance in sustainability issues, each one in its own way; and that early planned settlements like Heliopolis recorded moderate performance in sustainability issues, this paves the way for criteria to prepare new plans of new settlements and provide intensification repair tools to fix existing new settlements.