Cairo
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Cairo, the largest city of the highly urbanized Arab world, faces most of the ills that characterize the new megacities of the so-called Third World. Despite its powerful and highly bureaucratic central government, which retains remnants of the attempt to socialize the state, Egypt is unable to provide more than a bare minimum of services for most of its people. Low-income and very poor Cairenes are left, therefore, to work out their own strategies for coping with an oppressive, economically challenging environment. Viewed from the outside low-income Cairenes have been characterized as consumerist, spendthrift, blindly attached to rural tradition, and prone to create slums around themselves. Recent studies have shown, however, that the stereotypes inflicted on the vast majority of Cairo's people are a very poor fit. Instead this population has thrived in an adverse environment by means of its ability to adapt traditional mores, gender roles, forms of association, and attitudes toward work to the demands of their urban reality. The poverty of this immense low-income group is the impetus behind their struggle--rather than the result of their efforts or lack of efforts. With a population of 15 million, which is expected to reach 20 million by the year 2000, Cairo has overwhelming problems. In many quarters population density is extreme while "deteriorating physical infrastructure and public services are compounded for the majority of its population by glaring inequitie
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but ones which are socially and dynamically alive" (Wilkinson and Kardash 301). In projects built in the 1980s in the Tenth of Ramadan New City, however, allowances were made for the input of users in various aspects of planning, building and financing the housing. But the levels of decision-making overlapped in ways that were not conducive to satisfying both government planners and end-users. Thus, some householders are allowed to add on to their core houses, but "the extension of the core house has to follow a predetermined plan" laid out by government planners even though it also has to be "built by the owner himself" (Wilkinson and Kardash 305). But such plans were often ignored and owners employed local contractors to create new type of buildings with more traditional relationships between exterior and interior. In one of the authors' cases studies a family added an unplanned-for second story (to accommodate a daughter's family) and added a garden with "a plot for growing vegetables and keeping chickens" (Wilkinson and Kardash 306).
As a result of these conflicts the earlier projects were also judged failures by the government because users insisted on reapportioning internal space and redesigning the uses of exterior
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Approximate Word count = 2731
Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page)
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