NOVEMBER 17, 2018
HUBS FOR HOPE PUBLIC SPACE PROGRAMME FOR CAIRO'S SHANTYTOWNS
FEATURED BY NEDAA H. MAHBOUB- 2018
Introduction What Is a shantytown? Shantytowns are generally known as the places within cities where the inhabitances are concentrated in provoked conditions of life. This definition of a shantytown emphasizes the multidimensional nature of shantytowns. The aspects to define a shantytown vary according the field of interest and the backgrounds, whether national governments, academia scholars, NGOs or to community members. Stakeholders rely on certain dimensions to define slums, such as lack of basic services, substandard housing or illegal and inadequate dwellings, overcrowding and high density, unhealthy living conditions and hazardous locations, insecure tenure or irregular or informal settlements, poverty and social exclusion, or settlement size (to indicate-concentration)-(1).
Aims.and.objectives. 'Hubs for Hope' aims at empowering the neglected public spaces in Cairo's shantytowns against social segregations to be safe, inclusive, accessible and userfriendly including women, children, and elders. I experimented the initiative in a number of similar urban context projects that I took part in. Establishing the initiative- using emergent technologies- will enable me to impact a potential urban transformation of Cairo's metropolitan, based on public space interventions of six slums in the first year.
A vital aspect of the initiative is the assessment. Hence, Cairo's Happiness index- a scale I developed during my 1st degree- will test and evaluate how the users respond to the hub in correlation with their happiness values. The future plan is to achieve 40 public space interventions within a fiveyears' time frame. Public spaces as they define the quality of a neighborhood should involve several actions, such as community participation, capacity building, social identity, and income source generation. Thus, over the medium term, I plan to scale up these hubs besides the public plazas to provide water, sanitation and hygiene facilities, a playground for kids and an open theatre for social narratives as well as a workplace for nearby social entrepreneurs. All the piazzas will be eventually handed over to be community driven and maintained. To continue building youth capacity as I did previously, I'm already partnering up with my architectural school and planning to form another four academic partnerships by the fifth year. On the long term, I want to tackle the crisis of Egypt's centralized infrastructure through decentralized interventions of public spaces. I want to feature 'Hubs for Hope' towards upper Egypt outskirts for a quality of life for all. The potentiality of these spaces comes from how they act as smaller city centers and the possibility of transforming the urban planning process into resilient handmade practices. Getting the empowerment of authority and the civil society, the initiative will be cooperating with local governmental and civil society partners to feature future cultural festivals that take place around these public areas. My ultimate goal is leading these hubs to empower possible opportunities of global cities built around public spaces instead of residential blocks.