INTRO

The theme of this studio is to map and unpack the paradoxes of the Egyptian neoliberal city going beyond the binary dispositions of private/public spaces. Moving beyond the canonical epistemologies of gated communities framework developed in the geographies of the global north, we come to realize the production of public markets inside privatized gated communities in the case of Cairo, the development of public open-for-all mosques inside compounds, public church, strip-mall as a buffer edge instead of the concrete fence, and temporalities of access to gated communities creating a circumstantial dynamic formation of grey spaces, challenging the cookie-cutter theory of neoliberal city as we know it.

Two tasks were required from the students towards that end of re-imagining and stitching the neoliberal city of New Cairo developed at the eastern desert edge of metropolitan Cairo. Step 1 was designated to mapping and analyzing the spaces of anomalies and disjunctions that fall at the intersection of the epistemologies of public and private spaces. Secondly, step II, was about configuring how to generate a masterplan from these micro-spaces of interaction to stitch and amend the dysfunctional macro-scale of the masterplan. In this case, the urban design exercise becomes a methodology of action against the conventional birds-eye view of the Masterplan (with a capital ‘M’) to become a human-centered masterplan. The objective is to deconstruct neoliberal New Cairo by stitching the fences, gated enclaves, and security archipelagos through optimizing the already-existing effects of these ruptures shaking the dialectical utopianism already in place.

The urban design studio is a research-driven design inquiry. Every group is composed of 5-6 students where they conduct ethnographic fieldwork of three contested spaces of public/private tackling the question of segregation. They then develop a thesis statement and a design methodology of action to enhance those spaces. Afterward, they work individually on a blow-up action area to retrofit it. Then they synthesize their action areas into a collective vision for stitching and amending the existing dysfunctional masterplan in an attempt to develop a more networked infrastructure and connected built environment.