Upon its unveiling in a city with one square foot of green space per inhabitant, Cairo’s 74-acre Al Azhar Park in 2005 was rightfully heralded as the greatest green space in the city’s modern history.(1) The Park was part of an urban revitalization project in the old city aimed at improving the life of the local community as well as restoring its historic fabric.(2)  Investigating the complex spatial politics of the site might seem counterintuitive given its celebrated civic nature; it is in fact crucial that we understand the way architectural interventions such as this remap social space, extending and consolidating hierarchies of inclusion and exclusion. The boundaries of the Park and public use of it since its completion reveal the complicated nature of civic belonging in class-stratified Cairo. The ambiguous spatial relationship between the Park and its surroundings is perhaps nowhere more apparent than along the edge it shares with the neighborhood of Darb al-Ahmar. In an effort to respond to the specific spatial politics of the Park as well as to material and historic trajectories of building and habitation in Cairo, I worked on an architectural design proposal for an urban housing block within this common boundary.  The project takes issue with both the monumentalism(3) and contextualism(4) of many recent architectural projects in the Middle East, developing in its place an anisotropic(5) urban strategy that modulates in supple response to particular site conditions and design intentions. The project also proposes an alternative urbanism, reconsidering foundational aspects of the modernist master plan that continue to shape our creation and understanding of form within cities. Before turning to discuss the project, I will briefly describe Al Azhar Park and Darb al-Ahmar. 

Al Azhar Park reclaimed and greened a 500-year-old landfill located near the grounds of the original Fatimid royal city. The park is flanked on its eastern and southern fronts by the cemetery-cum-neighborhood known as the City of the Dead (al-Qarafa) but separated on the east by the Salah Salem Road. On its western front it is divided from Darb al-Ahmar by the 12th-century Ayyubid wall, which was unearthed during site excavations. This wall once marked the easternmost boundary of Salaheddin’s Cairo. Originally built to protect the city from marauders, the wall also came to mark the boundaries of the city, determining who was to be considered a citizen and who an outsider.  Later the wall merely separated residential areas from cemeteries, dividing the city into the living and the dead. Eventually, buried beneath refuse thrown ‘outside’ the city proper, the wall was obscured and the spaces of living and dead merged, as the City of the Dead developed into a residential neighborhood. The refuse pile now merely reinforced neighborhood divisions.(6) Most residents of the tomb complexes are more recent rural migrants than the residents of Darb al-Ahmar, part of the massive post-World War II rural-urban influx that saw the city’s population triple to over 17 million inhabitants today.

The restored Ayyubid wall reverses the polarity of its original urban condition, with the former dumping ground now transformed into a rarefied urban interior.  Al Azhar Park operates as an almost sacred space within the otherwise dense and impoverished landscape of the old city; even nature seems to favor it, as dust and smog dissipate in the airspace above it. The 270-m high, 3.5-m thick wall now operates as both barrier and buffer. It is impermeable physically and visually, restricting any movement to or from Darb al-Ahmar and forming an opaque barrier. Because of the elevation of the park land, visitors can only look down at Darb al-Ahmar without being able to access it; the park also affords exclusive views southward towards the Citadel, which is located on the Muq’attam hills, the only other elevated point of the old city besides the park. The park is accessible from Salah Salem road by car, and precariously by foot, as visitors have to loop around the park to this same vehicular entrance. A ‘community’ entrance through the Ayyubid wall had originally been planned for Darb al-Ahmar, as part of an initiative to revitalize the local economy by drawing tourists through the area on their way to the Park. This would have been the preferred route of entry for visitors traveling on foot from the old city and would also have rendered Darb al-Ahmar and the park as part of a homologous urban fabric. This entrance was never realized.

Darb al-Ahmar inspired the eponymously titled 1984 film that dealt with its thriving drug trade during the era of President Anwar Sadat, but the area is also well known for its mosques and mansions of architectural significance. These sit alongside a mosaic of derelict residential buildings of stone construction and new concrete block construction. The neighborhood is the production backbone of Khan al-Khalili’s knick-knacks, Cairo’s largest souq and a requisite stop for all tourists passing through the city.  While the Khan is only a ten-minute walk from Darb al-Ahmar, only the most enterprising tourists make their way to the neighborhood. Cairenes living outside the old city have even less reason to go there, although they flock to the nearby Park. If access to the Park were permitted at the Ayyubid wall, it is likely that the area adjacent to the entry would become prime real estate. It is easy, for example, to imagine tourists walking through Darb al-Ahmar to visit its historic sites and to buy discounted souvenirs directly from local artisans, ending their day with dinner in the park. Were a civic space located there, student life might well begin to spill over into the area from Al Azhar University, which borders the area.  A lack of appropriate amenities - community center, market place, open space - has also meant that local residents cannot easily gather. 

Cairo is often described pejoratively as a village of 17 million, and Cairene society is indeed class stratified. This proposal does not attempt to define urbanity based on historic precedent which distinguishes it from rusticity but instead sees opportunity in the needs of the city’s newer inhabitants, in reconsidering the landscape of the city and what type of urbanism an unsentimental look at Cairo might support. It is Modernism’s legacy to reread the city through a scientific lens, dividing it into discrete zones of work, leisure, and living, with a notion of the urban distinct and separate from the rural.(7) Through this proposal we reject the inviolability of these categories and instead allow the program(8) to emerge dynamically out of a gradational blend of activities that happen at different levels - of formality, duration, privacy, and publicity- and scales. We have now located our site and where the design proposal begins.

Our site is 4,000 square meters sandwiched between a 1970s brutalist building on al-Azhar University’s campus to the north, the Ayyubid wall to the west, and residential swathes of Darb al-Ahmar. The neighborhood holds some notable historic examples of Abbasid, Mamluk and Ottoman architecture but otherwise consists of degraded structures, retrofitted buildings, and newer concrete block structures built upon razed ground. Darb al-Ahmar is a very dense residential area with a local economy of skilled craftsmen, as well as scrapyards selling building material gathered from collapsed older structures. Local workshops are also the site of production of mashribiyya - the famous wooden lattice screens that filter views and light, which figure prominently in historic mansions and mosques as well as neo-Islamic architecture. The mashribiyya is often applied to new construction in the Middle East to lend it regional authenticity. This is done without questioning its materiality or form, despite the fact that the terms that necessitate its use have changed dramatically; it is no longer needed in residential construction to screen women from public view but it can still be considered as a filtering device, albeit for different users.  In addition to using mashribiyya, both mansions and mosques used to be spatially organized around courtyards, which new residential construction omits, as it is built for maximum ‘economy’. The courtyard operated as a multi-functional space, which allowed programs to bleed into it periodically - it is this trait, which creates more nuance within what is considered exterior and interior space that is of interest here. The courtyard and the mashribiyya feature prominently within this project but are reconceived – materially, organizationally, and programmatically.

While the urban housing block is conceived as a residential, commercial, agricultural, and leisure space it is predominantly used for dwelling. Cairo’s housing crisis is extreme, and includes an astonishingly high rate of informal housing: around 80% of the city’s buildings are provisional structures, built without permits or even legitimate title deeds. The City of the Dead is testament to this, as are the precarious light, wood constructions often found built atop concrete buildings as rooms for newlyweds.  Contemporary concrete construction, whether located in the old city or in the new suburbs of Cairo, are all built without any consideration of their spatial relationship with adjoining structures; they are also poorly designed and shoddily constructed. This repetitive construction of singular objects results in a visual monotony and a degraded urban condition. Young couples often bear the brunt of the lack of affordable housing. There is a great deal of tension in public spaces today between young couples and the police. Young couples unable to move into their own apartments become frustrated as they cannot consummate their marriages, resulting in moral crises in public spaces with engaged couples harassed by local police for improper displays of affection.

I decided to treat the Darb al-Ahmar site as a whole; hence the design is of an urban block and not of separate buildings. The conceptual approach is to design an architecture of non-uniform spatial conditions. This is accomplished by defining urban space through gradients - formal, programmatic, tectonic, and material. Any activity – dwelling, market, leisure – can be shaped by this logic of gradients; furthermore, one can even find layered, periodic moments for singular or multiple activities occurring within the same space. For example, dwelling is here defined as a place for more or less permanent habitation, which is further described by hourly or yearly occupation, but never categorized as “housing” (with that term’s implications about what constitutes a family numerically or socially). Furthermore dwelling is not separated from industry or leisure; instead these spatial relationships are dependant upon whether the dwelling is short or long-term, which influences its relationship to such spaces. Short-term dwelling is then directly linked to more public spaces out of need. Similarly, a given civic space may be conceived at certain times as a weekly market; at other times the same space – say, transfigured by water, which has climatic benefits – can shift programmatically into a play space or even an area for ritual cleansing. It is in this way that the project takes issue with the modernist master plan, what with its consideration of program as fixed entities and its de facto assumption of a separation between work, residence, and leisure spaces.

Formally, the block is more metropolitan in scale and program on the northern end of the site in dialogue with the institutional building facing it. The deeper volumes at the southernmost end of the block become community spaces that connect the block into the residential fabric around it. Situating itself at the same height as surrounding buildings and allowing multiple paths to thread its mass, the urban housing block defies a singular reading. From the neighborhood perspective the block seems to grow out of its local scale and program, while gradually becoming more monumental, whereas from the institutional side the monumental form seems to pixellate down into the neighborhood scale. The formal language of the block also plays with view and perspective, exemplifying aspects of Cairo’s downtown with its perspectival boulevards as well as the shallower spaces of the old city, with details viewed vertically instead of horizontally, at a close proximity instead of from afar. The project also looks with interest to the appropriation of residual space created by urban infrastructure, epitomized for example by the Friday market (souq al-gumma) taking place underneath the al-Tonssy highway flyover. The space located under the cantilever of the northern end of the urban block takes its cue from this vibrant space, but hopes to populate the space with a daily ebb and flow of inhabitants and activities.

In the recent fervor surrounding sustainability as the future of urbanism, designers and planners seem unduly focused upon technological innovation.  The power of DWELL’s anisotropic design by contrast derives from its use of gradients: non-uniform in its distribution of program, the organizational structure is dynamic, responsive to evolving relationships between user’s spaces and their needs. The block is animated by an urban vision in which agrarian, commercial, civic, industrial and domestic activities are rhythmically interwoven, defying modernism’s polarity between urban and rural, work and home, leisure and commercial. In counterpoint to today’s techno-rational language of sustainability, DWELL proposes an alternate urbanism of social ecology, orchestrating spatial conditions to promote exchange between distinct social groups at all levels and scales, in the process creating a dynamic, self-sustaining system. 

Sadia Shirazi is an architect based in Boston. She holds a MA degree from MIT and a BA with honors from the University of Chicago. She edited Thresholds 33: Formalisms and has published work in Bidoun, Thresholds, AU Arquitetura e Urbanismo, and the Architecture League of New York’s Travel Reports

(1)  Al Azhar Park is listed as one of the world’s greatest parks. See Project for Public Spaces, “60 of the World’s Great Spaces.” 2009.
(2) The Park was a $30 million (USD) project funded by the Aga Khan Trust for Culture (AKTC) as part of its historic cities programme. The Aga Khan Trust for Culture, “Al Azhar Park, Cairo and the Revitalization of Darb al-Ahmar.” 2005.
(3) Dubai’s high rises epitomize this monumental building strategy.
(4) This is also known as ‘critical regionalism’ or ‘vernacular’. The architecture in the Park illustrates a neo-Islamic style that means to fit into its local context, but instead essentializes architectural styles from Cairo’s historic buildings, grafting them onto new structures without a sense of their historicity or their relationship to building construction.
(5) By anisotropic I mean difference that is directionally variant, also described here as a non-uniform spatial distribution.
(6) See my “Cairo: Of Green Spaces,” Bidoun (vol. 3: 2005): xx-xx.
(7)  Mark Jarzombek, “Guangming: New Radiant City,” Thresholds 33: Formalisms (Spring 2008): 86-89.
(8) In architecture the word "program" is used as a design guideline and in general refers to types of activities a given space is meant to host.  It can be generically defined as residential, commercial, civic, etc. In this essay program is more flexibly defined as "emergent activity" that occurs through the strategic juxtaposition of spatial and functional relationships.