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Cairo is the sixth city to be examined after Dublin, Milan, New York, Guadalajara and Istanbul.
An age-old international crossroads, this extraordinary metropolis is a melting pot of many cultural traditions, a place where history and contemporary society interweave.
As with the other cities already considered, the four maps show the distribution of the resident population, key public facilities such as hotels, restaurants and community services, public transport density, and vegetation, including parks and public gardens.
With the population of the metropolitan area nearing 20 million, Cairo is the most heavily populated of the cities studied so far.
Cairo’s citizens are crowded into a broad strip of completely flat land, as can be seen by the contour map. The city is hemmed in to the west and east by desert, which effectively blocks urban development in these directions. It is as if the population were contained between two magnetic fields; the result is a highly intense, unstable dynamic. Central to population layout is the River Nile running on a north-south axis. It is along this magical river that numerous cultures have left their mark down the millennia.
The services map shows how urban quality-of-life features like shops, hotels, schools and general services are concentrated in three important areas, not by chance all located near the river. They all gravitate around the famous Tahrir Square, main theatre of the popular protests that some two years ago triggered what has been called “the Arab spring”, a difficult contradictory process marked by serious events that still today are shaping the history of Egypt with consequences for the whole of the Middle East.
The road system connecting the key centres along the Nile is essentially a grid of main arteries running parallel to the river intersected by roads running at right angles to these. Interestingly, as in many other huge cities, the river itself is the...
Digital
Printed
Constellation of Architecture Practice
Toshiko Mori Architect
The world in which we live is dynamic and constantly shifts through divergent modes of production, expression and engagements. It is no longer suffici...
Cairo’s Informal Identity: from Megalopolis to gardens
Some cities are crystallised in their particular physical form. In our minds we imagine and want them to remain forever unchanged. Others seem to refl...
Skyhouse, New York, USA
David Hotson Architect
As you exit the elevator into the vestibule of the Skyhouse, you realize, in an instant, that you have entered an extraordinary architectural construc...
