Ahmed Mounir Soliman

Purpose: The purpose of this article is to examine Cairo's master plans during the past 70 years, including the establishment of the New Administrative Capital City—which is based on two fundamental courses on the phenomenon of urbanisation—and other initiatives to address Cairo's Plans based on the thoughts of three planning schools—Chicago, Los Angeles and Liverpool. The aim is to determine if the right time to relocate Egypt's capital to a different place makes sense.Design/methodology/approach: Cairo has experienced significant urban challenges throughout its millennial history due to the continually shifting socioeconomic and political changes. This research uses prospective and retrospective methods to examine how planning theories have historically influenced building Cairo’s urban fabric and provides insight into the city’s master plans from the July Revolution of 1952.Findings: It is assumed that Cairo's socio-spatial transitions over time were caused by scattered expansion, leading to contemporary Cairo's socio-spatial evolution. The paper ends with some questions about the future of the city. Should planning policies change to cope with socioeconomic, spatial and political transitions?Originality/value: The article's significance stems from the necessity of adaptable and considerate ideas that move Cairo's communities towards a better setting and provide a crucial route for enhancing their environments. Using digital technologies to implement new capital while creating platform urbanism may be accomplished even with constrained budgets and short course lengths.

Based on a case study of Alexandria city, Egypt, this paper investigates the configuration, interrelation, and integration of urban expansion within the framework of sustainability transitions to enhance the performance of sociotechnical transitions. It explores two main arguments; first, to evaluate the recent urban planning innovations, and second, to raise awareness of the participatory planning model to enhance the involvement of the three pillars to better integrate urban sustainable development. It presumes there is a linkage between urban sustainability transitions and the geographical transitions. It further evaluates whether this linkage would benefit accommodating the rapid population growth of Alexandria. This research applies an empirical methodology to test concepts and patterns known from theory generating three scenarios from empirical data. Moving beyond the ‘niche–regime dichotomy’, this study concludes that innovative practices and vested interests are typically constituted in a dualistic manner and tend to incite processes of change in both.

A revolutionary book by De Soto to formalize land tenure by changing “dead capital” to “life capital” has become the trademark in Egypt of issuing a temporary reconciliation law of 2019 and its amendment to approve a legal certificate to the violators against a certain fee. The question is does this law legalize informal housing? Is it enough to introduce a legal certificate to secure land tenure for the violators? How would this law apply on the ground? Depending on the deductive methodology, this paper traces sociotechnical transitions concerning legalizing the status quo of building/land, tenure security, real-estate markets (formal/informal) caused by laws on buildings violations reconciliation. The idea is to take a step back and look at a wide-angle of the problem in the future to arrive at a clear picture of the influences of the introduction of a new law on the land market, before making a decision. The paper assumes that the temporary reconciliation law in Egypt is opening the debate on the alteration of land management to govern the status quo of the chaos of the right to land. It concludes this temporary reconciliation law has created a state of decayed/wealth, social inclusion/exclusion of the bottom of the social pyramid nevertheless to whom the justification is affected.

In 2018, UN-Habitat projected the total population of the planet was about 7.632 billion. Fifty-five percent were living in urban areas in which more than 20 percent were said to live in slum areas. Within the era of increasing urbanization, and in the context of Habitat III, this article highlights planning innovation of the sustainability transition in urban informality in the Middle East. Three themes are raised. The first is to trace the recent academic debate on urban informality transitions in the Middle East. The second is to ask whether it possible to borrow new planning innovations from the Global North and apply them in the Global South and Middle East. Finally, the present work considers whether it is possible to link between the theory and the practice of governance of sustainability transitions and urban informality. It concludes that the configuration of urban informality in light of sustainability transitions would enhance the continuous sociotechnical and political transitions in the Middle East.

This article examines land readjustment program as a tool to alleviate the arbitrary development of New Urban Land Expansion in Egypt. Also, it explores Participatory and Inclusive Land Readjustment (PILaR) as a mechanism to shorten the gap between the current Egyptian planning policy with its regulations and requirements and the existing reality of people’s needs and demands. Draw from a case study in Benha city, this article assumes that PILaR can be formulated and implemented on the ground with ‘technical enablement.’ The gap between the government policy and the capacity of the community should be narrowed to identify what is of critical importance and what is required for people concerned. The government should adopt PILaR and act as an agent for the avail of local citizens and for the compatibility and sustainability of rescuing agricultural lands and encourage the urban development in the back desert of Egypt.

In Egypt, between 1982 and 2004, agricultural land was being lost at an estimated annual, daily and hourly rate of 54,545, 149.4 and 6.22 feddan, respectively. In early 2006, the General Organization for Physical Planning introduced a programme, based upon a participatory approach, for setting up General Strategic Urban Plans (GSUP) for 231 Egyptian cities; as an attempt to prevent further urban sprawl on agricultural land. Detailed Plans for Urban Expansion Areas (DPUEA) as a main outcome of the GSUP of the city of Kotor is examined. This article examines two aspects; first it looks at the process, and the various challenges, of carrying out the DPUEA as the main outcome of the GSUP. Second, it investigates the process of collective planning; by which the stakeholders’ participation played a major role to facilitate/improve the outcome from a guided land development plan. Accordingly, this article sheds light on the assumption that abolishing obstacles of the DPUEA process, with ‘technical enablement’ at the local level, combined with a collective planning process would facilitate land delivery system for the urban poor and eradicate further urban sprawl on agricultural land. It concludes that a collective planning process with ‘technical enablement’ would facilitate land delivery system for the urban poor in a sustainable manner. Furthermore, the government should play the role of an agent for urban sustainability in order to magnify the political goal of saving and rescuing agricultural land and to encourage a guided sustainable urban development in the back desert in Egypt.