Planning Egypt's new settlements : the politics of spatial inequities = Takhṭīṭ al-mudun al-jadīdah fī Miṣr : siyāsāt al-tabāyun al-makānī / Dalia Wahdan.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Wahdan, Dalia, author.

Series:

Cairo papers in social science ; v. 32, monograph 1.

Cairo papers in social science ; volume 32, number 1

Language:

Arabic

English

Subjects (All):

Planned communities.

New towns.

City planning.

Egypt.

City planning--Egypt.

New towns--Egypt.

Planned communities--Egypt.

Physical Description:

iv, 116 pages : maps ; 22 cm.

Other Title:

Takhṭīṭ al-mudun al-jadīdah fī Miṣr : siyāsāt al-tabāyun al-makānī

تخطيط المدن الجديدة في مصر : سياسات التباين المكاني

Place of Publication:

Cairo ; New York : The American University in Cairo Press, [2013]

Language Note:

Summary in Arabic.

Summary:

This study critically analyzes the paradigms and practices of planning in Egypt since 1952. It interrogates the politics of national and physical planning while tracing the ideas that informed the establishment of new settlements in the country across the regimes of Nasser, Sadat, and Mubarak. Based on primary and secondary data, the study argues that under Nasser, plans often diverged from their blueprints and revealed the myth of 'technical objectivity' that underpinned the planning industry. It outlines the program of new settlements under Sadat and unveils the systematic exclusion of planners from decision-making apparatuses while institutionalizing 'profit-opportunism' in favor of private interests. The study then demonstrates the decline of planning under Mubarak and its emergence into a 'special purpose vehicle' in service of real estate developments associated with neoliberal shifts of the economy and skewed toward resource and privilege concentration in the hands of a few, thus further exacerbating uneven spatial morphologies.

Contents:

1 Urban Governance as Multi-scale Relations 1

Theoretical Framework 2

Research Methodology and Sources of Data 5

The Research Locale 8

Significance of the Study 10

2 Nasser's Agro-politan Planning 11

Capitalist Spatial Development and Egypt's Dependent Urban System 12

Structural Predicaments of the 1950s and 1960s 15

State-controlled Planning for Growth 18

Nasser's Planning Industry: State Technocracy 20

Planning Institutions 22

Conclusion 30

3 The 'Open Door' Building and Construction Era 35

October Working Paper 35

From Public Utility to Flexible Planning 37

Hollowing Out the Professional Ethos 42

Planning Vehicles 43

Unintended Consequences of Opening the Door 50

Conclusion 52

4 Wathiqat Misr for the Twenty-first Century 55

Structures and Relations of the New Settlements Program 56

Wathiqat Misr and the Controversies over the New Settlements Program 60

The Interstices between Policies and Planning 64

5 The Millennium Pharaohs of Sixth of October 71

The Initial Concept 71

Planning Sixth of October 74

Main Features of the General Plan 76

The Governing Structure 81

City Morphology 93

Images of Sixth of October 96

The Second Largest Governorate 98

Conclusion 100.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 102-108).

ISBN:

9789774165344

9774165349

OCLC:

749871243

Online:

Table of contents only