THE PATCHWORK METROPOLIS
Reem Ayman - Mariam Nada - Nada Waleed
Supervised by: Assoc. Prof. Holger Gladys
2020
Our project engages with a critical reading of Cairo’s urban transformation and proposes a sensible addition to the instantly urban restructuring and rescaling of the primary road infrastructure. Understanding the solidity of the current changes, we may want to raise the question of how to create an additional larger-scale network that redefines current ecological conditions. As an operational mode, productive foodscapes are considered infrastructure too and form the necessary basis of all interventions.
What had been formerly a compact city, Cairo’s metropolitan land-use produces a patchwork of exclusive functions. Our project extends on the same patchwork approach, engaging the subtext over the obvious. Biodiverse agro-land, green houses, socio-scapes, energy production, sport fields, fog harvesting, many diverse planting patterns; all together create an utmost playful and diverse urban landscape that evolves around food production, social programming of everyday assembly, and responsible consumption. The productive landscaping project is capable of compensating major losses of fertile land due to the unguided urban expansion of the metropolis.
Is there available land for the productive green layer? A noticeable pattern we have inferred from maps tells that land-uses least needed, or considered not essential to city centers, are pushed to the city’s outskirts creating what is known as urban fringe. Particularly with the rapid growth patterns in the global south, settlements grow very fast beyond these peripheries, fusing them into the urban fabric. Quite often, these inner urban peripheries become barriers that do not add to a sustainable urban settlement. In addition, Cairo’s polycentric new town and satellite city developments into desert lands east and west of the city proper, create much peripheral and secluded vacant lands. Those vacant lands, of little interest today, are ecologically and socio-economically most valuable to our project. Anticipating on the rather realistic growth scenario of the Greater Cairo Region, the today’s fringes, the left-overs would become central in a short period of time.
Here is where the seeding starts. The design project proposes a different kinds of central parks, the new normal takes the form of diverse urban foodscapes and socio-scapes. A pattern language of inhabitation. Highly productive and at the same time esthetic. Open and accessible for people from all income groups. A patchwork ecosystem of its own kind.
