From medieval Cairo to modern Masdar City: lessons learned through a comparative study

Abstract

Today, researchers of Arab urban centres will observe a few differences between Arab and Western cities. The Arab city is now westernized; this quality cannot protect it from the hot dominant climate, and obscures the architectural heritage acquired over centuries. Traditional Arab-Islamic urbanism has been ignored for decades, and Arab architects have been unwilling to revive traditional features or complying with the New Urbanism movement, which emerged in the early 1990s. This study reveals why the conventional urbanism of Arab-Islamic cities has been ignored, and investigates the potential of bringing it back to the modern metropolis by comparing medieval Cairo with contemporary Masdar City in Abu Dhabi. This paper will highlight the urban values inherited from the historic Arab-Islamic city, and the precautions that should be considered before reviving it. This research concludes that the traditional Arab city is rich with architectural and urban techniques that could be innovatively applied to contemporary municipalities. Present-day planners should learn from urban heritage, rather than dismissing it. When re-introducing old models, today's planners should focus on solving the paradox between the need for narrow, winding streets to maximize shade, and wide, straight streets to facilitate the movement of pedestrians and permeability. Architects should examine beforehand changes in sociocultural life based on feminism and concerns about public and private spaces.

Keywords:

• Arab-Islamic city
• New Urbanism
• medieval Cairo
• Masdar City
• traditional urbanism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. ‘Orientalist’ derives from ‘orientalism’ which

refers more broadly to the study of countries and regions in ‘the Orient’. During the period of colonial conquest, several European states set up institutions for dealing specifically with the Orient in trade and scientific study and by the nineteenth century, ‘Oriental Studies’ was a well-established discipline. (Haldrup and Koefoed 2009) Orientalists, who can be defined as those earlier scholars with knowledge of the languages and cultures of the Middle East and North Africa, were responsible for the concept of the Islamic city. The French Orientalists Georges Marcais, William Marcais, and Jean Sauvaget were prominent during the 1920s and 1930s (Bonine 2009). In this study, ‘orientalists’ means foreign (non-Arab) scholars with knowledge of Arab-Islamic cities.

2. NU or Neo-traditional Planning (Ellis 2002) is a movement that emerged significantly in 1993, against the modern urbanism. It has begun in North America and have spread to many other countries as a reaction against the suburban sprawl. The movement also advocates designing villages as a neighbourhood (Bridge 2009) encouraging walking, compactness, mixed land uses and high densities to avoid car dependency (Falconer et al. 2010) and provide quality of life. Therefore, the general aim of NU is inducing people to resort to the traditional urbanism and avoid the modern urbanism which ate the public spaces and offered inhuman urban developments, but through a contemporary perspective. NU ‘calls for new design concepts to meet new situations. These include innovative ways to retrieve the mistakes of recent development; new regulations and policies to keep the old mistakes from recurring; visionary proposals for making older areas competitive again’ (Barnett 1999, 7). In this study, the term of NU means the general aim of the movement more than its 27 principles per se.