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The Daily Nation - IS CAIRO PARK A NEW MODEL FOR URBAN RENEWAL? - 2005-03-24

Date: 
Thursday, 2005, March 24
Location: 
Source: 
www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=10&categ_id=4&article_id=13676# The Daily Star
Author: 
Kaelen Wilson-Goldie

When the official inauguration of Cairo's Al-Azhar Park unfolds this weekend, it will do so in two stages. The first is a private, invitation-only affair on March 25, replete with ceremonial plaque dedications, rousing speeches, musical performances (by Yo-Yo Ma's acclaimed Silk Road Ensemble, among others), and a guest list padded with visiting dignitaries and their security details.
The second is a more populist, people-power affair on March 26, featuring nothing fancy save an opening day for the masses.

This schism between private and public, elite and mass, runs throughout the Al-Azhar Park project, an ambitious, $30-million initiative that was first instigated by the Aga Khan Trust for Culture back in 1984. Built on a 500-year-old dump site - what the writer Max Rodenbeck once called 'a monument in garbage to the endurance of Cairo' - the 30-hectare park was created to provide a lung for one of the world's most congested, polluted and overpopulated cities, where one study estimates the rate of green space per inhabitant is less than a footprint.

Situated between Cairo's Islamic quarter and its City of the Dead, the Al-Azhar Park has been under construction for almost a decade. It opened (softly) to the public last year and is now set to announce its presence to the world this weekend. Still, many will ask, what is it exactly? Public garden? Philanthropic gesture? Private profit-engine generator?

Taken broadly, the Al-Azhar Park is unusual on many fronts: What began rather simply as a gift of green space to Cairene residents has morphed into a complex program operating on multiple levels at once. As it stands now, the project conflates landscape architecture and design with the conservation of historic monuments and a far-reaching development initiative geared toward stimulating urban revitalization in the adjacent neighborhood of Darb al-Ahmar. With some 250,000 residents who live on a dollar a day, all crammed into derelict brick and stone buildings that are stacked into tiny alleyways, Darb al-Ahmar is one of Cairo's poorest districts. It was an infamous incubator for the city's drug wars in the 1980s. It also houses a particularly high density of historic buildings and landmark monuments and edges a 12th-century Ayyubid wall built by Salah al-Din as a fortification against invading crusaders. The Al-Azhar park project is unique in that it has been carried out by an institution that is neither a public governmental office nor a private real-estate cooperation, the two polarized forces usually responsible for urban renewal efforts.

Aside from the technical urban issues of converting a quintessential brown space into a thriving green space, of clearing a landfill and finding vegetation suitable for salty soil, one of the most difficult challenges was convincing everyone involved that the Aga Khan was for real.

'Now we are doing fairly well,' says Mohamed al-Mikawi, the general manager of Aga Khan Cultural Services Egypt who has been overseeing the park project for five years. 'When we started in the community in 2000 we faced two major problems: to show that the organization was trustworthy to the community and to the government. It took us quite a while to build this trust. The people in Darb al-Ahmar have been neglected for a long time,' Mikawi adds. 'They have heard about projects in the past but they have never materialized.'

These suspicions were probably justified. Since it's coining in the 1960s, 'urban renewal' has become something of a malignant term, synonymous with slum removal and the whitewashing of urban neighborhoods. Especially in major cities in the U.S., urban-renewal projects were for decades responsible for displacing low-income, immigrant and minority residents to inhumane tower-bloc housing projects, cleansing them from view to make room for higher-paying, more upwardly mobile (and usually white) tenants.

If government agencies and city councils were taken to task for urban renewal policies in the 1960s and 1970s, market-led private-sector initiatives have not fared much better in the 1980s and 1990s. Public perception is that real-estate developers are motivated by greed and dollar signs, not by any notion of public good. Market urbanism tries to make a neighborhood pay off. It does not try to preserve its 'authenticity,' as variable a concept as that may be. And the provision of green space and public parks is often seen as a gloss, a superficial element to make more hard-nosed plans palatable. Consider the riots erupting in New York's Tompkins Square Park in the summer of 1998, all under the banner 'Gentrification is Class War.' Moreover, as Neil Smith points out in 'The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City,' these processes are no longer reserved for cities in the throes of late capitalism. They are very much present in the global south, the third world, the new regions of rapid and racy development.

'It took two or three years,' says Mikawi, to convince Darb al-Ahmar residents that the Aga Khan was not, in effect, trying to shove them from their homes. Complicating things further was the long time it took get the park built. 'For three years prior to 2000 they only saw us moving rubble. There were no real developments that the community or the government could see.'

Now, the park stands in full bloom. It is nestled onto a hill with resplendent, panoramic views of Cairo's Salah al-Din's Citadel complex, the Sultan Hassan Mosque, the Mohammed Ali Mosque, the City of the Dead, and the vast ramshackle vista onto the pulsing thriving glut of structures that is modern sprawling Cairo. The park, apparently, now represents the largest urban green space in North Africa. There are 30,000 square meters of grass and more than 655,000 plant species including citrus trees, date palms, royal palms, hibiscus, sycamores, acacia, and more. Some plants are artfully arranged, others grow more wildly, glamorously disheveled. There are marble and limestone walkways laid out throughout the grounds.

More than that, there is an artificial lake, a playground, sports fields, an amphitheater, two restaurants for high-end clientele, and two fey sculptures standing at the park's highest point, made from scrap metal and discarded scooter bodies, one red, one blue, and crafted into the shape of a pair of ostriches.

In Darb al-Ahmar, progress continues apace. The Aga Khan intends to rehabilitate 50 homes a year. To date, 19 dwellings housing 70 families have been completed, restyled as Mediterranean townhouses. Two medieval mosques have been restored. A school built into the 12th-century wall has been salvaged and converted into a community center with two libraries, a computer lab, an employment center, and, best of all, an outdoor community cinema.

According to Mikawi, about 1500 people from Darb al-Ahmar have received employment training and over 1100 have snagged jobs. The Aga Khan is focusing on traditional crafts and skills to keep the neighborhood sustainable, such as shoemaking, furniture manufacturing, tourist goods production, carpentry, masonry, and automobile mechanics work. Microcredit loans of $500 to $1000 are available, and over a third of the recipients are women. '$500 or $1000 may be a small amount,' stresses Mikawi. But it goes a long way, especially when the residents of Darb al-Ahmar, who 'literally have no collateral,' have no chance of getting a bank loan anytime soon.

Part of what enabled the Aga Khan to build trust was efforts among young people. Darb al-Ahmar now boasts its own children's choir, painting classes for children up to 14 years old, and a small youth theater troupe. 'Children came accompanied with their parents and they got interested,' reports Mikawi.

That said, problems remain. Local residents have, on occasion, taken advantage of the situation, at one point attacking Aga Khan staffers with knives and stones, demanding more money for the sale of a house that had to be dissembled from the site of the park's entrance. Some critics of the park contend that the architecture for the lakeside cafe and hilltop restaurant are, at best, superficially done, cookie-cutter buildings with Islamic accents only. Other critics zone in on the park's private-public slippage.

The Al-Azhar Park is not truly porous to the city. It may be accessible by three bus and tram routes, but it is not a place of daily routine or a scenic route from point A to point B. It is not, in effect, public. It is a destination, a tasteful theme park with a gate, an entrance, and an entrance fee. The most enduring of the park's critics are those who contend that the average Cairene citizen cannot afford a ticket price of six Egyptian pounds (a little over $1). For a family of six, indeed, the amount is quite steep in a country where civil servants earn just 300 Egyptian pounds a month (about $50).

But the gravest challenge for the Al-Azhar Park lies in the future. The Aga Khan is committed to guardianship of the park through 2007, when city of Cairo is expected to take over, unless it chooses to extend the terms of its agreement. Mikawi predicts that will be necessary. But whenever the park falls out of the Aga Khan's unique embrace and into public hands, questions of motive and profit and development will have to be carefully negotiated once more.


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