A holistic framework for reshaping urban energy infrastructure in Global South cities, a case study of the Greater Cairo Region, Egypt

Key Messages- Cities are complex systems that need integrated approaches to understand their characteristics and to identify challenges and opportunities for sustainable development.- Context-based and tailored solutions are required for achieving SDGs and developing circular flows. This is particularly important in the Global South.- Integrated and cross-sectoral planning and collaboration are necessary to improve the development of sustainable strategies and interventions to reduce trade-offs. Areas like the Greater Cairo Region in Egypt demonstrate the complexities of action across formal/informal sectors of waste management.

The Impact of Transit-Oriented Development on Fast-Urbanizing Cities: Applied analytical study on Greater Cairo Region

Transportation has always been the backbone of development. Transit-oriented development (TOD) has been theorized, piloted and expanded increasingly in the past few decades. In this regard, this paper investigates the relationship between urban development, the transportation process, and the required implementation guidelines within fast-urbanizing cities, such as Cairo. After reviewing different related sustainable development theories, the study investigates pioneering case studies that have applied TOD and provided adequate implementation frameworks. The authors then extract and compare a set of required policies. The current Egyptian development paradigm is then discussed in relation to these enabling policies, focusing on Greater Cairo Region, Egypt. The authors debate previous development plans, progress, and newly proposed ones, focusing on the transportation process as the means for development. The study concludes with a set of required guidelines to ensure the integration of transportation with land-use planning, thus ensuring a more prosperous and inclusive urban development.

Modeling and prediction of expected informal growth in the Greater Cairo Region, Egypt

Informal settlement growth is a vital challenge for developing countries, which requires monitoring and assessment by urban planners and city managers. Rural migration to urban areas leads to the unplanned expansion that grows within and beyond the city’s official boundaries. Although informal housing (IH) is growing fast, very little attention is oriented toward exploring tools and procedures for predicting its future expansion. Many studies have shown that informal housing is widespread and represents one of the most dominant features of urbanization in Egypt. Modern simulation and modeling technologies provide new methodologies to explore the complexity of urban growth. As a result, many planning models were developed and successfully used to simulate the spread of planned settlements in developed nations. However, the implementation of these models rarely achieves realistic simulation in the case of unplanned growth due to the developer’s field of study and the available resources. The main objective is to simulate the expected informal housing by modeling its causative land use factors in the Greater Cairo Region. This paper develops a predictive model that anticipates the spatial distribution of unplanned growth and where informal housing is likely to occur over a period based on known growth factors. The proposed Informal Housing Growth Model derives its principles from cellular automata and geographic information system technologies. This model uses a multi-criteria concept, including parameters and conditions related to informal growth, and can be adapted to other growth factors.

Income Inequality, Socio-Economic Status, and Residential Segregation in Greater Cairo: 1986–2006

Greater Cairo is a primate, monocentric metropolis with significant socio-economic disparities among its population and neighborhoods. This chapter examines the relationship between income inequality, the welfare regime, centralized governance, settlement type, housing policies, occupational status, and socio-economic segregation. Using data from the 1986, 1996, and 2006 censuses, we report the dissimilarity index to demonstrate the distribution of residents in the Greater Cairo Region by occupational status, we show patterns of socio-economic segregation based on the distribution of the population by categories of occupations across census tracts and employ the location quotient to compare the concentration of the top/bottom groups in each census tract relative to the city average. The results show that growing economic inequality does not necessarily result in greater socio-economic segregation. The results also suggest that social class contributes to residential clustering. While the poorer strata of the Greater Cairo Region were pushed to the periphery and the older urban core, affluent inhabitants were more likely to settle voluntarily in segregated enclaves to isolate themselves from the general population.

An Effective Framework for Monitoring and Measuring the Progress towards Sustainable Development in the Peri-Urban Areas of the Greater Cairo Region, Egypt

Sustainable development (SD) has become a crucial challenge globally, particularly in developing countries and cities. SD of peri-urban areas (PUA) has been tackled by a limited number of studies, unlike that of urban areas or cities. The PUAs of Greater Cairo (GC) are no exception; no study had addressed the state of the PUAs in terms of SD. Thus, this study sought to measure and evaluate the progress towards the SD in the PUAs of Greater Cairo, Egypt. Thirteen indicators were extracted from selected documents of the competent international organizations to measure and evaluate the performance of SD in the study area. The study resulted in a variety of charts and maps to explain the progress of SD in each municipality of the PUAs and then classify these municipalities based on their performance in sustainability indicators. The results revealed a wide gap between PUAs’ municipalities and the urban core of Greater Cairo. These results can help urban planners and decision-makers to better recognize the underdeveloped areas on the Greater Cairo peripheries, and hence, to develop the appropriate strategies and policies to improve SD in such areas.