Ребус 2024

Omar Nagati, creator of the Cairo Cluster's Urban Research, Learning and Environmental Studies Lab.

I would like to thank you for this opportunity to speak here. My name is Omar Nagati, I'm from Cairo. Quite a long way from here. And just for a few minutes, I'm going to talk about my organization. I am not a representative of the government, I am a representative of Cluster. We work very closely with the government, we develop master plans that have at their core a social responsibility to the small communities of the city.

In recent months, I have attended several conferences in Central Asia, in Uzbekistan, in Kazakhstan, in Kyrgyzstan. And I was struck by the similarities that cities in these countries have between them and Cairo. The state of the social environment, the market. And we realize that their development is quite a complex process. And we have to learn from successful stories and adopt successful experience. And, of course, Tatarstan is an excellent example in this respect. I wanted to show you a map on the screen to give you an idea of Cairo. It is a megacity, a large city that includes several agglomerations. The inner city is marked in orange. This is where investments and migration are contarolized.

And around the city are various centers that have sprung up self-built, without an architectural plan. And these new communities, new zones, they are also the center of our attention. In total, more than 20 million people live in Greater Cairo.

For the last five decades, we have been working to empower solutions for different services - housing, transportation, and so on - to the communities concerned. This encourages them to get involved, to be creative. Accordingly, we are trying to involve them, to draw from them and their ideas.

In Cairo, we believe that the state has a vision to transform Cairo into Dubai on the Nile. But most people live in such neighborhoods. So what do we do? So as architects, planners, professionals we know, we are talking about, if most changes in cities are done without involving professionals and involving local people, then it will lead to large-scale demolitions or other harsh measures. But if that happens, then we will by and large be limiting the development of the city.

This is only 5% of understanding the solution, the experience. We need to understand how these districts work, how they are organized - and they are not chaotic in this way - and involve the people who live there, the local experience. In the last couple of minutes, I will bring a project that we presented last week at the Urban Forum in Cairo. We showed this little object in the center of the pavilion. It's like a tricycle that the population uses to transport goods. It seems like a simple thing, but it's an affordable solution. Anyone can fix it very cheaply. Plus we can remind you that many infrastructure solutions are lacking in some areas, so we decided to use this base to present different solutions. Very simple ones, for example, like medical assistance, for example, it may turn out, and for the transportation of people in wheelchairs and so on.

This is just an example of different projects. Instead of starting from the level of the sustainable development goal and something high, we should go from the bottom, look at how people find practically realizable, affordable solutions, and then bring academic and other knowledge to solve specific problems of specific people on Earth.