Urban planning in Cairo goes Stuttgart

The new issue of the german magazine Qantara is out. Many interesting artices on ¨Papa Ratzinger¨ and islam, A conference on German muslims, a article by Fred Halliday on the issue of Islamism and the left, but what caught my eye the most was the article on urban planning in Cairo(any article who uses the term Um ad Dunya in the first paragraph is looked upon extremely favourably by me!). Ahmed-Abdul Rashid has written the article as part of an exhibition in Stuttgart, Germany, ¨building and planning in Cairo for the day after tomorrow¨ by the Institut fur Auslandbeziehungen(IFA) from early September-late October, culminating with a seminar¨Cairo - Between the legacy of world Culture and Global City on Oct 26-27.

The article itself starts of with saying that 50% of the world population lives in cities, 15 percent in megacities, where the writer states that only four of them is situated in the affluent industrialized world, New York, Los Angeles London and Paris and the bulk lives in megacities in Africa and Asia, altough Tokyo is indeed situated in Asia, it is a megacity, in the industrialized world in my view, a slight lapsus, by the author.

Speaking of Cairo he Quotes Ain Shams urban planning professor, Tamer El Khorazaty (and perhaps a pupil of Milad Hana) saying:
¨"Cairo has 28,000 inhabitants per square kilometre. The city is completely chock-a-block. We need a completely new strategy to allow the city to breathe again."

I would love to see the exhibition and join the seminar - anyone living in the proximity of Stuttgart, enjoy it!

urban planning, Cairo, Egypt, megacities