Urban Governance as a Tool for Enhancing Resilient Urban Form: Case Study Alexandria, Egypt

Zekry, Mary and Al Hagla, Khalid and Saadallah, Dina (2020) Urban Governance as a Tool for Enhancing Resilient Urban Form: Case Study Alexandria, Egypt. SHAPING URBAN CHANGE – Livable City Regions for the 21st Century. Proceedings of REAL CORP 2020, 25th International Conference on Urban Development, Regional Planning and Information Society. pp. 939-948. ISSN 2521-3938

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Abstract

Cities are continually changing in an adaptation process to overcome a diverse range of natural and man-made pressures. Natural disaster, political upheavals or economic crisis are examples of stresses that cities face and try to overcome in different ways by developing mechanisms for handling continues changes. Most of these stresses and pressures are interrelated, complicated and hard to predict in the future time. As a result of the wide range of shocks and stresses, cities may decay or collapse, affecting the lives of millions of people living within the urban areas. Therefore, to a certain extent, urban resilience is considered as one of the most essential topics within the discourses of the sustainable development as it tackles issues as risk reduction and disaster prevention. Accordingly, it was essential to develop and plan cities in ways that allow them to foster resilience to the uncertainty of the environmental, socio-economic and political changes overtime. Subsequently, the theory of resilience gained an attention within the urban field leading to the notion of urban resilience. In the last decades, Egypt as -a developing country- has witnessed several stresses due to major shifts in its political situation. Started at the 1950s with a shift from a monarchy to a socialist republic, followed by an open market system at the late 1970s, to reach a capitalist system in the early 1980s. All these major political shifts brought a wide range of urban governance forms, which in turn had significant effects on the urban form of the cities’ designed and built environment. In this context, urban governance changes in Egypt are frequent and consequent over a short period of time demonstrating the importance of tackling the issue of urban resilience. Designing and planning cities are profoundly political activities; therefore, politics should be prioritized in managing cities. Broadly, the research aims to explore the interplay between the urban governance and the resilience of the urban form over time. The research focuses on urban resilience in terms of long-term urban governance through studying the effect of the urban legislation of the different consequent systems on the city resilience. Accordingly, the research worked on developing a resilience index to measure the resilience of the urban form of a neighbourhood area in Alexandria through a time line while analysing the urban building laws that shaped this form. The study reaches a conclusion of identifying the legislation that formed the most resilient urban from over time.

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Case study Alexandria, Urban Legislation, Urban Governance, Resilience Index, Urban Resilience
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HD Industries. Land use. Labor H Social Sciences > HM Sociology J Political Science > JS Local government Municipal government
Depositing User:	REAL CORP Administrator
Date Deposited:	02 Feb 2021 15:59
Last Modified:	02 Feb 2021 15:59
URI:	http://repository.corp.at/id/eprint/652

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