Category: Cairo
15 June, 2012 (12:36) | Cairo, Configuration, Egypt, Housing, Markets, Tenure |
By:David A. Smith Sprouting in the desert: October Gardens townhouses When it comes to understanding affordable housing, nothing substitutes for actually seeing the product, as built, in its location – and so, when I had a free day in Cairo a few weeks back, I naturally enough spent it not crawling through the [...]
30 September, 2011 (09:00) | Building Codes, Cairo, Ecosystem, Egypt, Global news, Housing, Law, Rent control, Slums, Urbanization |
[Continued from yesterday's Part 1.] By:David A. Smith To collapse an overloaded system is the easiest thing in the world. Much harder is to build a better one anew. September, 2008; Searching for survivors after the Cliffside collapse, el-Doweiqa, Cairo The last time Egypt had a revolution (1952), it ended [...]
29 September, 2011 (09:06) | Building Codes, Cairo, Ecosystem, Egypt, Global news, Housing, Law, Rent control, Slums, Urbanization |
By:David A. Smith Unsound systems eventually collapse. Should we have seen it coming? That’s true whether the systems are political, financial, legal, or physical. We talk about systemic breakdown as if it were metaphoric, but for the residents of al-Me-adessa Street, collapse is no metaphor at all, as revealed in a well-intentioned [...]
29 June, 2011 (10:54) | Cairo, Egypt, Income certification, Markets, New York City, Regulation, Rent control, Rental, Theory |
By: David A. Smith [Continued from Part 1.] Yesterday’s post on Cairo rent control introduced us to a first-person tale by Marie-Helene Rousseau, from Big World Magazine, of a Heliopolis block of flats owned by an increasingly fractionalized set of heirs scatted around the world – and one flat, 2,700 square feet of [...]
28 June, 2011 (10:21) | Cairo, Egypt, Income certification, Markets, New York City, Regulation, Rent control, Rental, Theory |
While researching Egyptian rent control for my presentation to an Egyptian national conference on affordable housing sponsored by the American University of Cairo, I came across this Big World Magazine first-person tale, by Marie-Helene Rousseau, of decades and generations that wonderfully encapsulates, in time-lapse photography as it were, so many story lines of rent control: [...]