Sustainable development in Cairo’s Gammaliya district
Gammaliya has been the commercial and industrial center of Cairo since the end of the 19th century. It has, moreover, the highest concentration of Islamic monuments in the world. Adli Bishai, director of a project in Gammaliya now known as FEDA (Friends of Environment and Development Association) set up to the task of evaluating the condition of the area, including past conservation efforts, and to remedy errors and place the historic zone under a unified body as opposed to many ministries and government-sponsored organizations.
Sceptical colleagues and friends told him it wouldn’t work. They pointed out that the plan, as he envisioned it, would entail working with different ministries which were subject to the law and unlikely to change. He was warned that it was totally unrealistic to expect them to collaborate.
Undaunted, Bishai moved ahead. He started in 1993 by setting up FEDA, a non-governmental organization, and proposed a framework for sustainable development based on a balance between resource management, environmental protection, human development and economic growth. It was an enormously ambitious plan. Fifteen years down the line, however, the impossible is well on its way to being achieved.
FEDA’s success so far, Bishai hastens to point out, is due largely to public participation. “When people are encouraged to get involved in what is happening to the district in which they live and work, and when they see that it is an improvement to their lives and has the possibility of being an even better one for children, they work conscientiously to contribute to its achievement,” he says. Step by step FEDA is transforming the area, and the local population is enthusiastic about what is happening.
The project zone lies south of the Fatimid walls of Cairo. Within this confined area lies the largest concentration of ancient mosques, sabils, madrasas, souks, hammams, religious schools and hostels in Greater Cairo, as well as huge non-functional khans or wekalat. The latter — inns for traveling merchants built around a vast courtyard with stables and warehouses at ground level and living accommodation above — is where Bishai focused his attention.
“FEDA’s aim was to restore and reactivate the vast derelict inner space of the wekalat and use them to ease the population pressure and pollution elsewhere,” he says. “Simply, to clear the rubble and make it functional.”
Bishai says that the aim at the outset was to improve the quality of life by bettering hygiene through environmental control and community development services. “We are making use of existing buildings, not by transforming them into museums, but by making them useful to the community,” he says. In other words, they are being rendered into a condition in which they continue to play a traditional role in community life.
Anyone who has tried to “get things done” in Egypt will realize how enormously difficult it has been to achieve all this, especially when the physical infrastructure of the whole area, including sewerage, water and electricity, also had to be upgraded. This was done in cooperation with the Cairo governorate.
FEDA has introduced some singular additional activities, using art and cultural awareness as an effective educational tool. This is new to Egypt. As for the rising generation, FEDA has attempted to direct attention to marginalized groups in Gammaliya, including working children.
Excerpted from a report by Jill Kamil for Al-Ahram
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