 Thank you very much. I'm delighted to be here. Thank you for the organizers. Yeah, same along the same lines. We come from an architecture background as well as designers architects and urbanists We believe that space is not only a tool for To sort of analyze the human condition social condition, but also possibly to introduce Progressive change so spatial activism is here at the core of our practice cluster is emerged out to specific context out of what I still call the Arab Spring and I would like to share with you in the first few slides a bit of a background of Cairo to frame the context out of which We engaged in a number of research mapping, but also as and design intervention So I'll try to be fast and I'm gonna skip few slides because I think I'm gonna run out of time so Cairo is a 20 million city It's it's one of the largest cities in Africa and across the globe But as any complexity it could be abstracted in a very basic conditions the urban condition or three patterns I'm borrowed David Sims categorization the first one being the urban historical core It's a it's a city of deterioration and decay for many reasons we can talk about But it is still constitute the largest area of the city And it's also surrounded by a belt of sprawling or informal or or encroaching informality Mostly on a agricultural land to the north and the west of the city and they constitute around two-third of Housing stock to the majority of urbanization in Cairo is informal without architects with our planners how state-state framework and the third pattern is new cities new desert cities built on the desert as a state response to Informality there's been four generation of cities starting from the 80s and now we're building further east of this boundary a new Capital so the deteriorating urban core and this is The desert cities as you can see it's a very automotive driven American suburbia and then a typical image of informal development very different from Aris for example is much more dense more consolidated concrete frame built on agricultural land in a in a following a Great of agricultural basin, so it's pretty much private land is not squatting But it's it's illegality stems from being outside of zoning regulation, so I'm gonna skip this to and jump To the problematic so the city as in any other African cities there are all these contradictions Between the the way city represents themselves and where the majority of the people live The different sort of connectivity, but also segregation So to to build a how a highway to know where as we spoke earlier today Means also dividing informal area into two parts, so the connectivity means also disjunction There's also a very constant reminder on every day level that people crossing from there where they live to where they work or They would school and and in a various bottleneck kind of Connections in the late 90s The city built a new ring road to to create a new city limit and put sort of a new boundary of For the encroaching informality But what this ring road didn't do is to connect informal areas to have these instances where informal areas are Kind of cut through by highways, but you cannot really get onto the bridge or the highway We can even touch it that you can get into it So this dramatic truck's the position created very smart solution informal solution whereby city citizen built Steps to get from their badge or took took to the ring road take the micro bus Which in turn take them to the first metro station and so on so I have a spectrum of informal formal In transportation, but also other modes of urbanization Also the question perception was very important right before the evolution I would say most of the middle-class perception of informality was Limited to code a crane from their cars driving the highway and all the stereotypes and stigmatization was enforced by this very limited Ungrounded experience so in the meantime the city was envisioning brave new words This is car of 2050 vision of Dubai on the Nile They wanted to build again the same the same thing would been seen throughout the conference So in 2011 we had our urban revolt protesting this urbanization of So we started working in this particular moment trying to document and come to terms with these rapid Political urban change on the ground not only in Tahir Square, but also in any other part of the city We realized that urban evolution was not limited to the main square, but it's happening on every day through a small encroachment on public space if you will as I said the slow and silent and gradual revolution happening on the sweet level We also learned that moment that This particular condition in 2011 create a temporary Suspension of formal order the state was very vulnerable and security was almost absent for months And that was for us an opportunity to measure the extent to which when communities are left on their own to govern their own city To reclaim the public space. How would they govern it? What kind of rule system? So we started documenting what we called a city influx Measuring the different kind of informal patterns Organization structures to try to learn from informality during this particular moment before order would be restored We also learned that this kind of juxtaposition between formal order and formal practice is happening every size street and very basic stuff like you know New mode of urban citizenship like you know people taking the streets through public art But also through more substantial infrastructure projects like this particular example of a highway exit That was built entirely by community effort to connect the neighborhood to the ring roads mobilizing resources You know know how Labor and money etc. We have a video unfortunately. It didn't work technically, but once the new during that time This moment is very temporary and they wanted to document their their their acts of transformation and send the video to the governor of Cairo of Giza, sorry and Invited him to come and cut the ribbon at the moment when the state was the most vulnerable and so that the ring The exit was formalized and became legitimate Because he knew eventually the state will come back and their deed could be criminalized So we want to document this very important informal patterns so that we can also develop tools and methods for us as architect to engage in this Informalization, sorry informal development There are two projects. I'm gonna skip these two one of them on street vendors Street vendor for us is important issue not only because Informal economy is almost 50% of GDP, but more importantly to us or equally important street vendors occupy The sidewalk and the sidewalk is a very important demarcation between the public and the private And in cities in Europe and North America this line of demarcation is pretty sharp It's all in black and white and you know pretty much what you can or cannot do in public space In our cities in Cairo This is sort of a shade of gray the gray zone of public semi-public and everything is contested and negotiated So what you cannot do is pretty much contingent on who you are which time of the day We are going to etc. So this kind of contingency and Constant negotiation and and contestation is something to us was an entry point to understand a much more complex issue So the street vendor question was for us a key to understand this one square meter for us was an opening I opening a question to how the city is being organized informally through competing interests and frames of reference And then we did all this kind of technical drawings of this typological section between private and private and public And also sort of trying to codify this informal pattern what kind of distances what kind of measures We also measure the map the different stakeholders who are involved in this one square meter And then we also map the eviction campaign. So after the restoration of order 2014 the city mobilized for institutions including the police and the army in a misspelling agency to effect street vendors Which tells you something about significance and the symbolic significance of this particular issue? I'm going to skip the second example of the street Highway exit and took in the last few minutes on a design project So what we learned from this stakeholder analysis of street vendor was a tool. So how to engage? Intervention public space by mobilizing and and sort of engaging the interests of of of the neighbors and this is important because Cairo Doesn't have any city council or any form of formal participatory Mechanisms so therefore to do anything in the streets. It's almost everything coming top-down You don't know who decided and why and how so we wanted to counter that by proposing an alternative model of participation So we looked at downtown Cairo is the colonial part of the city This is how it looks from the postcard network of houseman street But it's also a network of back alleys and in between spaces and we wanted to reimagine the city through this network of back alleys Or in between spaces as a sort of almost a city from the inside out Because these in between spaces are not only physical containers But there are also spaces of mitigation and negotiation between public and private formal and formal but also space of transition Eliminality and that was very convenient when we were going through a political transition from a former order to a one the city of becoming So we could imagine this also back alleys as the spaces for greenways bikeways art festival, etc So we started by mobilizing art and culture to catalyze Generation in an inclusive way This is a sort of a image of During organizing of art spaces and then in 2014 after we start having maps all these in in between spaces alleyways We proposed a to do some sort of Streetscape intervention to develop to promote a more inclusive and accessible public space So the first thing we did was to start to engage the different stakeholders residents shop owners developers different authorities Anti-harassment women rights group, etc And I asked each party to tell us what they would like to see and what their concerns are and out of these contradictions I'm conflicting interests We developed a matrix and we gave it as a design brief to the design group and told them your role is to design something To negotiate this multiple interests So why here is that the role of space and especially intervention not the silly aesthetic one, but it's definitely but it's mostly a Negotiable kind of middle ground So the design that to propose is to bring nature back to the city as a too many so as a green oasis Of course, we had to also Negotiate with the authority because they were not necessarily interested to hear about democratic public space But we talked about you know beautification and and development of downtown. So we developed this corporate rendering This is during the construction. It's a very simple design of You know pavement and and green Tape even out with some heritage element We will manage to map this is the final design is basically trying to develop an interface between public and private while keeping the through traffic So this is the minutes And using the soft scape as a soft reminder between the public and the private And then towards the end of the project We helped to set up a committee for public space Which is also unprecedented to made a maintenance plan and ask representatives from each building to be part of the committee And then we stepped out. This is the project after it's finished and Today after four years, so we also organized a number of events to test the idea of of Sort of alternative activities in the alleyways and then the community started to Celebrate this space and every occasion in the aid or the Christmas they decorated on themselves. So this is This is the last two slides. So today as we as we do that sorry In the last couple of months, this is one of the historical area that next to downtown has been raised to the ground Using the trope of informality even though it's a historical area not informal area and making Way to another one of global capital real estate development we looked at earlier and This is image of the new capital of the highest tower in the Middle East and and and the question I would like to to to leave you with is two things So the technical question, which is what are the new tools and methods that architects are not trained to do as? Architects as negotiator as mediators as activists So that's a technical part that we share with you some of the tools But there's also a political question about whether there's still a space in countries like Egypt For example for civil society organization to operate as to carve out a third space between States top-down model and also capitalist development as we see in this project. Thank you very much