Homegrown cities: a socio-spatial analysis of incremental urban development. The case of Cairo.

This PhD project wishes to explore the process of popular housing construction in the Egyptian urban context, where in Cairo alone, over 12 million people live in self-built communities, referred to as informal settlements. By joining different conceptual frameworks that understand planning as a way of life , through the city’s social mechanisms of production, the aim of this project is to argue the need for a systemic approach looking at informal dynamics as alternative models for development. One in which existing local organization and networks of diverse actors present rich elements of analysis to understand the link between the role of actors in the housing production, their activities and inclusive sustainable cities. How can we rethink the relationship between housing policies and local practices, between the formal and the informal, and between the micro and macro scale of urban development? The objective of this action-oriented research is to practically explore a possible framework of collaboration with local communities engaged in self-construction, in order to create new concepts and recommend housing strategies and policies that revisists incremental development as a paradigm shift.