Friday 01.01.16

A Tale of Three Cities: From Cairo to London to San Francisco

OHK identifies five principles shaping urban regeneration

This is part 1 of a multi-part post; see part 2 here.

Public policy, spatial strategy, and place economics shape urban regeneration and reshape the cities and their inhabitants’ lives as they evolve and intersect. Cities experience both organic and planned changes, continuously redefining themselves. Because of this complexity, and because of the diversity inherent in our global assignments, our professional experience with urban regeneration has been remarkably varied and has exposed us to a wide spectrum of challenges facing cities in the contemporary age.

For 20 years, I have worked with interdisciplinary teams whose membership has ranged from urban designers to economists and market researchers. What I found most challenging was pulling these skills together to arrive at prototypes of solutions to urban challenges. It is not enough to simply collect and package the siloed recommendations from various team specializations; these varying insights need to be brought together.

As my career in urban regeneration has progressed, so have my approaches to achieving this integration through certain mental models. We at OHK encapsulate these models within five core principles that guide our ongoing urban regeneration efforts. In November 2015, we held a forum in San Francisco to demonstrate this framework and presented its applicability to three cities: San Francisco, London, and Cairo.  In a series of blog posts, I will present themes from each city and how we use our framework to make sense of them.

The Principle of Centrality

This principle addresses the spatial activity in a proposed urban regeneration scheme. Centrality asks: is the focus of urban regeneration inwards or outwards in relation to urban cores? For example, does it focus on historic downtowns or city centers, peripheral growth zones, major urban extensions, or satellite townships? Spatial centrality shifts over time, changing as government administration and policy evolve. In most countries, centrality has narrowed, shifting from suburban and peripheral growth strategies to city-center redevelopment.

The experience in London and other cities in the UK exemplifies this shift. In the 1960s, the policy focus was on suburban and peripheral growth. This focus moved inwards in the 1970s to neighborhoods, culminating in the larger, city-center-focused redevelopment schemes of the 1980s and 1990s. In the last decade or so, however, strategic integration of different levels of spatial thinking has become the overarching ambition. By contrast, Egypt still struggles with its decades-long strategy of built-from-scratch satellite towns and peripheral growth extensions. Only recently has there been debate about the shortcomings of this strategy. The lack of urban regeneration policies for the historic cores of Downtown Cairo and Heliopolis has come under fire as the government announces plans for its largest satellite effort yet - “Capital Cairo,” a new city plan 45 kilometers (28 miles) east of the metropolis. 

San Francisco offers yet another lens on centrality in urban regeneration planning. Even some thirty years after its initial inception, the San Francisco Master Plan retains a remarkably integrative approach to urban redevelopment across twenty focus area plans, including its Downtown, Waterfront, and Civic Center districts. There’s no question that San Francisco’s integrated vision was at least in part enabled by the extraordinary compactness and density of the city. It is admittedly risky to compare San Francisco’s urban footprint to those of cities that are five times as large (as with Cairo) or even ten times as large (as with London). Nevertheless, the plan is a valuable benchmark.

For perspective, we can contrast Cairo’s Khedivial core with comparable districts in San Francisco and London. In terms of urban area, Khedivial Cairo is roughly the size of San Francisco’s Financial District, Embarcadero, Civic Center, and the Mission Districts combined, and about twice the size of London’s traditional city center, the Square Mile. Why are these area comparisons important? They remind us that assessing centrality also requires attention to scale. The regeneration of historic Downtown Cairo, for instance, is a task of equal measure (at least as measured by urban land area) to the replanning of several of San Francisco’s largest districts. While we discuss San Francisco’s integrative approach as an example of effective centrality, we must note its relevance not to Cairo as a whole, but to Khedival Downtown Cairo in particular.

Centrality ultimately entails breaking a multifaceted urban situation across a large and complex area into a manageable set of smaller units that reflect existing districts, neighborhoods, and other configurations of cores and peripheries. In my next blog post, I will address governance, the second principle under our framework. 

This is part 1 of a multi-part post; see part 2 here.

Ahmed Al-Okelly is Managing Partner at OHK and regularly writes about urban design, community development, and sustainability. Contact him to learn more.