Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
the city of 10th of Ramadan, a deserted city at night that buzzes during day
with its factory workers on their daily trip in from surrounding villages.
Because the main driving force for moving from rural to urban or urban to
urban areas is the search for a better job opportunity, it is clear how vital it is
to properly plan these new communities. Thus, it is clear that housing should
follow jobs and not vice versa. If it is vital to transfer people to improve their
quality of living, jobs must be provided first. Otherwise, high-income inhab-
itants will continue to commute to their original jobs, creating other prob-
lems of traffic, transportation and pollution; lower income dwellers would
refuse to move because the job-housing package is more essential for them.
On the other hand, lack of appropriate housing in the new job location might
result in more commuting, raising expenditures or unemployment where
people would refuse to move in the search for a better job. In both cases, the
situation creates more poverty instead of solving the problem and of course
accentuates the issue of mobility and energy for transportation [6]. Until now,
NUCs in Egypt have been planned according to the principles of the Athens
Charter, advocating separation of uses and car dependency. This has con-
tributed to their limited ability to attract population and to sustain growth.
5.3.1 Strategic Plan Highlights
In order to reserve the current urban trend in new communities, especially
in Egypt, and to improve their performance, the principles of sustain-
able urbanism should be adopted in urban development plans. SUP can
be immensely useful. The strategic urban plan should focus on economic
development and on increasing the city's efficiency. There should be a focus
on promoting green policies. A number of relevant recommended actions,
based on analysis of best practices worldwide, would be analysed as follows:
1. Housing: An increasing number of residents in the zone will have
a decent, safe place to live, in terms of affordable housing construc-
tion programmes, self-help housing projects, migrant farm worker
housing construction, new mobile home parks and increased code
enforcement for new and existing housing.
2. Economic development: Community and economic development
activities and efforts to create employment opportunities and to pro-
mote business expansion and entrepreneurship, with micro busi-
ness loans and technical assistance.
3. Education: Including construction of new school buildings, utilisa-
tion of bookmobiles to reach unserved areas, and establishment of
special task forces to provide adult and job training, GED achieve-
ment and youth employment programmes.
4. Health care services: Would provide mobile medical clinics to travel
from school to school and to build permanent medical clinics.
