Students: Thomas Keller, Tomas Polach
Location: Cairo
Date: October, 2010
Type: Research project, student work

Created in 1948 on the left bank of the Nile, Mohandessin, City of the Engineers, was designed to accommodate the housing needs of engineers, the vital group in the industrialization effort following the 1952 Egyptian Revolution. First planned in 1935 as an expansion from Imbaba into the agricultural land which belong to the waqfs (hence the name Madinat al-Awqaf), a diagonal axis—Gamiat al-Dual al-Arabia, Arab League Boulevard—over 6 meters wide traverses the residential area with a green zone in the middle.  From the center of the axis, the plaza Midan Mustafa Mahmud radiate radial streets and regular parcels. The area is laid out by the active and prominent architect Mahmud Riad. who is also the author of the Arab League Headquarters, also in the area,  and who also had elaborated protypes of low-density economic housing. The Dokki area to the south had already been part of the westward extension carried out by Barillet-Deschamps and the University, Zoo and Botanic Garden which came later are part of the British legacy.

Today, Mohandessin remains an upper middle class neighborhood that has considerable diversity of commerce and offices in addition to residential real estate.  With international chains for cafes and restaurants, it is also the preferred neighborhood for tourists from the Gulf.  

This topic will look at the spatial manifestations of the ideologies which have shaped the neighborhood, from the initial Arab nationalism and socialist impulses of synidicate housing production reacting the population boom swelling the city in the 1960s to today’s influences from the Gulf region. The interactions with the the land parcels of the former agricultural land, the interesections with the areas of Miet Oqba and Hideya would also provide a counterpoint to the land appropriation process for informal developments on agrarian land which occur to the south of Mohandiseen as well as contrasting to the lower-middle class neighborhoods developed in the same time period in Imbaba to the north.