The futuer of urban growth in Egypt assessment of current trends and forging new approaches for sustainable development

Abstract EN

Since the seventies of the last century, Egypt has taken serious steps towards adopting the policy of establishing new cities to alleviate the encroachments on agricultural lands and to re-distribute the population on the desert lands adjacent to the valley, and then the homogeneous re-distribution of the population over the entire area of the country to achieve economic, social and security objectives.

This policy has gone through four phases or generations of new cities of various types (independent, satellite and twin cities), but for economic, social and implementation reasons, this policy has not been able to achieve its full objectives.

As a result the greater Cairo became a huge urban agglomerate with internal trips of more than 100 km length, making its service facilities and networks is too difficult, and worsened its environment, and pollution rates have increased to unprecedented rates, However, the urban area of the country has not increased by more than 3% in five decades and its population and urban densities- in the Nile valley and its surroundings- has doubled, while most of the European countries are establishing small and medium urban communities with a population of between 10000 and 50, 000 and between 50000 and 500000, which can be free from mechanical movement, which preserves the environment and reduces pollution rates, as the problems and challenges faced by mega cities than the small and medium communities, Thus, the research concludes that the future of the Egyptian urban sprawl should adopt the policy of distribution of small and medium urban settlements on the axes of regional roads and consider them as axes of development to redistribute the homogeneous population over the entire country rather than the too long agglomeration and the mega cities.